Instant or duration? Problematizing and dissolving the time paradox from the quarrel between Bachelard and Bergson

Abstract

If, for Gaston Bachelard, the reality of time is reduced to the present instant, surrounded by two nothings (the past and the future), for Henri Bergson, who is diametrically opposed to Bachelard’s, time is a continuum, an uninterrupted duration. More than that, for Bergson, the only real dimension of time is the past, which extends into the present and opens the door to the future, that is, to the new, to the novelty. Well, based on the quarrel established between these two thinkers about time (added to some other contributions), the present article intends to show how it is possible to dissolve the paradox of time from the deepening of its relationship with matter. This relationship has always been made in the history of philosophy, and even in science (because of the association of time with the movement of things), but never because the riddle of time (after all, as Augustine, we know and we do not know what time is) also depends on the deciphering of what is matter itself, always considered to be of less value by a dualistic metaphysics that still undergroundly dominates thought.