The Origin of Time

Heidegger and Bergson

Heath Massey

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781438455327, 9781438455310
• eBook ISBN: 9781438455334
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

The recent renewal of interest in the philosophy of Henri Bergson has increased both recognition of his influence on twentieth-century philosophy and attention to his relationship to phenomenology. Until now, the question of Martin Heidegger's debt to Bergson has remained largely unanswered. Heidegger's brief discussion of Bergson in Being and Time is geared toward explaining why he fails in his attempts to think more radically about time. Despite this dismissal, a close look at Heidegger's early works dealing with temporality reveals a sustained engagement with Bergson's thought. In The Origin of Time, Heath Massey evaluates Heidegger's critique of Bergson and examines how Bergson's efforts to rethink time in terms of duration anticipate Heidegger's own interpretation of temporality. Massey demonstrates how Heidegger follows Bergson in seeking to uncover "primordial time" by disentangling temporality from spatiality, how he associates Bergson with the tradition of philosophy that covers up this phenomenon, and how he overlooks Bergson's ontological turn in Matter and Memory. Through close readings of early major works by both thinkers, Massey argues that Bergson is a much more radical thinker with respect to time than Heidegger allows.

1

Following Bergson’s Footsteps

Time in Heidegger’s Early Works

1. The Question of Time

Many readers of Being and Time have noticed that when Heidegger distinguishes between temporality and what philosophers call “time,” he evokes Bergson’s name along with Aristotle’s. Yet the importance of Bergson’s role in Being and Time is rarely acknowledged. It is tempting to conclude from the way Heidegger dismisses Bergson in a footnote near the end of division two that he was only interested in preventing his readers from confusing his view of time with Bergson’s. The evidence from Heidegger’s early works suggests otherwise. A survey of his treatments of time prior to the publication of Being and Time in 1927 reveals a sustained engagement with Bergson’s thinking. With reference to the lecture courses and essays from this period, I aim to show, first, that not only did Heidegger consider Bergson a pivotal thinker with respect to time, but he also followed Bergson’s footsteps in thinking about time in several crucial ways; and second, that his treatment of Bergson displays an ambivalence stemming from concerns about Bergson’s understanding of life. Because Heidegger never lectured or wrote at length about Bergson, my case depends on evidence gathered from a variety of sources, some in which Bergson is mentioned by name and others in which he is not. By surveying the path leading to Heidegger’s dismissal of Bergson, I hope to shed more light on Bergson’s appearances in Being and Time and the role he plays in that work and in the early development of Heidegger’s thinking about temporality.

Heidegger’s initial remarks in Being and Time about Bergson are brief but provocative. In the prologue, Heidegger sets his sights on “the interpretation of time [Zeit] as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of being” (BT xxix/1). He fleshes this out somewhat in the introduction, announcing, “The meaning of being of that being we call Dasein will prove to be temporality [Zeitlichkeit],” and assigning himself the task of showing that “time is that from which Dasein tacitly understands and interprets something like being at all” (BT 17/17). We understand being in a temporal way, he aims to show, because our being is grounded in temporality and has a distinctive temporal structure that is not immediately apparent from the way time is ordinarily understood. With regard to how philosophers have traditionally thought about time, Heidegger writes:

This task as a whole requires that the concept of time thus gained be distinguished from the common understanding of it. The latter has become explicit in an interpretation of time which reflects the traditional concept that has persisted since Aristotle and beyond Bergson. (BT 17/18)

Heidegger soon explains why he credits Aristotle with the formulation of this “traditional concept” of time: in Physics IV, chapters 10–14, Aristotle explores the nature and existence of time in a way that becomes definitive for philosophy.¹ Later in the introduction, Heidegger writes, “Aristotle’s treatise on time is the first detailed interpretation of this phenomenon that has come down to us. It essentially determined all the subsequent interpretations of time, including that of Bergson” (BT 25/26). The obvious question is, why Bergson? What is it about Bergson’s interpretation of time that causes Heidegger to point in his direction, rather than Husserl’s, whose lectures on time-consciousness would soon be published under his supervision? Why not Hegel, whose interpretation of time—not Bergson’s—is the subject of the penultimate chapter of Being and Time? For that matter, why not Dilthey, whose thinking is the focus of some of Heidegger’s most important early investigations into time?²

It is not until a footnote near the end of Being and Time that Heidegger offers any reasons for singling out Bergson’s interpretation of time. In his discussion of the relationship between time and spirit for Hegel, Heidegger offers a brief sketch of why he considers Bergson a contemporary heir to the concept of time formulated by Aristotle.³ The initial focus of the footnote is how Hegel’s concept of time appears to be “drawn directly from Aristotle’s Physics” (BT 410n/432n). Turning to Bergson, Heidegger levels the same criticism:

Despite all differences in justification, Bergson’s conception agrees with Hegel’s thesis that space “is” time. Bergson just turns it around: Time (temps) is space. Bergson’s interpretation of time, too, obviously grew out of an interpretation of Aristotle’s treatise on time. It is not just a matter of an external literary connection that simultaneously with Bergson’s Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, where the problem of temps and durée is expounded, a treatise of Bergson’s appeared with the title: Quid Aristoteles de loco senserit.⁴ With regard to the Aristotelian definition of time as άριθμòς κινήσεως [arithmos kineseos], Bergson analyzes number before analyzing time. Time as space (cf. Essai, p. 69) is quantitative succession. Duration is described on the basis of a counter-orientation toward this concept of time as qualitative succession. (BT 410n/432–3n)

What makes Bergson’s concept of time traditional, according to Heidegger, is its dependence on Aristotle’s way of thinking about time. Bergson famously distinguishes between time and duration by showing that the way time is commonly represented in both thought and language is fundamentally different from the way time is lived. The main difference is that duration flows unceasingly and its moments permeate one another, while what we call “time” is a homogeneous medium akin to space, and its moments are juxtaposed like points or numbers. Heidegger claims that this distinction amounts to a mere reversal of Aristotle’s concept of time as arithmos kineseos, a number related to motion, which is demonstrated by Bergson’s definition of time as “quantitative succession.” If time is understood as something quantitative, or something that can be counted, Bergson thinks, then it is being confused with space. This is because counting requires that whatever is counted must be numerically distinct, and such distinctness implies externality and juxtaposition, which are spatial properties. Bergson concludes that “time, understood in the sense of a medium in which we distinguish and count, is nothing but space” (TFW 91/68). The fact that Bergson developed this distinction between time and duration while he was also writing a thesis on Aristotle’s concept of place is no coincidence, according to Heidegger. The signs all point back to Aristotle.

Heidegger thus portrays Bergson’s understanding of time—as he also portrays Hegel’s and Kant’s—as fundamentally Aristotelian.⁵ While it may appear to some that Bergson rethinks time radically, Heidegger contends, his reversal of Aristotle reveals that his thought remains traditional. The footnote on Hegel and Bergson continues:

This is not the place for a critical discussion of Bergson’s concept of time and other present-day interpretations of time. To the extent that anything essential has been gained at all beyond Aristotle and Kant, the concern is more with grasping time and “time consciousness.” (BT 410n/433n)

A couple of things are interesting about this caveat: first is the way Heidegger’s reference to “time consciousness” (Zeitbewußtsein) evokes Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of time, and second is the notion that a “critical discussion” or “decisive confrontation” (Auseinandersetzung) with Bergson is called for. Heidegger’s use of these particular terms raises more questions: Does Husserl’s conception of time fall under the “other present-day interpretations” that Heidegger intends to criticize? Is a confrontation with Bergson over his interpretation of time really necessary, and if so, why? In the first edition of Being and Time, in a remark omitted from later editions, Heidegger’s dismissal of Bergson concludes: “We shall come back to this in the first and third divisions of Part Two” (BT 410n/433n), referring to the critical interpretations of Kant and Aristotle he had originally planned for the “phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology” (BT 39–40/39–40). Although the second part of Being and Time was never published as such, Heidegger renews his attack on Bergson in his lecture courses immediately following its publication, reiterating and complicating the critique outlined above.⁶

In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, a lecture course delivered in the summer of 1927, Heidegger recapitulates his argument that Bergson does not overcome Aristotle’s concept of time. However, he goes further by accusing Bergson not only of formulating duration as a “counter-concept” to Aristotle’s concept of time, but also of misinterpreting Aristotle. According to Heidegger, Bergson “does not succeed by means of this concept [of duration] in working his way through to the true phenomenon of time,” yet Bergson’s inquiries “are valuable because they manifest a philosophical effort to surpass the traditional concept of time” (BPP 232/329). Heidegger attacks Bergson several times in the course of an extensive discussion of Aristotle, claiming that “the Aristotelian concept of time was misunderstood in the modern period, especially by Bergson,” (BPP 242/343) and that because of overly narrow interpretations of some of Aristotle’s terms, “the Aristotelian definition of time remains unintelligible. Or else defective interpretations occur, for example that of Bergson, who says that time as Aristotle understands it is space” (BPP 244/345). These remarks, while not exactly fulfilling Heidegger’s promise to return to Bergson in part two of Being and Time, still demonstrate his commitment to coming to terms with Bergson’s philosophy of time.⁷ Indeed, prior to criticizing Bergson, Heidegger had provided his students with a compendium of philosophical investigations of time, remarking, “From the most recent period we may cite Bergson’s investigations of the time phenomenon. They are by far the most independent” (BPP 231/328).

The same tension reappears the following year in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, a course delivered in the summer of 1928. There, he explains:

Recently Bergson tried to conceive the concept of time more originally. He made it more clear than any previous philosopher that time is interwoven with consciousness. But the essential thing remained unresolved in Bergson, without even becoming a problem. (MFL 149/189)

Later in the course, Heidegger adds:

Bergson first worked out the connection between a derived and an original time. But he did so in a way that went too far and said that time, once emerged, is space. … Bergson’s analyses nonetheless belong to the most intense analyses of time that we possess.” (MFL 203/262)

Although we could receive the impression from Being and Time alone that Bergson is more or less inconsequential for Heidegger, these lectures shortly following its publication paint a different picture. Here, Heidegger portrays Bergson’s philosophy of time as comprising the most “independent” and “intense” investigations of the contemporary age. This deserves our attention, if for no other reason than because Heidegger reserves such praise for Bergson rather than for his teacher and mentor Husserl.

Heidegger presents Bergson in these lecture courses following Being and Time as having achieved important insights about time, yet having been unable to see what is essential. Contrary to what Heidegger’s dismissal of Bergson in the margins of Being and Time suggests, he did not completely reject Bergson’s way of thinking about time. It may appear as if Heidegger viewed Bergson merely as a cautionary example of a contemporary philosopher who attempted to rethink time but could not do so radically enough because of his dependence on Aristotle. However, a close look at Heidegger’s early works shows that from his student days through the period in which he produced the earliest drafts of Being and Time, he already displayed both the recognition of Bergson’s importance and the ambivalence about his philosophy of time that are evident in the lecture courses following Being and Time.

Heidegger’s early encounters with Bergson help to illuminate why Bergson makes several prominent appearances in Being and Time only to be dismissed in a footnote near the end. Following Heidegger’s path in thinking about time from his earliest writings to Being and Time, we can see the development of his strategy of distinguishing between “primordial time” (ursprünglich Zeit), or temporality, and time as we commonly understand it. Recognizing that Bergson also seeks to radically rethink time, Heidegger uses Bergson as a touchstone, returning to his thought over and over again. However, he disagrees with Bergson’s account of duration as primordial time on many points. More precisely, Heidegger comes to disagree with Bergson on many points over the course of an engagement with his thinking that lasts more than a decade.

In what follows, I show that Heidegger appropriates certain key elements of Bergson’s thinking as early as his 1915 Habilitation lecture “The Concept of Time in the Science of History,” which contrasts the concept of time employed by natural science, particularly physics, with the concept of time needed for the study of history. Heidegger’s descriptions of this contrast echo Bergson’s distinction in Time and Free Will between the concept of time as a homogeneous medium, which he also associates with physics, and the experience of pure duration. However, Heidegger soon expresses concerns about Bergson’s philosophy of life, especially with regard to the question of the appropriate method for understanding it. In an essay written in 1920, “Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews,” and two contemporaneous lecture courses, Basic Problems of Phenomenology (WS 1919–20) and Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression (SS 1920), Heidegger takes issue with the view, which he attributes to Bergson, that life is a phenomenon that cannot be conceptually comprehended. Later, in his 1924 lecture The Concept of Time, Heidegger echoes Bergson again in the way he distinguishes time as it is measured by physicists and read off the clock from a more primordial experience of time. Heidegger thus plants the seeds for his interpretation of temporality in Being and Time by contrasting both the scientific concept of time and our ordinary understanding of time with a more “authentic” temporality of historical existence. In History of the Concept of Time (SS 1925), Heidegger announces a plan to make Bergson’s thought the point of departure for a phenomenological destruction of the traditional concept of time that will trace it through Kant and Newton to Aristotle. In the introduction to this course, Heidegger credits Bergson with attempting to overcome the traditional concept of time by going back to a more original one, but he claims that Bergson presupposes Aristotle’s concept. Finally, in Logic: The Question of Truth (WS 1925–6), Heidegger shows in more detail why Bergson’s philosophy of time is no exception to the rule that all philosophical reflection on time in the Western tradition has been dominated by Aristotle’s thought. In this course, Heidegger argues that Bergson’s thinking is shaped by its “constant opposition to Aristotle’s concept of time” (LQT 207/250), which becomes the theme for Heidegger’s interpretation of Bergson in Being and Time. By showing how Heidegger deals with time at each of these stages, I hope to reveal not only how he follows in Bergson’s footsteps, but also how he diverges from Bergson’s path to blaze his own trail to originary temporality.

2. The Structure of the Concept of Time

The earliest trace of Heidegger’s engagement with Bergson appears more than a decade before the publication of Being and Time in his 1915 lecture “The Concept of Time in the Science of History.”⁸ Heidegger’s goal in this lecture is to illuminate certain structural differences between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and the “historical sciences” (Geisteswissenschaften) by means of an examination of one of their basic concepts: the concept of time.⁹ His strategy is to analyze the structure of the concept of time by first examini...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Thinking Through Time
• Chapter 1: Following Bergson’s Footsteps: Time in Heidegger’s Early Works
• Chapter 2: Dispelling the Confusion: Pure Duration in Time and Free Will
• Chapter 3: Uncovering the Primordial Phenomenon: Originary Temporality in Being and Time
• Chapter 4: Reversing Bergsonism: Time and Temporality in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology
• Chapter 5: Challenging the Privilege of Presence: The Ontological Turn in Matter and Memory
• Conclusion: The Movement of Temporalization
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover