Time and Free Will · Henri Bergson
FREE WILL
I smell a rose and immediately confused recollections of childhood come back to my memory. In truth, these recollections have not been called up by the perfume of the rose: I breathe them in with the very scent; it means all that to me. To others it will smell differently.--It is always the same scent, you will say, but associated with different ideas.--I am quite willing that you should express yourself in this way; but do not forget that you have first removed the personal element from the different impressions which the rose makes on each one of us; you have retained only the objective aspect, that part of the scent of the rose which is public property and thereby belongs to space. Only thus was it possible to give a name to the rose and its perfume. You then found it necessary, in order to distinguish our personal impressions from one another, to add specific characteristics to the general idea of rose-scent. And you now say that our different impressions, our personal impressions, result from the fact that we associate different recollections with rose-scent. But the association of which you speak hardly exists except for you, and as a method of explanation. It is in this way that, by setting side by side certain letters of an alphabet common to a number of known languages, we may imitate fairly well such and such a characteristic sound belonging to a new one; but not with any of these letters, nor with all of them, has the sound itself been built up.
And the outward manifestation of this inner state will be just what is called a free act, since the self alone will have been the author of it, and since it will express the whole of the self. Freedom, thus understood, is not _absolute,_ as a radically libertarian philosophy would have it; it admits of degrees. For it is by no means the case that all conscious states blend with one another as raindrops with the water of a lake. The self, in so far as it has to do with a homogeneous space, develops on a kind of surface, and on this surface independent growths may form and float. Thus a suggestion received in the hypnotic state is not incorporated in the mass of conscious states, but, endowed with a life of its own, it will usurp the whole personality when its time comes. A violent anger roused by some accidental circumstance, an hereditary vice suddenly emerging from the obscure depths of the organism to the surface of consciousness, will act almost like a hypnotic suggestion. Alongside these independent elements there may be found more complex series, the terms of which do permeate one another, but which never succeed in blending perfectly with the whole mass of the self.
Such is the system of feelings and ideas which are the result of an education not properly assimilated, an education which appeals to the memory rather than to the judgment. Here will be found, within the fundamental self, a parasitic self which continually encroaches upon the other. Many live this kind of life, and die without having known true freedom. But suggestion would become persuasion if the entire self assimilated it; passion, even sudden passion, would no longer bear the stamp of fatality if the whole history of the person were reflected in it, as in the indignation of Alceste;[7] and the most authoritative education would not curtail any of our freedom if it only imparted to us ideas and feelings capable of impregnating the whole soul. It is the whole soul, in fact, which gives rise to the free decision: and the act will be so much the freer the more the dynamic series with which it is connected tends to be the fundamental self. [Sidenote: Our every-day acts obey the laws of association. At great great crises our decisions are really free as expressing the fundamental self.]
Thus understood, free acts are exceptional, even on the part of those who are most given to controlling and reasoning out what they do. It has been pointed out that we generally perceive our own self by refraction through space, that our conscious states crystallize into words, and that our living and concrete self thus gets covered with an outer crust of clean-cut psychic states, which are separated from one another and consequently fixed. We added that, for the convenience of language and the promotion of social relations, we have everything to gain by not breaking through this crust and by assuming it to give an exact outline of the form of the object which it covers. It should now be added that our daily actions are called forth not so much by our feelings themselves, which are constantly changing, as by the unchanging images with which these feelings are bound up. In the morning, when the hour strikes at which I am accustomed to rise, I might receive this impression σὺν ὄλῃ τῇ ψυχῆ, as Plato says; I might let it blend with the confused mass of impressions which fill my mind; perhaps in that case it would not determine me to act.
But generally this impression, instead of disturbing my whole consciousness like a stone which falls into the water of a pond, merely stirs up an idea which is, so to speak, solidified on the surface, the idea of rising and attending to my usual occupations. This impression and this idea have in the end become tied up with one another, so that the act follows the impression without the self interfering with it. In this instance I am a conscious automaton, and I am so because I have everything to gain by being so. It will be found that the majority of our daily actions are performed in this way and that, owing to the solidification in memory of such and such sensations, feelings, or ideas, impressions from the outside call forth movements on our part which, though conscious and even intelligent, have many points of resemblance with reflex acts. It is to these acts, which are very numerous but for the most part insignificant, that the associationist theory is applicable. They are, taken all together, the substratum of our free activity, and with respect to this activity they play the same part as our organic functions in relation to the whole of our conscious life.
Moreover we will grant to determinism that we often resign our freedom in more serious circumstances, and that, by sluggishness or indolence, we allow this same local process to run its course when our whole personality ought, so to speak, to vibrate. When our most trustworthy friends agree in advising us to take some important step, the sentiments which they utter with so much insistence lodge on the surface of our ego and there get solidified in the same way as the ideas of which we spoke just now. Little by little they will form a thick crust which will cover up our own sentiments; we shall believe that we are acting freely, and it is only by looking back to the past, later on, that we shall see how much we were mistaken. But then, at the very minute when the act is going to be performed, _something_ may revolt against it. It is the deep-seated self rushing up to the surface. It is the outer crust bursting, suddenly giving way to an irresistible thrust. Hence in the depths of the self, below this most reasonable pondering over most reasonable pieces of advice, something else was going on--a gradual heating and a sudden boiling over of feelings and ideas, not unperceived, but rather unnoticed.
If we turn back to them and carefully scrutinize our memory, we shall see that we had ourselves shaped these ideas, ourselves lived these feelings, but that, through some strange reluctance to exercise our will, we had thrust them back into the darkest depths of our soul whenever they came up to the surface. And this is why we seek in vain to explain our sudden change of mind by the visible circumstances which preceded it. We wish to know the reason why we have made up our mind, and we find that we have decided without any reason, and perhaps even against every reason. But, in certain cases, that is the best of reasons. For the action which has been performed does not then express some superficial idea, almost external to ourselves, distinct and easy to account for: it agrees with the whole of our most intimate feelings, thoughts and aspirations, with that particular conception of life which is the equivalent of all our past experience, in a word, with our personal idea of happiness and of honour. Hence it has been a mistake to look for examples in the ordinary and even indifferent circumstances of life in order to prove that man is capable of choosing without a motive. It might easily be shown that these insignificant actions are bound up with some determining reason. It is at the great and solemn crisis, decisive of our reputation with others, and yet more with ourselves, that we choose in defiance of what is conventionally called a motive, and this absence of any tangible reason is the more striking the deeper our freedom goes.
In a word, if it is agreed to call every act free which springs from the self and from the self alone, the act which bears the mark of our personality is truly free, for our self alone will lay claim to its paternity. It would thus be recognized that free will is a fact, if it were agreed to look for it in a certain characteristic of the decision which is taken, in the free act itself. But the determinist feeling that he cannot retain his hold on this position, takes refuge in the past or the future. Sometimes he transfers himself in thought to some earlier period and asserts the necessary determination, from this very moment, of the act which is to come; sometimes, assuming in advance that the act is already performed, he claims that it could not have taken place in any other way. The opponents of determinism themselves willingly follow it on to this new ground and agree to introduce into their definition of our free act -perhaps not without some risk--the anticipation of what we might do and the recollection of some other decision which we might have taken. It is advisable, then, that we should place ourselves at this new point of view, and, setting aside all translation into words, all symbolism in space, attend to what pure consciousness alone shows us about an action that has come to pass or an action which is still to come. The original error of determinism and the mistake of its opponents will thus be grasped on another side, in so far as they bear explicitly on a certain misconception of duration.
As we find it difficult to picture the double direction of the conscious activity in all the phases of its continuous development, we separate off these two tendencies on the one hand and the activity of the self on the other: we thus get an impartially active ego hesitating between two inert and, as it were, solidified courses of action. Now, if it decides in favour of O X, the line O Y will nevertheless remain; if it chooses O Y, the path O X will remain open, waiting in case the self retraces its steps in order to make use of it. It is in this sense that we say, when speaking of a free act, that the contrary action was equally possible. And, even if we do not draw a geometrical figure on paper, we involuntarily and almost unconsciously think of it as soon as we distinguish in the free act a number of successive phases, the _conception_ of opposite motives, _hesitation_ and _choice_--thus hiding the geometrical symbolism under a kind of verbal crystallization. Now it is easy to see that this really mechanical conception of freedom issues naturally and logically in the most unbending determinism. [Sidenote: If this symbolism represents the facts, the activity of the self has always tended in one direction, and determinism results.]
The living activity of the self, in which we distinguish by abstraction two opposite tendencies, will finally issue either at X or Y. Now, since it is agreed to localize the double activity of the self at the point O, there is no reason to separate this activity from the act in which it will issue and which forms part and parcel of it. And if experience shows that the decision has been in favour of X, it is not a neutral activity which should be placed at the point O, but an activity tending in advance in the direction O X, in spite of apparent hesitations. If, on the contrary, observation proves that the decision has been in favour of Y, we must infer that the activity localized by us at the point O was bent in this second direction in spite of some oscillations towards the first. To assert that the self, when it reaches the point O, chooses indifferently between X and Y, is to stop half way in the course of our geometrical symbolism; it is to separate off at the point O only a part of this continuous activity in which we undoubtedly distinguished two different directions, but which in addition has gone on to X or Y: why not take this last fact into account as well as the other two? Why not assign it the place that belongs to it in the symbolical figure which we have just constructed? But if the self, when it reaches the point O, is already determined in one direction, there is no use in the other way remaining open, the self cannot take it. And the same rough symbolism which was meant to show the contingency of the action performed, ends, by a natural extension, in proving its absolute necessity.
We have been present at the deliberation of the self in all its phases until the act was performed: then, recapitulating the terms of the series, we perceive succession under the form of simultaneity, we project time into space, and we base our reasoning, consciously or unconsciously, on this geometrical figure. But this figure represents a _thing_ and not a _progress_; it corresponds, in its inertness, to a kind of stereotyped memory of the whole process of deliberation and the final decision arrived at: how could it give us the least idea of the concrete movement, the dynamic progress by which the deliberation issued in the act? And yet, once the figure is constructed, we go back in imagination into the past and will have it that our psychic activity has followed exactly the path traced out by the figure. We thus fall into the mistake which has been pointed out above: we give a mechanical explanation of a fact, and then substitute the explanation for the fact itself. Hence we encounter insuperable difficulties from the very beginning: if the two courses were equally possible, how have we made our choice? If only one of them was possible, why did we believe ourselves free? And we do not see that both questions come back to this: Is time space? [Sidenote: Fundamental error is confusion of time and space. The self infallible in affirming immediate experience of freedom, but cannot explain it.]
If I glance over a road marked on the map and follow it up to a certain point, there is nothing to prevent my turning back and trying to find out whether it branches off anywhere. But time is not a line along which one can pass again. Certainly, once it has elapsed, we are justified in picturing the successive moments as external to one another and in thus thinking of a line traversing space; but it must then be understood that this line does not symbolize the time which is passing but the time which has passed. Defenders and opponents of free will alike forget this--the former when they assert, and the latter when they deny the possibility of acting differently from what we have done. The former reason thus: "The path is not yet traced out, therefore it may take any direction whatever." To which the answer is: "You forget that it is not possible to speak of a path till the action is performed: but then it will have been traced out." The latter say: "The path has been traced out in such and such a way: therefore its possible direction was not any direction whatever, but only this one direction."
To which the answer is: "Before the path was traced out there was no direction, either possible or impossible, for the very simple reason that there could not yet be any question of a path." Get rid of this clumsy symbolism, the idea of which besets you without your knowing it; you will see that the argument of the determinists assumes this puerile form: "The act, once performed, is performed," and that their opponents reply: "The act, before being performed, was not yet performed." In other words, the question of freedom remains after this discussion exactly where it was to begin with; nor must we be surprised at it, since freedom must be sought in a certain shade or quality of the action itself and not in the relation of this act to what it is not or to what it might have been. All the difficulty arises from the fact that both parties picture the deliberation under the form of an oscillation in space, while it really consists in a dynamic progress in which the self and its motives, like real living beings, are in a constant state of becoming. The self, infallible when it affirms its immediate experiences, feels itself free and says so; but, as soon as it tries to explain its freedom to itself, it no longer perceives itself except by a kind of refraction through space. Hence a symbolism of a mechanical kind, equally incapable of proving, disproving, or illustrating free will.
On the other hand, if I try to give you an account of this psychic state, I shall be unable to make you realize its intensity except by some definite sign of a mathematical kind: I shall have to measure its importance, compare it with what goes before and what follows, in short determine the part which it plays in the final act. And I shall say that it is more or less intense, more or less important, according as the final act is explained by it or apart from it. On the other hand, for my own consciousness, which perceived this inner state, there was no need of a comparison of this kind: the intensity was given to it as an inexpressible quality of the state itself. In other words, the intensity of a psychic state is not given to consciousness as a special sign accompanying this state and denoting its power, like an exponent in algebra; we have shown above that it expresses rather its shade, its characteristic colouring, and that, if it is a question of a feeling, for example, its intensity consists in being felt.
Hence we have to distinguish two ways of assimilating the conscious states of other people: the one dynamic, which consists in experiencing them oneself; the other static, which consists in substituting for the consciousness of these states their image or rather their intellectual symbol, their idea. In this case the conscious states are _imagined_ instead of being _reproduced_; but, then, to the image of the psychic states themselves some indication of their _intensity_ should be added, since they no longer act on the person in whose mind they are pictured and the latter has no longer any chance of experiencing their force by actually feeling them. Now, this indication itself will necessarily assume a quantitative character: it will be pointed out, for example, that a certain feeling has more strength than another feeling, that it is necessary to take more account of it, that it has played a greater part; and how could this be known unless the later history of the person were known in advance, with the precise actions in which this multiplicity of states or inclinations has issued?
Therefore, if Paul is to have an adequate idea of Peter's state at any moment of his history, there are only two courses open; either, like a novelist who knows whither he is conducting his characters, Paul must already know Peter's final act, and must thus be able to supplement his mental image of the successive states through which Peter is going to pass by some indication of their value in relation to the whole of Peter's history; or he must make up his mind to pass through these different states, not in imagination, but in reality. The former hypothesis must be put on one side since the very point at issue is whether, the antecedents _alone_ being given, Paul will be able to foresee the final act. We find ourselves compelled, therefore, to alter radically the idea which we had formed of Paul: he is not, as we had thought at first, a spectator whose eyes pierce the future, but an actor who plays Peter's part in advance. And notice that you cannot exempt him from any detail of this part, for the most common-place events have their importance in a life-story; and even supposing that they have not, you cannot decide that they are insignificant except in relation to the final act, which, by hypothesis, is not given.
Neither have you the right to cut short--were it only by a second--the different states of consciousness through which Paul is going to pass before Peter; for the effects of the same feeling, for example, go on accumulating at every moment of duration, and the sum total of these effects could not be realized all at once unless one knew the importance of the feeling, taken in its totality, in relation to the final act, which is the very thing that is supposed to remain unknown. But if Peter and Paul have experienced the same feelings in the same order, if their minds have the same history, how will you distinguish one from the other? Will it be by the body in which they dwell? They would then always differ in some respect, viz., that at no moment of their history would they have a mental picture of the same body. Will it be by the place which they occupy in time? In that case they would no longer be present at the same events: now, by hypothesis, they have the same past and the same present, having the same experience.
You must now make up your mind about it: Peter and Paul are one and the same person, whom you call Peter when he acts and Paul when you recapitulate his history. The more complete you made the sum of the conditions which, when known, would have enabled you to predict Peter's future action, the closer became your grasp of his existence and the nearer you came to living his life over again down to its smallest details: you thus reached the very moment when, the action taking place, there was no longer anything to be foreseen, but only something to be done. Here again any attempt to reconstruct ideally an act really _willed_ ends in the mere witnessing of the act whilst it is being performed or when it is already done. [Sidenote: Hence meaningless to ask whether an act can be foreseen when _all_ its antecedents are given.]
Hence it is a question devoid of meaning to ask: Could or could not the act be foreseen, given the sum total of its antecedents? For there are two ways of assimilating these antecedents, the one dynamic the other static. In the first case we shall be led by imperceptible steps to identify ourselves with the person we are dealing with, to pass through the same series of states, and thus to get back to the very moment at which the act is performed; hence there can no longer be any question of foreseeing it. In the second case, we presuppose the final act by the mere fact of annexing to the qualitative description of the previous states the quantitative appreciation of their importance. Here again the one party is led merely to realize that the act is not yet performed when it is to be performed, and the other, that when performed it is performed. This, like the previous discussion, leaves the question of freedom exactly where it was to begin with. [Sidenote: The two fallacies involved: (1) regarding intensity as a magnitude, not a quality; (2) substituting material symbol for dynamic process.]
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.