Oct 10, 2021 04:15 AM
https://bigthink.com/thinking/henri-bergson-time/
EXCERPTS: . . . For the late French philosopher Henri Bergson, there was a huge difference between this abstracted “clock time” and the everyday psychology of how we actually feel time pass.
Strictly speaking, all the units of time we use involve space and movement. [...] But this is not what it’s like to feel time. We are not stop-motion clay animations.
So, instead of “time,” Bergson preferred another word: duration.
For scientists, time is typically seen as a series of still images we skip between, like a vintage slide show. But Bergson described “duration” as a seamless stream or flow. It’s all about the passage of time: a “succession without absolute distinction.” There is an imperceptible passing between the past and the now. Our consciousness streams forever forward without stuttering between time units, no matter how infinitesimally small we divide them. The past bleeds into the present and we can’t tell one from the other.
[...] having two different frameworks for time causes confusion, or at least misrepresents what most of us experience every day. When we flip between the two, or if we spend too much time treating time as discrete scientific units, it can feel disorientating and surreal — an artificial description of a natural phenomenon. More than this, Bergson argued that even within certain scientific disciplines, this “clock time” presents a misrepresentation of the fact...
[...] Bergson was hugely popular in his day. He also really annoyed a lot of people. ... Both philosophers and scientists hated how Bergson relied on intuition to argue his case, and how brazenly irrational his project was — a philosopher who cared more about experience than reality. Bergson himself was rather dwarfed by what came later in Heidegger’s version of phenomenology and French Existentialism, but both owe a lot to Bergson.
Bergson was one of the leading lights that pushed philosophy further inside of our minds. He gave credence to introspection and subjectivity. When Bergson put his hands up to say, “Hang on, everyone, that’s really not how time works for me,” he was starting a kind of introspective and experiential philosophy that’s become very popular today... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: . . . For the late French philosopher Henri Bergson, there was a huge difference between this abstracted “clock time” and the everyday psychology of how we actually feel time pass.
Strictly speaking, all the units of time we use involve space and movement. [...] But this is not what it’s like to feel time. We are not stop-motion clay animations.
So, instead of “time,” Bergson preferred another word: duration.
For scientists, time is typically seen as a series of still images we skip between, like a vintage slide show. But Bergson described “duration” as a seamless stream or flow. It’s all about the passage of time: a “succession without absolute distinction.” There is an imperceptible passing between the past and the now. Our consciousness streams forever forward without stuttering between time units, no matter how infinitesimally small we divide them. The past bleeds into the present and we can’t tell one from the other.
[...] having two different frameworks for time causes confusion, or at least misrepresents what most of us experience every day. When we flip between the two, or if we spend too much time treating time as discrete scientific units, it can feel disorientating and surreal — an artificial description of a natural phenomenon. More than this, Bergson argued that even within certain scientific disciplines, this “clock time” presents a misrepresentation of the fact...
[...] Bergson was hugely popular in his day. He also really annoyed a lot of people. ... Both philosophers and scientists hated how Bergson relied on intuition to argue his case, and how brazenly irrational his project was — a philosopher who cared more about experience than reality. Bergson himself was rather dwarfed by what came later in Heidegger’s version of phenomenology and French Existentialism, but both owe a lot to Bergson.
Bergson was one of the leading lights that pushed philosophy further inside of our minds. He gave credence to introspection and subjectivity. When Bergson put his hands up to say, “Hang on, everyone, that’s really not how time works for me,” he was starting a kind of introspective and experiential philosophy that’s become very popular today... (MORE - missing details)