Sur la pluralité des temps

 

[With apologies to Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686). ]

A historian writes, that our modern sense of Time is no older than the industrialism of the United States;  though Time, to be sure, itself is rather older.

How does this fit in with the Bergsonian dichotomy of temps vesus durée (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1889) ?

 

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Note:

Newton himself, not concerned with psychology,  conflates the two:

Absolute, true, mathematical time, of itself and from its nature, without relation to anything exernal, flows equally; and its other name is duration.

-- Principia Mathematica

 

In histories of science, that passage may be cited in distinction to Einstein’s relativistic doctrines.  But one historian notes a caveat well prior to relativity:

 

Somehow Newton failed to see the circularity of this definition.  It has become clear since his day  that his concept of uniform (“equal”) flow of time  was redundant, since it is impossible to give any meaning to such an assertion of uniformity  unless the concept of time is already established.

-- Lloyd Taylor, Physics: the Pioneer Science (1941)

In the context of Relativity, self-standing Time  is abolished altogether:

 

“Raum für sich  und Zeit für sich  sollen völlig zu Schatten herabsinken, und nur noch eine Art Union der beiden soll Selbständigkeit bewahren.” (Minkowski, 1909)

(“Independent Space and Time  must sink into the shadowland”.)

 

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Temps (the usual word for ‘time” in French) is a feature of physics;  durée (lit. ‘duration’), a feature of lived experience, of the mind.

The former experienced its own bifurcation into (absolute) Newtonian time, and (relative to the observer) Einsteinian or Relativistic time.  Though cognitively uncomfortable to the many, at the time of its introduction, after a bit of familiarity  it all fits comfortably into basic math and physics, the former being simply a limiting case of the latter.   (Similarly, the intelletual scandal of the discovery of Non-Euclidean Geometry  was eventually digested, with the Euclidean being a sort of limiting case of the Spherical and the Hyperbolic.)

So now (per our historian) we must wrestle with a new entity:  Taylorized time -- time cut into lengths by the stop-watch brandished by a steely-eyed time-and-motion man, seeking to squeeze the last ounce (excuse me -- millilitre) out of the workforce.

Since that has nothing to do with physics, it is no contribution to our understanding of temps, but is rather a new take on durée, varying historically and culturally.

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Footnote:  I have always been a bit puzzled by Proust’s title A la recherche du temps perdu.   How shall we characterize his use of temps here?  One subtlety:  its implications and connotations evolve in the course of the novel.   A literal translation, In Search of Lost Time, sounds trivial, terrible.  Translator Scott-Moncrieff neatly skirted the problem with his resort to the Shakespearian Remembrance of Things Past.

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For further pensées concerning Time, from both literature and from physics, try these:

=>  https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/time