I, too, want to say welcome, @PureMemory. I appreciated those two videos on Henri Bergson you produced, especially how you wove together the artistic imagery and sound, the pacing of your speech, and the way explain yourself and your approach to the text.
Your description of Bergson’s theory of perception reminded me of an experience I had in college after I first started studying Zen meditation and was thinking a lot about non-duality. I was taking the bus into campus, staring out the window, and as we turned a corner I was looking at some trees… when it suddenly and very pleasantly occurred that I wasn’t really looking the trees at all.
There was a weird elusive flip sensation and I intuitively understood that my mind was there with the trees—was the trees. My mind was not “my mind” at all but the world itself was my mind. My thinking was not my thinking but that world’s thinking. It was a very cool flicker of insight (or outsight), which as soon as I questioned it, of course, fell back into the conventional pattern. But it was enough of an opening to confirm something in practice which hitherto I only knew in theory.
I have not read any of Bergson’s books—in fact did a whole undergrad in philosophy and had never heard his name. I think it was JF Martel, in Reclaiming Art in the Age of the Artifce (highly recommended), who brought him to my attention. JF and Phil Ford also do the Weird Studies podcast, whose spirit I think you’d like. Of course, later you learn he was once a world-famous personage who lectured widely and dialogued with Einstein, etc. It is weird the blind spots we have.
Sometimes I feel like my philosophical reading choices are just a way of playing whack-a-mole with my blind spots. Other times, to read a particular thinker during a particular time of one’s life feels destined, fateful, and precisely necessary for some larger unfoldment. On another level, one could say that we’re always talking about the same things basically, and that reading different kinds of literature gives us more interesting and convivial ways of talking about those things with other people who share enough of the same sources. We keep a discourse alive, like tending the fires through some long, cold cultural night.
But there’s also the more interesting prospect you raise, which is production value. To me, this is where the limits of Analytic Idealism are almost a priori and by definition constrained in ways I just can’t fit my mind inside of. I say this not having gone through the course, yet having listened to many hours and read enough parts of Kastrup’s writings, I believe, to get the gist. (That said, I would be hard-pressed to tell you the gist, without studying him a bit more.)
On the face of it, Analysis presupposes something is there to be analyzed. But who made that choice and why? For what ends? For what joy? What if we remove the assumption of the given—not only with respect to what it is or what it might be, but also that it may be in any way we imagine it—and instead leave it open-ended how we frame the thing in itself? Of any edifice of thought purporting to correctly describe What Is, I would ask: What for?
I think Bernardo’s work is super useful… especially IF you are looking for the best arguments to convince people who may have a scientistic bent of mind that their materialistic worldview is incoherent and the one you are advocating for (privileging consciousness) is superior. I also think it could be useful in the sort of technological project of reconstituting science in transphysical space. A new metaphysics for a new future science—this could be very powerful. I would also like to learn more about the differences between strong and weak emergence, and why those differences make a difference.
However, I’ve come to feel that creative expression is more important than—indeed, transcends and includes—analytic assertion. If it is anything on a universal scale, consciousness is creative first of all—otherwise there would be nothing to be conscious of (to more or less accurately reflect or describe). And if consciousness is everywhere and working through everything, then anything could be (/ everything is) constituted with creative intelligence of the highest order. It matters how we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, think about, and feel the world. Therefore we must be willing to engage in multiple modes of learning and expression in order to amplify our scope. (This is why I advocate for “philosophical sex.”)
I am definitely up for a getting more acquainted with Bergon’s thought, which feels so consonant with and supportive of my own creative endeavors and quests to understand, so I do look forward to more of your videos whenever they can happen for you. I also think it would be cool to read and dialogue together when the time is right. I find that reading as a social practice really enhances my learning, and is much more fun than doing it all by my lonesome. Nice to meet you.