time. There is no question that this is very obscure, and Kant gave only a rough exposition of the connection.

Let us give the name “world-time” to the time in which worldly data and natural processes (in the narrow sense) fall. Here we understand “world” in the philosophical sense: the “wherein” of existence’s being. At this juncture we cannot go into a proper explanation of the concept and structure of “world.” We are still completely in the dark about what this world-time basically is and how we are to understand it. All we know is that this time, understood as now-time, is the time wherein we encounter whatever is present.

A philosophical reflection does not fall out of the sky, nor is it an arbitrarily concocted undertaking. Like all knowledge it grows out of our factical existence and its everydayness. To the degree philosophical reflection tries to direct itself to time, it will let itself be given time in the form in which neutral world-experience knows time. That is to say, when philosophical knowledge stands in connection with science, it will understand time in the same way the phenomenon is already given in science. But on the other hand we also have to say: If a philosophical discussion of time has its place in the context of a philosophical reflection on nature; and if we treat time primarily within this context (in a controlling, perhaps even exclusive way), then philosophy will understand time basically as world-time. The same holds if the explanation of time gets connected with the question about the possibility of a scientific knowledge of nature, as is the case with Kant. The same goes if the context of the philosophical discussion of time is even more encompassing than that of an investigation focused specifically on nature; an example of this is the question about the origin of the world, or even its creation, as in Augustine and Neo-Platonism, where [249] eternity is posited over against the world understood as all beings within time.

The systematic location of the investigation of the phenomenon of time within a given philosophy is the index of the basic conception that guides the endeavor. Wherever time is seen in connection with world, nature, or created beings, it is understood as now-time, and “temporal” means: occurring and running its course “within time.”

This concept of time has dominated all philosophical reflection about time ever since Aristotle first came up with it and presented it in his Physics Δ 10–14 with a conceptual power that has never been equaled since. From Aristotle to Hegel, and even more so in the period of post-Hegelian philosophy, this concept of time has remained the guiding thread for the question of time. Why? Basically because the time that is understood in this way is the very kind of time that primarily and persistently imposes itself upon our everyday experience.

Bergson’s recent, independent investigation of time is no exception to the rule. It appears to attain to some new insights, and it seems that