AN ON-GOING REPORT
[Subject to change: ie; work in progress]
Reading Bergson-
1.
The plan: It being a difficult project, I won't force myself to completely
wrap my mind around it, [the project], in one try. If I feel like I
"get it", even just a little bit, I'll go on. I'm assuming, in terms of
my attention to Bergson, that everything he wrote requires more than one
or two reads. I will hope that my brain can build on its understanding.
How many readings is up to my brain and its future, and is not knowable
at this time. (Will I be Straussian; or Bloomian?)
2. Chapters and paragraphs are long. very long; need to resist the impulse to flip pages forward to see; "How long does this go on?"
Process philosophy-
From Wikipedia; Process philosophy, also ontology of becoming, or processism,[1] is an approach to philosophy that identifies processes, changes, or shifting relationships as the only true elements of the ordinary, everyday real world. It treats other real elements (examples: enduring physical objects, thoughts) as abstractions from, or ontological dependents on, processes. In opposition to the classical view of change as illusory (as argued by Parmenides) or accidental (as argued by Aristotle), process philosophy posits transient occasions of change or becoming as the only fundamental things of the ordinary everyday real world.
Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, classical ontology has posited ordinary world reality as constituted of enduring substances, to which transient processes are ontologically subordinate, if they are not denied. If Socrates changes, becoming sick, Socrates is still the same (the substance of Socrates being the same), and change (his sickness) only glides over his substance: change is accidental, and devoid of primary reality, whereas the substance is essential.
Philosophers who appeal to process rather than substance include Heraclitus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Nail, Alfred Korzybski, R. G. Collingwood, Alan Watts, Robert M. Pirsig, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Charles Hartshorne, Arran Gare, Nicholas Rescher, Colin Wilson, Tim Ingold, Bruno Latour, William E. Connolly, and Gilles Deleuze. In physics, Ilya Prigogine[2] distinguishes between the "physics of being" and the "physics of becoming". Process philosophy covers not just scientific intuitions and experiences, but can be used as a conceptual bridge to facilitate discussions among religion, philosophy, and science.[3][4][original research?]
Process philosophy is sometimes classified as closer to Continental philosophy than analytic philosophy, because it is usually only taught in Continental departments.[5] However, other sources state that process philosophy should be placed somewhere in the middle between the poles of analytic versus Continental methods in contemporary philosophy.[6][7]
Notes: P. 219 - ......Consciousness Beyond the Body, 2016 Melbourne Centre for Exceptional Human Potential, Aus; edited by Alexander De Foe; coincides with p. 162, Bergson, Time and Free Will.
Matter and Memory
Feel like I grasped the essentials to some extent; is that kind of vague? Yep... Next, I went to Wikipedia and here I'll print the first part of what they say:
(French: Matière et mémoire, 1896) is a book by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Its subtitle is Essay on the relation of body and spirit (Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit), and the work presents an analysis of the classical philosophical problems concerning this relation. Within that frame, the analysis of memory serves the purpose of clarifying the problem.
Matter and Memory was written in reaction to the book The Maladies of Memory by Théodule Ribot, which appeared in 1881. Ribot claimed that the findings of brain science proved that memory is lodged within a particular part of the nervous system; localized within the brain and thus being of a material nature. Bergson was opposed to this reduction of spirit to matter. Defending a clear anti-reductionist position, he considered memory to be of a deeply spiritual nature, the brain serving the need of orienting present action by inserting relevant memories. The brain thus being of a practical nature, certain lesions tend to perturb this practical function, but without erasing memory as such. The memories are, instead, simply not 'incarnated,' and cannot serve their purpose.
(I wonder if that means alcoholic blackouts might be accessible in the spirit world? Bergson manages to keep such questions behind a door kept only slightly ajar. Awfully well done, Henri.)
Time and Free Will
Sensations as magnitudes-
Location 8568 Kindle: "Psychophysics merely pushes to its extreme consequences the fundamental but natural mistake of regarding sensations as magnitudes. In truth, psychophysics merely formulates with precision and pushes to its extreme consequences a conception familiar to common sense. As speech dominates over thought, as external objects, which are common to us all, are more important to us than the subjective states through which each of us passes, we have everything to gain by objectifying these states, by introducing into them, to the largest possible extent, the representation of their external cause. And the more our knowledge increases, the more we perceive the extensive behind the intensive, quantity behind quality, the more also we tend to thrust the former into the latter, and to treat our sensations as magnitudes. ..."
Subjective and Objective numbers-
Location 8739: "The unit is irreducible while we are thinking it and number is discontinuous while we are building it up: but, as soon as we consider number in its finished state, we objectify it, and it then appears to be divisible to an unlimited extent. In fact, we apply the term subjective to what seems to be completely and adequately known, and the term objective to what is known in such a way that a constantly increasing number of new impressions could be substituted for the idea which we actually have of it." .....
Qualitative and Quantitative-
Location 8955: "Pure duration is wholly qualitative. It cannot be measured unless symbolically represented in space."
Laughter; an essay on the meaning of comic
Chapter l. Page 446 of 747 . 59%
Location
"To sum up, whatever be the doctrine to which our reason assents, our
imagination has a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every human
form it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter, a soul which
is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law of
gravitation, for it is not the earth that attracts it. this soul
imparts a portion of its winged lightness to the body it animates: the
immateriality which thus passes into matter is what is called
gracefulness. Matter, however, is obstinate and resists. It draws to
itself the ever-alert activity of this higher principle, would fain
convert it to its own inertia and cause it to revert to mere automatism.
It would fain immobilise the intelligently varied movements of the body
in stupidly contracted grooves, stereotype in permanent grimaces the
fleeting expressions of the face, in short imprint on the whole person
such an attitude as to make it appear immersed and absorbed in the
materiality of some mechanical occupation instead of ceaselessly
renewing its vitality by keeping in touch with a living ideal. Where
matter thus succeeds in dulling the outward life of the soul, in
petrifying its movements and thwarting its gracefulness, it achieves, at
the expense of the body, an effect that is comic. If, then, at this
point we wished to define the comic by comparing it with its contrary,
we should have to contrast it with gracefulness even more than with
beauty. It partakes rather of the unsprightly than of the unsightly, of
RIGIDNESS rather than of UGLINESS."
Chapter 1. Page 459 of 747 . 61% ...on Kindle.
......"Where did the comic come from in this case? It came from the fact that the living body became rigid, like a machine. Accordingly, it seemed to us that the living body ought to be the perfection of suppleness, the ever-alert activity of a principle always at work. but this activity would really belong to the soul rather than to the body. It would be the very flame of life, kindled within us by a high principle and perceived through the body, as if through a glass. When we see only gracefulness and suppleness in the living body, it is because we disregard in it the elements of weight, of resistance, and, in a word, of matter; we forget its materiality and think only of its vitality, a vitality which we regard as derived from the very principle of intellectual and moral life. Let us suppose, however, that our attention is drawn to this material side of the body; that, so far from sharing in the lightness and sublety of the principle with which it is animated, the body is no more in our eyes than a heavy and cumbersome vesture, a kind of irksome ballast which golds down to earth a soul eager to rise aloft. Then the body will become to the soul what, as we have seen, the garment was to the body itself- inert matter dumped down upon living energy." ......
Chapter 3, (Caricatures) p. 446 . %59. kindle.
...."To sum up, whatever be the doctrine to which our reason assents, our imagination as a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every human form it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter, a soul which is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law of gravitation, for it is not the earth that attracts it. This soul imparts a portion of its winged lightness to the body it animates: the immateriality which thus passes into matter is what is called gracefulness. Matter, however, is obstinate and resists. It draws to itself the ever-alert activity of this higher principle, would fain convert it to its own inertia and cause it to revert to mere automatism. It would fain immobilise the intelligently varied movements of the body in stupidly contracted grooves, stereotype in permanent grimaces the fleeting expressions of the face, in short imprint on the whole person such an attitude as to make it appear immersed and absorbed in the materiality of some mechanical occupation instead of ceaselessly renewing its vitality by keeping in touch with a living ideal. Where matter thus succeeds in dulling the outward life of the soul, in petrifying its movements and thwarting its gracefulness, it achieves, at the expense of the body, an effect that is comic. If then, at this point we wished to define the comic by comparing it with its contrary, we should have to contrast it with gracefulness even more than with beauty. It partakes rather of the unsprightly than of the unsightly, of RIGIDNESS rather than of UGLINESS. To be continued...
