Weird Studies/Courses/Bergson
27 Sep 2025 - 05 Oct 2025
- I was reluctant to take this course because I have never quite gotten the thing about Bergson. But, maybe this will teach me to do so.
tl;dr
- (my current opinion of Bergson, will update as the course goes on)
- After 2 lectures, and some reading: Bergson seems to be trying to get at the reality of lived experience, which is (sadly) not subject to analytic thought. He seems to be trying to describe the Tao with too many words. Something painfully sincere about his efforts to talk about the indescribable, but not sure I am enjoying it. JFM's enthusiasm for Bergson is quite upfront and makes for enjoyable lectures nonetheless.
- I think Bergson is tripped up by the methods of philosophy, even as he tries to go beyond them. All these essences and differences and dualisms. He is quite consciously trying to do philosophy in areas where philosophy doesn't work. He's inventing a new (or old) form of knowledge, "intuition", which is mostly defined in negation to normal knowledge and strikes me as quite iffy.
- A more sympathetic take: We all know the reality of time. Materialist, idealist, theist, free-willist, determinist – all of us are embedded in time and know in our bones what that means, theories aside. The world is happening and we are happening with it, since we are part of it. I think Bergson is saying something like this (with approximately 10^3 more words).
- This experienced time is more fundamental than clock time, and to the extent we treat time as clock time we falsify our experience. (Here I sort of roll my eyes – my rule is, whenever people are arguing about what is more fundamental, its really some kind of political fight and you should be on neither side – some of the convo in office hours suggests similar feelings from JFM and maybe Bergson. But it's hard to be a consistent antifoundationalist).
Theses on Duration
- This is JFM's concise summary points of Bergson's theory of duration, with my (occasionally dumb) comments.
- a) The scientific intellect cannot measure time; what it measures are simultaneities in space.
- b) When we “measure” time, we substitute spatial positions for temporal flow (durée).
- This seems wrong – all measures are substitutional, nothing special about time. Any act of measurement reduces some physical difference to a number, by definition. A digital clock counts discrete segments of time, voltages and circuitry are involved, but no space particularly. I actually have no idea what "simultaneities in space" means.
- I'm reminded of the paper The Semantics of Clocks by Brian Cantwell Smith, which is exactly about how clocks are both embedded in causality (time) and indicate things about it.
- c) The intellect, by nature, aims at fixities, “things-made,” rather than processes, or “things-in-the-making.”
- All measures involve fixities; all thought to an extent (so I am agreeing). But we have a lot of intellectual tools for talking about processes – Newtonian calculus, computation, process algebras, systems theory and cybernetics. It's true that this isn't easy and the natural tendency of thought is towards fixities, it takes effort to talk about process and becoming, and we need better tools and languages.
- If you substitute "Western philosophy" for "intellect" I would agree more. The Greeks had this thing for stasis that we are still trying to fix thousands of years later.
- d) Duration is the continuous, qualitative, and irreversible flow of becoming, necessarily excluded by the intellect.
- I do not know its name. I call it Tao (or durée, but same difference). And if duration is necessarily excluded by the intellect, why are we spending so much time talking about it? and what can we hope to say about this ineluctable aspect of being, or whatever it is?
- e) Duration is not “psychological time.”
- Why not? I think because that sounds trivializing. But lets say there is some primordial absolute time like duree, and psychological time is our experience of it, whereas scientific time is a chopped-up measured version if it. Is that sort of close? .
- Yeah JFM talks about "illusory" time, equating psychological to that, but that is wrong.
- f) It is clock-time, that is artificial, conventional, and thus, psychological. It is a spatialized construct useful for science.
- Well of course its artificial, not so sure about psychological.
- Here's something that irritates me. Always this competitive dualism, science time vs. duree. But they aren't opposites or competitors. I think Bergson would actually agree but because philosophy it keeps coming back to these antitheses/dualisms, my good time vs your bad time. You can kind of see Bergson trying not to do this but falling back into the pattern anyway, because (I guess) that's just how philosophy works.
- Here's what I would say: there is some basic temporal process to the universe, call it durée if you like. Then clock time and experiential time are two views or versions or aspects of it. Neither is quite the whole thing itself.
- g) Science (analysis) is valid only in a universe that endures, and thus presupposes duration even while excluding it.
- Mr. Gotcha! I hate this form of argument and this one seems particularly irritating (yes scientists exist, so my theory must be true).
- h) There is a difference in kind, not merely in degree, between space and time: the first cut.
- Yes even Einsteinian physics says so (the negative time coefficient in Minkowski spacetime matrix). Although "in kind, not merely in degree" doesn't mean anything to me.
- i) Intuition makes the cut: it must become the method by which duration can be grasped directly.
- Not sure what cut means. I may be quibbling here, but my position is that duration, if it is the unnameable, indivisible ground of being, is actually not graspable at all – directly or indirectly. Intuition might be a name for our attitude towards it, although probably not one I'd choose, it's misleading. We do know it in a way, by being part of it, it is at the very core of our being.
- j) To live is to endure: duration is the substance of existence itself, not an added dimension.
- I'm OK with this? I mean yay existence, I'm not sure calling it "duration" adds anything. But sure, there is some reality we are part of, and it is temporal in nature.
Dialog on time measurement
- To David Johnson
- Time and space are both dimensions, but they aren't the same, both in physics and in lived experience. They can both be measured, by processes that are roughly similar (not identical)
- In both cases, measurement requires dividing up a smooth continuum, and measures do not capture the full richness of what they are measuring (because that's how measurement works)
- This is sort of a common-sense, humdrum, industrial way of looking at time and space. It's not the whole story.
- Duree – well, I don't understand it fully, but it seems to be more like time as lived experience. We are embedded in time. The default view makes it seem like we can be outside time, viewing it like we would a calendar (an everyday form of a block-universe), but in fact we are always inside of it.
- It sometimes feels like these two views of time are in conflict, but they shouldn't be, since both are tr
- To JFM
- Sorry I am going to shut up after this. This is turning into an argument and neither of us want that. I am frustrated because there is so much here that I just don't get, while at the same time I am nodding in agreement with other aspects. As I said earlier, I'm willing to assume the problem is with my understanding rather than with Bergson.
- Re time as a dimension being "false" – I thought that Bergson's position was not that the spatialized view of time was false, but that that it was incomplete. It's obviously a very workable and useful concept in science and everyday life. Durée doesn't make our clocks and calendars stop working.
- If duration and clock time are both real, then the question becomes, how are they related? One theory (which might not quite be Bergson's, its more like my crude approximation) is that duration is foundational (more real) and clock time is a sort of intellectual grid we superimpose on it, to turn the raw flux of being into something we can commoditize and think about. But that is the same as "measure", that was my only point. It might do violence to the more primordial duration, but still, we do it.
- By "quasi-mathematical arguments", I meant that Bergson is touching on ideas that are traditionally the province of mathematics and science, like discrete vs continuous spaces and measurement. This triggers my math thinking. Perhaps they need to be taken in a more metaphysical way, but I'm not sure how to do that.
- I'm not sure why you think I'm being dismissive; on the contrary I'm doing my best to understand what Bergson is saying (and failing at least half the time, but it's not for lack of trying).
- unsent
- And I appreciate what he is trying to do, I think: integrate or reconcile the universal truths of lived experience with the world picture of science and reason. It's just that science has advanced quite a bit since his day. Cybernetic and computational thinking have new perspectives on the issues he thinks about, like perception and memory.
- This might be the core of my problems with Bergson. One of his goals (which I share) is to reconcile or dissolve the long-standing division between mind and matter. Well, computation does exactly that also, or claims to, in its own way. Not that its answers are definitive or without problems or better than Bergson's, but they occupy a certain ecological niche in my mind and maybe I don't have room for new stuff.
Lecture 1
- Conflict theory among philosophers. Acc Bergson, great minds do not war with each other.
- Philosophy as a creative endeavor, a kind of art (perfectly happy with that, contra)
- JFM: put aside critical mind and assume everything he said is true (oy vey). Well, even he argues with Bergson...feels Bergson is a mentor, a friend, he is fond of him.
- "the universe is a machine for making gods" – OK, that's good (and not offensive to my scientism). But the key terms need to be defined (and redefined): universe, machine, gods.
- the relationship between science-tech and religion is very salient, of course. Can Bergson transcend the dichotomy? Bergsonism holds out hope
- Bergson was singular. To follow him is to do your own thing. But still a few important followers
- William James
- Einstein debate. That and the rise of Husserl/Heidegger kind of blew him off the stage.
- 4 major works: Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Each is radically different from the last yet incorporates it.
- also a couple of collections: Mind Energy (!?), The Creative Mind (JFM recs as starting point)
- Duration is his key idea but apparently hard to grasp. It's a philosophical concept that points to something inexpressible (?). Seems simple enough to me...but maybe I don't get it. Duration is not just subjective time, it is the real, it is more real than anything (OK that sounds dumb).
- The weirdness of Bergson's thought: not like lovecraft, not like Camus, not negative. A weird that is inseparable from a kind of certainty. (OK I see why this appeals to him). Compare with Zen. "A weird that subtends all systems" – that which we know to be true but can't understand how we know it.
- Mysterianism, I'm starting to have an allergic reaction. But not imprecision of vagueness. More precise than Russell according to JFM. Unlike most philosophy, does not banish feeling. Not a hippie, whatever that means.
- Great religious figures introduce a new feeling into the world. Scriptures are contradictory but the religious sprit is not.
- Philosophy doesn't have its own telos, not an isolated activity, not disinterested. It should serve something else: life (rather than containing it). Intense engagement with life.
- Bergson's time: ok here comes the anti-mechanist stuff. Makes me want to scream, they just don't get it.
- durée time in its essence (bleah). Philosophy has problems with time (well, yes, because it is stupid). Duration (philosophy) - Wikipedia)
- Time in equations is different from experiential time. (Duh). Time is not measurable in its essence, only in its accidents (well, true of everything, this is achingly stupid).
- duree is an absolute, not in your head.
To state that an incident will occur at the end of a certain time t, is simply to say that one will have counted, from now until then, a number t of simultaneities of a certain kind
- I don;t quite get what is a "simultaneity"
- scientific time is always in the past. It concerns itself with points not flows. Skips "the intolerable intervals"
The intellect, by nature, aims at fixities, “things-made,” rather than processes, or “things-in-the-making.
- This is a problem with greek philosophy, not science.
- Durations don't have halts or structure.
- Durations are the things themselves as they change from moment to moment.
- If you substiture The Tao for Duration it makes a lot more sense. Ah someone else noticed that Weirdosphere
- Duration is immeasurable by nature (well fuck it then) but knowable. OK, Intuition can know it, but not intellect.
- Metaphysics --> Intuition --> more modern than modern
- duration is not psychological time. Hm, something questionable in this. to JFM, sayign it is subjective is to trivialize it...
- philosophy (and everything else) is done in time, necessarily, so checkmate Bertrand Russel? Einstein must be a character in a drama.
It is clock-time, not duration, that is artificial, conventional, and thus, psychological. It is a spatialized construct useful for science.
- OK sort of?
- "pure mobility." quote. No fucking clue. JFMs effort to explain just seemed like nonsense. Why should a movement be indecompsible? Oh god this is so confused. Braindamage! I hate this shit why did I pay for this?
- Bergson likes Zeno's paradox, but we have solutions for that that don't require mystification.
- Bergson trying to break through something. "The Real" . He overturned Plato, better than Nietzsche, but also makes him close to Plato.
- "the fire of creation at the heart of being" – OK I like that
Office Hours 1
- Bergson deeply religious. His last book. Humans create virtual constructs, major religious figures do this in a special way
Lecture 2
- Bergson superhero origin story – how he became a philosopher.
- The intellect can't deal with flow, just fixitities. See comment on calculus etc.
- Bergson not an idealist or mystic. Analysis:science : intuition:metaphysics. Analysis is from the outside. Cannot give us the real (I'm fine with this I guess). Analysis is useful, but limited and hence false if it claims to be complete. Metaphysics and science are completely separate (here I am not quite onboard).
- Science excludes duration. When methodology becomes an ontology. Science conquers metaphysics (falsely).
- You can't develop a concept of duration (so what are we doing here).
- Raise your arm, its one continuous motion not a series of points (ARGH NO)
- Sugar dissolving example. I don't get it. Time doesn't exist in the imagination (?)
- Somehow imagination and impatience prove duree is not psychological?
- The indeterminacy of the future, it doesn't exist like a movie or block world. Somehow our impatience proves this, because it imposes the reality of time ? The duration of the subject, of the sugar, and the universe itself.
- Materialism/idealism the least favorite seesaw (OK with him there)
- domblee: immediately. A cut, a halt in the flow (?)
- Mind/body problem is false dichotomy, intuition can cure. (OK I'm interested)
- Space: actual, time: virtual (???). Actual: active, acting. can touch an object in space, can't touch an object in time (past). Past is real, but different: virtually real. (ok, not sure I like the terminology).
- Analysis relative, intuitive allows knowledge of the absolute (OK here my skepticism kicks in a little, but also I'm intrigued). Can't get intuition from matter, can't get quality from quantitiy (my skepticism goes up a notch)
- Sympathy (project, animism, I/Thou). Ontological equality.
- No mental state is stable, always in flux (yes that I think is right). This starts to bring in some Heidegger/sitact ideas.
- Jealousy example from Proust or experience.
- We cut ourselves into static parts, along with the world (and intuition can fix). Ego. Two selves, ego-self and fudamantel self, which is inseparable from flow. Fundamental self is imbricated with duree, with the world (Yes!)
- Subjec/object/representation bad. Alt: "I intuit, therefore the world is". (Yes, very Chapman also)
- Free will and agency – the fundamental self solves this problem when properly framed. We are creating ourselves moment-to-moment. We can act acausally (ok here I get off the boat a bit)
- Does intuition eliminate all distinctions (nondualism?) Not according to Bergson. Old (bogus) philosophy problem. quant vs qual multiplicities.
Office Hours 2
- Q about relation to other ideas of unconscious at time (Freud, etc). esprit, soul. JFM: he does believe in immortal soul (?). Bergson's unconscious is metaphysical, not psychological (?). Our memory is 100% accurate (WHAT?). But we are only aware of a small part of it...seems confused. Unremembered memories.
- A somewhat Borgesian idea of a concept that only describes a singular thing.
- JFM: taoism is fine, but Bergson has vocabulary and actions. A science of mysticism.
- Difference from phenomenology (to come). Bracketing, epochs. Bergson a radical realist, a world without subject (?!). Against the old idea the consciouness is light illuminating a dark world. things have their own light.
- Jung vs Deleuze (JFM liked them both and was mocked at school...). Deleuze as procedurally applying Bergson.
- Bergson was a thinker of genius (singular intellects). Wonder what he'd think of Minsky and v.v.
- Some trashing of the block universe . Not so sure it is so easily dismissed.
- I asked: Bergson treats standard theories of time as if they haven't advanced since Zeno. But they have! Differential equations, computation, Minkowsky space, are all ways of dealing with time that are, if not Bergsonian, better than simple clock time. Does he address these?
- Answer was something like, Bergson tries to be scientific, given the science of his day.
Lecture 3
- Recap: first 2 lecs were mostly on Time and Free Will. Now on to Matter and Memory, which is magical and striking.
- Intelligence (rationality) is spatial by nature, masks duration, "the change itself that we call time" Intellect masks duration. Sugar water example (don't understand it). Sciennce supposes a universe that endures (whatever that means), and is always for purpose.
- The path to duration is intuition, a kind of method. More akin to tantra than science. Bergson makes some "discoveries", "distinctions", between time and space (why this is considered novel I do not understand).
- Space is actual (acts in the present)
- Time is the virtual (real but not present, actual)
- Two concepts of the self: a
- spatial self: self as subject
- temporaal durational self (submininal self). Ourselves as the very flux, beneath the intellectual abstraction.
- Surface self, ? fundamental self
- Bergson localtes free will in the underlying level (this seems exactly backwards to me)
- Quibble with all the details, but its basically, the mind left when the ego shuts up. I think all the time/space stuff is gubbish.
- One/many Idealism/materialism (?)
- But BOTH are within quant/space standpoint...
- deleuze difference and repitition (sorry dont understand this shit at all)
- Duration is not a single flux but a new kind of multiplicity
- The frame of an artwork calls on us to view it as a qualitative multiplicity
- Duree is not a force...not something that happens to things but the things itself.
- Becoming is infinitely varied (color example, do not get the point)...the intellect flattens into undifferentiated becoming. (Vulgar Heraclitus, but sounds more like science models of causality).
- ———– end of duration
- Bergson overthrows Kant, more or less. Kant was trying to unite idealism and materialism, transcendential idealism was his solution. Ding an Sich. We don't see that, just the noumena. So we can't know the real. But we can think it.
- God this is the stupidest kind of philosophy, I should have listened to Chapman
- Intuition is our basic access to reality (OK)
- 4 moves
- 1 reframe body and brain. Deny that they are containers of pictions, instead organs of action (very situated action )
- 2 matter is not representations in the brain but an aggregate of images (?)
- 3. 2 kinds of memory, neither is reducible to stored representations. Its virtual or immaterial (???)
- 4 to make sense, we need a totally new ontology of time. Not just flow, something more, needed to explain memory.
- Anti-representation. Exactly what Agre/Chapman were saying, and I have the same response.
- The body only responds to the present. It's a thing like a rock (I detect confusion comng down the pike). The intellect serves the body. It also evolved to help the body act. Also rooted in the present (space).
- Cinematographic model.
- The brain is a part of the body, nothing more or less. Purely mechanical, causal, in the present, like the rest of the body. Brain responsible fior variation, it is the organ of selection. Compared to telephone exchange (good for the time!) Part of the nervous system. This is all fine.
- Q: (unasked) What’s the relationship between body and intellect in Bergson. I assume not the materialist/computational model…so what is it, how are they related, how do they interact?
- Strandebeest comparison (but any automata would do).
- Ah but we are not strandebeests because we can think (which is nothing but acting according to representations of the past and future (memory/imagination)).
- For Bergson, laughter is punishment for forgetting to not be an automaton (man, its half Minsky half-anti)
- The brain can't store representation, that would be absurd (eh)
- First chapter is mindblowing (of M&M)
- materialism, idealism, dualism alla gree about representation (?)
- Spinoza was dualism? He muffs this
- Matter and mind reflect each other.
- Argh this stuff is so dumb.
- You need a god to harmonize a dualism (?)
- All 3 are intellectual, spatialized.
- Maybe my problem is that A&C blew my mind in this way in the mid 1980s so what do I have to with this now.
- multiplicity if images (or maybe ideas)
- image is halfway between thing and idea (? oh bollocks)
- matter is deterministic...
- But minds haver a zone of indetermination...in the gaps of causality ... somehow a function of the body. Body can choose (p5) – a center of action
- the brain is an image? What?
- Unsent flame
- I think I am a hopeless materialist
- I feel utterly lost with the last lecture. Weirdly, I still feel like half the time Bergson is saying things that strike me as completely sensible (if not that novel, but maybe they were when he was writing), and the rest of the time make no sense whatsoever.
- This might be a me problem – other people seem to make sense of it, why is it hard for me? My guess is that I am overly familiar with computational/materialist theories of mind and Bergson's terminology and concepts don't mesh well with them (which doesn't make them wrong, just indigestible for me).
- Instead I took my frustrations to Claude who can't get mad at me.
Office Hours 3
- I've decided to hang back and let it wash over me, rather than fighting.
- image-determinism except for body which introduces a "gap" Images that are living things are unpredictable (creative, anti-entropic). But even intert matter has duration (aka consicousness, memory) ???
- Matter IS memory. Rupert Sheldrake drew on Bergson (big surprise there)
- "there should be a name for when your realize naive realism and deep metaphysics agree" – sounds like a version of Buddhist realization that samsara ≡ nirvana.
- Searle had arguments for direct realism (?) "seeing things as they are"
- Bergson is a monist: everything is duree (or images?) "substance itself". But its a multiplicity, "seething". Within that, very shapr distinctions between matter and mind (eg). The One Thing is not expressible, so all we have are these views.
- Bergson requires that our notion of truth changes (away from vulgar platonism, general ideas)
- This is something I like about him...
- so where does concept tree come from? "Oscillation of memory"? blah
- Bergson focused on art and artists. "transcends a blah materialism"
- Deleuze: art is the only thing that endures. Bergson wants to make us all artists.
- Somebody said
Alfred Jarry said we were all dwarfs on the heads of giants (and the giant was Bergson) and I had to check that out on Claude