Transcendental Experience and the Thought of the Virtual
120318 this is a much later addition: just reading guardian website article about finding significantly more 'areas of the brain' where language, perception, memory, etc. are said to reside. important to remember this is not proof of 'identity theory' where brain=mind... best to think of these as 'access' areas to these qualities of the mind, the 'virtual' aspect, the 'superior empiricism' that does not deny contemporary neuroscience, does deny simple physical and psychic 'brain maps'...
020716 first review: once again, a short short philosophy book that requires a lot of previous reading. thus not one i can justly claim to have understood, but relative to recounted errors in an analytic summary of all bergson, this is much more interesting. as 'encounters' there is a shifting from bergson critiqued by deleuze, deleuze informed by bergson, bergson informed by deleuze, deleuze critiqued by bergson... the original assertion is the use and importance of 'virtual empiricism'...
'real but not actual, ideal but not abstract'- this is the formula appreciated (quote from proust), following an 'experimental journey', the best of which i can offer is a selection of chapter titles: 1- bergson's genealogy of consciousness, 2- introducing memory: psychological to virtual, 3- unconscious as ontology of the virtual, 4- between bergson and deleuze: method of intuition as transcendental/virtual empiricism, 5- cinematic thought: deleuzean image and crystals of time, 6- proust and thought: death, art, adventures of involuntary, conclusion: bergson-deleuze encouners: machine becomings and virtual materialism...
having just read this, inspired by it involving two favourite philosophers, i cannot fully comprehend the assertions, the arguments, and of course i am reading this as a kind of literature- surely someone of analytic persuasion would read this differently. bergson i read first, very impressed, very pleased, that metaphysics other than phenomenology or logical/analytic sort, metaphysics centred on time and life rather than space and math- could be so fruitful, coherent, opposite that 'spatializing' motif of analytics as used in 'natural sciences', its obvious practical application yet based on a mistaken ontology, an opposition of determinism and freedom which is for bergson a mistaken dispute, poorly worded, that animates a host of dualisms- but not the essential dualism that works for bergson eg. matter (space) and memory (time)...
this book is engaging and fun. the ideas of bergson work well for deleuze- and here i learn much of yet unread 'cinema 1' and 'cinema 2' books, where it is not simply that we think in 'cinematographic' terms but the 'cinema thinks itself'... there is first the contention by bergson that this 'mechanism', this 'projection', this 'image-creator', demonstrates the illusory real of our 'usual knowledge' (intellectual) but not the reality of movement, of life, of indivisible intuition... how this creates a false reality, an illusion of movement, which we humans must understand it is impossible to create motion from however-brief moments of still-images...
deleuze, on the other, contends that the 'cinema' is not 'the mechanism of thought' but 'the machinism of thought'... this is all fascinating, i might just order the book in a the u bookstore, so i can read it again and again... for there is yet the 'time crystal', the 'movement-image', the 'time-image', there is the 'multiplicity', the informing of the present by the past (and the past that was never present)... there is much to read. the only part that reads as off or mistaken is the conception of evolution on 'neo-lamarkian' lines, but then i have not read 'creative evolution'... (240716 read see review)...
so there is more to read, to try and grasp, and the motif of 'duration' and all the places it must be employed to create a 'superior empiricism' rather than a kantian framework of 'sensibilities', 'possibilities', that take the real away from the way it is thought and replaced by only our human conditions of possibilities...
deleuze offered basis of thought through bergson rather than husserl: not the phenomenological belief that consciousness is always 'of' something, rather that consciousness itself 'is' something.
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