List, Gary "For Bergson, measurable clock-time is just a useful illusion that chops up something that can’t really be so chopped"
This is precisely correct. Time, as in standard (as with language), is merely an "index" (in the general sense) and is entirely aspoteriori. Now living time, as you call it, is what we call age and there's obviously something to that but it has naught to do with "standard" (symbolic) measurements. Not in truth. Just thought I'd "co-sign" that sentiment (working on a much more different topic off-list for the list, hopefully, as soon as is possible — cannot present it without certain work carried out). Best Jack ________________________________ From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Gary Richmond <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, July 14, 2025 2:27 AM To: Peirce List <[email protected]> Subject: [PEIRCE-L] Alan Watts, Henri Bergson, and Charles Peirce (ans St. Augustine) on Time List, As I not infrequently have, I'm again thinking about 'lived' -- as opposed to 'mathematical' -- time. I've recently begun reviewing some of the writings of Alan Watts (I was once enamored of his thinking and, so, read all his books in my 20's) and came upon this snippet: “We must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present. That now is the creative point of life. So you see it's like the idea of forgiving somebody, you change the meaning of the past by doing that. . . Also watch the flow of music. The melody as it is expressed is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence [is]. . . you wait till later to find out what the sentence means." Alan Watts This made me think that -- coming from very different philosophical traditions and positions -- Watts, Peirce, and Henri Bergson all challenge the idea that time is a chain of instants. Watts, drawing on Zen and Taoist ideas, argues that the present is centrally involved in a kind of living, flowing 'wave', the present not being a thin 'slice' of time, but the center of an unfolding process. Trying to pin it down, he holds, tends to kill its reality. Peirce agrees that the “instant” is but a mathematical fiction. For him, real time always has 'thickness' -- what he calls the triadic moment is for Peirce the 'minimum' of time, i.e., the smallest unit of lived time (and perhaps not only lived time) where the past flows into the present and reaches toward the future. This flow is vital to how signs and meaning unfold, every moment involving traces of what came before and, shall we say, 'hints' at what’s to come. Bergson’s famous idea of durée (duration) also holds that real time is an indivisible, qualitative flow — like a melody you hear as a whole, not as separate notes (both Peirce and Watts at times also use musical metaphors for time's flow). For Bergson, measurable clock-time is just a useful illusion that chops up something that can’t really be so chopped. In the end, all three argue that lived time, real time (in Peirce's sense of reality), is continuous, alive, and in many cases, felt, that it is never just a series of 'points on a line'. I'd be interested in forum members' thoughts on this idea of time. However, I always think of St. Augustine's comment on reflecting on time: "What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I do not know.” Best, Gary R
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