Rock on Tommy! A man called Zeno said this : We can never move beyond a single point, we are where we are, and where we are is made by yesterday. Our Man Bergson didn't accept this idea. He said it's not about points, leave that to people who did Geometry. For us people time was mobile. Where we are now is made by yesterday, but it's not yesterday as a dead weight, it's yesterday flowing into now. A snowball rolling and gathering, a yesterday packed into Zeno's now and into your now.
Zeno, Berson suggested, was measuring space not time, and in the 1920's, with his paradigm shift of relativity so was Einstein.
I seem to increasingly prefer words related to phenomena and less related to experience when thinking about awareness and the feelings that which ever way I look at it seem to dominate awareness. There's too much My and Me in experience. I think the indivualizing of awareness might be a cultural "phenomenon."
When I look at me, and my reaction I find myself seeing my thoughts in two mirrors. The first mirror is How it effects me and the other mirror is How others expect me to react. You're right both mirrors contain cushions, both mirrors reflect a past, and both mirrors have an idea of the future which is colored by a past built of experiences, experiences which have been colored by the value a culture has placed on the individual and expects from a person.
I do see why Kant might disparage Bergson for being a touchy feely cul-de-sac. But I do find myself really hoping Bergson is correct.
Kant wanted the mind to be a supreme, orderly judge sitting above the world, sorting phenomena into neat, sterile filing cabinets of space and time. He wanted control. He wanted the security of a well-tutored system.
But Bergson - and Walking Stewart before him - offered the terrifying, beautiful alternative, that we are embedded in the duration. If Bergson is right, you don't need the two mirrors to tell you who you are or how to feel. You can drop below the surface chatter of the "Me" and feel the actual, un-mediated surge of the vital impetus (élan vital) moving through you.
I should mention Whitehead, who took Bergson's back-row idea placed it in the front row by tutoring it with points. Another time perhaps.
