Every movement in life is a success. Yet it also involves a setback, an arresting of its own movement, a closing off of itself. By differentiating itself into material form it loses contact with the rest of itself.

One or many durations? We can take the idea of a virtual coexistence and extend or apply it to the whole of the universe. “This idea, no longer simply signifies my relationship with being, but the relationship of all things with being. Everything happens as if the universe were a tremendous Memory.” It opens the door to “a radical plurality of durations…(where) the universe is made up of modifications, disturbances, changes of tension, and of energy, and nothing else.”

In what way can we say objects endure? Not in and of themselves, but in relationship to the whole of the universe.

Now we get at the heart of his critique of Einstein. For Bergson, “there is only one time (monism), although there is an infinity of actual fluxes (generalized pluralism) that necessarily participate in the same virtual whole (limited pluralism).”

The to and the of.

“The concept of multiplicity has two fates in the Twentieth Century: Bergsonism and phenomenology. In phenomenology, the multiplicity of phenomena is always related to a unified consciousness. In Bergsonism, “the immediate data of consciousness” are a multiplicity. Here, two prepositions, “to” and “of,” indicate perhaps the most basic difference between Bergsonism and phenomenology. The immediate data of consciousness as being temporal, in other words, as the duration (la durée). In the duration, there is no juxtaposition of events; therefore there is no mechanistic causality. It is in the duration that we can speak of the experience of freedom.”

“For Bergson, we must understand the duration as a qualitative multiplicity — as opposed to a quantitative multiplicity. As the name suggests, a quantitative multiplicity enumerates things or states of consciousness by means of externalizing one from another in a homogeneous space. In contrast, a qualitative multiplicity consists in a temporal heterogeneity, in which “several conscious states are organized into a whole, permeate one another, [and] gradually gain a richer content” (Time and Free Will, p. 122). Bergson even insists that the word ‘several’ is inappropriate to qualitative multiplicity because it suggests numbering.”

“For Bergson, a qualitative multiplicity is heterogeneous (or differentiated), continuous (or unifying), oppositional (or dualistic) at the extremes, and, most importantly, temporal or progressive (an irreversible flow). Bergson also calls the last characteristic of temporal progress mobility; this characteristic truly distinguishes duration from space, which is an “immobile medium” (The Creative Mind, p. 180). Finally, because a qualitative multiplicity is heterogeneous and yet interpenetrating, it is inexpressible. The continuous and heterogeneous multiplicity of consciousness is given immediately, that is, without the mediation of symbols (Bergson 1992, 162). For Bergson — and perhaps this is his greatest insight — freedom is mobility. Because Bergson connects duration with mobility, in the second half of the Twentieth Century (in Deleuze and Foucault, in particular), the Bergsonian concept of qualitative multiplicity will be dissociated from time and associated with space (Deleuze 1986).”

The present “is only the most contracted level of the past.” The present “infinitely contracts our past.”

We need to trace out the intersection of memory and information. Even if tge question “Where are recollections preserved?” is badly framed, a mechanical reduction of a more basic metaphysical structure, we are nevertheless justified to ask “How is information processed as information? And what are some of its distinguishing features?” Memory may be only one form in the nexus of information storage, retrieval, processing. Nevertheless, if we speak of memory in more general terms (that is, not a specific function of a single mind, or multiple minds, for example when we speak of a muscle memory) then memory may be a useful designation.

It’s not simply an act of recalling the past in comparison to the present. For “the present is not; rather, it is pure, becoming, always outside itself.” The present is active and useful, the past has ceased to act or to be useful, but has not ceased to be. It is incorrect to say that the past was, rather the past is being “in-itself, and the form under which being is preserved in itself.” The past is pure ontology. Moreover, the past is contemporaneous, coexists, with the present. The past does not follow the present, but is constituted immediately with the present. The past is presupposed, a pure condition, within the present. “Each present goes back to itself as past. Not only does the past coexist with the present that has been, but, as it preserves itself in itself (while the present passes), it is the whole, integral past; it is all our past, which coexists with each present.”

Duration is a virtual coexistence. Each successive slice of the past always contains the totality of the past. Memory is not merely an act of recollection, but an evocation, a state where recollections become actualized or embodied. Thus, we have a revolutionary definition of consciousness. “We do not move from the present to the past, from perception to recollection, but from the past to the present, from recollection to perception.” Recollection is actualized when it becomes an image. The past enters into a coalescence with the present,

Memory involves two simultaneous movements: a translation and a rotation. A translation “moves in its entirety to meet experience, thus contracting more or less, though without dividing, with a view to action; the other of rotation upon itself, by which it turns toward the situation of the moment, presenting to it that side of itself, which may prove to be the most useful.”

“The four aspects of actualization: 1) translation and 2) rotation, which formed the properly psychic moments; 3) dynamic movement, the attitude of the body that is necessary to the stable equilibrium of the two proceeding determination; and finally 4) mechanical movement, the motor scheme that represents the final stage of actualization.” In practice this can be described as follows. “The first moment ensures a point of contact between the past and the present: the past literally moves towards the present in order to find a point of contact (or of contraction) with it. The second moment ensures a transposition, a translation, an expansion of the past in the present: recollection-images restore the distinctions of the past in the present – at least those that are useful. The third moment, the dynamic attitude of the body, ensures the harmony of the two preceding moments, correcting the one by the other and pushing them to their limit. The fourth moment, the mechanical movement of the body, ensures the property utility of the whole and its performance in the present.” To this, we add a “fifth aspect of actualization: a kind of displacement by which the past is embodied only in terms of a present that is different from that which it has been.”

We can distinguish between a psychological unconscious and ontological unconscious. A psychological unconscious “corresponds to a recollection that is pure, virtual, impassive, inactive, in itself. A psychological unconscious, by contrast, “represents the movement of recollection in the course of actualizing itself: like Leibnizian possibles, recollections try to become embodied, the exert pressure to be admitted so that a full scale, repression originating in the present and an attention to life are necessary toward off, useless or dangerous recollections.

The concept of elan vital seems dependent upon the importance of the key concept of virtuality. It may be too strong to suggest that the fundamental difference between life (desiring machines) and non-life boils down to the existence of virtuality, especially as virtual particles play an important role in the understanding of physical systems. Is life a composite of the real and the virtual while non life is only merely real? Again, this seems reductive but nevertheless the way in which virtuality plays an unmistakable part of conscious experience needs further exploration.

Berkeley, according to Bergson, deserves credit for the insight. “Matter has no interior, no underneath, hides nothing, contains nothing possesses neither power no virtuality of any kind is spread out as a mirror surface and is no more than what it presents to us at any given moment.”

Virtuality is the mechanism by which an object divides into differences of kind. Objective = differences in degree; subjective = differences in kind. Synthesizing any complexity necessarily transforms the operation and its objective reality. The process of dividing up leads to a change in kind. “ There is other without there being several. To be more precise, it is the virtual insofar as it is actualized, and the course of being actualized, it is inseparable from the movement of its actualization. For actualization comes about through differentiation, through divergent lines, and creates so many differences in kind by virtue of its own movement.”

The observation that things endure (a multiplicity of durations or is there only one duration?) forces us to reformulate the physical nature of space as mere exteriority. We posit a pre-geometry from which space emerges as a relationship between things or durations.

The elan vital is virtuality in the process of being actualized. Life merges into the moment of differentiation, proceeding by dissociation and division. Movement is explained by the insertion of duration into matter. The branching effect is basic to this. Movement can only happen by way of a branching effect which allows virtuality to exist across its actual divergent lines.

The virtual is not the same as the possible. The possible has no reality but may have an actuality. The virtual is not actual, but nevertheless possesses a reality. As Proust says “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.” Deleuze continues. “The characteristic of virtuality is to exist in such a way that it is actualized by being differentiated and is forced to differentiate itself, to create its lines of differentiation in order to be actualized.”

This process can be described as creative evolution, that is, evolution is actualization of the virtual, the creation of differences.

Common errors: The belief that nonbeing precedes being. The confusion of being-present with Being. The belief that possibility precedes reality. The belief that disorder precedes order. That the primordial void exists prior to being. To see differences in degree when actually there are differences in kind.

The intuitive method: First, the stating of problems. Second, the discovery of genuine differences in kind. Third, the apprehension of duration.

First Rule: Intuition is a lived act. Being, order, existence are constituted by the creative act, that is to say, generative by the posing of the problem in duration (Durée). “True freedom is the power to decide, to constitute problems themselves.” The role of philosophy is to find and posit the problem. The properly stated question already entails its solution. Reject false problems, embrace true problems. More importantly, stating the problem is not a discovery (of what already exists). It is a creative act of invention (may never have happened). Often in practice this means inventing the terms (or mathematical formulations) in which the problem can be properly stated. Or, to state in another way, the problem has the solution it deserves.

False problems are two kinds: nonexistent problems (e.g., terms that confuse the more and the less) and badly stated questions (e.g., a badly analyzed composite). Upon closer inspection, though, the first kind is a special case of the second and more basic illusion: assuming differences in degree rather than kind. Intuition is the method by which we are able to dispel this illusion and rediscover differences in kind.

Second Rule: The intuitive method proceeds by division. That is because reality is presented as a mixture of composites. “The composite must therefore be divided according to qualitative and qualified tendencies. If the composite represents the fact, it must be divided into tendencies or pure preferences that only exist in principle. We go beyond experience, toward the conditions of experience.”

Example of method: “First, there is affectivity (a modification, variation, augmentation, or diminution of a body or its ability to act) which assumes that the body is something other than a mathematical point, and which gives it volume in space. Next, it is the recollections of memory that link the instants to each other and interpolate the past in the present. Finally, it is memory again in another form, in the form of a contraction of matter that makes the quality appear. (It is therefore memory that makes the body something other than instantaneous and gives it a duration and time).

Thus, “intuition leads us to go beyond the state of experience towards the conditions of experience.”

Third rule: problems are solved in terms of time. The duration (time + consciousness) is intuitively grasped as pure mobility and incompleteness. “Intuition is the movement by which we emerge from our own duration, by which we make use of our own duration to affirm, and immediately to recognize the existence of other durations, above or below us.” Duration is not a psychological state but a complex ontology. Duration is not merely a lived experience but a condition of experience, a continuity and a heterogeneity, a passage through differences. Duration is a qualitative multiplicity.