Temporal and “Kairic” Categories Applied to Providential History

Abstract

The three-fold system of fundamental temporal categories: “past”, “present”, “future”, helps in defining and concretizing the scheme that contains becoming. According to the basic Bergsonian distinction, the flow of duration being indivisible, time is introduced into the process of becoming by human understanding in order to make possible its divisibility, which is, of course, a “factice” conception, but which results from a typical application of a certain aspect of the Cartesian method (the more complicated the problems faced by the understanding are the more they are susceptible to being solved by analysis. Hence the “revolutionary” conception of Bergson, that time is an invention aiming towards practical activity, whereas duration, which corresponds to the reality of becoming, helps in grasping its meaning theoretically.