Time and Free Will

Bergson's doctoral thesis and first book, published in 1889 as an essay on the immediate data of consciousness. Chapter 1 argues that psychological states such as feelings and sensations differ in quality, not in measurable quantity, and that talk of their 'intensity' smuggles in spatial magnitude. Chapter 2 distinguishes two kinds of multiplicity: the quantitative multiplicity of separate units laid out in space, and the qualitative multiplicity of conscious states that melt into one another. Real time, which Bergson calls duration (durée), is of the second kind; clock time is time spatialised. Chapter 3 applies this to free will. Both determinists and their opponents, he argues, treat the self as a series of separate states and a choice as a point on a map of options. A free act is one that springs from the whole of the deep self, not the superficial self of social habit. Freedom is a fact we experience, not something we can define.

It introduces Bergson's idea of duration, which influenced later phenomenology and modernist writing, and offers an unusual way out of the old deadlock between determinism and free will.