The Philosophy of Time

Time before Times

Roger McLure

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781134322312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

The question of the existence and the properties of time has been subject to debate for thousands of years. This considered and complete study offers a contrastive analysis of phenomenologies of time from the perspective of the problematics of the visibility of time. Is time perceptible only through the veil of change? Or is there a naked presence of 'time itself'? Or has time always effaced itself? McClure's new work also stages confrontations between phenomenology of time and analytical philosophy of time. By doing so he explores ancient issues from a fresh perspective, such as whether time passes, whether experimental time is 'real time', and whether the very concept of time is contradictory.

Part I
Contrasts

1
Time as creative process

Bergson

Introduction

Some three decades ago Frederick Copleston summarized the estimate of Bergson¹ in the English-speaking world and continental Europe as follows:

Although Bergson once had a great name, his use of imagery and metaphor, his sometimes rather highblown or rhapsodic style, and a certain lack of precision in his thought have contributed to his being depreciated as a philosopher by those who equate philosophy with logical or conceptual analysis and who attach great value to precision of thought and language… In some countries, including his own, he has fallen into neglect for another reason, namely the eclipse of the philosophy of life by existentialism and phenomenology.²

No useful purpose would be served by dwelling on the charge of lack of precision (justified though it is).³ More instructive, because germane to Bergson’s intuitive method, are his own ideas about “precision in philosophy” (PM, 1–3), in particular his distinction between approaching philosophical problems through ready-made multi-purpose concepts or logical laws and approaching them through intuitions which are precise inasmuch as “tailored to the reality in which we live” (PM, 30). Intuition here means insight into the natures of things, eliciting their particular ‘logic’. On the intuitive standard of precision, a logically precise expression of a state of affairs that is not logically structured would be fundamentally imprecise—applying the law of the excluded middle to time, for example. The trouble with the metaphysical systems of the past, Bergson tells us, was that they violated the first principle of precision, which is that “the explanation that we must deem satisfactory is one that adheres to its object” (PM, 1). Bergson is not against metaphysics: his target is rather the arbitrary synthesizing that has constructed metaphysical systems baggy enough to accommodate possible worlds very different from our real world.

One might of course deny the existence of anything like Bergsonian intuition. But then the issue between Bergson and his rationalist (analytical) detractors switches to what should count as “true empiricism” (PM, 196). While Bergson’s statement that “a conception is worth no more than the possible perceptions it represents” (PM, 145) might sound like a verificationist slogan in a nonlinguistic key, any rationalist verificationist would withdraw sympathy on discovering that by ‘perceptions’ Bergson means ‘intuitions’; whereby it becomes clear that this verificationism owes allegiance less to empiricism than to le sensualisme anglais—French for the metaphysical doctrine that the empirical is exhausted by the sensory. According to the letter of standard (British) empiricism, all seeing is sight, insight being restricted to logical matters. Bergson has a less stingy concept of empiricism, allowing for empirical insight (intuition).

As for the role of existentialism in eclipsing Bergsonism in France: the existentialist revival of the Hegelian motifs of negativity took the gloss off Bergson’s famous arguments against ‘nothingness’, while the standard interpretation of his concept of intuition as a fusion of self with world seemed to many people to inflate the self to a fullness beyond due measure (Sartre slighted Bergsonism as a “philosophy of fullness”). Fullness, moreover, did not seem to sit comfortably with the themes of ‘trace’, original surplus and belatedness, subsequently ushered in by Derrida’s critique of ‘the metaphysics of presence’.⁴ Justified though it is by the surface of Bergson’s texts, the view of his intuition as fusion has been challenged by Gilles Deleuze’s reconstruction of Bergsonism around a new conception of temporal difference. We shall catch this at work at several points later on. Here it will suffice to indicate that the Deleuzean approach to Bergson sees him as making a seminal contribution towards the philosophy of difference, by dissociating difference from negation: “the essential feature of Bergson’s project is to think difference independently of every form of negation”.⁵

(These purely philosophical considerations would have to be supplemented, in any cultural history of French philosophy, by mention of the perceived irrelevance of Bergson’s luxurious metaphysical vision and perhaps facile optimism to the deflationary moral atmosphere of war-weary Europe. The sensitivity of intellectual life in France to the broader socio-historical context, its proneness to fashion, are never negligible factors in the fates of French philosophers.)

As for phenomenology’s part in backstaging Bergson: although French phenomenologists have tended to be existentialists, classical Husserlian phenomenology has a technical orthodoxy, deriving partly from Kant, which is independent of the (quasi-Hegelian) doctrines to which some of the existentialists harnessed it. And it is this technical orthodoxy, rather than the existentialist doctrines, which is invoked by Merleau-Ponty and Sartre in their influential criticisms of Bergson. Where Bergson had thought against Kant, French phenomenology inherited via Husserl, along with the latter’s intentional theory of consciousness, some of the basic tenets of the Kant’s non-naturalistic concept of mind (synthesis, transcendentalism, constitution, etc.). Against these the naturalism Bergson was measured and found wanting. To exhibit this Kantian-phenomenological critique is my main contrastive purpose in this chapter.

A more comprehensive view of the French phenomenologists’ estimate of Bergson would show some of them to be appreciative of him as a precursor of phenomenology, anticipating some phenomenological doctrines and creating, through his reaction against positivism, the climate in which phenomenology could flourish in France. While Sartre never softened his orthodox strictures, other French phenomenologists, less orthodox or in their less orthodox periods, have stressed Bergson’s anticipations of Heidegger. Thus Levinas:

Bergson’s theory of time as concrete duration is…one of the most significant, if largely ignored, contributions to contemporary philosophy. Indeed, it was this Bergsonian emphasis on temporality that prepared the soil for the subsequent implantation of Heideggerian phenomenology in France.⁶

And the later (as distinct from earlier and critical) Merleau-Ponty is more specific on the same point:

the original perception which we re-discover in ourselves and that which shows through in evolution as its inner principle are laced into each other…, we are always dealing with the same tension between one durée and another durée which frames it from the outside.⁷

Of these tensions or temporal rhythms more anon. The point here is just that Bergson is being credited with something like a home-produced prototype of Heidegger’s idea of time as a horizon for the understanding of Being: “it is now being as a whole that has to be approached from the point of view of time”,⁸ says Merleau-Ponty of the Bergsonian framing of human time by a temporally-defined external reality. A further consideration here is that Bergson’s battle-cry to philosophy to rediscover its ‘stone’ in “the immediate data of consciousness” had been heeded by French philosophers several decades before they heard it echoed in Husserl’s slogan “back to things themselves”.⁹

Since Copleston’s comment there has been a resurgence of interest in Bergson on the Continent and North America, driven partly by the gradual working-through of Deleuze’s influence and partly by the recognition that Bergson’s texts offer much that is of relevance to contemporary debates in philosophy of mind, aesthetics and some of the sciences of complexity.¹⁰ My contrastive purpose in this book, however, imposes a narrowing of the focus: to Bergson as just a philosopher of time and again to his philosophy of time to just a phenomenology of individual time-experience, disregarding his theory of cosmological time. The fact that Bergson took his phenomenology of time—his concept of ‘duration’ or durée—as a model for his later theory of cosmological time attests that the former can stand, as it will here, independently of the latter.¹¹

Time and substance

From the point of view of the main exegetical thesis of this book, it is the autonomy thesis or concept of ‘pure time-change’ that constitutes Bergson’s most important legacy to phenomenology. For as I intimated in the Introduction, post- Bergsonian phenomenology as a whole appropriates this doctrine under one interpretation or another, shedding most of the accessory doctrines specific to Bergsonism. The autonomy thesis does not affirm that there is time without change but rather that the change essential to time is internal to time itself, not parasitic on non-temporal factors such as objects or change-events in space; there is such an affair as ‘(the change of) time itself’ or ‘pure time’. Bergson’s version of this is the independence of time from space.

However, if the ordinary things (substances) of our world are bound to space, and if space is external to time as Bergson claims, then it might seem that Bergson’s time-change (durée) is something wholly immaterial, and opposed to a domain of space-bound timeless substances. That this is his view appears to be confirmed by an unusually explicit text: the continuity of our inner life, he says, is that

[of] a flowing or of a passage, but of a flowing and of a passage which are sufficient in themselves, the flowing not implying a thing which flows and the passage not presupposing any states through which one passes: the thing and the state are simply snapshots artificially taken of the transition.

(DS, 41)

This change involving no ‘thing’ would be contentless, the opposite of qualitative change. A self, or anything else, that changed this way could not be a substance. Durée, the change of time itself, would involve nothing resembling a process of change in a natural thing, no descriptive language would apply to it. (We shall see that this is precisely how durée is interpreted by Husserl and his followers.)

Yet all this conflicts with the theme of the concreteness of time in Bergson. His time is qualitative (a “qualitative multiplicity”) as distinct from homogeneous, and “concrete” (DI, 75, 77) as distinct from an abstract form indifferent to the contents passing through it. Bergson belongs to the small band of philosophers who refuse to separate the content of time from its form: “the content is of a piece with its durée” (PM, 11). The content? Can pure time have a content? Have we caught Bergson in contradiction with himself?

To see why there is no contradiction we need to focus on the word ‘thing’, which has so far had a free ride. What I think Bergson means by it is con veyed more exactly by the word “support” in his statement that in a heard melody “everything is becoming, but…the becoming, being substantial, has no need of a support” (PM, 140–141). Or again, referring to the familiar paradoxes of change: “if our intelligence persists in judging [change] incoherent, adding on I know not what support, it is because…” (PM, 8). This support is clearly the occult extratemporal (thus space-like, unchanging) substratum postulated by Locke and his followers to explain the possibility of a thing coming out of a change as the same thing (in a new state) that went into it. Now I think Bergson’s idea is that the change of time pre supposes no non-temporal substratum, not that it involves no thing that changes. It’s not that his flow is limpid, so to speak, but that it involves no non-flowing thing to which it is relative. The change of time encompasses the change of things, which therefore do not change in space.

It is doubtful whether even common sense believes that the change of inner life consists in some timeless substratum-self donning and doffing properties. That is why Bergson finds in the change-structure of inner life a privileged example of durée. An even better example (his favourite) is the experience of listening to a melody, where there is clearly no thing that runs self-identically through the music undergoing change en route (cf. a runner who remains the same man throughout his changes of position).¹² Notice that this musical paradigm does not support the idea of an experience of time-structure without content, of a limpid time-flow. The absence of an invariant thing running through the melody is experienced, rather, as the condition of temporal structure generating content (sound).

Writing large the musical example, we can say that for Bergson, as against Aristotle and common sense, change (as pure time-change) precedes and determines substance. There are not first things which then accidentally undergo changes; but rather a style of temporal change is essential to a thing and fixes its specific nature. Change is in that sense “substantial”: “this change is indivisible, it is substantial” (PM, 8); “the substantiality of the self is its very durée” (PM, 76); “its durée [life’s] is substantial inasmuch as pure durée” (PM, 80). The change of a leaf, say, from green to yellow, permits of no distinction between the leafhood of the leaf and its changing, between substance and change: a leaf is a particular complexity of change. So substance, duly distinguished from substratum, has been saved within a philosophy of process (always an achievement): “I am thereby in no way setting aside substance. On the contrary, I affirm the persistence of existences. And I believe that I have facilitated their representation” (PM, 211).

An attractive consequence of Bergson’s rejection of the substratum theory of substance is that it allows for a holistic conception of change which matches our actual perception of change. Consider: nobody denies that an apple that is red and sweet, having been green and bitter, is an apple that has changed. But ought we to say that the apple has changed from green to sweet, and from bitter to red? Or ought we not to say that its change to red can be from green only, and its change to sweet from bitter only? My informants are unanimous that the case for second sort of change is somehow stronger, but that the first nevertheless deserves to be accommodated within our concept of change. I think it is clear that the reason why the second sort of change is felt to be more compelling is that, without it, a substratum would be inconsistently qualified: to be both red and green all over an apple must change, whereas no change is necessary for something to be bitter and red or green and sweet (witness red peppers and asparagus). There is a temptation, to which Kant but not my informants succumbed, to ignore the first sort of change and treat all change as deducible from the need to avoid contradictory predications (the so-called ‘consistency theory of change’). But the temptation holds sway only as long as we are induced (by inter alia the language of discrete properties and from-to pairings) to picture change in terms of the substratum theory, for only then is it possible to distinguish between the two sorts of change and favour the one over the other.

The well-known difficulties associated with substratum—its existence not being independently identifiable (PM, 211), how the properties it ‘supports’ really relate to it—would be good reasons for ditching the notion. But can we do without it? Well, the substratum is supposed to have two functions: to unify properties and from—to pairings which, being essentially discrete, would otherwise fall apart; and to explain the identity of things across change. The unifying function is rendered redundant, however, if we construe things as synthetic wholes where every quality is conditioned by every other, as in this lemon of Sartre’s: “the lemon is extended throughout its qualities and each of its qualities is extended throughout every other. It is the bitterness of the lemon that is yellow, it is the yellowness of the lemon that is bitter.”¹³ Such synthetic wholes contrast with congeries of discrete properties, any one of which may change while the others do not: the former change as wholes into other wholes, producing a “continuity of sensory qualities” (MM, 222). In virtue of their synthetic connectedness, the qualities of the lemon hold themselves together, dispensing with the need for a unifying substratum. We might still seem to be left with the metaphysical problem of the preservation of identity through change: what makes a holistically changed lemon the same lemon as before the change? Bergson’s answer is that the problem is false, in that it wrongly assumes that a thing is what it is independently of change, landing us with the problem of explaining how it remains what it is despite changing: “the permanence of substance is in our view a continuity of change” (PM, 96).

The self-world relation as temporal difference

In the Foreword to his second work, (MM, 1896), Bergson announces that “questions concerning the subject and the object, their distinction and union, should be asked in terms of time and not in terms of space” (MM, 74; italics original). If this is true, the subject—object relation holds within time. Space lies outside that relation, outside time. The object, no less than the subject, is temporal without being spatio-temporal. Time embraces objects (matter) while remaining independent of space. To elucidate this version of the autonomy thesis is my main task in this section.

In Bergson’s first work (DI, 1889) the treatment of time is undertaken for the sake of a defence of freedom. Time is crucial to his main argument, but this is not an argument about time. The argument for freedom applies Bergson’s general methodological principle of unmixing ontologically non-immediate (therefore philosophically treacherous) ‘mixtures’; in the present case the mixture of time and space on which, he claims, rest both the fallacies of the determinists and the false conception of freedom advocated by their libertarian opponents. (Note that this mixture always consists of spatialized time rather than of temporalized space...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Note on the text
• Introduction
• Part I: Contrasts
• Part II: Confrontations