Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of ConsciousnessBergson, Henri
Philosophy
Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness
Bergson, Henri
Consciousness; Free will and determinism; Space and time
[Sidenote: If this symbolism represents the facts, the activity of the
self has always tended in one direction, and determinism results.]
The living activity of the self, in which we distinguish by abstraction
two opposite tendencies, will finally issue either at X or Y. Now,
since it is agreed to localize the double activity of the self at the
point O, there is no reason to separate this activity from the act
in which it will issue and which forms part and parcel of it. And if
experience shows that the decision has been in favour of X, it is
not a neutral activity which should be placed at the point O, but an
activity tending in advance in the direction O X, in spite of apparent
hesitations. If, on the contrary, observation proves that the decision
has been in favour of Y, we must infer that the activity localized
by us at the point O was bent in this second direction in spite of
some oscillations towards the first. To assert that the self, when
it reaches the point O, chooses indifferently between X and Y, is to
stop half way in the course of our geometrical symbolism; it is to
separate off at the point O only a part of this continuous activity
in which we undoubtedly distinguished two different directions, but
which in addition has gone on to X or Y: why not take this last fact
into account as well as the other two? Why not assign it the place that
belongs to it in the symbolical figure which we have just constructed?
But if the self, when it reaches the point O, is already determined
in one direction, there is no use in the other way remaining open,
the self cannot take it. And the same rough symbolism which was meant
to show the contingency of the action performed, ends, by a natural
extension, in proving its absolute necessity.
[Sidenote: Libertarians ignore the fact that one path has been chosen,
and not the other.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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