ABSTRACT
Duration, which concerns time as it passes, is the central concept of Bergson’s philosophy, even as it poses a challenge to philosophy. It cannot be elaborated discursively or abstractly, Bergson maintains; it can only be known through intuition. It is necessarily what Bergson calls a fluid concept. Starting with the initial introduction of this term in Time and Free Will (where it pertains to individual consciousness and immediate experience), the chapter traces how duration becomes “immanent to the whole of the universe” in Creative Evolution, and, in Duration and Simultaneity, “the very stuff of our existence and of all things.” Finally, the chapter briefly situates duration (and the shifts in Bergson’s treatment of it) in relation to the contemporaneous scientific work of James Clerk Maxwell, who investigated matter in terms of energy, and proposes that Bergson’s way of thinking finds a future in Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of ontogenesis.
