Taking another look at Bergson provides illustration on how the role of categories blunts our engagement with nuance (Bergson, 2002. Bergson (2001) observed that quite frequently we reduce a qualitative experience to a quantitative one. As a noise, a shade of color, a sensation changes, we refer to it as an increase or a decrease. This leads a person to carve their experience of something changing through time into concrete categories.
An example of the above is the visual color spectrum available to human beings- red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. If we experienced an object transitioning from red to violet, we would experience a flow of change through time. However, if we are asked to articulate the experience by a researcher, there is a reasonable chance we may summarize the experience as- the object transitioned from red to orange to yellow and so on.
The above is accurate, but it is stripped of flow for the receiver of our account. Our experience may then be recorded as a series of categories, and these categories are then shared with a wider audience. If we only read scientific categorical accounts of experience, we would be left with the impression of experience moving between blocks. What happens between the blocks would to some degree be lost. The nuance is stripped away.
For Bergson (2001) and recently McGilchrist (2021), poetry and art recapture the flow of transition. The suggestive nature of art and poetry invite the imagination to take part in experience. This is opposed to the explicit nature of categories which tell us, through propositions, what happened. Art and poetry open the world to suggestion, to something beyond which is presented on the canvas and the page.
If we are looking to move beyond fixed assumptions about the world, and perhaps think with more creativity, it is worth considering engaging with art and poetry. It is also worth exploring subjects from multiple perspectives and multiple mediums, not just categorical representations expressed in text and tables. This would allow us to engage with the nuance which exists between every transition of mood, color and weather. Nature perhaps provides the perfect backdrop to engage our imaginations and experience this flow.
Engagement with nature embodies the flow of reality and the nuance of transition. There are no straight lines in nature (McGilchrist, 2021), there is only the flow of one curve into another. Experiencing the flow of nature provides a person with an experience which is all nuance and subtlety, it inspires the imagination, and is poetic in nature. An example is staring at clouds. Clouds, as so many of us have experienced, invite us to imagine what they look like beyond simply the category of clouds, and we watch as they transition from one appearance to another. The final verse from Shelley’s poem, The Cloud, illustrates this perfectly-
I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
Shelley, P.B. (1838).
Reading
Bergson, H. and Pogson, F.L., 2001. Time and free will: An essay on the immediate data of consciousness. Courier Corporation.
Bergson, H., 2002. Henri Bergson: key writings. A&C Black.
Bergson, H., 2022. Creative evolution. Taylor & Francis.
McGilchrist, I., 2021. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. What Then is True?. Volume Two. Perspectiva Press.
Shelley, P.B., 1838. THE CLOUD. Livesey’s moral reformer, (15), pp.128-128.
