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To specify what we mean by time, it is sufficient to define it as convergent and divergent movements which persist in a discontinuous succession and change in a continuity of heterogeneous moments. This delimition places time outside mere philosophical theories of time. The sociologist cannot participate in the arguments over the justification nor the abolition of time in favour of eternity which many philosophers from Parmenides and Plato to Hegel have been tempted to do. As a matter of fact, the theories of the "Living eternity" of Plotine, St Augustine, Schelling and Hegel, who reduce human life to divine time, seem only to present the most diffused formulas for the destruction of real time in eternity. Our descriptive definition of time also avoids taking a position on the subject of the primacy of ontological-time or of "consciousness of time". There was a long tradition of identifying time with the "consciousness of time", and the "consciousness of time" with individual consciousness. Even philosophers who have revolutionised the interpretation of the "consciousness of time" by rendering it problematic, as Bergson and Husserl have done, have not been able to break away from idealistic subjectivism. This is why, in Les données immédiates de la conscience, Bergson spoke of the "qualitative duration as seen exclusively by the deeper self" (even when it is understood as a submerged self).

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-20869-2_3

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