Bergson’s text explores time, duration and our concept of free will. He is interested in our senses and sensations, and how we perceive these. Here is an outline of his thinking which I found effective;
“Look closely at a sheet of paper lighted e.g. by four candles, and put out in
succession one, two, three of them. You say that the surface remains white
and that its brightness diminishes. But you are aware that one candle has
just been put out ; or, if you do not know it, you have often observed a
similar change in the appearance of a white surface when the illumination
was diminished. Put aside what you remember of your past experiences and
what you are accustomed to say of the present ones ; you will find that what
you really perceive is not a diminished illumination of the white surface, it
is a layer o f shadow passing over this surface at the moment the candle is
extinguished. This shadow is a reality to your consciousness, like the light
itself. If you call the first surface in all its brilliancy white, you will have to
give another name to what you now see, for it is a different thing : it is, if
we may say so, a new shade of white. We have grown accustomed, through
the combined influence of our past experience and of physical theories, to
regard black as the absence, or at least as the minimum, of luminous
sensation, and the successive shades of grey as decreasing intensities of white light
But, in point of fact, black has just as much reality for our consciousness as
white, and the decreasing intensities of white light illuminating a given
surface would appear to an unprejudiced consciousness as so many different
shades, not unlike the various colours of the spectrum. This is the reason
why the change in the sensation is not continuous, as it is in the external
cause, and why the light can increase or decrease for a certain period
without producing any apparent change in the illumination of our white
surface the illumination will not appear to change until the increase or
decrease of the external light is sufficient to produce a new quality.” (p53-54)
We are aware of our surroundings, and our perceptions, but we do not always analyse them this closely. Our senses are mostly subconscious, we feel without thinking, as we perceive light and shade without having to consider them. We can understand the effects of light and dark on our surroundings. This is very interesting, as this is a physical limitation of the camera, which cannot define light from dark in its pursuit of middle gray. A white object can be placed in a very bright and a very dark room, and the machine will render contrasting tones, far from it’s ideal perspective of truth.
Duration, helps us to understand the same object in both spaces, while the camera can only represent one discrete interval in time, with no understanding of the previous event from which we can inform ourselves. Bergson describes our world in terms of space and time. When we count objects, we count them in space, ten objects are ten physical objects taking up ten discrete portions of space. We count them as they occupy the space. Without objects to count we think of numbers abstractly, and count 1,2,3,4 in time, not space, because we have no fixed object on which the number can grasp.
What leads to misunderstanding on this point seems to be
the habit we have fallen into of counting in time rather than in space. In
order to imagine the number 50, for example, we repeat all the numbers
starting from unity, and when we have arrived at the fiftieth, we believe we
have built up the number in duration and in duration only. And there is no
doubt that in this way we have counted moments of duration rather than
points in space ; but the question is whether we nave not counted the
moments of duration by means of points in space. It is certainly possible to
perceive in time, and in time
only, a succession which is nothing but a succession, but not an
addition, i.e. a succession which culminates in a sum. (p78-79)
Bergson goes on to give a more abstract, yet convincing argument, if we count sounds, we count them in space, not duration. He proves this by saying that to count them we count the individual sounds, separating them from each other and the gaps between them, by doing this, we separate the sounds from the space, effectively we are counting the space. Time, is therefore somehow linked to space, and is different from the concept of duration, which does not rely on space to be described. (p91)
Pure duration, that
which consciousness perceives, must thus be reckoned among the so-called
intensive magnitudes, if intensities can be called magnitudes : strictly
speaking, however, it is not a quantity, and as soon as we try to measure it,
we unwittingly replace it by space.
But we find it extraordinarily difficult to think of duration in its original
purity ; this is due,
no doubt, to the fact that we do not endure alone, external objects, it
seems, endure as we do, and time, regarded from this point of view, has
every appearance of a homogeneous medium. Not only do the moments of
this duration seem to be external to one another, like bodies in space, but the
movement perceived by our senses is the, so to speak, palpable sign of a
homogeneous and measurable duration. Nay more, time enters into the
formulae of mechanics, into the calculations of the astronomer, and even of
the physicist, under the form of a quantity. We measure the velocity of a
movement, implying that time itself is a magnitude. Indeed, the analysis
which we have just attempted requires to be completed, for if duration
properly so-called cannot be measured, what is it that is measured by the
oscillations of the pendulum ? (p106-107)