Bergson and Free Will

The standard English-language title of Bergson's first work, 'Time and Free Will', is hardly a direct translation of the original French, 'Essay on the Immediate Givens in Consciousness'. Still while 'Time' crucially misrepresents the main theme of the book, the essay does include a defense of Free Will. The main thread of the argument for the latter is that experience is fundamentally in heterogeneous flux; Deterministic theories all represent experience as static and homogeneous; hence, Determinism misrepresents experience, whereas Free Will, understood as a relation between a concrete self and an act that it performs, is self-evidently given in experience. The 'freedom' that Bergson espouses is therefore not as radical as Sartre's notion, since the latter entails the occurrence in experience of disruptive Nothingnesses, whereas for Bergson, transitions are seamless. But, as he expands in his later work on his original insights, this concept of Free Will as an episode in a seamless flux becomes vulnerable to new challenges. For example, in Creative Evolution, he now characterizes 'will' as a continuation of an impulsion, which, in turn, is a result of interactions that include solar energy, derived ultimately from vegetation. So, while the inter-species flow of these processes may still elude Deterministic homogenization, they are now exposed to a Humean or a Schopenhauerian criticism--that a 'self' is not given either as an element in, or as circumscribing, the immediate data of Consciousness. Hence, the 'free will' that, according to Bergson, is a function of that 'self', is not self-evidently given, and is, thus, possibly impersonal, as Schopenhauer argues.