the world are for it. The living organism, precisely because it is a center of real action, is a center of perspective. "The objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them."4 A "horizon" takes shape around
the living body5
Perception is not, then, a simple inspection of things: it is an anticipa- tion exercised by the body. If we set aside the contributions of memory (which alone make hallucination possible), there remains a "pure percep- tion" which establishes the body in things. This does not take place in us, but, more properly, there, where perception seems to be, in the midst of the world, outside. Science, therefore, is not well-suited to establish an objective theory of perception, because it is based on this very perception. Science refers us to the perceived world, previously given. The idea of a sci- entific knowledge, closed in upon itself, is only a myth:
Reduce matter to atoms in motion: these atoms, though denuded of phys- ical qualities, are determined only in relation to an eventual vision and an eventual contact, the one without light and the other without materiality. Condense atoms into centers of force, dissolve them into vortices revolving in a continuous fluid: this fluid, these movements, these centers, can themselves be determined only in relation to an impotent touch, an ineffectual impulsion, a colorless light; they are still images.6
By thus rehabilitating secondary qualities, Bergson quite consciously picks up where Berkeley left off. In the "Introduction" to Matter and
Memory we read that
Philosophy made a great step forward on the day when Berkeley estab- lished, in opposition to the "mechanical philosophers," that the secondary qualities of matter had at least as much reality as the primary qualities.7
In positing the material world, we therefore give ourselves, right away, an ensemble of images the existence of which it is no longer possible to renounce. Bergson repudiates the realism of thinkers which seeks to engender consciousness, to deduce it. We do not have to "deduce con- sciousness," for "by positing the material world we assume an aggregate of images."8 There is no In Itself which is not already a For-Me. In the approach
that Bergson takes, every esse is already a percipi. But Bergson does not follow this approach to its ultimate conclusion: in place of scientific realism, Bergson will substitute another realism, one founded upon the preexistence of total being. In it the percipi is deduced from the esse by degradation and carving out. "[T]he representation of an image [is] less than its presence."9
Bergson does not see, does not address the problem of the Cogito: he poses total being and carves out my perspective from it.
Matter and Memory 89
ceived from being rather than admitting, as he had been tempted to do, a primacy of perception, a kind of intermediate existence between the In Itself and the For Itself. He does not really look for the starting point of the subject's knowledge of being in the subject's situation in being, but places himself directly in being in order to then introduce the perceptive
decoupage. Neither Bergson nor the psychologists he criticizes distinguish
between consciousness and the object of consciousness.
In Kantian idealism, consciousness and extension are correlatives. Bergson criticizes subjective idealism, but not transcendental idealism.
There is in Bergson, then, a blindness toward the proper being of con- sciousness and its intentional structure. There is the same difficulty in explaining what the self which perceives is: Bergson represents this to him- self as a mixture of perception and recollection, the condensation of a mul- tiplicity of movements, a "contraction" of matter. Whence, in this first chapter, a constant mechanism of passage to the limit—with recognition of everyday experience as a "mixture."
It would have been necessary to show that the body is unthinkable without consciousness, because there is an intentionaiity of the body, and to show that consciousness is unthinkable without the body, for the present is corporeal.
Bergson began to see a philosophy of the perceived world which, in his first intention, was not realist. However, this view was spoiled by the move- ment to realism that considers the percipi as a lesser esse, consciousness being carved out from the interior of a world of images In Itself.
The truth is that the point P,. . . the rays which it emits, the retina and the nervous elements affected, form a single whole: that the luminous point P is a part of this whole: and that it is really in P, and not elsewhere, that the image of P is formed and perceived.10
Here, on the other hand, there is something new: not the fact of linking consciousness and object—Kant had already linked them—but the manner in which they are linked. In Kant, their relationship was that of a positing power to a posited object: the being of objects was at first idealized. The sentence quoted above is obvious for Kant, because the point P is, for him, nothing more than an ideal object. Kant considered the phenomenon of the object as an ideal order. What is new in Bergson, once again, is not found here. Bergson ignores reflective philosophy; thanks to this naivete, he is in a position to discover what remains inaccessible to reflective analysis: the thing and consciousness of the thing are linked, not as correlatives, but as absolutely simultaneous, without any priority Now Kant, despite every- thing, granted priority to the consciousness of the linker.