Matter and Memory: Tracing Freedom Towards a New Monism

If Time and Free will provides the metaphysical grounding for freedom in an understanding of duration achieved through intuition and the creative act, then Matter and Memory will build on this. Deleuze’s comment points in this direction when he notes that “Duration is essentially memory, consciousness and freedom. It is consciousness and freedom because it is primarily memory.” In other words, as we will discover, memory itself is in the process of duration, even if only in a virtual state. This is a virtual reality found within duration and not within space. This last sentence will be key to the claim that Bergson has overcome a dualism that separates matter and mind completely. This will require Bergson engaging more substantively with questions around what space is, more so than he did in his first major text Time and Free Will. Didactically, we begin by contextualising Matter and Memory, specifically in terms of its relationship to the notion of freedom. Exploring Bergson’s two forms of memory, and an eventual new monism, enables us to see memory and its relationship to duration more clearly. Crucially, this is where Bergson suggests that not only is memory related to freedom, but that there are degrees of liberty too. As we shall see, the freedom problematics Bergson engages with in Matter and Memory are materialism and dualism, neither of which provides an adequate response to the problem of freedom. As already noted, a new monism will seek to preserve freedom as dualism claims to do. In fact, Bergson’s solution will be to collapse both the mind and body back into this new monism in order to do this. As with the previous chapter, our discussion here seeks to follow Bergson’s method of intuition in identifying, problematising, and ultimately resolving the freedom problematic. Materialism and dualism are at the heart of the issue for Bergson and need to be tackled in order to understand the correct relation between the mind and body. Exploring the free act will be crucial to finding our way beyond this freedom problematic.