metonymy4u

Bergson stated that Kant had confused space and time in a mixture and proposed to advance our understanding of human reason by unmixing them. A deliberately poetic metaphor that begs for some redescription. What I believe Bergson wants to express is the fact that we often measure time by measuring space. And because we believe space is infinitely divisible into innumerable little packets, each one uniformly the same as the other for everyone everywhere in the universe, we therefore also believe the same about time. This model ostensibly helped Kant undermine the 17th century Cartesian notion that thinking substance is essentially separable from material substance. For if, as Kant proposes, space is merely the expression of our external awareness of these innumerable little packets and time merely the internal awareness of the same, then the 17th century dialectic (subjective vs. objective, thinking vs. material substance) devolves upon a cognitive description of homogenous awareness applied to a heterogeneous world of mere appearances. In a manner redolent with Cartesian solipsism, Kant proposes that we offset the instability of a world of experience with the consistency of the manner in which we experience that experience. Property dualism is undone by a description of cognitive monism. How neat.

What Bergson proposes is that we redescribe Kant’s idea of the homogeneity of our intuition of space and time as sets of quantitative heuristic tendencies (our sense of space and time as infinitely divisible) and sets of qualitative heuristic tendencies (our sense of change or “duration”). For Bergson the idea of duration functions to alert us to the distinct character of qualitative metaphors such as the difference between “anger” and “joy.” Such comparisons cannot rest on quantitative descriptions, but are expressed through qualitative comparisons only. Bergson thought that Kant had used his model of space and time to describe our sense of quantity only, mixing them together into an ineffective blend of “quantitative multiplicity” and thereby neglecting our qualitative sense. Thus Kantian space and time become for Bergson the manifold of quantitative understanding only, whereas Bergson’s idea of “true internal time” (duration) becomes the manifold of qualitative understanding. This was the clarification that Bergson hoped to promote by speaking of time and space all mixed up in the mind of old Kant. One might as well describe our sense of constancy (manifolds that can be counted) and our sense of change (manifolds that cannot be counted but only experienced).

After Bergson, two questions then arise: One is in regard to the impact of a model which no longer views space and time as the absolute unchangeable entities that they once were. What happens to our notion of cause and effect when the only identifiable constant in the universe is movement (change)? And furthermore, if nothing can be known as being where we think it is, at a given point in space or time, what can be said to exist? Finally, by redescribing duration (internal sense of change), as something distinct from space (external sense of constancy) doesn’t Bergson just get us into another (inverted) solipsistic trap, like a hole in space that has been neatly turned inside out but which still holds us tightly bound at its quicksand depth?