Chapter 2 - Bergson and Thinking as Dissociation

Summary

Chapter 2 introduces Bergson’s claim that thinking has a processual character that distinguishes it from judging. It analyses Bergson’s claim in Time and Free Will that the structure of our mental lives is different in kind from the way we understand the external world. It shows how Bergson’s later work develops an account of the interrelations of durational thinking and judging. Drawing on Bergson’s early untranslated lectures on Kant, it shows how Bergson pinpoints a lacuna in Kant’s account of the imagination, and attempts to argue that it is only by understanding thinking as operating through a process of dissociation, rather than the synthetic association of Kant’s model of the imagination, that we can understand the emergence of a meaningful world.