CHAPTER III

DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM

The fallacy of conceptualism, which, as Bergson conceives it, is to substitute space for time as the form of mental existence, has been discussed in the first chapter of _Time and Free Will_ in the aspect of applying intensive magnitude, and in the second chapter, numerical multiplicity, to psychic facts. It is the same fallacy which is discussed in the third chapter, in the aspect of applying to them the conception of determinate, causal organization. The outcome of the book is thus that the problem of freedom is just the problem of conceptualism, a problem of philosophic method. This book, _Time and Free Will_, is a manual of instruction for knowing the reality of mental existence; and its object is the _practical_ object of indicating the attitude necessary for that purpose. There are two possible attitudes, that of space and that of time, or that of conception and that of intuition. The conceptual is the attitude taken by philosophy universally, to be sure; which explains the futility of all extant discussions of the “persistent problems of philosophy.” It is clear, for instance, Monsieur Bergson thinks, that this attitude gives rise, in an automatic and inevitable way, to the problem of freedom--that is, that there would be no such problem but for this false cognitive attitude;--and at the same time that by originating in this unhappy way the problem is necessarily a pseudo-problem, cannot be stated without contradiction. For when you regard mental facts in the spatial or conceptual way, the question automatically arises, how are these facts causally related with other spatial facts? It is a contradiction because by “these” facts you mean non-spatial facts, which, in the nature of causation, can not be causally related with spatial facts, but which, the question presupposes, are so related. Such is the real meaning of the traditional problem of freedom. The solution, says Bergson, is to cease thinking spatially of that which is temporal; take the other attitude. Once you have done so, the problem vanishes; the causal relation is by definition a spatial relation, and there are no longer two spatial terms to be related. Such determinism is the associationistic conception of mind as an assemblage of distinct, coexistent elements of which the strongest exerts a preponderant influence on the others. Their organization is a mechanical system, and their operations obey the laws of mechanical causation.

As relative (_i. e._ quantitative) intensity is to absolute, qualitative intensity, as juxtaposited multiplicity is to interpenetrating multiplicity, so is determinate organization to organization by free evolution. The categories magnitude, number and cause apply to space. The difference, for Bergson, between space and time is, as we have seen, so absolute that it hardly expresses his theory aright to say that to the above three characters of space three temporal characters _correspond_. Reason seems lacking for any correspondence whatever. This is certain, at any rate: that when intellect makes time an object, and sees it greater or less, divisible and regularly consequential, three things are true about the real, non-objective nature of time, each of which truths manifests itself to intellect, but wrongly, erroneously. Moreover, it is plainly by reasoned, analytic discourse that Bergson discovers that the above intellectual manifestations of time’s essence are false. One discovers, furthermore, by this conceptual process, just how they are false, and corrects them with a result so conceptually precise and intelligible that, instead of these three characters falsely spatial, other three are determined as truly temporal. Instead of magnitude, quality has in this way been substituted; instead of multiplicity, indivisible variousness. For cause, the last chapter of the _Essai_ substitutes freedom.

We should now be well prepared for divining the nature of the freedom which is consciousness, or more generally, life. The organization of the facts of a given consciousness is such that the person is focally entire in any one of them, even as the entire body functions in each of its functions (cf. page 20). The determinate type of organization is analogous to the mechanically actuated manikin, not to the natural man, even though those fragments which build up the structure of the associationist soul are forces; for these forces are mutually distinct parts of the soul, whose union in it, and so whose interaction, depends on some principle extrinsic to any of them and is thus wholly determined from without. In the developmental type of organization, on the contrary, the _wholeness_ of action is its freedom, rather than independence of what is not itself. Although such independence seems to belong to it, as well, what Bergson is interested to emphasize about the freedom of the free action is that it is the expression of the entire person.

In the domain of life, there is no identity, for there is no permanence--“the same does not remain the same,” as Bergson puts it. The ego is not the same ego in any two moments; it is not the same ego that deliberates from moment to moment; and two contradictory feelings that move it are never respectively self-identical in two moments. Indeed, if the case were otherwise, a decision would never be made; the equilibrium of the opposing feelings would never be resolved. Merely by the fact that the person has experienced a feeling, he is modified when a second feeling comes. The feelings are the continually modified ego itself, a dynamic series of states that interpenetrate, reinforce each other and result in a free act by a natural evolution, because it emanates from the entire person.

Such is the character of the free act, a very intelligible character, it would seem, a character lending itself tractably enough to verbal definition, that is, conceptual definition, as a certain relation of act to agent. Yet it must immediately be added that what seems so intelligible and so conceptual an explication of this “certain relation”--what is contained in the two paragraphs preceding--is not regarded by the author as a definition of freedom. It seems that there is a distinction between the formulation of a conception on one hand, and a definition, on the other, though Bergson does not elucidate this distinction explicitly, and I have had to give up the attempt. The distinction is evidently of crucial importance, nevertheless. “We can now formulate our conception of freedom,” says the author, on page 219 of _Time and Free Will_. “Freedom is the relation of the concrete self to the act which it performs. This relation is indefinable just because we _are_ free. For we can analyze a thing, but not a process; we can break up extensity, but not duration. Or, if we persist in analyzing it, we unconsciously transform the process into a thing, and duration into extensity ... and, as we have begun by, so to speak, stereotyping the activity of the self, we see spontaneity settle down into inertia and freedom into necessity. Thus, any positive definition of freedom will ensure the victory of determinism.”

The attempt is therefore unwisely made by indeterminists to define freedom by meeting determinists on their own ground when the latter turn the question of freedom into considerations of the relations of the voluntary act to its antecedents, characterizing voluntary activity as essentially foreseeable before, or apodictically intelligible after the fact. When indeterminists permit themselves to be thus ambushed, they commit themselves to the support of determinism, by accepting the deterministic postulate, in the one case that “foreseeable” has intelligible meaning applied to psychic states, which it has not; or, in the other case, that willed acts are intelligible both before and after the fact.

The determinist, that is,--to take the second case first--professes that an act depends in a mechanical way upon certain antecedents. The indeterminist contends that the same antecedents could have resulted in either of several different acts, equally possible. Defenders and opponents of freedom agree in making a kind of mechanical oscillation between two points precede the action. I choose A. The indeterminists say, You have deliberated; then B was possible. The determinists reply, I have chosen; therefore I had some reason to do so, and when B is declared equally possible, this reason is forgotten; one of the conditions of the problem is ignored. Both represent the activity by a deliberative route which divides. Call the point of the division O; then the divisions of the forked line OA and OB symbolize the two divisions which abstraction distinguishes within the continuous activity, of which A is the termination. But while determinists take account of everything, and find that the route MOA has been traversed, their opponents ignore one of the data with which they have constructed the figure; and, after tracing the lines OA and OB, which ought to be united if they are to represent the progression of the ego’s activity, they make this progression go back to O and begin oscillating again!

The trouble with both these solutions, Bergson says, is that they presuppose an achieved deliberation and resolution, representable in space by a geometrical figure. The question, Could the ego, having traversed the route MO and decided on A, have chosen B? is nonsense: to put such a question is to affirm the possibility of adequately representing time by space, succession by simultaneity. It is to attribute to the figure traced the value of an image and not merely of a symbol. Figures represent things, not progressions: how shall a figure furnish the least indication of the concrete motion, of the dynamic progression by which the deliberation results in the act? The defenders of freedom say, The route is not yet traced; therefore one can take any direction. To which we reply, You can speak of a route, in such a connection, only after the action is accomplished, and then it has been traced. The determinists say, The route has been traced _thus_; therefore its possible direction was only that particular direction. To which we reply, Before the route was traced there was no direction, possible or impossible; there could, as yet, be no question of a route. In its lowest terms this merely means: The act, once accomplished, is accomplished; and the argument of the determinists: The act, before being accomplished, was not as yet an act. The question of freedom is not touched, because freedom is a shade or quality of the act itself, not a relation of this act with what it is not nor with what it can be. Deliberation is not oscillation in space; it is dynamic progression, in which the ego and the motives are in a continual becoming, as living beings.

Indeterminists, Professor Bergson says, must beware, again, of arguing against the prevision of voluntary acts. Once more, this is not because prevision of a voluntary act is possible, but because there is no sense in the phrase. If Paul knew all the conditions under which Peter acts, his imagination would relive Peter’s history. He must pass through Peter’s very own psychic states, to know with precision their intensity and their importance in relation to his other states. The intensity, in fact, is the peculiar quality of the feeling itself. Now, to know _all_ the antecedents of the act would bring you to the act itself, which is their continuation, and not merely their result, and above all in no way separate from them. To relive Peter’s history is just to become Peter--that is the only way Paul could conceivably “know all the antecedents” of the act in question. There is no question of predicting the act, but simply of acting. Knowledge of the antecedents of the act without knowledge of the act is an absurdity, a contradiction. The indeterminists can mean nothing, by such a contention as this, but that the act is not an act until it is acted--which is hardly worth meaning;--and the determinists can mean only that the act, once acted, is acted--which is no better. The subject of freedom is beside the point, in such a debate.

So the question of prevision comes to this: Is time spatial? You drew Peter’s states, you perceived his life as a marking in space. You then rubbed out, in thought, the part OA, and asked if, knowing the part before O, you could have determined OA beforehand. That is the question you put when you bring in Paul’s representation of the conditions (and therefore their materialization) under which Peter shall act. After having identified Paul with Peter, you make Paul take his former point of view, from which he now sees the line MOA complete, having just traced it in the rôle of Peter.

Prevision of natural phenomena has not the slightest analogy with that of a voluntary act. Time, in scientific formulæ, is always and only a number of simultaneities. The intervals may be of any length; they have nothing to do with the calculation. Foreseeing natural phenomena is making them present, or bringing them at least enormously nearer. It is the intervals, the units themselves--just what the physicist has nothing to do with--that interest the psychologist. A feeling half as long would not be the same feeling. But when one asks if a future action can be foreseen, one identifies physical time, which is a number, with real psychological duration, which has no analogy with number. In the region of psychological states there is no appreciable difference between foreseeing, seeing and acting.

According to the mechanical law of causation, the same causes always produce the same effects. But, in the region of psychic states, this law is neither true nor false, but meaningless; for in this region there is no “always:” there is only “once.” A repeated feeling is a radically different feeling. It retains the same name only because it corresponds to the same external cause, or is outwardly expressed by analogous signs. It was just said that the ego is not the same in any two moments of its history. It is modified incessantly by the accumulation of its past. One’s character at any moment, is the condensation of one’s past. Duration acts as a cause; but this temporal or psychological causation has no more analogy with what is called causation in nature than temporal variousness has with number, or intensity with magnitude. A causality which is necessary connection is, at bottom, identity; the effect is an expression of the cause, as mathematical functions are expressions of each other. But no psychic state has this virtual identity with, or mathematical reducibility to, any other with which it would thus be in the “necessary” kind of causal relation. Such effect is not given in the cause, but is absolutely new.

Time that has passed is an objective thing, and is representable by space; time passing is a subjective process, and is not representable. The free act is the actual passing of time; time in its passing is the very stuff of the existence of freedom. Analyze an act, and you make it a thing. Then its spontaneity is altered into inertia, its freedom into necessity. Hence any definition of freedom makes it determinism. But, though the analysis of the act and the definition of freedom are illusory undertakings, the fundamental fact of freedom remains unassailable by any argument.

* * * * *

Bergson’s way of vindicating freedom is thus to find no case against it. Of the positive sort, the only, and sufficient proof is appeal to consciousness. Freedom is an immediate datum of consciousness.

This is confusing to anyone who cannot follow Bergson in his view that subject and object, in actual intuitive consciousness, are indistinguishable, identical. And this fusion of the poles of consciousness while the nature of consciousness not merely suffers nothing but even attains its apogee thereby, needs more justification than Bergson has given it. Freedom is a datum of consciousness; but, as undetermined, it must, on Bergson’s principles, be consciousness itself--which, indeed, is plainly enough the teaching intended. Freedom is consciousness, then, purely subjective. In what sense is it a datum of consciousness? If it is a datum, is it not an object, of consciousness? It seems a case where, in order to see, you musn’t look, lest looking make what is purely subjective an object! This is hardly the case of the fovea and the faint star, where looking _loses_ your object; for here, looking rather produces it where no object belongs, or--perhaps one should say--transforms it. Your look, says Gustave Belot,[134] congeals and immobilizes it, denatures it like the Gorgon’s stare! It is knowable, says Bergson, only by being lived. It is a feeling we have. But the trouble is that, to be _known_ as undetermined, as freedom, to be even a feeling we have, it is back upon our hands as a datum, as an object.

Before I comment in my own way on the Bergsonian view of freedom, I wish to call to the attention of English readers the keen reaction of this French critic of Bergson. Belot objects to the modest-seeming statement that freedom is a feeling we have. Neither psychology, he thinks, nor common sense, approves.[135] They establish, on the contrary, a sensible difference between freedom, whatever it may be, and the feeling we have of it--any feeling we can possibly have. Our feeling of freedom is much less variable than our freedom. “We agree not to attribute a veritable practical freedom to the dreaming man, to the somnambulist, to the man affected with some mental disease. Yet the man who, in dream, sees himself act, sees himself free in his action; the somnambulist equally feels himself free and attributes to himself, in his dream, a responsibility that we decline to put upon him, and which he will reject, himself, when he wakes[136] ... The furious madman must ordinarily feel himself free in the accomplishment of a murder for which a tribunal will not consent to punish him. The fact is, it suffices, in order that we should feel ourselves free, that our acts should be in harmony with our ideas and our feelings. Now, that may very well be, in the cases of the dreamer, the somnambulist, the madman.... They would therefore feel themselves free. But they are not free; for they only act from an incomplete consciousness; and a great number of elements of their normal ego, which would permit the revision, the correction, the inhibition, are lacking.” A glimmering of the fact of one’s madness is a token of the only residuum there is of freedom. “It is to conserve some freedom, to perceive that one no longer is master of oneself.”

Bergson is alive to all this--sometimes, as when he says that the freedom of a free action is its _entirety_, its expression of the total personality. But Belot is quite justified in charging him with forgetting it, for only by forgetting it could he conceive of freedom as an immediate datum of consciousness. It is, indeed, far from the case that our freedom is nothing but the feeling we have of it, or that it is proportional to this feeling. What is so altered by the determinist habit of mind, by the conceptual attitude toward will, is not at all one’s feeling of freedom, but only one’s interpretation of it. An immediate, spontaneous feeling, being prior to theory and analysis, is safe from any influence from them. In the most incorrigible determinist, consciousness of the wish, other things equal, is exactly the same as in the most incorruptible indeterminist.

Precise determination of will is not only not contrary to freedom but is indispensable to it. Minimizing the value of motive in activity is loss, not gain, to freedom. The motive is what connects our act to our whole personality, and makes it ours. Without this connection, we are not free; its interruption is a limitation, not the condition, of freedom. And indeed freedom is so limited by the mass of our unreflecting impulses. Bergson is right in saying that we are rarely free. But therefore he is wrong in saying that freedom is the mere spontaneity of the ego.

In a certain passage[137] Bergson describes freedom in a way which seems almost explicitly to deny the doctrine that it is the entirety of will. Here it is a revolution of one part of the self against the rest, far from emanating from the total self. And such revolution, just so far as it is purely spontaneous, or arbitrary, is irresponsible instead of free. Just so far, on the other hand, as it is not arbitrary, it is determined. In fact, however, appearance of arbitrariness argues nothing about determination except that one is ignorant about it.

In showing the absurdity of all argumentation for or against the determination of a future voluntary act by present conditions, the considerations offered by Bergson are almost perfect proof of such determination. The reason we cannot think another’s thought without disfiguring it is just that the conditions of the thought, and so of the act, are not all reunited. The act, then, is supposed to depend on these conditions. Now, an absolute present is a fiction; each moment of the true duration of consciousness is a commencement and an achievement. Determination is nothing but that intimate connection of events which prevents us from isolating an absolute present. The case of Peter and Paul then, proves only that foresight could not be adequate to determination, not that determination is absent. The inability of even the author of an act to foresee it is no criterion of its freedom. Any free acts of our own that we do foresee, we foresee as connected with our present state, as ours, in fact; it is that which makes their freedom, but that supposes also their determination. This foresight, it may be said, is always insufficient and imperfect. So much the worse for freedom, not the better. It is thereby limited, not made. There are, indeed, always events outside of us that baffle our calculations, as well as unconscious tendencies, unperceived forces within us, indistinctly developing beneath the reflective and clear-seeing ego (Bergson calls this the superficial, Belot the higher ego) which suddenly break out, rout it and upset it. Such civil war is anything but freedom.

The uniqueness of psychic states, whether free or not, neither exempts them from determination nor even differentiates them from physical states. That a psychic state is not reproducible Bergson shows to be because the past, incessantly accumulating and modifying itself, is never the same in two moments. A clearer statement of the solidarity of past and present--_i. e._ of determination--could not be made. It may well be true that in the physical as well as in the moral world, every individual is without counterpart; it is none the less a product of nature, for its uniqueness; and, as a product of nature, determined, in its own uniqueness, by nature. Among our most unique acts, the most original are far from being the freest. The eccentricities of the madman are more original than the sober doings of the rational, but not so free. The more enlightened men are, the freer; but the more they do and think the same thing. Their divergences come from their ignorances and their unconsciousness, which are also the limits of their freedom. It is the same with them as with nature: it is when it produces monsters that it is most new, but it is then also that it has been least free, most constrained in its doings.

Monsieur Bergson has not done away with psychological determinism; but if he had, he would have hindered freedom rather than helped it. But the problem is not purely psychological; it is psycho-physical. We are at once body and consciousness. A freedom which were not exerted in the outer world would be absolutely nominal and illusory; and in order to manifest itself therein, it must be accompanied by physical processes. These too, then, if determinism is contrary to freedom, must be exempt from determination.

Bergson’s denial of psycho-physical parallelism[138] is no gain for freedom. If no external effect is essentially involved in a volition, the volition is impotent--which is surely not to be free. Nor would it be characteristic of freedom to have activities going on in the organism without the avowal of consciousness. So far as we do possess such unconscious goings-on, we are absolutely passive to their operation. Psycho-physiological parallelism[139] is a condition of freedom, not its negation. Some sort of correspondence is necessary to the feeling of freedom, and in that case freedom cannot dispense with determinism in nature, at least. One might, perhaps, suppose a preestablished harmony between a contingency (the moral world) and a determinism (the physical); it would be easier to suppose it between two determinisms; but between two contingencies--that is too much to ask!

Suppose, then, the ability of mind to produce, veritably cause physical modifications. Suppose an energy not subject to calculation. But how shall we ever know such an energy in the external world? All that is spatial is calculable, if number is derived from space. How could an energy, then, be manifest in the physical universe, _i. e._ in space, without being thereby subjected to the same forms of quantity and to the requirements of calculation?

Bergson’s attempt to repudiate the problem of determinism, as a pseudo-problem, results in his vacillation between the two sides of the controversy. Sometimes he accepts the solidarity of our acts with the rest of our conscious life, sometimes he denies it; which is to vindicate freedom sometimes by determinism, sometimes by indeterminism. In the beginning he founds freedom in the mutual penetration of the states of consciousness; even sensation is a commencement of freedom, because it embraces “the sketching and, as it were, prefiguring of the future automatic movements;”[140] and the free act is defined as that which “springs from the self”[141] without intervention of anything strange. Then, little by little, the contrary thesis takes the upper hand: the act of will becomes a _coup d’état_; “the successive moments of real time are not bound up with one another;”[142] the dynamic conception supposes “that the future is not more closely bound up with the present in the external world than it is in our own inner life.”[143] Bergson maintains, to be sure, that solidarity can be admitted between the past and the present and denied between present and future. Once the event happens it is indeed necessary that we should be able to explain it, and we can always do so by plausible reasons. But this connection is established after the fact for the satisfaction of our discursive reason. The past is fixed, it cannot _not have been_; it has become a _thing_, under the domain of the understanding and of analysis. Whereas, at the moment of enactment, the activity is a _process_, and so not capable of analysis. When the route is traced, we can analyze its directions and windings, but it is not traced in advance of being traced; it is the tracing that makes the route, not the route that determines the tracing. You can explain what is given, but there is no explaining what is not given.

Bergson, however, does not keep this point of view. The future, we have just seen, is “prefigured” in the present. Then it is as necessary to the feeling of our freedom to be able to connect our future to our present in our decision, as to be able, once the act is accomplished, to give account of it by reasons drawn from our consciousness. Bergson’s thought vacillates this way because he attributes two incompatible characters to the inner life, qualitative heterogeneity and mutual penetration of its states. Grant the heterogeneity and you have an infinitesimal dust, the very denial of connection and penetration. If the states penetrate there are always two near enough to each other in quality to form an identical whole, while they differ only in degree, as two very near shades of the same color. But then there is a quantitative, and so a homogeneous, aspect of the inner life.