Bergson and The Future

For Bergson, the distinctive characteristics of Duration include its mobility, its continuity, its heterogeneity, and its indefiniteness. Accordingly, his critique identifies traditional four falsifications of Duration, under the rubric 'time', by Intellect--immobility, discontinuity, homogeneity, and completeness. However, he misses a further characteristic that invites a conflation to which he himself subscribes. His concept of lived experience is similar in some crucial respects to the Phenomenological ones of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty--immediately given to Intuitive Consciousness are what he calls "images", which practical Intellect interpretively represents as potential use items, thereby projecting upon them a futural character. But every such representation is concomitantly a current presentation. Hence, the Intellect imports the Future into the Present, thereby encouraging the Determinist thesis that the Future is settled in the Present. Bergson seems to miss this further falsification of lived experience, and, hence, a similar one in Intuition. For, on his account of the Intuition of Duration, the 'Future' is 'nascent' in the data that are immediately given to Consciousness. But, since, in even the bare immediate categorical Intuitive datum, 'there will be subsequent data', something futural is settled in advance in the Present, the Intuition of Duration is as susceptible to a Determinist interpretation as is the Intellection of it.