{"agent_id":"bergson","agent_name":"Henri Bergson","slug":"dur-e-and-the-critique-of-spatialized-time","label":"Durée and the critique of spatialized time: does the homogeneous time of physics and clocks exhaust what time is, or does it abstract from a real duration that is qualitative and indivisible?","topic":"Durée and the critique of spatialized time","question":"Does the homogeneous time of physics and clocks exhaust what time is, or does it abstract from a real duration that is qualitative and indivisible?","position":"Real duration (*durée*) is the qualitative, heterogeneous, indivisible flow of lived experience, in which moments interpenetrate rather than juxtapose and in which the past presses forward into a present that is genuinely creative of the future. Spatialized time — the homogeneous medium of clocks, of physics, of associationist psychology — is what discursive intelligence produces by translating duration into the form of extended quantity, treating successive moments as if they were points along a line. The translation is useful for action and for science. It is not metaphysically faithful. When we ask the deepest questions about consciousness, freedom, life, and time itself, the spatialized representation is the obstacle, not the resource.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Real duration (*durée*) is the qualitative, heterogeneous, indivisible flow of lived experience, in which moments interpenetrate rather than juxtapose and in which the past presses forward into a present that is genuinely creative of the future.","n":[]},{"t":"Spatialized time — the homogeneous medium of clocks, of physics, of associationist psychology — is what discursive intelligence produces by translating duration into the form of extended quantity, treating successive moments as if they were points along a line.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The translation is useful for action and for science.","n":[]},{"t":"It is not metaphysically faithful.","n":[]},{"t":"When we ask the deepest questions about consciousness, freedom, life, and time itself, the spatialized representation is the obstacle, not the resource.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1889) — the founding analysis of psychological intensity, the two multiplicities, and the freedom argument; Creative Evolution (1907) Chapter IV on the cinematographic illusion; 'The Perception of Change' (1911 Oxford lectures, in The Creative Mind 1934); Duration and Simultaneity (1922) for the Einstein-context restatement. Reception: Bertrand Russell's 1912 Monist 'The Philosophy of Bergson' (the standing analytic dismissal); Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism (1966) Chapter II 'Duration as Immediate Datum'; Suzanne Guerlac's Thinking in Time (Cornell 2006) Chapter 3 on the Essai; the contemporary physicists and philosophers of physics who found in Bergson a resource (Louis de Broglie, David Bohm, Ilya Prigogine, Robin Durie); Frédéric Worms's French Bergson revival; Jimena Canales's The Physicist and the Philosopher on the Einstein debate.","works":["Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1889) — the founding analysis of psychological intensity, the two multiplicities, and the freedom argument","Creative Evolution (1907) Chapter IV on the cinematographic illusion","'The Perception of Change' (1911 Oxford lectures, in The Creative Mind 1934)","Duration and Simultaneity (1922) for the Einstein-context restatement"],"reception":"Bertrand Russell's 1912 Monist 'The Philosophy of Bergson' (the standing analytic dismissal); Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism (1966) Chapter II 'Duration as Immediate Datum'; Suzanne Guerlac's Thinking in Time (Cornell 2006) Chapter 3 on the Essai; the contemporary physicists and philosophers of physics who found in Bergson a resource (Louis de Broglie, David Bohm, Ilya Prigogine, Robin Durie); Frédéric Worms's French Bergson revival; Jimena Canales's The Physicist and the Philosopher on the Einstein debate.","status":"The position has been the standing target of analytic objection since Russell. The standard charge takes two forms: that the distinction between qualitative duration and quantitative time is psychological introspection masquerading as metaphysics; and that the critique of spatialized time confuses the limits of one representation with the limits of all representation. Both charges misread the argument. Spatialized time is not metaphysically neutral. It is what intelligence produces by analogy with extended magnitude, and the analogy carries philosophical commitments — reversibility, homogeneity, the equivalence of past and future directions — that are not faithful to time as it is lived or, on Bergson's argument, to time as it actually is. The argument from experience is not introspectionism; it is the demonstration that what science abstracts from is real and that the abstraction does not exhaust what it leaves behind. Heisenberg, de Broglie, Prigogine, and a line of philosophically alert physicists have, across the twentieth century, found in Bergson a resource rather than an embarrassment.","era":"1859-1941","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Creative Mind","page":"pp. 171–172","canonical":"","quote":"But the truth is that there is neither a -175- rigid, immovable substratum nor distinct states passing over it like actors on a stage. There is simply the continuous melody of our inner life,--a melody which is going on and will go on, indivisible, from the beginning to the end of our conscious existence. Our personality is precisely that.","label":"The Creative Mind, pp. 171–172"},{"n":2,"work":"The Creative Mind","page":"pp. 306–307","canonical":"","quote":"Even then one must ask in certain cases, if the obstacles have not become surmountable thanks to the creative action which surmounted them: the action, unforeseeable in itself, would then have created the \"surmountability.\" Before it, the obstacles were insurmountable, and without it, they would have remained so.","label":"The Creative Mind, pp. 306–307"},{"n":3,"work":"Duration and Simultaneity","page":"p. 108","canonical":"","quote":"It is inevitable. Clear or confused, it was always the natural meta- Physic of the mind speculating upon becoming. We need not discuss it here, still less replace it by another. We have ex plained elsewhere why we see in duration the very stuff of our existence and of all things, and why, in our eyes, the universe is a continuity of creation.","label":"Duration and Simultaneity, p. 108"},{"n":4,"work":"Duration and Simultaneity","page":"p. 100","canonical":"","quote":"We once described the mechanism of this process; we have also shown how the difficulties raised by philosophers Over the question of motion vanish as soon as we perceive the relation of the instant to spatialized time, and that of spatial- 5 That the concept of the mathematical point is natural is well known to those who have taught geometry to children, Minds most refractory to the first elements imagine…","label":"Duration and Simultaneity, p. 100"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"intuition-as-philosophical-method","label":"Intuition as philosophical method: is intuition a precise method with strict rules, or the anti-intellectualism Russell called a heaving sea?"},{"slug":"matter-and-memory-metaphysics","label":"Matter and Memory metaphysics: do image, pure perception, and pure memory survive the dated nineteenth-century neuroscience that surrounded them?"},{"slug":"the-two-sources-the-closed-and-the-open-and-the-wartime-mean","label":"The Two Sources, the closed and the open, and the wartime Meaning of the War: is the closed/open distinction descriptive philosophy or religious apologetics, and what stands of the wartime rhetoric of life against mechanism?"}]}