Retrospective 2025-04

This is a retrospective of week 4, 2025 (2025-01-20–2025-01-26).

This week I’ve continued reading Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson by William Barnard. Barnard writes (my emphasis):

While Living Consciousness is not a book on ethics, it has increasingly become clear to me that different metaphysical assumptions imply different visions of how human beings could or should live in the world and what human beings could or should aspire to become.

—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

According to Bergson, if we focus on the immediacy of what is occurring moment by moment within the depths of our own experience, what we will discover is that our consciousness, unlike the objects in the world surrounding us, is a freely flowing continuity of ceaseless change, a dynamic flux that is ever new and intrinsically creative. Our consciousness is also (again, in contrast to the world of matter) inherently temporal.

—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

…it is extremely difficult to cultivate this mode of intuitive knowledge…due in large part to our deeply rooted biological need to focus our attention outside of ourselves in order to master the objective world.

—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

According to Bergson, our urgent, almost obsessive, need to analyze, weigh, quantify, and control the external world cuts us off, at least partially, from the freedom and creativity of our deeper self…

—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

…Bergson asks us to shift our attention away from the insistent messages bombarding us from the outside as well as from the superficial beliefs that we have inherited from others in order to attempt the extremely difficult task of paying careful attention to what is present within us, as us, as the ever new, inherently creative, flux of our own consciousness.

—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

…he [Bergson] begins to emphasize that the external world itself, if understood correctly, is (like our own consciousness) not split into atomistic parts, but rather is a dynamic, flowing, interconnected continuum of processes; that is, the material world in reality is not a collection of “things” bumping into each other in utterly predetermined ways in the “container” of empty space, but rather is constituted by ceaseless movement and change and consequently is also inherently temporal in nature.

—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

…the physical world, if understood correctly, is less like a complex rearrangement of tiny billiard balls bouncing off each other and more like an intricate and interconnected dance of vibratory, spatiotemporal processes…

—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

…the physical world is not some sort of immensely complicated mechanical object, but instead is closer to a melody. As Bergson notes, like our consciousness, the melody of the physical universe is never static; it does not have clear-cut boundaries, but rather it unfolds. Like our consciousness, the tones of this melody overlap: they interpenetrate each other and yet, interestingly, each tone remains distinct. Like our consciousness, the tones of the melody of the universe are inherently plural and yet are simultaneously held together via the cohesive power of memory. Finally, this cosmic melody (again, like our consciousness) is a manifestation of continual change; it is an ever new play of difference—difference that is inherently temporal in its very nature (i.e., melodies take time).

—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

…both unity and diversity, continuity and change, identity and difference are intrinsic and deeply intertwined aspects of both the physical world and the deepest levels of our selfhood.

—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

According to Bergson, our “pure perceptions” (i.e., perceptions that are devoid of any overlay of memory) are formed when we subconsciously screen out the vast majority of the proto-conscious images of the universe that are ceaselessly flowing in and through us so that we can pay attention to the tiniest fraction of this universal flux, thereby converting the virtual consciousness of these universal images into the bedrock of our conscious perceptions. Our “concrete perceptions” (i.e., our actual, lived perceptions of the world around us) are, in turn, formed when these “pure perceptions” are overlaid with various layers of memory.

—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

Our everyday experience, therefore, is grounded in material reality (in that our perceptions are rooted in a direct, albeit highly truncated, contact with the physical universe); however, simultaneously, our experience of the world, others, and ourselves is powerfully shaped under the surface of our conscious awareness by the utterly unique and ceaselessly changing configuration of our personal memories—not only our specific, episodic recollections of past events, but even more importantly, a condensed, ever-shifting fusion of subconsciously held beliefs, cultural assumptions, bodily memory, and affective patterning. Every moment of experience, therefore, is a participatory, co-created event that, on the one hand, connects us to a shared, objective world, while on the other hand, is utterly unique and profoundly molded by our biographical, cultural, and historical background.

—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

…there are numerous levels of our memory that, sadly, appear to have become highly defended, contracted, and walled off due to repeated traumatic experiences; while even if it is true that we can all too often act under the influence of these more “knotted” levels of our inner world, in ways that can seem deadened or mechanical, nonetheless … it is always possible (in our freedom) to cultivate and deepen our connection to these depths and, hence, to generate increased levels of spontaneity, consciousness, and creativity in our daily lives.

—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

…Bergson attempts to base his philosophical conclusions on what is available to all of us in our own immediate experience. For Bergson, it is crucial that philosophical investigations start from what is, arguably, the most intimate, undeniable, vividly felt knowledge that we possess: what is taking place within our own consciousness.

—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

…it is a grave error to assume that our own inner states of awareness should be subjected to the same types of observational techniques that we would use to gather accurate information about external objects (e.g., measurement, controlled laboratory experiments, and so on).

—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson

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This week I’ve also started reading Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness by Henri Bergson. F. L. Pogson, Bergson’s translator, writes (my emphasis):

The method which he [Bergson] pursues is not the conceptual and abstract method which has been the dominant tradition in philosophy. For him reality is not to be reached by any elaborate construction of thought: it is given in immediate experience as a flux, a continuous process of becoming, to be grasped by intuition, by sympathetic insight. Concepts break up the continuous flow of reality into parts external to one another, they further the interests of language and social life and are useful primarily for practical purposes. But they give us nothing of the life and movement of reality; rather, by substituting for this an artificial reconstruction, a patchwork of dead fragments, they lead to the difficulties which have always beset the intellectualist philosophy, and which on its premises are insoluble. Instead of attempting a solution in the intellectualist sense, Professor Bergson calls upon his readers to put these broken fragments of reality behind them, to immerse themselves in the living stream of things and to find their difficulties swept away in its resistless flow.

—F. L. Pogson, Translator’s Preface in Time and Free Will by Henri Bergson