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.
Chapter IV
BERGSON’S ABHORRENCE OF DETERMINATENESS
A deep, temperamental abhorrence of determinateness—that is the motive of Bergsonism. By admission of Bergson, any object of the mind is determinate. But therefore a philosophy that repudiates determinateness in the nature of reality is ineffable because it is objectless. It is ineffable also because any reason offered for the indeterminateness of reality is determination of it. The dread of determinateness is the dread of reason, of explanation, of interpretation—in a word, of philosophy. A consciousness which can ‘testify that we are free’ is not an objectless consciousness; and freedom, if consciousness can testify to it, cannot be an indeterminate nor an immediate (i. e. unobjectified) datum of consciousness. Bergson’s position is that it is essential to the true nature of reality in itself, under whatever aspect—e. g. duration, motion, freedom etc.—to be subjective; and that this is why Zeno is right in finding motion, for instance, unthinkable; for “unthinkable” properly means (though it did not mean, for Zeno) incapable of becoming objective. This to say, is it not, that the true nature of reality independently of all point of view is to be viewed from a certain point! It comes to this, at least, if to be subjective is compatible with being known in any sense, with being contained within consciousness at all. Otherwise it comes to the skeptical (and self-contradictory) doctrine that it is essential to the true nature of reality to be unknowable in every sense. The former, of course, is Bergson’s view regarding subjectivity.[144]