Sunday, December 5, 2010

Bergson and Ordinality

Bergson attributes to Duration 'succession', but not 'order'. That is, lived experience is given sequentially, but to assert an ordering relation between any two moments entails a comparison of them, which, according to Bergson, is possible only via an homogenizing abstraction of them from the flow of Duration. Hence, he glosses over another, more fundamental, ordering characteristic of Duration, that can be termed its 'Ordinality'. 'Ordinality' can be defined as the 'earlier-later' character of Duration, also often variously called the 'directionality', the 'asymmetry', or the 'anisotropy' of Time. If he recognizes the Ordinality of Duration, it is not apparent when he seems to affirm that Succession is reversible, or that the contents of Memory can return to the Present upon becoming useful. For, reversibility is antithetical to Ordinality, applicable only to an abstraction from it. For example, an experiential arc from older to younger is imaginable, but it seems impossible to imagine that even that course can be lived from later to earlier, i. e. even older=earlier and younger=later in that imaginary scenario. Furthermore, Bergson's analysis of the process of counting abstracts from its directionality, thereby bypassing an opportunity to better examine its evolutionary nature.

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