Time in a mirror. History of the Idea of Time in the Writing of Henri Bergson

Abstract

The question posed by Bergson is why the depth of perception and the continuity of time that we experience inside us is so confined and delimited by signs, symbols, or ideas that we use to represent the world that we perceive? His hypothesis is that philosophy and science have weakened throughout their history the power of the vital current represented by time and memory. The objective of Henri Bergson is to defend the need to go back to a metaphysics that links in the same durée the eternal time of the idea and the fluidity of vital and bodily time. His methodology is to revisit the history of the idea of time and the conception of philosophers about it and their resistance to discovering the durée under the idea of time.