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.
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Notes
Hegel, Lesser Logic, § 163; quoted by J. N. Findlay, Hegel: a Re-examination, Macmillan, New York, 1958, p. 225.
A. N. Whitehead, ‘Autobiographical Notes’, in The Philosophy of Alfred North White-head (ed. by Paul Schilpp ), Northwestern University, Evanston, 1941, p. 7.
V. Jankelevitch in his book Henri Bergson, Presses Universitaires, Paris, 1959, p. 225.
Cf. Bergson’s explicit rejection of nominalism in M.M., pp. 150–151.
A. N. Whitehead, The Principle of Relativity, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1922, Chapter 13 D. Bohm, Causality and Change in Modern Physics, Harper Torchbook, 1961, pp. 164–170
Cf. M. Capek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics, pp. 231–241.
J. J. Baumann, Die Lehre von Raum, Zeit und Mathematik, Berlin 1869, II, pp. 668–671;
F. A. Lange, Logische Studien, Iserlohn 1877, pp. 141ff. The reference to G. Noel is in Bergson, T.F.W., p. 75; that to Paul Du Bois-Reymond Allgemeine Funktionstheorie is in Helmholtz-Schlick, op. cit., p. 72
J. Tannery’s article ‘Principes fondamentaux de l’arithmetique’ is in Halsted’s Introduction to the English translation of Helmholtz’s Counting and Measuring, Van Nostrand, Princeton, 1931, p. I X.
H. Poincare, ‘Les fondements de la geometrie’, The Monist VII (1898) 57.
E. W. Beth and J. Piaget, L’epistemologie mathematique et psychologie, Etudes de psychologie genetique, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1961 [Vol. XIV], p. 112.
Jean Piaget, Genetic Epistemology (Columbia University Press, 1970), p. 12.
L. J. E. Brouwer, ‘Consciousness, Philosophy and Mathematics,’ quoted by E. W. Beth, The Foundations of Mathematics, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1966, p. 618.
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© 1971 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Čapek, M. (1971). Duration as Concrete Universal. Bergson and Croce. In: Bergson and Modern Physics. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3096-0_24
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