Clocks That Can Be Rewound and Life That Cannot Be Unwound Bergson, "Creative Evolution," late nineteenth/early twentieth century.

Clocks That Can Be Rewound and Life That Cannot Be Unwound Bergson, "Creative Evolution," late nineteenth/early twentieth century.

Time, as used by humans, is understood as something that can be divided and arranged like space and returned to as needed. Like the hands of a clock returning to the same position, the past and present are compared side by side and treated within a framework suitable for management and measurement. The time of life, however, is essentially different from this human time. The time of life is irreversible; it never returns to the same state twice. Even if its outward appearance and functions seem to repeat themselves, changes always accumulate inside it, and the past does not disappear but continues to live on, folded inside the present. This difference in the view of time became strongly felt in both philosophy and the natural sciences from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. In physics, the concepts of entropy and irreversible processes were emerging, and it was being shown that time was not merely a reversible coordinate. Against this
background, the question of explaining life in terms of spatialized time emerged. Human time is useful for isolating, reproducing, and controlling events, but phenomena such as the growth, aging, and evolution of life can only be understood in the context of a continuous flow of change. Life is not an entity placed in time, but an entity that continues to flow as time itself, and its understanding depends more on reading how the past lives in the present than on predicting the future.