Notion Of Duration Research Articles

Mapping the notions of the self and the world in the works of Henri Bergson and Nishida Kitarō

Few questions have been discussed more frequently throughout the history of philosophy and across cultures as what it means to realize the self and the world. From the long history of philosophers in both Western and Eastern traditions, there are two figures who notably stand out for their intuitive philosophies of consciousness to grasp the ultimate meaning of the self and the world — Henri Bergson and Nishida Kitarō. Both Bergson and Nishida used the intuitive method which resolutely oriented their philosophies towards the understanding of a unified whole. In this article, I will explore the similarities and points of difference in Bergson and Nishida’s philosophical projects in their attempts to explain the self’s connection with the world. Furthermore, I aim to establish a global history of Bergsonism which shares affinities with the Eastern traditions of thought and religious experience. The notions of duration and absolute nothingness, which Bergson and Nishida both used to express diverse perspectives on the nature of the self and the world, are presented to show how similar their stances are to one another even if the two conceptions have significant differences.

Bergson’s Notion of Duration as Drive

A renewed interest into the philosophy of Bergson in the last decades brings his central notion duration to the fore of lively discussions. This renewed interest certainly has its source in Deleuze’s Bergsonism, where he declared Bergson’s philosophy as an alternative to phenomenology that dominated the philosophical discussions throughout the 20th century. Deleuze’s attempt to put Bergson as an alternative to phenomenology was a protest against the phenomenological tradition, which denounced Bergson’s analysis of duration as it is first developed in Time and Free Will as remaining within the confines of psychological realism and reducing time to a flowing, fluid thing that resides in consciousness. In an attempt to contribute to the Deleuzian interpretation that defends Bergson’s notion of duration against its phenomenological criticisms, I argue in the present study that the notion of duration as developed by Bergson in Time and Free Will can be best interpreted in terms of a Leibnizian notion of force. Following Bergson’s criticism of reduction of time to a homogeneous medium in the work of Kant, I introduce Bergson’s analysis of duration as a drive that prolongs the past of consciousness into its present. In doing this I take a detour through Heidegger’s interpretation of Leibniz’s vis activa as drive.

A Non-Stationary Heat Spell Frequency, Intensity, and Duration Model for France, Integrating Teleconnection Patterns and Climate Change

The warming observed over the past summers since 2000 is unprecedented in climate records in Europe and especially in France. Extreme temperatures and heat spells were often analyzed in the literature by applying extreme value theory but rarely in a non-stationary (NS) framework and duration modeling is often excluded. For a modern risk-based approach, it is important to have knowledge of the duration, magnitude, and frequency of occurrence of heat spells in a climate variability and change context. Yet, despite their obvious importance, teleconnections and associated climate indices (CIs) have often been excluded from heat spell modelling. The notion of duration is also not easily interpretable in a frequency analysis and can even be subtle, especially in a NS context. In this study, we used time-varying statistical distributions with parameters conditional on covariates representing the time and CIs. The daily maximum temperatures (DMTs) observed at the Orange and Dijon stations in France were used as a case study. This paper highlights a possible relationship between some large-scale climate patterns and the heat spells in France. Overall, the results suggest that considering the combined effect of global warming and these patterns in NS models is useful for a more appropriate characterization of the hazard heat spells in France.

Mutual Determination, Concrescence and Transition. Whitehead’s Speculative Conception of Temporal Subjectivity Interpreted from a Merleau-Pontyan Standpoint

The interpretive approach adopted in this paper is influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy and in particular by his understanding of Nature, which in turn takes into consideration Whitehead’s work. Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is seen by its author as the metaphysical generalization of problems found in his investigation of natural knowledge. Whitehead admits that a speculative approach is necessitated by the very questions arising from the mathematical concepts of the material world and the revolutions undergone in logic, mathematics and physics at the turn of the century.Whitehead’s understanding of nature is framed from the beginning in terms of a processual approach. However, this notion of process is not fully worked out in the epistemological works and requires a metaphysical deepening. This is due to the fact that the notion of duration adopted in the epistemological works is not sufficient to convey the notion of process. This lack of adequacy is coupled by Whitehead with the need to interpret process in terms of experience. In turn, this notion of experience is wider than the usual one, for it implies that there is experience from the lowest levels onwards. Matter itself experiences. Seen in this perspective, reality is thus conceived in terms of a whole in constant change, whose parts are in mutual connection. This conception derives from Whitehead’s criticism of Aristotle’s substantialism and from his preference for a relationist ontology. The outcome of this approach is a speculative conception of reality in terms of a twofold notion of process: concrescence and transition, which Whitehead sees as the two faces of the creative advance of nature. This dual notion of process is interpreted in this essay in a merleau-pontyan perspective.

Disseminating Time: Durations, Configurations, and Chance

This essay addresses time’s dissemination both in the sense of an undoing or fracturing of unifying conceptions of time, as well as in the sense of ‘scattering seeds’ by conceiving of manifold temporalizing configurations of living beings, things, and events without an overarching sense of time. After a consideration of traditional conceptions of time, this essay explores the notion of duration in Bergson in order to make it fruitful for thinking duration without centering it in human consciousness. The author suggests that we can begin to think the temporal happening of things and events in terms of different temporal configurations of various degrees and qualities of complexity that may be occasioned by chance, whereby chance is understood as the freeing of time-spaces of indeterminacy in which temporal configurations take shape or manifest themselves.1

The Trace of Time: A Critique of Vitalism

This article develops Derrida's logic of the trace in relation to the concept of time and the revival of various forms of vitalism. Through a critical interrogation of Bergson's notion of duration, I show how the logic of the trace articulates an originary co-implication of time and space, which also entails a co-implication of the animate and the inanimate, the event and the machine. Refuting any vitalist conception of life, the deconstructive logic of the trace allows one to reckon with the philosophical implications of Darwinism.

Generating subjectivity through the creation of time.

Time has been revived in psychoanalysis, especially in relation to infant research. This paper builds on ideas of time and rhythm from psychoanalysis by integrating Bergson’s notions of duration and affect and queer theories’ ideas of cultural spaces. Together, these theories create a vision of development as an ongoing process of affect regulation based in the emerging capacities to gather time. Here bodies come into being as they are produced in social spaces even as these bodies then reshape those social spaces. Thus, this theory integrates the cultural. These ideas will be demonstrated through a close reading of a case study of 18 years of one woman’s diaries. These diaries tell a story of a childhood shaped by invasive and abusive parents followed by an adult life marked by intimate partner violence and bulimia. Focusing on three specific entries like one would examine moments in a session, this paper will track how the diarist demonstrates an emerging capacity to recognize, regulate, and experience affect as she is able to gather and rearrange time in her diaries.

On Semantic Peculiarities of Secondary Imperfective Verbs in Russian: Their In/Compatibility with the Notions of Duration and Completion

On Semantic Peculiarities of Secondary Imperfective Verbs in Russian: Their In/Compatibility with the Notions of Duration and Completion

Time and Authenticity

This essay reexamines the history of the preservation discourse that linked a monument’s authenticity to the conservation of its patina. It puts this discourse in a broader intellectual context in order to show it to be related to changes in the Western cultural understanding of time, which were partially brought about by Henri Bergson’s notion of duration. The idea that the nature of objects was to be in a state of perpetual change put into crisis the practice of restoring buildings to a past frozen moment in time and gave rise to the conservation of monuments in their “as found” condition. Important European preservation theorists such as Cesare Brandi, Paolo Torsello, Piero Sanpaolesi, and Paul Philippot debated how to express aesthetically the idea that monuments constantly change over time, despite being under a strict conservation regime. Their answers relied on the cleaning of surfaces and the limit of what was considered acceptable visual change. Their collective discourse theorized the patina as a discursive surface where preservationists were called on to express architecture’s existence in time.

Time for Memory: Beyond Spatial Metaphors?

This article is a continuous dialogue on memory triggered by Brockmeier’s (2010) article. I drift away from the conventionalization of the archive as a spatial metaphor for memory in order to consider the greater possibility of “time” for conceptualizing memory. The concept of time is central to understanding the nature of human experience as a process in which a constant flux of change in organism, cultural and social practices is observed. Two categories of time have been explored, firstly the Aristotelian, physical time for an experimental paradigm, and secondly, the way in which we experience time in terms of autobiographical memory. The second category of time is discussed, drawing on Augustine and Bergson amongst others. Bergson’s notion of duration has been considered as a promising concept for a better understanding of autobiographical memory. Psychological phenomena such as autobiographical memory should embrace not only spatial dimension, but also a temporal dimension, in which a constant flow of irreversible time, where multiplicity, momentarily, dynamic stability and becoming and emergence of novelty can be observed.

The (dis)location of time and space: Trans-cultural collaborations in Tokyo

ABSTRACTThis collaborative article explores the (dis)location of time and space as experienced by the authors while collaborating with Japanese theatre company Gekidan Kaitaisha (Theatre of Deconstruction), and through the authors' own project: ‘Site Memory Mapping Project: Tokyo Marathon Walk’ (2012). Through discussing these projects in detail, the authors attempt to reflect the complexity of multiple perspectives within cross-cultural collaborations and to frame such collaborations as acts that allow transformation of the self. Drawing upon Henri Bergson's notion of duration, time is discussed in terms of its non-linear temporality, and as it is experienced spatially within the performer body and in Kaitaisha signature practices. The article locates the authors as operating in, and dislocated by, time and space, in a geographical, spatial, cultural, philosophical and performative sense. They argue that through the performative practices, and the cultural and temporal/spatial located experiences they discuss, the self transforms/forms in the temporal/spatial specificity of the action.

Cohabiting in Time: Towards an ecology of rhythm

Most accounts of rhythm focus on notions of duration, pulse and metre, to explore the practices and constructs by which those involved in music performances co-ordinate their involvement. Yet there is a significant body of musical practice where sounds co-habit in time, without the same sorts of constraints found in metric co-ordination: from the gentle singing of Joseph Beuys during his Action Piece I Like America and America Likes Me, to Paul McCartney's song ‘Blackbird’. This is similar, say, to the improvisation practice of composer and trombonist George Lewis in his work with the computer programme Voyager. Starting from some ideas laid out by Gaston Bachelard and Gregory Bateson, and recent writings on critical post-humanism, this paper explores ways of considering ecologies of sounds in time, and their consequences for human musical experience.

Moving between Images: The Orchestration of Diverse Time-space Constructs in Fine Art Practice

This paper discusses how the image can be thought in the context of contemporary fine art practice. Drawing from the author’s practical and theoretical engagement with image making, it explores how the juxtaposition of diverse fine art media contributes to a differentiated appreciation of the time-space relation and how the dialectic of absence and presence of figuration relates to movement and assists the experience of nomadic dwelling. Emphasis will be put on the temporal qualities of the image and its material presentations in space; this applies to the physicality of painting, but also to the screen presence of video or the spatial organization of photographic images. The orchestration of diverse time-space constructs will be considered in relation to Bergson’s notion of duration as multiplicity, Deleuze’s metaphor of the crystal image, Husserl’s concept of simultaneous time flows and Birnbaum’s appraisal of the phenomenology of multi-screen video installations.

The time of activity

This essay analyzes the time of human activity. It begins by discussing how most accounts of action treat the time of action as succession, using Donald Davidson's account of action as illustration. It then argues that an adequate account of action and its determinants, one able to elucidate the ``indeterminacy of action,'' requires an alternative conception of action time. The remainder of the essay constructs a propitious account of the time and determination of action. It does so by critically drawing on Henri Bergson's notion of duration and Martin Heidegger's notion of the teleological dimensionality (past, present, and future) of existence. Whereas Bergson provides valuable insights into the continuity of activity, Heidegger illuminates the determination of action. Combining their insights yields an account of the time of activity that supplements succession with a nonsuccessive temporality: the time of activity is an overlapping continuum of action performances each of which is structured as coming towards an end starting from a motivating state of affairs. The essay concludes with brief thoughts on what justifies calling the nonsuccessive dimensionality of existence a kind of time.

The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves by Tobias Smollett

61 Locke’s notion of duration as the space between two ideas. Nonetheless, I strongly recommend Mr. Campbell’s book as an indispensable introduction to a subject that promises to haunt Sterne criticism for a long time. Garry Sherbert University of Regina TOBIAS SMOLLETT. The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, ed. Robert Folkenflik and Barbara Laning Fitzpatrick. Athens: Georgia, 2002. Pp. liv ⫹ 314. $50. Although Sir Launcelot Greaves has been ‘‘not the most heralded’’ of Smollett’s works, it has, however, always had special interest. Formalconsiderationscenteraround Smollett’s translation of Don Quixote (1755), both literary/allusive and contemporary social/satirical. And Smollett’s publishing the novel in twenty-five chapter-length installments (1760–1761) gives it an important place in the history of serial publication. Mr. Folkenflik’s Introduction situates the novel in the present century. The biographical background is concisely summarized; and the section on influences, alert and informative. He locates the novel insightfully in the tradition of Jonson’s ‘‘verbal excess,’’ and alongside Fielding’s hyperliterary satire (his 1734 play Don Quixote in England is recognized as an intermediary source). He notes the relevance of Hogarth’s contemporary prints and the overriding influence of Cervantes. (And all of these identifications are systematically followed up in the Notes.) The six pages on contemporary politics are essential to an understanding of the fulminations of the party-writer Ferret in the novel, the famous election chapter, the scenes in the private asylum, and much besides. The protracted discussion of Anthony Walker’s two illustrations seems less relevant. The two sections on ‘‘Composition, Printing, and Reception’’ and ‘‘Form, Character, and Themes’’ are disappointing. In the first, Mr. Folkenflik cannot resist the editor’s temptation to push conjecture into probability—even while reproving others for doing the same, as when he rejects ‘‘Scott’s questionable anecdote’’ about the novel’s hasty composition. If ‘‘details concerning the composition of Sir Launcelot Greaves are difficult to ascertain,’’leave it at that. And conjectures about Walker’s illustrations feature here, too. The pages on the reception of Greaves reveal Mr. Folkenflik’s refusal to engage at any but the most perfunctory level with the critical response to the novel. An editor has some duty toward how the text is received, and here Mr. Folkenflik has been surprisingly negligent. The single paragraph he devotes to twentieth-century readings of Greaves is both bland and incomplete, ignoring for example my treatment of thenovel’s language in Tobias Smollett: A Study in Style (1977) and John Valdimir Price’s suggestive essay in Alan Bold’s Tobias Smollett, Author of the First Distinction (1982). Although Mr. Folkenflik remarks that ‘‘the language of Sir Launcelot Greaves . . . has always been considered one of its genuine triumphs,’’he never explains or justifies this claim. His Notes fill fifty pages. Many are lexical, a large number devoted to the nautical jargon of Captain Crowe, with reference to Falconer’s 1780 Universal Dictionary of the Marine. When one recalls that what Smollett calls Crowe’s ‘‘unconnectedexplosion 62 of sea-terms’’ was fashioned for its incongruous display of outlandish idiolect, is such diligence a virtue? The same could be said of Ferret’srhetoricaltriumphasmountebank; the Jonsonian obfuscation deliberately blows sand in the reader’s face, and the thirty learned notes here are the inflation ad absurdum of academic commentary. Notes on medical and legal jargon, and research on place-names are more rewarding (the editor follows Roger Hambridge’s heroic attempt, in a 1977 PhD, to plot the novel’s itinerary, town by town), as is the commentary which is maintained on the intertextual play with Cervantes himself, Shakespeare, Fielding, Hogarth, and others. There is one note that I must take issue with. Mr. Folkenflik baldly announces, ‘‘Smollett was a slave-owner.’’This unadorned comment obscures the fact that Smollett acquired slaves with his Creole wife’s dowry, which were sold very shortly afterwards. Alongside the compendious apparatus of this text, was there no room for this mitigating circumstance? Damian Grant University of Manchester DUSTIN GRIFFIN. Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002. Pp. x ⫹ 316. $60. Mr. Griffin’s earlier book, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (1996), demolishes the persistent...

Bergson and Russian Modernism, 1900-1930

This study focuses on the Russian modernist attraction to Bergson's notions of duration and intuition, his unbridled optimism in both art and life, and his belief in the individual's creative power to perceive and participate in a constantly changing, dynamic universe. In an intriguing conclusion that addresses present-day concerns, Fink explores the significance of Bergsonian thought for post-Communist Russia as it continues its creative evolution into the next century.

From the Third Republic to Postmodernism: Language, Freedom, and the Politics of the Contingent

principles. It is this alleged contradiction between democracy and liberty which presides over the marriage of anti-rationalism and right-wing politics and allows the newlyweds to embrace Bergsonism. Louis Pinto goes further than the critics cited above, asserting that the philosophical terminology Bergson deploys in his doctoral thesis, Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience (1889), is in fact a cryptopolitical discourse (Pinto 1984, 28). That treatise was instrumental in reinvigorating French philosophical spiritualism and thus could become an important weapon in the arsenal of the Right in the debates of the 1890s about the role of the intellectual.7 In it the philosopher responds to the claims of both positivism, in its mechanist and associationist branches, and Kantianism with its assertion of a moral freedom in the world of the thing in itself' outside the domain of temporality, by developing his notion of duration according to which contingency was tantamount to a freedom opposed not only to any determinism, but to any universal law in general. His basic argument is that human action can neither be predicted in advance nor subsumed under any general law, because to do so one would have to translate mental states into some language, and any language necessarily deals only with generalized abstractions: words are like numbers or algebraic notation in that they can be applied to anything 7In fact, as Charlton has demonstrated, spiritualism remained alive in French philosophy throughout the nineteenth century, even in the heyday of French positivism during the Second Empire (17-19). 787 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.162 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 04:50:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Wet and dry epoch durations of spatially averaged rain rate, their probability distributions and scaling properties

This article is concerned with the notion of duration of wet and dry epochs in stochastic processes of spatially averaged (instantaneous) rain rate over a given region. Gamma, Lognormal, and Inverse Gaussian parametric families of probability distributions have been considered as candidate models for the distribution of such durations. Goodness of these model's fit to data of dry and wet epoch durations obtained from real time series of spatially averaged rain rate, has been tested with Pearson's \(\chi ^2\)-test. The parameters of each of these models have been estimated by maximum likelihood and method of moments, based on TOGA-COARE measurements of tropical rainfall. The hypotheses of independence and identical distribution (i.i.d.) among durations of dry or wet epochs have also been tested using a certain version of the Wald-Wolfowitz test. Finally, the effect of spatial scale on the moments of dry and wet epoch durations has also been investigated, pointing to self-similarity of the underlying random structures over space. The main result of this study is that among the three candidate models, Inverse Gaussian is the one conforming most adequately with all the classical testing criteria implemented here, and also with the newly established scaling behavior of both dry and wet epoch duration processes over space. This is a remarkable finding, considering that the Inverse Gaussian family has recently been also justified from a theoretical viewpoint as a reasonable model for the probability distributions of dry and wet epoch durations.

God, Time and Helm

In much modem thinking, God is eternal only in the sense that he has no beginning or end. I reject that view. But I also reject what is sometimes taken to be the only genuine alternative to it—the suggestion that God is timeless, where ‘timeless’ includes ‘having no temporal location’ (i.e. existing at no moment of time) and ‘lacking duration’. I think we should speak of God existing at moments of time and having duration. In what follows I shall try to indicate why by focusing on one of the most recent statements to the contrary—Paul Helm’s new book Eternal God.On Helm’s account, to call God ‘eternal’ is to say that ‘There is for him no past and no future. It makes no sense to ask how long God has existed, or to divide up his life into periods of time. He possesses the whole of his life at once; it is not lived successively’ (p. 24). God’s timeless eternity, says Helm, is to ‘be explained in terms of time-freeness, where the only questions of simultaneity and non-simultaneity are quoad nos, and from which both the notions of duration and instantaneousness are banished’ (p. 36).Some have urged that the equation of eternity with timelessness leads to insoluble problems for the theist. According to Anthony Kenny, for instance, it means that God is simultaneous with distinct temporal events, which are therefore simultaneous with each other. Such is also the opinion of Richard Swinburne.