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:
- Clean text
- 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. 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." 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. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/henri-bergson/time-and-free-will-an-essay-on-the-immediate-data-of-consciousness.
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.
This latter thesis, which is maintained by psychophysicists, we shall examine later ; but even the opponents of psychophysics do not see any harm in speaking of one sensation as being more intense than another, of one effort as being greater than another, and in thus setting up differences of quantity between purely internal states. Com mon sense, moreover, has not the slightest hesita tion in giving its verdict on this point ; people say they are more or less warm, or more or less sad, and this distinction of more and less, even when it is carried over to the region of subjec tive facts and un extended objects, surprises nobody. But this involves a very obscure point and a much more important problem than is usually supposed. When we assert that one number is greater than another number or one body greater than another body, we know very well what we mean. SS'ca-For in both cases we allude to unequal Statob!Hlt spaces, as shall be shown in detail a to Intensities. ^^ further on> and we call that Space the greater which contains the other. But how can a more intense sensation contain one of less intensity ? Shall we say that the first implies the second, that we reach the sensation of higher intensity only on condition of having first passed through the less intense stages of the same sensa tion, and that in a certain sense we are concerned, here also, with the relation of container to con tained ? This conception of intensive magnitude seems, indeed, to be that of common sense, but we cannot advance it as a philosophical explanation without becoming involved in a vicious circle. For it