"Freedom Regained: Henri Bergson at the Collège de France": A conversation with Alexandre Lefebvre and Nils F. Schott (Keywords: Freedom; Determinism; Time; Memory; History of Philosophy)

From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 2 ("Violence")

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On the occasion of an exciting new Henri Bergson book, “Freedom: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1904-1905” (Bloomsbury, 2024), this conversation explores the book’s main themes, their relevance today, and how they fit into Bergson’s wider philosophy.

Alan Shepherd (AS): You’ve been working to prepare English editions of some of Henri Bergson’s lectures from 1901 to 1905, the first book of which, “Freedom”, has recently been published. What is the origin of the books and how is it that we’re seeing these for the first time in English now?

Alexandre Lefebvre (AL): This is a great story. Bergson (1859-1941) was appointed to France’s most prestigious academic institution, The Collège de France, in 1900 as the Chair of Greek and Roman Philosophy (and then, from 1904 until his retirement in 1914, as the Chair of Modern Philosophy). Each year for fourteen years he gave a lecture on a topic of his choice, which was open to the public.

But here’s the thing: Bergson lectured without notes and in an era before voice recording. How, then, were his lectures preserved? Sadly, most weren’t and are lost to history. We do, however, have transcripts of four full courses. The reason is wild. One of Bergson’s most dedicated students was the poet Charles Péguy, who religiously attended each lecture course. There were four years, however, when he couldn’t make it due to a scheduling conflict. So what did he do? What any dedicated student would: he paid, out of pocket, for legal stenographers to take down each of those lecture courses verbatim. Amazing!

It gets better. For years these transcripts were stored in three big red cardboard boxes and forgotten. But in 1997 they were rediscovered and donated by Péguy’s estate to the Jacques Doucet Library and eventually published by the Presses universitaires de France. The courses we have are The Idea of Time (1901–1902, published in 2019), The History of the Idea of Time (1902–1903, published in 2016), The History of Theories of Memory (1903–1904, published in 2018), and The Evolution of the Problem of Freedom (1904-1905, published in 2017). With Bloomsbury, we are preparing English editions of three of these four courses. Freedom has just been published in 2024, the 1902-1903 course on the history of time is next and should be out in 2026, and finally memory in 2027.

AS: How do you see Bergson’s place in the history of philosophy and the significance of his thought today?

AL: Bergson’s fortunes in the history of philosophy are fascinating, a real rollercoaster ride. In his day, particularly between 1900-1910, it’s no exaggeration to say that he was a rockstar. His books were bestsellers and the wider public flocked to his lectures, with hundreds of men and (a novelty at the time) women gathered outside his lectures at the Collège jostling for scarce seats. Of course, no one—certainly no philosopher—becomes a cultural phenomenon simply on the merit of their work. There are always wider social and intellectual trends that make it possible. In Bergson’s case, there are several. First, his philosophy was part of a broader artistic movement (impressionism in painting, perspectivism in literature) that sought a return to the subject and how individuals experience the world. Second, he emphasized embodiment and emotion at a time when industrialization made those topics highly appealing. Yet at the same time, third, his books closely and generously engage with the natural and human sciences of his day (including neuroscience, physiology, biology, physics, and sociology) to carve out a place for human meaning and spiritual experience. Last but not least, as editors of his work we have to say that it doesn’t hurt that he wrote and spoke beautifully and accessibly, winning him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.

Those were the good days. In the Anglo-American analytic tradition, it’s fair to say that Bergson has never had good traction, with Bertrand Russell’s polemical article in 1912 galvanizing hostile opinion. But after his death, Bergson’s fortune dips in precisely the place where it seemed most assured: French philosophies of meaning and experience. The short and sad truth is that he wasn’t considered cool anymore. Newcomers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty turned to German sources to develop existentialism and phenomenology respectively, and Bergson was forgotten: a “classic” in the pejorative sense of the term.

Today, though, we’re confidently announcing that Bergson’s back! Two landmark French interpretations kickstarted the process: Gilles Deleuze’s short book Bergsonism (1966, 1991 English edition) and Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Henri Bergson (1959, 2015 English edition) which revived interest in Bergson’s metaphysics and ethics respectively. Now in French and English (along with many other languages, from Spanish to Japanese), there is a vibrant global Bergson community (an “open society,” we jokingly call ourselves, reprising a key term of Bergson’s) developing his notions of time, subjectivity, consciousness, freedom, laughter and love, both exegetically and in response to twenty-first-century problems.

AS: The book, as you mentioned, presents his lecture course on The Evolution of the Problem of Freedom. He’s not directly lecturing on his philosophy, but it is very much his take on the issue. It’s striking the way he manages to make sense of the problem through Western philosophical history and to show that there is progression. The progress is very slow, it’s across centuries, but it’s the progress of our fundamental worldview. As well as a history, it is, as you say in the book, “a philosophy in the making” that he sets out more fully in his other works, particularly, when it comes to the problem of freedom, in Creative Evolution, which he was writing at the time. I think you’ve said it well that what is vital about his philosophy is that it is a philosophy of meaning and experience. He argues for, and affirms, our freedom in ways that are still helpful today. And one of the main themes in this book is, in words from your introduction, that “we know and feel that freedom is real, we think and reason that freedom is an illusion”, or in Bergson’s words, “there’s a gap, an irreducible gap, between the immediate consciousness we have of our freedom, of free action, and the knowledge we gain of it by means of reflection.” Could you explain this a little further and tell us how he develops this theme through the lectures?

Nils F. Schott (NFS): We’re quite lucky not only to have the transcripts at all but to have this particular set—on freedom, time, and memory, the central concepts of his published work until Creative Evolution. From what we can tell, after his reassignment to the Chair of Modern Philosophy (and so, after the course on the problem of freedom) Bergson no longer delved into the history of philosophy as he did before. What we see here is just how much his philosophy is (also) an original engagement with earlier thinkers against the wider background we just sketched. In turn, this engagement with other philosophers throws light on what Bergson is doing in the published work readers are familiar with, namely asking: what’s the problem we are dealing with? How does it pose itself in different contexts?

In the Freedom lectures, as you say, the problem takes the form of a gap between our immediately (or intuitively) experiencing ourselves as free as we act in the world, and our reasoning about the world in deterministic terms—in other words, between freedom and necessity. Freedom, as Bergson has it, is the name of “the problem that action poses to our speculation.” But it can become a problem only once we begin to reflect on our action, and it can become a problem only for reflection. That’s why there is a history or evolution of the problem in the first place. Bergson describes this history as an “oscillation” between the two sides of the gap, as it were, between intuition (or the immediate experience of freedom) and reflective consciousness. From the Presocratics to the nineteenth century, necessity seems to always carry the day—and yet freedom never goes away, it remains a problem.

By the time Bergson is speaking in the early twentieth century, though, a new situation has emerged, in which the reconciliation of the two (that is, of intuition and intellect) seems possible in a “new science.” Creative Evolution can be understood as laying the groundwork for that science. Beyond the parallels with the published books—and we’ve been fortunate to benefit from the work of the editors of the French versions of the lectures who highlighted these parallels—it is fascinating to see how in his lectures Bergson presents this history of oscillation and manages to avoid falling into one or another set of extremes.

On the one hand, the problem is not immutable. It changes, it evolves, and we will not find any ready-made answers in the history of philosophy (or anywhere else, for that matter) to copy into the language of our time. We must philosophize ourselves and invent new ways of addressing the gap between freedom and necessity. On the other hand, the way Plotinus or Kant, say, addressed freedom was meant to solve particular challenges that may no longer be ours, which had to do with the relationship of body and soul or with the rational nature of the universe—but that does not mean that their theories of freedom are inaccessible and meaningless. As Bergson shows, the problem and attempts at resolving it resonate across time (the parallel he identifies between Plotinus and Leibniz is one of his favourite examples). We might say that the same is true of Bergson’s theory: insofar as the problem poses itself for us as well, the way he addresses the problem—articulating it as it emerges and poses itself in his time, shaped by empirical psychology and evolutionary biology—will resonate with us.

For Bergson, determinism is a natural tendency of the mind because the characteristic trait of our faculty of analysis and reflection, our intellect, is that it is “mathematical.”

AS: For Bergson, determinism is a natural tendency of the mind because the characteristic trait of our faculty of analysis and reflection, our intellect, is that it is “mathematical.” He goes on to explain in Creative Evolution that it is so because mind has had to predominantly evolve and adapt itself to act on inert matter, for practical survival. Kant described matter reaching us through the spatialising form of our perception such that there is a fundamental agreement between our a priori reasonings about extension and what we discover empirically. Bergson thought that Kant had set out the profound agreement of mind and matter, but had failed to explain how and why it came about, and he fundamentally opposed Kant’s denial that we could intuitively know the absolute and his view that all our knowledge is relative to the forms imposed by our constitution. Bergson believed that consciousness and matter were opposites that had, through the evolution of life, adapted themselves to each other; two forms of knowing evolving with the two forms of reality before it—intuition bearing on life, intellect on matter. Through the intellect we get a grip on the static and inert, we see a unified nature, and a unified science, in which there is a necessary connection of causes and effects.

This is real knowledge when applied to matter, but when we apply the same mind-frame to life, and to our action, it gives us only relative knowledge; the essentially durational nature of life escapes it. Instead, we should focus on what rare moments of intuition can tell us when it comes to really knowing something about life. And this helps to explain why, in arguments of free will versus determinism, the determinist always seems to win. They have, as Bergson puts it, “the frameworks, the habits of thought, language on [their] side” whereas the “freedomist” is “forced to appeal to an inner feeling”. Another factor in determinism’s favour is the belief in fate. It’s consoling. In a brilliant short section in these lectures, almost an aside, Bergson analyses its primary element deep in the psychology of humanity as originating from our feelings toward death. Fate and death are both inevitable, unforeseeable, and blind to our purposes. On the other hand, there have been, he thinks, only two or three great philosophies of freedom (Socrates and, perhaps surprisingly to some, Descartes, are two he discusses).

In our time it seems like the argument has been largely resigned over to determinism, perhaps as physical explanations have made such progress toward a unified theory. It doesn’t really seem to be argued about much anymore. But, of course, I absolutely agree that the way Bergson addresses the problem still resonates. What support can his philosophy give freedomists to respond, or at least to take heart?

NFS: Yes, indeed, it really does appear that the “meshes of necessity” have got so tight as to let nothing slip through. But then, for Bergson, this is always the case and why theories of freedom take the form of “explosions”: they arise in response to theories of determination and open or, rather, articulate a breach in the web of “universal necessity.”

The example of the belief in fate is very interesting. It is, like you say, an insightful passage that also points to what makes freedom different. It’s not a belief like any other because the evidence is always there: we all know—know by intuition—ourselves to be free. The question is whether one seeks to drown it out and tighten the meshes, as it were, to the point of equating freedom and necessity (which is what Leibniz does) or whether one grants freedom a place (which is what Descartes does).

As for succour for the freedomist, there it is: because the intuition of freedom is always possible, there is always something, however little and, as you say, rare it may be, that cannot be that easily dismissed. And this opening (to use the later language of  The Two Sources of Morality and Religion) or insight can be built on: freedom will find a path toward articulation, eventually.

But support... that’s a taller order. Because at a minimum, you have to grant the validity of intuition. Bergson, in fact, begins all three lecture courses by insisting on this point.  Without such a change of perspective, it is very difficult, to say the least, to make the point persuasively. You’ll find this in various guises throughout Bergson’s work: going from the whole to the parts rather than from the parts to the whole, looking ahead from the past rather than looking back on it, and so on. His contemporaries and, in so many words, Bergson himself identified it as one, if not the central feature of his philosophy. Yet as long as that new perspective isn’t shared, “intuition” or “inner feeling” will hardly count as a reliable witness. And there is the added difficulty of appealing to shared experience without exposing oneself to the criticism that such an appeal imposes a specific, partial experience on everyone else, a criticism universalizing humanism has been the subject of.

But it’s worth keeping in mind that for Bergson, it would be wrong to limit the question to human beings. It may well be that we’re not so far from another “explosion,” one that takes place thanks to a redefinition of consciousness and thus one that would allow for the question to resonate in a whole new way.

AS: You mentioned earlier that Bergson’s “solution” to the problem in this lecture course is the idea of a “new science” that reconciles intellect and intuition. Perhaps more promisingly for our time, he describes the same general idea in other works as science and metaphysics being two complementary forms of knowledge; science according to intellect and metaphysics according to intuition; he doesn’t insist on metaphysics being considered a science. Either way, he does, as Alexandre said, try to carve out a place for human meaning and spiritual experience. He advocates a radical empiricism, a knowledge from all experience, both internal and external, and argues against what we would call scientism. And there’s the bigger “story” in Creative Evolution about the origin of intellect and intuition, and of how our mind has evolved primarily as intellect and we retain only a faint glow of intuition which works intermittently and fleetingly. Elsewhere he writes that “to think intuitively is to think in duration,” that it is a “direct vision of the mind by the mind.” It would be good if you could help clarify Bergson’s notion of intuition, particularly for those who may not be familiar with his works and for those to whom it may sound airy-fairy.

But to continue, as you describe in your introduction, he began with a subjectivist conception of freedom where, on occasion, we act from our deepest self, where the long evolution of our emotions and thoughts, possibly our whole being, is materialised in a present action or decision, for example (not one of Bergson’s), finally declaring our genuine love for someone. He began like that, but developed and deepened his philosophy; it’s not just an intuition of ourselves, it “opens the way for us into consciousness in general” and to a “metaphysics of life.” The spirit of all life is, in some small way, within us; human and otherwise, present and past. And that does seem to be, in a sense, plainly true. Whatever our belief about the origin of life, it’s clear we are very far from having created ourselves.

From another angle, Bergson is best known for his thought about the nature of time, about “duration”; the real time from which conventional time and the time of physics is derived, and on which it depends. We cannot grasp duration conceptually, we can only have the lived experience of it, in other words, we can only know it intuitively. It’s a vision of time in which there is genuine novelty, something he thinks philosophy has generally overlooked. Time is always new, is as new now as it ever was, “each moment is a fresh endowment”; though we don’t usually see or feel it like that, we sometimes can, and that’s a positive thing for us in our lives. And, as he describes in Time and Free Will and Creative Evolution, it is at the rare moments when we experience duration that we are truly free. What I’m trying to get at is that there’s a connection between intuition, duration, and freedom. How does what Bergson has to say about freedom and intuition relate to his philosophy of time? Or, how would you describe that connection?

AL: Thanks for the opportunity to clarify what Bergson means by “intuition,” a concept at the heart of his philosophy and which he knew was liable to be used and abused. As you say, it does not mean something “airy-fairy,” as if you had “thinking” on the one hand and then something like “vibes” or “feeling” on the other. The idea, rather, is that there are two ways to think, know, perceive, and experience. Bergson called the first “spatial,” in which we use concepts (scientific and ordinary) to divide and subdivide the world and our own experience into internally homogeneous parts. To think (know, perceive, and experience) spatially about my day, for instance, is to say, “This morning I woke up, had breakfast, brushed my teeth, wrote some emails, and so on.” My experience is divided into internally homogeneous blocks that are distinct from each other, which is handy to hold myself to account, plan, communicate, and much more. Space is the realm of language, representation, and science.

“Temporal” thinking, knowing, perceiving, and experiencing is something quite different. Rather than carve up the world into distinct parts that are internally homogeneous and externally different (e.g., now waking up, next eating breakfast), I appreciate instead how time flows in an uninterrupted continuity in which everything is always turning into (“becoming”) something else. My morning, now, is not a scheduled succession, but my life unfolding as it does, changing in every moment, from waking to toothbrushing, and on it goes. “Intuition,” then, is the conscious effort that we can use to reinsert ourselves into a flow of time (or “duration”) and it is a mode of knowing and experience that is, in principle, not representable, for the moment we use language or symbols to convey it, we fall into space. (Many great works of literature try to turn space into time through feats of writing, such as the first moments with Marcel from In Search of Lost Time to the last with Anna Karenina from Anna Karenina.)

Returning to your question, you’re right that the early Bergson developed his concept of intuition (though he didn’t use that word yet) in relation to subjective experience exclusively. And there is a real romantic streak in Time and Free Will where he opposes duration and the free development of personality to the imposition of social categories and expectations, as if the unfolding of each individual life is always at the mercy of social categorization and the demand to be this or that. But as his thought matured, Bergson started to conceive of the world and, at the limit, life itself in terms of duration and intuition. That’s what evolution represented for him in the breakthrough of Creative Evolution: life in time, life as it is unfurling itself in creative and open-ended ways.

As his thought matured, Bergson started to conceive of the world and, at the limit, life itself in terms of duration and intuition.

His lectures on freedom are so compelling because he’s revisiting the early issue of subjective experience in light of his newer reflection on life as a temporal phenomenon. The result is this wonderful layering where the old concerns about personal experience and authenticity remain, but are now combined with an appreciation of freedom as unpredictability and creativity. Intuition in the lectures, then, is doing double duty to access both these dimensions of time: subjective (and concerning personal experience) and objective (and concerning the world).

AS: The next book in the series will present the lecture course on The History of the Idea of Time, and the final book, The History of Theories of Memory. Bergson mentions the lectures on time in a footnote in Creative Evolution; reading of them there I’d wondered at how fascinating it must have been to be at those lectures and hear such a profound philosopher of time on that subject, and now, fantastically, here is the next best thing!

Memory might seem to be more of a psychological subject, but since, for Bergson, there’s a sort of unity of time and consciousness, memory, the preservation of the past, has a metaphysical aspect. He wrote at length about it in his book Matter and Memory several years earlier but it’s a rarer topic in philosophy. The books aren’t due out till 2026 and 2027, but would it be possible to have a sneak preview of the content?

NFS: With pleasure! Let me begin by emphasizing again something that all three lecture courses share, namely a concern with the development of ideas, which is evident in the course titles: “history” and, picking up on what Alex just said, the telling shift to “evolution” in Freedom. From the books he published, we have a good idea of what Bergson’s idea of time is, say, but what is fascinating to see—and must have been even more fascinating to listen to, as you say—is how Bergson inscribes this idea in a history without his theory losing any of its originality.

At the same time, it is also fascinating to see the critical charge spelled out in such detail, given that, as Bergson says in the Freedom lectures, what counts is what is positive in a philosophy—what Bergson calls its “intuition”—not its criticism of something else. And even though few readers will be familiar with the contemporary intellectual debates that Bergson closely followed and actively participated in, the lecture format, with its frequent recapitulations, for instance, allows us to see what Bergson was steeped in and to hear echoes with much more clarity. Moreover, Bergson’s criticism of philosophies that today’s readers are more familiar with—especially Descartes’ and Kant’s—offers an alternative vantage point on the thinking expounded in the published books.

Bergson traces the idea of time as he understands it against the foil of the paradoxical notion of a time that does not endure.

All this to say that there is a lot to look forward to even for longtime readers of Bergson, including asides, as it were, like the remark on fate you pointed out in the Freedom lectures. 

In Time, Bergson traces the idea of time as he understands it against the foil of the paradoxical notion of a time that does not endure. The stations of this itinerary resemble those of the Freedom lectures: a distinction between knowledge by intuition and knowledge by analysis serves as the starting point for a review of pre-Socratic philosophy, of Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists. He spends a little more time on the early modern period than in the Freedom lectures, discussing, for instance, Giordano Bruno and Nicolas of Cusa. He then moves to Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant, and concludes with a reflection on knowledge and science.

The Memory lectures invert the procedure of the Freedom lectures: here, the historical part follows what Bergson calls the “dogmatic” part. This first, longer part lays out Bergson’s conception of the life of the mind—which is what the discussion of memory is really about—starting, once again, with the distinction between intellect and intuition. This part is particularly intriguing, I find, because in its engagement with contemporary debates—for example around the unconscious or around resemblance and contiguity—it shows just how new this conception was. That is not to say that the historical part is any less interesting. It includes discussions of authors we don't find at all in the books, and, like the other courses, gives a fuller sense of Bergson’s notions.

Alexandre Lefebvre is Professor of Politics and Philosophy at The University of Sydney. His most recent book is Liberalism as a Way of Life.

Nils F. Schott is the editor or translator of some twenty books in philosophy and the humanities.

Alan Shepherd studied philosophy at the University of Glasgow and is the current treasurer of the PSE.

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From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 2 ("Violence")

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