Note on 2 aspects of time

"These moments that are given are a gift from time".

The sense that the moment, as opposed to the event which is a different but complimentary aspect of time, is a stalling before irreversibility, before the event. These stallings are a key element of duration as Bergson described. What is the relationship of the two aspects?

Duration is essentially the 'continuation of what no longer exists into what does exist'. Ansell Pearson citing Bergson in Germinal Life, p. 34

The nature of that continuation is not as a deterministic sequence of states, but more like the debris of a previous condition the totality of which is lost in the transition and hence not traceable. The moment is determined by the past and the future, its relation to the event that disurpts it, by a qualitative loss, an untraceable and non-determinstic causation.

That Bergson's method of intuition claims to be ethical it is in its engagement with other durations as such stallings, indeterminacies facing irreversibility. But more, it is in opposition to the tracing of present states back to deterministic causal reifications. The state arrives through its loss, forgetting as Nietzsche claims, of the complex conditions out of which it emerged.

Robert O'Toole : 14 May 2004 20:10 |  Tags: Philosophy Research Transversality Transversality |  Comments (4) |  Report a problem