Matter and Memory

by Henri Bergson

Overview

French philosopher Henri Bergson produced four major works in his lifetime, the second of which, “Matter and Memory”, is a philosophical and complex nineteenth century exploration of human nature and the spirituality of memory. In this work, Bergson investigates the function of the brain, and opposes the idea of memory being of a material nature, lodged within a particular part of the nervous system. He makes a claim early in this essay that matter and memory are dualistic, leading to a careful consideration of the problems in the relation of body and mind. His theories on sense, dualism, pure perception, concept of virtuality, and famous image of the memory cone often make Bergson’s essay a confusing and challenging existentialist work. However, the years of research and extensive pathological investigations spent in preparation for this and other essays have gained Bergson great distinction as a brilliant, though unjustly neglected, theorist and philosopher. This edition includes a biographical afterword and follows the translation of Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781420979503
Publisher:	Digireads.com Publishing
Publication date:	12/11/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1927. His works include Time and Free Will, An Introduction to Metaphysics, Creative Evolution, and The Creative Mind.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	vii
Chapter I	Of the Selection of Images for Conscious Presentation. What our Body Means and Does	1
	Real action and virtual action	1
	Representation	8
	Realism and Idealism	14
	The choice of images	17
	Relation between representation and action	35
	The image and reality	45
	The image and affective sensation	51
	Nature of affective sensation	55
	The image, apart from sensation	59
	Natural extension of images	62
	Pure perception	69
	Approach to the problem of matter	73
	Memory	81
Chapter II	Of the Recognition of Images. Memory and Brain	86
	The two forms of memory	86
	Movements and Recollections	105
	Recollections and movements	118
	Realization of memories	145
Chapter III	Of the Survival of Images. Memory and Mind	170
	Pure memory	170
	What the present is	176
	The unconscious	181
	Existence	189
	Relation of past and present	191
	Memory and general ideas	201
	The Association of Ideas	212
	The plane of action and the plane of dream	217
	The different planes of consciousness	220
	Attention to life	225
	Mental equilibrium	227
	The Office of the body	231
Chapter IV	The Delimiting and Fixing of Images. Perception and Matter: Soul and Body	233
	The problem of dualism	233
	Description of the Method	238
	Indivisibility of movement	246
	Real movement	254
	Perception and matter	259
	Duration and tension	267
	Extensity and extension	277
	Soul and body	291
	Summary and Conclusion	299
	Index	333

What People are Saying About This

Gilles Deleuze

Matter and Memory was the diagnosis of a crisis in psychology. Movement, as physical reality in the external world, and the image, as psychic reality in consciousness, could no longer be opposed. The Bergsonian discovery of a movement-image, and more profoundly, of a time-image, still retains such richness today that it is not certain that all its consequences have been drawn.

Walter Benjamin

Since the end of the Last century, philosophy has made a series of attempts to lay hold of the 'true' experience as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses. It is customary to classify these efforts under the heading of a philosophy of life. Towering above this literature is Bergson's early monumental work, Matter and Memory.

Endorsement

Since the end of the Last century, philosophy has made a series of attempts to lay hold of the 'true' experience as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses. It is customary to classify these efforts under the heading of a philosophy of life. Towering above this literature is Bergson's early monumental work, Matter and Memory.

—Walter Benjamin

From the Publisher

“It would greatly distort Bergson to minimize the amazing description of perceived being given in Matter and Memory. Never before had anyone thus described the brute being of the perceived world. In unveiling it along with nascent duration, Bergson rediscovers in the heart of man a pre-Socratic and ‘prehuman’ sense of the world.”— Maurice Merleau-Ponty