ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how understanding time, using intuition and imagination, can help us face into climate change and how a perennial philosophical problem – the distinction between spiritual and material explanations about ‘being in the world’ – entangles how people navigate time. Henri Bergson taught philosophy in Clermont-Ferrand, France, where, in 1889, he completed Time and Free Will, winning his doctorate. In this work, he questions Kant’s idea that causality ‘belongs to God,’ who lives outside of time. Bergson suggests our immediate, inner experience is of duration, the flow of felt time, in which there is no sequencing of events. Time perception depends on our perceptual apparatus. In humans, this is complex, involving several overlapping neural networks. Kant argued cause and effect are in the ‘world-as-it-appears-to-us’, and so are in space and time. They are concepts, not ‘things-in-themselves;’ and they are ‘concepts’ people impose on sense data, rather than features of the real world.
