3 - Durance: Unfolding in Time

Summary

(i) Preliminaries In our discussion of pure perception, we showed how it should be understood in abstraction from sensation (even though pure perception is always accompanied by sensation). Likewise, we showed how any real example of perception involves not only sensation but memory.

But memory introduces a new and crucial element, that of time. Given that our experience of the world is temporally structured, what is the nature of this structure? Bergson's answer to this question is the hardest and most crucial part of his philosophical position. What is the temporal structure of our experience?

The commonsense answer is that our experience has a temporal structure because it contains elements which are temporally ordered. On this view, there are temporal items, which might be or be called events, and we have the ability not only to identify such items but also to determine how they stand to each other in terms of before-and-after. How can we determine this? These items pass, it may be said, in our experience of them from being future, to being present, into the past. So our method of determining how events are temporally ordered is the succession of our experiences.

Now Bergson's treatment of time is complex and has a considerable number of strands. But I believe we should do well to start from a claim we already touched upon.