QuestionsDoes time really exist?Clock time is spatialised time; real time is lived duration
Does time really exist?Time really passes

Clock time is spatialised time; real time is lived duration

Bergson's duration

Henri Bergson 1859 · 1941The free act springs from our whole personality: lived duration cannot be cut up like space.
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What it claims

Real time is duration: a qualitative continuity that flows, where the past extends into the present. The time of clocks is only its spatial symbol.

Why

Clock time lines up moments like points in space; lived time is a flow of changes that melt into one another.

The same idea through history
Henri Bergson1889In chapter II of his doctoral thesis, Bergson distinguishes pure duration (quality, fusion) from the homogeneous time of clocks (quantity, juxtaposition).
Henri Bergson1889Chapter III of the same thesis applies this distinction to freedom: the free act takes place in time as it flows, not in time that has flowed.
Henri Bergson1922In Duration and Simultaneity, Bergson takes the idea up against Einstein's theory of relativity: duration is a continuation of what is no more in what is.
In short

"Clock time is spatialised time; real time is lived duration" is an argument by Henri Bergson (Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience), 1889, ch. II, 1889) on the question "Does time really exist?" (answer: time really passes). Its claim: Real time is duration: a qualitative continuity that flows, where the past extends into the present. The time of clocks is only its spatial symbol. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience), 1889, ch. II
Valid with an implicit premise

Listen to a tune. You do not hear one note, then another, then another, each neatly separate: each note is coloured by those before it, and the phrase unfolds in one piece. For Bergson, that is real time. When we measure it with a watch, we replace it, without noticing, by a line of points, as if time were space. This line is useful for science, but it is only an image. Real time is the duration we live, and we experience it directly.

P1To count moments, we line them up and set them side by side like points that are kept in a medium. The time of clocks, 'homogeneous time', is thus spatialised time: a fourth dimension of space.
P2The time we live, pure duration, is not a series of points: it is a succession of qualitative changes that melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, with no affiliation with number, like the notes of a tune.
P3So homogeneous time is nothing but the ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness: a translation of duration into space.
P4 · implicit premiseWhat we live directly is real, and a translation cannot be more real than what it translates: the real is lived duration.
So real time is duration: a qualitative continuity that flows, where the past extends into the present. The time of clocks is only its spatial symbol.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, one could accept everything else and answer that lived duration is only a state of our brain, and that the time measured by clocks is the time of the world. This is what Einstein will say: there is a physical, objective time, and a psychological time that depends on it.
The argument is valid. P1 and P2 contrast two times: the one we count (spatial) and the one we live (qualitative). P3 concludes that the first is derived, an image projected onto the second. P4, the hidden premise, says the source is more real than the copy. So real time is duration.
Analogy. A score on the table lets you count everything: notes, bars, durations. But it is not the music. The music is the listening, in lived time. For Bergson, the watch is the score and duration is the music.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Albert Einstein 1922 · attacks the conclusion

At the meeting of the Société française de philosophie in Paris in April 1922, Einstein answers Bergson that the time of the philosophers cannot differ from that of the physicists: it is the same. One starts from intuitive time, the feeling of the order of our states of consciousness, but one must then reach an objective time, that of physics.

a defender replies
see the argument
Henri Bergson defender of the argument · 1922
Bergson holds that any real time is a lived time, or one that could be lived. The other times of relativity, those of fictitious observers, are attributed times and not lived time. So there is only one real time.
Where the debate stands (our summary)The two men only half understand each other. Einstein holds that the time of physics, measured by clocks, is the only objective time and that lived time is tied to it. Bergson holds that the time of physics is a constructed time, which presupposes lived time. The debate is about what is called 'real': the measurable or the lived.
Bertrand Russell 1912 · attacks premise 1

Russell holds that Bergson ignores modern mathematics. For him, a continuous motion can be perfectly represented by a series of points, provided there is always another point between any two: a cinematograph with an infinite number of films, never a next film, would perfectly represent a continuous motion.

a defender replies
H
Herbert Wildon Carr defender of the argument · 1913
Carr replies that the mathematical definition of continuity may remove the ground of Zeno's argument, but does not remove the paradox in the idea of movement itself. Bergson may be right or wrong, but he offers a solution of a paradox, whereas Russell, in Carr's view, offers a choice of paradoxes.
Bertrand Russell 1913
Russell admits that Carr's impression (of being left with a greater paradox) is partly the fault of his own way of putting things. He adds that this impression, which Carr shares with many philosophers, comes mainly from fallacious inferences drawn almost unconsciously about infinity and continuity.
Where the debate stands (our summary)The two camps are not quite talking about the same thing. Russell shows that a series of points can represent continuous motion without contradiction. Bergson and Carr answer that what matters is the experience of motion and duration, which this representation leaves out. Core disagreement: what a good theory of time must explain.
John McTaggart 1908 · attacks the conclusion

McTaggart holds that time does not exist. For him, time requires events to be past, present or future, and he judges that this way of ordering them is contradictory. If that is right, the lived duration Bergson defends cannot be a real time.

no reply
see the argument
We have not yet found a direct reply by Bergson in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) We have found no reply from Bergson to McTaggart. A Bergsonian would say that McTaggart reasons about time already spatialised, with 'past' and 'future' points set in a series, not about lived duration (P1, P3).