Bergson on time and duration

Duration is the most important aspect of time for Bergson. Duration implies that everything must always be in a constant process of change. For example, human history, culture and consciousness arise from experienced duration. Duration is linked with emotions, as well as consciousness and history, and it is only through emotions that we can experience any sense of time. Time itself should not be broken down into parts, for Bergson. It is constantly flowing, without pause or break, and this is how we should experience time. But for humans to be productive in any sense, time must be broken down. For if time is not split down into comprehendible parts, we would never know how long something lasted, or how much time we had before the next event starts. This is how humans must live and deal with time in everyday life. This is what Bergson describes as spatial time. There are ethical issues surrounding this for Bergson. For if time is linked with consciousness, and time can be broken down, so can ones consciousness, meaning it could easily be manipulated and distorted.

Bergson hates the idea that time is broken down. He says that quantitative time is only used to manipulate and measure the world. Each unit of time used by humans, be it seconds or years, are without links to the past or future, for to split time down into these subunits it to ignore the real essence of time, that which is indivisible and linked to all past history and all future possibilities.

While Bergson’s ideas about duration and time seem at first glance to be very true, but also impractical. If humans are not able to split down and measure time, society would not function. Since the beginning of intelligent civilizations, time has always been measured, even if only by the rising and setting of the sun, and the changes in the seasons, time has been measured and split down into usable and useful parts.

John Marley N0216498