The Pop Group - We Are Time



We Are Time (Bergsonism)

“…we may sum up his (Bergson’s) philosophy in a single idea: time is real. Thus expressed, this statement does not sound particularly enlightening, original or exciting. Once we explore its meaning, however, it turns out to be a kernel from which an entire new world picture might be developed.

To say that time is real is to say, first, that the future does not exist in any sense. Ths is by no means a trivial point…since for the determinist every event merely unfolds the ready made reality hidden in existing conditions; the course of events consists, as it were, in displaying a destiny written in advance for all eternity, as if time were only a machine to unwind a film reel which has been there all along, with its entire story. For Bergson, on the contrary, the life of the universe is a creative process, whereby something new and unpredictable appears at every moment…

This implies, secondly, that…the time of physics is not real. Both in science and in our daily life we perceive time as if it were another level of space: a set of homogeneous segments placed next to each other and together composing an indefinitely long line. This time is an artificial, abstract concoction that we need for practical purposes. Real time, for Bergon…is neither homogeneous nor divisible; it is not a property abstracted from movement but it is in fact what each of us is: we know it intuitively from direct experience…

…real time is therefore possible only through memory, in which the past is accumulated inits fullness. In the abstract time of physics, nothing of one segment is preserved in the subsequent ones; they are juxtaposed in an indifferent succession. In the actual duree (Bergon’s word for time) nothing is lost, but nothing is reversible either: each moment carries within it the entire flow of the past and each is new and unrepeatable. Since the matter of the past perishes, but the memory of it does not, and since memory is not an aspect of matter, it is likely that the human mind is largely independent of body and can survive its destruction.”

- Leszek Kolakowski