Background and Key Concepts

Bergson’s philosophy forms an organic whole rather than a strict conceptual framework; therefore, all aspects of his doctrine, especially memory, intuition, and the self, are informed by duration and in turn bring about a fresh understanding of duration itself. ¹ Bergson’s idea of duration, ‘durée’ – introduced in Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889), translated as Time and Free Will (1910) – underpins his philosophy. In this work, he argues that many philosophers confuse time with its spatial representation. Milič Čapek points out that Bergson’s philosophy had to ‘contend with a strong tradition of regarding space not only as a reality among other realities, but as the most real of all’. This tradition of ‘attributing a privileged ontological status to space tended towards the divinisation of space’ and found a modern form, as ‘space-mysticism or aether mysticism, even as late as 1925 among serious physicists like Oliver Lodge’. ² A spatial representation presents time as an unbounded line that can be subdivided into separate units, each identical to the other. Just as material objects occupy positions in space, events are conceived of as superimposed upon the already existing medium of time. Such a conception is useful in that it enables one to measure the passage of time and to determine the order of events. However, Bergson argues that this analogy leads us to conceive time erroneously. Unlike space, time unfolds; it is un-extended, mobile, in perpetual becoming, in contrast to space which is already extant. Bergson claims that the concept of time eludes mathematics and science. He argues that since time is mobile, the instant one attempts to measure a moment, it is gone. What one measures is an immobile, complete line, whereas time is mobile and always incomplete. No two moments are identical, for the one will always contain the memory the other has left it. Therefore, a person can only experience two identical moments if she has no memory. ³ In order to differentiate between the spatial representation of time and time itself, Bergson uses the term ‘durée’, that is ‘duration’. The term ‘time’ in conventional usage is inextricably intertwined with its spatialised conception as used in classical physics. Bergson’s new term is therefore useful in making the distinction clearer.