Mechanical Time and Vital Time: Fallacies in the Clock, 1900-2025

Mechanical Time and Vital Time: Fallacies in the Clock, 1900-2025
At the heart of Bergson's philosophy is a fundamental questioning of "time" itself. He regarded "homogeneous, spatially measured time," such as the clock that modern society believes in, as deviating from true vital time. This is what he called "spatialized time," which is nothing more than a uniformly divided mathematical and physical signifier. On the other hand, the time that we actually live and feel - the time that is with the flow of memories, expectations, and emotions - is what he called "durée," or lived time.

This duration cannot be measured by a physical second hand. One moment is not simply a sequence of the next moment, but a fluid, qualitative chain of change in which the past permeates the present and the future looms as a premonition. For example, one minute of separation and one minute of boredom are physically equal, but have very different weights as experiences.

Bergson saw this loss of the sense of duration and the tendency of human beings to adjust themselves to the rhythm of an external clock as the "illusion of mechanical time. He warned that this illusion misreads the nature of life, and even freedom and creativity can be perceived as quantifiable and manageable.

For him, philosophy is an effort to break through the shell of this illusion, and by living again the rhythm of duration through intuition, we can recover the modern man's sense of time. A turn from counting time to feeling time. This was the "revolution of time" advocated by Bergson.