Philosophy
Henri Bergson
1859 – 1941
Duration — lived time — cannot be cut into units without losing what it is. The claim explains why measurement so often flattens the thing it was meant to track.
Read alongside: Stay · Sense
- Start with
- Creative Evolution (1907)
- Where they resist the book
- Bergson distrusts analysis itself. Taken far, that leaves little room for the disciplined critical thinking the book also asks for.
Works worth the time
Creative Evolution · 1907
Where duration is argued at length — why lived time resists being cut into units.
Read further
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Henri Bergson ↗
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Where Bergson appears
Process before substance.
Heraclitus is quoted more often than he is taken seriously. Read as process philosophy rather than aphorism, the river says that things are patterns of change rather than objects that happen to move. Whitehead extends the same claim: what is real is the event, not the thing. An organisation, on this reading, is a rate rather than a structure.