The implication of movement: from Bergson to Bohm

Abstract

In Creative Evolution (1907), Henri Bergson’s concept of the cinematographical mechanism of thought serves as a model allowing him to deconstruct an epistemology originating in ancient Greece. Within this epistemology, the “becoming” that Bergson writes of is seen primarily as the degradation of a form rather than that which breathes life into forms. While he first admits the practical benefits derived from the cinematographical character of our knowledge, Bergson then advances his line of argument by questioning the specificity with which such a knowledge can attain insight into the nature of this “moving reality” itself:

In order to advance with the moving reality, you must replace yourself within it. Install yourself within change, and you will grasp at once both change itself and the successive states in which it might be immobilized. (2001, 297)

Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots; as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Henri Bergson