Elephant Time, Bergson’s Duration, and the Possibility of Empathy

I’ve always wondered how squirrels experience time. Is time an essential expression of the universe or emergent from other factors? What about whales or black walnut trees? Microbes or orchids?

I came across a fascinating article/podcast about how elephants might experience time last night. The discussion of research by Khatijah Rahmat, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, explores what she calls “elephant temporality.”

Instead of assuming that animals experience time in ways that mirror our own, Rahmat asks a different question. What if elephants inhabit their own forms of duration? Not simply a faster or slower version of human time, but something structured through memory, ecology, and social life in ways that may not align with the rhythms we impose on the world.

Rahmat organizes her research around three overlapping dimensions: individual history, eco cultural identity, and what she calls human impacted time. The categories themselves are less important than what they point toward. Elephants are not simply products of biology or instinct. They accumulate experience across long lives. They inherit patterns of movement and orientation from older members of their herds. Their lives unfold within landscapes that hold memory across generations.

Rahmat is careful to say that we cannot claim direct access to how elephants experience time subjectively. Temporal experience cannot be observed directly. It appears through signs. Through behavior, social organization, and relationships with place. But those signs are not imaginary. The patterns they reveal are real.

One example from her work is particularly interesting to me. In the Belum rainforest of Malaysia, Indigenous communities have lived alongside wild elephants for centuries. The relationship is not built on management or control but on attentiveness. Local communities have learned which seasons bring elephants to particular fruiting trees. When those seasons arrive, people avoid those areas. The elephants come and feed. The humans yield space.

There is no contract and no shared language. Yet over generations something like an understanding has developed. Rahmat calls these patterns “agreements,” and the word is surprisingly precise. It describes a stable rhythm of coexistence that has formed through long mutual attention to each other’s movements through time.

For anyone familiar with Henri Bergson‘s work, this begins to sound very familiar (I’ve been doing a lot of work and research on Bergson lately, so it obviously stood out to me).

Bergson spent much of his career arguing that the way modern societies measure time is not the way time is actually lived. Clocks divide time into equal segments that can be counted and compared. Lived experience does not unfold that way (hence his famous or infamous debate with Einstein about relativity). Real time, he argued, is durée, or duration.

Duration is a flowing continuity in which the past remains present within the moment we are living now. Memory accumulates inside perception. Experience thickens rather than advancing in neat units. Time, in this sense, is not a series of separate instants but an ongoing movement in which past and present interpenetrate.

If Bergson is right, then it becomes possible that different forms of life inhabit different durations. Time is not a universal grid imposed equally on every living being. It is something lived through bodies, memories, relationships, and environments.

An elephant that remembers distant watering holes from decades earlier, that follows migration routes learned from older matriarchs, and that responds to slow ecological rhythms may be inhabiting a form of duration that looks very different from the accelerated schedules that structure much of human life today.

Rahmat’s three dimensions also explore this possibility. Eco-cultural identity describes the way elephants inherit patterns of movement and knowledge that function almost like cultural traditions. Individual history describes the accumulation of experiences each elephant carries throughout its life, including memories and trauma. Human-impacted time describes what happens when the temporal rhythms of industrial development collide with the slower durations through which elephants and ecosystems have evolved.

When a forest corridor disappears in a single generation, what vanishes is not only habitat. Something else is disrupted as well. The orientation of a herd toward a landscape that once held meaning for them.

Research by the psychologist Gay A. Bradshaw helps make this visible in unsettling ways. Bradshaw has studied elephant herds that lost their matriarchs to poaching and found behavioral patterns that resemble trauma responses observed in humans. Younger elephants in those herds exhibited heightened aggression, unstable social relationships, and behaviors that fell outside the normal patterns of elephant societies.

The matriarch was not simply the oldest member of the herd. She carried decades of memory. She knew where water could be found during drought. She remembered the histories of neighboring herds. She guided the group through landscapes using knowledge no other elephant possessed. When she was lost, something more than an individual life disappeared. A storehouse of collective memory was removed. Part of the herd’s temporal world collapsed with her.

This is where Edith Stein‘s phenomenology of empathy becomes helpful.

Stein argued that empathy is the way we encounter another center of experience without collapsing it into our own. When we empathize with another person, we do not literally enter their consciousness. Instead, we perceive expressions, gestures, and actions that reveal the presence of another subject who experiences the world differently from us.

Empathy is not projection. It is a disciplined attentiveness to the fact that another interior life exists.

What Stein describes philosophically, Rahmat approaches methodologically. She cannot step inside elephant experience. But she can follow the traces that point toward it. The matriarch’s memory. The seasonal agreements between elephants and human communities. The visible disruption that occurs when those relational patterns are broken.

These behaviors become the ways interior life shows itself. Seen in this light, careful attention to those patterns is not sentimentalism. It is a form of perception.

Rahmat describes moments watching elephants in the Belum rainforest as dusk settled along the roadside. The elephants would approach to warm themselves along the edge of the pavement. What struck her was how clearly they could assess her presence. If she turned off her headlights, they remained calm and continued feeding.

Without language, a kind of communication unfolded.

She struggled to describe what was happening without reaching toward words like subjectivity or shared understanding. Yet calling it elephant “personhood” did not quite fit either, since that still frames the animal world through human categories. What she sensed was something else. Another form of life unfolding alongside her own. Another duration moving through the same landscape.

This has implications for conservation that reach deeper than policy discussions usually allow.

Environmental policy tends to operate within relatively short human timeframes. Planning cycles extend across years or perhaps a few decades. Political systems often shorten those horizons even further.

Yet elephants and the ecosystems they inhabit operate within much longer durations. Migration routes can extend across centuries of learned behavior. Herd structures depend on matriarchs whose memories anchor the group’s survival strategies. Landscapes themselves develop through slow ecological processes unfolding across generations.

When those landscapes disappear within a single generation, something more than habitat is lost. Entire temporal worlds are disrupted. The knowledge embedded in migration routes no longer has a landscape in which to function. The accumulated experience within a herd loses the ecological context that once gave it meaning.

Even the quiet agreements that formed between species over centuries can vanish without anyone realizing they were there.

In that sense, conservation may require us to think not only about protecting space or population numbers, but about protecting duration itself. Living beings inhabit temporal relationships with places that extend far beyond our immediate planning horizons. When those relationships are broken, forms of life built on long memory and ecological continuity are fractured in ways we are only beginning to understand.

One of the quieter tragedies of modern culture is how completely mechanical time has shaped our perception of the world. Schedules, productivity systems, and digital calendars encourage us to treat time as a sequence of units to be managed and optimized. That framework has practical advantages, but it also narrows our awareness of the many temporal worlds unfolding around us.

Forests grow in decades. Rivers reshape landscapes across centuries. Elephant herds carry knowledge across generations. These are not poetic exaggerations. They are reminders that life unfolds within durations that clocks cannot fully capture.

If Bergson helps us recognize the thickness of lived time, and Stein helps us understand how empathy allows us to encounter other centers of experience, then Rahmat’s research invites us to extend those insights beyond the human sphere. Elephants are living within temporal structures that we only partially perceive, yet those structures are no less real for that reason.

Learning to notice those different temporalities may be one of the most important ecological skills we can cultivate. It requires patience, attentiveness, and a willingness to admit that the world contains many ways of inhabiting time.

And once we begin to notice that, it becomes harder to believe that the human clock is the only one that matters. Somewhere tonight a herd is moving toward water remembered decades earlier.

Further Reading

Henri Bergson – Creative Evolution
Bergson’s classic work introduces the concept of durée, or lived duration, and explores how life unfolds through continuous creative evolution rather than mechanical time.

Edith Stein – On the Problem of Empathy
Stein’s phenomenological study of empathy remains one of the most careful explorations of how we encounter the inner lives of others without reducing them to our own perspective.

Gay A. Bradshaw – Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity
Bradshaw’s research on elephant societies and trauma reveals the depth of elephant social memory and the psychological consequences that follow when those structures are disrupted.

Khatijah Rahmat – Research on Elephant Temporality
Rahmat’s work explores how elephants experience time through individual history, eco cultural identity, and human impacted landscapes.

Robin Wall Kimmerer – Braiding Sweetgrass
Kimmerer’s reflections on ecological relationships and Indigenous knowledge traditions offer a powerful reminder that attentiveness to other beings and their rhythms has long been part of how humans learn to live with the land.