Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness by Henri Bergson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Once again, Bergson takes us in another direction. He excels at pulling out the underlying relations that structure methodology. He exposes how we construct regular notions such as time, space, self and so on — showing us that such terms are actually heterogeneous. That we assume that the formality of language and conception is what things are; ignoring the uncertainty and difference that characterizes how we consider ourselves in a constant becoming all of our own.
At the heart of this essay, Bergson takes us towards free will, understanding that our conception of selfhood as a social manifestation (so we live outside ourselves) or as an “external projection of the other” which is reached by “deep introspection” but not given to “states” that are “amenable to measure”. This suspension of our sense of being between these two regimes disallows us our freedom since we are rarely grasping ourselves and instead dealing with how we are meant to consider ourselves. This is akin to unraveling how we know ourselves; we consider who we are by slowly replacing ourselves with our own map of ourselves, and then forgetting that the map is a map, and considering the map as who we are. This insightful proposition sounds oddly postmodern but it originates for Bergson as the understanding that we are not a static field of temporal absolutes. Rather, we are a process of integration — non-repeatable and consistently in flux. It is Bergson’s criticism of philosophy and science that we ought to know ourselves by the invariance that we come to misrecognize what we are as we always eliminating contingency and difference only to assuming the inadequacy of our ideas as being static and non-changing despite the inconsistency of our lived experience… as we use our social identity (as an unchangeable reference) to anchor our physical invariance. This is also why Bergson finds fault with causality; because all points on the manifold are localizations. Extensions of localizations will never attain stability with identity.
This amounts to saying that the more we strengthen the principle of causality, the more we emphasize the difference between a physical series and a psychical one.
It is for this reason; this difference between our psychical inconsistency that is immeasurable and our “physical series” anchored in social identity that we find ourselves with free will. In essence, because we are constantly becoming- through our own sense of process and not one that is grounded on the mechanized clocks of human coordination. Bergson questions social time as being time; instead he seeks to highlight how we generate ourselves and constantly make ourselves through the immediacy of our lived contexts. Confusing this with our ordered institutions and our prized laws of equivalence and mathematical measurement would be to further alienate who we are by mistaking our tools for what we really are.
I have read quite a few of Bergson’s books by this point. I had no idea this was his doctoral thesis until I was nearly done with the book. (I tend not to read covers or jackets). In this we see the promise of Bergson’s originality; his ability to suss out difference in approach and concentrate on how the acceptance of formal invariance in method creates a context by which centralized content often doesn’t match centralized content. In many ways, this is why different disciplines cannot speak to one another; because they assume too much and do not recognize their own assumptive principles. Because, to question such principles would be, often, to destroy the very discipline those methods generate. In this, Bergson is refreshing!
