§76. Matter and Image

The theory of images in Matter and Memory (1896) is among Bergson's most original contributions to philosophy. “I call matter the aggregate of images, and perception of matter these same images referred to the eventual action of one particular image, my body” Bodies are images, and material, physical nature is an aggregate of images.

Empiricisms. Barry Allen, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197508930.001.0001. means by image. These are similar to photographs or holographs, the photo­graphic apparatus cutting into things, stopping nature's continuity, creating an image of discontinuity and unnatural stability. Like that, Bergson's image is a portion, cut out, isolated, made static and present, creating, as with pho­tography, an unnatural discontinuity and stability. Cut from what? Bergson calls it continuous extensity. One might also say unpunctuated flux, original becoming, primitive passage, natura naturans. “The division of unorgan­ized matter into separate bodies is relative to our senses and to our intellect, and... matter, looked at as an undivided whole, must be a flux rather than a thing.”³

In Epicurus's theory of perception, the eidola, radiant films, molecular assemblages moving together though much finer than anything we see, convey molecular models of surfaces to touch our organs (§17). Fluxes of eidola in vision stabilize with attention into perception (phantasia), but Epicurus eliminates the difference between inner and outer objects by iden­tifying the external object of perception with the content of perception. The external object (the body radiating eidola) is what we see by compounded subvisible eidola. We see, not the eidola but their source, whose surface their compounds model. The physical continuity between eyes and objects seen is as immediate as when something is placed in your hand or on your tongue.

Bergson made an early (1884) study of Epicurean philosophy, publishing a volume of extracts from Lucretius, to which he added an essay on Epicurean natural philosophy. What Bergson calls an image is an Epicurean phantasia, conceived without the eidola theory. These readily separate. Phantasia are phenomena; eidola belong to the atomist theory of their genesis. If, as at­omism holds, nature is atoms and void, whence phantasia? Eidola explain that. But of course if we set aside the atomism, the problem to which eidola were a solution does not arise, and it must be said that the eidola are a liability for Epicurus's theory of knowledge. Being affected by eidola, people seem al­most automatically to form doxa (beliefs) regarding something external, in which case what matters is whether these doxa are confirmed or at least not counter-witnessed. Eidola drop out except as the hypothetical unseen cause of doxa, and phantasia are wheels that turn with nothing else. If the doxa are confirmed, what does it matter that their cause was eidola, or their phantasia clear and distinct?

Instead of atomic eidola radiating to impassive organs, Bergson thinks like the Darwinist that, with qualifications, he is. Sense organs do not passively await affection by the environment, instead they seek it out. Sense organs are active, actors, almost with a mind of their own, the effect of natural selection on a geological timescale. The phantasia are our work, our image, pictorial artifacts we introduce into the flow of natural changes as an adaptively tuned perceptual categorization of environmental energy-flows. Bodies are relative stabilities, relative to form and scale of life. There is no foregrounded, dis­continuous body in nature. Unperceived, nature is all continuity—no halts, no punctuation, no objects, instead continuous extensity with primitive passage.⁴

European philosophers tend to detest this idea, preferring to follow Plato and think that being is first, then becoming, relation, and difference. Real beings are what they are, identical to themselves, while becoming is an acci­dent, as are relations and differences.

Movement is not simply spatial translation. It is vibration, radiation, a qualitative redistribution that makes an entire environment interact. Bergson writes, “If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy nilly, wait until the sugar melts. This little fact is big with meaning.” Deleuze thinks the point is “that the movement of translation which detaches the sugar particles and suspends them in the water itself expresses a change in the whole... a qualitative transition.” That cannot be accomplished all at once; the change, infinitesimal as it may be, must propagate, and that takes time. Hence, as Bergson says, “There do not exist things made, but only things in the making, not states that remain fixed, but only states in process of change. Rest is never anything but apparent, or rather, relative All reality is, therefore, ten­

dency, if we agree to call tendency a nascent change of direction.”⁵

Matter, material nature, has a sort of wholeness, though with non-classical qualities that may seem paradoxical. It is a whole, but not a totality, being open and constantly changing.

Bergson did not appreciate being compared to Heraclitus, though I do not understand why. His philosophy is a Heraclitean and Protagorean reply to Plato. “Everything is becoming but where the becoming, being in itself substantial, has no need of support.” Becoming is not derivative, acciden­tally following and leaning on being. Becoming is original, or as Bergson said “substantial in itself”; it is “being” that is secondary and relative. Enduring identity and spatial discontinuity are artifacts of life, but not so the phe­nomena of duration, such as genesis, mobility, and endurance. With these we catch experience where Bergson wanted, before “that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility,” it becomes perspectival, practical, social, all-too-human experience.⁷