Bergson, Henri (1859–1941)

The philosopher Henri Bergson was born in Paris and studied at the École Normale Supérieure. Following graduation he taught philosophy at various lycées (secondary schools) in Provence, after which he taught at the Collège de France. He received his doctoral degree in philosophy in 1889 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1928. His background in psychology is most easily recognizable in his early writings. Over his long career, he developed ever more into a metaphysician. Key among his ideas is the distinction between the mechanized clock time of scientific thinking and the way time is actually experienced.

The experiencing of time as a quantity, as a countable element of a time continuum, differs for Bergson at a basic level from the qualitative experiencing of a duration. The duration is something pure and is not expressed in quantities. It is equivalent to the immediate experience of totality. A melody or a symphony is to be experienced only as a whole. Its wholeness possesses an immediacy that cannot be broken up into its elements without losing its qualitative characteristics. Its temporal [Page 83]extension is pure duration. According to Bergson, the completely pure duration is the form that the succession of our perceptual processes assumes as our “I” yields itself to life, when it refuses to separate the present and past states. The tones of the melody fuse together, its different parts infusing each other simultaneously. Furthermore, if a melody is deconstructed into its components, then time, the medium in which one counts and differentiates, is nothing more than space.

According to French philosopher Henri Bergson, real time cannot be analyzed mathematically, and to measure time is to try to create a break or disruption in time

Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain-38388.

The pure duration is fundamentally different from countable time. To Bergson, it was impossible to construct a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative elements. The experience of a duration is the experiencing of a quality that is immeasurable. Pure duration is an indistinguishable, qualitative manifold, which is in no way similar to numbers. It is a mistake on the part of the natural sciences not to carefully separate qualitative and quantitative characteristics. The uniformly flowing time of the natural sciences is a physical-astronomical construction. This time is seen as a line whose points represent successive moments. Admittedly, time may be mathematically expressed in such a way, but this is not really time itself. Real time is the immediately experienced time, and this is duration (durée). In the analysis of the experiencing of space, psychologists have stopped studying space in exchange for our perceptions, through which we achieve meaning or understanding of the concept of space. Perceptions have a qualitative character because they are not themselves extended, but their synthesis causes extension. Space is created out of mental activity, which, with one stroke, contains the different perceptions and also orders them next to each other. In this respect, space is that which allows us to differentiate multiple identical and simultaneous perceptions from one another. Humans are able to conceive of space without quality. Thus, two different realities exist for humans: the reality of sense qualities, which is heterogeneous, and the reality of space, which is homogeneous. The reality of space allows us to implement exact differentiations, to count and to abstract.

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