In his essay ‘The Potential and the Actual’ (1930), the French thinker Henri Bergson argued that maybe essentially the most foundational query of metaphysics – ‘Why is there one thing as a substitute of nothing?’ – is poorly conceived, reflecting a mistaken view that ‘there may be much less within the thought of void than within the thought of fullness’. Constructing from this place to begin he suggests – to place all of it a bit merely – a metaphysics sprung as a substitute from the fullness of the evolving actuality through which we ceaselessly discover ourselves. This experimental video essay from Epoché Journal pairs textual content excerpted from ‘The Potential and the Actual’ with archival imagery and unique music. Drawing out Bergson’s themes in sudden methods, the brief offers Bergson’s influential phrases a curious new life practically a century after they have been first revealed.
