QuestionsAre we free?The free act springs from the whole self, and lived time is not space
Are we free?Free will

The free act springs from the whole self, and lived time is not space

Freedom and duration (Bergson)

Henri Bergson 1859 · 1941The free act springs from our whole personality: lived duration cannot be cut up like space.
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What it claims

Freedom is a fact: free acts exist, and determinism, which holds only for time that has flowed, does not reach them.

Why

Determinism replaces lived time with its picture in space; yet some acts spring from our whole personality, and from it alone.

The same idea through history
Henri Bergson1889In the last chapter of his doctoral thesis, Bergson argues that determinism rests on a confusion between lived time (duration) and time pictured as a line in space.
In short

"The free act springs from the whole self, and lived time is not space" is an argument by Henri Bergson (Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience), 1889, ch. III, 1889) on the question "Are we free?" (answer: free will). Its claim: Freedom is a fact: free acts exist, and determinism, which holds only for time that has flowed, does not reach them. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the conclusion does follow from its 4 premises. AskPhilosophy presents 5 objections, 4 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience), 1889, ch. III
Valid

If we knew everything about you up to this morning, could we predict what you will decide? Determinists say yes: your motives, your character and your past fix the result, as the positions of two billiard balls fix their collision. Bergson answers that this reasoning hides a mistake. It treats your inner life as a series of things set side by side, like marks on a ruler. But a deep decision is not a mark on a ruler: it comes from the whole person, who changes as she deliberates. For Bergson, freedom is therefore not a mysterious power; it is a fact of lived experience that the language of space cannot describe.

P1All forms of determinism (physical or psychological) assume that lived duration can be replaced by its picture in space: a series of moments set side by side, which could be played again identically.
P2This equivalence holds for time that has already passed, which can be pictured as a line. It is false for time as it flows, the time we live while acting.
P3A truly free act takes place in time as it flows, not in time that has already flowed.
P4We are free when our acts spring from our whole personality and express it, and from it alone.
P5 · implicit premiseSome of our acts (even if rare) do spring in this way from the whole self, rather than being just the result of a surface state, a habit or a suggestion.
Therefore freedom is a fact: free acts exist, and determinism, which holds only for time that has flowed, does not reach them.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, one could accept everything else and still say: none of our acts really springs from the whole self, they all come from a surface state, so none is free. Bergson himself admits that free acts are rare and that freedom comes in degrees.
The argument is valid. P3 and P2 show that a free act escapes the equivalence between duration and space. P1 says determinism needs this equivalence, so it does not apply to such an act. P4 and P5 say that such acts exist and are free. The weak points are P2 (is it true that lived time cannot be described by a law?), P1 (does determinism really need this equivalence?) and P5 (do such acts exist?).
Analogy. A melody you are listening to is not the same as its score lying on the table. The score lets you compute everything in advance, but the emotion of the melody exists only in the lived time of listening. For Bergson, a free decision is like the melody, and determinism is like the score.

Objections

5

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Physical determinism (as Bergson presents it) 1889 · attacks premise 1

If the principle of the conservation of energy holds for all living bodies, the position of each material point of the brain is strictly determined by its position at the previous moment. Sensations, feelings and ideas would then be only the result of this motion, and necessity would follow without any assumption about the soul or about lived time.

Bergson replies
Henri Bergson
Even if the position, direction and velocity of each atom of the brain were determined at every moment, it would not at all follow that our psychological life is subject to the same necessity. One would first have to prove that a strictly determined psychic state corresponds to a definite brain state, and this proof is still to be given.
Henri Bergson
It is not the need to found science, but a psychological mistake, that has turned this principle of mechanics into a universal law: lived duration has been confused with the duration that glides over inert atoms. The so-called physical determinism thus reduces, at bottom, to a psychological determinism.
The debate goes on (our summary) Bergson does not deny everything. He admits that, if the conservation of energy is applied strictly, the freedom that remains is rather limited: our movements, seen from outside, would not be distinguishable from automatism. Even today, the question of how far a brain state fixes a decision is still debated, and determinists find Bergson's thesis about duration hard to test.
Psychological determinism (associationism, J. S. Mill, as Bergson reports them) 1889 · attacks premise 4

Our mind is a set of distinct states: desires, fears, temptations. Each state is necessitated by the previous ones, and the strongest wins. So, says Mill, we could have abstained from murder if our aversion to the crime had been stronger than the temptation. There is no "whole self" acting on top of these forces: the self is only their sum.

Bergson replies
Henri Bergson
Bergson admits that there is always some relation between the present state of consciousness and any new state to which one passes. But he asks: is this relation, which explains the transition, the cause of it? On his view it explains after the fact; it does not compel.
Henri Bergson
States of consciousness are not separate things: as we dig below the surface and get down to the real self, its states cease to stand side by side, they permeate and melt into one another, and each is tinged with the colour of all the others.
The debate goes on (our summary) The debate is about what "cause" means. For a determinist, explaining a state by the previous ones is enough to show it was necessary. For Bergson, this explanation is a reconstruction made after the fact, with words that cut up states the self lives as a whole. The two camps do not agree on what would count as a test.
Spinoza 1677 · attacks the conclusion

Men are mistaken in thinking themselves free. This opinion consists only in being conscious of their own actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are conditioned. Their idea of freedom is therefore simply their ignorance of any cause for their actions.

Bergson replies
Henri Bergson (on causality in Spinoza) 1889 · Reply at a distance: Bergson on Spinoza (1889)
Whether we study Cartesian physics, Spinozistic metaphysics or the scientific theories of Bergson's own time, we find everywhere the same anxiety: to establish a relation of logical necessity between cause and effect. This anxiety leads to turning relations of succession into relations of inherence, doing away with active duration and replacing apparent causality with a fundamental identity.
The debate goes on (our summary) Bergson does not answer directly the idea that the feeling of freedom comes from ignorance of causes. He criticises the view of causality that lets Spinoza say everything is necessary, and then relies on immediate experience: "among the facts which we observe there is none clearer". A Spinozist will reply that lived evidence is exactly what misleads, like the impression that the Sun is close by. The disagreement is about what proves more: lived experience or deduction.
The determinist who looks backward (as Bergson presents him) 1889 · attacks premise 2

Once the act is done, one can place oneself in thought at an earlier period and assert that the coming act was already necessary at that very moment. Or, the action having been performed, one claims that it could not have taken place in any other way. Freedom would then be an illusion of someone who has not yet seen the causes.

Bergson replies
Henri Bergson
Bergson examines the possible definitions of the free act (the one that "might have been left undone"). Each, he says, implies an absolute equivalence between concrete duration and its spatial symbol. As soon as this equivalence is admitted, one ends up with the most rigid determinism: the flaw lies in the question asked, not in freedom.
The debate goes on (our summary) For Bergson, the question "could he have acted otherwise?" is badly posed, because it amounts to replaying time like a film. Contemporary philosophers who defend the consequence argument (van Inwagen) or the requirement of being able to do otherwise find it, on the contrary, well posed. The debate about what "being able to do otherwise" means continues today (see the consequence argument).
Jean-Paul Sartre (on Bergson) 1943 · attacks premise 4

Sartre here criticises Bergson's thesis: the idea of a "deep self" whose acts would come as a father's children do, with a reassuring family resemblance. By projecting freedom into a psychic object, Bergson helps to disguise anguish, but at the expense of consciousness: what he describes is not our freedom as it appears to itself, it is the freedom of another.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1943, after the author's death (1941).
The debate goes on (our summary) Bergson died in 1941, before Being and Nothingness (1943), and could not reply. A Bergsonian would say that the deep self is not a thing set behind our acts but the very movement of duration. Two ideas of freedom remain here: expressing one's whole personality (Bergson), or choosing without support, even against one's character (Sartre).