The Touch of the Touching World: Lived Imagery Reweaves Perception 1900 to Today

The Touch of the Touching World: Lived Imagery Reweaves Perception 1900 to Today

An image is neither a mere intrapsychic image nor a rigid mass of matter itself. What Bergson aimed at with matter and memory was to break out of the dead ends that idealism and realism, respectively, hold, by remaking the scaffolding of perception itself. Idealism draws perception too close to representation. The world becomes, in the end, nothing more than an image created by consciousness, and external resistance and coincidence are diluted. On the other hand, realism draws perception too close to matter. In this case, it tends to bring the power of representation creation to the side of matter in order to fill in the gaps in the explanation of how matter gives rise to representation.

Bergson breaks both habits and redefines matter as the totality of images, and perception as the state in which these same images are bound to one particular image, the body, and thus to the possibility of action. Here the image is more open than the representation, but not as fixed as the thing itself. It is positioned as a concept that is more than a representation and less than a thing.

The perceptual picture that this definition creates is very different from the brain-complete model. Perception is a process in which only the parts that are meaningful to the actions that the body can now perform are selected from the whole of the world's continuous imagery. It is a reduction, not an addition, a selection, not a generation. The brain and nervous system are not devices for creating the world, but rather they act as filters that filter out what is unnecessary and pass through what is necessary for the act.

This view distances idealism from the danger of confining the world to consciousness and realism from the danger of assuming extra capacities for matter. Spirit and matter are understood not as two disconnected realms, but as disconnections with different roles in the same continuum. Imagery is the crucial intermediate concept to explain perception while preserving its continuity.