Bergson, "False problems"

An essay ("Les faux problèmes") by this French philosopher. You can read the original as part of this collection.

Now let us close this overly long parenthesis, which we had to open to show to what degree conceptual thought has to be reformed and sometimes even discarded to be able to arrive at a more intuitive philosophical approach. We said that this philosophy will most often turn away from the social vision of the object already created; instead, it will ask us to participate mentally in the act of creation. It will place us, therefore, on this particular spot, in the direction of the divine. As it were, it is quite human that the labor of individual thought would accept its insertion into social thought and use preexisting ideas like any other tool furnished by the community. Yet there is already something quasi-divine in the effort, however humble, of a mind who reinserts itself into the life force which generates societies that generate ideas.

This effort will exorcize certain ghosts of problems which have plagued the metaphysicist, that is to say, each one of us. I am talking about those alarming and insoluble problems which have more to do with that which is not than with that which is. Such is the problem of the origin of being: "How can it be that something – material, mind, God – exists? There must have been a cause, and a cause of a cause, and so on indefinitely." And so we continue from cause to cause; and if we stop it is not because our reason does not look beyond, but rather because our imagination closes its eyes, as if above an abyss, to escape the vertigo. And so persists the problem of order in general: "Why should there be an ordered reality in which our thought is recovered as if in a mirror? Why isn't the world incoherent?" I say that these problems refer to that which is not more than with that which is. We would never be surprised, as it were, that something exists – material, mind, God – if we did not implicitly admit that it would be possible for nothing to exist. We figure – or better, we think we figure – that being came to fill a void and that nothingness logically preceded being: primordial reality – what we call material, mind, or God – would then add itself to this, a scenario which remains incomprehensible. Similarly, we would never ask why order exists if we did not think we had conceived of a disorder which would submit to reality and which, consequently, would precede it, at least ideally. Thus order would need to be explained, whereas disorder rightly would not require explanation. 

This is the point of view that we risk taking as long as we only seek to understand. But let us try additionally to create (apparently, we can only do that through thought). When we dilate our will which we tend to reabsorb into our thoughts and sympathize more with the creative effort, these incredible problems retreat, diminish, and disappear. And that is because we sense that divinely creative willpower or thought is too rich and full, in its immensity of reality, for the idea of an absence of order or an absence of being to be able only to graze it. Representing the possibility of absolute disorder, and even more so of nothingness, would mean saying that it could not be the being of everything, and that would be a weakness incompatible with its nature, which is force. The more we consider the matter, the more abnormal and morbid seem the doubts which torment a normal and sane man. Let us recall the doubter that closes his window then returns to verify the closing, then verifies the verification, and so forth. If we were to ask him his reasons, he would reply that he could have reopened the window each time he tried as best he could to close it. And if he is a philosopher, he would intellectually transpose the hesitation in his behavior into this formulation of the problem: "How can one be sure, definitely sure, that one has done what one wanted to do?" But the truth is that his power to act is wronged, and here is where he suffers: he only had a semi-desire to carry out the act and that is why the act leaves him with nothing more than semi-certainty. Now can we solve the problem this man has given himself? Apparently not, but we will not give him such a problem: herein lies our superiority. At first glance, I would be able to believe that there is more in him than in me because both of us close the window, yet it is only he who raises a philosophical question. But the question with which he tasks himself is in reality nothing more than a negative; it is not more, but less; it is a deficit of willpower. This is precisely the effect that certain "big problems" have upon us when we place ourselves in the context of creative thought. They tend towards zero as we approach this context, being nothing more than the distance between the context and ourselves. And so we discover the illusion of the person who thinks he is doing more by tasking himself with such questions than by not tasking himself. It is very much like imagining that there is more in a half-consumed bottle than in a full bottle because the latter only contains wine, whereas the former contains both wine and emptiness.

But as soon as we intuitively perceive the truth, our reason resurfaces, corrects itself, and intellectually formulates its mistake. It has received the suggestion; it provides the check. Just like the diver on the ocean floor will feel and touch the wreck pointed out to him by the pilot high up the air, so will our reason immersed in the conceptual environment verify from point to point, through contact, analytically, what had been the object of a synthetic and supraintellectual vision. Without any warning from outside, the thought of a possible illusion would not have even grazed it because the illusion made up part of its nature. Shaken from its sleep, it will analyze the ideas of disorder, of nothingness and its congenerics. And it will recognize – if only for a moment, as the illusion will then immediately appear dispelled – that we cannot suppress an arrangement without another arrangement's taking its place, or replace one material without the substitution of another. Therefore "disorder" and "nothingness" really denote a presence – the presence of a thing or an order that does not interest us, which disappoints our effort or our attention. And it is our disappointment that is expressed when we call this presence an absence. In such a case, talking about the absence of all order and of all things – that is to say, of absolute disorder and absolute nothingness – would mean saying words devoid of sense, flatus vocis, since a suppression is simply a substitution envisaged on one of two sides, and the abolition of all order or of all things is a substitution of one side, the idea that has as much existence as that of a round square. So when the philosopher speaks of chaos and nothingness, he is doing nothing more than moving into the order of speculation – taken to the absolute and emptied there of all sense, of all effective content – two ideas made for practice which would then refer to a determined type of material or order, but not to all order and not to all material. From this point of view, what is to become of the two problems of the origin of order and the origin of being? They vanish; they vanish because they are only asked if we imagine being and order as "occurring," and consequently if we imagine nothingness and disorder as possible or at least conceivable. As it were, they are nothing more than words, a mirage of ideas.

May reason be penetrated by this conviction and be delivered from this obsession – only then will human thought breathe. It will no longer task itself with questions which retard its further progress.* It witnesses these difficulties vanish one by one, such as, for example, ancient Skepticism and modern criticism. It may also arrive at the side of Kantian philosophy and the "theories of knowledge" which emanate from Kantianism – and it doesn't stop there. As such, the very aim of The Critique of Pure Reason is to explain how a defined order can add itself to materials that are allegedly incoherent. And we know the price that we would pay for such an explanation: the human mind would impose its form on a "sensitive diversity" emanating from who knows where; the order which we find in things would be that which we ourselves impose. As a result, science would be legitimate but relative to our ability to know, and metaphysics would be impossible because there would be no knowledge beyond that of science. In this way, the human mind would be relegated to a corner like a schoolchild told to stand in the corner in punishment, prohibited from turning his head to see reality in the way it really exists. And there's nothing more natural if we have not noticed that the idea of absolute disorder is contradictory or, better, non-existent, a simple word by which we designate an oscillation of mind between two different orders. From this point of view, it is absurd to suppose that disorder logically or chronologically precedes order. The merit of Kantianism is to have developed this idea in all its consequences and presented it in its most systematic form, that of a natural illusion. But it has conserved it: Kantianism is in fact based upon this concept. Shed this illusion and we immediately bring back the human mind by science and metaphysics, by knowledge and by the absolute. 

Thus we return to our starting point. We said that we needed to take philosophy to a higher level of precision, to place it in a position to resolve more specific problems, to make it an auxiliary and, if needed, a reformer of positive science. No more big system which embraces everything possible and sometimes also the impossible! Let us content ourselves with the real, material and mind. But let us also ask our theory to encompass the real so tightly that nothing, no other interpretation may slip between them. There will therefore be only one philosophy like there is only one science. Both will be created by means of a collective and progressive effort. And it is true that a perfection of the philosophical method will be imposed, symmetric and complementary to that which science once obtained.

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* When we recommend a state of soul in which such problems vanish, let it be understood that we are only doing this to the problems which give us vertigo because they put us in the presence of the void. The quasi-animalistic condition of a being who never asks himself a single question is another matter, as is the semi-divine state of a mind who is not tempted to evoke, by an effect of human infirmity, artificial problems. For this privileged way of thinking the problem is always at the point of arising but is always arrested, whereby what is properly intellectual is stopped by its intellectual equivalent which sparks its intuition. The illusion is neither analyzed nor dissipated because it is not declared; yet it would be if it were declared; and these two antagonistic possibilities which are of an intellectual order are cancelled intellectually for not leaving room for anything apart from an intuition of the real. In the two cases we have cited it is the analysis of the ideas of disorder and nothingness which provide the intellectual equivalent of the intellectualist illusion.

Bergson, "What is a dream?" (part 3)

The final part of a lecture given at the Institut général psychologique by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

So what then is the difference between perceiving and dreaming?  What then is sleeping?  I am not, of course, asking about the physiological conditions of sleep; that is a question for physiologists to debate, and it is far from being resolved.  I am asking how we should represent the state of a sleeping man's soul.  For the mind continues to function during sleep; it exerts itself − as we have just seen − upon sensations and memories.  And whether we are asleep or awake, it combines the sensation with the memory the sensation evokes.  The mechanism of this operation seems to be the same in both cases.  Nevertheless, we have, on the one hand, normal perception, and, on the other hand, we have dreams.  The mechanism therefore does not work in the same way.  Where is the difference?  And what is the psychological character of sleep?

Let us not trust too much in theories.  We have said that sleeping consisted of isolating oneself from the outside world.  Yet we have shown that sleep does not close off our senses from external impressions, but rather that these impressions lend most dreams their subject matter.  We have also seen that sleep may provide rest devoted to the higher functions of thought, a suspension of reasoning.  I do not think this can be more precise.  In dreams we often become indifferent to logic, but not incapable of logic.  At the risk of bordering on paradox, I would almost say that the fault of the dreamer is to reason too much.  He would avoid the absurd if he remained a mere spectator to the procession of his visions.  But when he wants to provide an explanation at any cost, his logic, destined to connect these incoherent images, cannot but parody reason and approach absurdity.  What is more, I recognize that the higher functions of intelligence are relaxed during sleep, and that even if the faculty of reason is not encouraged by the incoherent game of images, it occasionally amuses itself by defying normal reason.  Yet we could say the same thing about all other faculties.  Thus we cannot characterize the state of dreaming as an abolition of reason or an occlusion of the senses.  Let us put these theories aside and get in touch with the facts.

We have to conduct a decisive experiment upon ourselves.  As we leave the dream state − since we can scarcely analyze ourselves in the course of the dream itself − we will espy the passage from sleep to waking and tighten the beginning and end of that passage as closely together as we can.  Attentive to what is essentially inattentiveness, we will come upon, from a waking state's point of view, the state of the soul still present in the sleeping man.  This is difficult, but not impossible for those who have exerted themselves patiently.  Now permit this panelist to tell you one of his dreams and what he thought he verified upon waking.

The dreamer thinks he is at a tribune haranguing a crowd.  A confused murmur arises from the back of the auditorium.  It gets stronger and stronger; it grows into rumbling, yelling, a horrific din.  Finally, cries can be heard from every part, chanted to a regular rhythm: "Show him the door!  Show him the door!"  At this moment he suddenly wakes up.  A dog was barking in the neighboring garden, and every "woof, woof" of the dog was confused with one of the "Show him the door!" cries.  This is the moment to grasp.  The waking "I" which has just appeared will return to the dreaming "I," who is still there, and say to him: "I have caught you in the act!  You show me a crowd screaming but there is nothing more than a dog barking.  Do not try to flee; I have you: I will learn your secret; you will allow me to see what you did."  To which the dreaming "I" responds: "Take a look: I didn't do anything, and it's precisely in this regard that we differ, you and I, from one another.  Do you think you have to do nothing at all to hear a dog bark and understand that this is a dog barking?  A very serious mistake!  Without thinking about it, you make a considerable effort.  You have to take your entire memory and all your accumulated experience, then lead it, in a sudden constriction, to find only one sound amidst your memories of sound which most closely resembles the sensation of the sound you heard, or which best explains that sound.  This sensation is therefore recovered by memory.  Moreover, you have to obtain a perfect adherence so that there is not even the slightest gap between them (if not, you would be sitting squarely in that dream); the only way you can ensure that this adjustment occurs is by paying attention, or rather by a simulated tension of the sensation and the memory.  This is what a tailor does when he is about to have you try on a piece of clothing for 'basting': he uses pins and fits the material as tightly as he can to your body, which is offered for the task.  Your waking life is therefore a life of work, even when you think you're not doing anything, since at any given moment you must choose, and at any given moment you must exclude.  You choose from among your sensations since you reject a thousand 'subjective' sensations from your consciousness which reappear immediately after you fall asleep.  You choose with extreme precision and delicacy from among your memories since you shove aside all memories which do not fit your present state.  This choice, which you incessantly effectuate, this continually renewed adaptation, is the essential condition of what we call common sense.  But adaptation and choice keep you in a state of uninterrupted tension.  You do not realize it at the time, no more than you sense atmospheric pressure.  But at length you grow weary.  Having common sense is very tiring.

"For, as I just told you, I differ from you precisely in that I do not do anything.  I wholly and simply refrain from making the ceaseless effort which you make.  You are attached to life; I am detached from it.  I become indifferent to everything.  I am uninterested in everything.  To sleep is to be uninterested in life.  We sleep in the exact measure that we are uninterested.  A mother who sleeps next to her child may not hear cracks of thunder whereas a sigh from her child might wake her up.  Was she really sleeping in favor of her child?  We do not sleep in favor of that which continues to interest us.

"You ask me what I do when I dream?  I am going to tell you what you do when you are awake.  You take me − the dreaming "I," the totality of your past − and you lead me, from narrowing to narrowing, and enclose me in a very small circle which you trace around your current action.  This is being awake, this is living a normal psychological life, this is struggling, this is wanting.  As for dreams, do you need me to explain them to you?  Dreams are the state in which you naturally find yourself as soon as you abandon yourself, as soon as you neglect concentrating on a single point, as soon as you stop wanting.  If you insist, if you demand to have something explained to you, ask then how your will goes about the matter at every waking moment, in order to obtain instantaneously and almost unconsciously the concentration of everything you have within you regarding what interests you.  But direct your query to the psychology of awakedness.  Its principal purpose is to respond to you because being awake and wanting are one and the same thing."

This is what my dreaming "I" would say.  And it would tell us many other things if we let it do so.  But it is time to finish up.  What is the essential difference between dreaming and being awake?  We would be repeating ourselves by saying that the same faculties are exerted, whether in waking or in dreaming, but that they are tense in the first case and relaxed in the second.  Dreaming is our entire mental life minus the effort of concentration.  We still perceive, we still remember, we still reason: perceptions, memories, and reasonings might abound in the dreamer since abundance, in the domain of the mind, does not mean effort.  What requires effort is the precision of the adjustment.  We have to do nothing for a dog's bark to untether, in passing, the memory of a crowd's rumbling.  But for this memory to come back as a preference to all other memories, the memory of a dog barking, and to be understood henceforth, that is to say effectively perceived, as a bark, this requires a positive effort.  The dreamer no longer has the power to make that effort.  In that regard, and only in that regard, does he differ from a man who is awake.

This is the difference.  It is expressed in many forms.  I will not get into any detail; I will limit myself by drawing your attention to two or three points: the instability of dreams, the speed with which they can unfurl themselves, and the preference they bestow upon insignificant memories.

The instability of dreams can be easily explained.  Since dreams in essence involve not adjusting a sensation precisely to a memory, but instead allowing the sensation to frolic, a number of very diverse memories may be posed against a single sensation.  Take, for example, a green spot sprinkled with white dots in the field of vision.  This may summon a memory of a meadow full of flowers, a pool table and its balls − as well as many, many other things.  All these memories wish to be revived in this sensation; all of them run after it in pursuit.  Sometimes they reach their goal one after the other: the meadow becomes a pool table and we witness some extraordinary transformations.  Sometimes they come together: the meadow is a pool table − an absurdity the dreamer will perhaps attempt to alleviate by reason, which will aggravate it further.

The speed at which certain dreams develop seems to be another effect from the same cause.  In but a few seconds, our dream may present us with a series of events which would have taken several whole days if we were awake.  You know Alfred Maury's observation: it has remained a classic, and whatever might have been said about it recently, I deem it plausible because I have found analogous accounts in the literature on dreams.  Yet this precipitation of images has nothing mysterious about it.  Note that the images of dreams are mostly visual; conversations which the dreamer thinks he has had are, in the majority of cases, reconstructed, completed, and amplified when he wakes up.  Perhaps even, in certain cases, it may even have been only the thought of the conversation, its overall meaning, that accompanied those images.  For, as large a multitude of visual images as we may desire can occur all of a sudden, in panorama; more likely it will be a succession of a small number of moments.  It is therefore not surprising that dreams amass in a few seconds what would have taken many waking days: dreams see them in short; they proceed, when all is said and done, like memory proceeds.  In a waking state, the visual memory which serves to interpret the visual sensation is obliged to place itself precisely upon it; from here follows the unfurling; it takes up the same time; in short, the recognized perception of outside events lasts just as long they do.  But in dreams, the interpretative memory of the visual sensation regains its liberty: the fluidity of the visual sensation forces the memory not to stick; the rhythm of the interpretative memory therefore does not need to adopt the rhythm of reality; and the images may henceforth occur, if they so choose, with vertiginous speed, as would happen with a film reel if we did not regulate its unfurling.  Precipitation, no more than abundance, is no sign of power in the domain of the mind: it is order, it is always the precision of adjustment that requires effort.  The interpretative memory could become strained, it could pay attention to life, it could finally exit a dream: whatever the case, external events will chant its pace and slow down its speed.  As, in a clock, the pendulum in its slices delays for the period of several days the spring which would be practically instantaneous if it were free.

So what would be left is to find out why dreams prefer this or that memory to others just as capable of placing themselves upon actual sensations.   The fantasies of our dreams are scarcely more explicable that those of our waking hours; at the very least, we may note their strongest tendency.  During normal sleep our dreams gather those thoughts which passed like flashes or those objects which we perceived without fixing our attention upon them.  If we dream of the events of the day, insignificant occurrences, not more important things, have a greater chance of reappearing during the night.  On this point I agree completely with the views of many other researchers.  I am in the street; I am waiting for the tram; it would not be able to touch me because I do not budge from the sidewalk.  What do I then say when, at the moment it grazes me, the idea of a possible danger crosses my mind?  If my body shrinks back instinctively without my being conscious of being afraid, the next night I may dream that the tram will run me over.  During the day I take care of a sick person whose condition is hopeless.  If a ray of hope flares within me for just an instant − a momentary, almost imperceptible flash − my dreams that night may show me the sick person cured; in any case, I would be more likely to dream of a cure than of death or illness.  In short, what is preferably recalled is what is least noticed.  There is nothing surprising about that.  The dreaming "I" is a distracted "I" who is relaxed.  The memories that harmonize best with it are the memories of distraction, those, as it were, which do not bear the mark of effort. 

These are the observations which I wanted to present to you on the subject of dreams.  They are quite incomplete.  They still only refer to the dreams we know nowadays, to those which we remember and which usually belong to lighter sleep.  When we sleep deeply, we may experience dreams of another kind, but of them little is left by the time we wake up.   I tend to believe − for, it should be said, reasons predominantly theoretical and therefore hypothetical − that it is during this deep sleep that we have a far more extended and detailed vision of our past.  It is thus towards deep sleep that psychology should direct its efforts, not only to study the structure and function of unconscious memory, but also to scrutinize more mysterious phenomena that are the result of "psychical research."  I will not venture onto this terrain; nevertheless, I cannot but attach a certain importance to the observations culled with such indefatigable zeal by the Society for Psychical Research.  Exploring the unconscious, working in the basement of the mind with specially suited methods − such should be the principal tasks of psychology in this century that has just begun.  I have no doubts that some wonderful discoveries await us, discoveries perhaps as important as those in preceding centuries in the physical and natural sciences.  In the very least, this is my wish for our new century and the hope I convey to you here in conclusion.

Bergson, "What is a dream?" (part 2)

Part two of a lecture given at the Institut général psychologique by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Let us summarize what we have discussed.  During natural sleep our senses are in no way shut off from outside impressions.  Doubtless they do not have the same precision; on the other hand, they come across far more "subjective" impressions which took place unnoticed during waking hours, when we were moving about the outside world common to all men, and which reappear during sleep because now we only live for ourselves.  We cannot even claim that our perception is reduced when we sleep; rather, it expands, in certain ways at least, its field of operation.  It is true that it loses in tension what it gains in extension.  It hardly delivers anything not diffused and confused.  But we create dreams with just as much real sensation.

How do we create dreams?  The sensations which act as our material are vague and unspecified.  Let us take the most basic among them, those colored spots that evolve before us when we close our eyelids.  Here we have black lines on a white background.  They could represent a carpet, a chessboard, a page of writing, a host of other things as well.  Who selects these things?  What is the form that imprints its decision upon the indecision of the material?  This form is memory.

We note first of all that dreams generally create nothing at all.  Doubtless one may cite several examples of artistic, literary, or scientific works carried out in the course of a dream.  I will only mention the best known of these.  A musician of the eighteenth century, Tartini, burnt with the fires of composition but the muse remained rebellious.  He fell asleep; and here is where the Devil himself appeared, seized a violin, and played the sonata so desired.  Upon waking, Tartini wrote the sonata down from memory, and it comes down to us as the Devil’s Trill Sonata.  But we can get little from such a terse account.  What we really need to know is whether Tartini didn’t actually compose the sonata while trying to recollect it.  The imagination of the sleeper who wakes sometimes adds to the dream, retroactively changes it, or fills in the gaps which may be, we understand, considerable.  I have looked for more profound observations and, most of all, for more certain authenticity. But the only one I could find was that of the Scottish novelist Stevenson.  In a curious essay entitled “A chapter on dreams” Stevenson teaches us that the most original stories have been composed or at least completely sketched out in dreams.  But read that chapter attentively: you will see that the author once knew, at some point in his life, a psychological state in which he had difficulty determining whether he was asleep or awake.  In fact, I believe that when the mind creates, when it makes the effort that demands the composition of a work or the solution to a problem, it is not asleep – at least that part of the mind which is working is not the same as the one which is dreaming.  The working part pursues, in the subconscious, research which has no bearing on the dream and which only appears upon waking.

As for the dream itself, it is hardly more than a resurrection of the past.  But it is a past we do not recognize.  Often, it involves a forgotten detail, a remembrance that seemed erased and which, in reality, was hiding in the depths of memory.  Often the image evoked is also that of an object or action perceived distractedly, almost unconsciously, during waking hours.  And most of all, there are fragments of shattered remembrances which memory collects here and there and which it presents to the consciousness of the sleeper in an incoherent form.  Before this assembly deprived of sense, intelligence (which continues reasoning regardless of what is said) looks for meaning; it attributes incoherence to the gaps which it fills in evoking other remembrances, those which are often presented in the same disorder and which, in turn, suggest a new explanation, and so forth indefinitely.  But for the moment I will not insist on this viewpoint.  Suffice it to say that, to respond to the question I just asked, the informative power which converts vague impressions that catch the eye, the ear, and the entire surface and interior of the body into precise and specified objects – this is memory.

Memory!  When awake, we have quite a few remembrances which appear and disappear, demanding our attention one after another. But these are the remembrances closely attached to our situation and our action.  I recall now a book by the Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys on the subject of dreams.  The situation is that I am dealing with the question of dreams and I am here at the Psychology Institute; it involves my surroundings and my occupation, that which I perceive and what I am called upon to orient the activity of my memory in a particular direction.  The remembrances which we evoke while awake, as foreign as they often appear to our preoccupations of the moment, are always connected in some way.  What is the role of memory in an animal? It is to remind him, in each case, of the advantageous and disadvantageous consequences of analogous antecedents and thus to instruct him on what he has to do.  In man, memory is not as much a prisoner of action; I recognize what I have to do but I still persist in not doing it or doing something else.  Our remembrances, at any given time, form a solid whole – a pyramid, if you will – with an unceasingly moving summit that coincides with our present and surges with it into the future.  But behind the remembrances which come and rest in this way upon our present occupation, and which are then revealed in the occupation, there are also others, thousands and thousands of others, below the scene illuminated by our consciousness.

Yes, I believe that our past life is there, retained in its minutest details, and that we forget nothing, and that everything we have ever perceived, thought, wanted, from the first waking hour of our consciousness, persists indefinitely.  But the remembrances which my memory keeps in this way in its darkest depths are also in the form of invisible ghosts.  Perhaps they yearn for light; in any case, they do not try to surface.  They know that it is impossible, and that I, a living and moving creature, have other things to do apart from seeing to them.  But suppose that at a given moment I become disinterested in the present situation, in the present action, in that one point on which my memory would normally concentrate all its activities.  Suppose, in other words, that I fall asleep.  This is when these immobile remembrances, sensing that I have just hurdled the obstacle and lifted the trapdoor which kept them in the basement of my consciousness, set themselves in motion.  They rise, bustle about, carry out tasks, all during the night of the unconsciousness person, an immense danse macabre.  And, all together, they run to the door that has just been cracked open.  They all want to get through.  They all cannot, since there are too many of them.  From among this multitude of summoned remembrances, which are the ones selected?  You will have little difficulty in guessing.  Just now, when I was awake, the remembrances admitted were the ones that could invoke a relationship with the present situation, with my current perceptions.  Now they are the vaguest forms that take shape before my eyes; the most indecisive sounds which impress my ear; the most indistinct of touches which scatter across the surface of my body.  But they are also the most frequent sensations that come from the inside of my organs.  And so, among these ghost remembrances which seek to ballast themselves with color, with sound, with materiality in the end, those which manage to do so are the ones which can assimilate the colored dust that I see, the sounds from outside or inside which I hear, etcetera, and which, in addition, harmonize with the general affective state of which my organic impressions are composed.  When this junction operates between memory and sensation, I dream.

In a poetic page of The Enneads, the philosopher Plotinus, interpreter of and heir to Plato, explains to us how men are born into life.  Nature, he says, sketches out living bodies, but only sketches them out.  Left to its own devices, it would not complete the task.  On the other hand, souls reside in the world of Ideas.  Incapable of acting and not even thinking about doing so, they glide above time and outside space.  But among the bodies, there are certain ones who correspond more in form to the yearnings of certain souls.  And among the souls, there are those who recognize themselves more clearly in certain bodies.  The body, which emerges from nature’s hands still not quite viable, will then polarize to that soul which will give it a complete life.  And the soul, looking at the body in which it believes it has seen its reflection, fascinated as if looking in a mirror, will let itself be attracted as well, bow forward and fall.  Its fall is the beginning of life.  I would compare these detached souls to the remembrances which wait at the bottom of our unconscious.  I would also liken our nocturnal sensations to those hardly sketched bodies.  The sensation is warm, colored, vibrant, and almost living, but indecisive.  The remembrance is clean and precise, but without an inside and without life.  The sensation would surely like to find a form in which it may fix the indecision of its contours.  The remembrance would surely like to obtain material to fill itself out, to ballast itself, to realize itself at last.  They are attracted to one another, and the ghost remembrance materializing in the sensation which brings it blood and flesh becomes a being which lives its own life.  It becomes a dream.

The birth of a dream has therefore no mystery to it.  Our dreams are elaborated a bit like our vision of the real world.  The mechanism of operation is the same generally speaking.  What we see of an object placed before our eyes, and what we understand of a phrase pronounced in our ears, is little, as it were, next to what our memory adds to it.  When you glance through your newspaper, when you leaf through a book, do you think that you actually perceive every letter of every word, or even every word of every sentence?  You wouldn’t be reading many pages per day then. The truth is that you perceive neither the word nor the sentence, but instead only certain letters or certain characteristic traits, just enough for you to guess the rest.  All the rest you think to see, when in reality you have brought upon yourself a hallucination.  Many corroborative experiments leave no doubt in this regard.  I will only cite those of Goldscheider and Müller.  These researchers write or print formulations in contemporary usage: “Entry strictly forbidden”; “Preface to the fourth edition,” etcetera, but take care to make mistakes, changing and, above all, omitting letters.  The person subjected to this experiment is then placed before these formulations, in the dark, and naturally has no idea what was written.  Then the inscription is illuminated for a very short time, too short a time for the observer to see all the letters.  He begins, in fact, by determining experimentally the time needed to catch sight of a letter of the alphabet.  It is thus easy to make it so that the subject cannot distinguish more than eight or ten letters, for example, from the thirty or forty contained in the formulation.  For, more often than not, he can read this formulation without any difficulty.

But this is not the most instructive point of this experiment for us.  If one were to ask the observer which letters are the ones he perceived, the letters he would mention might in fact be present.  But they could also be letters which are absent, which have been replaced by others or which were simply omitted.  In this way, because sense seems to demand it, he sees himself working off nonexistent letters in full light.  The characters that are really perceived are those which serve to evoke a remembrance.  Unconscious memory, finding the formulation to which these characters begin to give shape, projects this remembrance out in hallucinatory form.  It is the remembrance which the observer has seen, much more than the inscription itself.  In short, reading is guesswork, but not abstract guesswork: it is the exteriorization of remembrances, of perceptions recalled simply and therefore unreal, all of which benefit from the partial realization which they find here and there in order to realize themselves completely.

In this way, in a waking state, our recognition of an object implies an analogous operation to that which a dream carries out.  We see nothing of an object except its sketch; this calls upon the remembrance of the complete thing; and the complete remembrance of which our mind was not conscious, remains in any case internal as a simple thought, and takes advantage of the occasion to project itself outwards.  It is this type of hallucination, inserted into a real frame, which we inflict upon ourselves when we see something.  There would also be a lot to say about the attitude and behavior of the remembrance during the course of the operation.  One should not think that the remembrances lodged at the bottom of memory remain there inert and indifferent.  They are waiting; they are almost ready at attention.  When the mind is more or less preoccupied and we open up our newspaper, don’t we immediately manage to stumble across a word which corresponds precisely to our preoccupation?  But the sentence makes no sense, and we perceive right away that the word we read is not the word printed: there were simply some traits in common between the two, a vague resemblance in their configuration.  The idea that we absorbed thus awakened, in our unconscious, all the images of the same family, all the remembrances of similar words, and made them hope, in a way, that they might return to consciousness.  And one has, in effect, become conscious once again that the actual perception of a certain form of word is beginning to come into being.

Such is the mechanism of perception strictly speaking, and such is the mechanism of dreams.  In both cases there are, on the one hand, real impressions made on the sensory organs, and, on the other hand, remembrances which come to be inserted into the impression and which profit from its vitality to return to life.

Bergson, "What is a dream?" (part 1)

The first part of a lecture given at the Institut général psychologique by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

The subject that the institute invited me to talk to you about is so complex and raises so many problems – some psychological, others physiological and even metaphysical – and would require explanations of such length (and we have so little time), that I request your permission to forgo all prefatory and non-essential remarks and come immediately to the heart of the matter.

So here is a dream: I see marching before me all sorts of objects; none of them exists in reality.  I feel that I am coming and going, enduring a series of adventures, when all the while I am asleep in my bed, and quite peacefully at that.  I listen to myself speak and I hear how I am answered; nonetheless, I am alone and say nothing.  Whence comes this illusion?  Why do we perceive people and things as if they were really present?

But first, is there nothing at all?  Isn't a certain perceptible material offered to our sight, to our hearing, to our touch, etcetera?

Let us close our eyes and see what happens.  Many people will say that nothing happens, but that is because they are not looking attentively.  In reality, we notice a great many things.  First of all, a black background.  Then spots of various colors, sometimes drab, sometimes of a singular clarity.  These spots dilate and contract, change forms and nuance, encroach upon one another.  The change may be slow and gradual.  On occasion this change also takes place with extreme rapidity.  Whence comes this phantasmagoria?  Physiologists and psychologists have spoken of "luminous dust," "ocular spectra," and "phosphenes"; in any case, they attribute these appearances to slight modifications produced incessantly in the circulation of the retina, or to the pressure which the closed eyelid exerts upon the human eye, mechanically exciting the optic nerve.  Yet it matters little what the explanation of the phenomenon may be, or what name we choose to give it.  It is found in everyone and it provides, without a doubt, the stuff from which we carve out our dreams.

Alfred Maury and, around the same period, the Marquis d'Hervey de Saint-Denys had both remarked that these colored spots in moving form might be consolidated at the moment of our becoming sleepy, thus sketching the contours of the objects that will compose our dreams.  This observation was taken, however, with a grain of salt because it came from psychologists who were half-asleep.  G. T. Ladd, an American philosopher and professor at Yale University, has since devised a more rigorous method, if one of difficult application as it requires some training.  It involves keeping our eyes closed when we wake and retaining for a few moments the dream that is about to disappear from our field of vision and soon, of course, also from our memory.  Here we see the objects of our dreams dissolve into phosphenes and become confounded with the colored spots which the eye really perceived when our eyelids were closed.  For example, let's say we were reading a newspaper: this is a dream.  We wake up, and from the newspaper, whose lines are fading, we see a white spot with vague black streaks: this is reality.  Or we might think of a dream coming to us on the open water.  As far as the eye could see, the ocean was nurturing its grey waves crowned in white foam.  Upon waking, everything gets lost in a large spot of pale grey sprinkled with brilliant dots.  During sleep, therefore, something was offered to our perception, a visual dust, and this dust is used to create dreams.

Is it the only thing used?  To speak only about our sense of sight, let us say that beside these visual sensations whose source is internal, there is also an exterior cause.  The eyelids may have been closed, yet the eye still distinguishes light and darkness and even recognizes, up to a certain point, the nature of that light.  For the sensations provoked by real light lie at the origin of many of our dreams.  A candle lit suddenly will evoke in the sleeper, if his sleep is not too deep, an ensemble of visions dominated by the idea of fire.  Tissié cites two such examples: "B. dreams that the theater of Alexandria is on fire; the flames illuminate an entire city quarter.  All of a sudden he finds himself transported to the center of the basin at Manshieh square; a streak of fire runs along the chains connecting the bounds placed about the basin.  Then he finds himself in Paris at the Expo which is on fire ... he witnesses some harrowing scenes, etcetera.  He wakes up with a start.  His eyes had been taking in the ray of light projected by the dark lantern which the nurse on duty had turned towards his bed when she passed by..."; "M. dreams that he has been engaged by the marine corps, where he once served.  He goes to Fort-de-France, to Toulon, to Lorient, to the Crimea, to Constantinople.  He sees flashes of lightning; he hears thunder ... finally, he takes part in a battle in which he sees fire leaving the mouths of the cannons ... He wakes up with a start.  Like B., he was woken up by the stream of light projected by the dark lantern of the nurse making her rounds."  Such are the dreams that can be provoked by vivid and unexpected light.

Very different are those which suggest a continuous, soft light, such as that of the moon.  Krauss tells us that one night, as he was waking up, he noticed that he was still extending his arms towards the person who had been, in his dream, a young girl, towards what was nothing more than the moon, amidst whose beams of light he squarely sat.  This case is not the only one.  It seems that the rays of the moon, caressing the eyes of the sleeper, may have the power of provoking such virginal apparitions.  Would this not explain the fable of Endymion, the shepherd forever asleep, whom the goddess Selene (otherwise known as the Moon) loves so profoundly?

The ear also has its interior sensations – buzzing, chiming, whistling – which we make out rather poorly while awake yet which sleep cleanly detaches.  What is more, once we are asleep we continue to hear certain noises from outside.  The creak of furniture; the crackling fire; the rain beating against the window; the wind playing its chromatic scale in the chimney; as well as other sounds which catch the ear and which dreams convert into conversations, cries, concerts, etcetera.  When scissors and tongs are rubbed together before the ears of a sleeping Alfred Maury, we get the following: he immediately dreams that he hears an alarm and that he is witnessing the events of June 1848.  I can cite other examples.  But one must understand that sounds have as much place in the majority of dreams as forms and colors do.  Visual sensations predominate; in fact, often we do nothing more than see although we may believe that we hear at the same time.  According to Max Simon, we may even have an entire conversation during a dream and then suddenly realize that no one is speaking and that no one has spoken.  It was a direct exchange of thoughts between us and our interlocutor, a silent interview.  A strange phenomenon this, and yet one easy to explain.  For us to hear sounds in a dream, there generally need to be real sounds that are perceived.  With nothing the dream does nothing.  And so, when we do not provide our dream with acoustic material, it has trouble creating acoustics.

Moreover, the sense of touch interferes as much as the sense of hearing.  Contact and pressure affect consciousness more when one is asleep.  As it influences the images that at that moment occupy the field of vision, the sense of touch may be able to modify their form and meaning.  Let us suppose that all of a sudden the sleeper feels his shirt touch his body; he will remember that he is dressed lightly.  If he were then to believe he was walking down the street, he would think passers-by were gazing at him as he had very little on.  Those passers-by would not, however, be shocked, because it is rare that the eccentricities to which we subject ourselves during dreams have any emotional effect on our spectators, regardless of how confused or embarrassed we may be ourselves.

I have just referred to a very well-known dream.  And here is another, which many among you must certainly have had.  In this dream, we feel we are flying, gliding, and traversing space without touching the earth.  In general, when it happens once, it tends to happen again, and at every new experience, we say to ourselves: "I have always dreamed that I was in motion above the ground, but this time I am fully awake.  Now I know and I will show others how they can free themselves from the laws of gravity."  If you wake up suddenly, this, I believe, is what you will find.  You felt that your feet had lost their foothold since you were stretched or spread out.  On the other had, thinking you were not asleep, you were not conscious of being in bed.  Therefore you said to yourself that you were no longer touching the ground and, what is more, that you were standing up.  It was this conviction that developed your dream.  Notice that in the cases in which you feel that you are flying, you believe you are launching your body to the right or left side, lifting your arm in a sudden movement as if you were flapping a wing.  For this is precisely the side on which you are sleeping.  When you awake, you will find that the sensation of making an effort to fly was created by nothing more than the pressure of your arm and body against your bed.  This phenomenon, detached from its cause, was nothing more than a vague sensation of fatigue imputable to your effort.  Re-attached to the conviction that your body left the earth, it became the precise sensation of making an effort to fly.

It is interesting to see how the sensations of pressure, encompassing even the field of vision and taking advantage of the luminous dust present therein, can be transposed in this field into forms and colors.  One day, for example, Max Simon dreamed that he was standing before two piles of gold coins, that these piles were uneven, and that he was trying to even them out.  But he did not succeed.  Here he experienced a vivid feeling of anxiety.  This feeling, increasing from minute to minute, finally woke him up.  He then noticed that one of his legs was caught under the folds of his covers, and that his two feet were not at the same level, and were trying in vain to come closer to one another.  It is obviously from there that he derived his vague sensation of unevenness, which, having intruded upon the field of vision and finding there perhaps (this is the hypothesis I propose) one or more yellow spots, was expressed visually by the unevenness of two piles of gold coins.  Thus there exists, immanent in tactile sensations during sleep, a tendency to visualize ourselves and insert ourselves in such a form into our dreams.

More important still are the sensations of "interior touch" emanating from all points of the organism, in particular from the viscera.  Sleep may give them, or rather imbue them with a singular delicateness and acuity.  Doubtless they were there during waking hours as well, but since we were distracted from them by other actions, we were living outside of ourselves; sleep has made us return to ourselves.  It has happened that people suffering from laryngitis, tonsillitis, etcetera, have found themselves afflicted in the middle of a dream with a disagreeable stinging sensation in their throats.  A simple illusion, they tell themselves upon waking.  Alas, so quickly does the illusion become reality!  We can enumerate serious illnesses and accidents, epilepsy seizures, cardiac afflictions, etcetera, which were discovered this way, prophesied in a dream.  We are thus not surprised that philosophers such as Schopenhauer claim that dreams transfer to our consciousness the shocks sustained by our nervous system; that psychologists such as Scherner attribute to each organ the power of provoking specific dreams that represent those organs symbolically; and that doctors such as Artigues have written treatises on the semiological value of dreams, on the manner in which they aid in the diagnosis of illnesses.  More recently, Tissié has shown how troubles with digestion, breathing, and circulation can be conveyed in certain types of dreams. 

Bergson, "The possible and the real" (part 3)

The conclusion to an essay by this philosopher and man of letters.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

In the course of the Great War, newspapers and magazines sometimes turned away from the terrible worries of the present to consider what would happen later on, once peace had been regained.  The future of literature in particular preoccupied them.  One day I was approached and asked how I saw the future.  Somewhat confused, I declared that I did not see it at all.  "Don't you see at least," was the reply, "a few possible directions?  We admit that we cannot foresee the details; but you at least, you the philosopher, have an idea of the set of possibilities.  How do you imagine, for example, the great dramatic work of tomorrow?"  I will always recall my interviewer's surprise when I answered him: "If I knew what the great dramatic work of tomorrow would be, I would create it myself."  I saw clearly enough that he thought the future work locked away, since then, in who-knows-what cupboard of possible works; in consideration of my age-old relationship with philosophy, I was supposed to have obtained the key to that cupboard. 

"But," I say to him, "the work of which you speak is not yet possible." 

"But it simply has to be possible, so that it will come to pass." 

"No, it is not.  That said, I will grant you that it will have been." 

"What do you mean by that?"         

"It's very simple.  I mean that a man of talent or of genius will emerge and create a work: and then it will become real and even, by the same means, retrospectively or retroactively possible.  It would not be, it could not have been, if this man had not emerged."

"That's a bit much!  You surely would not allege that the future influences the present, that the present introduces something into the past, that action goes back through the course of time and leaves its mark behind!"

"That depends.  I have never claimed that one might insert some of the real into the past and thus work backwards through time.  But that one might lodge there some of the possible, or, rather, that the possible might lodge itself there at any time, this is not doubtful.  As reality gradually creates itself, unpredictable and new, its image is reflected behind it in the indefinite past; thus it finds it has been, at all times, possible; but just at the very moment where it begins to have always been, and that is why I was saying that its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once its reality has appeared.  The possible is thus the mirage of the present in the past.  And as we know that the future will end up becoming the present, as the effect of the mirage continues unabatedly to produce itself, we tell ourselves that in our current present, which will be the past of tomorrow, the image of tomorrow is already contained although we haven't come to grasp it.  And precisely there lies the illusion.  It is as if one thought that, having espied one's image in the mirror before which one has just situated oneself, one could have touched the image if one had remained behind.  Moreover, in judging in this way that the possible does not presuppose the real, one admits that the realization adds something to the mere possibility: the possibility would have been there the entire time, a ghost awaiting its hour; thus it would have become reality by the addition of something, by who-knows-what transfusion of blood or life. 

"One does not see that it is exactly the opposite.  That, what is more, the possible implies the reality corresponding to something linked to it, because the possible is the combined effect of reality having appeared and of a device that sends it backwards.  The idea, immanent to most philosophies and natural to the human mind, of possibles which would be realized by an acquisition of existence, is thus pure illusion.  One might as well claim that the man of flesh and bone stems from the materialization of his image as it appeared in a mirror, under the pretext that in this real man there is everything which one finds in this virtual image with, in addition, the solidity needed so that one can touch that image.  But the truth is that here one needs more to obtain the virtual than to obtain the real, more for the image of man than for man himself, because the image of man will not be drawn if one does not begin with man, and one would need more than a mirror."  

This is what my interviewer forgot when he asked me about the theater of tomorrow.  Maybe he was also unconsciously playing on the sense of the word, "possible."  Hamlet was doubtless possible before having been realized, if one means that there was no insurmountable obstacle to its realization.  In this particular sense, we call possible that which is not impossible; and it goes without saying that this non-impossibility of a thing is the condition of its realization.  But the possible understood in this way is not virtual or ideally preexisting to any degree.  Close the barrier and you know that no one will cross the road; from there it does not follow that you would be able to predict who will cross that road if you open the barrier.  Nevertheless, you pass surreptitiously, unconsciously from the completely negative sense of the term "possible" to the positive sense.  Here possibility just meant "absence of impediment"; from this you now forge a "pre-existence in the form of an idea," which is something completely different.  In the first sense of the word, it is a truism to say that the possibility of a thing precedes its reality: by that you understand simply that such obstacles, once surmounted, were surmountable.***  

But, in the second sense, this is an absurdity, because it is clear that the mind in which Shakespeare's Hamlet was drawn in the form of the possible would thereby have created the reality.  Thus it would have been, by definition, Shakespeare himself.  In vain you may imagine initially that this mind could have emerged before Shakespeare, and here is where you are not thinking about all the details of the drama.   As you gradually complete these details, Shakespeare's predecessor will find himself thinking everything that Shakespeare will think, feeling everything that Shakespeare will feel, knowing everything that Shakespeare will know, perceiving therefore everything that Shakespeare will perceive, occupying consequently the same point in space and time, having the same body and the same soul; being Shakespeare himself.

Yet I insist too much upon that which goes without saying.  All these considerations impose themselves when one is dealing with a work of art.  We will not, I believe, end up finding it evident that the artist creates the possible at the same time as he creates the real when he is carrying out his work.  From where then would we likely hesitate to say just as much about nature?  Isn't the world a work of art, incomparably richer than that of the greatest artist?  And isn't there just as much absurdity, if not more, in supposing here that the future is drawn in advance, that possibility pre-exists reality?  Once again, I would like the future states of a closed system of material points to be calculable and, consequently, visible in their present state.  But, I repeat, this system is extracted or abstracted from a whole which comprises, apart from inert and unorganized matter, organization.  Take the concrete and complete world with the life and consciousness it contains; consider nature as a whole, generator of new species in forms as original and new as the drawing of any artist; follow, within these species, individuals, plants or animals, each of whom has its own character – I was about to say personality (because one blade of grass does not resemble another blade of grass any more than Raphael resembles Rembrandt); rise above individual man to the societies which unfurl actions and situations comparable to those of any drama: how can one still speak of possibles which would precede their own realization?  How does one not see that if the event is always explained after the fact by such and such preceding events, a completely different event would also be explained well, in the same circumstances, by antecedents chosen differently – what am I saying?  Ultimately by the same antecedents cut differently, distributed differently, perceived differently in retrospect?  From the front backwards a constant remodeling of the past by the present, of the cause by the effect.

We do not see it always for the same reason, always in thrall of the same illusion, always because we treat as greater that which is less, and what is less as that which is greater.  Let us put the possible in its place: evolution is something very different from the realization of a program; the doors of the future open very wide; a limitless field is liberated and released.  The wrongness of doctrines – quite rare in the history of philosophy – that knew to grant a place to indetermination and liberty in this world, is not to have seen what their affirmation implied.  When these doctrines spoke of indetermination and of liberty, they had in mind with indetermination a competition among possibles, and by liberty a choice between possibles – as if the possibility were not created by liberty itself!  As if an entirely different hypothesis, in placing an ideal pre-existence from the possible to the real, did not reduce the new into nothing more than a rearrangement of old elements!  As if it could not be taken in this way sooner or later as being calculable or predictable.  In accepting the postulate of the adverse theory, we would introduce the enemy in its place.  One has to make a choice of the two: it is the real which becomes possible, and not the possible which becomes real.

But the truth is that philosophy has never frankly admitted this continual creation of unpredictable novelty.  Ancient thinkers were already repelled by such a notion since, being more or less Platonic in their approach, they concluded that Being, complete and perfect, was given once for all things, in the immutable system of ideas.  There was nothing that could be added to the world unravelling before our eyes; on the contrary, it was nothing more than a diminution or degradation, its successive states measuring either the increasing or decreasing distance between what is, a shadow projected in time, and what ought to be, the Idea seated within eternity, and sketching out the variations of a deficit, the changing form of a void.  It was Time that would spoil everything.  Modern thinkers, true enough, are fond of a different point of view.  They no longer treat Time as an intruder, a perturber of eternity; but all the same they reduce it to a mere semblance.  The temporal is therefore nothing more than a confused form of the rational.   What is perceived by us as a succession of states is conceived by our intelligence, once the fog has lifted, as a system of relations.  The real becomes once again the eternal, with the only difference that it is the eternity of the Laws in which phenomena are resolved, instead of being the eternity of Ideas which would serve as their model.  But in one case as in another, we are dealing with theories.  Let us stick to the facts.  Time is immediately given.  This is enough for us and, waiting for its inexistence or perversity to be demonstrated to us, we will simply conclude that there is an effective gushing of unpredictable novelty.

Philosophy will benefit from this by finding some kind of absolute in the moving world of phenomena.  But we will also benefit from this by feeling happier and stronger.  Happier because the reality that is being invented before our eyes will give each of us, incessantly, certain satisfactions that art procures here and there for those on whom fortune shines.  To us it will reveal – beyond the fixedness and monotony which our hypnotized senses initially perceived owing to the constancy of our needs – this renovative and incessant novelty, the moving originality of things.  But above all we will be stronger because we, creators of ourselves, will feel that we are participating in the great work of creation that is at the origin and that continues before our very eyes.  In pulling ourselves together, our faculty to act will increase.  Humiliated until then in a pose of obedience, slaves to who-knows-what natural necessities, we will rise up again, masters associated with an even greater Master.  Such is the conclusion of our study.  Let us keep seeing a simple game in our speculation about the relationship between the possible and the real.  It may be a preparation for living well.

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*** Perhaps again we should ask ourselves whether, in certain cases, the obstacles did not become surmountable thanks to the creative action which surmounted them.  This action, unpredictable in itself, would then have created the "surmountability."  Before this action, the obstacles were insurmountable and, without this action, they would have remained so.