Time and Free Will

by Henri Bergson

This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1913 edition by George Allen & Co., Ltd., London.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Psychology, France, Science, Classics, Metaphysics

278 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1889

About the author

Popular and accessible works of French philosopher and writer Henri Louis Bergson include Creative Evolution (1907) and The Creative Mind (1934) and largely concern the importance of intuition as a means of attaining knowledge and the élan vital present in all living things; he won the Nobel Prize of 1927 for literature.

Although international fame and influence of this late 19th century-early 20th century man reached heights like cult during his lifetime, after the Second World War, his influence decreased notably. Whereas such thinkers as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Paul Sartre, and Lévinas explicitly acknowledged his influence on their thought, Bergsonism of Gilles Deleuze in 1966 marked the reawakening of interest. Deleuze recognized his concept of multiplicity as his most enduring contribution to thinking. This concept attempts to unify heterogeneity and continuity, contradictory features, in a consistent way. This revolutionary multiplicity despite its difficulty opens the way to a re-conception of community, or so many today think.

Reviews

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you like this review, i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

240716 this is a much later later addition: i have now read Creative Evolution must again suggest it is this book best to read first of all his work. it is also important to read Matter and Memory which extends his thoughts on time with 'intensive multiplicity', and realize the ongoing difficulty to 'think time' when its 'quality' resists symbolic form. these are all engaging philosophical contentions...

110615 this is a much later addition: just put bergson's work on the modernists shelf, partly because of his prevalence in the intellectual atmosphere of that time, partly that he deserves to be reread. maybe this will encourage me to read his big work 'creative evolution', but must confess it is mostly deleuze i have been reading, and this might lead to spinoza and nietzsche before him... of bergson's work, i would suggest this book first, he is a clear writer, his nobel was actually in literature, and does not feel like educated unravelling is ever needed to follow him...

011012 first review: this is the 4th book by bergson i have read, though it is his doctoral thesis and contains his original insights, his contention we- that is, western philosophers- have essentially misconceived time on a spatial model. as a line, as points, as circle, as any image that traces history but not actuality of the process of time. we think of time as movement, as points, as described history, as is so useful in physics, but this is not true time, which is always duration...

this book actually seems harder as it progresses, as it shows the results of this mistaken concept of time, as it reveals the persistence through all our metaphysics, of thinking of time as 1- atomistic, as points, as 2- all as homogeneous as space, as 3- therefore predictive and repeatable, as 4- commonly replacing qualitative aspect with spatial and thus quantitative values. this is the time of physics. this is how, for example, we misapply these frameworks in the inextensive mind rather than correctly only in extensive nature... an example would be emotions, saying something like affection is 'more'- a measurable 'quantity'- when it is a 'qualitative' change from indifference to attraction to blinding love...

maybe i need to talk out these ideas to fully grasp them, but analytic, static, models are not the essential flowing of time. can see how this stream of consciousness could interest proust, for one. as i am not studying bergson and require no complete understanding, i am able to move- in a metaphoric manner, perhaps i should say, resonate rather than move- these ideas, this way of thinking, to apply it to the entire view of reality slightly impoverished from lived experience, the metaphysical view of scientific realism...

time is not passage, is not tendency to entropy as in closed physical systems, time is elaboration, is intensity, is gaining through novelty, does not have a preset condition of completeness. conservation of energy does not apply to time, only space. in north american sports the play clock counts down to zero- we sports fans talk about running out the clock, running out of time- where we should perhaps adopt the european sports play clock which counts up to the full time, rather than down to zero... that the future is not-yet is no more unreal than the space over the hill is not-real...

one aspect so convincing, so engaging, is bergson's argument of freedom and essence not somehow beyond our perceptions- as kant's thing-in-itself- but rather staring at us obviously, but obviously unnoticed, in our perception of time. not a mistake that heidegger will call his big work being and time! time is not space, is not subject to determinist causality, it is an error to think it is a variable easily replacing calculations in place of space, of points, when time is essentially duration and not simple points on a line, a line describing the real after-the-fact...

questions rise do not date or decrease this work- english translation 1910- but do suggest further explorations and thoughts: how do we deal with einstein's space-time continuum if time and space are so essentially different? if the mind is not the matter how do they affect each other? slow, slow i am, probably these are issues addressed but i did not pick them up. but it is beautiful to find the source of much merleau-ponty et al, here, waiting to be thought of...

more
Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
Matter and Memory
Creative Evolution
Henri Bergson: Key Writings
An Introduction to Metaphysics
Laughter
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life
Bergsonism
Updating Bergson: A Philosophy of the Enduring Present
Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition
Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty: The Logic and Pragmatics of Creation, Affective Life, and Perception
Henri Bergson
Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson
The Bergsonian Philosophy of Intelligence
Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel
Morality in Evolution: The Moral Philosophy of Henri Bergson
The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy
The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Bergson's Time And Free Will

Henri Bergson (1859 -- 1941) was the rare philosopher who received for a time a large popular following together with the Nobel Prize for Literature. From a time of great influence, Bergson's works fell into years of neglect. There has been a revival of late of interest in his philosophy. Bergson's best-known book is "Creative Evolution" (1907). For all the popularity of this work, it is highly difficult to read. I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in a reading group on Bergson in which we have read his first book, "Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness" and will soon begin the second, "Matter and Memory". These two books together with "Creative Evolution" are best read in sequence to try to understand Bergson.

"Time and Free Will" (1889) was Bergson's doctoral dissertation. An epigraph from Plotinus frames the book and offers an elliptical suggestion of its content: " 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." The book focuses on free human creativity and on the inadequacy of language for its expression and understanding. Bergson is at the outset seeing philosophy far differently than the linguistic philosophy and the "linguistic turn" that soon was to become prevalent in England and the United States.

F.L. Pogson, the authorized translator of the book into English (1910), says in his Preface explaining the nature of Bergson's project:

"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."

Bergson's own Introduction explains how the problem of free will rests upon certain confusions, particularly between time as succession in space and an internalized time as duration, that his book aims to dispel. Bergson writes:

"What I attempt to prove is that all discussion between the determinist 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."

The book is in three parts. In the first, Bergson analyzes mental and emotional states and argues that the intensity of feelings are properly qualitative and not quantifiable. In the second part, Bergson argues that conscious states form a seamless, non-verbal, non-discrete succession in duration which he distinguishes from a spatial conception of time as separable instances. The concept of number, for Bergson, is part of a spatial conception of time as discrete, separable, repeatable points. Spatial time forms the basis for mathematics, science, and most of the actions of everyday life.

In the book's third part, Bergson argues that conceptions of causality and determinism apply to spatial time and not to time in duration. Durational time allows for human freedom. One is lost when one tries to define freedom as definitions are products of conceptualizaion and spatialization rather than of duration and succession.

Bergson relies on a combination of introspection, an analysis of the psychology of his day, his understanding of the nature of number and of mathematics, and argument to explain his position, punctuated by beautiful evocative writing and metaphor. Much of this material is clogged and difficult to follow. The arguments and analyses appear to be intended suggestively as, by Bergson's own position, they are beyond and prior to reason and proof. Obscure as this account is, it offers a sense of reality and meaning beyond science and the quotidian. The aim is sufficiently suggestive and alluringly put to have influenced many, on at least a visceral level, including many writers and artists.

Bergson's philosophy aims to upend the more usual philosophical accounts of space and time, such as those offered by Aristotle or Kant, together with common sense. There were those swept away by this book and by Bergson's successor books notwithstanding their obscurity. "Time and Free Will" is a book that to me is unconvincing as a whole but that is evocative and suggestive. I learned from struggling with the book and from discussing it with fellow readers in my online class.

Robin Friedman

[Orhan Pelinkovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Time, in essence, is not an empirical unit of measurement divided into artificial increments illustrated by a clock. This imposed, objective concept of time is incompatible with real time. Real time, or duration, as Bergson refers to it, is something more personal and is based on an individuals experience rather than an external measurable phenomenon.

Time doesn't tick to a single beat or a solitary musical note, instead, it's a continuous motion regulated by one's emotions, perceptions, and state of mind. This flow of time, for instance, when one is very young, feels abundant and endless, when one is in love, it feels like a rush, or a swell, or a halt, and with age, for some, a finite accelerated outflow; a drift or a leak.

This book was written over 130 years ago, yet the topics that Bergson discussed are still not fully understood today. For example: Can the magnitude of pain be objectively measured for each individual? Can the intensity of fear be reduced to a scientific unit of measurement relevant to all? Does free will exist, and to what extent? Is time a thought, a particle, or a dimension, and does it occupy the exterior world, or only the mind?

I could see that Bergson's thought experiments might have impressed or partially influenced Einstein's and Freud's work.

In a way, Bergson rejects the scientific findings and deterministic view of the world as facts, in favor of a deeper, more introspective analysis of our impressions and consciousness.

[Kelsey Hennegen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh this is such an incredible work! The way he treats the true self and distinguishes it from the social self, his depiction of language and how naming a thing or a state makes it so explicit, discrete, concrete but that doesn’t really comport with the true potency of the feeling. About how we don’t experience discrete states, but emotion like a symphony intensifying, not a single instrument. Or like colors blending, bleeding into each other. He completely sees the integration of mind and body, the ways the body is involved in mental states. How we cannot talk of mental states without talk of the body. The texture of our psychic states, no one reducible to another yet they seem to compound, form a hierarchy. His description of art and beauty is wonderful. Art as a collation of experience through which the artist’s history is conveyed and he talks of the experience of art as the self “lulled” into forgetting itself, that you can access the artist’s experience through art and it is almost like a collapse of time and history, or a proximity that is the closest thing to truly knowing another. It almost seems, in a Bergsonian sense that art, music, poetry can rip me (the audience) from my linear, limited, self-imposed narrative of history constructed through language and lets me transcend myself.

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I was in the process of reading this book, I often felt frustrated: Bergson seemed to go on at length with empirical details of scientific theories of space and time, at a level of detail that seemed irrelevant to his main philosophical points. And then his philosophical points didn't seem to make much progress from Kant: our experiences are mediated by the application of concepts, such as the concepts of space and time. But as I've had more distance from this book, I find its points continuing to haunt me. More than any other book I've read before, Bergson really makes the point felt that our prereflective perceptual experience is indeterminate and complex in a way that is impossible to capture in language, which consists in clean-cut, determinate concepts.

Here is my summary of his main points. There are two fundamentally distinct modes of experiencing things: one corresponds to space, the other to time. Space refers to an empty homogeneous space that consists of identical and non-overlapping units. The size of a unit is arbitrary; even when regarding the smallest possible unit of space, we cannot help but conceive of portions of space of this unit to be identical and non-overlapping. Time refers to duration, or a continuous unfolding of experience.

Bergson seems to implicitly hold that in order to make sense of something, it needs to be individuated. Physical objects in the world are already individuated (spatially at least) so we can directly apprehend them. But experience itself (i.e., the experience of an object) isn’t a thing out there in the world; it is not spatially individuated into elements or units. So in order to make sense of time, we must conceptualize experience, or translate it into “symbolic representations.”

For example, when we hear someone walking away, we individuate sounds as corresponding to the individual footsteps she takes. In this case, we have conceptualized an experience of sound in terms of the spatially-extended, quantitatively measurable causes of the experience. This distorts experience/time. Time is really duration, where there are no separable units, with “gaps” between them; there is really only one continuous, dynamically unfolding sound.

In general, we often conceptualize time as a homogeneous medium, analogous to space. In other words, we represent experience in symbolic terms, which obscures the essentially durational nature of experience. In pure duration, the past and present form “an organic whole,” analogously to how in listening to a song, notes later in a succession are phenomenologically co-present with those prior in the succession, so that these notes may interact, and we experience the song as a whole. Moreover, in pure duration, our subjective experience of time, not all happenings are equally phenomenally salient, or salient at all; so our experience of things could contradict the literal chronological order of causes and sensations (as it is in dreaming).

In making sense of feelings, sensations, and other elements of experience, we often talk about them in terms of their intensity. Intensity turns out to be a quantitative notion; in using it to make sense of feelings, we implicitly commit ourselves to conceptualizing our feelings as spatial and discrete, which distorts their true, durational nature. In reality, the phenomenon that we describe as increasing intensity is in fact just that a feeling comes to change more other aspects of experience. Bergson spells this out with this example: when one is in a certain mood, a certain task may be very difficult to perform. But as one gradually enters a mood that is matched to the task, the task becomes increasingly easy to perform.

This process of ‘entering a mood’, which phenomenologically consists in experiencing the task as increasingly easy, in various bodily feelings, and in all the other changes that can come with a mood’s growing stronger, illustrates what a highly “intense” feeling consists in. This process is necessarily diachronic. It is not a matter of a single feeling in one’s body that can be measured by a certain unit, and then an intense feeling would be one that consists in many units at a given moment in time (that would be quantitative, the idea of intensity as something measurable by a number scale).

Bergson applies his views to understanding the debate on free will. It is plausible to understand mechanical causation as operative in the spatially-extended world, but not in the inner, experiential world. Mechanical causation can hold only between individual, self-standing things. When people apply this concept to experience, they conceive of experience as consisting in individual, successive states; earlier states causally determine later ones. But in pure duration, there are no such individual states, no units that could exert causal influence on others; there is rather only one organic dynamic whole. A model of this dynamic whole is that there are various motives in a constant state of becoming, although we should remember that in reality there are no discrete motives.

I am left with a couple of questions. What kind of awareness do we have of time, according to Bergson? It seems that we can be awake and aware without applying concepts and spatializing time when we’re undergoing experience, but at least when we talk about experience with language (which is the hallmark of reflecting on experience and becoming explicitly aware of something perhaps), we commit this act of conceptualization and distortion. But what are the differences in the kinds of awareness with and without language? Bergson only discusses the contents of experience as unconceptualized v. conceptualized, not the kind of awareness of or how we come to know those contents.

Does Bergson believe that talking about or conceptualizing experience necessarily involves entering this spatial framework? That would seem to be the case if Bergson understands space as simply when we have discrete individuals; but space seems to involve more than that… So why does Bergson put so much emphasis on “space” when he talks about conceptualizing things and making them explicit? I guess whenever we conceptualize something, the thing becomes an individual among others that would fall under the same concept; this as analogous to the idea that space consists of homogeneous units?

It seems that Bergson’s thought is very similar to Kant’s in the First Critique; both talk about the application of concepts in making experience conscious for ourselves, and that there is a discrepancy between the state of experience before and after this application. What are Bergson’s main innovations from this Kantian picture? For Kant, the state of experience before the application of the categories is not possibly consciously accessible at all; the categories must be applied in order for the manifold of sense to count as experience at all, if experience is understood as something that is consciously accessible. This doesn’t seem to be the case for Bergson, but he doesn’t make explicit exactly what are the differences in kinds of awareness we have for pure duration v. conceptualized, spatialized experience. Moreover, Bergson introduces new phenomenological details to duration; the idea of a dynamic, unfolding oneness. But it is also vague.

What is the explanatory significance of talking about time as always changing, continuous, and unified? It seems to me that at least this allows for the fact that any conceptualization of an experience will necessarily be partial; there is no ultimate fact of the matter regarding experience. If experience is intrinsically unified and dynamic in this manner, conceptualizing it will always be cutting it up in some way; and there doesn’t seem to be objective criteria of the right way to cut it up, because original experience just isn’t in a cut-up format at all. So this makes room for the idea that interpretation is always creation. This allows for all the explanatory schemata and entities of science to not be applicable to experience. That mechanical causation can’t hold between mental states (there are no such states to begin with!) is an example of this.

I'd highly recommend this book to anyone with background in the phenomenological tradition and who wants to understand the predecessors of this tradition.

[Maali · Rating 4 out of 5]

يمثل بيرغسون احد الوجوه المؤسسة للفلسفة الفرنسية المعاصرة , وقد بلور فكره بالاعتماد على تحليل نقدي للمناهج وللنتائج العلمية لعصره وتطمح فلسفته ذات الطابع الروحي الى ان تكون بمنزلة عودة واعية ومتعقلة الى معطيات الحدس والتي تمكننا وحدها من التطابق مع الحركة الحرة والهالة للحياة والروح وهذا الكتاب كان بداية مشروعه واول معالم نظريته الخاصة بالمعرفة
فالفلسفة الحيوية عند برجسون تري أن العقل بطبيعته عاجز عن تزويدنا بكل المعرفة، بإعتبار أنه لا يستطيع أن يمارس نشاطه إلا في مجال المادة أو ميدان الحس الخارجي وحده، لكن بالإضافة إلي هذا المجال فإنه يوجد مجال آخر لا يستطيع العقل أن يصل فيه إلي أية معرفة دقيقة بشأنه. هذا المجال الأخير هو مجال حياتنا الباطنية ومن ثم يصبح هذا المجال الجديد في حاجة إلي وسيلة معرفية أخري. فإذا كان العقل يمكننا من معرفة العالم الخارجي، فإن حياتنا الباطنية بدورها تحتاج إلي ما يطلق عليه برجسون اسم "الحدس" أو "العيان" وهو ضرب من الإدراك المباشر لحياتنا الباطنية ولمجري حياتنا الشعورية..

[Pol-Edern LARZUL · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bullshit littéraire plaisant. Il aurait aimé être Proust. Très utile pour dépassement fallacieux en troisième partie d'une disserte.

[Brian Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never seen a philosopher that looks like his philosophy. Bergson appears incredibly comical because he has a face that's in a constant state of confusion, but the more you look at him the more you realize a hint of enlightenment within the tensions of his facial muscles. Perhaps what distinguishes Bergson from most philosophers today is his fashion for poetry, and paradoxes. it must be understood that Bergson is responding to the traditional Kantian notion of Time and Space, which ultimately reforms the Kantian notion of freedom (in noumena) and 'things in themselves.' If you do not know what these terms mean, then don't worry because he clarifies it in the end. What is perhaps most intriguing about Bergson's essay is the structure of it or the order which he wrote it in. In the first chapter he first distinguishes between inner states and outer states, which slowly builds towards his notion of time and space in the second chapter. Finally he ties the dual notion of time to show why determinism is unsustainable, and why freedom ultimately reigns. Like most continental philosophers it is guaranteed that you will deal with mental cramps/frustration, but the process of understanding Time and Free Will is ultimately a mental masturbation.

I recommend this book to anyone who has struggled with the notion of free will and determinism. I must also point out that Bergson was heavily influenced by the Greek poet/philosopher Heraclitus. I HIGHLY recommend one read the Penguin Classic version of Heraclitus' poems, Fragments before reading Bergson. This will provide some clarification on Bergson's dual aspect of Time.

Happy reading to all!

[Jacob Hurley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bergson sets out to prove the existence of Free Will (if his claim is true that the final chapter, which deals with this, is the most important); he begins with challenging the Kantian transcendental aesthetic by retorting that the mechanistical space-time apperception is but one of many interlocked conscious states, all of which are unique and non-reductible. From this he infers that there is no reason to presume that reality operates according to our accurate but self-imposed geometric ontology, but rather in holistic and organic processes, least of all Time, which must flow both through the world and our heads in a completely distinct way. As such, our non-mechanistical mindsets in a teleologically organic world have no reason to operate necessarily based on mere logical scaffolding, and it's unclear in what way we could even comprehend their being 'determined', beyond pre-existing desires to assert determinism. Instead, reality must flow organically and beyond our logical apprehension, as must even our own immediate conscious states.

A strange book, given how its basic claim of the limitations of logic are not unique (although ahead of their time); that he is able to arrive at this essentially phenomenological argument, starting from a Kantian perspective and developing the ideas naturally, makes it already a monumental sort of text and one critical for studying Husserl-Heidegger-etc. Moreover, given how much his arguments about 'qualitative conscious states' and the resulting 'multiplicity' resemble analytic phil-of-mind arguments about qualia, I don't see how many of his arguments couldn't be re-given almost verbatim and logically accepted in our own epoch - and indeed I believe his argument about the active ability of non-reductive conscious states remains a common argument for free will used today.

Bergson was apparently a popular figure in his day delivering lectures to huge crowds, and remained esteemed enough to have a debate with Einstein decades later; historically he is an interesting, almost messianic figure, becoming a celebrity for arriving at a mystic argument from what (at the time) appeared to follow from reasonable scientific consensus. His arguments are something of a skeleton key to literary modernism, being the exact source for Proust's and Woolf's existential epiphanies. Yet of course, like all arguments based off conscious states, it crumbles epistemologically, and even among the modernists Joyce and Percy Lewis criticized Bergson for precisely his evasive, navel-gazing efforts to create passive mysteries about time and mind which are neither technically accurate nor good for much more than feelings of profundity . . . .

[mohab samir · Rating 5 out of 5]

ان ثراء المحتوى الفلسفى النقدى لذو أهمية كبرى فى تحديد قيمة كتب الفلسفة  بشكل عام ، ولكن استخدام النقد من اجل البناء الفلسفى هو أعظم قيمة .
كان ذلك النهج الذى سار عليه برجسون كما سار عليه هيجل من قبل وإن تميز أسلوب برجسون الشعرى عن كتابات هيجل المجردة حد الجفاف .
ولا يطرح كاتبنا قضيته الا بشكل ضبابى فى البداية حيث يضطر لعرض النظريات الفلسفية الخاصة بالمناهج العامة الكبرى والتى تمس قضيته . وكعادة الفلسفة تأخذنا من العام الى الخاص والعكس فى تردد يعتمد تناغمه على عقل الفيلسوف ذاته . وكعادة برجسون فى كتاباته حيث يتفوق فى طريقة العرض الفلسفية القائمة على النقد المتواصل والايجابى الذى يدعم رؤية تصحح ذاتها بذاتها من خلال تحليل واضح لكل ما فى الشعور والنفس والوعى .  ولا يدع للأجزاء والتفاصيل أن تتمادى فى جذبه بعيدا عن موضوعه الرئيسى حتى وان شعر القارئ نفسه بذلك فإنه يعود ليدرك فيما بعد مدى أهمية الوصول لهذه النقطة بالنسبة الى الموضوع العام .
بالتالى لا تتضح لنا القضية الأساسيه فى جملتها الا فى نهاية الكتاب حيث يعرضها الكاتب فى الختام كقضية هندسية بسيطة تمت البرهنة عليها للتو . ويهتم برجسون فى كتاب ( المعطيات المباشرة للوعى ) أساساً بتحليل قضية الحرية وهى من أهم القضايا الفلسفية ومن أكثر المفاهيم إثارة للجدل الفلسفى وحيث يتجه التفكير العلمى الحديث الى نفيها وحتى الكثير من الكانطيين المحدثين والبراجماتيين غيرهم .
وعندما يتوقف هؤلاء عن التحليل فى ابعد أغوار الواقع والنفس يحاول برجسون اتمام ما فشل سابقوه فى اتمامه حيث يوضح فى النهاية أن سبب المشكلة الأكبر كامن فى التحليل والتصور المبنى عليه المنقوصين لمفهوم الحرية .
والحرية عند برجسون هى كل ما يمثُل فى الواقع بشكل واعى وإرادى بحيث لا يمكن تكراره ولا تجزئته الا بصورة تمثلية وتشبيهية ولكن لا يمكن لصورة فعل حر ان تتطابق تماما مع صورة فعل حر اخر وهذا هو المعيار الأساسى للقول بالحرية وتمييزها ، ولكن للغة دور نافى لفهم هذه الحرية حيث توهمنا ان افعالنا متطابقة وعامة وحيث تفشل ذواتنا فى استخدامها للتعبير عن هذه الحرية الخاصة بوعينا بما يحويه من افكار ومشاعر ورغبات حيث نسقط فى هذه العمومية بمجرد استخدام اللغه . ولكن هذا هو دور اللغه من حيث كونها اداة تواصل اجتماعية والتى تتطور فى اتجاه التعميم باستمرار حيث يسهل التواصل والتفاهم وبالتالى التعاون الذى هو غايتها .
ويمكن تصور مفهوم برجسون للحرية كتطور للمفهوم الهيجلى فصورة الفرادة الخاصة بالفعل هى ناتجة عن دمج التصور الفلسفى مع التصور السياسى للحرية عند هيجل مما يضعف تناقض المفهوم الهيجلى للحرية وهو ما أخذه عليه ماركس . أما المفهوم فى ذاته فلا يخلو من نقيضه لأن لكل لحظة من الحرية أجزاء ضرورية ولحظات فردية أقل شمولا ويمكن تصورها فى حالة إستقلال عن اللحظة الأوسع إلا أن كل لحظة شاءت بنفسها أن تلتقى أو تشمل الأخرى أو تشتمل فيها . وبالتالى لا يمكن أن تتحقق الحرية الأوسع للفرد وبالتالى فهمها الأعمق إلا بتحقق الحرية الشاملة للمجتمع . كما أن مفهومها يتطور فى الزمن ويحمل تاريخه منذ ما قبل ولادته معه , أما الحرية ذاتها فهى الغاية التى يسعى إليها هذا التاريخ لا إلى شكل نهائى ومثالى (فكرى ) بل تطور واقعى مستمر إلى شكل أعلى وأسمى من الحرية بإستمرار .
كما يلعب التصور الغامض او الناقص لمفهوم الزمان والمكان المجردين او محاولة اجراء تطابق مسبق بينهما او حتى تزامن تلعب دورا كبيرا فى اعاقة التصور السليم لمفهوم الحرية او حتى نفيها .
واستفاض برجسون فى نقد هذه الأفكار وحدد من خلال هذا النقد التمثل الأكثر واقعية ومنطقية لهذه المفاهيم المجردة والمفارقة .
كما استفاض كذلك فى نقد العلماء الذين كرسوا جهودهم العلمية وتجاربهم لنفى الحرية كعلماء النفس الفيزيولوجى او علماء الأعراق و الحتميون من علماء الطبيعة , حيث إضطر الكاتب لإعادة تحديد مفهوم السببية والبرهنة على محدوديته وسوء فهم الكثير له وتطبيقه مجازا حيث لا يكون موضعه فيتكرر ويترسخ سوء فهمه فى عقول البشر وعلماء الطبيعة على السواء .
كانت رحلتى الثانية مع برجسون ممتعة وثرية كالأولى تماما وان كنت اتفقت معه تماما فى أفكاره ونقده - الذى لا يخلو من نقد الذات - الا ان الفائدة الكبرى من مثل تلك الكتب هى إبراز الصورة الشاملة بما تحوى من علاقات واجزاء وإعطاء منظور جديد أكثر وضوحا مزيلاً طبقة أخرى من الضبابية والشك الذى يغشى رؤيتنا للعالم ولحياتنا على الدوام .

[Susan Budd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bergson explains why it is impossible to travel into the past. He makes an excellent and eloquent argument. A solid and convincing argument. I can offer no rebuttal.

Nevertheless I remain undaunted.

[Gijs Huppertz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Het is een ontzettend boeiend werk, ik heb er echter maar beperkte fragmenten uit kunnen halen die ik volledig begreep, omdat het in het verloop van het boek steeds moeilijker en moeilijker werd. Zeker een herlezing waard.

[Xander · Rating 2 out of 5]

Before reviewing this essay by Henri Bergson, I have to admit something. I generally don't like post-Kantian continental philosophy. It is much ado about nothing. Alright, almost nothing. In general, these are works spanning hundreds and hundreds of pages, outlines the most abstruse and detailed philosophical arguments in attempts to refute the common sense and scientific worldview. And if not attempting to do this, then it's a recycling of problems of Ancient Greek philosophy, dressing them up in metaphysical jargon but offering not really any significant new answers.

Bergson, unfortunately, seems to be no exception to this rule. This is an essay, spanning 250 pages, outlining detailed arguments and refuting atlernative explanations, to defend some very simple ideas. Admittedly, Bergson - at least the English translation, which he himself approved - writes in a clear and accessible style - much to be preferred over earlier and later French philosophers. But I simply don't get why these essays have to be so inaccessible... The material is dense, but it could be presented in a much more simplistic way...

Anyway, I will try to summarize Bergson's key ideas and then leave this review with the statement that I am curious as to his other (later) works - to see how he developed his ideas on time, space, self-consciousness and freedom.

To start with, Bergson is a dualist in the Cartesian tradition, For him, there's matter and there's mind - two different realms of being. Most of post-Cartesian philosophy tried to integrate the two realms - for example, reducing the external world to internal states - but Bergson keeps these two realms existing neatly side by side.

Second, according Bergson, the two are essentially different. The mind is essentially a dynamic process of ever-evolving states of consciousness. These internal states are themselves organic beings, qualititave wholes. This means that all our ideas, feelings, thoughts and acts are qualities, conscious intensities. Consciousness is an ever evolving flow of states, meaning it is identified as (inner) duration. As long as I am conscious, I am this process.

These internal processes Bergson posits in opposition to the external world - this is the world of material objects, distinct and infinitely divisible in elements. All material objects are, ultimately, points spread out in space, and thus quantifiable in geometrical terms.

So far so good. The problems start, according to Bergson, at the surface where inner conscousness meets the outer world. We map our inner states of consciousness - ideas, feelings, thoughts, etc. - on the outer world, in order to understand it. In doing so, the outer world leaves an impression our inner consciousness. We perceive a quantifiable world in space and through our reflective consciousness, we now use this model to understand our own inner life. We start chopping up consciousness into distinct parts, isolating and understanding them on themselves. Also, we objectify these states, in that we quantify them and start measuring them. So, for example, the then groundbreaking field of psychophysics tried to measure inner states and formulate natural laws, perfectly in line with natural science.

In short, the mind and all its aspects is now an amalgam of quantitative objects in space. The biggest problem lies in our objectification of duration. Duration is a process, an organic whole, but is now split up in parts, quantified, and replaces our inner notion of time. Really, the time of common sense and natural science is nothing but a fourth dimension in space, measuring the permanence of material objects.

According to Bergson, the main driving force behind this objectification of our mind is our social life. We exist as organisms and function in groups. We use language to live together - to function properly and accomplish our goals. Language is perfect for explaining the material world, since words denote classes of objects, i.e. they artifically chop up things and generalize. The problem starts when we use language to explain our inner life - we now express a continuous, dynamic process in artificially constructed terms. This distorts our picture of ourselves - language makes us forget who we are. Bergson calls this process the forming of an ever-growing crust on our pure consciousness.

So, we started with two worlds - a mechanic world of natural laws, and a dynamic world of immediate data - and are now left with just this mechanical world. The world of causality, conditions leading, through the operation of natural laws, to predictable outcomes.

There are a few implications of this. First, the mathematization of our inner life leads to insurmountable philosophical problems. Free will is the most important one of these, and it is this problem that Bergson tries to solve in his essay. Supposedly, free will either exists or it doesn't. Determinists claim free will cannot exist, since our psychology - as part of the natural world - is determined by natural laws. Libertarians claim all or most of our actions are choices - against the background of a multiplicity of alternatives - we simply can go back in time, retrace our steps, and choose again - theoretically.

Bergson claims both positions are delusional and spring from a common postulate: that choices and hesitations - i.e. particular moments in time - are isolated. Again, we use symbols - words or geometrical pcitures - to represent our actions, and subsequently get confused. For example, we picture ourselves as following the path of A-B-C, and at moment C we choose option X over Y. Now, the determinist claims A-B-C-Y was never open to me; the libertarian claims A-B-C-Y is perfectly possible.

Both claims rests on the - unnoticed - supposition that at moment X, it is possible to retrace this path (X-C). Bergson rightly remarks that first there's the fact of X, then comes the reflection on earlier states (A-B-C). The path A-B-C-X wasn't there until X, so there's no reason to project this path 'back' , say to moment B. A path is only traceable if it's already there, and at that moment it is unchangeable. It is no use jumping on the determinist wagon and state (the obvious): since this path takes this direction, there was no other direction. A direction is a property of a path already there, when the path wasn't there, there was no direction - to say this direction was logically necessary thus is absurd.

What Bergson means is that consciousness is a dynamic process of continuous becoming. When we act, this act both determines who we are and changes us by incorporating this action into itself (as process). We act, and that's that. Reasons for acting, as well as any causal mechanism, are artifically postuled after (!) the fact. The act is the manifestion of our Will, through our body, in the world. It was nothing 'before' acting and neither can we predict it from 'earlier' conditions - prediction and contingency are both the delusions of our reflective consciousness replacing our qualitative inner states for quantitative symbol, whether words or geometrical figures. The whole debate on free will boils down to the question: Is time space?

And now we can answer the original question of free will: What is it? According to Bergson, freedom is the relation of the concrete self to its acts. This relationship is undetermined, because we are free. In other words, freedom is a datum for consciousness - it is a given fact that manifests itself in acts of consciousness. Since we always act in a world peopled by other consciousnesses, encrusting our pure consciousness, leading us to forming habits, following advice, etc. - to forget who we really are - this freedom is always a gradual fact, and we are free in exact proportion to the unreasonableness of our acts.

All reasons are words; all words are symbols representing four dimensional spatial material objects;
hence all reasoned behaviour is unfree behaviour. We are free when we simply act - when we express our living force in a pure form. So, Bergson ends with stating that we actually have to Selfs: our social, spatial Self, and our pure concrete Self. Deep reflection will reveal our pure states of consciousness for what they really are - given facts from an endless stream of consciousness - living organisms, as parts of a continuous and heterogeneous whole of duration. To be free, we have shake off our symbolic-spatial way of thinking, rid ourselves of social conventions, and act in our pure form, to express our living force - vitalism.

“To act freely is to recover possession of oneself, and to get back into pure duration.”

So, to summarize this all in four statements:
1. When we regard our conscious states - artifically - in their pure form, we see they are quality, i.e. intensity.
2. When we regard consciousness in its pure form, we see it is duration, a dynamic ever-evolving process of intensities.
3. Our pure Ego is hidden under an ever-growing crust of social conventions, and geometrical and linguistic symbolism.
4. Freedom is the relationship between our pure Ego and its acts, to the degree to which these acts are consciously willed.

Now, although I found Bergson's essay impressive in its construction, and at times the illumination of his developing concepts was beautiful, I am not the type of person to value vitalism much. It all sounds rather Nietzschean - taking dualism as his starting point, Bergson seems to develop the view that the real, pure world is the world of duration, the world of the Ego. The outer world - the world of both common sense and science - is merely left - vide Kant - as a fallacy, a delusion, a misfigured way of thinking, enforced on us by our social life and our language.

Expressing yourself in words or symbols becomes detrimental to your grasp of reality - this seems nothing but a flight back into your own mind, fleeing the imperfections and illusions of the material world. It's all well for scientists to study this world as if it's the real world, just as it's all well for common folk to live their lives in this world as if this is the real world, but not me - nah ah - I know the real, real world, and I'll retreat to this world, existing in the inner confines of my own mind. Bergson seems to me to be promoting a pseudo-scientific form of irrationalism, dressing the rejection of reason in the garb of truth.

I am very curious how he will develop these notions of reality, freedom, mind, matter, time and space in his later works, but I get the feeling that I will have to side fully with Bertrand Russell on exclaiming Henri Bergson to be delusional himself...

[Tony Poerio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bergson reminds me of Borges in a lot of ways.

I'm sure he was a huge influence on JLB, and their writing shares similar qualities in my recollection.

Concise, precise, and often mind bending.

People will always write treatises on the nature of time.

And this book will always be a reference. Maybe it always was?

[Ben Kearvell · Rating 4 out of 5]

To understand Deleuze, one has to read Bergson.

[Đăng Dương · Rating 5 out of 5]

keyword: becoming

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If magnitude, outside you, is never intensive, intensity, within you, is never magnitude." ... that just about covers it.

[Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little dense, either because of the translation, the ideas and thoughts, or both. However, there is true wisdom in these pages relating the propensity of humans to apply symbols to things internal and consequently replace those internal states with symbols, which can be used to make calculations and develop theories, when those internal states in and of themselves can never be isolated and replaced with symbols, and removed from their initial states of being.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

La tesi di laurea di Bergson, cugino di Proust.

[Karim Kadry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully wrong

[Emelie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Det som gör hoppet till en så intensiv lustförnimmelse är att framtiden, som vi efter eget gottfinnande förfogar över, samtidigt uppenbarar sig för oss i en mångfald lika leende och lika möjliga former. Även om den starkast åtrådda av dessa förverkligas, måste vi ge upp de övriga och mister därmed mycket. Vår föreställning om framtiden, rik på oändliga möjligheter, är alltså mer fruktbar än framtiden själv. Härav kommer det sig att man finner mer tjusning i hoppet än i besittningen, i drömmen än i verkligheten.”

Hur vi ser på tid är så intressant. Ofta upplever man tiden som en linjär företeelse, där händelser särskiljs från varandra för att skapa en ordning i alltet. Det är även vanligt förekommande att vi projicerar våra tidsliga erfarenheter i rummet, just för att kunna konkretisera dessa ting och bilda en tydligare förståelse av våra upplevelser. Exempelvis kan vi kastas tillbaka till barndomen bara genom en simpel doft eller smak: förnimmelsen väcker ett minne till liv där bilder spelas upp inom oss. Vi har alltså kopplat samman något vi erfarit i livet (genom våra sensationer och känslor) med något i den materiella världen. Och detta har vi sedan paketerat (på det viset vi själva vill) och placerat långt bak i det förflutna. Vårt jag delas därmed in i en rad olika tidsliga faser, där det nutida jaget separeras från jaget i dåtid (och framtid).

För Bergson är tiden istället något som är rörligt (men kanske fortsatt rörigt :’)). Han talar om ett nuflöde, där tiden är flytande och något som vi konstant upplever (istället för mäter). Allt som vi tidigare har erfarit blir istället till en aktiv del i det nutida jaget. Tiden bara är, och allt existerar på en och samma gång. Att leva på riktigt är att omfamna alltet och förbli flytande. Hans synsätt är ändå ganska befriande: man kommer liksom ifrån att behöva dela upp livet (och jaget) i en mängd olika delar, och därmed även den konstanta strävan efter att konkretisera dåtiden. Om man lägger för mycket fokus på hur man bör uppfatta sig själv utifrån sina tidigare erfarenheter och upplevelser, börjar man liksom leva utanför sitt sanna jag. Med Bergsons tankebanor kan man bli mer fri till att välja sin handling och skapa något i nuet. Tiden gör sig bäst genom att upplevas snarare än att mätas. Och oavsett vad så kommer tiden alltid att finnas där, men den stora skillnaden ligger inom oss, och hur vi upplever det hela.

[Mehdi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work is excellent.

Picking this book as my next read, I went into it quite blind; I had only a vague idea of what it covered. The incredible insights I gained throughout its pages, together with the enjoyment I derived from them and from the writing style, which is clear and concise but far from dry, made it a truly rewarding reading experience.

The translation, done by F. L. Pogson, is very good. I would not be making an overstatement by saying that it is even impeccable. I read the English translation side by side with a French copy, under the original title of the doctoral dissertation, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, and I have not a single objection to raise. This is only to be expected, since, as indicated in the translator’s preface, it was approved by Bergson himself.

Substance-wise, while I have quite a few disagreements with some of the points made, disagreements that might seem fatal considering that they are mostly concentrated in the assertions made in Chapter III, which Bergson himself explained is the main point of the book, with Chapters I and II serving, so to speak, as introductions to it and as the development of the tools necessary for him to make his argument, I still found much to be learned from it. There is much insight to be absorbed and a shift in perception that I assume will remain with me for a long time.

In Chapter I, Bergson attacks our tendency to treat qualitative states in the same way as we do quantitative ones. This concerns primarily our psychic states, such as joy and sorrow; aesthetic feelings, such as those concerning music, poetry, and art in general; our affective sensations, as he calls them, referring to things such as pain, pleasure, and disgust; and our representative sensations caused by external objects and related to muscular effort. He offers a thorough analysis in which he shows that the difference between these states is, upon deeper investigation, a qualitative difference, meaning that it is quite removed from measurement in the way that temperature or weight can be measured.
He shows how what we call wistfulness and deep sorrow are not simply the same state existing at different quantitative degrees of intensity, but rather distinct states altogether. He is willing to retain the word "intensity," but argues that what is actually involved is a qualitative difference, where one state continuously transforms or blends into another. As he shows in the next chapter, language itself is quite inadequate for expressing these states in their true form, since language is predisposed toward giving concepts rough and definable meanings, meanings that are removed from subjectivity and personal experience, and made impersonal so that they can be shared and used by everyone.
The same analysis applies, as I mentioned before, to aesthetic feelings. Here I must point out that even if one disagrees with what these exact qualitative changes are, as I do, I think his broader point that they are qualitative remains quite defensible. The same is true of simple sensations, where he gives a detailed explanation of how the muscular effort involved in experiencing weight does not simply increase in degree, but rather expands across a larger surface and changes in nature. Overall, the argument is quite well put together.

Chapter II is a decisive chapter, and I assume not only for this book but for Bergson’s philosophy as a whole.
Here, Bergson becomes quite technical, discussing the epistemological, mathematical, and physical theories of his time, and offering a minute analysis of our conception of multiplicity: how it is that we can even count, what succession really is, and what process gives rise to our idea of it. He also comments on the debate concerning the nature of space, a debate that had been ongoing since the days of Leibniz and Newton. He broadly sides with the Newtonian tradition, though more specifically with the distinctive transcendental position developed by Kant (Only with regard to the question of space. As you will find when reading this work, he believes Kant is mistaken about the spatio-temporal nature of our sensibility as presented in the Transcendental Aesthetic; rather, he argues that sensibility is fundamentally spatial, with the temporal aspect ultimately reducible to space.)
Bergson holds that space is indeed something “real", not merely a residue resulting from the countless relations and mutual limitations between physical objects. At the same time, he does not regard it as necessarily existing as an independent reality outside human experience. Rather, space (as we know it) is a precondition of human cognition, universal in its application yet (perhaps) uniquely anthropological in its origin. All of this serves as groundwork for highlighting how our conception of time, as we colloquially speak of it, is inherently spatial. Time as it is referred to in mechanics, astronomy, or even daily life is a spatial concept, quite removed from pure duration, from concrete time as experienced by consciousness itself. We lose sight of this due to our natural disposition toward abstraction, categorization, and the imposition of geometrical limits, as we seek clarity and precision at the expense of the confused but immediate reality of inner consciousness.
I would, of course, advise reading the work itself to grasp his ideas and arguments in their fullness. Any review can only filter them through its own interpretation and thus inevitably reduce the richness of his thesis. Bergson does not limit this analysis to duration alone, but extends it to motion as well, tying these ideas together and, as I alluded to earlier, explaining how social life, language itself, and abstraction contribute to a misguided conception of consciousness as it truly is. Only through a great effort of introspection, he argues, can we reveal the flux that is the true essence of the ego: the constant becoming, the melody as a melody, and not merely as the sum of its individual notes, the enduring consciousness.
(I would like to emphasize that Bergson is not arguing against the sciences. His critique of our conception of time is not a critique of the way physics is conducted, a distinction worth mentioning since I have seen this point misunderstood several times. In fact, he repeatedly acknowledges the correctness of scientific theories and recognizes their usefulness in describing the physical world and in aiding us in every facet of life.
Bergson’s contention is rather with these conceptions exceeding their proper limits and being applied to domains where they are unsuited, such as psychology, where they fail to capture, as I have mentioned, the indivisible, continuous and qualitative multiplicity that constitutes our consciousness.)

Chapter III is where he combines everything and provides his defence of free will by attempting to turn the chessboard itself on which defenders of free will and determinists have traditionally argued. Ultimately, I disagree with him, but it was my favourite chapter.
The linchpin of this roughly 80-page edifice is to be found in the first dozen pages, where he makes a perhaps subtle but decisive leap, the refutation of which, in my humble opinion, collapses all of his arguments.
Bergson identifies two kinds of determinism, physical and psychological. He then asserts that the former is reducible to the latter, spends about a dozen pages establishing this point, and then moves on to critique psychological determinism. There is much, much, much to be said about this critique, and he essentially spends the remaining 70 pages expounding it. However, I believe that we do not necessarily need to go there, because his treatment of physical determinism is wholly inadequate to establish his point, and thus it undermines almost everything he has to say afterward.
He begins with an analysis of physical determinism itself that is as good as any other, explaining how the mechanical molecular theory of matter, the principle of the conservation of energy, and indeed Newtonian physics as a whole point toward a deterministic reality. In the same way that these principles apply to rocks and trees, our organisms are also subject to these laws, including our neural systems and brain activity. Essentially, if a mathematician had complete knowledge of the position of every single atom and the forces they exert upon one another at any given point, they would be able to calculate and predict, infallibly, all subsequent movements and the next state in which reality, and the universe itself, would find itself.
Bergson then criticizes determinists for asserting that this determinism of material reality is applicable to the succession of psychic states, that is, to our enduring consciousness. He argues that the connection between neural activity and conscious states is far from clear, pointing out that the relation between our nervous system and consciousness remains obscure, rather than being the kind of straightforward and determinate relation that some claim it to be. Therefore, he argues that the conclusion determinists draw from this line of argument is stronger than what can and should be justified. Considering the state of science at the time he was writing his dissertation, and one might argue even today, where we have made enormous strides in exploring the close relation between, so to speak, our hardware and software, this is a fair point to raise.
However, Bergson admits that this is not enough for his thesis, since even granting that conscious activity can be independent, or semi-independent, from the biological reality of our bodies, it would only leave us with a very narrow sphere of freedom, one that is effectively irrelevant to the debate, since our physical movements and a large portion of our psychic states would still be predetermined by the laws of classical physics.
This point, by the way, stands even in light of the new discoveries in quantum physics and the new revelations in cosmology and general relativity, which have made it clear that classical physics is, in fact, an approximation, and that many of the supposedly infallible principles we once attributed to it do not apply in the way we thought they did.
Bergson thus attempts to reject the applicability of Newtonian physics, in the way it operates on lifeless matter, to living and especially conscious beings. For this, he relies on a kind of vitalism that science would not grant and that empirical evidence would appear to contradict. This point is indeed made in only a few paragraphs, without much elaboration, and this is only natural, since there is very little with which to work.
Now, there is a great deal to be said about the rest of the chapter, which contains many of the most enjoyable moments I had while reading this book, where his main arguments are developed. However, I believe that as long as this hurdle remains unsurmounted, determinism stands just as strong before the chapter as it does after it. Unfortunately, I might add.

Overall, I strongly recommend this book. It is written in such a way that even a layman like myself can understand and appreciate the points being made, while gaining significantly in knowledge from its insights.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

You begin to see his huge influence on Deleuze in this book. Deleuze who gives credit all around has still seemingly not given enough credit where it is due. Even the entire book Deleuze wrote for Bergson is not enough considering how history gets written. This book shows that Bergson is the true carrier of philosophy after Hegel. Deleuze believing that Nietzsche brings philosophy to an end might be why the story of philosophy ends there.

Clearly Bergson is more of a practical beginning if anything. Not an ending. Nietzsche’s postmodern anti-philosophy and philology is not lost on Bergson. The future is, if not presently, to continue to combine semiology with physics and evolution through some form of complexity based Mandelbrot, Wolfram, or “X” algorithmic language.

Long story short, Bergson deserves all the credit bestowed on Deleuze and Nietzsche. He should be considered Hegel’s greatest disciple if not at least alongside Adorno, Ponty, and Marx. Both Matter and Memory, and this book, are masterpieces of western philosophy.

“Prefiguring, as having an idea of a future act which cannot realize without effort, does not involve necessary determination…

Between the idea and the action, some hardly perceptible intermediate processes come in, the whole mass of which takes for us a form sui generis, which is called the feeling of effort. And from the idea to the effort, from the effort to the act, the progress has been so continuous that we cannot say where the idea and effort end, and where the act begins.”

“In dealing with states of consciousness we cannot vary their duration without altering their nature.”

[Frank Bierbrauer · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely interesting book. Bergson talks about the possibility that time is more than simply "a parameter in the equations", so to speak, as it is so often understood in science. For example in physics time is really nothing that truly creates anything. Time in physics is merely a re-arranger of otherwise independent pre-existing fundamental separate objects. For Bergson it is wholly creative, the engineer of novelty. In this text, Bergson's PhD thesis, he focuses mainly on what time means in a personal sense to a human being. That is whatr he calls "lived time", and what most scientists call psychological time. Such a lived time is a seeming sense of both continuity and yet heterogenity at the same time. This means that although each moment interpenetrates the next it is qualitatively different from the last. Although each moment is necessary for the next, yet the next moment is wholly new and the previous moments do not define it, they are consistent with it. This book is about such a sense of time within us, each and every person who lives. He also touches upon free will and what it means when we propose that time is of this form.

In addition it is very well written, much easier to read than most philosophy books and it has within it, all throughout it Bergson's way of thought. The book itself opens your mind to his way of thinking by allowing you to enter his thought processes. It is unique in this sense.

[Bernardo Moreira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lido em dupla com o Fabio, ou seja, debates brutais que mantiveram-se no nosso debate de sempre que confronta os eixos Spinoza-Althusser-Deleuze (eu, com Bergson) contra Hegel-Adorno-Lacan (Fabio). O debate foi muito mais profundo que nós esperávamos, o que tornou a leitura do livro uma tarefa grandiosa.
O livro é muito bom, a escrita é belíssima em alguns momentos. A edição da Edipro é ótima, com notas e comentários que ajudaram bastante a aprofundar a leitura.
Bergson desenvolve um teoria da multiplicidade e da experiência da duração que é uma das grandes inspirações para Deleuze, que é uma das minhas principais referências (ficando atrás apenas de Althusser no período que escrevo isso). A forma com que Bergson debate com a física e com os filósofos da moral é brilhante. Não tenho porém uma conclusão sobre meu alinhamento em relação ao que Bergson defende. Compreendo enquanto central para a filosofia da diferença, mas alguns buracos que apareceram ao longo do debate ainda não me permitem abraçar Bergson completamente. A leitura do Bergsonismo, feita logo depois dessa (sozinho) ajudou em algumas questões, mas acredito que só me aprofundando mais na obra de Bergson poderei situar melhor minha posição.

[Mz · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://www.respublica.gr/2021/01/post...

[Daniele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibile, fa emergere cose che sono ormai coscienza storica

[Sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bergson’s main goal in the book is to convince us that most of our most pervasive difficulties regarding time are born from improperly representing phenomenal time (along with other features of consciousness) with a spatial mathematical structure that sneaks in all sorts of hidden assumptions that mess up our ability to think about our consciousness clearly and our ability to make free choices. Do they succeed? I think in many places they do, and I like Bergson a lot. Their criticisms of many of the conceptions of intensity, duration, and causality used by psychophysicists and other psychologists are rigorous and still very insightful.

My only reservation is that, despite Bergson's great care in catching hidden assumptions people sneak in when talking about experience and qualia using mathematical concepts, Bergson himself slips up and imports extraneous assumptions when talking about mathematical concepts/qualia themselves. So, for example, he seems to think that true mathematical greater-than relations can only be grounded by comparing volumes in space. I do not see why Bergson thinks this. Even in physics, I can speak of (and even measure) systems with greater or lesser energy or greater or lesser electric charge without any appeal to volume, and very useful ways of ranking experiences like Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility seem to me to require no spatial intuition at all. Bergson appears to me to make a similar error when they note our conception of number as fundamentally spatial (even if the real numbers have a naturally attached metric, there are other completions of the rational numbers which are very alien to our notion of space but which we can nevertheless rigorously understand: the p-adic number systems) and when they seem to think the determinism of physics as being contingent on the conservation of energy (as a counter example a Conway's Game of Life universe is perfectly deterministic but lacks any meaningful notion of conserved energy). On account of these confusions on Bergson’s part, I am still much, much more optimistic that mathematical (and even, I dare say, spatial/geometric) models can be used to faithfully and usefully represent aspects of internal states. Stanley Smith Stevens’s notion of Level of Measurement, for example, seems very much an improvement in research methodology that is sensitive to the sorts of problems Bergson points out. Bergson’s notions of just how fine-tuned mathematical structures can be to match some intuitions but not others are limited (just look at all the fine shades of notion between a largely structureless topological space and a Riemannian manifold). Nevertheless, I think Bergson's critique of “intensity” in psychology as being used to name really different forms of measure born from different contexts is worthwhile.

Probably their wildest conceptual idea is their concept of consciousness being non-Markovian (where a system is Markovian if its current state is all one needs to know to determine its probability distribution of possible futures). Bergson thinks that we may be directly influenced by the past beyond any simple form of internal “memory” storage system. On account of this, they believe mental states are fundamentally unrepeatable (because they are always influenced holistically by the fullness of the past). This, more than anything, is what leads them to criticize the possibility of true scientific knowledge (or even communication) of consciousness states being possible, and leads them to formulate their notion of freedom. I have to say this peculiar worldview is very aesthetically pleasing. It is a comforting thought that nothing is ever really permanently forgotten or lost. However, as intuitive as Bergson points out aspects of it to be, I can not say I am very convinced, there is not really any evidence of the memory process ever reaching beyond what is physically encoded. But then again, some physicists like Jacob Barandes argue that maybe the universe really does contain non-Markovian physical processes, so perhaps it may be instructive to try to think of future experiments to test if this is the case for consciousness. It would be very good news of Nikolai Fedorov’s cosmist project if so.

As a last note, Henri Bergson pairs well with Dune.

[boocia]

really enjoyable read. unironically, really makes you think. refreshingly clear for a french guy writing against german idealism (he even summarizes his argument at the end!), though obviously it was still very hard to follow for a layman. in some ways, a long walk to get to the zen buddhist idea of radical attentive presenthood and existence and selfhood as a stream and not an enduring state, but with added in post-enlightenment/liberal fascination with "freedom".

after reading and attending hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit class it's really satisfying to understand/catch-on to Bergson starting his argument from immediate conscious experience. i loved his hard push against what is expressible and measurable vs. what is actual. the final moments in this book about the inexpressibility of freedom is so cool. his argument is that conceptions of freedom in the material world are sort-of poisoned by a scientific (western! he refs older cultures who don’t do this) understanding of causality (being able to cause things?), and causality itself is a consequence of a conception of metered time where things are cogitated to occur in order and not simultaneously (a constraint of scientific expression). there's something breathtaking about this, it reminds me of arguments in "The Dialectical Biologist" about whether you would say an ant is an individual organism and eats leaves or if the ant-and-leaf through their connection/dependence can be considered one organism. is the dam an expression of beaver behavior or an extension of beaver's biological body? we think about it in the cartesian object-subject way but that is not inherently real. i Loved the move to differentiate laws of the material world like gravity from their applicability to conscious states.

i think the non-causative freedom to be found in duree, bergson’s proposed simultaneity, is sort of the intuitive leap here. he claims it isn’t expressible, tho i think his clue of what is Not free behavior is helfpul: as society and language concretize simpler psychic states, consciousness stultifies into hard associative connections between these symbolized states and external reality — “automatism covers freedom”. the conclusion is freedom is most obvious in totally unique and novel circumstances (he tells us to think back to times of critical decisions, and how we can’t always explain the reason for our decisions in a causative way in those moments as much as rationalize them later). i think a corollary is that freedom is more evident outside of society that reifies and enforces the language and symbols that oversimplify psychic states. this is lowkey a queer reading, about the love that has no name, the identities without term, etc.

i’m a little cautious about a positive supposition about freedom vs a negation of determinism being the conclusion of bergson’s lines of thought. or rather, i can see the argument for negating determinism and therefore all that’s left is freedom, but is it the same willful, conscious freedom we talk about colloquially? if anything it seems like *conscious* free will is the illusion, in that if i’m able to identify the cause and effect and identify why i did something, that will intrinsically be either an inaccurate confusion of time with space (to use his terms) or in the “automatism” category. free will seems to be rare and far between, and in a state attenuated from societal personhood. bergson pts to extremely intense internal awareness being a way to notice(?) free will. again i wanna pt to zen buddhism, of parting the illusions of society, material law, etc. to find some ineffable Truth by sitting and being as present as possible. A lot of the self disappears, but not … all of it … does it?

idk. a banger, love chewing on this one. it’s a REALLY slow start as a heads up tho, lots of mincing thru weird scienceymathy formulas etc.

[Hieronymus Stew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rather than cosy up to any established camp in the free will debate, Bergson argues that both determinists and their opponents commit the same fatal error: to think of time as space.

When we think of time, we tend to think in terms of a timeline, with various events organised side-by-side: your birth, your first day of school, and so on. But this attempt to spatialise time, says Bergson, presents time retrospectively, as something finished. In experience, time has a sense of becoming; it is dynamic and flowing. In experience, there are no clear boundaries between mental states such that we can simply string several up side-by-side like Christmas cards; rather, they "interpenetrate" or "melt into" each other to form a conscious whole.
One way of thinking about this "interpenetration" is through the metaphor of music. When we listen to a piece of music, we cannot simply analyse each note, one-by-one, and then have a full understanding of the piece. We have to experience the full work in its flowing rhythm; and when one note is off, it does not have a localised effect, but can upset the way we experience the entire phrase of the melody. In the same way, we cannot capture an action with anything like a series of frames; for it is part of a living whole which must be experienced.

The problem with determinism, then, is it splits up an action into its constituent parts in the homogenous expanse of space and, looking at the finished image of it, argues that it could not have been otherwise.

Of course, the way that determinism is typically formulated is that any event is the product of antecedent causes: but causality, for Bergson, approaches the notion of identity "as a curve approaches its asymptote". So when we say that A causes B, we're really envisaging A and B alongside each other with a relation strong enough to constitute a kind of identity enveloping both A and B. And so, we're still looking at a finished thing; we're still looking at something static; we simply cannot - while still picturing time as space and action as sprayed out along a timeline - capture the sense of dynamism which characterises the free act. For Bergson, we cannot define freedom positively, for to lean on words would be to invite spatial thinking into the mix, and hence smother the very vital liveliness we're trying to capture.

Bergson's writing breaks into moments of genuine poetry at points, which somehow doesn't feel forced or out of place amidst his more dry passages. I can see why he developed something of a cult in his day (apparently people would go on mystical pilgrimages to his birthplace), but also why he has been somewhat shunned more recently. Talk of a 'life force', the favouring of intuition over intellectual analysis, and his famous debate with Einstein, have left his reputation ailing in the climate of current analytic philosophy. In any case, though, his thoughts on the topic of free will are - fittingly - very original, and his arguments I'm sure will stay with me for a long time.