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  • Weird Studies
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    Weird Studies/Courses/Bergson/Class Notes

    19 Oct 2025 - 26 Oct 2025
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      • Lecture 1

        • conflict theory among philosophers. According to Bergson, great minds do not war with each other.
        • Philosophy as a creative endeavor, a kind of art (perfectly happy with that)
        • JFM: put aside critical mind and assume everything he said is true (ok thats going to be a problem). 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. But the key terms need to be defined (and redefined): universe, machine, gods.
        • Bergson was singular. To follow him is to do your own thing. But still a few important followers esp Deleuze and 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, the foundation (see A consumer's guide to the foundations of reality )
        • 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.
          • The certainty thing – I get where he is coming from, I think. The reality of our experience is the one thing we are certain of, and he is going to found everything on that, and it gives him confidence, he's always right. But there are obvious problems with this kind of self-enclosed certainty, its how cults work. Philosophies are supposed to work by different rules (maybe they really don't, and its better to have something with clear cult tendencies rather than the more mainstream ones whose cult is hidden in the bones of the default culture).
        • 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, argh
        • Time in equations is different from experiential time.
        • Time is not measurable in its essence, only in its accidents.
          • Philosophy braindamage, any use of "essence" is a red flag. He's saying that duree is time's essence, and clock-time is mere "accident".
          • Had a long argument about measurability of time elsewhere: time is perfectly measurable, just as space is, they both involve "superpositions".
        • 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. Alright maybe not, what do I know about intellectual history. I've always had a thing for process-based science (cybernetics, emergence, etc) and realize that stuff is kind of post-Bergsonian, it might not exist without his influence.
        • 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 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?
        • 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
        • "Abstracting away all the abstraction to arrive at the concret" – ditto

      • 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.
        • 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 locates 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
            • I actually have no idea what this could mean. If its not one thing why give it a name to suggest it is one? I detect some ancient and broken philosophy underneath this: one and many, one of those many confusing dualisms philosophers have wasted time on for thousands of years.
              • OK well Bergson would probably agree and say he's serving up new solutions. I guess I see him as mostly making the same mistakes in a different guise. Not his fault, but he was limited by his times.
          • 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.
          • Intuition is our basic access to reality (OK)
          • 4 moves
            • 1 reframe body and brain. Deny that they are containers of pictures, 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. The intellect serves the body. It also evolved to help the body act. Also rooted in the present (space).
              • The problem is that this is wrong, the body does not respond only to the present, it has "memory" (state). In crude example: If you condition Pavlov's dog, its responses to the present are affected by the past history, and the mechanism for doing this is non-mysterious.
          • 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. See Marvin Minsky/on jokes.
            • 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.
                • You need a god to harmonize a dualism (?)
                • All 3 are intellectual, spatialized.
            • Maybe my problem is that Agre & Chapman 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).

      • 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

      • Lecture 4

        • Rest of M&M. Theses on Perception and Memory
        • reframing the mind/body problem (after Descartes). Using duration, etc.
        • a) body is an instrument for action (temporality).
        • b) body in the present (but doesn't account for physical memory)
        • c) intellect evolves to serve the body (so discretizes time? ok). Plato's big mistake d) brain is part of the body (so far I'm 100% with him here)
        • e) getting into images, now I jump off the train.
        • Pure perception is pure causality (the floor percieves that table) Deleuze takes this very seriously. Panpsychism.
        • f) perception is "direct contact with images". This makes zero sense to me.
        • g) "real applied perception" involves selection and the body, as opposed to "pure perception" which I guess I don't understand.
        • h) "the relation between the phenom and the thing is not that of appearance to reality, but merely that of the part to the whole" – ok that is clear, if a bit hard to internalize...OK this addresses that quote about about "difference not in kind". He is saying that perceptions and objects are the same, destroying by fiat the representaion/reality disjunct. Inverting Kant
        • i) we don't actually have pure perception, because memory is involved. Now the body has a time dimension...memory is the presence of the past of the body as it acts in the world (ok, but that's just what memory is in the abstract)
        • j) two types of memory: habit (motor, procedural) and pure (episodic)
        • insofar as our bodies are shaped by evolution, they are shaped by memory (true but again, so what)
        • k) difference in kind between perception (no representation) and memory
        • l)
        • m) memories not stored in the brain, but in the actual past (???) makes zero fucking sense.
        • the past is there virtually (but somehow this is different from spatialized block-world theories, because duration or something).
        • deja vu as some kind of bergsonian phenom. becoming aware of the true nature of time. brotosauri are wandering the earth right now, but virtually.

      • Office Hours 4

        • Direct realism. A hill JFM would die on. Memory involves direct access to the past.
        • Elan vitale expansive, matter is resistant (here I really break with Bergson, he's got some old idea of matter )
        • The brain is important to perception, Bergson says a lot about brain lesions, and perceptual states are "mirrored" in brain states. Car driving analogy. The brain is coordinated with psychic activity but its not reduction, because it is an image (???)
        • Someone brings up Donald Hoffman as contradictory. He makes the same argument about the brain being an image. "brain is an image among images", is supposed to be the key that blows up representation, I don't see it.
        • Deleuze: intution is not just you sinking into your own duration, but accessing others. At the edge of thought transference, telepathy.
        • Wanting to ask my question about cybernetics but reluctant, don't think it wil go over.
        • "it is irrational to think the soul does not survive the body"
        • Bergson was not a fan of Spinoza (prefers Leibniz). Deleuze was a big fan of both. Conatus and elan vital similar. Spinoza is too block-universe, no becoming.
        • The Shining as a Bergsonian film (memory of place, the shining as intuition)
        • Owen Summerscale is crysstallogerapher, Sheldrake fan.
        • Steven Lindstrom: my dad helped build the Bahai temple in Wilmette! That is cool (I grew up near there and visited often)
        • JFM acknowledges that modern neuroscience might modify Bergson (but not fundamentally)
        • we spatialize time a lot, that's OK, just remember its a map and duree is the territory (OK)

      • Lecture 5

        • Finally we get to know what "a machine for making gods" means.
        • Bergson was a vitalist but of a different sort. We have access to our interiority and so that of other living things. But missing from Darwin is "vital impulse". (So it is vitalism?)
        • Bergson dualism: intellected, science, straightforward VS intuited world where we dwell but foreign to intellect. Quality, qualia, bleah. But these are two aspects of a single world (OK). Map and territory. Science does not get to the bottom of the real (OK).
        • Last book took him 25 years and is deeply uncomfotable. Mysticism was allied with Nazis.
        • totality of obligation (closed)
          • Kind of confused about Dawkins. Open morality is difference in kind a differernce in nature (I do not really buy this but OKx)
        • Old morality can be based on laws, new absolute morality must be in terms of a singular person. An event can't be computed, must be felt.
        • static vs dynamic religion
        • Bergson wants to get over conflict between technical and mystical
          • Hey me too. Yes despite all my quibbles and frustrations I can easily imagine that Bergson and I have some deep shared goals.

      • Office Hours 5

        • Patrick Curry – Re-enchating the World Conference – Proust quote – "If intellect does not deserve the crown of crowns, only intellect can reward it...only intellect can give the first place to instinct" (OK but obvious)
        • Causation vs creation – wanted to cite Michotte on "direct" perception of causality
        • Something about love and qualitative multiplicities – things that are allowed to be what they are but unified in a kind of harmony.
        • Beings have been called into existence ... who were destined to love...somehow this underlies the universe...matter is the resistance to how these beings relate to each other (ok there is bad dualism again).
        • Political question: identity is violence, technology is the real enemy... For Bergson, technology is the answer...perfectly consonant...how do we heal the split...enantiodromia might save us.
        • Bergson and JFM don't accept McLuhan dictum that tech determines consciousness.
        • Q asks if Bergson is a virtue ethicist (more or less?)
        • A philosophical geneology is not a history. All Axial age religions express the same open morality. Confucianism and Stoicism are close but too static. It's all about exemplars. Religions aren't really codes, but models for being.
        • JFMs new book: based on his Its All Real class, some paranormal stuff but dealing with imagination. An inverted Bergsonism (not sure what that means).
        • Q: how does elan vital square with progressive view of history (something like that). EV is life itself as manifesting as love...underlies both closed and open religions. War as culture identity. Christianity breaks this open...many parallels between Bergson and Marx (?) human equality. Elan Vital seeking unity after it fragmented. Mysticism that seeks to transform world (Franciscans). Teleology and the divine. JFM stops before he starts sounding like Hegel
        • What kind of technology would a truly open-religion society produce. Jacques Ellul. Is technology bad because we let a certain faction control it (OK a bit uncomfortable for me). Bergson not an accelerationist. (Last chapter of 2MR relevant).
        • JF has some problems with Bergson theory of dream (and of fabulation)
        • Some talk about being a "qualitative multiplicity" as opposed to the "Herculean ego" and I can't help translate it into Society of Mind terms but not sure that is valid. Hm. Techno-multiplicity vs Begson-Deleuze-Guattari mille plateau multiplicity. Also Hillman.
          • OK: I do not understand the point of this: "When you experience real time (not clock time), your past doesn't disappear - it's continuously preserved and carried forward, coloring and modifying your present" Like, yes, who doesn't believe that the past affects the present? You could be the biggest mechanist since Newton and not quarrel with that. But he is saying the past is literally present. Somehow this is supposed to be better than the block-universe theory?
          • Sorry not even sure if I'm arguing with Bergson or some mechanical travesty of him.