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Duration and Simultaneity Henri Bergson

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Duration and Simultaneity Henri Bergson BOBBS-MERRILL THE LIBRARY OF LIBERAL ARTS BERGSON Duration and Simultaneity .B413 Duration and Simultaneity WITH REFERENCE TO EINSTEIN'S THEORY Henri Bergson Translated by Leon Jacobson Professor of Art, East Carolina College With an Introduction by Herbert Dingle Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy of Science University of London The Library of Liberal Arts published by THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY, INC. A Subsidiary of Howard W. Sams & Co., Inc. Publishers • Indianapolis • New York • Kansas City Henri Bergson: 1859-1941 Duree et Simultaneity was originally published in 1922 COPYRIGHT © 1965 ™ BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY, INC. 1 Unked States of America Librar^rot ? y Congress Catalog Card Number 64-66064 First Printing Translator's Preface It is the moral of Bergson's philosophy that we shall not live as fully as we could, and that philosophy and science will not co-operate as they might, as long as we remain unaware that "it is time which is happening and, more than that, which causes everything to happen." If we do not notice the actuality and efficacy of time, it is not through oversight, but because time is ruled out by the intelligence, whether exercised in our daily problem-solving or, much more precisely, in scientific investigation. For our intellect was made to prepare our action upon things; and action is taken on fixed points. Our intelli- gence, looking for fixity, masks the flow of time by conceiving it as a juxtaposition of "instants" on a line. But, in Bergson's view, despite this normal exteriorization of our feeling of duration into a "spatialized" time, the mind, being more than intellect, is still capable of apprehending uni- versal becoming in a vision in which "what was immobile and frozen in our perception is warmed and set in motion." It is possible to "reascend the slope of nature" and, by a concen- trated effort of attention, by "intuition," to contact directly, deep within, that concrete duration which is "the very stuff of our existence and of all things." Bergson well understood, then, that it is our practical rou- tine that has militated against a renewal, or deepening, of our perception; that "our senses and our consciousness have re- duced real time and real change to dust in order to facilitate our action upon things." Nor, certainly, does he condemn positive science for not being concerned with duration (even though that is its inspiration), since "the function of science is, after all, to compose a world for us in which we can, for the convenience of action, ignore the effects of time." What he deplores, however, is the tendency of science, and philosophy, vi DURATION AND SIMULTANEITY to mistake its conceptualizations of reality for reality itself. It is, indeed, against a biological and psychological "meta- physics" that Bergson's major works are directed, always with the ultimate aim of clearing the path to vision. Duration and Simultaneity is the concluding chapter in this long polemic with scientism. In the work before us, Bergson argues against the demand by "the theoreticians of relativity," made in the name of Ein- stein's theory of special relativity, that we believe in the "slow- ing" of time by motion in each relatively moving system in the universe. Of course, the very notion of slowed times runs counter to the common-sense view of a single, universal time; and it also contradicts Bergson's allied conception of duration, central in his philosophy. It therefore becomes Bergson's pur- pose in Duration and Simultaneity to demonstrate: (1) that it is actually the supposition of multiple, real times, not that of a single, real time, which Einstein's postulate of the reciprocity of motion contradicts; (2) that the considering of Einstein's times as "real" is attributable to an oscillation, in the course of physical investigation, between the standpoints of Einstein's "bilateral" and Lorentz' "unilateral" theory of relativity; and that (3) this oscillation is itself traceable to "our not having first analyzed our representation of the time that flows, our feeling of real duration." Let us first consider this last, and widest, "frame" of Bergson's argument. As in all his works, Bergson points out in Duration and Simultaneity that it is not the experience of duration that we ordinarily have in mind when we speak of time, but its meas- urement. For what we care about in practical life is the meas- urement of the real and not its nature. But we cannot di- rectly measure that reality which is duration, since it is an indivisible flow, and therefore has no measurable parts. To be measured, it must first be spatialized. Now, the first step in this process is taken when we think of the experienced flow of our mner duration as motion in space; and the next, when we agree to consider the path described by this motion as , translator's preface vii. the motion itself. In dividing and measuring the path, we then say we are dividing and measuring the duration of the mo- tion that is tracing it. For us, it is the earth's rotation that is the model motion tracing the path of time. Time then seems to us "like the un- winding of a thread, like the journey of the mobile [the earth] entrusted with measuring it. We shall then say that we have measured the time of this unwinding and of the universal unwinding as well." But, if we can correlate these two un- windings, it is only because we have at our disposal the con- cept of simultaneity; and we owe this concept to our ability to perceive external flows of events either together with the flow of our own duration, or separately from it, or, still better, both separately and together, at one and the same time. If we then refer to two external flows which take up the same duration as being "simultaneous," it is because they abide within the duration of yet a third, our own. But, to be useable, these simultaneities of durations must be converted into simultaneities of instants; and this we do as soon as we have learned to spatialize time. As noted above, we divide the path that has come to symbolize the flow of real time into equal units of space, and into "instants," which are the ex- tremities of these units. But, now, in addition, we point off the whole length of the moving path of a contemporary event with corresponding points of division. Any portion of the duration of its motion is then considered measured when we have counted a number of such correspondences, or simul- taneities. These simultaneities are instantaneities, not partaking of the real time that endures. But they are yet simultaneous with instants pointed off by them along our inner duration, and created in the very act of pointing. Bergson declares, there-: fore, that it is because instant-simultaneities are imbedded in flow-simultaneities, and because the latter are referrable to our own duration, that what we are measuring is time as: well as space; and, conversely, if the time being measured is viii DURATION AND SIMULTANEITY not finally convertible into an experienced duration, it is not time, but space, which we are measuring. Now, it happens that none of the motion-induced slowings of time allegedly uncovered by Einstein's theory of special relativity is convertible into duration. For, from Einstein's standpoint of the reciprocity of motion in space, these times are merely attributed by a real physicist-observer in a con- ventionally stabilized, "referrer" system S, to merely imagined physicist-observers in a conventionally mobilized, "referred-to" system 5'. Not being "pasted" to a time which is either lived or livable, they are purely fictional, in no way comparable to the actually lived time of the physicist in S. But the unreality of multiple times betokens the singleness of real time. For, were the referrer-physicist in S to betake himself to S', he would, by that very fact, be immobilizing it into a referrer system and would then live the same time there which he had lived in the former referrer system S. This mterchangeability of observers and their lived times in two systems in a state of uniform and reciprocal motion is conse- quent upon Einstein's hypothesis of the reciprocity of motion in space. Hence, "far from ruling out the hypothesis of a single, universal duration, Einstein's theory of special rela- tivity calls for it and confers upon it a superior intelligibility." The fact is, according to Bergson, that it is in Lorentz' unilateral," not Einstein's "bilateral" theory of relativity that multiple times can logically be considered real. For, it is there alone that a system of reference is regarded as at abso- lute rest, while other systems are in absolute motion. These conditions, found in Lorentz' theory, do imply the existence ot multiple times, all on the same footing and all "real." Yet, physicists support Einstein's, not Lorentz' theory of relativity; the question arises as to why they should attribute to instein a doctrine properly ascribable to Lorentz. To n confusi ,' °n of Einstein's Lorentz' viewpoints seems«Jr and almost inevitable. It stems from the fact that even when P ysicist begins by granting Einstein's thesis that any two translator's preface ix systems, S and S', are in reciprocal motion, he cannot, as a physicist, investigate this system without immobilizing one of them into a "stationary" system of reference. The result is that "absolute rest expelled by the understanding is reinstated by the imagination." In the mind of the physicist, two representa- tions of relativity then accompany one another, one, "radical and conceptual" (Einstein's), and the other, "attenuated and imagist" (Lorentz'), and "the concept undergoes contamina- tion by the image." In other words, even though the physicist conceives relativity from the standpoint of Einstein, he sees it a little from that of Lorentz.
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