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context in his major work, L'evolution creatrice (1907). As early as his first treatise, Bergson makes the attempt to overcome the Aristotelian concept of time and to show its one-sidedness. He tries to get beyond the common concept of time by distinguishing durée, duration, in contrast with time as commonly understood, which he calls temps. In a more recent work, Durée et simultaneité (2nd edition, 1923), Bergson provides a critical examination of Einstein's theory of relativity. Bergson's theory of duration itself grew out of a direct critique of the Aristotelian concept of time. The interpretation he gives of time in the common sense rests on a misunderstanding of Aristotle's way of understanding time. Accordingly, his counterconcept to common time, namely duration, is also in this sense untenable. He does not succeed by means of this concept in working his way through to the true phenomenon of time. Nevertheless, Bergson's investigations are valuable because they manifest a philosophical effort to surpass the traditional concept of time.
We have already stressed that the essentials of what can first of all be said about time within the common understanding of it were said in the two ancient interpretations of time by Aristotle and Augustine. Of the two, Aristotle's investigations are conceptually more rigorous and stronger while Augustine sees some dimensions of the time phenomenon more originally. No attempt to get behind the riddle of time can permit itself to dispense with coming to grips with Aristotle. For he expressed in clear conceptual form, for the first time and for a long time after, the common understanding of time, so that his view of time corresponds to the natural concept of time. Aristotle was the last of the great philosophers who had eyes to see and, what is still more decisive, the energy and tenacity to continue to force inquiry back to the phenomena and to the seen and to mistrust from the ground up all wild and windy speculations, no matter how close to the heart of common sense.
We must here deny ourselves a detailed interpretation of Aristotle's treatise as well as Augustine's. We shall select a few characteristic propositions in order to illustrate by them the traditional time concept. In supplementation we shall draw several important thoughts from Leibniz, whose discussions of time, like all of his essential ideas, are scattered about in occasional writings, treatises, and letters.
To the clarification of the Aristotelian time concept we shall preface a short account of the structure of the Aristotelian treatise on time.
α) Outline of Aristotle's treatise on time
The treatise contains five chapters (Physics, 4.10-14 ). The first chapter (chap. 10), being first, defines the inquiry, which moves in two directions.