Customer Reviews

Matter and Memory

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Matter and Memory is often taken as the cornerstone of Bergson's work by the few who still read him, and I can't disagree with them. This is certainly his most radical work, but unfortunately, it is also his most difficult. Speaking for myself, even though I was very well read in the literature on Bergson--especially Deleuze's--I still had to read the first chapter almost four times before I felt comfortable enough to move on to the second. And it really isn't that Bergson is just obscure here. He does not use neologisms, and he tries very hard to be as precise as possible. I would say, I guess, that this is why it is still necessary to bother with this work, because it's difficulty is quite evidently related to its profundity. The concepts of matter and memory developed at length by Bergson in this work were so novel in his time that they're pretty much still as novel today. That's partly because, as some reviewers below say, there's a general feeling that science has made his "queer" views obsolete. This is palpably false. And then, on the other hand, it's because this book is terribly dry and, as Leonard Lawlor has said, doesn't have any entertaining "characters," like Merleau-Ponty's Schneider, to keep people plastered to the page. Consequently, not many people, even professional philosophers, have read the book in its entirety.
In sum: unless you're some sort of deity, you probably won't be drooling with a thirst for Bergson after reading this for the first time. The book is poorly organized and the chapters are all around 70-80 pages long, so ideas and arguments are jumbled about like lottery balls, and oftentimes Bergson just seems to write whatever pops into his mind at the moment. However, I re-iterate that with an open mind and some patience, the difficulty will be forgiveable, and the effort to get inside of it well worth your time. This gets five stars for the ideas, three for style.

Gabriel Clark-Leach's comments reveal his ignorance of not only of "English students" but also of Damasio. His snide generalizing is indicitive of the quality of his thinking.