Skill and Swimming

As advocating Transience over Permanence, Bergson is often conceived as a successor to Heraclitus, in conflict with the Parmenidean tradition.  Less well-recognized is the partly more ancient antecedents of a different theme: Fluidity vs Discreteness.  The prototype of the former is Thales' Water, and that of the latter is Democritus' Atoms.  For, the representation of the former by the latter exhibits some of the main distortions of Duration as Space.  However, while Water is overt, and Atoms a substratum, for Bergson, it is fluid Duration that is the substratum, with the overt stratum of ordinary Experience constituted by discontinuity.  Now, the reason for this inversion is that he conceives exoteric experience, i. e. the engagement with the environment, as essentially entailing the process of division--selecting from the environment the raw materials for survival.  Thus precluded is the possibility of recognizing fundamentally fluid exoteric experience, the prototype of which is swimming.  Hence, he cannot recognize that fluid motion, i. e. skilled performance, is esoteric to only the unskilled.  Ultimately, it is perhaps because the ancient element with which he associates the human body is Earth, rather than Water--which constitutes 60% of it--that he conceives fluid experience as esoteric.