Abstract

We speak of a person's "sense of time." But what is that sense? If there is no immediate point of departure for a scientific analysis, how can the experience be grasped at all? Because of its relative imperviousness to scientific scrutiny, temporal experience has long been the subject of philosophical investigation. For example, the writings of French philosopher, Henri Bergson, became fashionable because of his romantic view that time reflects our creative participation in the evolution of the cosmos. He called the thrust of this evolution "l'elan vitale", and he considered it a metaphysical force that can be intuited through the undifferentiated awareness of temporal duration.