Bergson, Time and Free Will, Chapter 3, §116 Hence meaningless to ask whether an act can be foreseen when all its antecedents are given.

by Corry Shores
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[The following is summary. My commentary is in brackets.]

Henri Bergson

Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience

Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness

Chapter III. "The Organization of Conscious States. Free Will."

Chapitre III. "De l'organisation des états de conscience : la liberté."

Part LII: Real Duration and Prediction

"La durée réelle et la contingence"

§116 Hence meaningless to ask whether an act can be foreseen when all its antecedents are given.

Previously Bergson argued against this determinist position: we can predict someone's next decision if we know everything about them. Bergson showed that this can only happen by either of two ways. 1) We know everything that the person has done with absolutely intimacy. This means that we must be that very person now in the act of committing that current decision, and we must have lived exactly her life in her body all the way up to now. Or, 2) we know abstractly all the person's psychic states that she had up to now, along with their role in her behavior. But often times we do not know abstractly the importance of a given mental state until much later in a person's life, after certain implicit things about past mental states become more explicit. But then we would need to know that person's future. This goes against our original aim of predicting her future.

Now Bergson concludes that there is no meaning to the question: "Could or could not the act be foreseen, given the sum total of its antecedents?" (189b). We saw that the two possible ways we might do so defeat our purpose to predict someone else's coming decisions. If we are that person, then we are not predicting another person's decision, but rather making it ourselves. Or, if instead we already know someone else's future, then there is nothing more to predict.

Images from the English translation [click for an enlargement]:

Images from the original French [click for an enlargement]:

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Transl. F. L. Pogson, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2001).

Available online at:

http://www.archive.org/details/timeandfreewill00pogsgoog

French text from:

Bergson, Henri. Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Originally published Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1888.

Available online at:

http://www.archive.org/details/essaisurlesdonn00berguoft