The “education of the senses” in Bergson

a bergsonian reading of Hume’s discontinuity in light of the sciences of cognition

Abstract

This article examines David Hume’s and Henri Bergson’s conceptions of continuity and discontinuity in perceptual experience. It addresses these concepts in both authors and presents a Bergsonian reading of Hume. We maintain the hypothesis that Bergson’s notion of an “education of the senses” — the active role of corporeality in sensorimotor harmonization — constitutes an advance over Humean associationism and proves consistent with recent findings in cognitive science and neuroscience, a hypothesis we verify by comparison with recent experiments. To this end, we highlight the role of corporeality in cognition and investigate its coherence from a contemporary scientific perspective. For Hume, discontinuity — the interruption between perceptions — is characteristic of perception, and continuity is organized through associative relations. Bergson, in turn, attributes discontinuity to the body’s distinct sensory pathways and proposes that perceptual continuity is obtained through an “education of the senses” linked to movement. Hume and Bergson thus differ in their perspectives on perceptual continuity and discontinuity, and our Bergsonian reading of Hume suggests an explanation in accordance with the most current sciences. Moreover, both philosophers present features in their thought that enable us to compare them with certain perspectives from cognitive science and neuroscience. Hume’s systematic approach to knowledge acquisition can be compared with the stages described by the ventricular doctrine of the brain, while Bergson anticipated an important issue regarding the relation between continuity of body-image, motor action, and continuous perceptual experience.