Friday, June 09, 2006

On Henri Bergson, movement and time

"The line one measures is immobile, time is mobility. The line is made, it is complete; time is what is happening, and more than that, it is what causes everything to happen. The measuring of time never deals with duration as duration; what is counted is only a certain number of extremities of intervals, or moments, in short, virtual halts in time."
Science (geometry, mathematics, physics) cannot be concerned with the interval, and even when dealing with a passing time, it has to treat it as if it had already passed. This happens because its task is to extract from the material world that which can be repeated and calculated, and therefore which is not in a state of flow. Duration is what one can only feel, a continuity which is never unity nor multiplicity but whose "continuous phases penetrate one another", intensively differentiated by "the uninterrupted up-surge of novelty". A movement that is change in itself. "Let us say then, that in duration, considered as a creative evolution, there is perpetual creation of possibility, and not only of reality."

Change is indivisible into different states, which can only be distinguished scientifically.

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