The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World by McGilchrist Iain

Author:McGilchrist, Iain [McGilchrist, Iain]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781914568053
Google: zZa3zgEACAAJ
Publisher: Perspectiva Press
Published: 2021-11-09T20:34:45+00:00

Similarly Leibniz remarks that mathematical points, ‘even an infinity of points gathered into one, will not make extension’.131 So extension in space and extension in time cannot be constituted by aggregation of points or parts. Both of these ideas are expressed more eloquently by Bergson and by James, but my point is that they are not confined to a ‘Bergsonian’ or ‘Jamesian’ view: they are there in the European tradition well over 200 years previously, and are mathematically correct according to Leibniz, who invented calculus.

And since a point is conceived as static, no matter how many of them you have, you can never get from a point or points to motion. ‘How can one fail to see’, says Bergson, ‘that the essence of duration is to flow and that one static element stacked on another will never result in anything that has duration?’132

However, you may say, a flow, while it cannot be made up (prospectively) from static parts, could have recognisable ‘regions’ in it once it has come into being. So when Bergson says: ‘We shall think of all change, all movement, as being absolutely indivisible’,133 he does not mean that it cannot be retrospectively divided, but that such a division can apply only to the representation, not to the entity itself, whose essence is change, motion, flow. His point is that the representation has lost the very element – duration or extension – that is the essence of what it tried to capture. For, once time – or motion – is retrospected on, it is no longer time or motion. In attempting to account for a pure process of change analytically, we can do so only by reducing it to parts time and again, until at last we reach something that no longer changes. But, at the very moment we exclaim ‘Finally, I have it!’, we have, by definition, only immobilities; and from them no change can ever emerge. The change we were trying to account for must forever elude our grasp.

If change, which is evidently constitutive of all our experience, is the fleeting thing most philosophers have spoken of, if we see in it only a multiplicity of states replacing other states, we are obliged to re-establish the continuity between these states by an artificial bond; but this immobile substratum of mobility [see note], being incapable of possessing any of the attributes we know – since all are changes – recedes as we try to approach it: it is as elusive as the phantom of change it was called upon to fix.134

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