Duration (philosophy)

was only a pragmatic belief. Zeno of Elea believed reality was an uncreated and indestructible immobile whole. He formulated four paradoxes to present mobility as an impossibility. We can never, he said, move past a single point because each point is infinitely divisible, and it is impossible to cross an infinite space. But to Bergson, the problem only arises when mobility and time, that is, duration, are mistaken for the spatial line that underlies them. Time and mobility are mistakenly treated as things, not progressions. They are treated retrospectively as a thing's spatial trajectory, which can be divided ad infinitum, whereas they are, in fact, an indivisible whole. Bergson's response to Kant is that free will is possible within a duration within which time resides. Free will is not really a problem but merely a common confusion among philosophers caused by the immobile time of science. To measure duration (durée), it must be translated into the immobile, spatial time (temps) of science, a translation of the unextended into the extended. It is through this translation that the problem of free will arises. Since space is a homogeneous, quantitative multiplicity, as opposed to what Bergson calls a heterogenous, qualitative multiplicity, duration becomes juxtaposed and converted into a succession of distinct parts, one coming after the other and therefore "caused" by one another. Nothing within a duration can be the cause of anything else within it. Hence determinism, the belief everything is determined by a prior cause, is an impossibility. One must accept time as it really is through placing oneself within duration where freedom can be identified and experienced as pure mobility. ==Images of duration==

The first is of two spools, one unrolling to represent the continuous flow of ageing as one feels oneself moving toward the end of one's life-span, the other rolling up to represent the continuous growth of memory which, for Bergson, equals consciousness. No two successive moments are identical, for the one will always contain the memory left by the other. A person with no memory might experience two identical moments but, Bergson says, that person's consciousness would thus be in a constant state of death and rebirth, which he identifies with unconsciousness. Even this image is incomplete, because the wealth of colouring is forgotten when it is invoked. Because a qualitative multiplicity is heterogeneous and yet interpenetrating, it cannot be adequately represented by a symbol; indeed, for Bergson, a qualitative multiplicity is inexpressible. Thus, to grasp duration, one must reverse habitual modes of thought and place oneself within duration by intuition. == Influence on Gilles Deleuze ==

Gilles Deleuze was profoundly influenced by Bergson's theory of duration, particularly in his work Cinema 1: The Movement Image in which he described cinema as providing people with continuity of movement (duration) rather than still images strewn together. ==Physics and Bergson's ideas==

Bergson had a correspondence with physicist Albert Einstein in 1922 and a debate over Einstein's theory of relativity and its implications. For Bergson, the primary disagreement was over metaphysical and epistemological claims made by the theory of relativity, rather than a dispute about scientific evidence for or against the theory. Bergson famously stated of the theory that it is "a metaphysics grafted upon science, it is not science". == See also ==