Cinematic perception and Zeno’s arrow

Henri Bergson attempted to solve the paradox of Zeno’s arrow (which can never cover the infinite points between the bow and the target, and yet does) by calling attention to the implicit spatialization of time within the paradox. The space in which movement takes place is divisible, but the duration of time that is the movement itself is not divisible. The arrow never rests at any point, but moves through the whole time, and thus reaches the target. As he explains in *Time and Free Will,* “Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic of this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general . . . .The mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind.”

There are some problems with this: Is this a distortion of healthy perception, or a feature of any perception? Does it apply to all sense perception, or only to vision? (Bergson apparently believed that vision was peculiarly cinematic; a melody is perceived as pure temporality.) There is also the evident problem of mediation: After all, how can we actually “attach ourselves” to the inner becoming of things in a way that avoids the mediation of perception and language. Bergson was attempting to rebut Nietzsche’s perspectivism, which he believed held relativistic implications. Thus he distinguished between “two ways of knowing a thing”: “The first implies going all around it, the second entering into it. The first depends on the viewpoint chosen and the symbols employed, while the second is taken from no viewpoint and rests on no symbol. Of the first kind of knowledge we shall say that it stops at the relative; of the second that, wherever possible, it attains the absolute.”

Still, it does seem that the spatialization of time is genuinely behind the Zeno paradox. And not only Zeno. As Bergson pointed out, Platonic Ideas are fixed cinematic frames that attempt to capture a changing sensible reality: “We end in the philosophy of Ideas when we apply the cinematographical mechanism of the intellect to the analysis of the real.”