The author would like to thank Tano Posteraro for reading the draft and providing valuable comments.
1What does it mean to read Bergson with Heidegger? It is well known that Heidegger's interpretation of Bergson, which he made public in Being and Time — let's call it the exoteric interpretation — dealt almost entirely with Time and Free Will. However, according to Heath Massey’s The Origin of Time. Heidegger and Bergson, most of what Heidegger actually found valuable in Bergson’s thought appeared in Matter and Memory (Massey 2015, 7). This is particularly apparent when one reads Heidegger’s early lectures with an open mind. For example, we find the following passage in a lecture on Logic given at the University of Marburg during the winter semester of 1925-26:
In his later writings Bergson has not changed the exposition of time given in his early work. […] The essential and enduring element of his philosophical work does not lie in this direction at all. Rather, the things of value, for which we are grateful, are found in his text Matière et Mémoire. It is a basic text for modern biology, and it contains insights that are far from exhausted yet (Heidegger 2010, 207-208).
2To give another example (this time from a lecture on Metaphysical Foundations of Logic in the summer semester of 1928), which will become important later, Heidegger was not at all unaware of the importance of the concept of image in Matter and Memory:
Bergson’s analyses nonetheless belong to the most intense analyses of time that we possess. It has become a commonplace that Bergson (as well as Dilthey) is fuzzy and must be therefore re-examined and improved. But Bergson’s “images” are the very expression of his exertions to really grasp the phenomenon within the realm he takes for his theme. The lack does not lie in an alleged fuzziness — Bergson is perfectly clear in what he sees. But it lies in the overly narrowed realm of his set of problems (Heidegger 1984, 203).
3However, this promise of positive and critical interpretation — let us call it the esoteric interpretation — will not be fulfilled at all. Why? Massey enumerates a legitimate “series of questions” (Massey 2015, 171): (1) Why does Heidegger, in Being and Time and thereafter, continue to attack aspects of Bergson’s thought that he does not consider essential? (2) What is it that Heidegger considers so valuable in Matter and Memory? (3) Why does he characterize it as a contribution to “modern biology” rather than to psychology and metaphysics, which Bergson seems to address more directly in this book?
4If the purpose of this article was to do to justice to Bergson — which it is not, and this is why I urge the reader to read Massey’s excellent work — then an attentive reading of Massey’s book would be nearly sufficient. In particular, regarding (1), I find Massey’s response to the unjustified attack on Time and Free Will very persuasive. I say “nearly” because there remain two minor issues in his study that need to be amended.
- 1 A Short History of Bergson Studies on the Schematism. On this issue, before Barthélemy-Madaule (196 (...)
5One is the problem of schematism, which Massey’s interpretation of Matter and Memory does not deal with (and, correspondingly, there is no reference to Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), the so-called “Kantbuch,” and concepts such as imagination or schematism are not listed in the index). Isn’t it the problem of schematism that Heidegger finds so worthy of appreciation in Matter and Memory? — this is my answer to (2) ((3) will be elucidated in a separate study comparing Creative Evolution and Heidegger's 1929-30 lecture course, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics). I believe that Heidegger’s reading of Kant shows the influence of his confrontation with Bergson. By interpreting Bergson’s Matter and Memory and related texts (included in Mind Energy) as works on schematism,1 we can better understand Heidegger’s path forward. Conversely, by considering Heidegger’s Kantbuch and the possible interpretations of Kant that might be made beyond them, we might come to a deeper understanding of Matter and Memory and beyond. This is a tentative answer to the question posed at the beginning: what does it mean to read Bergson with Heidegger? It is with this double expectation that I will proceed.
6We begin with the long-running battle between Bergson and Kant, which haunted Bergson throughout his life and had already started in Time and Free Will. Let us look back briefly. In chapter 2 of Time and Free Will, Bergson, while appreciating that “the theory which he works out in the Transcendental Aesthetic consists in endowing space with an existence independent of its content, and […] in refusing to regard extensity as an abstraction like the others” (Bergson 2001, 92), added a twist to Kant’s invention by introducing the distinction “between the perception of extensity and the conception of space” (Bergson 2001, 96). “The higher we rise in the scale of intelligent beings, the more clearly do we meet with the independent idea of a homogeneous space” (Bergson 2001, 96). In other words, “space is not so homogeneous for the animal as for us,” and humans perceive or conceive a “space without quality,” but Bergson finds equally in both of them “a special faculty” “differently extraordinary [autrement extraordinaire]” (Bergson 2001, 97). I propose to consider Bergson’s biological gaze for Immanent Aesthetic. This aesthetic does not deny or oppose the transcendental aesthetic. As Massey aptly points out, Bergson proposes “a kind of reversal of Kant’s transcendental aesthetic” (Massey 2015, 82). By tracing the flexions of the transcendental to their extremes and unfolding their folds, we find transitions and permeations, where there seemed to be ruptures and abysses. What does this mean?
7Bergson acknowledges “with Kant” (Bergson 2001, 236) the “very sharp distinction between the matter of consciousness and its form, between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous” (Bergson 2001, 234) that dominates his entire theory, but in which "the strength and the weakness of Kantianism reside” (Bergson 2001, 233). The strength, i.e., “the advantage of providing our empirical thought with a solid foundation, and of guaranteeing that phenomena, as phenomena, [which] are adequately knowable” (Bergson 2001, 234), stems from the fact that the homogeneous space is a form of our sensibility (it cannot be stressed enough that Bergson, along with Kant, acknowledges this point). The weakness, i.e., “Kant’s great mistake was to take time as a homogeneous medium” (Bergson 2001, 232) and to fail to see that we humans recognize “two different kinds of reality, the one heterogeneous, that of sensible qualities, the other homogeneous, namely space” (Bergson 2001, 97). Kantian intuition of a homogeneous medium is “an intuition peculiar to man” (Bergson 2001, 236), while “other minds, e.g., those of animals […], do not distinguish [objects] so clearly either from one another or from themselves that of man” (Bergson 2001, 236). By underlining that this intuition “foreshadows and prepares the way for social life” (Bergson 2001, 236), Bergson views Kantian theory from the perspective of a philosophy of life that takes even animal nature into account, just as Lévi-Strauss took Sartre as an example of la pensée sauvage. Instead of “raising an impassable barrier between the world of phenomena, which he hands over root and branch to our understanding, and the world of things in themselves, which he forbids us to enter” (Bergson 2001, 235), Bergson rather reveals that the very absolute distinction is required by the vital interest that man as an organism inevitably implies. From the point of view of what might be called the pragmatism of life, this distinction that for Kant was almost eternal, absolute, and unchanging, becomes a kind of variable gear or differential life-system, so to speak, in which “the transition is made by imperceptible steps from concrete duration, whose elements permeate one another, to symbolical duration, whose moments are set side by side” (Bergson 2001, 239-240).
8As an important corollary to the above reading, I shall quote a passage from Bergson’s Lecture on the Critique of Pure Reason. There, Bergson says that the concept of habit elaborated by the empiricists of the 18th century, and the concept of heredity elaborated by the evolutionists of the 19th century, represent the knowledge acquired through experience that eventually become part of the intellect and take on the character of necessity and strict universality, which Kant regards as essential and irreducible.
Thus, between the knowledge that Kant calls inductive, and which would present only a relative universality, and the knowledge that Kant calls a priori and whose universality would be rigorous, there would be only a difference of degree […]. Evolutionism makes us witness the genesis of the so-called a priori concepts. An explanation of this kind would not count in Kant’s eyes (Bergson 1995, 138, my translation).
9To see rather a difference of degree than a degree of nature between inductive universality and a priori universality, to rethink a priori concepts from a genetic perspective, to consider the emergence of transcendental elements as an immanent fold or folding of experience, is the basic idea of what I called Bergson’s Immanent Aesthetic.
10The battlefield is shifted to a deeper dimension in Matter and Memory. It is a shift from the Immanent Aesthetic which shows how the sensible diversity self-organizes without transcendental synthesis (more precisely, everything is proceeding as if a transcendental synthesis had taken place, when in fact it only occurred afterwards, as an effect), to the Immanent Logic which formulates how the imagination that mediates sensibility and understanding, and the schema as “a hidden art in the depths of the human soul” (Kant 1998, 273) that mediates intuition and concept, are determined not by the transcendental synthesis of the a priori and the empirical, but by the self-turn of experience (from experience in general to human experience). This is, of course, in keeping with the fact that in the Critique of Pure Reason, the first section “Transcendental Aesthetics” was followed by the second section “Transcendental Logic,” which operates the deduction of the concept of pure understanding.
11While Kant maintains a transcendentalist position, Bergson seeks the conditions of possibility for experience in the self-transformation of experience. This is what the famous passage on the “turning point of experience” in Chapter 4 of Matter and Memory testifies to, an extremely valuable testimony to the methodology of Bergson’s immanent philosophy, which seeks to see the emergence of transcendental elements in the immanent folding and folds of experience.
But there is a last enterprise that might be undertaken. It would be to seek experience at its source, or rather above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience (Bergson 1988, 184).
12To say that an experience turns towards usefulness to become human experience means, in Kantian terms, to say that an experience comes to be perceived as a phenomenon by normal cognitive faculties under the control of the understanding, or, in the context of Matter and Memory, to say that an experience enters into a state in which the hybrid system of memory and perception, as represented by the inverted cone diagram, can function normally. The very construction of this system testifies to the fact that we humans are living beings. It should not be overlooked that immediately after that decisive passage, Bergson refers to Kant’s attempt and the intention to overcome it:
The impotence [impuissance] of speculative reason, as Kant has demonstrated it, is perhaps at bottom only the impotence of an intellect enslaved [asservie] to certain necessities of bodily life […]. By unmaking [défaisant] that which these needs have made, we may restore to intuition its original purity and so recover contact with the real (Bergson 1988, 184-185).
- 2 In Creative Evolution, to cite just one striking example, when he describes the élan vital as “an a (...)
- 3 On the motif of violence in Bergsonian philosophy, see Fujita (2012; 2022).
13This gesture of défaire, along with words such as “violence” or “powerlessness,” is a word that always appears in key passages of Bergsonian philosophy,2 and plays a similar role to the worn soles of the dancer’s slippers that produce graceful, supple pirouettes. The motif of violence remains manifest, not just as a superficial ornament, but in the very fundamental methodological dimension of Bergson’s intuitive philosophy; and it continues until his last book, Creative Mind, published in 1934.3 If, as we have seen, antinomy is the more typical expression of the “impotence of speculative reason, as Kant has demonstrated it,” then it is no surprise that Bergsonian intuition is anti-antinomy and in this context figures that gesture of défaire.
Antinomies were of man’s making. They did not come from things themselves but from an automatic transfer to speculation of habits contracted in action. What a careless attitude of the intellect had done, an effort on the part of the intellect could undo [défaire]. And for the human mind that would be a liberation (Bergson 2007a, 54-55).
14In Bergson’s view, Kant proves that an intuitive metaphysics is the only possible metaphysics, and after giving people a moment of hope, he immediately adds that the construction of such a metaphysics is unfortunately impossible because we lack the all-important intuition. But, Bergson counters, it would in fact be so if there were no other time or change than those which Kant perceived and if our usual perception could not get out of them (Bergson 2007a, 105). Getting out of time has, needless to say, nothing to do with bringing us to the afterlife. It is possible to grasp again, in their fundamental intuition, the time and change that “our senses and our consciousness have reduced to dust [réduits en poussière] in order to facilitate our action upon things” (Bergson 2007a, 106). To this usual violence wielded by ordinary senses and consciousness, another intuitive violence, to borrow an expression from the title of a recent book by Judith Butler, the force of nonviolence, is counterposed by Bergson.
In order to reach intuition it is not necessary to transport ourselves outside the domain of the senses and of consciousness. Kant’s error was to believe that it was. […] Undo what they have done [Défaisons ce qu’ils ont fait], bring our perception back to its origins, and we shall have a new kind of knowledge without having been obliged to have recourse to new faculties (Bergson 2007a, 105-106).
- 4 “Normal psychical life, as I conceive it, is a system of functions, each with its own psychic organ (...)
- 5 The same discussion of illness as an effort to recover is developed at the end of Lecture 7 of Berg (...)
- 6 It is a passage which we find in a conference Bergson made in English at Columbia University in 191 (...)
15The Kantian regime of common sense and science, in which “sense and consciousness” violently imprison experience within a framework of usefulness, is pitted here against the Bergsonian regime of intuitive philosophy, in which new possibilities of cognition can be obtained by a kind of counter-violence that briefly overthrows the former regime. This opposition is by no means a sterile speculative confrontation. Bergson’s view of a priori concepts as rooted in the dimension of life, rather than like castles that suddenly and inexplicably appear in the void, is underpinned by the thought that our ordinary days are in fact a kind of tightrope-walking barely balanced by the dynamic equilibrium (équilibre mobile) of a fragile and vulnerable mind.4 Furthermore, for Bergson, illness is an “effort to recover,”5 even a “psychological autotomy” (Bergson 2018, 156, my translation), like a lizard surviving by cutting off its own tail. In the last instance, “it is tiresome to be human.”6 It would be absurd, if we considered a spinning top, which is barely self-supporting because it is spinning at high speed, as stationary and stable, and miraculously self-supporting without reason. In order to trace the contours of reality in all its twists and turns, Bergson always chooses as the ultimate object of his philosophy the time of decision and free action, aphasia and déjà vu, the evolution of life and the experience of the mystic, experiences involving a “special or vital interest” (Bergson 2007b, 112) and the “moments of inward crisis” (Bergson 1975, 15). He calls for a philosophy that seeks to increase the “probability” found at the intersection of “lines of fact” as the method of its own philosophy. We humans, always bound to the needs of present life, can, through philosophical intuition as a tension-filled intellectual endeavour, change the direction of the movement of thought, which continues in inertia, and glimpse the complex trajectory of life. Bergsonian philosophy is both sympathetic and patho-logic in the etymological sense, it is a philosophy that explores the logic of experience. The critical and clinical eye of Bergsonian philosophy sees man in his vulnerability.
16Now it is time to get to the core of the battle with Kant in Matter and Memory. The point of contention is the relationship between transcendental imagination or transcendental schematism and the concept of image. For Kant, the imagination is not merely the faculty that forms images for recollection and the reorganization of experience. It also performs an essential function for the formation of cognition in general, in the way that it carries out the function of “synthesis,” collecting as elements of cognition the diversity brought to sensible intuition and of “unif[ying] them into a certain content” (Kant 1998, 211). Kant called “pure or productive” the imagination performing the function of such transcendental synthesis, which precedes all experience and makes experience itself possible.
17Or, the pure or productive imagination plays a mediating and central role in the three syntheses of pure understanding concepts, i.e., categories, that constitute objective cognition: (1) the synthesis of apprehension in intuition, (2) the synthesis of reproduction in the imagination, and (3) the synthesis of recognition in concepts. The synopsis and the apprehension of the manifold a priori through sense must proceed one by one. If thus I were always to lose the preceding representations (the first parts of the line, the preceding parts of time, or the successively represented units) from my thoughts and not reproduce them when I proceed to the following ones, then no whole representation and none of the previously mentioned thoughts, not even the purest and most fundamental representations of space and time, could ever arise. Therefore, the apprehension of the manifold requires, in fact, the action of the imagination to reproduce the preceding representations and keep them in the present.
18What, then, do we find in Bergson's Matter and Memory that corresponds to this pure or productive imagination? In his lecture course on Critique of Pure Reason, Bergson wrote: “Pure imagination is an understanding in the form of memory” (Bergson 1995, 162). Since the understanding in the first Critique occupies an overarching position according to the speculative interest of reason in a cognitive faculty, “understanding in the form of memory” would mean the hybrid system of memory and perception that underpins normal cognitive functions, as represented by the famous inverted cone diagram consisting of base AB (pure memory) and apex S (action).
19If the imagination stops working, the unity of experience will be dismantled, and the world of phenomena will become “a blind play of representations, i.e., less than a dream” (Kant 1998, 235). What plays a central role in the pure imagination in preventing the disintegration of experience and maintaining its unity, and in keeping phenomena as phenomena rather than dreams, is nothing other than the schemata and the schematism that produces them.
20The schema, as a representation (but as distinct from the image), is sensible. But as something lacking particularity and individuality, the schema is intelligible. In other words, the schema is a mediating representation between the two (Kant 1998, 273). What Kant calls “schema” are the formal and pure conditions of sensibility to which the concepts of understanding are restricted in their use, and what he calls “schematism” is the way or the art in which the understanding practices with those schemata. Why are schemata and schematism so important to Kant? Because schemata connect intuition to concepts.
In fact it is not images of objects but schemata that ground our pure sensible concepts. […] the image […] must be connected with the concept, to which they are in themselves never fully congruent, always only by means of the schema that they designate (Kant 1998, 273-274).
21The concept of a cat, for example, goes far beyond the form of the cat that I see before me now. Kant is saying that such a concept can only be connected to my concrete intuition of the cat through the schema of the cat, which is an indefinite figure of the cat. It is in this sense that Kant stresses that “imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself” (Kant 1998, 239). The question of schematism is posed when the categories of understanding’s concepts are applied to the various objects of sensible intuition in order to connect our minds to the world. Not only, then, with the motor diagram (schème moteur) in Chapter 2, which Jankélévitch praises as a “idée ingénieuse,” but already from the theory of images in Chapter 1, which installs pure perception, through the inverted cone in Chapter 3, to the theory of tension/extension in Chapter 4, are not all these conceptual devices to explain the survival of pure memories and the actualization of memory-images into perception and action, devices which Bergson calls the planes of consciousness, related to the problem of what Kant calls the pure imagination and the schematism? From our point of view, Matter and Memory is a work of hyper-schematism or better de-schematisation that attempts to rethink the problem of imagination and schematism connecting two different realms of existence (mind-memory and body-matter) from the standpoint of immanent philosophy. Why do we say that Matter and Memory is a book on “hyper-schematism” or “de-schematisation” instead of simply “schematism”? We shall look at this point in the next section.
22How is Heidegger involved in such a battle between Bergson and Kant? The general project of his famous Kantbuch was to install the transcendental imagination, the “common but to us unknown root” (Kant 1998, 152) of the “two stems of human cognition,” sensibility and understanding, at the foundation of the Critique of Pure Reason. Heidegger sharpens the function of such transcendental synthesis of the imagination and redefines it as the very movement of “transcendence” for finite beings. The imagination must not only present the objects that appear before us but must also open a place of “turning toward” (Zuwendung) in which it prepares such appearances to appear to itself as such. “To hold oneself in advance in such a play-space, to form it originally, is none other than the transcendence which marks all finite comportment to beings” (Heidegger 1990, 50). In short, imagination, taken in its pure productivity, is not only the faculty to present beings, but also the faculty to form the horizon that makes that presentation properly presentable. If so, it is the theory of image that plays for Bergson the role of the transcendental imagination for Heidegger. For it seems to be the totality of images that not only presents beings when they appear before us, but also opens the very space which makes possible such an appearance to appear to itself as itself.
23But this is not yet the decisive encounter between Bergson and Heidegger. The boundary of transcendental synthesis can only be the pure form of time in which each sensible figure finds its own form. This horizon prepared by the transcendental imagination is time, and the formation of this horizon is not merely a form of intuition in which receptivity in general is given, but it is the very form itself, the “origin of time” (Heidegger 1990, 128) as a figuration that gives rise to the series of successive sequences of “now” for the first time. In this sense, Heidegger asserts “the transcendental power of imagination as original time [transzendentalen Einbildungskraft als der ursprünglichen Zeit]” (Heidegger 1990, 123). To seize in the first Critique the position of pure imagination as the dimension of primordial temporality, is to see, in the language of Time and Free Will (as seen in Section 2), not an “impassable barrier” between phenomena and things themselves, but “a transition from concrete duration, in which elements interpenetrate, to symbolic duration, in which moments coexist” made through “imperceptibly subtle stages;” to see, in the language of Bergson’s Critique of Pure Reason lecture, not a difference in nature but a difference in degree between inductive universality and a priori universality, and rethinking a priori concepts from a genetic perspective. In short, we can say, in the terms proposed in Section 3, that Heidegger also tries to see “transcendence” as a “turn.” Earlier, I said that Heidegger’s reading of Kant may be influenced by his confrontation with Bergson and that the interpretation of Bergson’s Matter and Memory as a work on schematism may help us to better understand the path Heidegger has taken. The reason lies in this precise point.
- 7 Incidentally, we find in Derrida’s 1964-65 lecture on Heidegger a passage suggesting that our readi (...)
24However, from the genetic perspective of this immanent philosophy, Heidegger’s attempt to get to the core of the Critique of Pure Reason by reinterpreting the transcendental imagination in the dimension of fundamental temporality is rather stunted.7 Why can we say so? Let us first clarify what the limits of Heideggerian interpretation are. Heidegger called “transcendental imagination” an ability to form horizons that can prepare in advance not only the encounter with beings but also the encounter itself as a “place of confrontation.” In fact, however, Jacob Rogozinski in his brilliant article astutely points out that “the project of transcendence ob-jects the horizon of the world to itself only in order to return to itself as subject.”
In fact, the imagination hardly departs from the circle of its auto-affection, receives nothing that it has not already pre-formed (Rogozinski 1993, 140).
25Transcendental imagination thus “never truly exposes itself” (id.). Bergson had already sniffed out the limits of the Heideggerian interpretation in the Kant of Critique of Pure Reason that Rogozinski points out. The crucial problem with the Kantian perspective, in which apperception perceives sensible intuitions by applying a scheme from the side of understanding, is the following: what is given to consciousness is only what consciousness gives (always through a medium), and we never know “I” or “the outer world” as “what is given directly to consciousness.”
The whole object of the Critique of Pure Reason is, in fact, to explain how a particular order is superadded to supposedly incoherent materials. […] The human mind imposes its form upon a “sensible diversity” of unexplained origin; and the order we find in things is the order we ourselves put in them (Bergson 2007a, 49).
26It seems clear that Deleuze also had the above limits of the Critique of Pure Reason and its Heideggerian interpretation in mind, when he wrote:
But we should not conclude from this text that the schematism is the deepest act of the imagination, or its most spontaneous art. The schematism is an original act of the imagination: only the imagination schematizes. But it schematizes only when the understanding presides or has the legislative power. It schematizes only in the speculative interest. When the understanding takes up the speculative interest, that is, when it becomes determining, then and only then is the imagination determined to schematize (Deleuze 1984, 18).
27How, then, does the imagination work when it is not determined as such by the understanding (non-transcendental imagination, so to speak), or when, in Bergsonian terms, it overflows the hybrid system of memory and perception represented by the diagram of the inverted cone?
28The rest of the drama is as expected. Everything changes with the Critique of Judgment. “One might say, as a last resort, that the imagination here ‘schematizes without a concept’ (Kant 1951, §35). […] In fact the imagination does something other than schematize […]. It is a free and indeterminate accord between faculties” (Deleuze 1984, 49). What is at stake in the third Critique is a certain liberation of the imagination, and even the raging of it. As far as we know, Heidegger does not take into account the contribution of the third Critique to the question of schematism and imagination. The existence of a spontaneous and productive imagination in free play with an undetermined understanding may reveal the possibility of a new way of thinking about imagination and temporality, different from Heidegger’s interpretation of transcendental imagination. This time, the battleground is the “Analytic of the Sublime” in the Critique of Judgment. Who comes to Kant’s rescue after Heidegger? It is Kant in the Critique of Judgment, and the violence over imagination in the theory of the sublime.
29In the “Analytic of the Sublime,” the imagination gives itself over to an entirely different activity. The feeling of the sublime is experienced when one is confronted with an overwhelming amount of (mainly visual) imagery — vastness or power, amorphous or bizarre forms - and when one is certain to be placed in a safe state. “Bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piled up the vault of heaven, borne along with flashes and peals, volcanoes in all their violence of destruction, hurricanes leaving desolation in their track, the boundless ocean rising with rebellious force, the high waterfall of some mighty river […]. But provided our own position is secure, their aspect [Anblick] is all the more attractive for its fearfulness” (Kant 2007, 91). Beauty is concerned with the bounded form of the object, whereas the sublime is concerned with the unbounded formlessness of the object. Beauty is associated with the representation of quality, while the sublime is associated with the representation of quantity. The beautiful involves emotions that directly promote life, and thus can be one with the imagination at play. The sublime, on the other hand, is a pleasure that arises only indirectly, “being brought about by the feeling of a momentary check to the vital forces followed at once by a discharge all the more powerful, and so it is an emotion that seems to be no play, but a serious matter in the exercise of the imagination” (Kant 2007, 75-76). Finally, “the most important and vital distinction between the sublime and the beautiful” is that the feeling of the sublime “may appear, indeed, in point of form to contravene the ends of our power of judgement, to be ill-adapted to our faculty of presentation, and to do violence [gewalttätig], as it were, to the imagination” (Kant 2007, 76).
30The reason why the sublime is important is that it does violence to the transcendental imagination and exposes its limits, from which the limits of the transcendental schematism, and thus of the Heideggerian interpretation, are also revealed. As far as the gradual grasping of parts (Auffassung /apprehension) is concerned, the imagination has no limits. However, in the case of simultaneous summation (Zusammenfassung /comprehension), imagination can face a limit. Even the usually accomplished simultaneous comprehension runs into a limit when the object is so huge that the first thing perceived is partially gone before the imagination can perceive the last thing. Everything proceeds as if the imagination is facing its own limits and is willing to endure the violence that pulls it to the point of its power’s end.
31As an example of the limits of comprehension, Kant quotes “the bewilderment, or sort of perplexity, which, as is said, seizes the visitor on first entering St. Peter’s in Rome” (Kant 2007, 83), but in our time we can imagine space travel. The more one sees the overwhelming expanse of the landscape as far as the eye can see, the more “a feeling comes home to him of the inadequacy of his imagination for presenting the idea of a whole within which that imagination attains its maximum, and, in its fruitless efforts to extend this limit, recoils upon itself, but in so doing succumbs to an emotional delight” (Kant 2007, 83). And this “emotional delight” is the aesthetic feeling judged to be sublime.
32According to Rogozinski, it is the scale of space that at first glance seems to limit the range of the imagination, but in fact it is the more fundamental tremendousness of the temporal. Just as I am about to collapse, I discover that my ability to conceive requires time, and that I lack time.
But how can time escape from the imagination, given that the imagination is temporal through and through? Perhaps the “Analytic of the Sublime” obliges us to place in question anew the Heideggerian interpretation: the imagination would not, then, be identical with originary temporality; the violence the imagination inflicts on time and the temporal failure of its synthesis would be the indices of a dispute or “incompatibility” [différend] between time and the imagination, of a primordial discord the sublime event reveals (Rogozinski 1993, 142).
33As Kant writes, the comprehension of the manifold in the unity, and consequently the comprehension of the successively apprehended parts at one glance [in einem Augenblick]is a retrogression that removes (aufhebt) the time-condition in the progression of the imagination, and renders co-existence intuitable (Kant 2007, 89). Because of this finiteness and impotence of simultaneous comprehension, which is the function of accepting the parts of the grasped object into intuition and compressing and presenting them all at once in a total representation, the imagination does violence to introspection.
Therefore, since the time-series is a condition of inner sense and of an intuition, it is a subjective movement of the imagination by which it does violence [Gewalt] to inner sense — a violence which must be proportionately more striking the greater the quantum which the imagination comprehends in one intuition (Kant 2007, 121-122).
34What Kant here names the “violence” of imagination is very close to what Bergson described earlier as “undoing the system of sensation and consciousness.” This is to cut off temporal succession and to compress the series of apprehensions into a moment, to deviate and withdraw from the temporal condition (linearly represented temporal succession), which is the form of intuition (internal sense). When it is forced to confront its own limits, the imagination goes beyond them. “Since the mind is not simply attracted by the object, but is also alternately repelled thereby, the delight in the sublime does not so much involve positive pleasure as admiration or respect, i.e., merits the name of a negative pleasure” (Kant 2007, 76).
35Since intuitive and aesthetic comprehension includes the other work of the imagination, other than a logical comprehension restricted within the framework of the understanding, doesn’t the imagination, defined by Heidegger as fundamental temporality, bankrupt temporal formation by its own work? Isn’t it precisely because of its own “violence” that the imagination deviates from and opposes the transcendental imagination, which is said to open up the horizon of time formation in Kantbuch?
36The violence of the imagination in the sublime would bring the transcendental one “to a standstill.” Even if, as Heidegger says, the transcendental imagination is a fundamental temporality, then the intuitive, aesthetic, and sensible comprehension sketched in the Critique of Judgment’s theory of the sublime shows that the imagination itself does not work in accord with the temporality so assumed. It exposes the limits of the imagination itself as a violence exercised on the inner senses, of which time is an a priori form, and thus fails to sum up further. However, this in turn gives rise to a feeling of sublimity that passively looks beyond the limits to the idea of reason, and this highlights the existence of a broader and more fundamental imagination that deviates from the workings of the transcendental one. Yusuke Miyazaki, one of the leading Derrida scholars in Japan, calls this imagination Einbildungs-Gewalt.
37The stakes for the imagination that results from such “violence” are extremely high. If the transcendental imagination is only a pre-restricted one insofar as it allows the transcendental aesthetic to identify with its own temporality, Rogozinski says, such “violence” will bring to light, if only momentarily, the inherent power of the unreserved imagination.
38The sublime in the Critique of Judgment, with its spatially and temporally overwhelming phenomena, violates and exposes the limits of the transcendental imagination that the Critique of Pure Reason had established as the bedrock of cognition, and reveals the limits of the transcendental schematism, and thus the limits of the Heideggerian interpretation as well. Is there, then, in Bergson's writings, such a scene in which imagination is not legislated by the understanding (let us say, an imagination forcenée), and its movements overflow from the system of memory and perception represented by the inverted cone diagram? We think it may be the panoramic vision that peeks out briefly in Bergson's Matter and Memory, Mind-Energy, and Creative Mind.
- 8 The excellence of Draaisma is that it is extremely sensitive to technological change and the words (...)
39Rogozinski found in the sublime a scene in which the imagination is, as it were, convulsed, and we find a very similar scene in Bergson’s panoramic vision. The issue, as I mentioned earlier, is whether the spontaneous productive imagination, in free play with the undetermined understanding, could reveal to us a new way of thinking about imagination and temporality. In his numerous writings, Bergson analyzes the “panoramic vision of the dying” (vision panoramique des mourants), the phenomenon in which “persons resuscitated from drowning or hanging, have said that during a moment they had the panoramic vision of the totality of their past” (Bergson 1975, 94). This is an interesting comparison to the sublime in that it is a situation in which one is engulfed by an overwhelming amount of primarily visual imagery experiences of “the totality of one's past.” Since it is impossible to give a more fascinating introduction to the history and current state of research on this phenomenon, referred to in English-speaking professional papers by the term “panoramic memory” (introduced by the English neurologist S. A. Kinnier Wilson in 1928) than Douwe Draaisma (Draaisma 2004), we will begin with a quick look at the characteristics of this phenomenon from his book.8
40The characteristics of this phenomenon, which Fechner also mentions in his 1836 Booklet on Life After Death, are the following. (1) This phenomenon is primarily a visual experience; (2) its images are vivid and detailed; (3) everyone watched the images “from the outside” and “passively” and felt themselves to be spectators; (4) the speed at which the images appeared was either extremely fast or extremely slow, but no one felt that they were subjectively or actively involved in the choice of speed. (5) The emotions associated with the images were neither fear, regret, confusion, nor distress, but were filled with peaceful feelings. Most evoked pleasant emotions. (6) Many memories of their youth appeared, and people often saw themselves in the scenes. The differences were mainly related to the time sequence of events. (7) Some people said that the images appeared in chronological order, while others said that they appeared in reverse order. (8) Some people said that the images appeared seamlessly, while others said that unrelated images appeared quickly one after another. (9) No one saw only images from the past. Some of them saw images of the future, and in most cases, they included scenes of their most important or close loved ones grieving over their death. The other condition for the appearance of panoramic memories was the certainty of death, which was a very important trigger (those who were certain reported four times more panoramic memories than others).
41As far as I know, it is Georges Poulet who has offered the most accurate reflection on Bergson’s analysis of this phenomenon (Poulet 2011). Let us briefly summarize Poulet’s discussion below. First, the originality of the Bergsonian interpretation must be emphasized. Poulet draws attention to four references that Bergson makes when interpreting the panoramic vision in Matter and Memory. The first three (Winslow, Ribot, and Maury) are mostly content to apply the rules of quantitative methodology by giving a solely physiological explanation (poisoning of the blood, acceleration of blood in the brain, growth of encephalic vibrations) and focus on the succession of states of consciousness, although several of the examples that they give seem to highlight simultaneity, a state in which all memories of the past appear at once. Only the last, Victor Egger (1848-1909), had a keen sense of the contradiction between the successivism of the psychologists and the simultaneity that sprang from their examples. Egger also emphasized the way the vision involves “a vital sensation of the self-experienced by a being that finds its very existence threatened” (Poulet 2011, 490).
- 9 In a recently discovered letter addressed to Egger, although on dreams, Bergson identified this ver (...)
42The point of conflict between Egger and Bergson lies in the fact that, on the psychological dimension, the former emphasizes “a concentration of forces in the face of peril, or a hardening in the face of danger” (id.), while the latter, quite to the contrary, sees relaxation as the key to the panoramic vision9. Poulet aptly points out: “no one mentioned this sense of relaxation before Bergson. Neither psychologists nor writers, it appears, saw its importance. […] It is by an entirely original insight that he linked the appearance of total memory not to a tension, a tautening, or a hyperactivity of the soul, like most of his predecessors, but on the contrary to a relaxation of the soul’s habitual tension” (Poulet 2011, 491, 492).
43Bergson, however, was not consistent in his interpretation of this phenomenon from the beginning. Among the three texts in which he refers to the panoramic vision, namely his 1896 Matter and Memory (Bergson 1988, 155), his 1911 article “The Perception of Change” (Bergson 2007a, 127), and his 1913 article “‘Phantasms of the Living’ and ‘Psychical Research’” (Bergson 1975, 94), his interpretations vary. Is the vision of the dying an undivided fusion in which all memories are condensed, or is it a plurality of details juxtaposed in a disjointed way? That is, a numerical multiplicity, or a multiplicity of permeation? According to Poulet, in the period between Time and Free Will and Creative Evolution, the destination of the détachement de l'action oscillated between two series: one is a consciousness of the melodic continuity of existence, and the other is the opposite of this continuity, that is, the juxtaposition of discontinuous elements on the basis of a homogeneous space. This is a “difficulty inherent in the very basis of Bergsonian doctrine” (Poulet 2011, 496). For, on the one hand, in order to reach awareness of inner life, the mind must be released from the tensions that confine it within the narrow circle of its action (attention to life), but when these tensions are relaxed and diminished, the released thought quickly loses focus and concentration, attention is dispersed, and, as a result, cognition itself, which should have been the goal, is lost.
44Between these two interpretations, the text of Matter and Memory could be taken either way and remained “curiously indefinite,” says Poulet. But as Bergson’s thought matures, it follows a more definite direction. His mature interpretation of the panoramic vision involves a thought that is “at once tense and relaxed” (à la fois tendue et détendue), thought that “relaxes its ties with the present without relaxing the attention with which it thinks what it thinks,” a thought that, like a dream, “turns away from present life but that, unlike dreams, persists in the attentive role of thought.” Poulet rightly points out that in his 1911 “Perception of Change,” Bergson applies to the panoramic vision the “conversion of the attention” which he formulated in his 1903 “Introduction to Metaphysics” (Poulet 2011, 496-497).
45While carefully attentive to the “reversal” and “turn” of attention to life, Poulet still assumes a simple action/inaction dualism, according to which “Bergson’s philosophy is a doctrine of action, not of inaction and abandonment,” and he names the perspective on the relaxation of tension “what can be called the seduction of Bergsonian philosophy (la tentation du bergsonisme)” (Poulet 2011, 493). But this makes it completely unclear where the difference lies between the tension in “attention to life” (what Poulet calls “habitual tension”) and the tension in the “conversion of the attention” (the state that Poulet calls “at once tense and relaxed”). What the astute Poulet seems to have overlooked is that the relationship between the two tensions and the difference in their natures is nothing more than the relationship between utility and efficacy and the difference in their natures. In other words, what Poulet seems to lack is a perspective of “idleness” (désœuvre).
46Here I would like to introduce an important distinction between “impotence” (impuissance) and “idleness” (désœuvre). It is often said that pure memory is impotent. Bergson himself often wrote in a way that could be taken as such (e.g., Bergson 1988, 127). But if pure memory is simply invalid and simply impotent, constantly having to borrow its life and potency from perception and the senses, how can we understand the “sharpness” and “activity” of pure memory as depicted in the following passage? “Coextensive with consciousness, it refrains and ranges alongside of each other all our states in the order in which they occur, leaving to each fact its place and, consequently, marking its date, truly moving [se mouvant bien réellement] in the past and not, like the first, in an ever renewed present” (Bergson 1988, 151).
47Just as the sensible diversity must at least not reject its reception in order to give itself to intuition, then given to understanding through a schema, so too must pure memory leave room for responding to the call of perception. Let’s look at the previous quote again carefully. While it is true that memory is not purely internal, the “place” and “date” given here do not simply allow for objectification. Rather, the date represents not the ordinality of pure memory, but the one-time singularity of the event, and the place opens up dimensionality itself, like in Heidegger.
48Since the particularity of memory must be erased in order for it to serve as a reference for action, and its more general aspect must be turned toward perception, the fact that we dare to give it a place and store it with an inscribed date means that we do not give it something that only benefits immediate utility. In other words, sensori-motor memory and pure memory are not opposed as “active/passive” but as two kinds of activity, and the latter is not a sterile “inactive impotence,” but rather “dynamic idleness” as an activity that resists utilitarian activity and seeks its recasting. This is where the productive imagination of Bergson comes in.
To call up the past in the form of an image [of true memory], we must be able to withdraw ourselves from the action of the moment, we must have the power to value the useless [l'inutile], we must have the will to dream [vouloir rêver]. Man alone is capable of such an effort (Bergson 1988, 82-83).
49Idleness is also a mode of existence, an efficacy distinct from another mode of performativity, utility. Unlike utility, the efficacy of idleness does not go straight forward to simple immediate efficiency.
But, if almost the whole of our past is hidden from us because it is inhibited by the necessities of present action, it will find strength to cross the threshold of consciousness [la force de franchir le seuil de la conscience] in all cases where we renounce the interests [désintéresserons] of effective action to replace ourselves, so to speak, in the life of dreams [la vie du rêve] (Bergson 1988, 154).
50“Waiting” (attendre) is also an extreme form of what Bergson calls “attention à la vie” or “tension.” Pure memory does not respond to the urgent reality of the present, but dares to retreat, to wait for another action. “If we refuse to attribute some such waiting [attente] to recent, and even to relatively distant, recollections, the normal work of memory becomes unintelligible” (Bergson 1988, 172). It goes without saying that the state of waiting, one of the characteristics of pure memory, is not impotence but idleness.
51However, there were always glimpses of a particular kind of violence in the imagination of Kant’s sublime and in the attention to life in Bergson’s panoramic vision. What, then, is the violence of pure memory? Heidegger declared that Kant had turned away from this “unsettling unknowable” and that imagination was the Abyss [Abgrund] that Kant had glimpsed in his thorough grounding in metaphysics. If we follow Rogozinski and Miyazaki, we might also assume that Heidegger, too, perceived the same unsettling abyss in the “violence” of imagination depicted in Critique of Judgment and retreated from it without further exploration. But then, we are tempted to interrogate Rogozinski, who criticizes Heidegger, who criticizes Kant, with the following question: “Is there no end to this chain of violence?” Rogozinski asked whether the transcendental synthesis, which limits and arranges the potential “power” of the imagination in advance to suit the Aesthetic, is in fact violence or not. Are the workings of such transcendental imagination unjustly restricting and suppressing the inherent “power” of imagination? Rogozinski stated that the “violence” of Einbildungs-Gewalt, on the contrary, was not so much “violence” as a supersensible force that pointed to the freedom from which this conceptualization was fundamentally emancipated.
52In our view, pure imagination freed from the legislative power of the understanding is nothing but the concept of image in Matter and Memory. Let us recall Heidegger’s words quoted at the beginning of this article: “The things of value, for which we are grateful, are found in his text Matière et Mémoire. It contains insights that are far from exhausted yet” and “Bergson’s images are the very expression of his exertions to really grasp the phenomenon within the realm he takes for his theme. The lack […] lies in the overly narrowed realm of his set of problems.” But whereas the transcendental imagination is fundamental temporality for the Heidegger of Kantbuch, Bergson's theory of image is only the reverse side of this temporality. The fundamental temporality behind Bergson’s theory of image is, of course, pure memory, or a dream plane. The violence of pure memory, if there is such a thing, would be a non-violence that is freed from the very idea of power, not unlike the divine violence that Benjamin referred to in his “Critique of Violence,” which ‘frees us from sin’ (entsühnen). Let us now return to panoramic memory.
53Poulet may be too quick to dismiss Bergson’s last text on panoramic vision, “Phantasms of the Living and Psychical Research,” as “less interesting than the first two because it says nothing new” (Poulet 2011, 487), but we do not share his view. This third analysis is valuable because, in contrast to the other two analyses, it articulates, through the gesture of “looking back,” the continuity of the brain’s internal/external limitations and Bergson’s philosophical methodology of approaching them. Bergson interprets there the phenomenon as a state in which a kind of hoop usually tight fastened of “sensation and consciousness” came loose. Normally, the brain guides our thoughts into action, giving way to (canaliser) our mental life and at the same time setting limits to (limiter) the workings of the mind. Bergson believes that we, like racehorses, have our eyes covered with eye shields, just as a horse's harness covers the sides of its eyes so that it can concentrate only on running. Since our eyes are usually only covered, the covering can be removed in exceptional circumstances. I think this seemingly trivial point is the crucial difference between transcendental philosophy and immanent philosophy.
The truth is that our whole past is always present behind us, and to perceive it we have but to look back; only, we cannot and we must not look back. We must not, because our end is to live, to act, and life and action look forward. We cannot, because the cerebral mechanism is fashioned to this end, — to mask from us the past, to let at each moment only so much pass through as will throw light on the present situation and favour our action (Bergson 1975, 94).
54The sublime is “a pleasure that arises only indirectly” when one is certain that one is “placed in a state of safety,” “produced through the feeling that the vital force is momentarily prevented, immediately followed by a gushing out of the vital force that much more powerfully,” whereas the panoramic vision is the certainty that one will soon die. At times, “the feelings became quite pleasant, and included that languid but full feeling before one is tired and sleepy” (Draaisma 2001, 240). Both are complex and peculiarly pleasurable experiences, but the circumstances in which they are brought about are opposite, and seem to symbolize the difference between transcendental philosophy, which emphasizes distance, and immanent philosophy, which is formed in the midst of experience, although Kant attempts in the third Critique to speak of a self-turning of experience compared to the first Critique.
55In his Critique of Judgment, Kant describes how the sublime, as an overwhelming amount of (mainly visual) imagery, fails the simultaneous summation (Zusammenfassung/ comprehension) and convulses the imagination, so to speak. According to Rogozinski, this pointed to the limits of the Heideggerian interpretation of the transcendental schematism as a fundamental temporality. In various texts, Bergson also depicted scenes in which the hoop of “attention to life” as “racial attention [attention de l’espèce]” (Bergson 1975, 95) is lifted and “that is enough to call to mind a thousand different “forgotten” details and to unroll the whole history of the person before him in a moving panorama” (Bergson 2007a, 127). This phenomenon, however, contributes rather to the elucidation of what Bergson calls “the plane of dream” (Bergson 1988, 172), the “base AB of memory” in which “all the events of our past life are set out in their smallest details” and are only “dreamed” (Bergson 1988, 167), and thus the planes of consciousness represented by the inverted cone diagram. In contrast to Kant, who abstained from “looking back” and declared the changeability of categories impossible, and in contrast to Heidegger, who followed Kant’s opinion by regarding transcendental imagination as a fundamental temporality, Bergson argued that “looking back” is possible and that looking beyond the turning point of experience is philosophy’s contribution to the progress of science.
56Whereas in the Heidegger of Kantbuch transcendental imagination is fundamental temporality, Bergson’s concept of image is merely the reverse side of this temporality. The other side is, of course, pure memory, the plane of dreams. What Kant and Heidegger call transcendental synthesis is “that continuous attention common to us all, imposed by nature, which we may call “racial attention” (Bergson 1975, 95), that is, what Bergson calls “the attention to life” (Bergson 1975, 95). Let us recall: we saw, with Bergson, the two violences over the regimes of sensation and consciousness (the violence of imprisonment wielded by sensation and consciousness and the violence wielded against sensation and consciousness to liberate us from that imprisonment), and with Rogozinski, the two violences over the transcendental imagination exposed in the experience of the sublime (the violence wielded by the imagination and the violence wielded against the imagination). We should not overlook here the two kinds of violence surrounding “attention to life” exposed in the experience of the panoramic vision. Needless to say, there is the violence of attention to life (utility), which “forces us to look forward” by effectively restricting the field of consciousness, holding attention to life, and the violence of conversion and reversal (efficacy), which defies this violence by daring to look backward (while maintaining a specific tension that relaxes the tension) when one “should not” look back. Just as the sublime in Kant’s Critique of Judgment found a new aspect of imagination from its convulsions, so too Bergson moves from the paralysis of attention to life in the panoramic vision to the construction of his own theory of memory. Here, too, we see a facet of Bergson's critical and clinical philosophy.
- 10 Bergson Looks Back Twice. In order to determine this Bergsonian inversive thought more precisely, l (...)
Should, however, the attention to life grow weak for a moment […], then our mind, which has of force been kept till then looking forward, loses the tension which strains it and by the recoil is made backward-looking; it surveys its whole history. The panoramic vision of the past is due, then, to a sudden disinterestedness in life born of the sudden conviction that the moment is the moment of death. Therefore, up to then the business of the brain, so far as it is the organ of memory, has been to keep the attention fixed on life by usefully contracting the field of consciousness” (Bergson 1975, 94-95).10
57It is true that the transcendental imagination functions under the dominance of understanding, in schemata and schematism. But the imagination has another face, and when we catch a glimpse of it, we are awakened from the oblivion of memory. When the imagination is released from the schematism and enters the sphere of memory, it corresponds, in Bergson’s terms, to going back from the motor diagram (sensori-motor memory) to what Bergson calls the “plane of dreams,” to which we are led by a sudden “disinterestedness in life” as another violence.
58The reason why panoramic memory is treated only marginally by Bergson is, of course, that it is an extreme case in which the brain, as an organ of memory, ceases to “keep the attention fixed on life” and “to limit usefully the field of consciousness.” But, on the contrary, this is also why panoramic memory is so important for the understanding of Bergsonian philosophy. As is well-known, Bergsonian philosophy is a philosophy founded on subtraction, and the panoramic memory is a valuable testimony to the crisis of collapse that the subtraction system has faced. Panoramic memory is not pure memory insofar as it comes to the fore as a large number of overwhelming visual images. Of course, neither is it contained within the ordinary present. If déja-vu is a simultaneous projection of present perception and present memory, panoramic memory is a state in which the whole past is projected at a higher or lower speed in a kind of dreamlike state, detached from the perceptual present, so to speak. Why is it that in the sublime the imagination breaks down against the overwhelming volume of summation, but in panoramic memory the imagination does not? Perhaps it is because time in the panoramic vision does not flow as it normally does. Rather, time exists external to experience in the sublime (personal security is fully ensured), but in panoramic memory, since death is felt to be imminent, the limitations imposed by the brain are removed, the condensed scale of time is relaxed and expanded, time is freed of utility and becomes the past re-living itself in an ocean of idleness, awaiting, and efficacy.
59Let me summarize. This paper began by asking what it would mean to read Bergson with Heidegger. In section 1, as a possible response to this question, I hypothesized that Heidegger’s reading of Kant might show the influence of his confrontation with Bergson, and that it is a matter of schematism that Heidegger finds so much to appreciate in Matter and Memory.
60In section 2, we saw the transition from Time and Free Will to Matter and Memory as a deepening of Bergson’s battle against Kant, and the essence of this battle as a deepening from Immanent Aesthetic to Immanent Logic. In section 3, by seeing this battle from a methodological dimension, we attempted to show that ultimately Bergson’s attempt was to understand transcendence as a self-turning of experience, and the a priori as a fold or folding of experience.
61In section 4, based on the above preparation, I discussed how Matter and Memory can be said to be a work on a kind of schematism. If the question of schematism is raised when we try to grasp the relation between our mind and the world by applying the categories of the understanding to the various objects of our sensible intuition, then all the conceptual devices involved in what Bergson calls “the planes of consciousness,” from the persistence of pure recollection and memory images to perception and action, concern the pure imagination and the schematism in Kant’s words. Matter and Memory is therefore a work that attempts to rethink the problem of imagination and schematism linking two different realms of existence, mind-memory and body-matter, from the standpoint of the philosophy of immanence.
62In section 5, I discussed Heidegger in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and suggested that his attempt to read transcendental imagination as primordial temporality can be interpreted as being on the way to a Bergsonian philosophy of immanence that sees the transcendental as the folds and folding of experience. Heidegger is on the way because, sticking to the sphere of schematism, he still considers imagination within the framework of normal cognitive faculties in which the understanding wields legislative power, and he never seems to interrogate the very force that constitutes that framework itself, namely, attention to life.
63In section 6, relying on Rogozinski’s attempt to overcome the problems of Kantbuch with the theory of the sublime in Critique of Judgment, I argued that it is Kant in the Critique of Judgment who comes to the rescue of Heidegger, who has stopped in the middle of his path. The reason why the sublime is important is that it exposes, within experience, the limits of the transcendental imagination, of the transcendental schematism, and thus of the Heideggerian interpretation.
64In Section 7, I took up the analysis of the panoramic vision, which is only barely visible in Bergson’s writings. There appears, through the difference between the tension of attention to life and the tension of conversion, an imagination not defined by the understanding (let us say, an imagination forcenée), imagination backlit by the movement of what overflows from the system of memory and perception represented in the diagram of the inverted cone.
65In Section 8, to define the difference between the two tensions more precisely, I investigated the distinction between the two modalities of idleness and impotence (and thus the difference between the two forms of activity, efficacy and utility), which is key to understanding pure memory. Heidegger attempted to redefine Kant’s transcendental imagination as a fundamental temporality, which corresponds to Bergson’s theory of image. Rather, it is pure memory that is inextricably linked to it and is im-plicated under the form of the inverted cone diagram of consciousness with the power of idleness.
66In Section 9, I took up, once again, Bergson’s third analysis of the panoramic vision. This analysis is valuable because, in contrast to the other two analyses, it articulates, through the philosophical gesture of looking-back, Bergson’s methodology of approaching the continuity of the brain’s internal/external limitations. In panoramic memory, time is not external to experience, as in the sublime, but time is itself a re-living of the past.
67By interpreting Matter and Memory as a work of de-schematization (dé-schématisation), which allows us to see the stability and fragility, as well as the structure and limits of schematism at the same time, we believe we have proposed a way to better understand the correspondence between Bergson’s problematic and those of Kant and Heidegger; and conversely, by taking into consideration Heidegger’s Kantbuch and Kant’s theory of the sublime, we believe we have supplied the way to better understand, for example, the meaning of Bergson’s panoramic vision.