FILAMER CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY

Graduate School
AUTONOMOUS STATUS – CHED
Roxas Avenue, Roxas City 5800

HENRI BERGSON
Duration and Simultaneity

“Past, Present and Future do not exist separately, as independent

realities, but they are a single undivided entity, closely
interwoven, and influence each other continuously”

(Ed. D 601 Philosophy of Education and Man)

ZENDA MARIE F. SABINAY LANIE MAY T. BERINGUELA

Ed.D SE Student/Discussant Ed.D SE Student/Discussant

JONATHAN P. LEAL, PH.D.

Professor
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Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was one of the most famous and

influential French philosophers of the late 19th century-
early 20th century.
Life and works
 Bergson was born in Paris on October 18, 1859; he was
the second of seven children of a Polish Father and
English mother; both of his parents were Jewish. Bergson
was a notably exceptional pupil throughout his
childhood. Like his German contemporary, Edmund
Husserl, Bergson's original training was in mathematics.
Bergson won the first prize in mathematics for the
prestigious “Concours Général,” which led to the publication of his solution to a problem
by Pascal in 1877. Bergson nevertheless chose to prepare for the École Normale in the
letters and humanities section. His math teacher, disappointed, famously claimed, “you
could have been a mathematician; you will be a mere philosopher” .
 His first scholarly publication was in 1886, in the Revue Philosophique; “On Unconscious
Simulation in States of Hypnosis” concerns the results of his observations at sessions of
hypnosis.
 In 1888, Bergson submitted two doctoral theses in Paris: Essai sur les données immédiates
de la conscience, published as a book (Time and Free Will) in 1889; and the then required
Latin thesis, Quid Aristoteles de loco senserit (Aristotle's Conception of Place).
 Bergson's second book, Matter and Memory, appeared in 1896. This book led to Bergson's
election to the Collège de France.
 Creative Evolution appeared in 1907 and was not only the source of the “Bergson legend,”
as well as of numerous, lively academic and public controversies centering on his
philosophy and his role as an intellectual.
 Bergson published his reflections on Einstein as Duration and Simultaneity (see Mélanges,
1972).
 In 1928, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

 Finally, in 1932, he surprised everyone with the publication of his last major book, The
Two Sources of Morality and Religion, which gave rise to renewed debates and
misunderstandings about his philosophy and his religious orientation. The final collection
of his essays, The Creative Mind, appeared in 1934.
 During the second half of the Twenties, Bergson suffered from severe arthritis, which
eventually forced him to retire from public life.
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 Bergson died on January 3, 1941 at the age of 81. World War II had of course already
begun, and Germany, occupying France, had established the Vichy government. There is
a rumor that he had converted to Catholicism near the end of his life, but there is no
document to support this rumor.
 Bergson had instructed that all of his papers be destroyed. The story goes that his wife obeyed
this order, throwing all of her husband's papers into the fireplace.

 The lack of archival material is one reason why Bergson went out of favor during the second half
of the Twentieth Century.

➢ Henri Bergson’s famous published books

 Bergson believed that the processes of immediate experience and intuition are more
significant that abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.
 Bergson wrote about four specific branches of philosophy:
Creativity. His philosophy emphasizes pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity,
and freedom.
Duration. Bergson became aware that the moment one attempted to measure a moment,
it would be gone; one can measure an immobile, complete line, but time is mobile and
incomplete.
Intuition. dynamic process of thought which penetrated the static limitation of logic.
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Laughter. In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate and

consequently to correct our neighbor.
 Bergson Philosophies are similar to existentialism because he believes in vitalism. Vitalism
is a philosophy that life is controlled by its own laws and not those of Physics and
Chemistry.
 Bergson believe that science cannot b used to explain all events or predict future because
individuals have intuition that science doesn't.
 Bergson claimed that when we suppress our “élan vital” and manage our lives with logic,
“we act in rigid, mechanical ways, treating new experiences merely as repetitions of
previous ones.”

This Philosopher Helped Ensure There Was No Nobel for Relativity

Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein reached and swayed the 1921 Nobel committee.

On April 6, 1922, Einstein met a man he would never

forget. He was one of the most celebrated philosophers of the
century, widely known for espousing a theory of time that
explained what clocks did not: memories, premonitions,
expectations and anticipations. Thanks to him, we now know
that to act on the future one needs to start by changing the
past.
The “dialogue between the greatest philosopher and
the greatest physicist of the 20th century” was dutifully
written down. It was a script fit for the theater. The meeting,
and the words they uttered, would be discussed for the rest of
the century.
There, Bergson participated in a debate
with Einstein, which, according to Merleau-
Ponty, seems to testify to a “crisis of
reason.” Bergson published his reflections on
Einstein as Duration and Simultaneity.
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Duration and Simultaneity

 In order to define consciousness and therefore freedom,

Bergson proposes to differentiate between time and
space, “to un-mix” them. On the other hand, through the
differentiation, he defines the immediate data of
consciousness as being temporal, in other words, as the
duration (la durée). In the duration, there is no
juxtaposition of events; therefore there is no
mechanistic causality. It is in the duration that we can
speak of the experience of freedom.
 For Bergson, we must understand the duration as a
qualitative multiplicity . Qualitative multiplicities are
temporal. For example, the feeling of sympathy, a moral
feeling. Our experience of sympathy begins, according to
Bergson, with our putting ourselves in the place of
others, feeling their pain.

 But, if this were all, the feeling would inspire in us abhorrence of others, and we would
want to avoid them, not help them. Bergson concedes that the feeling of horror may be at
the root of sympathy. But then, we realize that if we do not help this poor wretch, it is
going to turn out that, when we need help, no one will come to our aide. There is a “need”
to help the suffering. For Bergson, these two phases are “inferior forms of pity.”

 In his “Introduction to Metaphysics,” Bergson gives us three images to help us think about
the duration and therefore qualitative multiplicities (The Creative Mind, pp. 164–65).

 The first is that of two spools, with a tape running

between them, one spool unwinding the tape, the
other winding it up. Duration resembles this image,
according to Bergson, because, as we grow older, our
future grows smaller and our past larger. The benefit
of this image is that it presents a continuity of
experiences without juxtaposition. Duration, for
Bergson, is continuity of progress and heterogeneity;
moreover, we can also see that duration implies a
conservation of the past. Indeed, for Bergson and this
is the center of his truly novel idea of memory, memory conserves the past and this
conservation does not imply that one experiences the same (re-cognition), but difference.
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One moment is added onto the old ones, and thus, when the next moment occurs, it is
added onto all the other old ones plus the one that came immediately before. In
comparison, therefore to the past collection of moments, it cannot be the same as the one
immediately before, because the past is “larger” for the current moment than it was for
the previous moment.

 Although Bergson does not say this, one might say that Tuesday is different from Monday
because Monday only includes itself and Sunday, while Tuesday includes itself, Monday,
and Sunday. This first image, therefore, implies that duration is memory: the
prolongation of the past into the present.
 The second image of qualitative
multiplicity is the color spectrum. We
saw in the first image of the spools that
there is constant difference or
heterogeneity. The color spectrum
helps us understand this, since a color
spectrum has a multiplicity of different shades or nuances of color. Here we have
heterogeneity, yet even this image is inaccurate and incomplete, for it represents duration
as a fixed and complete spectrum with all the shades spatially juxtaposed, whereas
duration is incomplete and continuously growing, its states not beginning or ending but
intermingling .
 Bergson's third image is an elastic band being stretched.
Bergson tells us first to contract the band to a mathematical
point, which represents “the now” of our experience. Then,
draw it out to make a line growing progressively longer. He
warns us not to focus on the line but on the action which
traces it. If we can focus on the action of tracing, then we
can see that the movement — which is duration — is not only
continuous and differentiating or heterogeneous, but also
indivisible. For Bergson, there is always a priority of
movement over the things that move; the thing that moves
is an abstraction from the movement. Now, the elastic band being stretched is a more
exact image of duration. But, the image of the elastic is still, according to Bergson,
incomplete. Why ? Because, for him, no image can represent duration. An image is
immobile, while duration is “pure mobility” (The Creative Mind, p. 165).
 In “Introduction to Metaphysics,” Bergson compares all three images: “the unrolling of our
duration [the spool] in certain aspects resembles the unity of a movement which
progresses [the elastic], in others, a multiplicity of states spreading out [the color-
spectrum].” Now we can see that duration really consists in two characteristics: unity and
multiplicity.
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Simultaneity

 The property of two event happening at the same time. We perceive the world in terms
of simultaneous intersection of past and present experience.
 Bergson searched for a more basic definition of simultaneity, one that would not stop at
the watch but that would explain why clocks were used in the first place. He agreed that
clocks helped note simultaneities, but he did not think that our understanding of time
could be based solely on them. “When our eyes follow on the face of a clock, the
movement of the needle that corresponds to the oscillations of the pendulum, I do not
measure duration, as one would think; I simply count simultaneities, which is quite
different.” Something different, something novel, something important, something
outside of the watch itself needed to be included in our understanding of time. Only that
could explain why we attributed to clocks such power: Why we bought them, why we
used them, and why we invented them in the first place.

 Simultaneity, then, is grounded on the third flow of a consciousness that apprehends

other flows in one flowing act of awareness.

 When we are seated on the bank of a river, the flowing of the water, the gliding of a boat
or the flight of a bird, the ceaseless murmur in our life's deeps are for us three separate
things or only one, as we choose. We can interiorize the whole, dealing with a single
perception that carries along the three flows, mingled, in its course; or we can leave the
first two outside and then divide our attention between the inner and the outer; or,
better yet, we can do both at one and the same time, our attention uniting and yet
differentiating the three flows, thanks to its singular privilege of being one and several.
Such is our primary idea of simultaneity. We therefore call two external flows that occupy
the same duration 'simultaneous' because they both depend upon the duration of a like
third, our own; this duration is ours only when our consciousness is concerned with us
alone, but it becomes equally their when our attention embraces the three flows of a
single indivisible act.
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“Past, Present and Future do not exist separately, as independent realities,

but they are a single undivided entity, closely interwoven,
and influence each other continuously”

“The future is in reality open, unpredictable, and indeterminate.”

It eliminated real time; that is, “what is most positive in the world.”

 This duration, as we saw, is nothing but memory and also consciousness. More
precisely, the idea of duration is considered as “the multiplicity of conscious states” , a
“qualitative multiplicity” that can be defined as “a unity that is multiple and a
multiplicity that is one”.
 Durée is inner experience, it is the inner life itself and as such it is grasped by means
of intuition.
 In intuition, “everything is in a present which seems constantly to be starting afresh”
in other words, it is in intuition that we grasp the world as it is, in its continuous flux and
becoming. To grasp the world in its becoming makes us feel we are participating in
vital impulse and as a result, brings joy and strength to our lives.
 Bergson gives us a metaphysical standing in order for people to be more joyful and
stronger. To do this, he makes us awaken to our fundamental self. To live with the
fundamental self is to live in duration and it is our fundamental self which makes us
become more joyful and stronger because then people feel themselves freer. In other
words, people experience true freedom by being awakened to their true self. In practical
life, we loose this self while in duration we regain it. So the claim is: to live freer makes
people more joyful and stronger. To feel free, however, does not mean to do whatever
you want to do. True freedom is a state of consciousness in which you are
participating in creation, in which you feel the creative evolution of which you are a
part and that is the main reason why what Bergson recommends us refers to a
metaphysical standing and not to a ‘know-how’.

 Simultaneity is the property of two event happening at the same time. We perceive the
world in terms of simultaneous intersection of past and present experience.