Tendency and Time

This chapter addresses the temporal sense of Ravaisson’s notion of tendency and inclination, in showing how it implies a notion of duration, as a non-linear, non-quantifiable lived time. The chapter shows first that Bergson’s famous account of duration, Time and Free Will, departs from Ravaisson’s explicit remarks about time as irreducible to quantification in his own doctoral dissertation half a century earlier. The second section shows that Bergson’s notion of duration takes up Lemoine’s L’Habitude et l’instinct, which itself developed Ravaisson’s more oblique remarks concerning habit and durée. Lemoine enables us to see, with and after Ravaisson, not only that habit involves a non-linear notion of time as duration, but also that the most fundamental form of habit is durée understood as a primitive contraction of past, present, and future.