ABSTRACT
The philosophical core of the book, this chapter introduces process philosophy. Through an examination of the irreversible reality of subjectivity, Bergson’s famous notion of the durée reélle and Whitehead’s critique of the bifurcation of subject and object are introduced. The causally closed ‘time’ of positive science determines existence from the beginning to the end of the universe, be it 3 seconds or 3 trillion years. But the reality, of course, is that the future does not exist: our choices are real, and only one of myriad potential futures comes into being at each moment. As Bergson insists, durational succession exists, I am conscious of it; it is a fact. Bergson’s star – once the brightest of any living philosopher in the world – faded almost as quickly as it rose, under the onslaught from the logical positivists whose verificationism insisted that any proposition has no factual meaning if no evidence of observation can count for or against it: all ethics, aesthetics, romance, and metaphysics – and the very subjectivity with which duration is experienced – were thus closed down and dismissed. In this chapter it is reintroduced to a new audience.
