The River That Embraces the Soul: True Duration Revealed by Abandoning Space (1890s) Bergson, "Time and Freedom"

The River That Embraces the Soul: True Duration Revealed by Abandoning Space (1890s) Bergson, "Time and Freedom"
What Bergson calls "true duration" begins, first and foremost, with a thorough critique of our habit of unconsciously biasing our everyday understanding of time toward spatial images. Usually we draw time as a line segment, and then arrange moments like dots on it to delimit the past, present, and future. Already at this stage, Bergson believed, time is replaced by a spatial form, and thus the original qualitative flow of time is lost.

What kind of time, then, appears when spatialization is removed? That is what Bergson called "true duration. Inside consciousness, emotions and memories overlap each other in such a way that they seem to melt into each other, and there is no such thing as a completely separate moment. For example, persistence has a smooth thickness like a gradation, just as the emotions of anger and sadness do not completely break off and switch, but move on to the next emotion with its afterglow and vestiges. This thickness is invisible if we treat time as a series of dots, but it actually works as the most fundamental layer that constitutes consciousness.

This is why Bergson emphasized the analogy of melody. A melody cannot be understood by isolating and adding together individual notes. It can only be heard as a single flow when the previous note lingers and permeates the next note. Thus, duration is not a "set of parts" but a "change that resonates as a whole. The lived experience itself, prior to the symbolization of time, resides there.

In contemporary neuroscience and time perception research, this "present as a wholeness" is also being discussed. It is believed that visual and auditory processing is not a mathematical point in time, but is bundled together in "integration windows" of tens to hundreds of milliseconds, within which our "now" is formed. Signals from multiple senses are perceived as a coherent whole, even though they are not simultaneous in the brain. This is a finding that suggests that "the present is a coherent entity with a certain width" is closer to the reality than the assumption that "the moment is a point," which resonates greatly with Bergson's intuition.

From this understanding, time is neither a mere quantity nor a sequence of addable dots, but rather "a stream that is constantly reweaving itself. Inside the lived time, expectations of the future and reverberations of the past change the way we feel about the present, always forming a new whole. The "true duration" that Bergson was trying to show is precisely that vital form of time that cannot be captured by measurement.