Treating time on the model of space, as divisible units (seconds, instants) laid out side by side; for Bergson a category mistake.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
Spencer and the positivists go wrong by projecting the way they picture space onto time, chopping it into countable units like minutes and instants; time is qualitative, not quantitative.
Put simply Bergson: Spencer and the positivists, who trust only scientific observation, treat time like space, chopping it into countable units such as minutes and instants. That is their mistake. Time is a matter of quality, not quantity.
You cannot spatialize only the past. Lay elapsed time out like space and the future is spread out too, complete behind a screen; contingency vanishes and our acts arrive ready-made.
Put simply Bergson: if you lay out past time like space, you must lay out the future that way too, as if already complete behind a screen. Then nothing is left open, and our actions arrive ready-made.
Intellect is built for inert matter. It measures, categorizes and breaks things into separable pieces from outside; at ease only with the discontinuous and dead, it cannot grasp life.
Put simply Bergson: the intellect is made for lifeless matter. It measures, sorts and breaks things into separate pieces from the outside. At ease only with what is cut up and dead, it cannot grasp life.
Links from these claims to others in the course. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
SpencerThe only knowledge worth the name comes from the sciences; no other source yields anything solid. L7 · 10:48
BergsonSpencer and the positivists go wrong by projecting the way they picture space onto time, chopping it into countable units like minutes and instants; time is qualitative, not quantitative. L7 · 12:40
Spencerian quantifying science treats time like space and so misses lived duration.
BergsonFree will is inseparable from qualitative time: because we live time as an undivided flow, we can act spontaneously, in ways no one could have fixed beforehand. L7 · 23:13
BergsonYou cannot spatialize only the past. Lay elapsed time out like space and the future is spread out too, complete behind a screen; contingency vanishes and our acts arrive ready-made. L7 · 34:24
Spatializing time is the mirror image: it deletes contingency and with it creative agency.
BergsonMechanism treats nature as a machine: isolate each part, understand it, reassemble. Applied to life, that reaches only the parts and yields a thin, derivative picture of the whole. L7 · 28:07
BergsonIntellect is built for inert matter. It measures, categorizes and breaks things into separable pieces from outside; at ease only with the discontinuous and dead, it cannot grasp life. L7 · 39:12
Intellect is the faculty whose analytic partition of matter yields mechanism; fine for machines, blind to life.
GoetheGoethe's charge against Mendelssohn: he treats beauty as an entomologist treats a butterfly, pinning it down until its color pales and nothing living is left. L2 · 46:35
BergsonIntellect is built for inert matter. It measures, categorizes and breaks things into separable pieces from outside; at ease only with the discontinuous and dead, it cannot grasp life. L7 · 39:12
Analytic intellect, like the pinned butterfly, cannot grasp the living wholeOur inference
BergsonIntellect is built for inert matter. It measures, categorizes and breaks things into separable pieces from outside; at ease only with the discontinuous and dead, it cannot grasp life. L7 · 39:12
BeauvoirSexuality, for Beauvoir, cannot be absorbed into the social order: eroticism is "a revolt of the instant against time," and trying to channel or exploit it risks killing it. L16 · 41:15
Shore sees Bergson's influence in Beauvoir's view that live spontaneity cannot be disposed of like inert matter: eroticism is a realm of freedom.
Terms that appear in the same claims.