Waiting for Sugar to Melt Bergson, "Creative Evolution" Time Shows the Shape of Life Late 19th Early 20th Century

Waiting for Sugar to Melt Bergson, "Creative Evolution" Time Shows the Shape of Life Late 19th Early 20th Century

When sugar is put into water, we must wait a certain amount of time for it to dissolve completely. You can stir it, but you cannot skip the process. This simple fact is an important metaphor for the time of life and consciousness. The completion of the sugar water cannot be understood by any amount of analysis of positional relationships and simultaneity, but only by undertaking the process itself.

What this metaphor demonstrates is that the time of life is different from the time of a human-like clock. Clock time is treated as something that can be separated like space and can be sped up or sped back. The process of sugar dissolving, however, cannot be omitted. Every state along the way has meaning, and cutting out only the beginning and the end does not capture the essence of the phenomenon.

The same is true of life and consciousness. When moving from one state to the next, there is always time to wait, and there are changes that occur only during that time. No matter how precisely we describe the elements and spatial arrangements that exist simultaneously, we cannot explain the process of change itself. What is important is not the result, but the process that leads to it.

From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, the concepts of irreversible processes and entropy appeared in physics, and the view of time as a mere reversible measure began to be shaken. At the same time, in the fields of philosophy and psychology, there was a shared awareness of the problem that the flow and persistence of consciousness could not be explained in terms of spatialized time. The sugar-water metaphor served as an intuitive illustration of the temporal qualities of life in this intellectual context.

The act of waiting does not mean doing nothing. Rather, it is to accept time as it is, with generation in progress. Life is an entity that lives in time that cannot be shortened or replaced, and its essence resides in the process itself. Just as sugar quietly dissolves, life continues to change its form in the time it waits.