A quotation from Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson

1859 CE – 1941 CE

He argued that the time we live is nothing like the time we measure, and that philosophy had confused the two for two thousand years.

Bergson's central argument is simple and strange: time as we live it (durée, duration) has nothing in common with the time science measures. Clock time is space. It is a grid we lay over the flow of lived experience to make it countable, predictable, manageable. The real thing, the thing that constitutes our inner life and makes change possible, is not divisible or measurable at all. It can only be grasped by intuition: not a vague feeling but a philosophical method, a way of entering into the thing rather than walking around it. He applied this to evolution in Creative Evolution, arguing that life is not mechanistically determined but animated by an élan vital that philosophy must learn to trace. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927, the first philosopher to do so. He refused a special exemption from anti-Jewish laws in occupied Paris in 1940, and stood in the registration line with everyone else. He died of pneumonia a few months later.