One of Henri Bergson's most prominent discussions focuses on time, how it is quantified and thus, how the creativity and richness of human experience can be diminished.
Life is creative and progressive for Bergson. The concept of vitalism drives life, not merely biological determinism. The rise of industrial society implemented the proliferation of numeric arrangements. Such hyper organisation began voiding the world of human value.
Fragmentation of time on quantitative criteria threatens to mechanise society. For Bergson, time is qualitative, and must be so, for diversity of life to occur. The spatial division of time undermines the constant flow of life.
Separating time and space imposes a linear sequence to experience. Difference of experience becomes systematically categorised, thus mechanising life. The artificial practice of quantification, long implemented over time, conditions us to subconsciously separate our own experiences, distorting natural duration.
Bergson details the social distortion of time by distinguishing between spacial and real time. Spacial time incorporates the mechanisation of life through quantitative organisational structures, while real time is indivisible, a qualitative intensity that reflects conscious flow. The social segmentation of this conscious flow, known as 'la duree', potentially leads to control of life through quantitative restrictions.
Existence cannot be pre determined through extensive legislation based on quantification. Each event if completely new for Bergson. The dogmatic nature of organised religion perhaps opposes the newness of time Bergson discusses. Subscribing to an unknown deity implies predetermination of life, focused on finality in the world. The future would be known, time's creativity would be completely redundant.
The vitalism present in all life transcends such mechanistic ideology. Bergson promotes an understanding based on observing life in terms of it's transitive nature. The creativity resident in all life is realised in such varying degrees of intensity.
Sean Jones N0204187
Thank you Sean, good work. Interesting point taking up the ‘industrial’ aspect of Bergson. He is I think in this sense strangely placed in relation to modern, and more recently, modernist philosophy. While many of the modernists embraced and celebrated quantification and segmentation, take a look at examples of Blast magazine, this is something that is wholly resisted by Bergson. Vitality and ‘wholeness,’ or at least wholeness in the sense of connected becoming, resists this constantly. I think in many ways Picasso’s Guernica represents the nth degree of the logic of segmentation, which amounts to now the mechanized dismemberment of the town, its lifeworld, and its denizens. Bergson, who predated all of this, thus does in some way represent the romantic resistance to modern European industrialization, and its symptomatic social effects. One small thing is that you got slightly mixed up on a point. The duree is synonymous with qualitative and heterogeneous time. While the duration is a term which instinctually states that that something ‘endures’ and thus lasts over a space of time, I think the point for Bergson is that duration refers to the remaining of absolute reality, reality itself while always becoming ‘remains’ in so far it is indivisible perpetual becoming.
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