§79. Virtual Experience

Images do not cease to exist on the arrival of a new present. They abide, endure, survive the passing of the present. That is memory, the survival of images, and what the past is, surviving images.

Bergson's argument is elucidated by comparison with Peirce. Peirce thought that what I just described as actual existence is the correct philo­sophical meaning for “exist”; to exist is to “react with other like things in the environment”; existence is a “theater of reactions.” “To exist means, by virtue of the ex in existere, to act upon or react against the other things that exist.” He contrasts existence with reality, which he explains as being indifferent to assertion or thought. “I define the real as that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them to be, or ever will have thought them to be.” All that exists, all actual existence, is real in this sense, but so is much else, much that is not actual or active but could be and even tends to be. Such capacities and tendencies are the generals or thirds of Peirce's Scotist realism. His language is not Bergson's, but I think the doctrine is.

Bergson's idea of virtual is not the same as what is called by that name in optics or in digital simulation. In these cases the image is perfectly actual; what is virtual is some further quality of the image, for example the apparent location of a mirror image. The image is actual and present; what is virtual is its (seeming) location behind the mirror. Bergson has something different in mind, not virtual location but virtual being, virtual existence, a virtual entity being real but not actual and never present. That is not as cryptic as it may sound, for we are acquainted with such qualities and usually call them ten­dencies. Virtual entities are tendencies, virtual existence is the existence of tendency, and tendency is the power unique to the virtual. Tendencies are not actual but tending, leaning, and encountering resistance. Every tendency tends to become actual, but never without opposition and often without ef­fect. A tendency is an undesigned but still directed movement; movement with a limit, an immanent finality, furthered or frustrated by other tenden­cies. Images surviving in the past are such tendencies—tendencies to repeat, to re-present, to add their experience to perception.²¹

Real tendency implies the nonexistence of the future. All is not given. Because the future does not exist, there must be tending, process, becoming that is never present or actual (in which case it would be finished, not tending and futural). Virtual tendencies do not resemble anything actual or present, not even the actualities that may express them, this non-resemblance distin­guishing virtualities from possibilities, which are clear and distinct and cor­respond to an exact address in logical space. Virtual existence is not like that. Deleuze nicely describes virtual beings as “obscure and distinct.” Different tendencies are as distinct as, say, trot-run-gallop, or zygote-blastula-fetus.

Tendencies press to become all that they can be, restrained solely by the puissance of every other tendency. This dynamism distinguishes tendency from Aristotelian potential, which has no creative capacity, everything in Aristotle turning around the accomplished form, fully present and actual. “Actuality is the end, and it is for the sake of this that the potency is acquired.” This potential is actually impotent, having no impetus to actualize, and cre­ating nothing. Matter, the matrix of potential, has no potency to actualize anything that does not already exist as form. Aristotelian materialization is not creation; what materializes is not new, being only a sense-perceptible ex­pression of a timeless form. Aristotle’s potential is static; Bergson's tendencies are dynamic, indeed, living. “Life is tendency.”²²

Not a tendency, not one among many. Life is tendency, that is, the source of tendency, the origin of all that is tending in nature, matter alone having no tendency. A molecule, a crystal, or a stone is always all that it can be, and changes only when moved externally, whereas organisms, no matter how ru­dimentary, have tendencies that exceed a mechanical reaction. Tendency is vital movement toward a limit, an immanent finality without design. A ten­dency tends, leans, verges. Its being is this tendentious finality; it is (actu­ally) nothing at all. What is tending about the virtual is this nisus to actuality, and what is virtual about a tendency is the interpenetration of presence and nonpresence. Tendencies have a past, a history, which they carry with them as an immanent final cause. The elements of tendency “are not like objects set beside each other in space and mutually exclusive, but rather like psychic states, each of which, although it be itself to begin with, yet partakes of others, and so virtually includes in itself the whole personality to which it belongs.”²³

Life introduces tendency into matter because what life ultimately has to adapt to is not an environment—environments are accumulated solutions to the problem in its primitive form.

Perception is virtual action; not yet action, though tending to it. Memory is virtual experience; not yet present, but tending to add itself to present per­ception, enhancing acuity and prudence with its experience. Memory is as virtual as the past it remembers, and not any kind of trace. It is nothing ac­tual, and does not exist in space, only in time, in the past. Memory is not a record of the past; it is the past, the virtual existence of the past, while rec­ollection is a selectively open channel to the past. Virtual images surviving in the past tend to be recollected when offered a kinesthetic conduit to the present by perception. This past and its images are just as real as bodies unperceived in space. The past has not ceased to exist; it has ceased to be present and has therefore ceased to be useful. However, memories are ten­dencies, tending to inform perception and enhance it with experience. Their power to return is normally controlled by neurology, which adaptively delimits (waking) memory to recollections that enhance the survival value of perception-action. The function of neurology with respect to memory is not storage; it is to analyze spontaneous recollection for the useful and adap­tive and let the rest lapse in unconsciousness. “The brain's part in the work of memory” is not to preserve the past, says Bergson, “but primarily to mask it, then to allow only what is practically useful to emerge through the mask.”²⁴

It is said as a truism that the past does not exist, that it is gone, nothing, nonentity, though for Bergson what is lost in passage is not existence but presence, which is relative to a perceiving organism's metabolic rate, and utility, which is relative to need. “Presence” and the present are not structures of time per se (unlike the past). They derive from life and inherit the relativity of life's forms and scales. Because the past is inert, that prejudices us against its existence, though the truth is that we merely cannot act on the past. All we can act on is actual. Since it is only in the present that we act, unconscious pragmatism equates presence with reality. This anthropomorphic preposses­sion surreptitiously elevates the cognitive preferences of one evolved species to the absolute, predisposing our thought to the fallacy Bergson and James denounce as “intellectualism.”