Henri Bergson

In Henri Bergson's book Creativity, time was indivisible, it was fluid. It wasn't the abstract, quantifiable time of math and science, or of clocks. He used the word "duration" to describe the experience of consciousness. "Duration" allowed for a truer appreciation of the real nature of time, as a flux between past, present and future in the process of becoming which could only ever be intuitively grasped. In our compendiums of understanding the error is to mistake intuition for common sense. The latter is practical and cultural. The former perceives the existence of the quantum level, the tiniest of units, but can't demonstrate it. Evolution for Henri, wasn't mechanistic, it was a pure undetermined explosion. It was an easy idea to love.  And indeed the mathematician Penrose would suggest that consciousness itself emerges when the quantum phenomena of superposition occurs in neurons, the energy exchange is corralled by what are called micro-tubules and last long enough to be the source of what Bergson would have considered our experience of time as fluid rather than the mechanistic clock time of bits that are directed by mathematical formulas.

La grandeur de la France

 

During the Second World War Albert Camus was an editor for a French Resistance newspaper called Combat. Jean-Paul Sartre was captured by the Germans, as a prisoner he read Heidegger, wrote his War Diaries, in 1941 he was released into the public by the Vichy Regime for poor eyesight. Jean Genet, during the second world war, served a number of jail sentences for vagabondage, lewd acts and thieving. I recently subjected Baxter to a crash course on all three writers. Why? He has promised to behave a little longer.

Pollards and Copses

 I do have a slight disagreement with a recent dictionary's understanding of Copse. The coppicing of copses wasn't to make them denser it was irregular harvests of useful hardwoods. Hazel Nut, Chestnut, Ash, Lime, Willow and Alder. This is a picture of Willow.

Ferns have been around for 400 million years

 

Worth recalling Kant as The Philosopher of the Enlightenment. If he had a militaristic subtitle it might have been Dare to Think. In his essay on The Enlightenment he used the phrase Dare to Know. He thought in terms of thinking for oneself as an expression of an individual's maturity.