An Active Commons

Bergson's body-as-present and spirit-as-past distinction (one of time as opposed to the Cartesian spatial separation of body and spirit) hits its full stride, I believe, with the idea of an active spirit -- a spirit that like Bergson's looked-for perception is complete and unlike Bergson's metaphysicist predecessors' spirit is different than matter by degree rather than kind, and is therefore able to act upon matter/be acted upon by matter. The active spirit is also different than Bergson's earlier exploration of "the past as essentially that which acts no longer" and the present as "that which is acting" (74 in my 2007 Cosimo edition). If spirit is active the past is active as well, and as the past in our unconscious is active it means the unconscious is no longer powerless. That which is repressed (the whole of the image, for example) returns to affect bodies, consciousness, the present, etc., and, even in another sense of the word, affects themselves. I'm not sure how much I'm departing from Bergson here, but in thinking about the goals in the last two pages of chapter four -- changing the future by changing the past, that is, to create something new by using memory to imagine the past, and insert new possibilities into it, rather than repeating it -- the active spirit seems central. Repeating the past is connected to not remembering the past, and in this lack of memory the past and the present are actually conflated (temporally and spatially). Similarly, in psychology the unconscious is powerful when one is unaware of its power. Becoming aware of it changes power relations, as does becoming aware of the past through memory. The past and spirit become distinct only temporally, and as such are just as active as the present and matter. Bergson's distinction, then, is a very useful way to think about causality. It is actually similar in some ways to Derrida's theory of causality, "spectrality," that is, how the immaterial, repressed, spectral, etc., cause us to act. 

On refuting materialism by leaving to matter the qualities usually stripped from it, Bergson writes, "This, indeed, is the attitude of common sense with regard to matter, and for this reason common sense believes in spirit. It seems to us that philosophy should here adopt the attitude of common sense, although correcting it in one respect" (80). Apart from Bergson's correction and intention here, common sense, if I'm not mistaken, was thought by medieval philosophers to be part of a set of "internal senses" apart from the five "external" senses. It was what connected disjunctions of the different senses, and it survived as a concept of a common judgment on which we can all rely. It is also class-based: in thinking that philosophy should act more like common sense, the "we" in my "we can all rely" becomes the common wo/man, the multitude, etc., those who, for Bergson, believe in spirit. Going further, think of "the commons" as opposed to the traditional bourgeois conception of philosophers retained from the Ancient Greeks. Think of a knowledge commons that in our present is no longer just traditional but digital: where land was once the sole conception of property intellect has taken its place, that is, the fuzzy concept of "intellectual property" that corporations are now so worried about just as the bourgeoisie once worried about land.