Time and freedom

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Time and Freedom (French original: Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience ) is the German title of a treatise by the French philosopher Henri Bergson , first published in 1889 (German 1911) , in which he attempts to go through › freedom ‹ in a three-step process to ensure the rejection of the unrestricted validity or applicability of scientific quantification efforts and the materialistic and deterministic theorems associated with them.

Bergson's three step into time and freedom

Intensities

The first chapter, Time and Freedom, starts with the experiential area of ​​psychological facts to show that "intensities" - such as the sensation of greater or lesser pain or the perception of two different shades of blue - are not actually gradations of a uniform phenomenon, but diverge qualitatively . According to Bergson's thesis, there are two fundamentally different types of sensations , the color blue does not fan out into a spectrum of different shades, but the term "blue" creates the combination of qualitatively different color impressions obtained by means of intellectual abstraction.

Manifold

After he had worked out the fundamental opposition between the apparently quantitative gradation and the actual qualitative divergence in the first section, Bergson leads in the second passage to a core problem of his philosophy: the differentiation of time and duration ( durée ). Here he analyzes time as a “bastard concept”, as a hybrid of duration and space . According to Bergson, time as it presents itself to our everyday perception is essentially space. If, for example, we record the strikes of a bell in its succession, the only way to count is because we artificially split the heterogeneous sensation of a conglomerate of notes (similar to a melody) into discrete characters , into individual strikes and line them up next to one another in an "ideal space". Bergson counters this scientific construction, the product of which is the plane arrow of time (reversible in mechanics, irreversible in thermodynamics), with the "duration" of consciousness. In its heterogeneous, self-pervading multiplicity of states, the duration of consciousness is indispensable in order to summarize the space, which itself knows no time, but only consists of well-differentiated differences in position, into a movement, a story. If Bergson imagines the space to be similar to individual 'snapshots', individual images, these images can only be "made to run" if a consciousness that lasts, lasts through several images and thus pulls them together, allowing them to merge. The duration is therefore alien to the space.

freedom

On the basis of the ascription of duration, consciousness is given a characteristic that removes it from quantification , that to a certain extent immunizes it against the simple integration in causal chains and the consequent determination of all actions. Insofar as the consciousness of its duration becomes aware, the person carries out an action out of the totality of the entanglements and entanglements of its individual duration, it disregards the determination of possible (only artificially separated) individual components. A thesis that Bergson will expand and make plausible, especially in matter and memory , and which receives its evolutionary and metaphysical turn in the creative development .

Even if time and freedom are by no means representative of Bergson's complete works and, in particular, the term durée here still relates entirely to the area of ​​"immediate facts of consciousness" and consequently remains psychologically defined, this is an indispensable treatise for an understanding of the complete work in spite of all later modifications, the main strands of the complex conceptual network of Bergson's philosophy, which has recently been revived, is already exposed.

The basic concepts: space, time, duration

room

Bergson's definition of space makes full use of the terminological fundus that was tailor-made for her by Kant , considers it to be homogeneous, as a form of perception of human knowledge on which the perception of the extended world is based and - contrary to the assumptions of British empiricism - not just from whose objects are abstracted and consequently cannot be a quality of qualities. Beyond Kant, Bergson goes so far as to upgrade the perception of homogeneous space to the condition of all higher intellectual activities - language skills as well as mathematical operations or, in other words, all those activities that, according to Bergson, require, things - and be it even in an ideal room - to be arranged side by side. Which brings us to another decisive property of space: it is the place of a " reciprocal exteriority without succession ", which means that in space outside of perceiving consciousness we can very well encounter several Zenonic arrows that are external to one another and yet never to a movement of the same. Ultimately, the only relationship that exists within space is the position and, as it is strictly separated from all temporality, there is no succession, no succession, only simultaneity. If movement should come about, a conscious observer would be required, a memory that made the moment point in its unexpanded nature its own, linked it with the past moment point and, in the interpenetration of past and present, created a movement that was suitable for a qualitative act . But the space itself, it could be repeated, knows no history, only simultaneous positional differences.

Time vs. Duration

Starting from consciousness and its function as an observer of the simultaneity of things in space, it only takes a small step to the duration, the actual and original contribution of Bergson's thought, around which his philosophy seems to be entwined in its entirety. Let us analyze - as Bergson does - the space as a homogeneous, three-dimensional one, in which objects are grouped simultaneously and in manifold relations to one another, but as one to which the succession, to which the sequence is alien, we also place the immediately given consciousness to this Opposite space, it seems to be imperative to assign a duration to this consciousness as well. Otherwise, how should it be able to merge the mere 'snapshots' of the incoherent spatial images into a movement, into a continuum? Consciousness, if it wants to pull together the constellation just perceived and already past in space with the present one in order to make the perceptual images 'work', must survive both constellations. This determination of duration, which to a certain extent emerges from the peculiarities of space and consciousness, is by no means sufficient. Bergson's terminology goes even further, to the point that the term duration itself has misleading implications if one is inclined to associate it in the ordinary sense of the word with standstill or even temporal expansion. Duration is by no means a standstill, as it increasingly opens up to the process of differentiation of élan vital , especially in Bergson's later works, especially the creative development - a tendency that is already leaving its first traces in time and freedom in matter and memory , but nowhere in the then characteristic clarity comes to language.

But it is not an extension of time either. Because a large part of the intellectual efforts in time and freedom are used by Bergson to just pull up the cleanest possible partition between the terms time and duration, to demonstrate that the everyday concept of time »is ultimately a bastard concept that originated from the penetration of the Imagination of space in the realm of pure consciousness owes «. Time, as an impure hybrid structure of duration and space, is space insofar as it is thought of as homogeneous - a priming medium that allows space for the alignment of objects , only that the alignment does not take place as simultaneous relocation, as in space, but rather in succession. Objects are placed one after the other on a flat surface, which we call time, so that time ultimately meets space on the one hand in its homogeneity and on the other - and this is particularly important - equally allows things and events to be external to one another. We believe that we see a chain of discrete signs in time: an object can be clearly separated from the other as in space, one event can be separated from the next. But, according to Bergson, this form of exteriority does not belong in any way to duration, that is, to what originally and actually deserves to be called time. Rather, the emergence of the "bastard concept" of time can be seen as a result of intellectual activity, more precisely the ability to link states of consciousness that are actually heterogeneous and pervasive to individual positional constellations of spatial objects and thus ascribe to them the same well-being that objects in Space is really suitable. In this way, space becomes the measure of our sense of time, a specific positional relationship of things obviously occurs - after only consciousness has made the duration available to it and thus produced movement and history - at the same time as a state of consciousness. As if a ruler (the spatial objects) were placed on an indistinguishable surface, that state can now be extracted from the heterogeneity and penetration of the states of consciousness that occurs simultaneously with a fixed spatial constellation. The result is the illusion of homogeneous time and the well-differentiated states of consciousness. An illusion to which, to put it pointedly, the consciousness contributed the duration, the space the discrete juxtaposition.

literature

  • Deleuze, Gilles: Bergson for an introduction. Hamburg 1989 (= SOAK introductions, vol. 44)
  • Gimmler, Antje, u. a. (Ed.): The rediscovery of time. Reflections - Analyzes - Concepts. Darmstadt 1997.
  • Guerlac, Suzanne: Thinking in time: Henri Bergson (an interdisciplinary conference). In: Modern Language Notes 120 (2005), pp. 1091-1098.
  • Marrati, Paola: Time, Life, Concepts: The Newness Of Bergson. In: Modern Language Notes 120 (2005), pp. 1099-1111.
  • Pflug, Günther: Henri Bergson. Sources and consequences of inductive metaphysics. Berlin 1959.
  • Russel, Bertrand : The Philosophy Of Bergson. In: The Monist 22 (1912), pp. 321-347.
  • Sandbothe, Mike: The temporalization of time. Basic tendencies of the modern contemporary debate in philosophy and science. Darmstadt 1998.
  • Tugendhat, Ernst : Heidegger and Bergson on Time. In: Das Argument 34 (1992), pp. 573-584.
  • Vrhunc, Mirjana: Image and Reality. On the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Munich 2002 (= transitions, vol. 47).

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bergson, Henri: Time and Freedom. Hamburg 2006. 3rd edition, p. 76
  2. ↑ On the criticism of this psychologistic view cf. fundamental Frege, Gottlob: The basics of arithmetic . Stuttgart 1987 [first 1884].
  3. ^ Bergson, Henri: Time and Freedom. Hamburg 2006. 3rd edition, p. 83
  4. ^ Bergson, Henri: Time and Freedom. Hamburg 2006. 3rd edition, p. 86; for criticism also the discussion in Russell, Bertrand: Philosophy of the Occident. Their connection with political and social development. Cologne 2002. 5th edition, p. 811.
  5. ↑ So Bergson's proposal to resolve the Zenonic Paradox . Cf. Bergson, Henri: Time and Freedom. Hamburg 2006. 3rd edition, p. 86.
  6. ↑ See Vrhunc, Mirjana: Image and Reality. On the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Munich 2002 (= transitions, vol. 47), pp. 27–30 and Deleuze, Gilles: Bergson for introduction. Hamburg 1989 (= SOAK introductions, vol. 44), pp. 53–68.
  7. ↑ cf. Bergson, Henri: Time and Freedom. Hamburg 2006. 3rd edition, p. 59.
  8. ↑ The French durée has different connotations than the etymologically obvious and thus recommended duration as a translation . Cf. Vrhunc, Mirjana: Image and Reality. On the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Munich 2002 (= transitions, vol. 47), p. 15 f.
  9. ↑ cf. Vrhunc, Mirjana: Image and Reality. On the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Munich 2002 (= transitions, vol. 47), p. 15 and p. 28f.
  10. ^ Bergson, Henri: Time and Freedom. Hamburg 2006. 3rd edition, p. 76
  11. ↑ This homogeneity also corresponds to the nature of the mechanical trajectories , in which the similarity of the medium time is the condition for the reversibility of movements according to the laws of impact. Cf. Sandbothe, Mike: The temporalization of time. Basic tendencies of the modern contemporary debate in philosophy and science. Darmstadt 1998, p. 12 f.
  12. ^ Bergson, Henri: Time and Freedom. Hamburg 2006. 3rd edition, p. 76, p. 83.
  13. ↑ Bergson calls this exchange " endosmosis ". (Bergson, Henri: Time and Freedom. Hamburg 2006. 3rd edition, p. 83)