Henri Bergson on Time and Free Will

Hello everybody, Omi Berkson is one of our most significant vitalist thinkers who from the late 1800s until his death in 1941 offers one of the most sophisticated modern versions of vitalism. His work is constructed as a reaction to a variety of strains of rationalist thought as found in the likes of Charles Darwin, Kerber Spencer and August Comte. In contrast, Berkson emphasizes themes of life, vitality, creativity, duration, themes which he developed in a collection of works famed for their post-dial and his use of metaphor and imagery. Notably, Berkson would win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1928. His work is famed for a recursive expression of life itself. His writings are not strictly representations of his themes. They are more performative, written to express what life itself is. We can find the common denominator of many themes of his work in his 1889 work Time and Free Will, or in French essay, so a donny immediate delicacy wants essay on the immediate givings of consciousness roughly. In this lecture, then I will explain the core themes of Time and Free Will. I will begin with a sharp biography of Berkson to give you a sense of the man, subsequently I will talk about the overall core themes of Time and Free Will. Berkson's famous distinctions between time and space, the qualitative and quantitative is theory of duration and what that tells us about why the human being is fundamentally free. Part one, sharp biography. Berkson has a quite cosmopolitan background. He was born in Paris, his father was a pianist of Polish extraction, his mother was Jewish, Anglo-Irish, the new Dunkaster, I believe, and Berkson spent his earliest years in England. He and his family later went back to live in France and where he elected to become a naturalist for in-citizen. He remained fluent in English and was directly involved in overseeing English translations of his work. He would not have become a school teacher in French secondary school, but later was appointed to the prestigious Kolner-Mal superior in 1898. His first book was his doctoral thesis which became Time and Free Will, which you will talk about, and he would not to hold the prestigious chair of Philosophy at the College de France from 1900 to 1921. And we're done to receive several honors. He became a president of the Academy Fonsée, which is an old, I suppose, of indrable and very exclusive institution for promoting a safeguard in the French language. In 1930, he was awarded the Legion of Honor, one of France's highest public honors. The reason I am drawing your attention to his awards is because it is very hard to just grasp how well known, reputed, and famous, and influential Berkson was. In the Anglophone world, now I think it's fair to say we have less of a sense of the appeal of the public intellectual. But this is not the case in France. Berkson set the mold for the public engaged academic and the intellectual rock star. Particularly after the publication of "Creative Evolution", "Le Volucion Créatrice" in 1907. Berkson's fame took off. The work was an international bestseller. He became famous in the media. His lectures attracted huge audiences and were often overcrowded and rambunctious affairs. And he would be met with cheers and applause. Reportedly, on a visit to New York in 1913, Berkson became possibly the first philosopher to cause a traffic jam on Broadway. Berkson's work itself was also hugely influential in literary and artistic circles. Most famously, Marcel Proust's "In Search of Last Time" is influenced by Berkson. This fame tells us that his ideas on life, duration, creativity, having a universal appeal. The origins of that appeal can be explained in "Time and Free Will", which I will turn to more materially. Berkson himself died in 1941. In Paris under the Vichy government, he refused an offer of exemption from the Nazi racial laws to Vichy were implementing. Part 2. "Quality of Time and Quantitative Time" To get to the heart of Berkson's philosophy, we need to understand that he is a dualist of sorts. Julius divide the world into two substances, two distinct substances, matter and spirit. And this makes Berkson of course a vitalist, but he's a distinctive type of dualist. So I don't think we could say he is a Cartesian dualist. The distinction he draws is not so much matter in mind or matter in spirit, and more time and space. But more of that more materially. Firstly, the overall trust of all of Berkson's philosophy is that time is primary, and space is secondary, and consequently derivative. Time is effectively what life is, indeed, time is what we are. This is quite a radical thesis, and there will be taken up in many forms over the 20th century in European philosophy, most notably in Martin Heidegger's work. But in time and free will, Berkson is doing something quite radical in the history of philosophy. If we think back to Plato, the thought was that the eternal and immutable is primary. The forms, as Plato famously called them, and the world of flux and appearances is secondary and derived from the former. Berkson completely reverses this thesis. Not only is he saying that life is a form of process, flux, and change is going even deeper than that, and saying reality is change, are more precisely movement. That which exists is dynamic, even more, and that exists because it is dynamic. To exist is to change. Time and free will then is an attempt to explain the existence of the human mind as flux. Change is a necessary condition of human consciousness, and time and free will explains to us how the flux of consciousness constitutes the majority and the reality of human life. The original French title is probably more accurate than the English translation. The French title is SS2Lé Donnet, Immediate De la Conscience, which we can translate as essay on the immediate givens of consciousness, or alternatively essay on the immediate quality of consciousness. Berkson then is interested in how consciousness immediately unfolds or gives itself to itself. There are three, I think, core elements and themes we need to pay attention to in time and free will. First, the idea is that psychological experience cannot be quantified. I was not quantifiable. Secondly, time also is not quantifiable. Something immeasurable yet is ever-present or palpable to our experience. And finally and consequently, Berkson's theory of time, which he develops in time and free will, enables him to assert the theory of freedom because at the core time and free will is a defense of freedom or a defense of free will. The way Berkson gets to that is quite different, quite original. He's not basing his defense of free will on an opposition between freedom and determinism. Our immediate position of compatibility rather, he's arguing that humans are originally free because of how we experience time. So, how then do we experience time? Well, Berkson takes that we detested to the immediacy of time. And once we do that, we will see the time is primarily that which makes our life intelligible. Berkson famously begins time and free will with a critique of traditional dogmatic approaches to our understanding of perception. This stems from a traditional empirical understanding. If we take someone say like David Hume, the idea would be that our minds are derived from sense experience. Sense experience occurs in a flux of unitary impressions which we will see from the external world. That impressions are unitary or discrete tells us something about the magnitude of our perceptions. Our perceptions have an intensity. They are felt to greater or lesser degrees and we can say that they are subject to increase and diminution. Here, Berkson, I think, is drawing a distinction between internal perception, perceptions as felt, and external perceptions perceptions that are extensive. But there's a bit of a problem here from the perspective of magnitude or range. How can that which we count to be both extensive and intensive as well be extended and unextended? As Berkson himself puts it, and I quote, "All the discussion between determinists and the opponents implies a previous confusion or duration would extend of succession with simultaneity of quality with quantity. We tend to have confused ideas, we tend to have confused ideas about both quality and quantity. We tend to think dogmatically in the empirical vein that internal and external experiences in the first instances are countable, measurable, quantitative. And the external state of the world happily maps on to our inner states. Also, because we assume our perceptions are discrete, we think that they are in some way atomized and therefore thinkable in units and are therefore countable, of course. This also suggests that consciousness can be characterized as flat and homogeneous. Now what do we mean by that or why homogeneous? Well, if we can break conscious experience into units, one unit is as measurable as any other, and it is therefore countable and flat. Interferers are counted. In contrast, birx and tanks consciousness is alive, rich and not at all static. Consciousness itself is the time of immediate flow. Consequently, the time becomes, I suppose, somewhat relativized for birx atom. This is to say time is the different experiences of time. So there is no absolute Newtonian clock or universal time, which is the same in all instances rather. Consciousness is real time where it is occurring. This idea is common sense enough. If you think of how time is felt for a different variety of people in different contexts, you will get to see what birx and is driving at. Time when you are bored is different to time when you are excited and having a nice time. The time of the inmate on dead row is different to the expectant child's time on Christmas Eve. For some reason, we think of time though as quantitative, measurable and uniform, that it can be measured on clocks, watches, calendars, electronic diaries and smartphones, and is therefore measurable in a mechanistic way. In fact, for birx and time has the opposite. It is intense, novel, dynamic, immeasurable. The philosophical point in birx and is making is that time is in excess of material causality. If you think about it, it makes more sense to say something like one inch or centimeter of consciousness. This is a bit of a bizarre thing to say. The point is that none of these things are immediate or present, where we introspect and examine what birx and calls the immediate givens of consciousness. We can limit ourselves to notions of causality when attending to the inner duration of experience. And here, birx and is asking us to rethink how we think about time. Time is understood in a basic mathematical or physical sense, as birx and things represented in the form of succession. Oh, one discreet and identical moment after another. The trouble with this, and here is not a million miles from a manual can's critique of humans, if we think of time as isolated and discreet moments, there is nothing connecting these different instances. The moments are self-contained and do not connect our interpenetrate each other. This perspective is not limited to maths and physics. We also think like this in our everyday life too, when we measure time in terms of discreet seconds minutes and hours on the clock. The problem for birx and is that this does not at all explain the flow of conscious experience, or how moments connect to each other. In other words, how the discreet moments of consciousness do not endure? Birx and things that we have inculcated the habit of spatializing time. Now, what does that mean? Time is not a juxtaposition of ever renewing or ever novelizing presence or present moments. And the most basic visual representation of this would be that time is success of one moment after another, along a line say from A to B to C to D. But that underlines for birx and the trouble with images. If we would present time visually, then we tend to think of it as a line. So what we are effectively doing is transposing the extension of space into the mind, what one point ranged alongside others. To think of time in this way is abstract and not lived, part two, time, not space. Time, at least as we have come to conceive it, is that which is without quality or intensity. And unfortunately, this leads to a very impoverished notion of time according to Birx and the time we use instrumently, mechanically in our everyday lives is predictable and measures and purportedly maps onto the mathematical and ordinate or reality itself. This time is predetermined. Time is like this, always has been like this, and always will be. Here, spatialized time is made up of segments that are distinct. One minute is a unity unto itself. Any moment though is separated. The way we think of it as separate when we abstractly measure time is with the view that there is no connection to any previous seconds or reminit minutes. This second is this second, not that second. This minute is this minute and not that minute. All this amounts to is that our conventional habits and patterns of thinking about time are illusory. In fact, with us the ability to think of time at all and Birx and wants to return us to this last knowledge. Birx and gives the examples of counting sheep, are counting the soldiers on a hill in a battalion. Try imagining a battalion of uniform soldiers on a hill. I'm told that a battalion is between 500 and 1000 soldiers. The first appears homogenous, but to count them we appear to space. There is, what Birx and calls, a quantitative multiplicity. And within that multiplicity each soldier takes up a specific space which allows us to distinguish one from the other until we have counted up the lot. But what's actually happening here? Well, firstly we are unwittingly disregarding the qualitative differences between soldiers. Secondly, we are also disregarding the types of being they are, they are common features or humanity they like. Since we are treating them as homogenous units, there is no difference between one soldier and one sheep. What unit? We are just counting here and there without any qualitative difference. The thing is though, before we count a set of soldiers, sheep or trees or whatever, the quantity of multiplicity is, the set of sheep or soldiers. However, prior to that counting, there must be a unity there to be quantified, to be counted. There must be all of the sheep or soldiers to count as a whole before we get to the discrete instances of sheep or soldiers. This is what Birx and calls, qualitative multiplicity. A qualitative multiplicity is a state which is most isomorphous with consciousness itself. And what is more, because the different individuals are taught together, they are naturally successive and therefore form a duration. Again, Birx and really helps us with his examples, he talks about a clock striking four times, and here I quote him, this is a long quote. Once I am writing these lines, they are our strikes on an neighboring clock, but my inattentive ear does not perceive it until several strokes have made themselves heard. Hence, I have not counted them, and yet I only have to turn my attention backwards to count up the four strokes which have already sounded and add them to those which are here. If, then, I question myself carefully on what is just taken place, I perceive that the first sound has struck my ear and even affected my consciousness, but that the sensations produced by each one of them, instead of being set side by side, has melted into one another in such a way as to give the whole peculiar quality to make a kind of musical phrase out of it. So, this example is instructive, the number, that is, four strikes, is our qualitative multiplicity. But the way Birx and Poeslet is that these strikes melt or interpenetrate each other, rather than being discrete and unconnected moments, the strikes are peculiar, have an internal context, intensity, and are indivisible as they occur. This state of qualitative multiplicity is an indivisible moment. In fact, moment is not the right word, since what is singular about these four strikes is unrepeatable. When we quantify the strikes of the clock or the notes of a song, which is all variants really unusable, we will not get to the intensive actuality of the experience. The problem is, we think of the duration of experience via a holy inappropriate medium, that is space or extension. Berkson when talking. about experiencing sounds suggests that we think of time as, and I quote, a homogenous medium in which our conscious states arrange alongside one another as in space, so as to form a discreet multiplicity. What is happening for some reason is that we are turning the authentic reality of our immediate experience into space. If this all sounds very abstract to you, it should. Because when we measure time in terms of space, that is exactly what we are doing. We are abstracting a segmented and fragmented channeled idea of extension and treating it as if it is primary. Our understanding of space has its origins then in time and not the other way around. But how do we get to this abstraction of time from space? No, there's a question. Well, for Berkson, we get the abstraction in two specific ways. Firstly, we think that extension is an aspect of the physical qualities of things. So, say, a sensation we have of a color or a sound are taken as directly representing how things are themselves in the external world. For example, if I am seeing a blue stick of varying hues of blue, when I think of that and try to articulate that to myself in a rational mode of thinking, I am suggesting that I see several discrete blue objects. The sensation of blue represents supposedly different single properties of the object. But what is it to say this? Basically, that my sensation of the color blue is extended, spread out as part of the object. I abstract extension from experience. Space is the spreading out of different and now countable properties. Secondly, the second reason for thinking of space in an abstract sense is because of a manual can't. Can't thought space is an a priori condition of experience. We are equipped with the ability to distinguish several perceptual impressions out in space. We can think of space itself as having an existence independent of its content. We can think of many objects and we think of spaces form as without objects. This means space is an a priori form or ordering of our experience of external sensations. In respect of what we are experiencing in the external world, it is the fact that we are intruding spatially in a spatial sense which is primary for can't. Berkson thinks that can't is mixing things up a little. In Berkson, our idea of space comes from an act of subjectivity. If those ideas are deriving from an act, then they are continually occurring irrespective of any temptation we have to isolate and explain them as simple phenomenon. An act implies duration, a movement that occurs. If this is the case, then there cannot be a mind standing outside our sensible experiences, unifying them all at the same time and setting them in juxtaposition. So Berkson's time is the acts of conscious and experience. While can't thought a priori forms a space in time were different to our sensible experience, Berkson does not think we can separate the ordering of thought from sensible experience. Can't thought the transcendental structure of consciousness is radically different in kind from the flow of sensible experience? Berkson contrasts except the reality of the flux of experience. And this is the primacy of perception, the raw immediate flow of the flux of sensual situation. But what does this flow reveal to us? Well, there is no sense of time without succession, and before and after. But equally, there is no sense of time without what Berkson calls the act, or the joining of what we take to be discrete moments, but which are, in fact, enduring. This is effectively a form of synthesis of the now, the just gone, many minute. Berkson's original contribution here is that time is primary, where traditionally time would be derived from the eternal and a temporal. The radical idea here is that there is no act that is not a form of the passage of time. Time is the movement of the present itself. It is duration. If this is the case, there are no states then that can be juxtaposed, delimited, demarcated, every immediate, supposed state is itself a moment of transition or activity. In fact, the very designation state is illusory. Paratry duration. There is no real or full difference between the passing of one state and the birth of another. The thing like this is to suggest we are separator successive states in contrast. For Berkson, the idea is that we are changed without cessation. It does not really make sense to say states since this implies stasis or rest and any state is nothing but change. Disappealed to the flux, Berkson calls duration. Jolay. Duration means nothing can ever remain the same, but in jurors, space is the medium that can actually achieve with state since it allows consciousness to discriminate one moment, point, unit from another. But to do this automatically acknowledges succession. E.G. won't point after another nor the temporal designation. Here we can see Berkson's radical metaphysics come to a head. The temporal moment is illusory, while it appears to cease to pass away. It does not because the moment is of the continuous and indivisible activity of duration. Consequently, there is only eternal duration or the persisted creation of life. Duration retains all past moments in our future occurrences because duration itself is divided. It is indivisible and continually draws together in a perpetual present that is continually presenting itself. Any division is just a secondary specialization of time that we impose on the superior reality of duration. In Berkson's own words, and this is a long quote, and I quote, "Pur duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live. When it refrains from separating its present state from its former states, for this purpose it need that be entirely absorbed in the passing sensation of our idea for it in. On the contrary, it would no longer endure. Now indeed, it forget its former states. It is enough that in recalling these states, it does not set them alongside its actual state as one point alongside another. But forms both the past and present states into the organic whole as happens when we recall the notes of a chewed belting, so to speak, it worded another. Thus, when it comes to the question of consciousness, Berkson reveals that the immediate debt of consciousness gives itself to us in two distinct ways as duration ad spatially. Consciousness is given both quantitatively and spatially, that is to spatial forms and they are given in their real temporal form. The former is derivative from the latter. When we experience things of duration, then we are perceiving things directly. So, while spatially forms can be instrumentally valuable, clocks help us meet on time, diaries help us schedule events. All these activities do, though, give us some bad habits and distorts our access to the true nature of reality, which is to say duration, as well as blocking our ability to entute the true nature of inner consciousness. It is, when we think our intuit that we see that our mind is not made up of fragmented sections, just tell us our mind is pure or true duration. Consciousness is a unified and indivisible multiplicity. Discreet multiplicity is consciousness organized just like things of the hour and space, that is here, that is there. All things in our field of experience have the sharp borders or distinct isolated edges, isolated at the hour isolated entities that are externally related to each other. But, according to Berkson, this is a misguided view, if we take it as primary, real time is not distinct, but an unbroken flow of true and pure duration. What does consciousness look like when part of in this way? Remember, Berkson is a type of dualist. It is imperative to separate consciousness from the external world to discern its real character. Geoation has a moving little space, or separate objects in the external world. Conscious states are not distinct, but unified. Their unity is not separable, but dissolves from one state to another. In other words, there are no sharp lines, demarcations, or edges between thoughts. In addition, conscious states are self-moving. There, the duration of the world is in folds. Other, as not, has explicit purpose and time at free will. Berkson does seem to be making a value judgment, and that is that it is bad for us to only understand ourselves and spatial or quantitative terms. As adults, if we focus too much on space, then we end up with, and I quote, "a self who states and changes permeate into one another and undergo a deep alteration, as soon as we separate them from one another in order to set them out in space." It is like we are mutilating ourselves in some way, diversity ourselves from the creativity of life itself would have distorted quite a theater view of the world. If consciousness is a qualitative continuity without break our interruption, but each state flowing into each other without disconnection or disruption, then our consciousness is as flow is self-moving, and as such cannot be determined. If the deepest realm of consciousness is pure flow, then our inner life is continually novelizing itself. And if it is continually novelizing itself, then it is in some way also free. It is becoming new, duration implies everything is in a constant process of change. Consequently, duration is always a moment of tension and contraction, tightening and relaxation. As humans, then time is an intense, intensive and intimate part of our lives. We are not explainable as things are objects out there in the world. Neither are we just processes or sequences or events, rather we are time or duration itself. But why does this make us free? Now, there's a question. Well, it is because of Birx and Zidious and Cratic view of determinism. Determinism, the law that cause follows effects, and that if we are caused, then we cannot be self-causing. That is free, follows on from the idea of spatialized time. Here time is objectified into different points or objects, as we have seen. If that is the case, if we think like this, then we are not thinking creatively. We are making a picture of ourselves as beings that are determined, and this is a situation Birx and would rather avoid. Duration, however, is closer to our own inner natures, because duration is indivisible, and we are a duration, it means we cannot be caused, and because duration is continually unfolding, this means a new and unpredictable entity is present in each and every moment all at once. In raw human terms, our conscious life, its quality of perceptions, memories, images, thoughts, ideas are intensively different, but also melt and dissolve into each other. Thus duration is immeasurable, and how it acts is indeterminate. In space we are the result of or we are acted upon, but in duration we are live, we live, we act and are therefore free. This is essential to Birx and because he wants to reject the view of the human being as mechanical. The human is naturally spontaneous in Birx and the view. This is a bit of a tricky thought, quite subtle. The idea being the human mind, the free will, is not determinedable, a specific acts, but about by specific causes. Rather, it IS those acts. The human IS free. This is not about choosing between competing alternative options, to negate a prior chain of causes. Instead, what Birx and his driving at is that duration implies the human being is continually free action itself. We usually post things like this in terms of a line of cause that determine ourselves, however, this is something that we think of only after the fact. It is only when something has happened that we think of things like alternatives or the past not taken, but in the moment, which is a truth, is where we are being enacted, free will and determinism only matter retrospectively. But one way, free will and determinism is a false dichotomy, something we impose after something has incurred. The free will, determinism, opposition, then, is a bit of a pseudo-problem. The self-exuation, which is to say the continual flow of a pulsating present moment, aiming to express this capacity of ourselves, reveals us as pure possibility, our continual, unactualized possibility. Even if it might not feel like this often, it is always a case while we are alive. So, to be free, we aspire to express the growth and development of our most intimate selves, our inner duration, such developmental self, continually in growth is the self as acting freely and spontaneously, which is our fundamental expression as free beings. In conclusion, Berkson emphasizes time over space. In time and free will, consciousness is given to us in two divergent ways. We experience time as extensive spatial and external, our weakening experience time as duration and flow. The former is, in instrumental time, time of clocks and smartphones and time tables, the latter is duration, which is lived time, the time of our interior life, which is palpable, acted, and felt. That which is real is movement, takes this, is equivalent to change, and this is Berkson's viteless impulse. Takes this is therefore to grow, to develop, to optimize our creative self-expression and to remain in tune with the endless creation of ourselves that we are, as selves we tend to oscillate back and forth between these forms of self. This is to say that freedom is not easy. On the contrary, freedom is hard. Even if we are naturally self-generating and self-creating, it is hard to think that. More often than not, we succumb to the temptations of organized and spatial life, remaining constrained by the ways our society is organized, whom we can coalesce thinking about freedom with the freedom that we naturally are, then we have something truly special. This is the point, I will be aware that we can grasp ourselves as well and truly alive. On that, I shall leave the last word to Henri Berkson, and I quote, "Now, the free act takes place in time, which is flowing, and not in time, which is already flowing. Freedom is therefore a fact, and among the facts, which we observe, there is none, clover. All the difficulties of the problem and the problem itself arise from the desire to endow duration, with the same attributes as extensity. To interpret a succession by a simultiliety, and to express the idea of freedom in a language into which it is obviously untranslatable."