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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Time and Free Will," Henri Bergson explores the concepts of time and freedom through a philosophical lens. His work challenges traditional notions of determinism and examines the role of intuition in human decision-making. Bergson's writing style is characterized by its clarity and depth, making complex ideas accessible to readers. This book is a landmark in the history of philosophy, drawing on both scientific and metaphysical insights to present a compelling argument. Bergson's ideas have had a lasting impact on the fields of psychology, literature, and philosophy, influencing thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Gilles Deleuze. His revolutionary approach to the study of time continues to provoke thought and debate in academic circles. "Time and Free Will" is a must-read for anyone interested in the nature of consciousness and the complexities of human experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Time and Free Will
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Table of Contents
Introduction
Between the ticking of the clock and the beating of the heart lies a fault line where freedom struggles to breathe. Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will invites us to stand at that fault line and feel how measurement and experience pull in different directions. Rather than collapsing the living present into the neutral marks of a dial, Bergson asks what time becomes when it is sensed, remembered, and chosen from within. His inquiry is not merely technical; it touches the drama of agency, the texture of memory, and the pulse of attention. The result is a book that still speaks with arresting immediacy.
Henri Bergson (1859–1941), the French philosopher who would later receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, published Time and Free Will in 1889. Composed as part of his doctoral work, the book entered a world newly confident in scientific method and increasingly eager to quantify mental life. Its original subtitle, An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, signals its ambition: to return to what is first given in inner experience before imposing external models. Bergson brings a distinctive voice to that task, combining lucid analysis with a sensitivity to the nuances of feeling and thought that resists easy reduction.
The central premise is at once simple and revolutionary. Bergson distinguishes between the homogeneous, divisible time we measure—minutes, hours, units arrayed in space—and the qualitative continuity we live from the inside. He calls the latter a duration in which states of consciousness interpenetrate rather than line up like beads. By taking seriously the immediacy of inner life, he argues, we can avoid confusing the representation of time with its felt reality. This turn has consequences for psychology, ethics, and metaphysics, because it reframes how change, identity, and decision are to be understood without forcing them into a spatial mold.
Free will, for Bergson, is not a problem to be solved by calculating causes as if they were weights on a scale. It is a question about how a person’s past, character, and present feeling condense into a single act experienced from within. When time is treated as a sequence of discrete instants, every choice seems predetermined by prior elements. When time is grasped as lived duration, an act can express the whole person without being prefigured in fragmentary pieces. This reframing does not sidestep difficulty; it relocates it to the arena of experience where freedom and responsibility can be meaningfully assessed.
Time and Free Will holds classic status for its conceptual originality and its resonance far beyond academic philosophy. Early twentieth-century literature, with its fascination for consciousness and the malleability of narrative time, found in Bergson a framework that illuminated new artistic practices. Writers such as Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce explored inner temporality in ways critics have often connected to Bergsonian insights. The book’s vocabulary—especially its distinction between measured time and lived duration—helped name what modernist techniques were making visible: that the inner flow of experience rarely mirrors the external schedule of clocks and calendars.
Its impact within philosophy was equally substantial. Pragmatists, including William James, engaged sympathetically with Bergson’s emphasis on immediate experience. Phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty found in his analyses a resource for describing embodiment and perception. Later, Gilles Deleuze would revive and reinterpret Bergson’s ideas, showing their fertility for metaphysics and aesthetics. At the same time, the book provoked vigorous debate from thinkers committed to more mechanistic or formal approaches. The friction it generated helped articulate fault lines that shaped twentieth-century thought, ensuring that Bergson’s challenge to reductionism remained a living interlocutor rather than a historical curiosity.
Part of the book’s enduring appeal lies in its method. Bergson does not merely assert theses; he guides readers through examples that reveal the texture of inward life. Consider the experience of listening to a melody: the notes do not simply succeed one another; they form a qualitative whole that lingers and transforms as it advances. Such examples clarify how inner states interweave without becoming numerically separable. The prose, in French and in translation, glides between analytic precision and evocative illustration. This combination of rigor and lucidity makes the argument both memorable and testable against one’s own experience.
Time and Free Will also anchors Bergson’s later career. It prepares the way for Matter and Memory (1896), which examines how perception and memory cooperate, and for Creative Evolution (1907), which develops a dynamic account of life and novelty. Themes first articulated here—duration, qualitative multiplicity, the critique of spatializing time—reappear in expanded forms across his oeuvre. The recognition he later received, including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, reflects the reach of a philosophical style that made ideas palpable without sacrificing depth. This early book is the seedbed where much of that style and vocabulary first took root.
Historically, the work intervenes at a moment when psychology sought scientific legitimacy through measurement and experiment. Psychophysics and associationist theories aimed to map mental states by quantifiable laws. Bergson does not deny the value of such methods for certain purposes; he argues instead that they cannot capture the living continuity of consciousness. The risk, he warns, is to mistake a convenient model for the thing itself. By pressing this point, the book provides a counterweight to methodological enthusiasm, reminding us that the success of measuring instruments does not guarantee their adequacy to what is being measured.
As a classic, the book has endured because it gives readers concepts that are both precise and elastic. “Duration” is not a nebulous metaphor; it is a disciplined way of attending to experience that can be applied to art, ethics, psychology, and everyday life. The text invites dialogue across fields, and its influence on literary criticism, film theory, and cultural studies reflects that openness. It has been translated widely since the early twentieth century, ensuring its circulation beyond France. Generations return to it not out of nostalgia but because it enriches the language available for thinking about time and agency.
For new readers, the most fruitful approach is to read slowly and test each claim against experience. The book does not seek to win by authority; it seeks to clarify what we already live, often without noticing. As you proceed, keep an eye on how examples illuminate the argument rather than functioning as mere illustrations. Resist the impulse to convert every insight back into spatial terms; that reflex is itself part of what Bergson asks us to interrogate. In doing so, the work becomes less a set of doctrines than a training in attention to the life of the mind.
Today, when algorithms quantify behavior and calendars compress attention into slots, Bergson’s distinction between measured time and lived duration feels newly urgent. Debates in neuroscience, psychology, and ethics continue to grapple with the relation between causation and choice, data and experience. Time and Free Will does not tell us how to live by prescribing rules; it equips us to recognize the textures of our own agency amid pressures to optimize everything. Its classic status rests on this lasting capacity: to make familiar phenomena strange enough to be seen, and in being seen, to become sources of clarity, responsibility, and freedom.
Synopsis
Time and Free Will, first published in French in 1889, introduces Henri Bergson’s reexamination of time, consciousness, and human freedom. Written amid the rise of experimental psychology and the prestige of measurement, the book challenges attempts to model inner life on spatial and quantitative terms. Bergson proposes a return to immediate data of consciousness, describing experience as it is lived rather than reconstructed by abstract schemata. The work develops a sustained critique of imposing number where quality is primary, and it culminates in an account of time as duration and of freedom as the expression of a self formed through continuous change.
Bergson begins by clarifying a method that gives primacy to qualitative description without denying the practical achievements of science. He argues that many confusions arise when we translate inner states into spatial images and numerical scales. The opening discussion encourages distinguishing what consciousness presents from what language and social habits superimpose. With this distinction in place, he prepares the analysis of intensity, multiplicity, and succession. Time, he contends, is often mistaken for a line of points laid out in space; the ensuing chapters show how that confusion distorts both psychology and metaphysics, and how a corrected view reshapes the question of free will.
The first part investigates what is meant by the intensity of psychic states. Against the assumption that sensations possess measurable magnitudes, Bergson maintains that intensity marks qualitative differences in experience. He reevaluates psychophysical regularities that correlate stimulus and sensation, suggesting they register conditions external to consciousness or practical thresholds of response more than the inner feel itself. What appears as a more-or-less is often a shift in kind or direction, not an addition of identical units. The analysis emphasizes that number suits collections of discrete items in space, whereas lived intensity is an indivisible progress that resists straightforward quantification.
Next, Bergson diagnoses the origins of the tendency to quantify inner life. Everyday discourse and scientific practice prefer symbols that can be compared and averaged, so we replace qualitative states with measurable causes or observable effects. The language of more and less, appropriate for counting objects, migrates to feelings and obscures their specificity. By tracing this substitution, he reveals that disputes about the measurement of sensation frequently concern proxies rather than consciousness itself. The result is a cautionary conclusion: instruments may register stimulus strength or motor outcome while the qualitative character of experience eludes capture by numerical scales.
The second part turns to multiplicity and time. Bergson distinguishes a quantitative multiplicity of distinct units in homogeneous space from a qualitative multiplicity in which elements interpenetrate within consciousness. He argues that common conceptions of succession imitate spatial juxtaposition, treating moments as identical points arranged side by side. This spatialized time enables counting and coordination but fails to represent lived succession. By contrast, inner duration is a heterogeneous flow, a continuity in which states shade into one another. The analysis reframes continuity and division, showing that cutting duration into identical instants does not merely describe it but transforms the phenomenon under examination.
Elaborating this view, Bergson presents duration as the ongoing formation of the self. Each present carries the weight of what has been lived, not as stored units but as a continuous becoming that endures and transforms. Personal identity is thus a dynamic continuity rather than a fixed substrate beneath change. He also contrasts a deep, creative self with a more superficial, socially adapted self fashioned by practical needs and public language. The deeper self inhabits duration and qualitative change; the superficial self projects its states into homogeneous time, facilitating communication and action while risking distortion of the inner life it translates.
From this distinction follows a reevaluation of measurement. Clocks and calendars, indispensable for coordination and science, quantify temporal intervals by counting homogeneous units, effectively translating time into space. These tools are apt for external observation but can mislead when carried into the analysis of consciousness. Bergson holds that the precision of such representations rests on ignoring the heterogeneity of inner succession. He does not contest the usefulness of scientific time; rather, he restricts its jurisdiction, maintaining that psychological reality is grasped through intuition of duration. Confusions between these registers foster puzzles about continuity, division, and change that the book seeks to clarify.
The final part addresses freedom. Bergson contends that disputes between determinism and indeterminism often share a mistaken spatialization of inner life, picturing motives as discrete units that line up to cause an act or as random impulses. He recasts freedom as the act that expresses the whole person as formed by duration. Deliberation is portrayed as maturation rather than calculation, a qualitative condensation of a life into a decision. This account aims to preserve responsibility without reducing action to mechanical sequence or caprice, by appealing to the continuity and indivisibility of the lived self that emerges through time.
Time and Free Will thus proposes a shift in how we approach consciousness and agency. By disentangling lived duration from the spatial forms suited to measurement, Bergson reframes key problems in psychology, metaphysics, and ethics. The book’s enduring significance lies in its claim that certain aspects of experience are grasped through attentive description rather than by quantification alone, and in its conception of freedom that resists both determinism and arbitrariness. Without denying the practical force of scientific representation, it defends the integrity of inner life and invites renewed attention to the qualitative continuity that shapes human thought and action.
Historical Context
Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will appeared in Paris in 1889, at the heart of the French Third Republic. The era’s dominant institutions were the centralized university system anchored at the Sorbonne, the École Normale Supérieure that trained elite teachers, and a rapidly expanding state school network shaped by secular republican ideals. Public culture celebrated scientific progress, administrative rationality, and the authority of expertise. Within this milieu, philosophy was closely tied to pedagogy and examination culture. Bergson’s book emerged from that institutional world, yet it challenged central intellectual habits of the time: the urge to quantify inner life and to subordinate experience to measurable, homogeneous time.
Bergson was educated at the École Normale Supérieure, passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1881, and taught in provincial lycées while composing his doctoral work. In 1889 he defended two theses at the University of Paris: a Latin dissertation on Aristotle’s concept of place and, as his main thesis, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, published the same year by Félix Alcan. The French doctoral system required such paired submissions, encouraging wide historical learning coupled with an original study. Time and Free Will thus entered print as both a credential within the university hierarchy and an intervention into contemporary debates on psychology and freedom.
The late nineteenth century in France remained deeply marked by positivism, a tradition descending from Auguste Comte that prized the methods of the natural sciences as models for all knowledge. Positivist outlooks encouraged confidence in causal explanation, regularity, and empirical classification. By the 1880s, this ethos permeated pedagogy and public discourse. Bergson’s book confronted that orientation by claiming that inner life resists reduction to quantifiable data. He argued that time, as lived, is qualitative duration, not a sequence of identical units. The work thereby questioned whether the positivist program could adequately describe consciousness, motivation, and the possibility of human freedom.
New disciplines bolstered positivist ambitions. Experimental psychology and psychophysics, pioneered by Gustav Fechner’s Elements of Psychophysics (1860) and Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig (1879), sought to measure sensations and reaction times. In France, Théodule Ribot created a powerful institutional base for empirical psychology, including a chair at the Collège de France in 1888 and the Revue philosophique. Researchers attempted to map intensities of feeling and to quantify perception. Time and Free Will directly criticized these efforts, arguing that intensities are qualitative and that importing spatial metaphors—points, lines, units—into inner time distorts what is most essential about conscious experience.
Associationist psychology and British empiricism further shaped the intellectual climate. Thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer explained mental life through the aggregation of discrete impressions bound by association. In France, Hippolyte Taine’s analyses extended this approach. Bergson rejected the resulting picture of the mind as a mosaic of atomic states. He defended a continuity of consciousness in which states interpenetrate, comparable to how notes in a melody fuse into a whole. By opposing arithmetical models of the mind, the book answered a widespread tendency to treat memory, emotion, and decision as summations of separable elements.
Debates over Kant and neo-Kantianism also framed philosophical study in Europe. In France, Charles Renouvier’s neo-critical philosophy and Émile Boutroux’s thesis on the contingency of natural laws (1874) challenged strict determinism while maintaining rigorous analysis. Another background thread was the French spiritualist tradition of Maine de Biran and Félix Ravaisson, emphasizing inner effort and habit. Bergson absorbed insights from this milieu but went further: he argued that treating time as a homogeneous, measurable form—whether empirically or a priori—betrays the qualitative heterogeneity of durée. Time and Free Will thus cut across both empiricist and rationalist codifications of temporality.
The question of free will had legal, scientific, and moral stakes in the 1880s. Laplacian determinism endured as an ideal of complete prediction; evolutionary theory after Darwin’s Origin (1859) and social evolutionism in Spencer gave rise to deterministic narratives about behavior. Criminology, influenced by Cesare Lombroso, modeled crime as a predictable outcome of heredity and environment. Bergson acknowledged causal regularities but argued that genuine choice occurs in lived duration, where character and situation fuse in novel ways. His account reframed freedom not as a metaphysical exception to causality, but as an expression of the irreducibly qualitative continuity of inner life.
Contemporary physics provided a contrasting picture of time. Classical mechanics and precision measurement treated time as uniform and divisible, a parameter governing motion. New developments—electromagnetism (Maxwell) and thermodynamics—reshaped scientific vistas, yet they retained formalized temporal frameworks. Relativity lay in the future. Bergson did not dispute the utility of physical time for science; rather, he argued for a categorical distinction between physical time and psychological duration. Time and Free Will thereby defended the autonomy of introspective analysis against the encroachment of mathematical models when dealing with consciousness, emotion, and deliberation.
Industrialization and new infrastructures reoriented daily experience of time. Railways demanded coordinated schedules; telegraph networks synchronized distant activities; factories imposed clock-discipline on labor. International moves toward standard time culminated in the 1884 International Meridian Conference, which recommended Greenwich as the prime meridian. Although France retained practices tied to the Paris meridian well into the next decades, timetables and cross-border coordination encouraged homogeneous reckoning. Against this backdrop, Bergson’s insistence that lived time is qualitative and heterogeneous read as a counterpoint to the era’s temporal standardization, reminding readers that inner duration escapes the grid of uniform hours.
Paris in 1889 dramatized the cult of progress through the Exposition Universelle, crowned by the Eiffel Tower. The fair displayed machines, colonial exhibits, and scientific marvels, offering a spectacle of measurement, classification, and technical prowess. Visitors encountered synchronized clocks, scheduled performances, and regimented flows of crowds. Time and Free Will, published that same year, proposed that the deepest rhythms of consciousness cannot be captured by external measurement. While the city staged modernity’s confidence in quantification and display, Bergson’s book argued that the meaning of time emerges from indivisible experience, not from the mechanical succession marked by public clocks.
The book originated within a school system transformed by the Jules Ferry laws of 1881–82, which established free, compulsory, secular primary education. These reforms expanded a meritocratic professoriate and standardized curricula. Philosophy at the lycée and university level emphasized clear definition, logical argument, and historical erudition. Bergson mastered these tools—his text is rigorously argued—yet he turned them toward rehabilitating intuition and immediate data of consciousness. The institutional drive to rationalize education thus paradoxically nurtured a thinker who criticized rationalism’s overreach, distinguishing legitimate scientific abstraction from the qualitative fabric of mental life.
Medical and neurological research exerted cultural authority in fin-de-siècle Paris. At the Salpêtrière, Jean-Martin Charcot’s demonstrations on hysteria and hypnosis captivated audiences and professionalized clinical observation. Experimentalists probed reflexes and reaction times, often treating mental phenomena as functions of nervous mechanisms. Psychologists such as Pierre Janet explored automatism and subconscious fixed ideas. Bergson did not deny the value of such inquiries, but Time and Free Will contested the assumption that mental intensity and temporal flow could be captured by physiological scale or stimulus-response laws. He argued that subjective duration weaves together states in ways that exceed mechanical sequence.
Aesthetic currents reinforced interest in inner experience. Symbolist poetry (exemplified by Mallarmé and Verlaine) and musical sensibilities foregrounded suggestion, rhythm, and the ineffable. Impressionism, though earlier, had already unsettled rigid outlines in favor of shifting atmospheres. Bergson’s analyses of melody and qualitative multiplicity resonated with these artistic concerns, without positing direct influence. The book’s insistence that consciousness is an interpenetrating flow paralleled a broader fin-de-siècle turn toward subjectivity and nuance. In a cultural environment questioning realism’s certainties, Time and Free Will offered a philosophical vocabulary for thinking about continuity, feeling, and temporal experience.
The late nineteenth century also advanced social quantification. Ministries expanded statistical bureaus; social scientists such as Émile Durkheim argued for objective methods in studying social facts (notably in the 1890s). Time studies in factories and administrative routines spread the ideal of measurable efficiency, even before Taylorism’s formalization in the next century. Bergson’s defense of durée furnished a caution against overextending quantification from external processes to inner life. While acknowledging the utility of statistics and measurement in their proper domains, the book argued that motivation, creativity, and decision are grasped through qualitative analysis, not by translating them into homogeneous numerical series.
French philosophical publishing and periodicals provided the platform that amplified Bergson’s challenge. Félix Alcan’s catalog cultivated debates among psychologists, philosophers, and historians of science. The Revue philosophique, founded by Ribot in 1876, circulated reviews and controversies that situated Time and Free Will within ongoing disputes about method. Early readers recognized the originality of Bergson’s concept of duration, even when they questioned its implications. The book’s rigor—deploying clear examples, critical reconstructions of rival theories, and careful distinctions—made it legible across camps, ensuring that its critique of spatialized time could not be dismissed as mere romanticism.
Time and Free Will also launched a trajectory that would shape early twentieth-century thought. Matter and Memory (1896) extended the analysis to perception and memory; Creative Evolution (1907) brought durée into biology and creativity. Although later controversies—such as Bergson’s public exchange with Albert Einstein over the status of time in 1922—lay in the future, the 1889 book already marked the boundary Bergson wished to draw between scientific time and lived duration. Seen in historical perspective, it inaugurated a distinctive response to modernity: respecting science’s scope while insisting on philosophical autonomy in the study of consciousness.
Politically, the Third Republic sought cohesion through secular schooling, military service, and symbols of progress, yet it soon faced crises like the Dreyfus Affair (from 1894). Although Time and Free Will predates that conflict, its defense of inner freedom and critique of reductionism resonated in a society grappling with authority, expertise, and public reason. By locating freedom within the structure of experience rather than in metaphysical exceptions, Bergson offered a nuanced alternative to fatalism and to purely external moralities. His approach suggested that genuine responsibility emerges from the thick continuity of a life, not from mechanistic calculus or formal decree.
Author Biography
Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was a French philosopher whose work shaped debates about time, consciousness, and creativity across the early twentieth century. He developed a distinctive method of intuition and the concept of durée, or duration, to challenge mechanistic accounts of mind and nature, arguing for a lived, qualitative time irreducible to spatialized measurement. His books reached a wide readership far beyond academic philosophy, influencing literature, psychology, and the arts. In 1927 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for the richness and vitality of his ideas and style. At the height of his fame, his Paris lectures attracted overflowing audiences and international attention.
Educated in Paris, Bergson excelled at the Lycée Condorcet before entering the École Normale Supérieure, where he earned the agrégation in philosophy. His formation drew on the French spiritualist tradition associated with Félix Ravaisson, Jules Lachelier, and Émile Boutroux, while he also engaged seriously with mathematics, psychology, and evolutionary biology. Early reading of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin helped frame his later critique of reductionist evolutionism. He was receptive to currents in British and American thought, notably pragmatism, and later corresponded with William James. These influences converged in a project that privileged immediate experience and creative becoming over static conceptual abstractions.
After qualifying, Bergson taught in provincial lycées before returning to Paris. While teaching, he wrote the dissertation published as Time and Free Will (1889), arguing that inner duration differs from the homogeneous time of clocks and that freedom is expressed in the continuity of conscious life. Matter and Memory (1896) developed a novel account of perception and memory linking body and mind without collapsing either into the other. With Laughter (1900), a study of the comic, he offered a widely read analysis of social life and rigidity. These works established him as a major voice in debates over psychology, metaphysics, and aesthetics.
In the early 1900s Bergson was appointed to the Collège de France, where his lectures became a cultural event. Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) presented his method of grasping duration by intuition rather than by analysis alone. Creative Evolution (1907) popularized his philosophy in a sweeping reinterpretation of life and novelty, advancing the notion of an élan vital as a way to think organic creativity. The book was praised and contested: scientists often resisted its biological claims, while many writers and philosophers found its vision exhilarating. International visits and translations amplified his profile, and his exchanges with pragmatists emphasized practical bearings of metaphysical ideas.
Bergson engaged vigorously with contemporary science. Mind-Energy (1919) collected essays that elaborated his account of consciousness, effort, and the continuity of experience. Duration and Simultaneity (1922) addressed the theory of relativity, defending the autonomy of lived time while acknowledging physics’ success with measurement; the book sparked controversy about science and philosophy’s respective domains. During the First World War he undertook public tasks on behalf of France, and in the early 1920s he served as the first chair of the League of Nations’ International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, advocating exchange among scholars and artists. His public stature made him an emblematic intellectual of the era.
Recognition accompanied continuing work. Bergson was elected to the Académie française in 1914, and in 1927 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) analyzed moral obligation, social cohesion, and the role of creative and mystical inspiration in opening closed structures of life. La Pensée et le mouvant (1934), often translated as The Creative Mind, gathered essays and lectures clarifying his method and concepts. Critics in emerging analytic and positivist circles questioned his reliance on intuition, yet his influence remained strong in phenomenology, process-oriented thought, and modernist aesthetics. His style and problems continued to inspire debate across disciplines.
Illness increasingly limited Bergson’s activity in the 1930s, but he continued to revise and supervise editions of his work. The political catastrophes of the decade sharpened his reflections on morality and social forms. He died in 1941 in occupied Paris. Notably, he affirmed solidarity with the Jewish community during persecution, a decision often cited in accounts of his personal integrity. Bergson’s legacy endures through his analyses of time, memory, and creativity, which remain touchstones in philosophy of mind, cognitive science discussions of temporal consciousness, literary theory, and the study of innovation. Renewed interest has emphasized the subtlety of his method and its interdisciplinary reach.
Time and Free Will
Καὶ εἴ τις δὲ τὴν φύσίν ἔροιτο τίνος ἔνεκα ποίεῐ εἰ τοῡ ἐρωτῶντος ἐθέλοι ἐπαΐειν καὶ λέγειν, εἴποι ἄν "ἐχρῆν μὲν μὴ ἐρωτἂν, ἀλλὰ συνιέναι καὶ αὐτὸν σιωπῇ, ὤσπερ ἐγὼ σιωπώ καὶ οὐκ εἴθισμαι λέγειν."
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
Henri Louis Bergson was born in Paris, October 18, 1859. He entered the École normale in 1878, and was admitted agrégé de philosophie in 1881 and docteur ès lettres in 1889. After holding professorships in various provincial and Parisian lycées, he became maître de conférences at the École normale supérieure in 1897, and since 1900 has been professor at the Collège de France. In 1901 he became a member of the Institute on his election to the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques.
A full list of Professor Bergson's works is given in the appended bibliography. In making the following translation of his Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience I have had the great advantage of his co-operation at every stage, and the aid which he has given has been most generous and untiring. The book itself was worked out and written during the years 1883 to 1887 and was originally published in 1889. The foot-notes in the French edition contain a certain number of references to French translations of English works. In the present translation I am responsible for citing these references from the original English. This will account for the fact that editions are sometimes referred to which have appeared subsequently to 1889. I have also added fairly extensive marginal summaries and a full index.
In France the Essai is already in its seventh edition. Indeed, one of the most striking facts about Professor Bergson's works is the extent to which they have appealed not only to the professional philosophers, but also to the ordinary cultivated public. The method which he pursues is not the conceptual and abstract method which has been the dominant tradition in philosophy. For him reality is not to be reached by any elaborate construction of thought: it is given in immediate experience as a flux, a continuous process of becoming, to be grasped by intuition, by sympathetic insight. Concepts break up the continuous flow of reality into parts external to one another, they further the interests of language and social life and are useful primarily for practical purposes. But they give us nothing of the life and movement of reality; rather, by substituting for this an artificial reconstruction, a patchwork of dead fragments, they lead to the difficulties which have always beset the intellectualist philosophy, and which on its premises are insoluble. Instead of attempting a solution in the intellectualist sense, Professor Bergson calls upon his readers to put these broken fragments of reality behind them, to immerse themselves in the living stream of things and to find their difficulties swept away in its resistless flow.
In the present volume Professor Bergson first deals with the intensity of conscious states. He shows that quantitative differences are applicable only to magnitudes, that is, in the last resort, to space, and that intensity in itself is purely qualitative. Passing then from the consideration of separate conscious states to their multiplicity, he finds that there are two forms of multiplicity: quantitative or discrete multiplicity involves the intuition of space, but the multiplicity of conscious states is wholly qualitative. This unfolding multiplicity constitutes duration, which is a succession without distinction, an interpenetration of elements so heterogeneous that former states can never recur. The idea of a homogeneous and measurable time is shown to be an artificial concept, formed by the intrusion of the idea of space into the realm of pure duration. Indeed, the whole of Professor Bergson's philosophy centres round his conception of real concrete duration and the specific feeling of duration which our consciousness has when it does away with convention and habit and gets back to its natural attitude. At the root of most errors in philosophy he finds a confusion between this concrete duration and the abstract time which mathematics, physics, and even language and common sense, substitute for it. Applying these results to the problem of free will, he shows that the difficulties arise from taking up one's stand after the act has been performed, and applying the conceptual method to it. From the point of view of the living, developing self these difficulties are shown to be illusory, and freedom, though not definable in abstract or conceptual terms, is declared to be one of the clearest facts established by observation.
It is no doubt misleading to attempt to sum up a system of philosophy in a sentence, but perhaps some part of the spirit of Professor Bergson's philosophy may be gathered from the motto which, with his permission, I have prefixed to this translation: — "If a man were to inquire of Nature the reason of her creative activity, and if she were willing to give ear and answer, she would say — 'Ask me not, but understand in silence, even as I am silent and am not wont to speak.'"
F. L. POGSON.
OXFORD,June,1910.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
We necessarily express ourselves by means of words and we usually think in terms of space. That is to say, language requires us to establish between our ideas the same sharp and precise distinctions, the same discontinuity, as between material objects. This assimilation of thought to things is useful in practical life and necessary in most of the sciences. But it may be asked whether the insurmountable difficulties presented by certain philosophical problems do not arise from our placing side by side in space phenomena which do not occupy space, and whether, by merely getting rid of the clumsy symbols round which we are fighting, we might not bring the fight to an end. When an illegitimate translation of the unextended into the extended, of quality into quantity, has introduced contradiction into the very heart of the question, contradiction must, of course, recur in the answer.
The problem which I have chosen is one which is common to metaphysics and psychology, the problem of free will. What I attempt to prove is that all discussion between the determinists and their opponents implies a previous confusion of duration with extensity, of succession with simultaneity, of quality with quantity: this confusion once dispelled, we may perhaps witness the disappearance of the objections raised against free will, of the definitions given of it, and, in a certain sense, of the problem of free will itself. To prove this is the object of the third part of the present volume: the first two chapters, which treat of the conceptions of intensity and duration, have been written as an introduction to the third.
H. BERGSON.
February, 1888.
CHAPTER I THE INTENSITY OF PSYCHIC STATES
It is usually admitted that states of consciousness, sensations, feelings, passions, efforts, are capable of growth and diminution; we are even told that a sensation can be said to be twice, thrice, four times as intense as another sensation of the same kind. This latter thesis, which is maintained by psychophysicists[1], we shall examine later; but even the opponents of psychophysics do not see any harm in speaking of one sensation as being more intense than another, of one effort as being greater than another, and in thus setting up differences of quantity between purely internal states. Common sense, moreover, has not the slightest hesitation in giving its verdict on this point; people say they are more or less warm, or more or less sad, and this distinction of more and less, even when it is carried over to the region of subjective facts and unextended objects, surprises nobody. But this involves a very obscure point and a much more important problem than is usually supposed.
When we assert that one number is greater than another number or one body greater than another body, we know very well what we mean.
For in both cases we allude to unequal spaces, as shall be shown in detail a little further on, and we call that space the greater which contains the other. But how can a more intense sensation contain one of less intensity[2q]? Shall we say that the first implies the second, that we reach the sensation of higher intensity only on condition of having first passed through the less intense stages of the same sensation, and that in a certain sense we are concerned, here also, with the relation of container to contained? This conception of intensive magnitude seems, indeed, to be that of common sense, but we cannot advance it as a philosophical explanation without becoming involved in a vicious circle. For it is beyond doubt that, in the natural series of numbers, the later number exceeds the earlier, but the very possibility of arranging the numbers in ascending order arises from their having to each other relations of container and contained, so that we feel ourselves able to explain precisely in what sense one is greater than the other. The question, then, is how we succeed in forming a series of this kind with intensities, which cannot be superposed on each other, and by what sign we recognize that the members of this series increase, for example, instead of diminishing: but this always comes back to the inquiry, why an intensity can be assimilated to a magnitude.
It is only to evade the difficulty to distinguish, as is usually done, between two species of quantity, the first extensive and measurable, the second intensive and not admitting of measure, but of which it can nevertheless be said that it is greater or less than another intensity. For it is recognized thereby that there is something common to these two forms of magnitude, since they are both termed magnitudes and declared to be equally capable of increase and diminution. But, from the point of view of magnitude, what can there be in common between the extensive and the intensive, the extended and the unextended? If, in the first case, we call that which contains the other the greater quantity, why go on speaking of quantity and magnitude when there is no longer a container or a contained? If a quantity can increase and diminish, if we perceive in it, so to speak, the less inside the more, is not such a quantity on this very account divisible, and thereby extended? Is it not then a contradiction to speak of an inextensive quantity? But yet common sense agrees with the philosophers in setting up a pure intensity as a magnitude, just as if it were something extended. And not only do we use the same word, but whether we think of a greater intensity or a greater extensity, we experience in both cases an analogous impression; the terms "greater" and "less" call up in both cases the same idea. If we now ask ourselves in what does this idea consist, our consciousness still offers us the image of a container and a contained. We picture to ourselves, for example, a greater intensity of effort as a greater length of thread rolled up, or as a spring which, in unwinding, will occupy a greater space. In the idea of intensity, and even in the word which expresses it, we shall find the image of a present contraction and consequently a future expansion, the image of something virtually extended, and, if we may say so, of a compressed space. We are thus led to believe that we translate the intensive into the extensive, and that we compare two intensities, or at least express the comparison, by the confused intuition of a relation between two extensities. But it is just the nature of this operation which it is difficult to determine.
The solution which occurs immediately to the mind, once it has entered upon this path, consists in defining the intensity of a sensation, or of any state whatever of the ego, by the number and magnitude of the objective, and therefore measurable, causes which have given rise to it. Doubtless, a more intense sensation of light is the one which has been obtained, or is obtainable, by means of a larger number of luminous sources, provided they be at the same distance and identical with one another. But, in the immense majority of cases, we decide about the intensity of the effect without even knowing the nature of the cause, much less its magnitude: indeed, it is the very intensity of the effect which often leads us to venture an hypothesis as to the number and nature of the causes, and thus to revise the judgment of our senses, which at first represented them as insignificant. And it is no use arguing that we are then comparing the actual state of the ego with some previous state in which the cause was perceived in its entirety at the same time as its effect was experienced. No doubt this is our procedure in a fairly large number of cases; but we cannot then explain the differences of intensity which we recognize between deep-seated psychic phenomena, the cause of which is within us and not outside. On the other hand, we are never so bold in judging the intensity of a psychic state as when the subjective aspect of the phenomenon is the only one to strike us, or when the external cause to which we refer it does not easily admit of measurement. Thus it seems evident that we experience a more intense pain at the pulling out of a tooth than of a hair; the artist knows without the possibility of doubt that the picture of a master affords him more intense pleasure than the signboard of a shop; and there is not the slightest need ever to have heard of forces of cohesion to assert that we expend less effort in bending a steel blade than a bar of iron. Thus the comparison of two intensities is usually made without the least appreciation of the number of causes, their mode of action or their extent.
There is still room, it is true, for an hypothesis of the same nature, but more subtle. We know that mechanical, and especially kinetic, theories aim at explaining the visible and sensible properties of bodies by well defined movements of their ultimate parts, and many of us foresee the time when the intensive differences of qualities, that is to say, of our sensations, will be reduced to extensive differences between the changes taking place behind them. May it not be maintained that, without knowing these theories, we have a vague surmise of them, that behind the more intense sound we guess the presence of ampler vibrations which are propagated in the disturbed medium, and that it is with a reference to this mathematical relation, precise in itself though confusedly perceived, that we assert the higher intensity of a particular sound? Without even going so far, could it not be laid down that every state of consciousness corresponds to a certain disturbance of the molecules and atoms of the cerebral substance, and that the intensity of a sensation measures the amplitude, the complication or the extent of these molecular movements? This last hypothesis is at least as probable as the other, but it no more solves the problem. For, quite possibly, the intensity of a sensation bears witness to a more or less considerable work accomplished in our organism; but it is the sensation which is given to us in consciousness, and not this mechanical work[3q]. Indeed, it is by the intensity of the sensation that we judge of the greater or less amount of work accomplished: intensity then remains, at least apparently, a property of sensation. And still the same question recurs: why do we say of a higher intensity that it is greater? Why do we think of a greater quantity or a greater space?
Perhaps the difficulty of the problem lies chiefly in the fact that we call by the same name, and picture to ourselves in the same way, intensities which are very different in nature, e.g. the intensity of a feeling and that of a sensation or an effort.
The effort is accompanied by a muscular sensation, and the sensations themselves are connected with certain physical conditions which probably count for something in the estimate of their intensity: we have here to do with phenomena which take place on the surface of consciousness, and which are always connected, as we shall see further on, with the perception of a movement or of an external object. But certain states of the soul seem to us, rightly or wrongly, to be self-sufficient, such as deep joy or sorrow, a reflective passion or an aesthetic emotion. Pure intensity ought to be more easily definable in these simple cases, where no extensive element seems to be involved. We shall see, in fact, that it is reducible here to a certain quality or shade which spreads over a more or less considerable mass of psychic states, or, if the expression be preferred, to the larger or smaller number of simple states which make up the fundamental emotion.
