The Bergsonian Metaphysics Behind Huxley’s Doors

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The Bergsonian Metaphysics Behind Huxley’s Doors

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes attempts to help us understand psychedelic experience via the ideas of Aldous Huxley and Henri Bergson. More specifically, he attempts ‘to rectify and fortify’ Bergson’s metaphysics as it is represented in Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, a book about the use and experience of mescaline. In it, Huxley employs two Bergsonian concepts: that of the ‘reducing valve’ and that of ‘Mind-at-Large’. According to the former concept, one’s perception of both the external world and one’s past is greatly filtered for practical purposes. According to the latter concept, the whole of the external world (not just that part of it that one perceives, but all of it, i.e., the universe) and the total past (not just one’s own past) exist as consciousness. Applying these concepts to the use and experience of mescaline, Huxley presents a Bergsonesque view approximating (but not identical to) pantheism and, with it, extended-mind theories, one that (as Sjöstedt-Hughes puts it) ‘sees the brain and body as receiving rather than generating consciousness—a top-down and exogenous approach to the mind’.

...The reducing valve and Mind-at-Large notions each have spatial and temporal aspects, when we examine them in more detail in Bergson’s work. Spatially, the reducing valve filters away many sensible properties in the ‘external world’; temporally, the valve filters away much of the past. As we shall see, Bergson argues that memory is never lost as the past persists into and comprises the present as a continuous movement—only access to memory can be lost. The term ‘external world’ is placed in scare quotes here because another aspect of Bergson’s theory of perception, which Huxley alludes to in his trip report, is that the perceived external world becomes part of the perceiver, and vice versa. So the concepts ‘internal’ and ‘external’ can be misleading (to the extent that such language can push one into a false metaphysics). Bergson often emphasizes the fact that time is not space,17 and it is the confusion of this that has led to fundamental errors in philosophy and science. But before we focus on these spatial and temporal subdivisions, let us first examine Huxley’s own thoughts relating to this general theory in The Doors, before we look at Bergson’s more specific theory...

...The function of the brain, for Bergson, is to funnel and channel, ‘canalize’, external images, or qualial processes, into potential actions: ‘that which the brain explains in our perception is action begun, prepared or suggested, it is not perception itself’. The more complex our brains, the more options, the more channels, we have in acting. So the brain is necessary but not sufficient for functioning; but it is neither necessary nor sufficient for consciousness. With this theory, we would of course expect to observe neural correlates of consciousness, as we do, yet we should not consider the relations one of emergence (of mind from matter), but of continued movement from external events (or from memory). There is therefore more in mind than in its neural correlates, in the respective figurative relation of an object to its shadow. It is impossible, Bergson claims, to derive consciousness from non-conscious (panhylal) cerebral activity. Neural correlates of consciousness merely indicate the continuity of external action into potential bodily behaviour started – not mentality generated. Yet of more importance to the comprehension of consciousness is the role of memory...

Creative-Divine Aspect of the Mind-at-Large

Bergson argues that there is a creative vital impulse, an élan vital, that drives through the universe and as such drives evolution, and drives individual minds. In Bergson’s 1907 book, Creative Evolution—where he makes the case for this impetus as necessary for understanding evolution more comprehensively—he states that this impulse is not that of vitalism, it is not mechanistic causation, and it is not teleological.

There is no cosmic designed ideal, telos—the future (unlike the past) does not exist. Yet the future cannot be determined as mechanistic laws of nature are only parochial tendencies, and mechanistic causation cannot account for mentality. There is, however, a general drive, impetus, which is the creative energy that Bergson calls God, which is Love: ‘God’s love … is exactly that of the vital impetus; it is this impetus itself, communicated in its entirety to exceptional men.’87 These men, these people, are the mystics (and to a lesser extent the artists, and to an extent still less to all people who intuit their creative impulses).