Duration (durée)
Real time is the continuous flow of interpenetrating states of consciousness, indivisible, unrepeatable, ever creative. Clock time is time spatialised.
The Nineteenth Century · 1859 – 1941
Henri Bergson
柏格森 · Henri-Louis Bergson
Duration, intuition and the élan vital: time is not the space on a clock face but an indivisible flow, which intellect chops up and only intuition can enter. He was the most famous philosopher of the early twentieth century.
Philosophy of LifeBirthplace: Paris
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
Source: Creative Evolution, ch. 1
Bergson was born in Paris to a Polish-Jewish musician and an English mother. At the Lycée Condorcet he won prizes in both mathematics and literature and chose literature, entering the École Normale Supérieure in 1878 alongside Jaurès and Durkheim. He taught in lycées for over a decade; studying Spencer's evolutionism while teaching at Clermont-Ferrand, he noticed that the time of science does not flow, and from this came his first insight.
His doctoral thesis of 1889, Time and Free Will, distinguished two kinds of multiplicity: the quantitative multiplicity of things side by side in space and the qualitative multiplicity of states that interpenetrate in consciousness. Real time is the latter, which he called duration, an indivisible continuous creation in which each moment contains the whole past. The problem of free will seems insoluble only because determinists mistake duration for a trajectory in space. Matter and Memory (1896) argued that memory is not stored in the brain, which is merely an organ of action; the past survives whole and is recalled as needed.
In 1900 he became professor at the Collège de France, where his lectures were packed with fashionable society; people came an hour early for seats, and students complained that ladies' hats blocked the view. Creative Evolution (1907) extended duration to life: evolution is neither mechanical adaptation nor predetermined purpose but an élan vital, a vital impulse pushing through matter and branching into ever new forms. Intellect evolved as a tool for handling matter and therefore cannot grasp life; only intuition coincides with life from within. The book made him world-famous, and in 1927 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
During the First World War he went on missions to America and helped persuade Wilson to enter the war; afterwards he chaired the League of Nations' committee on intellectual cooperation. He was Einstein's adversary: in their Paris debate on time in 1922 the public judged that Einstein had won. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) distinguished closed from open societies and static from dynamic religion, with the mystic as the source of open morality. Late in life he drew near to Catholicism but refused baptism, wishing to stand with the Jews who were about to be persecuted. He died in occupied Paris in January 1941, reportedly of a chill caught while queuing to register as a Jew.
Key Ideas
Intuition and intellect
Intellect evolved for handling solids: it divides, fixes and spatialises. Intuition is sympathy that coincides with its object from within. Metaphysics is the science of intuition.
The élan vital
Evolution is an original impulse driving through matter, branching and creating unforeseeable new forms. It is neither mechanism nor teleology.
Memory and the body
The brain does not store memory but filters it, admitting to consciousness what serves present action. The past survives in its entirety.
Open and closed society
The closed society holds together by obligation and static religion; the open society is opened toward all humanity by the call of mystics and heroes.
Influenced by
- Plotinus
He lectured on Plotinus for a whole year at the Collège de France, comparing the creative élan vital with the overflowing One.
- Immanuel Kant
He rejected Kant's treatment of time as a form of intuition on a par with space: real time is duration, which can be neither spatialised nor cut up by concepts.
- Baruch Spinoza
- William James
Their correspondence ran ten years; James called Creative Evolution 'a marvel', and Bergson said James's stream of consciousness and his own duration were the same discovery.
- Heraclitus
Influenced
- William James
Mutual admirers: he said reading Bergson was like 'opening a window', and the stream of consciousness and durée were one intuition.
- Alfred North Whitehead
He acknowledged the kinship of Bergson's duration with his own process, but rejected Bergson's disparagement of intellect.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Emmanuel Levinas
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
- Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Gilles Deleuze
When Bergson was out of fashion he wrote Bergsonism, and duration, multiplicity and the virtual became the central tools of his philosophy of difference.