{"id":2430,"date":"2010-12-25T04:00:45","date_gmt":"2010-12-25T11:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/?p=2430"},"modified":"2011-12-19T15:24:16","modified_gmt":"2011-12-19T22:24:16","slug":"essai-sur-les-donnees-immediates-de-la-conscience-time-and-free-will","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/essai-sur-les-donnees-immediates-de-la-conscience-time-and-free-will\/","title":{"rendered":"Essai sur les donn\u00c3\u00a9es imm\u00c3\u00a9diates de la conscience \/ Time and free will"},"content":{"rendered":"
(1889) Henri Bergson
\n<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/span><\/span>Bergson subscribes to a kind of dualism.\u00c2\u00a0 Like Descartes’, his cleaves subject and object.\u00c2\u00a0 However, in contrast to the Cartesian doctrine, for Bergson this cleft is much more a consequence<\/em> of<\/em> rather than a grounding for<\/em> his philosophy.<\/p>\n

The deeper distinction for Bergson lies between what he calls the quantative and the qualitative [1]. One important difference that sets these apart lies in the nature of the multiplicity which is inhered.\u00c2\u00a0 Quantitative multiplicity consists in juxtaposition, making it possible to speak of discrete ‘objects’.\u00c2\u00a0 Qualitative multiplicity, on the other hand, consists in interpenetration.\u00c2\u00a0 Unlike the former, the latter is not amenable to division, with major consequences for epistemology.<\/p>\n

For Bergson, matter is to be treated quantitatively, at least in so far as the relations between objects are concerned.\u00c2\u00a0 Conscious phenomena, on the other hand, ‘contain’ or ‘are diffused with’ preceding ones.\u00c2\u00a0 Consequently, they are to be treated qualitatively [2,3] and cannot be treated in terms of constituent elements.\u00c2\u00a0 ‘Love’, ‘anger’, and ‘the taste of sourness’, for example, are irredicible qualities or ‘shades’ of inner life.<\/p>\n

And then there are concepts, which for Bergson include numbers and other abstracta. \u00c2\u00a0He argues that the form<\/em> that concepts take is borrowed from perception of the outside world, with its discrete objects.\u00c2\u00a0 To this extent, his is an empiricist philosophy.\u00c2\u00a0 However, because of the inescapably quantitative nature of concepts, their use is inappropriate in the analysis of phenomena of the inner conscious world [4].<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

[1] [Question: is this distinction itself quantitative or qualitative?]<\/p>\n

[2] [Question: how is this fundamentally different from the way newly arising configurations of matter in the Universe relate to earlier configurations?\u00c2\u00a0 Cf. the Second Law’s upward flow of Entropy.]<\/p>\n

[3] [All of this was long before Quantum Mechanics, remember.\u00c2\u00a0 Still, it is somewhat surprising how absolutely Bergson holds to the individuation of physical objects.\u00c2\u00a0 Are individual clouds in a whirling cloudfield not perhaps more than just analogous to the multiplicity of conscious ‘elements’?]<\/p>\n

[4] [It must here be remarked that Bergson’s concepts exhibit juxtaposable multiplicity.\u00c2\u00a0 If so, does a person’s use of a concept then not necessarily call for the existence or occurrence of a discrete mental phenomenon, somewhere?\u00c2\u00a0 Bergson does not address this tension.]<\/p>\n

[Lithograph: Maurits Cornelis Escher (1955), Liberation<\/em>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(1889) Henri Bergson Bergson subscribes to a kind of dualism.\u00c2\u00a0 Like Descartes’, his cleaves subject and object.\u00c2\u00a0 However, in contrast to the Cartesian doctrine, for Bergson this cleft is much more a consequence of rather than a grounding for his philosophy. The deeper distinction for Bergson lies between what he calls the quantative and the … Continue reading Essai sur les donn\u00c3\u00a9es imm\u00c3\u00a9diates de la conscience \/ Time and free will<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2430"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2858,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2430\/revisions\/2858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realfuture.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}