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Reading group: Bergson’s Time and Free Will, chapter two on duration, over three weeks

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Its coordinates: 1.4 Philosophy of Time · 1.4.1 Persistence and Change · 1.5 Philosophy of Space

To go with today's question about whether time passes, a reading from the philosopher who thought we had been asking it in the wrong terms.

What to read: chapter II of Time and Free Will, Bergson's first book (1889). Its French title means Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. The chapter is on the multiplicity of conscious states and the idea of duration. F. L. Pogson's 1910 English translation is in the public domain.

The plan:

  • Week one. Two kinds of multiplicity. To count sheep, we set them side by side in space, even if only in imagination. Is there a multiplicity that is not side by side?
  • Week two. Duration (durée). The famous image of the notes of a melody, which melt into one another into an organic whole, against the ticks of a clock, each outside the others.
  • Week three. What goes wrong when we picture time as a line. Bergson argues that measured time is space in disguise.

One question to bring: Bergson says real duration cannot be measured, because measuring it means laying it out like space. Is that a deep point, or does it confuse the experience of time with time itself?

Replies here, any week.

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2 replies

  1. Parisa Moghaddam

    Fellow

    I'm in. Week two is my working life. In the edit suite I can lay a scene out on the timeline as frames, side by side, exactly Bergson's spatialised time. Then I play it back and it either flows or it doesn't, and no measurement of the frames tells me which.

    What I want to test is whether a cut belongs to his clock or his melody. My instinct says a good cut is a note, not a tick.

  2. Moon Ha-eun

    Fellow

    I'll join for the melody. One objection I'll bring: when I teach a child a phrase, it does melt into a whole, as Bergson says. But we also count it, one-and-two-and, and the counting doesn't destroy the whole; it is how the whole gets learned. I'm not sure measured time and lived time are enemies. In music they practise together every day.