Duration is a theory of time and consciousness laid down by the French philosopher Henri Bergson .
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Bergson's Theory
Bergson sought to eliminate the shortcomings that he saw in Herbert Spencer's philosophy, in connection with what he believed to be Spencer's lack of knowledge of mechanics , which led Bergson to the conclusion that time eludes mathematics and the natural sciences [1] . Bergson realized that the moment when a person was trying to measure time was over: a fixed, full line is measured, while time is moving and incomplete. In some cases, time may accelerate or slow down, while for science it will remain the same. Thus, Bergson decided to explore the inner world of man, which is a type of duration, neither unity nor quantitative multiplicity [1] . Duration is inexpressible and can only be displayed indirectly, through images that can never show the full picture. This can only be comprehended by intuition of the imagination [2] .
Bergson first introduced his concept of duration in his essay Time and Free Will: An Essay on Immediate Data of Consciousness . It was used as a defense of free will in response to Immanuel Kant , who believed that the foundation of free will lies only outside time and space [3] .
Answers to Kant and Zeno
Zeno of Elea believed that reality is an uncreated and motionless whole [4] . He formulated four paradoxes to present mobility as impossible. According to him, we can never go through one point, because each point is infinitely divisible and it is impossible to go through infinite space [5] . But for Bergson, a problem arises only when mobility and time, that is, duration, are taken as the spatial line that underlies them. Time and mobility are mistakenly regarded as things, not progressions. They are considered in retrospect, as the spatial trajectory of things, which can be divided indefinitely, while they, in fact, are a single whole [6] .
Bergson's answer to Kant is that free will is possible for a period during which a person lives. Free will is actually not a problem, but only a general confusion among philosophers caused by the motionless time of science [7] . To measure duration, it must be translated into a fixed, spatial time of science, transferred from non-extended to extended. It is because of this translation that the problem of free will arises. Since the space is homogeneous, quantitatively multiple, the duration is compared and converted into a sequence of separate parts, one goes after another, and therefore "act" on each other. Nothing in duration can cause anything in it. Thus, determinism , the belief that everything is determined before the cause, is impossible. You need to take time as it is by placing yourself over a period where freedom can be defined and perceived as pure mobility [8] .
Duration Images
In Introduction to Metaphysics , Bergson presents three duration images. The first has two coils: one unfolding to represent a continuous stream of aging, feeling close to the end of a lifespan, the other folding to show a continuous increase in memory, which, according to Bergson, equals consciousness. A person without memory can have two identical moments, but, says Bergson, realizing that a person will thus be in a state of death and rebirth, which he identifies with loss of consciousness [9] . The image of the two coils, despite the fact that they are of a uniform and proportional thread, while Bergson believed that no two points can be the same, so the duration is heterogeneous.
Bergson then provided an image of the spectrum of a thousand gradually changing shades with a line that runs through them, being influenced and supporting each shade. But even this image is inaccurate and incomplete, because it represents the duration in the form of a fixed and full spectrum of all shades juxtaposed in space, while the duration is incomplete and constantly growing, its state is not the beginning and not the end, but something mixed [9] [10] .
| Instead, let's imagine an infinite small piece of elastic, contracting, if possible, to a mathematical point. Let's do it gradually, so as to identify the points of the line, which will gradually grow larger. Let's focus our attention on the line, not as a line, but as the action that it tracks. Let us assume that this action, despite its duration, is indivisible, assuming that it goes on non-stop; that if we add a stop to it, we will get two actions instead of one, and that each of these actions will then be indivisible, as we said; that this, in itself, is not a moving act that is never shared, but a fixed line with which it lies in space, like a path in space. Let’s move our mind from the space that pulls together the movement and focus exclusively on the movement itself, on the act of tension or expansion, in general, on pure mobility. This time we will have a more accurate image of our development on time. |
Even this image is incomplete, because, when referenced to it, they forget about the richness of colors [9] . But, as the three images show, it can be formulated that the duration is of high quality, not widespread, somewhat uniform, mobile and constantly penetrates itself. However, the concepts posed side by side cannot adequately represent the duration.
| In fact, we are changing without ceasing ... there is no significant difference between the transition from one state to another and maintaining in the same state. If a state that "remains unchanged" is more diverse than we think, then on the other hand, the transition from one state to another resembles more than we imagined - a single state is prolonged: the transition is continuous. Just because we close our eyes to the continuous change in each physical state, we are forced, when the changes have become so formidable as to attract our attention, to speak as if a new state would be placed next to the previous ones. We believe that this new state, in turn, remains unchanged and so on ad infinitum [11] . |
Because the qualitative multiplicity is heterogeneous and penetrating itself, it cannot be adequately represented by a symbol, and for Bergson, the qualitative multiplicity is inexpressible. Thus, in order to understand the duration, you need to move away from the usual ways of thinking and set yourself up for the duration with the help of intuition [2] .
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics , pages 11 to 14.
- ↑ 1 2 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics , pages 165 to 168.
- ↑ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Time and Free Will has to be seen as an attack on Kant, for whom freedom belongs to a realm outside of space and time.
- ↑ Parmenides, On Nature .
- ↑ Aristotle, Physics , VI: 9, 239b10.
- ↑ Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory , pages 191 to 192.
- ↑ Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness , Author's Preface.
- ↑ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy For Bergson - and perhaps this is his greatest insight - freedom is mobility.
- ↑ 1 2 3 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics , pages 164 to 165.
- ↑ Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics , page 163: Strictly speaking they do not constitute multiple states until I have already got beyond them, and turn around to observe their trail. [...] In reality, none of them begins or ends; they all dovetail into one another.
- ↑ Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1911) tr. Arthur Mitchell, Henry Holt and Company