In Search of Bergson's Lost Time
100 years ago, a philosopher and a physicist debated the nature of time...
“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
~ Henri Bergson (1849 - 1941)
Late one Spring afternoon in Paris, at a gathering hosted by the Société française de philosophie, one of the world’s preeminent philosophers took the stage with a Nobel Prize winning physicist to debate the nature of time.
One hundred years have passed since that mighty meeting of the minds, which took place on April 6, 1922. The intervening spell has been kind to the physicist, Albert Einstein, whose name is today practically synonymous with the concept of genius itself. Indeed, TIME Magazine went on to declare the author of the theories on Special and General Relativity its “Person of the Century.”
As for the philosopher, who once brought Broadway traffic to a standstill when he gave sold out lectures in New York City, whose “rich and vitalizing ideas and brilliant skill” earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, and to whom the above quote belongs...
... time itself seems almost to have passed him by.
I picked up a copy of M. Bergson’s essay, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, early on the pandemic, a period in which, for those of us suffering seemingly endless lockdowns (Buenos Aires was at one point the longest “hard locked down” city on the planet), time itself appeared to stand still... or perhaps remain on repeat.
In his highly readable essay, M. Bergson introduces the reader to his concept of la durée, or “duration.” While physicists tend to concentrate on “objective” time, that is, the kind we commonly measure in minutes and hours, months and millennia, Bergson concerned himself more with the human experience which, as the pandemic was illustrating “in real time,” could be something else entirely.
We have all experienced the feeling of time “dragging on” (waiting at the bus stop or in a long queue at the bank) or “speeding up” (as on the waning days of a summer vacation... or even the years themselves as, progressively, they seem to slip gently from our grasp the older we grow.) This phenomenon Bergson attributed in part to our subjective experiences, our accumulation of memories which then impact our understanding of, and appreciation for, the duration of “real time.”
La durée, Bergson argued, is both unextended yet heterogeneous in that no two moments can ever be alike for any individual observer (at least, not one with the faculty of memory; every would-be “identical” moment would carry the experience of the previous episode, thereby rendering it distinct in that very manner).
Intrigued, I followed this introductory text with some deeper reading, namely his Creative Evolution, in which M. Bergson introduces his concept of élan vital, a kind of “vital impetus” or impulse in us all, an idea which traces back to the ancients, notably Zeno of Elea, and even recalls elements of Schopenhauer's “will-to-live.”
With nothing but (apparently slow-moving) time on my hands, I began to discover during my pandemic reading Bergson’s influence on a number of other notable authors and their works; Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and, of course, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the first volume of which, Swann’s Way, I took on vacation to Brazil to re-read just last week...
... but which, for one reason or another, whether Einsteinian or Bergsonian (or Epicurean?), I did not find the time to finish.
Until next Wednesday...
Joel Bowman
Buenos Aires ~ Sept. 28, 2022
P.S. In one of those happy twists of fate, it was M. Proust’s cousin, Louise Neuberger, whom Bergson married in 1881. The novelist, much influenced by the philosopher, served as best man.