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
It is therefore obvious that, if it did not betake itself to a
symbolical substitute, our consciousness our successive would never
regard time as a homogeneous medium, in which the terms of a succession
remain outside one another. But we naturally reach this symbolical
representation by the mere fact that, in a series of identical terms,
each term assumes a double aspect for our consciousness: one aspect
which is the same for all of them, since we are thinking then of
the sameness of the external object, and another aspect which is
characteristic of each of them, because the supervening of each term
brings about a new organization of the whole. Hence the possibility of
setting out in space, under the form of numerical multiplicity, what
we have called a qualitative multiplicity, and of regarding the one
as the equivalent of the other. Now, this twofold process is nowhere
accomplished so easily as in the perception of the external phenomenon
which takes for us the form of motion. Here we certainly have a series
of identical terms, since it is always the same moving body; but, on
the other hand, the synthesis carried out by our consciousness between
the actual position and what our memory calls the former positions,
causes these images to permeate, complete, and, so to speak, continue
one another. Hence, it is principally by the help of motion that
duration assumes the form of a homogeneous medium, and that time is
projected into space. But, even if we leave out motion, any repetition
of a well-marked external phenomenon would suggest to consciousness
the same mode of representation. Thus, when we hear a series of
blows of a hammer, the sounds form an indivisible melody in so far
as they are pure sensations, and, here again, give rise to a dynamic
progress; but, knowing that the same objective cause is at work, we
cut up this progress into phases which we then regard as identical;
and this multiplicity of elements no longer being conceivable except
by being set out in space, since they have now become identical, we
are necessarily led to the idea of a homogeneous time, the symbolical
image of real duration. In a word, our ego comes in contact with the
external world at its surface; our successive sensations, although
dissolving into one another, retain something of the mutual externality
which belongs to their objective causes; and thus our superficial
psychic life comes to be pictured without any great effort as set
out in a homogeneous medium. But the symbolical character of such a
picture becomes more striking as we advance further into the depths of
consciousness: the deep-seated self which ponders and decides, which
heats and blazes up, is a self whose states and changes permeate one
another and undergo a deep alteration as soon as we separate them from
one another in order to set them out in space. But as this deeper
self forms one and the same person with the superficial ego, the two
seem to _endure_ in the same way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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