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In the fourth and final chapter of Matter and Memory, published in 1896, Henri Bergson lays out his program for the future of philosophy. After discussing the nature of perception and providing his ontological account of time, in what is arguably his most difficult book, Bergson recounts in his own way the history of metaphysics and its shortcomings. The conflicting approaches of empiricism and dogmatism share a common, yet unnoticed, assumption: they take reality and experience as such to be made up of what we call "facts." Both empiricism and dogmatism do not accept that "facts," "words," and "objects" do not present us with "pure experience,"¹ but only correspond to our human way of mapping out reality according to the necessities and needs of ordinary and social life. Perception, intelligence, and language are not, according to Bergson, tools for pure knowledge, but instead are essentially pragmatic faculties meant to respond to the needs of animal and social life. What we perceive and name, indeed, the very way in which we perceive and name, is fundamentally interested. Philosophy has failed to recognize the essential pragmatic nature of our faculties and has taken as pure descriptions of reality as such what are in fact ways of arranging experience for the sake of facilitating action and communication.

Empiricism and dogmatism may differ in what they consider to be the principles of philosophy, but they share the mistaken premise that their starting point is with irreducible phenomena when in fact such phenomena are pragmatic constructions that dogmatists and empiricists fail to acknowledge as constructions. It is no wonder that [End Page 1099] the outcome is the building up of conflicting systems, all equally plausible and all consequently refuting each other. If it is easy to recognize here the echo of Kant's analysis of the origin of distrust in the power of metaphysics, Bergson's answer will not be to claim the impotence of speculative reason. The solution provided by critical philosophy, "which holds all knowledge to be relative and the ultimate nature of things to be inaccessible to the mind,"² should not be the last word of philosophy. That is to say that, according to Bergson, Kant's definition of experience as relative to the constituting structures of a transcendental subjectivity is no more accurate than the naive conception of experience held by dogmatism and empiricism. The fate of philosophy is not confined to either arbitrary constructions or criticism; there is "a last enterprise to be undertaken," a different method, and a different future for philosophy to hope for. Bergson describes it in the following terms:

Such is, in truth, the ordinary course of philosophical thought: we start from what we take to be experience, we attempt various possible arrangements of the fragments which apparently compose it, and when at last we feel bound to acknowledge the fragility of every edifice that we have built, we end by giving up all effort to build. But there is a last enterprise to be undertaken. It would be to seek experience at its source, or rather above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience.³

Needless to say, the effort of "seeking experience at its source" is not proper to Bergson alone. In some sense, all philosophies provide an account of experience, of what we have to understand as experience. And, as for the period we are concerned with, Edmund Husserl, in his own attempt to find a new beginning for philosophy, was also defining phenomenology as a way of reaching experience as its source. The singularity of Bergson's view lies somewhere else. It is in the "how" to get to the source of experience that Bergson's thought finds its singular place, its singular voice.

Let me underline two crucial points in the quoted passage. Bergson writes that the source must be sought "above" the decisive turn at which experience becomes, properly speaking, human. This implies that a philosophy of experience does not coincide for Bergson with a philosophy of subjectivity: it is neither a humanistic or existential philosophy, nor a...