Matter and Memory

by Henri Bergson, Nancy Margaret Paul (Translator)

Overview

A monumental work by an important modern philosopher, Matter and Memory (1896) represents one of the great inquiries into perception and memory, movement and time, matter and mind. Nobel Prize-winner Henri Bergson surveys these independent but related spheres, exploring the connection of mind and body to individual freedom of choice. Bergson's efforts to reconcile the facts of biology to a theory of consciousness offered a challenge to the mechanistic view of nature, and his philosophy can be regarded as a forerunner to later developments in relativity theory and conceptions of mental process. His original and innovative views exercised a profound influence on other philosophers -- including James, Whitehead, and Santayana -- as well as novelists such as Dos Passos and Proust. Essential to an understanding of Bergson's philosophy and its legacy, Matter and Memory is among Dover's Philosophical Classics. A collection of the major works in Western and Eastern philosophy, this new series ranges from ancient Greece to modern times. Its low-priced, high-quality, unabridged editions are ideal for teachers and students as well as for other readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781420939385
Publisher:	Digireads.com Publishing
Publication date:	05/19/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 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