Duration as Concrete Universal. Bergson and Croce

Abstract

This, of course, does not mean that Bergson is a Platonist; his duration is a concrete universaland as such akin to the Aristotelian or Hegelian view. As hinted above, Ingarden is fair enough to recognize that Bergson’s polemic was intended only against those ‘forms’ and ‘essences’ which were artificially separated from their concrete, dynamic content and whose fictitiously static character is due precisely to their being artificially ‘lifted’ out of the stream of experience. Ingarden thus entirely agrees with Bergson’s criticism of the view which regards the ‘essence’ of a certain thing as a mere average of its successive, static snapshots; the real ‘essence’ of ‘form’ of duration is inherent in and temporally co-extensive with its dynamic content. He correctly points out that Bergson’s criticism of the idea of absolute disorder, the criticism which implies that there is no reality completely devoid of order or structure, requires that even the dynamic processes, that is, duration itself, have a certain ‘order’, a certain ‘structure’, a certain recognizable, universal whatness, the correct grasping of which is one of the main goals of Bergson’s epistemology.¹This implication of his own thought was overlooked by Bergson when in the fourth chapter of Creative Evolutionhe claimed that the idea of ‘becoming in general’ is always necessarily inadequate.