Freedom – Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904-1905
Bloomsbury Publishing
2024
Hardback
272
Reviewed by: Kynthia Plagianou (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Introduction
This edition marks the first in a series of three English translations of lectures that Henri Bergson (1859-1941) presented from 1901 to 1905 at the Collège de France. As the editors of the series, Nils F. Schott and Alexandre Lefebvre, mention, the complete list of courses Bergson offered during his fourteen-year appointment at France’s most prestigious academic institution remains unknown (Schott & Lefebvre 2024: ix). Intriguingly, from the eleven known delivered courses, only four were preserved in writing out of sheer coincidence: Charles Péguy, a dedicated attendee of Bergson’s lectures, hired two stenographers to keep verbatim notes when a scheduling conflict prevented him from attending the lectures for four subsequent years. These four transcriptions, the only records of Bergson’s teaching style and material, eventually appeared in print by the Presses Universitaires de France between 2016 and 2019. With the first book on The Evolution of the Problem of Freedom (1904-1905) published in 2024, the other two of the four courses are scheduled to appear in English translation by 2027: The History of the Idea of Time (1902-1903) and The History of Theories of Memory (1903-1904).[1] Since the current edition introduces the series to prospective readers, I want to briefly comment on the project’s specifics before I provide an overview of Bergson’s lecture on the problem of freedom. It is worth noting that, for curious reasons, the English translations do not follow the courses’ chronological order. However, the editors do clarify why the fourth preserved course on The Idea of Time (1901-1902) is not included in the series: only the last sessions were transcribed, and the French edition is based on a reconstruction of the course thanks to surviving students’ notes (Schott & Lefebvre 2024: xiii).
The translations arrive in good time as the revived enthusiasm for Bergson’s thought has peaked in the past few years. In the English-speaking world, Bergson Studies flourishes, with new publications on different aspects of his thought and life appearing almost annually.[2] Edited and translated by leading Bergson scholars, the lectures at the Collège promise to attract a wide readership. For philosophers and intellectual historians, especially those working in the continental tradition, the lectures manifest the richness of Bergson’s philosophical vision. Perhaps the most important philosopher of the early twentieth century in France, Bergson revolutionised metaphysics and developed rigorous reflections on many topics relevant to contemporary philosophy, such as the nature of time, the relation between memory and perception, types of causality, and, of course, the possibility of freedom. Luckily, not only do we have the preserved transcripts, but these are devoted to the three central themes of Bergson’s thought until the 1910s: time, memory, and freedom. In his course material, Bergson recapitulates or anticipates the ideas developed in his three major works, Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907). The lectures read complementarily to the published works as they follow the historical evolution of each theme, looking at cardinal moments in Western philosophy when a thinker or a school of thought shifts the problem in a new direction. This engagement with the tradition in the lectures corrects the impression Bergson’s writings sometimes evoke, “that he springs from the ground as if without any predecessors at all” (Schott & Lefebvre 2024: x). Importantly, the lectures offer an accessible way into the Bergsonian universe for a general audience interested in philosophy and the history of ideas. Designed to appeal to specialists and non-specialists alike, the courses at the Collège were open to everyone without academic requirements, registration, or fees. In this regard, Bergson’s lectures can still play their part in disseminating complex ideas while conveying to the general audience the pleasures of “thought in the making”.
The Freedom Lectures
- Necessity and the origin of the idea of freedom in antiquity
Bergson’s course on the problem of freedom unfolds in twenty lectures over a period of five months (from 6 December 1904 to 20 May 1905). In the first lecture, instead of defining freedom directly, thus “favouring a particular theory and prejudging the solution”, Bergson sketches the constitution of freedom “as a problem” in the history of philosophy. Perhaps anticipating impatient listeners, he downgrades this introductory exposition, characterising it as invoking “vague generalities”, but in truth, it sets the tone for the entire course (Bergson 2024: 12, 21). His opening lines, “[…] no matter what theory (people) advance on the subject of freedom, there’s one point on which everyone agrees: freedom is a certain characteristic that is inherent, or that seems to be inherent to our action such as it immediately appears to us, such as it’s given to our immediate consciousness” (Bergson 2024: 12), condenses several assumptions, which Bergson unpacks into the following interrelated claims.
First, there are two primary faculties that differ in nature and function: “immediate consciousness” and “reflective thought”, reigning over “action” and “speculation” respectively. Second, freedom arises as a problem in the encounter of these two mutually exclusive faculties: “[i]t is the problem that our action poses for our speculation” (Bergson 2024: 12). Why is this so? Precisely because they work differently. Any voluntary act, Bergson continues, is “self–sufficient”: it exists in the thrust of a single intention. The intellect, on the other hand, operates through pairs of terms. While the will is expressed in one single tendency that translates into action, the intellect oscillates between two terms and, by establishing a causal relation, makes a synthesis for reflection. Even so, it is still unclear why the problem of freedom arises at this stage, and Bergson deepens his explanation, marshalling the concepts of time and duration. His third claim is that, while action necessarily unfolds in time, time “absolutely escapes the grip of reflective thought”. Summing up the gist of themes that appear in Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory and the drafts of Creative Evolution, Bergson makes a fourth claim: immediate consciousness proceeds via intuition and becomes the site for the unfolding of inner life, while the intellect proceeds via understanding, and has an altogether different role and relation to time. The intellect evades duration or the passage of time. It merely registers the results of this passage arrayed in fixed positions in space. Even if we introduce movement to simulate duration, this is composed of spatial elements, and as much as we narrow the intervals between points, we will not capture the flow of time.
According to Bergson, science and intellectualist metaphysics, relying precisely on a spatial conception of time, grasp only “what is already made” and eschew what exists “in the making”, namely action. Historically, they constantly upgrade their methods, advancing all the more sophisticated theories to determine causal relations and uncover natural laws, committing to an all the more rigorous determinism. However — with this point being the crux of this introductory exposition — the tighter our deterministic outlook becomes, the more the dissonance between our intellectual faculties and intuition increases. The inner feeling of agential freedom we experience when we act, and to which intuition testifies, persists despite our intellectual progress. Even though the will, with its practical orientation, harnesses the intellect and its capacity to establish necessary connections to navigate through a chaotic world, the intellect remains oblivious to the will’s freedom. Evolutionary speaking, action precedes speculation, and our intellectual faculties have developed to facilitate action. Increasingly, these faculties gained independence and instituted their own proper scientific and speculative domains. When the question of freedom is posed from within these domains, we necessarily adopt the deterministic framework that renders freedom a mere illusion. By contrast, starting from the practical domain of action and the perspective of the will, both freedom and determinism are rendered effectively explainable.
Turning to history, Bergson notes that there are good reasons why determinist views predominate and the freedomists are “always on the defensive”. Since all habits of thought, logic and even language conform to necessitarian thinking, the freedomists are “forced to appeal to an inner feeling”, which they can only articulate through ready-made concepts and in opposition to determinism. In that respect, notwithstanding the course’s title, “Evolution of the Problem of Freedom”, it is deterministic theories that have evolved, properly speaking. An early conjecture of necessity as a “rhythmic movement” that periodically brings back the same events is found in the Ionian philosophers. With the Stoics, the grid of causal connections tightens, and what was understood as a “vague regularity of nature” turns into a cosmological doctrine “of the universal interdependence of all things” (Bergson 2024: 19). Later, Plotinus, while rejecting the Stoic doctrine, refines it further. Deterministic thinking, as Bergson relates, evolves throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance until it finds its most rigorous expression in modernity. While in antiquity necessity was understood in qualitative terms, the effect manifesting a qualitative change induced by the cause, with the advent of modern science and the mathematisation of nature, causal relations become quantifiable, that is, relations between magnitudes expressed by functions. The scientific mechanisation of necessity will first enter philosophy with the Cartesian system and culminate in Spinoza’s and Leibniz’s absolute determinism.
If the idea of necessity is naturally prompted by our intellectual tendency to structure reality according to causes and effects, the idea of freedom arises in an altogether different manner. Stemming as a sentiment accompanying action, freedom grows and strengthens primarily outside philosophy. Progress in the ideas of freedom never occurs from speculation or science but rather “by an intrusion into philosophy of certain sociopolitical elements”, which are products of collective intuition. Bergson’s interesting thesis accounts for the discontinuous manner in which ideas of freedom surface and claim validity throughout intellectual history. The first “explosion” of the freedomist sentiment, according to Bergson, took place in the fifth century BCE in Pericles’s Athens, where social changes shifted notions about citizenship and ethico-political life. The collective experience of social upheaval found expression in Socratic thought. Even though Socrates did not explicitly interrogate the possibility of human freedom, his thought is impregnated with a latent intuition of freedom, which will become explicit in Plato and Aristotle.
The lectures between December 16, 1904, and March 10, 1905 — the second to twelfth lectures in the current volume — present the evolution of determinism in antiquity: from early Greek thought to Neoplatonism, through to the Stoics and Epicurean atomism. As mentioned, Bergson argues that the ancient stream of necessitarian doctrines was disrupted by themes of freedom rooted in Socrates’s moral considerations. Bergson’s originality is easily seen in his interpretation of the Greek canon. Despite Socrates being treated by historians — including Aristotle — as a psychological and ethical determinist, Bergson argues that he is evidently a nascent freedomist: his focus on human action, his questioning of the scope of natural science, his resort to inward experience, and his propensity to mysticism are all traits of freedomist thinking. According to Bergson, the Socratic intuition of freedom is manifested in the possibility of choosing knowledge leading to virtue over ignorance. Plato dramatises this theme through his mythical and allegorical imageries: in the fall of the soul and the allegory of the cave, the good is a kind of light, and freedom consists in the choice of enlightenment. However, Platonic freedom is a concept that is not easy to circumvent, either. Depending on which dialogue we consider, Plato’s reflections on the human soul oscillate between determinism and freedom. In fact, in Timaeus, he posits two forms of necessity: one that guides action towards the good aligning with reason, and a blind, physical necessity of bare chance (anankē). The possibility of freedom lies between these two distinct causal orders in choosing the middle ground of aretē (virtue). As Bergson notes, Plato, like every great thinker of freedom, reveals its problematic nature: “[….] the moment we’re about to grasp it, we say to ourselves that now free will must be explained, that if we choose, we do so for a reason and for something. Then, as we articulate the choice, we see it vanish into thin air” (2024: 57-58).
Next, Bergson moves on to make some interesting remarks about Aristotle’s general methodology insofar as it takes the problem of freedom into an altogether new terrain. For Bergson, Aristotle is not a systematic thinker in the sense of constructing new problems; rather, he is a great analyst: his speciality is analysing existing ideas to their elements, clarifying them and pushing them to new ground. Regarding freedom, we will not find a definition or a theory in Aristotle, but rather a meticulously developed network of concepts, “chance, randomness, a general theory of contingency and the relation of the soul and pure intellect (nous)” that are all components of the problem of freedom. For Bergson, Aristotle is the first to acknowledge that the idea of contingency frustrates the mind’s attachment to necessary conditions, and he discusses in detail Aristotle’s solution to the problem of future contingents. The latter was originally formulated by the Megarian School, and then reconstructed by Aristotle in his Peri hermēneias (On Interpretation) in the following way: “out of two opposite propositions relative to the future one is (already) necessarily true; thus, there is no contingency and future is fully determined” (2024: 73). Aristotle rejects this formulation because experience and common sense inform us otherwise: logic cannot foreclose the actuality of the future, and tukhē (chance) remains open in the present. Instead, what qualifies as the truth of two opposite future propositions in the present is a disjunctive proposition that poses the two as alternatives (“Tomorrow there will be or there will not be a sea battle”).
According to Bergson, Aristotle’s analysis of the Megarian syllogism reveals the fallacy behind any form of determinist argument. Specifically, the rejection of contingency results from an arbitrary and illusionary negation of truth’s temporal character. Tricked by the intellect’s natural tendency to think mathematically, strict determinists understand all possible truths to be similar to mathematical propositions, namely eternal truths (the fact that even mathematical truths are discovered does not alleviate the fallacy). The intellect cannot accept a truth’s semi-eternity, the fact that it comes into existence: “[…] it seems to us that (a) proposition, which became true, has been true for all eternity. It’s one of the characteristics of truth, as soon as it appears to us as truth, to leap outside time and appear to us as timeless” (2024: 76).
Moreover, for Aristotle, contingency is an inherent defect of nature introduced by hylē or matter, which is a principle of indetermination. Freedom is a human privilege, precisely because it refers to a choice: to reverse the movement of nature towards indetermination, ascend towards nous or the pure intellect, and reconnect with what is essential and the immutable. This is contrasted with the modern humanist idea of freedom, which maintains absolute necessity with respect to matter, while contingency pertains only to questions of ethics and human agency (2024: 78). Prefiguring the conclusion of the course, Bergson challenges both accounts, arguing that contingency and freedom, understood as the “creation of certain unforeseeable actions” and “indetermination in relation to causes” are found “everywhere there is consciousness, and de jure, everywhere where there is organic life” (2024: 78).
The next school of thought discussed by Bergson is Stoicism, which introduced the doctrine of universal fatalism in its “most powerful expression” (2024: 93). For Bergson, the Stoic doctrine exemplifies the absorption and assimilation of ideas of freedom into deterministic presuppositions commonly found in history: “[w]e have here the first example of a fact we find throughout the entire history of philosophy. […] what I’d call the necessary chocking of the doctrines of freedom by speculations concerning the whole of nature” (2024: 93). Stoicism, in particular the Greek founders of Stoicism, aiming to “democratize” philosophy, modified certain aspects of Platonic-Aristotelian thought to make it more accessible. The most critical of these transformations is the substitution of the single principle of logos spermatikos (generative reason) for the duality of matter and form or Idea (hylē and eidos). The Greek word logos has different meanings (speech, discursive reasoning, theatrical practice), but they all designate “the idea or image of a double-sided reality”, “something that as multiple, as unrolled, as slackened or as extended, is material, and that, when considered as one, as taut in itself, as undivided, is something rational, intellectual, and even intelligent” (2024: 104). In Stoicism, the universe is at once matter and intelligence, both corporeal (all that is, is a body, sōma) and rational or intelligent.
According to Bergson, ancient philosophies tend to agree that if things were perfectly rational, there would be no place for contingency, indetermination and, consequently, human freedom. For Aristotle and Plato, things are not as they ought to be: the world is subjected to movement and change, and these processes degrade it. Movement is the tangible proof of imperfection in the world. For Aristotle, the fact of contingency makes human freedom possible, whose purpose is to compensate for the disruption of the rational order: “[t]he function of our will is to put things back in place, as much as that’s possible” (2024: 106). By contrast, in Stoicism, things are as they ought to be insofar as change and movement are not understood as imperfections; their very explanatory principle, logos, is something essentially mutable and in a constant state of unfolding. The principle of logos spermatikos entails movement, change and transformation; it is an intelligent and rational principle, and yet mobile. For Bergson, the Stoics do not perceive any breach between things as they are and things as they ought to be. The world is exactly as it should be (“sympathy of everything with everything”), and its perfection and absolute coherence exclude contingency and, consequently, freedom in humans.
Bergson devotes considerably less time to conceptions of freedom and necessity derived from ancient atomism, developed by the Epicureans and solidified by Lucretius. While he dedicates two lectures to all the other ancient doctrines, his discussion of Epicurus and his legacy is cut short to almost half a session. This is because, as he argues Epicurean “ideas on the subject of freedom did not evolve” (2024: 119). Nevertheless, Bergson emphasises the radical character of the atomistic theory of necessity, which is indeed close to modern and contemporary mechanistic determinism based on the idea of the material universe as an abstract field of mathematical points. Ultimate units or atoms, indestructible and unchanging, separated by the void, yet mobile, combine in different aggregates, changing their relative positions and generating all natural phenomena. Whereas in Stoicism universal interdependence posits a rational necessity that proceeds from the whole of the universe to its parts, like the image of an organism, in Epicureanism, necessity has no overarching meaning, and the universe emerges as the sum of the primary elementary necessities of the atomic combinations. Despite its deterministic kernel, Epicurean philosophy accounts for contingency and freedom through the notion of paregklisis (the Latin clinamen). To allow for the accountability of human action, Epicurus endows atoms with the ability to deviate slightly (paregklinein) from their preordained course, from the ‘path that destiny assigns to it’ (118).
Bergson concludes his discussion of ancient doctrines with Plotinus’s “synthesis of all ancient thought” (2024: 127). As Bergson states, Plotinus’s doctrine of freedom is “by far the most complete, the most highly constructed of what the ancients have bequeathed to us on this question” (2024: 127). Plotinus’s corpus, in general, is the most systematic philosophy in antiquity, and it has reached us intact. He produced a “perfectly coherent and unified” synthesis of all Greek thought, aiming to insulate it from the ideas of his time (third century CE), which he considered “barbaric”. This is particularly evident, for Bergson, in Plotinus’s theory of freedom, which integrates Platonic-Aristotelian and Stoic elements. Even if “he fought the Stoics, and the Stoics’ fatalism in particular”, Plotinus’s starting point, according to Bergson, is distinctly Stoic, for he accepts the “perfect regularity of the course of nature” (2024: 129). Bergson cites several of Plotinus’s descriptions, all of which are reminiscent of Stoic themes: for example, his conception of the universe as a living being composed of parts, separated in space yet contiguous, fulfilling a universal sympathy or intention; or his comparison of the material universe to the harmonious complexity of a dance, where “the dancer is not conscious of the multitude of movements”, but s/he simply wants to dance (2024: 129).
As Bergson notes, Plotinus articulates the quest for freedom with the greatest precision: “[i]t suffices to find a solution, that, on the one hand, preserves the principle of causality […] and that, on the other hand, will allow us to be something” (2024: 130). For Bergson, Plotinus’s particular novelty is to present the problem of freedom as a question of the origin of life, specifically human life. Extending the Platonic-Aristotelian teaching on the body-soul relationship, he provides a theory about how the human being both enters the order of nature as a living body and “breaks” it in exercising her will. Plotinus argues that, even if we can overcome the natural order and secure for ourselves the realm of action, true freedom rests on detaching from nature and retreating to the plane of the Intelligible (kosmos noētos). As Bergson explains, the Neoplatonic teaching that “freedom does not reside in action but in the intellect” and “[h]umans produce action when they are too weak for contemplation, action being only the shadow of contemplation” is the ultimate expression of the Greek belief that the faculties of action are inferior to the intellect. In modernity, under the influence of Jewish and Christian theology — Bergson mentions the debate between Scotus and Aquinas over the primacy of the will — this hierarchical relationship will be reversed: beginning with Descartes, modern philosophers acknowledge and affirm the miraculous power of the will to prevail over understanding, to multiply its power, and, in certain cases, to be the source of the intellect.
The first (thematic) half of the course ends with Bergson demarcating ancient and modern assumptions pertaining to the problem of freedom. So far, his discussion is systematic rather than simply historical and follows the interpretational lines announced in the first lecture: freedom marks the limit between the speculative and the practical domain. Occasionally, Bergson indulges in small digressions, which enrich the main exposition without affecting its structure and lucidity. For example, when he explains that necessitarians do not oppose theories of freedom but rather “absorb” them to assimilate freedom with necessity, Bergson does so with a comparison from geology: every intuition about freedom is a “geological eruptive force”, while theories of necessity are forces of “disintegration” and “sedimentation” that act upon intuitions and reshape them (2024: 21); or, when, in an illuminating digression, he discusses the ideas of moira (fate) and anankē (necessity) in ancient non-philosophical literature — from tragic and epic poetry to Herodotus — with the aim of elucidating the emotional and affective roots of fatalistic thinking (2024: 25-27).
2. Determinism and the problem of freedom in modern philosophy
The second thematic half of the course comprises seven lectures, from 17 March to 20 May 1905 (lectures thirteen to twenty in the volume). Bergson here follows the intertwining of necessity and freedom within the framework of Western modernity. As it was prefigured in the first lecture, the new parameter defining the relationship between the two notions from the early seventeenth century onwards is the advent of modern science. According to Bergson, the scientific framework mandates, on the one hand, that causal relations pertain to physical laws and that, on the other hand, the reality of these relations can be fully grasped by mathematics. In that respect, Bergson’s discussion follows the way in which philosophy grapples with scientific determinism, beginning with Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, through to Kant’s Copernican Revolution, with the discussion concluding with a brief but suggestive preview of Bergson’s position (introduced in “The Introduction to Metaphysics” (1903) and fully developed in Creative Evolution (1907)).
While philosophical notions of necessity evolve vis-à-vis developments in science, philosophy always turns to questions of freedom when forced by developments in the social domain, and always via intuition. In the dawn of modernity, the second “eruption of freedom” is traced back to the transformations Christianity and Judaism initiated in social and psychical life. These themes, which persisted throughout the Middle Ages, were incorporated by Descartes’s voluntaristic philosophy and, from there, spread across modernity. The third explosion emerged from ‘ideas and feelings’ related to the 1789 Revolution as they appear in Rousseau and more thoroughly in Kant.
Bergson highlights several key aspects of Cartesian philosophy, the first of which refers to the “incontestable and profound influence” of Christianity in Descartes’s system. The most obvious influence is Duns Scotus’s ideas on the subject of divine and human will. Descartes’s freedomist doctrine rests on a series of creationist theses: God not only created the world but also created the truth and the good, and the criteria to judge his creation, by a “decree of his free will” (2024: 152). The idea of a creative God, a willful and active deity intervening in the world, is absent from ancient thought, in which contemplation and the intellect are superior to action and everything appetitive (2024: 151). By contrast, Descartes affirms that the human will is infinite, similar to the divine, and he ascribes to human beings an absolute faculty of choice. The difference between human and divine will is that, in humans, even if in principle infinite, factually the will is restricted by the intellect, which imposes its own time to judge and evaluate. Bergson sees as underlying Descartes’s voluntarism a theological motivation. Error and sin result from a lack of coordination between the will, infinitely invested in every act and operating fully in the present, and the intellect, which takes its time to deliberate. Thus, Descartes can account for the existence of evil through this discordance of the faculties, without tracing it directly back to God.
What is striking about Descartes, in Bergson’s view, is that he combines a rigorous determinism with the quest for freedom. While Cartesian metaphysics follows the mechanistic principles found in physics and analytic geometry, his moral intuition affirms the inner feeling of freedom manifested in action. In Descartes’s disciples — Spinoza, Leibniz, and the eighteenth-century physicians and scientists inspired by Cartesianism — the rational component of Descartes’s thought prevails. Specifically, Bergson sees in Spinoza and Leibniz a “partial return to the Greeks” as they seek “to provide a unified and simple, consistent and logical explanation of the totality of things” (2024: 175). Christian influences are superseded by an intention to unify Cartesianism, eliminate its subjectivist presuppositions, and provide a metaphysical ground. In doing so, Bergson holds that, even if not deliberately, they return to Aristotelian and Neoplatonic themes. Spinoza, for example, assumes the Aristotelian ideal of athanatizein, of allowing the human intellect to reconnect with what is purely intelligible and eternal. The difference is in the execution of the plan towards immortality. Broadly speaking, for the ancients, the essential, eternal forms or genera, the source of pure knowledge, lie more or less in “a beyond”, while in Spinoza’s metaphysics, which conforms to the new science, the intelligible, that is, natural, physical laws, are immanent to nature.
For Bergson, Spinoza transforms Cartesianism “from a doctrine of freedom that it was into a doctrine of necessity, and of the most radical and least flexible necessity that has ever been formulated” (2024: 178). Nevertheless, Spinoza’s interventions resolve Descartes’s inconsistency or discontinuity, as Bergson calls it, that is, the influence of the soul on the body, which remains inexplicable in Descartes and which disrupts the order of universal mechanism. Bergson focuses on the first two parts of the Ethics, and his discussion of the key moment of Spinoza’s doctrine is lucid and insightful: the difficulty with explaining the status of the attributes, the type of distinction pertaining to modes, and the symmetry of order between modes of different attributes. Bergson argues that everything in Spinoza’s system leads to a single goal: beatitude, what Spinoza calls true freedom as the liberation from servitude, an aspect of which is the illusory belief in free will. Rather, we partake in “the absolute freedom of God” when we apprehend what is necessary, the eternal reasons inscribed in nature expressing God.
Similarly, Leibniz aimed to eliminate the Cartesian rift between determinism and freedom, and he did so in the extreme. Bergson calls Leibniz a “pure intellectualist” much more assiduous than Spinoza: “he is convinced that reality can be fully resolved into ideas” (2024: 187). Both epistemological and metaphysical aspects of Leibniz’s determinism are equally inflexible and result from the reworking of ancient doctrines, modifying them to fit the new scientific framework: “[t]hus, by starting from the Aristotelian […] conception of science and by eliminating hylē, we arrive more or less at the doctrine presented in the Discourse on Metaphysics, just as, by taking Plotinus’s doctrine, his theory of the Intelligibles, and by eliminating hylē, we arrive at a doctrine analogous to the one presented in the Monadology” (2024: 192). First and foremost, Leibniz aims to erase the troubling idea found in Descartes that the soul can, somehow, interact with the body and change its movement. Developing this criticism, Leibniz will abandon the idea that matter is essentially extensive because extension results from an abstraction, a homogenisation of a fundamentally heterogeneous reality. From there, Bergson explains, Leibniz is led to posit indivisible elements that are “dynamic points”, or mathematical points, the center of forces that he calls monads or souls. Monads are isolated from each other, and each is a “state of mind”, a perception that fuzzily represents the totality of the universe and clearly only as a (point of) view of this totality: a “monad is a view of the universe; the totality of these complementary views make up the universe” (2024: 196). According to this theory, space is a projection made by the human mind, a symbolical order that allows us to represent the partial views or monads, that is, “purely qualitative differences, which alone are real”, as magnitudes (2024: 196).
Bergson maintains that, for Leibniz, this inelastic, fully saturated universe sustains not only human freedom in the Cartesian sense, but wholesale contingency. Leibniz breaks freedom down into three essential characteristics: spontaneity, intelligence and contingency, and he argues that, in his monadological universe, each substance maintains these three elements. Spontaneity characterises the monads to the extent that they are self-developing and self-determining, being totally insulated from each other. Intelligence as a condition of freedom “is realised by human souls”, and so the anthropomorphic notion of freedom is maintained. Finally, contingency is affirmed: even if actions are absolutely determined by the monads’ notion (its complete definition), these determinations are not logical necessities, since their opposite would not imply a contradiction. They are real possibilities, alternatives to what is actually the case. The latter, which “we call existence”, is akin to a highlighted contour among all the other possible sketches that remain unactualised. As Bergson remarks: “[f]reedom is power. An intellectualist like Leibniz cannot accept the idea of power, and so he spreads out all the possible actions, he turns them into so many accompaniments, as it were, of the action really performed” (2024: 211).
The last three lectures, on 5, 12, and 19 May 1905, comprise a second, much shorter semester. Bergson touches upon several important issues, but in places, due to the limited time, the discussion seems uneven. He begins with a summary of the main differences between ancient and modern notions of necessity, indeterminacy, causality and freedom, as they have been developed throughout the lectures. He also makes some interesting methodological remarks on how philosophical notions are displaced within scientific debates. For example, he sketches an acute criticism of reductive and eliminativist positions in psychophysiology, arguing that the misapplication of allegedly rigorous materialist commitments to mental phenomena results in a much less rigorous metaphysics, a weak variant and “simplification of Cartesian metaphysics” (2024: 219). This is why, Bergson stresses, “we have to distinguish very clearly between science and philosophy” and their respective methodologies, and that the philosophical question is “whether freedom can find a place” within the mechanistic explanatory framework. According to Bergson, this type of semi-scientific, semi-metaphysical determinism prevailed at the end of the eighteenth century, nourishing its own opposition as notably expressed in Rousseau’s moral and political philosophy. At the same time, in England, Berkeley’s immaterialist and nominalist ideas challenge the foundations of Newtonian and Cartesian science, based on the criticism that the mechanistic image of nature they presuppose is a mental or symbolic construction (2024: 228). While Rousseau’s motivations are moral, and while Berkeley’s are primarily theological, their criticisms halt the unbound mechanism prevailing at the time, creating a current of thought that puts freedom back in the discussion and prepares the third Kantian “eruption of freedom”.
For Bergson, “Kant’s stroke of genius” was that he realised that “if we put freedom in the very place of reality, we don’t for all that compromise scientific mechanism […]; on the contrary, we’re able thereby to found this mechanism, give it an unshakeable basis” (2024: 229). In the remaining one-and-a-half lectures, Bergson explains in what the Kantian solution consists, and how we should understand the notion of freedom that it entails. Already with Descartes, free will defies mechanism, and becomes a positive and creative power. Kant’s great invention, however, is to posit freedom’s creative power as the ground of the mechanistic, natural order itself. Beginning from a concept of nature that adheres to Newtonian science, Kant’s starting point in the Critique of Pure Reason is to establish the link between physics and mathematics: the problem of founding mechanism translates to a question of founding mathematics. Bergson provides an instructive summary of Kant’s transcendental epistemology, which renders nature coextensive with scientific consciousness and its transcendental apparatus, meaning that “nature and science are the same thing: nature cannot [not] be scientific because they’re the same thing” (2024: 233). As Bergson explains, the Kantian conception of nature, the realm of phenomena constituted by human intellect, becomes the seat of mechanism: “determinism exists, in short, only for our intellect, […], as a function of our knowledge” (2024: 234). Kant endorses freedom, but not as a possibility for the empirical self, locating it outside the causal order of knowledge. Kantian freedom, in Bergson’s description, refers to the transcendental perspective, from which the pure self initiates the unfolding of a moral character. Bergson stresses, that while our moral conduct is conditioned upon the transcendental position that the “intelligible self” creates for itself and occupies, yet it unfolds in a series of actions in time. It is questionable if such an unfolding of freedom can be integrated into the mechanistic order, as Kant claims it can. We must assume that our actions “carve out a surface from the rest of nature”, which necessarily depends on a certain flexibility granted by the causal order (2024: 236). For Bergson, this interdependence implies that the spontaneity and autonomy of moral conduct are compromised, and arguably, freedom, even if it is granted, cannot be sustained.
By the time the reader arrives at the final lecture, the problem of freedom arises as “the problem of the relationship between thought and action” (2024: 239). It is in the last lecture that Bergson speaks from the perspective of the present, and therefore, not as a historian but as a philosopher aspiring to transform the problem of freedom in his own right. For Bergson, Kant gave the modern problem of freedom its most precise and rigorous formulation, and consequently, any systematic intervention must begin there. Kant’s solution was so effective that, despite the nineteenth-century’s explosive developments in the sciences and in mathematics, there was no radical displacement of the problem of freedom. In this paradigm, knowledge is “a perfectly coherent system of mathematical relations” underlying natural phenomena, and action is a separate domain that precedes this order: “[a]ction is reality itself, and what we call science is something that gravitates around action”, which is “the foundation of science” (2024: 241). Therefore, freedom hinges upon how rigorously one upholds this primacy of action over knowledge. In Kant, the primacy of action is conditioned by universal consciousness, the impersonal, transcendental human mind that “insofar as it is free, it will launch phenomena into space and time that perfectly connect with one another, and insofar as it knows itself, it will present a nature in which everything is necessary” (2024: 242).
Bergson takes an issue with Kant’s solution based on universal consciousness because it renders philosophically irrelevant the inner feeling of freedom accessed by “empirical or psychological consciousness”. The latter, for Bergson, testifies to the complex conditions of action within what he calls “duration”. Kant does not, and could not, allow “jurisdiction” to empirical or immediate consciousness because he lacks an understanding of time as duration and treats time in spatial terms (2024: 244). Bergson’s critique of spatialised conceptions of time, as alluded to in the introductory lecture, concerns the discrepancy between the intellect’s spatial mode of knowing (giving coherence to distinct elements that remain external to each other) and intuition’s mode of access, which testifies to the qualitative change in the stream of inner experience, a type of knowledge that the intellect cannot register. Between the two, that is, “physical or discursive knowledge” and “intuitional knowledge”, Bergson sees intermediary forms, such as the systematicity corresponding to organic life (2024: 245). Between orders of knowledge, what changes is the density or tension of deterministic relations: “[i]n the physical world, causality means necessary determination, but to the extent that we go from the physical to the psychical, we see the connections between cause and effect becoming less and less tight. And when we reach the pure psychical, there’s almost no more connection at all, causality being not a relation but a being, a production […]. So we go by degrees, by an imperceptible transition, from what Kant called causality according to nature, physical causality, to what he calls causality by freedom, which is creation” (2024: 246). Bergson’s course on the problem of freedom ends with a statement of his philosophical project: to develop a kind of radical empiricism that is both scientific and takes into account intuition or internal experience, recasting thus the problem of freedom anew.
Conclusion
My aim in this review was primarily to inform potential readers about the contents of this publication. I offered some evaluations of the lectures’ general format and teaching aims, but I avoided criticisms of Bergson’s historical arguments as it would have necessitated an extensive reference to his monographs and other works. I want to conclude this task with some additional comments. First, the transcribed version of Bergson’s lectures might sound, at times, repetitive to the reader, but this serves perfectly the aims of the oral exposition, in which dramatising repetition creates cohesion and imprints the ideas on the audience. Ideally, Bergson’s lectures would be recited, perhaps, in the context of a study group, to reinvigorate the orality of this “thought in the making”. Second, readers interested in the history and historiography of philosophy should bear in mind that Bergson presents the ideas of the canonical thinkers in the form of a metanarrative, which serves the reconstruction of “the problem of freedom”. His reading is selective, and as he notes, sometimes he diverges from the standard interpretations and classifications of thinkers found in the scholarship. For example, Bergson’s presentation of Kant’s concept of freedom is based exclusively on the Critique of Pure Reason and its relation to transcendental idealism, and he omits the details of Kant’s moral theory. Finally, the contemporary reader cannot avoid noticing the patent Eurocentrism of Bergson’s discussion, which focuses exclusively on the Western philosophical canon. Without disregarding the time and context of the lectures, readers might think that Bergson could have acknowledged the limits of his presentation. But overall, and as I highlighted at the beginning of this review, both specialists and non-specialists will find Bergson’s Freedom lectures a rich and rewarding reading experience.
Bibliography:
Bergson, Henri. 2024. Freedom: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904-1905. Edited by Nils F. Schott & Alexandre Lefebvre. Translated by Leonard Lawlor. London-New York: Bloomsbury.
Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott. 2024. “Series Preface” and “Introduction: Henri Bergson, Freedomist”. In Freedom: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904-1905. Edited by Nils F. Schott & Alexandre Lefebvre. Translated by Leonard Lawlor, ix-xiv, 2-9. London-New York: Bloomsbury.
Alexandre Lefebvre, Nils F. Schott & Alan Shepherd. 2024. “Freedom Regained: Henri Bergson at the Collège de France, A conversation with Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott”. In The Philosopher, Vol. 112, No. 2, 78-83. Available at https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/freedom-regained.
[1] See also ‘Freedom Regained: Henri Bergson at the Collège de France, A conversation with Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott’, available at https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/freedom-regained.
[2] The most recent in publication order: Keith Ansell-Pearson, Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition, Bloomsbury (2018); Mark Sinclair, Bergson, Routledge (2019); Alexandre Lefebvre & Nils F. Schott, Interpreting Bergson: Critical Essays, Cambridge University Press (2020); Paul Atkinson, Henri Bergson and Visual Culture: A Philosophy for a New Aesthetic, Bloomsbury (2020); Mark Sinclair & Yaron Wolf (eds), The Bergsonian Mind, Routledge (2022); John Ó Maoilearca, Vestiges of a Philosophy Matter, the Meta- Spiritual, and the Forgotten Bergson, Oxford University Press (2023); Emily Herring, Herald of a Restless World. How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, Basic Books (2024).
