time

For Bergson the immediate awareness of time is found in the intuition of Becoming, a relaxed state of consciousness wherein indistinct qualities are perceived within a temporal interval in which present contents pass into the past, becoming memories, as those and other memories interpenetrate the present flow.  This interval is a continuous moment of duration in which the past is prolonged into the present in the form of conscious memories of the near-term past.  Bergson’s whole system is complicated and entails the tenuous claim that image memories are stored in a spiritual past realm, so I have amended it to accord more with actual experience and provide timely moral guidance.  Still, there are at least two points that require clarification.  The first is how duration is commonly experienced and the second is how the remote past can re-enter the present in memories such as in Proust’s famous tea-soaked madeleine experience.

For the first point Bergson offers the example of hearing a bell tolling which is a succession of separate sounds that one hears as a continuous whole.  This is a poor example because he omits to specify the period and rate of the sounds.  A much better illustration is hearing a cicada buzzing for around thirty seconds.  While one seems to hear it as a temporal whole, it is actually a series of separate short clicks.  We hear each one as it occurs in each successive present moment and hold them as conscious memories within a single moment of duration as they continue and add to the series of such memories.  It’s like adding beads to a string, except it’s in time, not space, so we’re aware that the earlier clicks are past and not present.

Within the universal Becoming there are two kinds of action: ever-new present ones and repetitions of past ones.  All of the past is preserved in some repetitive material form, as a rock, for example, remains the same as it repeats its past action indefinitely.  Humans meanwhile have bodily memories in which past actions are retained in dormancy, like a dance step that is learned in the present and retained in the body until it is repeated at a later time.  Although for Bergson image memories are different and are stored, as I have mentioned in a separate spiritual realm, he has bodily and conscious action both originating in the body either as physical motion or virtual bodily action that is projected onto external objects and reflected from them as images. 

Since I have explained that process previously here and here I will proceed to discuss present sense perception as just a matter of projecting memories onto present external objects.  Bergson describes this at length in Matter and Memory, detailing how such memories are mostly generic, not particular, in order that virtual action should pass into habitual bodily motions.  Our action is not always reflexive, and we may pause and study the objects before us, bringing forth more particular memories that illuminate additional aspects of them.  

For Bergson the initial reflections of virtual action from objects are “pure perceptions” which embody their actual sensory qualities but are not yet conscious.  As they are subsequently overlaid with image memories that come forth from their separate spiritual abode they become conscious perceptions.  He therefore has virtually all of our sense perception consisting of memory images and not the sensory qualities of objects presently before us.  In my amended scheme, images are formed by the functional conjunction of our projected virtual actions and those of external objects.  Virtual actions repeat the past and therefore are past, while the conjunction constitutes a new moment of Becoming and is therefore present.  Sense perceptions are thus amalgamations of present and past contents in varying degrees.

Accordingly, much of our common experience is composed of projected generic memories rather than the particular qualities of present objects.  A great deal of it is also recognition of previously seen objects, and this involves quite particular memories projected onto their objects.  To wake up every morning and see my room as the same is to repeat such past experience which yet exists in the context of the present.  For I think of what I will do today that will be different from what I have done on previous days.

We live in temporal contexts in which change is ongoing, yet some experiences can seem to return us to past time.  Sense perceptions are accompanied by feelings, some of which are particularly pleasurable, and repetition of certain images may reactivate such feelings.  Dwelling on an image and the feeling may draw forth associated memory images, as the memory evoked by the taste of the tea-soaked madeleine swelled into a vast recollection of Combray for Proust.  As it overtook his present experience, it seemed to transport him into the past.  Not only was his consciousness filled with memory which, as repetition of the past, was the past, it was accompanied by the distinctive feeling of nostalgia that characterizes such sustained attention to the past. 

A fine example of this phenomenon that people may be able to relate to is how an especially tender early moment in the romance of Swann and Odette coincided with hearing a certain musical phrase in a performance.  For long afterward, hearing that phrase brought back the memories of the occasion and their exceptional pleasure.  With these memories they literally relived that past precious moment.    

My life-long fascination with time has led me into increasingly deeper study and reflection on Bergson’s work.  Understanding of both it and time itself have developed – fittingly, over time – and this article presents my latest advance in that endeavor.