Horkheimer rejected Bergson’s durée for homogenizing time and erasing suffering

Evidence

Horkheimer supported Bergson’s distinction between “experienced” time and the abstract time of the natural scientists. But, he quickly added in qualification, Bergson had been mistaken in trying to write a metaphysics of temporality. In so doing he had been led to an idea of time as duree (duration), which was almost as abstract and empty as that of the natural sciences. To see reality as an uninterruptible flow was to ignore the reality of suffering, aging, and death. It was to absolutize the present and thus unwittingly repeat the mistakes of the positivists. True experience, Horkheimer argued, resisted such homogenization. The task of the historian was to preserve the memory of suffering and to foster the demand for qualitative historical change. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 213

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School’s overarching critique of positivism, abstract temporality, and Benjamin/Adorno’s later themes of the memory of suffering in history. — connects to: Leibniz and Bergson treated temporality as mere immanent continuity; Bergson’s vitalism rejects both mechanistic and finalist accounts of evolution; Bergson’s durée fails to theorize the genuinely new and unpredictable — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 248

Broader Connections

• Bergson’s vitalism rejects both mechanistic and finalist accounts of evolution #responds-to (0.72)