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
Only one course will remain open to the determinist. He will probably
give up asserting the possibility of foreseeing a certain future act or
state of consciousness, but will maintain that every act is determined
by its psychic antecedents, or, in other words, that the facts of
consciousness, went, the phenomena of nature, are subject to laws. This
way of arguing means, at bottom, that he will leave out the particular
features of the concrete psychic states, lest he find himself
confronted by phenomena which defy all symbolical representation and
therefore all anticipation. The particular nature of these phenomena
is thus thrust out of sight, but it is asserted that, being phenomena,
they must remain subject to the law of causality. Now, it is argued,
this law means that every phenomenon is determined by its conditions,
or, in other words, that the same causes produce the same effects.
Either, then, the act is inseparably bound to its antecedents, or the
principle of causality admits of an incomprehensible exception.
[Sidenote: But as regards inner states the same antecedents will never
recur.]
This last form of the determinist argument differs less than might be
thought from all the others which have been examined above. To say that
the same inner causes will reproduce the same effects is to assume that
the same cause can appear a second time on the stage of consciousness.
Now, if duration is what we say, deep-seated psychic states are
radically heterogeneous to each other, and it is impossible that any
two of them should be quite alike, since they are two different moments
of a life-story. While the external object does not bear the mark of
the time that has elapsed and thus, in spite of the difference of time,
the physicist can again encounter identical elementary conditions,
duration is something real for the consciousness which preserves the
trace of it, and we cannot here speak of identical conditions, because
the same moment does not occur twice. It is no use arguing that, even
if there are no two deep-seated psychic states which are altogether
alike, yet analysis would resolve these different states into more
general and homogeneous elements which might be compared with each
other. This would be to forget that even the simplest psychic elements
possess a personality and a life of their own, however superficial they
may be; they are in a constant state of becoming, and the same feeling,
by the mere fact of being repeated, is a new feeling. Indeed, we have
no reason for calling it by its former name save that it corresponds
to the same external cause or projects itself outwardly into similar
attitudes: hence it would simply be begging the question to deduce from
the so-called likeness of two conscious states that the same cause
produces the same effect. In short, if the causal relation still holds
good in the realm of inner states, it cannot resemble in any way what
we call causality in nature. For the physicist, the same cause always
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