Get started

WorkHenri Bergson

Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness

Calling one grief greater than another borrows a word from space, and a free act, looked at properly, is no choice between branches.

by Henri Bergson214 passages held

  • English, a translation held here, and your language
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work See it in context
Original title
Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience
First published
(aged 30)
Original language
French

Report a rights issue

Overview

Teaching in Angers and then Clermont-Ferrand through the 1880s, Bergson set out to sort through the founding concepts of mechanics, and was stopped by something he had not gone looking for: in physics, time never actually lasts. What the equations handle is a line, already drawn, divisible anywhere. What anybody undergoes is not that, and no science of the day had a word for the difference. The thesis he submitted to the Faculté des lettres de Paris in 1888 is built in that gap; Félix Alcan published it the following year, alongside a second thesis in Latin on Aristotle's idea of place. The book's first opponent is psychophysics, and Gustav Fechner by name. The Weber–Fechner law tied the strength of a sensation to the strength of its cause by an equation — sensation climbing by equal steps as the stimulus is multiplied — and so treated a loud sound as a quantity of a quiet one. Bergson answers that intensities have no quantity at all. A deepening grief is not more of the same grief; it is another state, and to call it more is to smuggle in a measure from space. Bergson turns the same argument on freedom. Determinist and defender of free will both picture a self standing at a fork in the road, and both have already turned a life into a diagram. In durée — duration, time as it is undergone rather than counted — states run into one another, and the act that follows expresses the whole person instead of selecting a branch. F. L. Pogson's English version of 1910 pushed the literal title down into a subtitle and went out as Time and Free Will. Four years later a decree of 1 June 1914 placed it on the Index of Forbidden Books, together with Matière et mémoire and L'Évolution créatrice.

Key concepts

What is an intensive magnitude, and why deny that it is a quantity?

An intensity is a quality mistaken for a size. Extensive magnitudes contain parts you can count: a length, a weight, a number of chairs. A sharper pain contains nothing you could add up; it is a different state wearing the same name. Bergson's charge is that psychology reads the second as if it were the first.

What did the Weber-Fechner law claim about sensation?

That sensation is a measurable quantity fixed by its cause: as the stimulus is multiplied, the sensation climbs by equal steps, and an equation ties the two together. The law made a science of mind look possible. Bergson accepts the measurements and rejects what they are about, since the numbers describe the stimulus and never the feeling.

What are the two kinds of multiplicity this book keeps distinguishing?

Things counted lie side by side in space and stay distinct from one another: that is numerical multiplicity. States lived through interpenetrate, each colouring the rest, so that separating them alters them: that is qualitative multiplicity. The distinction carries the whole book, because any account of inner life that begins by listing states has already chosen the wrong one.

What separates the superficial self from the deep-seated self?

The superficial self is life translated into words and shared categories, clean-edged states that can be named, compared and argued over. The deep-seated self is that same life as it is undergone, continuous and unrepeatable. Most conduct runs off the surface, which is why determinism describes it so well, and the rare act rising from below is where freedom sits.

What does Bergson mean by accusing an argument of borrowing from space?

It names a fault you can test for. Wherever an account of inner life uses parts, sides, distance, greater and less, or anything divisible, it has imported properties that belong to space and applied them to something that has none. The borrowing is usually invisible because ordinary language carries it along. Most of the book's targets are caught this way.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Duration, not the line on the clock

Does lived time have the shape physics gives it, a line already drawn and divisible anywhere, or does something get lost the moment inner life is laid out in space?

Physics handles time as a line already drawn, and a line can be cut anywhere; what anybody undergoes cannot. Bergson's name for the second is durée, duration, time as it is undergone rather than counted, where states run into one another instead of lying side by side. The error he traces is a borrowing: number, measure and divisibility all come from space, and every psychology that counts inner states has quietly turned a life into a diagram.

  • duration
  • time
  • space
  • number
  • measurement
  • multiplicity
  • motion
  • mathematics

Enter a dialogue

Intensity has no quantity

Can one sensation be more of another sensation? Fechner's law says yes and puts a number on it, and if that is wrong an entire science of mind has been measuring something it never had.

Against the Weber-Fechner law, which tied sensation to stimulus by an equation and so read a loud sound as a quantity of a quiet one, Bergson argues that intensities differ in kind. A deepening grief is not more grief but another state, and calling it greater smuggles in a measure taken from space. Psychophysics, on this reading, measures the cause and reports it as the effect, and language helps the confusion along by lending one word to both.

  • intensity
  • psychophysics
  • sensation
  • quality and quantity
  • psychological intensity
  • measurement
  • emotion
  • language
  • perception

Enter a dialogue

Freedom as an act that expresses the whole self

Where does freedom actually sit, if not at a fork in the road? Both the determinist and his opponent picture a self choosing between branches, and the picture may be the thing that is false.

Determinism and the usual defence of free will share a diagram: a self standing before two paths, one of which it takes. Bergson refuses the diagram. In duration nothing stands beside anything, so an act ripens out of the whole person and expresses a history rather than selecting from options laid out in advance. Freedom is a fact about rare and deep acts rather than a general property of choices, and it can be neither proved nor denied by arguments that begin at the fork.

  • free will
  • determinism
  • causality
  • self
  • selfhood
  • consciousness
  • psychology
  • associationism
  • mind-body problem

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
214
distinct concepts
232
by passages held, corpus-wide
#335

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “consciousness” and “duration”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
consciousnessduration45
durationfree will33
consciousnessfree will32
determinismfree will31
durationspace21
causalityfree will19
determinismduration18
consciousnessspace16
causalityduration11
causalitydeterminism10
causalityconsciousness8
perceptionspace8
consciousnesssensation7
perceptionsensation7
consciousnessdeterminism6
consciousnessperception6
durationperception5
sensationspace3
durationsensation2
free willspace2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1889 Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience) you are here EN
  2. 1900 Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique)

    The outlier on Bergson's shelf: the only one of these books that turns to the stage and the street. What it carries across is the test — the living against the mechanical, now applied to what makes an audience laugh.

     EN
  3. 1901 Dreams (Le Rêve)

    In French it survives as a chapter of L'Énergie spirituelle, the 1919 collection of his occasional pieces; in English it has gone on being sold as a book of its own, which is why a single lecture stands here beside three much larger works.

     EN
  4. 1907 Creative Evolution (L'Évolution créatrice)

    Fame arrived with this one: audiences at the Collège de France who had not come to study, reissue after reissue, a readership well outside philosophy.

     EN
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work

— or open another of their works