The Continuity of Matter
My comments got a little long, so I figured I'd create a new post.
Like those who have already posted, I found the text difficult and am still trying to make sense of it (and haven’t yet read the outside essays). Rather than work out its overarching ideas, I have focused on particular points that interest me.
One point that intrigued me is Bergson’s analysis of the continuity of matter in chapter IV. He establishes as a rule that “All division of matter into independent bodies with absolutely determined outlines is an artificial division” (196). Yet we, as living humans, experience an “irresistible tendency to set up a material universe that is discontinuous, composed of bodies which have clearly defined outlines and change their place, that is, their relation with each other” (197). We assign boundaries to matter so as to divide it into distinct objects that we can comprehend and use to meet our needs (for example, nourishment), yet there are actually no such boundaries. In fact, according to Bergson, “very simple experiments show that there is never true contact between two neighboring bodies, and besides, solidity is far from being an absolutely defined state of matter” (199). Matter is continuous, but “the habits and necessities of practical life” encourage us to imagine matter to be discontinuous (199). Here I found it useful to recall some (slightly fuzzy) lessons from chemistry and biology. An endnote referenced in chapter IV mentions Van der Waals, which reminded me of the intermolecular forces named after him (Van der Waals forces). These also include, for instance, hydrogen bonds (slight attractions between hydrogen and oxygen, nitrogen, or fluorine responsible for the cohesion of water molecules, among other things) and are slight attractions—not actual contact—between atoms and/or molecules. A result of intermolecular forces is cohesion, enabling us to see an object—whether solid or liquid—where, as Bergson reminds us, there actually is no object. Rather than empty space, however, there exist between molecules or atoms forces--what Bergson describes as “threads” (200). He writes,
How might this notion of matter as continuous be complicated in a digital environment? Do we create, for our own human needs, these same boundaries or outlines in a digital environment, in “cyberspace”? I feel like I don’t really “see” cyberspace, but I know there is something out there connecting all the disparate websites on the Internet. What counts as matter on the Internet? I probably consider a website to be a “thing,” but it’s not an object I can hold and it doesn’t have mass, like ordinary matter. And when I think about the Internet, I’m usually not thinking about its physical infrastructure--servers and whatnot.
Something else I've been thinking about while reading: I've had an impulse to take the easy way out and defer to “what science says” in considering some of Bergson’s thought experiments about perception and the nervous system. Advancements in neuroscience over the past 100 years might shed light on some of the conditions Bergson is examining. Though Bergson draws upon science—his work is interdisciplinary, as Steph noted—Matter and Memory is chiefly philosophical, as I am continually reminding myself. But I guess I wonder how our responses to philosophy change with advancements in science. While science hasn’t resolved certain big questions—the existence of God, free will, for example—it has sorted out some other questions, including perhaps those involving the brain. I’m not very literate in neuroscience, but I wonder how recent discoveries might complicate Bergson’s work.
Like those who have already posted, I found the text difficult and am still trying to make sense of it (and haven’t yet read the outside essays). Rather than work out its overarching ideas, I have focused on particular points that interest me.
One point that intrigued me is Bergson’s analysis of the continuity of matter in chapter IV. He establishes as a rule that “All division of matter into independent bodies with absolutely determined outlines is an artificial division” (196). Yet we, as living humans, experience an “irresistible tendency to set up a material universe that is discontinuous, composed of bodies which have clearly defined outlines and change their place, that is, their relation with each other” (197). We assign boundaries to matter so as to divide it into distinct objects that we can comprehend and use to meet our needs (for example, nourishment), yet there are actually no such boundaries. In fact, according to Bergson, “very simple experiments show that there is never true contact between two neighboring bodies, and besides, solidity is far from being an absolutely defined state of matter” (199). Matter is continuous, but “the habits and necessities of practical life” encourage us to imagine matter to be discontinuous (199). Here I found it useful to recall some (slightly fuzzy) lessons from chemistry and biology. An endnote referenced in chapter IV mentions Van der Waals, which reminded me of the intermolecular forces named after him (Van der Waals forces). These also include, for instance, hydrogen bonds (slight attractions between hydrogen and oxygen, nitrogen, or fluorine responsible for the cohesion of water molecules, among other things) and are slight attractions—not actual contact—between atoms and/or molecules. A result of intermolecular forces is cohesion, enabling us to see an object—whether solid or liquid—where, as Bergson reminds us, there actually is no object. Rather than empty space, however, there exist between molecules or atoms forces--what Bergson describes as “threads” (200). He writes,
[W]e see force and matter drawing nearer together the more deeply the physicist has penetrated into their effects. We see force more and more materialized, the atom more and more idealized, the two terms converging toward a common limit and the universe thus recovering its continuity. We may still speak of atoms; the atom may even retain its individuality for our mind which isolates it, but the solidity and inertia of the atom dissolve either into movements or into lines of force whose reciprocal solidarity brings back to us universal continuity. (200)Atoms themselves are not so solid, however, as they are made mostly of empty space (a small nucleus surrounded by electrons constantly moving in individual orbits).
How might this notion of matter as continuous be complicated in a digital environment? Do we create, for our own human needs, these same boundaries or outlines in a digital environment, in “cyberspace”? I feel like I don’t really “see” cyberspace, but I know there is something out there connecting all the disparate websites on the Internet. What counts as matter on the Internet? I probably consider a website to be a “thing,” but it’s not an object I can hold and it doesn’t have mass, like ordinary matter. And when I think about the Internet, I’m usually not thinking about its physical infrastructure--servers and whatnot.
Something else I've been thinking about while reading: I've had an impulse to take the easy way out and defer to “what science says” in considering some of Bergson’s thought experiments about perception and the nervous system. Advancements in neuroscience over the past 100 years might shed light on some of the conditions Bergson is examining. Though Bergson draws upon science—his work is interdisciplinary, as Steph noted—Matter and Memory is chiefly philosophical, as I am continually reminding myself. But I guess I wonder how our responses to philosophy change with advancements in science. While science hasn’t resolved certain big questions—the existence of God, free will, for example—it has sorted out some other questions, including perhaps those involving the brain. I’m not very literate in neuroscience, but I wonder how recent discoveries might complicate Bergson’s work.
posted by Danielle at
4:32 PM
3 Comments:
I suppose I will be merely piggybacking on what everyone else has already said if I say that I found Bergson hard going. I think I’ll risk joining the group mentality on this one because I did find him hard going. It was one of those reading experiences where, in one moment, I felt a flash of insight—Got It!—and, in the next, lost it completely. Maybe that’s not an entirely inappropriate way of reading, given Bergson’s subject matter.
Like Danielle, I find it easier to focus on moments that interested me (or where I thought I was getting it), rather than on Bergson’s overarching project/argument. One of the moments that most interested me came relatively early in the book, when Bergson claims that, “[i]n fact, there is no perception which is not full of memories” (33). We do not see, recognize, interpret, or perceive the world around us without calling forth past memories through which we make sense of the perceptions. As Bergson explains it:
With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience. In most cases these memories supplant our actual perceptions, of which we then retain only a few hints, thus using them merely as “signs” that recall to us former images. (33)
I’m interested in how past memories might “supplant” what we actually perceive. The idea that we can only see the present through the myriad lenses of various pasts strikes me as resonant with the “known-new contract” of learning that comes to us from education (through Vygotsky???). We learn new things by fitting them into—and against—what we already know. There is always, then, an overlap between past and present, known and new. What happens when we turn perception into “signs” that call forth “former images”? How might it change the way we think about perception if it is always a matter of “reading” signs?
What I’m still trying to reconcile is how to integrate Bergson’s philosophies with the social constructionism that Composition has drilled into me. They don’t seem antithetical. In fact, Bergson’s idea about perception being informed by the “thousand details of our past experience” doesn’t sound all that different from the social filters of discourse communities that tell us how to make sense of things. But Bergson doesn’t seem interested in the social; his working out of the relationship between matter and memory seems to be located entirely in the individual mind/spirit. I wonder what he would say about social constructionism?
On a completely different note—and one that I cannot yet flesh out—I’m trying to work out relationship I’m sensing (maybe imagining?) between Bergson and Bakhtin. The former argues that “[t]he diverse perceptions of the same object, given by my different senses, will not, then, when put together, reconstruct the complete image of the object; they will remain separated from each other by intervals which measure, so to speak, the gaps in my need” (49). These gaps, that Bergson says an “education of the senses” can help to restore, strike me as resonant with Bakhtin’s concern for the unfinalizable. Like I said, I can’t quite articulate this yet, but it’s swirling around...
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I keep thinking, didn't I leave physical chemistry for a reason? Don't I hate all this theoretical bs? The answer being of course, absolutely. I find the idea of saying the same thing a thousand different ways completely useless not to mention mind numbing. To think Bergson can fill an entire book with basically a two or three sentence idea simply because that idea can't be explained. It's like p-chem, no one really knows what the hell they are talking about so they keep dancing around the theoretical fire hoping to distract people into thinking that they have a clue.
So then I start thinking about what we talked about in class, by we I mean Jamie, how the humanities are not integrated into the "digital" the way the sciences are. And then it kind of makes sense that to become like science one has to embrace science and pretend to understand it like the scientists do.
I liked the part in about soul and body. I wished someone would talk more about that. I'd prefer a metaphorical interpretation to a scientific one.
Ending my bitter rant.
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