Time and Free Will

Overview

About two hundred and forty pages, published in French in 1889 as Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, an essay on the immediate data of consciousness, and submitted as Bergson’s doctoral thesis; the English title under which it became known, Time and Free Will, states the book’s ultimate destination rather than its literal French title, and captures accurately what the argument is actually building toward across its three chapters, even though the case for free will does not become explicit until the final section.

It was Bergson’s first book, written when he was still in his twenties, and it already contains, in compressed and rigorously argued form, the central methodological commitment that would organize his entire later philosophy: a sharp distinction between space, and the discrete, externally related, measurable units appropriate to it, and duration, the genuinely flowing, qualitative, interpenetrating multiplicity that characterizes real, lived time and consciousness, and that Bergson argues gets systematically falsified whenever it is unconsciously translated into spatial terms.

The argument

Against the measurement of intensity. The book opens with what looks like a narrow, technical dispute within experimental psychology, but which Bergson develops into something with far larger stakes: a critique of the then-common practice, associated particularly with the new discipline of psychophysics, of treating the intensity of a sensation or feeling, how strong a pain, a light, or an emotion feels, as a genuine measurable quantity, something that could, at least in principle, be assigned a precise numerical value and compared on a single scale the way physical magnitudes like weight or length are compared.

Bergson argues this treatment is a category error. Increasing intensity of feeling, he insists, is not actually an increase in quantity along a fixed scale but a qualitative change, a genuinely different state replacing an earlier one, and the impression that intensity varies along a measurable continuum is itself an illusion generated by unconsciously associating inner qualitative changes with external, genuinely quantifiable causes or accompaniments, like the increasing physical stimulus that produces an increasingly intense sensation, and then mistakenly transferring the quantitative character of the external cause onto the inner qualitative effect itself.

Duration versus spatialized time. This initial critique sets up the book’s central and more far-reaching distinction, developed at length in the second chapter, between duration and the spatialized, homogeneous time that Bergson argues both physics and, more insidiously, our own everyday and philosophical thinking habitually substitute for it. Spatialized time treats successive moments as a sequence of discrete, externally related instants, essentially interchangeable points strung out along a line, the kind of time a clock measures and that can be laid out, divided, and represented all at once, as though the whole sequence already existed spread out before us like points on a ruler.

Real duration, the time actually lived by consciousness, Bergson argues, is nothing like this. It is a continuous, flowing, genuinely indivisible multiplicity in which successive moments do not sit side by side as separate, externally related units but interpenetrate and qualitatively color one another, so that no two moments of a genuinely lived duration are ever really identical or separable the way two points on a spatial line are separable; each new moment carries and is qualitatively inflected by the whole accumulated weight of what came before it, in a way that resists being decomposed back into discrete, countable parts without falsifying what is actually being decomposed.

Two selves. Bergson uses this distinction to argue that there are, in effect, two different selves available to introspection. The superficial self is the self as we habitually represent it to ourselves and to others for practical and social purposes, already translated into the discrete, nameable, comparable states that language and social communication require, a self that has, in effect, already been spatialized and thereby falsified in the very act of being represented at all. The deep self, reached only through a more difficult, sustained introspection that resists this habitual translation, is the self as it actually exists in duration, a continuously flowing, qualitatively unique becoming that cannot be adequately decomposed into discrete states without losing exactly what makes it what it is.

Bergson argues that most psychological theorizing, and most ordinary self-reflection, actually examines only the superficial self, mistaking it for the whole of inner life, and that determinism about the will draws its apparent plausibility almost entirely from this same mistaken substitution.

Freedom as the expression of the whole self. The book’s final chapter draws out the consequence for the classical problem of free will. Determinism, Bergson argues, depends on picturing a decision or action as the determined outcome of prior discrete mental states, feelings, motives, character traits, treated as separate, measurable causal factors that could, in principle, be summed or calculated to predict the resulting act, exactly the way physical causes determine physical effects along a spatialized causal chain. But this picture, Bergson insists, is available only because it has already spatialized the self into discrete, externally related states, precisely the falsification his earlier chapters have been diagnosing.

Once the self is properly understood as it actually exists, in genuine, indivisible duration, the entire picture that makes determinism seem inevitable dissolves. A free act, on Bergson’s account, is not the mechanical output of separable prior causes that could in principle be predicted by anyone with sufficient information about those causes in advance; it is an act that expresses the whole of the indivisible, continuously accumulating self at that moment, the way, Bergson suggests, a work of art expresses the whole of the artist who made it rather than being calculable in advance from a list of the artist’s separable traits and influences. Such an act cannot be predicted, not because of any mere practical difficulty in gathering enough information, but because prediction as such requires treating the self as a sum of separable, externally related parts, which the genuinely free, deeply rooted act, springing from duration rather than from spatialized psychological mechanism, simply is not.

How to read it

Read the first chapter, on the measurement of intensity, as necessary groundwork rather than a digression; the critique developed there, of treating qualitative differences as though they were disguised quantities, is the same basic move Bergson later applies to time itself, and seeing it worked out first in the narrower case of sensation makes the larger argument about duration considerably easier to follow.

Work through the distinction between duration and spatialized time slowly, ideally with a concrete example of your own. Try genuinely attending to your own present state of consciousness without immediately naming or categorizing it into discrete, already-familiar terms, and notice how quickly the act of naming or comparing seems to substitute a static representation for whatever was actually, continuously happening.

Notice that Bergson’s argument for free will is unusual in that it does not directly engage the traditional back-and-forth between compatibilist and libertarian positions on their own terms. Instead, he argues that the entire debate, as traditionally conducted, rests on a shared and mistaken assumption, that the self can be adequately represented as a sequence of discrete, externally related states, and that once this shared assumption is exposed and rejected, the traditional problem itself is dissolved rather than solved on either side’s terms.

Read the discussion of the two selves, superficial and deep, as offering a genuine diagnostic tool as well as a metaphysical claim: ask, for any given account of a decision or a feeling, whether it is actually describing the deep, flowing self or only the superficial, already-spatialized representation of it that ordinary language and social communication require.

Read this book before Bergson’s later works if you are approaching him for the first time; it is where the fundamental duration-versus-space distinction that organizes everything he wrote afterward, including Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution, receives its first and, in some ways, still its clearest and most rigorously argued statement.

Questions it raises

• Is the distinction between qualitative intensity and quantitative magnitude as clean as Bergson claims, or do some inner states genuinely admit of something like measurement without falsification?
• Does duration, as Bergson describes it, name a real feature of lived time, or is it simply a description of how difficult introspection actually is, mistaken for a metaphysical discovery about time’s true nature?
• If a free act expresses the whole indivisible self and cannot be predicted even in principle, how would we ever distinguish a genuinely free act from a merely unpredictable or random one?
• Bergson argues determinism depends on covertly spatializing the self. Is this an accurate diagnosis of the strongest versions of the determinist position, or does it attack a weaker, more naive version of determinism than the position’s best defenders actually hold?
• What is the relationship between the superficial self, useful for practical and social life, and the deep self Bergson wants to recover through introspection? Can we function socially at all without the superficial self’s spatializing translations?
• Bergson’s argument dissolves the traditional problem of free will rather than answering it on its own terms. Is dissolving a philosophical problem this way a genuine solution, or does it simply relocate the same difficulties under new vocabulary?