Time and free will, an essay on the immediate data of consciousness
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~89,500 words · 425 passages
Cite this work
- APAHenri Bergson. (n.d.). Time and free will, an essay on the immediate data of consciousness. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/henri-bergson/time-and-free-will-an-essay-on-the-immediate-data-of-consciousness
- MLAHenri Bergson. Time and free will, an essay on the immediate data of consciousness. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/henri-bergson/time-and-free-will-an-essay-on-the-immediate-data-of-consciousness.
- ChicagoHenri Bergson. Time and free will, an essay on the immediate data of consciousness. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/henri-bergson/time-and-free-will-an-essay-on-the-immediate-data-of-consciousness.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
Bergson's doctoral thesis, of 1889, and the book in which his central idea appears: the time we live is not the time we measure.
Context and history
The French title is 'Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience'; the English, 'Time and Free Will', is the translator's and promises more than the book undertakes. The distinction is between clock time — homogeneous, divisible, in fact a line in space — and duration, which is how time is given to consciousness: continuous, without separable parts, each moment carrying all the earlier ones. Bergson shows that nearly all the classical problems about freedom arise from confusing the two: if a decision is pictured as a point on a line, what needed explaining has already been destroyed. The book made Bergson famous and gave him enormous influence until the 1930s, when he vanished almost entirely; he is being read again now.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Thus the comparison of two intensities is usually made without the least appreciation of the number of causes, their mode of action or their extent. There is still room, it is true, for an hypothesis of the same nature, but more subtle. We know that mechanical, and especially kinetic, Attempt to dis- theories aim at explaining the visible tinfuish Inten- r ° sities by atomic and sensible properties oi bodies by movements. . But it is the sen- wen defined movements of their ultisation which is &iven in con- mate parts, and many of us foresee the sciousness, and . •'. not the move- time when the intensive differences of ment.