The Machine of Knowledge
To depict a marching regiment on a screen, we do not model each soldier’s motion; we take a series of instantaneous views and run them rapidly past a lamp. The pictures themselves never move — the mobility lives in the apparatus. Bergson claims that ordinary perception, language, and science all work this same way.
Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality
Why We Cannot Help It
The illusion is not a philosopher’s error but the natural bent of an intellect built for action. To act on the world we must arrest it into stable, handleable states; the cinematographic method is supremely practical. It only becomes a metaphysical mistake when we take the snapshots for reality and try to reconstitute movement by adding up immobilities — which, as Zeno’s paradoxes show, can never be done.
The Alternative
Real becoming is continuous and indivisible; you do not build it out of static positions any more than you build a melody out of silences. To grasp it we must reverse the habitual direction of thought and install ourselves within the movement itself — the work of intuition. The history of philosophy, Bergson suggests, is largely the history of mistaking the film strip for the living scene.
The cinematograph analogy anchors Chapter IV of Creative Evolution, Bergson’s critique of the mechanistic history of philosophy.
Related Concepts
