Bergson, Time and Free Will, Chapter 2, §68 "But What We Call Measuring Time is Nothing but Counting Simultaneities. The Clock..."

by Corry Shores
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Bergson, Time and Free Will

Chapter II, "The Multiplicity of Conscious States," "The Idea of Duration"

Part XXI: Is Duration Measurable?

§68 "But What We Call Measuring Time is Nothing but Counting Simultaneities. The Clock Taken as an Illustration"

Bergson will illustrate why we cannot measure duration.

We look at a pendulum clock. We see both the pendulum swinging back-and-forth, and the second-hand running circularly around the dial. (107-108) At no point is the pendulum or second hand in more than one place at a time. But we count the simulteneities to gauge the amount of passing time.

We firstly experience within us pure duration. Here, our conscious states interpenetrate and organize into qualitative wholes. But we endure through these changes. So we imagine what seems to be the pendulum's past oscillations while at the same time experiencing the present oscillations. (108b)

But let's take our attention away from the ego experiencing these moments. Really in our pure mental states there is never more than one pendulum-oscillation at a time. For it is never in more than one place at a given moment. Our mind-states are always in the present. Hence they perceive no duration.

Consider instead that we take our attention away from our consciousness of the pendulum. Instead we focus on the ego's experiences. We find that what is left is nothing more than a pure qualitatively-varying duration. This is the ego's heterogeneous duration. None of its moments are exterior to another. None relate to number in any way.

So within our ego, moments succeed one another, but they permeate each other and are never simultaneous. But in the pure space outside our ego, there is only the existence of the present pendulum-swing. The previous ones do not exist. There is a radical distinction between what exists and what does not exist. Hence there is a radical distinction between this pendulum swing and the last one. So the succession of moments outside our ego are mutually external to each other. But if the past moment no longer exists, then we cannot say that one pendulum-swing temporally relates to another. For that other swing has disappeared from space. In order for there to be a succession of moments, there needs to be an observer who maintains the image of the previous moments. Then he must symbolize them, and place these symbols side-by-side in "auxiliary space." (108-109) This of course requires an ego. Hence there is really no succession in the spatial world outside the ego.

Thus:

1) within the ego, there is succession without mutual externality, but

2) outside the ego, there is mutual externality without succession. (108cd)

We know that the successive phases of our mental life interpenetrate. However, each individual phase corresponds to a different swing of the pendulum. Because each swing is radically different from the rest, we may sharply distinguish each of them. But then there will be a sharply distinct pendulum-swing that corresponds to a phase of our mental life that is not sharply distinct from the other phases. We then develop the habit of marking distinctions in our conscious life by means of their correspondences to external objects. In this way, the pendulum's oscillation breaks our interpenetrating mental states into parts that are external to each other. (109b) Each moment is absolutely unique and follows the next in a succession. This gives us the erroneous idea of a homogeneous inner duration that is similar to space.

Now, out in space, each pendulum-swing disappears. This makes each one radically distinct from the others. But because they become erased, space cannot have temporality. But, our consciousness preserves the past swings in its memory, and then places them along a line of ideal space. In this way, our minds create "a fourth dimension of space, which we call homogeneous time." The pendulum's swings occur in one place. But this fourth spatial dimension allows them to be continually juxtaposed to one another. (109-110)

So when we wrongly spatialize duration to quantify it,

1) our mental life obtains spatiality so to juxtapose moments, and

2) exterior space obtains temporality as a result of it being used to gauge duration.

When fluids pass through a porous membrane to join with other fluids, physicists call this endosmosis. Space passes through to duration to create time. So Bergson characterizes this movement as an endosmosis of sorts. (109a)

Bergson will now clarify the roles that the real and the imaginary play in this process.

1) Real space exists. It lacks duration. In it phenomena appear and disappear. Their appearances and disappearances are simultaneous with our mental states.

2) Real duration exists. It is the inter-permeation of our mind's heterogeneous moments.

3) Yet, each conscious moment may be related to a contemporaneous state in the exterior world. In this way, one moment of consciousness may be separated from the rest.

4) This produces a comparison between duration's reality and space's reality. [One state in space indexes a moment of consciousness.] In this way, duration becomes symbolically represented.

5) Space is a homogeneous medium. And states in space now index moments of mental life. By this means, duration takes on the "illusory form" of a homogeneous medium.

6) This whole process depends on there being a connecting link between space and duration. This link would be the intersection of space and time. Simultaneity is that link. (110bc)

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Images from the pages summarized above, in the English Translation [click on the image for an enlargement]:

Images from the pages summarized above, in the original French [click on the image for an enlargement]:

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Transl. F. L. Pogson, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2001).

Available online at:

http://www.archive.org/details/timeandfreewill00pogsgoog

French text from:

Bergson, Henri. Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Originally published Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1888.

Available online at:

http://www.archive.org/details/essaisurlesdonn00berguoft