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
In the second place, in a duration assumed to be homogeneous, the
same states could occur over again, causality would imply necessary
determination, and all freedom would become incomprehensible. Such,
indeed, is the result to which the Critique of Pure Reason leads. But
instead of concluding from this that real duration is heterogeneous,
which, by clearing up the second difficulty, would have called his
attention to the first, Kant preferred to put freedom outside time and
to raise an impassable barrier between the world of phenomena, which
he hands over root and branch to our understanding, and the world of
things in themselves, which he forbids us to enter.
[Sidenote: How corrected by taking real duration into account.]
But perhaps this distinction is too sharply drawn and perhaps the
barrier is easier to cross than he supposed. For if perchance the
moments of real duration, perceived by an attentive consciousness,
permeated one another instead of lying side by side, and if these
moments formed in relation to one another a heterogeneity within which
the idea of necessary determination lost every shred of meaning, then
the self grasped by consciousness would be a free cause, we should have
absolute knowledge of ourselves, and, on the other hand, just because
this absolute constantly commingles with phenomena and, while filling
itself with them, permeates them, these phenomena themselves would not
be as amenable as is claimed to mathematical reasoning,
[Sidenote: With Kant, we assume a homogeneous space, the intuition of
which is peculiar to man and prepares the way for social life.]
So we have assumed the existence of a homogeneous Space and, with
Kant, distinguished this space from the matter which fills it.
With him we have admitted that homogeneous space is a "form of our
sensibility": and we understand by this simply that other minds, e.g.
those of animals, social life, although they perceive objects, do not
distinguish them so clearly either from one another or from themselves.
This intuition of a homogeneous medium, an intuition peculiar to man,
enables us to externalize our concepts in relation to one another,
reveals to us the objectivity of things, and thus, in two ways, on the
one hand by getting everything ready for language, and on the other by
showing us an external world, quite distinct from ourselves, in the
perception of which all minds have a common share, foreshadows and
prepares the way for social life.
[Sidenote: But if concrete duration is heterogeneous, the relation of
psychic state to act is unique and the act is rightly judged free.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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