"Bergson was irritated, and not just by the woman's discourteous tone. In so many of his writings and lectures, he had returned to the idea that rigid concepts fail to convey the fluidity of reality. So to be put on the spot and forced to translate the nuances of his finespun developments into a punchy catchphrase felt nothing short of insulting. The woman did not seem to notice his annoyance and impatiently awaited his response."
"We have no record of how Bergson arrived at durée, a complicated idea, arguably his most important one. In Bergson's own telling, all of the doubts, questions, and ideas that had been bubbling up in the years since he left Paris had crystallized in Clermont-Ferrand in one fateful moment: "One day when I was explaining the sophisms of Zeno of Elea to my students on the blackboard, I began to see more clearly in which direction I should look.""
A mid-1910s lecture at the Collège de France ended with a woman demanding a brief statement of Bergson's philosophy; he replied, "I simply argue, Madam, that time is not space." Durée, the central notion, defines time as a flowing qualitative process rather than a spatialized metric and underpins his reputation. Bergson traced the insight to a moment in Clermont-Ferrand while explaining Zeno's sophisms on a blackboard, when doubts and ideas crystallized. The anecdote situates the emergence of durée amid teaching, intellectual perplexity, and the image of dark clouds gathering around extinct volcanoes outside the classroom.
Read at Apaonline
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