Henri Bergson and the Philosophy of Religion: God, Freedom, and Duration 9781032392530, 9781032392547, 9781003349044

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“This is an ambitious and persuasive appropriation of Bergson’s thinking aiming to address one of the perennial problems of theism: the relation of divine foreknowledge to human freedom. Moravec’s ground-breaking and barrier-breaking book will be required reading for all those interested in the philosophy of religion.” Mark Sinclair, Queen’s University Belfast “This is a unique contribution to the field bringing together analytic and continental philosophical reflections on God, time, and free will. Moravec offers a fascinating and lucid reconstruction of Bergson’s thought, and creatively draws out the implications for contemporary debates within the philosophy of religion.” R.T. Mullins, University of Lucerne

Henri Bergson and the Philosophy of Religion

This book connects the philosophy of Henri Bergson to contemporary debates in metaphysics and analytic philosophy of religion. More specifically, the book demonstrates how Bergson’s philosophy of time can respond to the problem of foreknowledge and free will. The question of how humans can be free if God knows everything has been a perennial issue of debate in analytic philosophy of religion. The solution to this problem relies heavily on what one thinks about time. The problem of time is central to Bergson’s philosophical system. In this book, the author offers a systematic application of Bergson’s thought to the freedom and foreknowledge problem. The first chapter presents a discussion of Bergson’s central concept of la durée (duration). The subsequent two chapters link la durée to the relation of time and space. Here, the author provides a Bergsonian response to McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time and develops a novel theory of time connected to Bergson’s analysis of temporal experience. The last three chapters explore the relation between free will, determinism, and divine foreknowledge. The author reconstructs Bergson’s theory of freedom and shows how it undermines the underlying dogmas of contemporary free-will theories. The author then argues that Bergson’s philosophy can be used to resolve the free will and foreknowledge problem in the philosophy of religion. The monograph concludes by opening avenues for new research into Bergson and analytic philosophy of religion, such as the philosophy of religious language, the relation between God and modality, religious experience, and religious pluralism. Henri Bergson and the Philosophy of Religion will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Bergson, 20th-century continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of time. Matyáš Moravec is Gifford Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, UK. His published work has appeared in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, and The Bergsonian Mind (Routledge, 2022).

Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Philosophy

The Legacy of Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Laughter Bataille, Deleuze, and Rosset Lydia Amir Heidegger’s Ecological Turn Community and Practice for Future Generations Frank Schalow Lectures on a Philosophy Less Ordinary Language and Morality in J.L. Austin’s Philosophy Niklas Forsberg Heidegger and the Contradiction of Being An Analytic Interpretation of the Late Heidegger Filippo Casati Camus and Fanon on the Algerian Question An Ethics of Rebellion Pedro Tabensky Wittgenstein’s Philosophy in 1929 Florian Franken Figueiredo Henri Bergson and the Philosophy of Religion God, Freedom, and Duration Matyáš Moravec

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Twentieth-Century-Philosophy/book-series/SE0438

Henri Bergson and the Philosophy of Religion God, Freedom, and Duration Matyáš Moravec

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Matyáš Moravec The right of Matyáš Moravec to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moravec, Matyáš, author. Title: Henri Bergson and the philosophy of religion : God, freedom, and duration / Matyáš Moravec. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023008378 (print) | LCCN 2023008379 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032392530 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032392547 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003349044 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Bergson, Henri, 1859-1941. | Religion—Philosophy. | Time—Philosophy. | Philosophy, French—20th century. Classification: LCC B2430.B43 M655 2024 (print) | LCC B2430. B43 (ebook) | DDC 194—dc23/eng/20230518 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023008378 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023008379 ISBN: 978-1-032-39253-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-39254-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-34904-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003349044 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

to Belfast

Contents

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction

1

PART 1

Time and Consciousness

11

1

Bergson on Time and Space

13

2

Unreal Time or Real Duration? McTaggart and Bergson

40

3

Relative Existence: Towards a New Bergsonian Theory of Time

67

PART 2

God, Time, and Freedom

93

4

Eternity and Bergsonian Time

95

5

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem

130

6

Bergsonian Freedom and Divine Causality

162

Conclusion

189

Index

193

Acknowledgements

This monograph started as a PhD project at the University of Cambridge. My greatest thanks go to my supervisors: Sarah Coakley and Robin Le Poidevin. Without their support, this work would never have been possible. I am grateful to Barry Dainton, Natalja Deng, Élie During, Douglas Hedley, Hugh Mellor, Adrian Moore, Ryan Mullins, Catherine Pickstock, Damien Pollard, Pierre Bonnier, Jacob Sherman, Mark Sinclair, Emily Thomas, Peter West, and Frédéric Worms for comments on several key arguments that appear in the course of this work. Furthermore, this research would never have been the same without the help, support, and encouragement of the members of the Graduate Parlour of Pembroke College, Cambridge. My thanks also go to the peer reviewers and publishing staff at Routledge for their assistance in getting this monograph ready for publication. Many of the arguments in this book were presented at conferences or workshops at the Universities of Innsbruck, Lugano, Oxford, Siegen, and Vilnius. I am grateful to the participants at these events for their feedback. The reshaping of the material from thesis form to monograph form took place at Durham University, Queen’s University Belfast, and the University of St Andrews. The doctoral research from which this monograph originated was made possible by a studentship hosted by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership and Pembroke College, Cambridge (Grant Number: AH/L503897/1, Grant recipient: Matyáš Moravec). The original PhD version of the dissertation is available Open Access as: Moravec, Matyáš. ‘God and Time: A Neo-Bergsonian Perspective’. Doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2020. https://doi. org/10.17863/CAM.63284. Some of the material in this monograph has already been published in abridged form in the following articles: Moravec, Matyáš. ‘A Perpetual Present: Henri Bergson and Atemporal Duration’. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11, no. 3 (2019): 197–224. https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v0i0.2629.

xii Acknowledgements Moravec, Matyáš. ‘Eternity, Relative Realities, and Ontological Idealism about Time’. TheoLogica 5, no. 1 (2021): 175–96. https://doi. org/10.14428/thl.v5i1.31723. Moravec, Matyáš. ‘A Bergsonian Response to McTaggart’s Paradox’. In The Bergsonian Mind, edited by Mark Sinclair and Yaron Wolf, 417–31. Routledge Philosophical Minds. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429020735-38. (Copyright ©  2022 from ‘A Bergsonian Response to McTaggart’s Paradox’ by Matyáš Moravec. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa plc.) I am grateful to the publishers for the permission to republish this work and to the peer reviewers of the journals for their comments. My final thanks go to Christopher for his wonderful support in the process of writing this book.

Introduction

In 2020, Élie During and Paul-Antoine Miquel published a text titled “We Bergsonians: The Kyoto Manifesto,” commenting on what they think should be the future of work on the philosophy of the French thinker Henri Bergson (1859–1941). They declare: We, Bergsonians, have read and re-read Bergson; we have studied the complex ways in which his philosophy has been received. … Bergsonism has been interpreted in various ways: the point is to change it and put it to work in the context which is manifestly very different from Bergson’s own. … What we need is not a new commentary, it is a new research programme … which permits derivation from methodological orthodoxy if and when the need arises. … To re-iterate: the task at hand is not to read or re-read Bergson, it is a matter of translating him. Translating Bergson requires us to escape the stranglehold of his own words.1 This book puts Bergson into one such new “context which is manifestly very different from Bergson’s own”: the classical problem of human freedom and divine foreknowledge. The thesis of this book is simple: Bergson’s philosophy, when properly “translated,” as During and Miquel would say, can offer a new solution to this classical problem. The problem of human freedom and divine foreknowledge is typically construed as the following question: how can humans be free if God knows everything? It has been a problem for the major monotheistic religions for hundreds of years. In the 20th and 21st centuries, it has been taken up by analytic philosophy. The core of the problem can be expressed in simple terms: does God know today what I am going to do tomorrow? If He does, could I not do it? The solution one goes for relies heavily on one’s views about time. For example, if the future does not exist, then there is nothing for God to know. Or, if God exists outside of time, then, strictly speaking, He does not know anything today. As we will see, the freedom and foreknowledge problem is also connected to a cluster of other related DOI: 10.4324/9781003349044-1

2 Introduction questions: what is the relation between time and the human mind? Is time an illusion? Are we free? Time is central to Bergson’s philosophical system. Unfortunately, due to various contingent historical factors, his work has largely been excluded from mainstream analytic philosophy, the philosophical tradition which has come to dominate philosophy departments in the English-speaking world. He has usually been read as a “continental” thinker. Recently, this has begun to change. Philosophers in the analytic tradition have appealed to Bergson’s insights within the philosophy of biology,2 the philosophy of temporal experience,3 or the philosophy of time.4 This monograph offers another context into which Bergson’s thought can be placed by using his insights within the philosophy of religion. The interlocutors with whose thoughts Bergson’s philosophy will be put   into dialogue here may seem highly eclectic. On the pages that follow, the reader will encounter Bertrand Russell, Thomas Aquinas, J. M. E. McTaggart, Hilda Oakeley, or contemporary analytic philosophers of religion. In a sense, the key objective of the book is a “creative synthesis,”5 understood as an attempt to bring together hitherto unconnected strands of thinking about several aspects of the foreknowledge problem. The problem itself is primarily an occasion to bring together three philosophical traditions: Bergsonians, analytic philosophers, and Thomists, the last of whom have been especially concerned with the problem at hand. I think that each of these traditions (complicated as their exact delineation might be) has discovered something fundamentally true about the nature of reality. Nevertheless, they have traditionally been extremely sceptical of one another. The superficial impressions one gets from the history of philosophy are the following: analytic philosophers and Bergsonians have been enemies ever since Russell’s critique of Bergsonism.6 Thomism is fundamentally incompatible with Bergsonian thought.7 And translating medieval philosophy into the language of analytic philosophy is inherently fraught with difficulty.8 This book will try to show that all three traditions have something important to contribute to the resolution of the freedom and foreknowledge problem and that each can benefit from a dialogue with the others. History This is not a book in the history of philosophy. It is not, in the words of During and Miquel, “a new commentary.” Nevertheless, a few extremely brief words about the history of the traditions or thinkers that it is trying to bring together are in order. More often than not, when asked at philosophy conferences, what one’s field of research is, Bergson scholars have to explain to other philosophers

Introduction  3 (unless the latter are historians of philosophy) who Bergson was. If you transported any academic European philosopher from the 1910s or 1920s into the present day in a time-travel machine, they would likely have been shocked by this. A recently published monograph by Andreas Vrahimis opens with the following sentence: “During the first quarter of the twentieth century, Henri-Louis Bergson … was probably the most famous living philosopher in the world.”9 Bergson published widely on topics including time, memory, laughter, biology, or religion. He received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1927, travelled the world giving lectures, and contributed to the foundation of the League of Nations. His thought has had a lasting influence on literature, especially modernism and the work of Marcel Proust. His philosophy has also had a global impact: a recent project titled “Global Bergsonism” run by the Société des amis de Bergson is currently mapping the worldwide influence of Bergson’s philosophy, which has sadly been overshadowed by Bergson scholarship in Europe.10 This book is published in the Routledge Series in Twentieth-Century Philosophy. There is one key phenomenon that characterises the history of 20th-century European philosophy (if there is such a thing): the division between the analytic and the continental traditions. Mountains of books have been written on this distinction and what needs to be done to overcome it. Adrian Moore, in the Preface to his monumental Evolution of Modern Metaphysics, calls these divisions “customary but equally absurd.”11 In the case of Bergson, this is particularly true. Classifying him in either of the two camps is incredibly difficult, perhaps impossible. Nevertheless, due to various historical contingencies (some of which I address in this book and elsewhere12) and his huge influence on Sartre, MerleauPonty, or Deleuze, he is usually associated with the continental tradition. And analytic philosophers have, for the most part, been highly sceptical of him. But the early analytic tradition was also highly sceptical of the philosophy of religion. Analysing religion was not one of the disciplines present, at the cradle of analytic philosophy. The first sentence of William Hasker’s excellent overview of the history of analytic philosophy of religion puts it as follows: Analytic philosophy of religion was gestated in the 1940s, born in the early 1950s, spent its childhood in the 1960s and its adolescence in the 1970s and early 1980s.13 However, as soon as analytic philosophy of religion left high school, so to speak, it turned itself to the problems regarding the relationship between God and time, including the question of how we could be free if God is omniscient and is, therefore, supposed to know the future.

4 Introduction I said above that the third tradition that this book will appeal to is Thomism, very broadly interpreted as a way of thinking about God that takes inspiration or derives from the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Analytic philosophy has a long history of appealing to historical thinkers and incorporating them into contemporary frameworks, as attested, for example, by Humeanism in the philosophy of science or Aristotelianism in ethics. Analytic philosophy of religion soon created a fusion of its method with the thought of Aquinas, generating what has come to be known as “Analytical Thomism.” This book will draw on several thinkers who have become associated with this movement. Caveats The “creative synthesis” approach brings with it several caveats. The first of these is slightly cowardly but necessary. This book grew out of a doctoral dissertation, a book chapter, and several peer-reviewed papers.14 The purpose of the dissertation and the papers was to defend several subarguments that this book relies on. The purpose of this book itself, however, is different: it is to paint a much more general picture of how divine omniscience, Bergsonian time, and human freedom might fit together. As a result, much of the technical scaffolding that features in the peer-reviewed papers has been discarded to make this book more accessible to a wider readership. The absence of this scaffolding might at times make it look like the construction is hanging in midair. I think that the construction does not collapse with the scaffolding removed. However, I also hope that the picture painted here is interesting enough to motivate research into more sophisticated ways in which such technical scaffolding could be reconstructed if the construction begins to wobble. Examples of presuppositions that this book relies on but that are not defended here could be classified under several headings or “Hypotheses:” Hypothesis 1: God is timeless. Hypothesis 2: God is omniscient. Hypothesis 3: God is the source of being. Theologically, the God this book works with has fairly minimal contours. I do not appeal to the vast majority of attributes postulated by classical theism, such as divine omnibenevolence or the key tenets of trinitarian theology. But the three hypotheses above are assumed. By Hypothesis 1, I mean the claim that there is no succession in the life of God. Many theologians have recently moved away from Hypothesis 1. Ryan Mullins, in his seminal book on the topic, argues that “there are no successful Christian research programs that promote divine timelessness because divine

Introduction  5 timelessness is not compatible with any existent theory of time.”15 The first half of this book tries to offer such a compatible theory. By Hypothesis 2, I primarily mean omniscience as it pertains to human actions: God knows human actions that happen in time. He knows what you are doing now, what you did yesterday, and what you will do tomorrow. True enough, there are problems inherent to the doctrine of omniscience as such: whether God knows what it is like to be evil is just one example of this. These problems might make omniscience incoherent (and responses to them might make it coherent), but they do so independently of what I argue for here. The focus of this book is only on the types of problems generated for omniscience by the existence of human freedom. Hypothesis 3 simply affirms that all reality depends for its being on God. More details on what exactly this is supposed to mean are provided in Chapter 4. Hypothesis 4: There are irreducibly mental facts. Due to reasons that will become obvious from the picture of the self articulated by Bergson, this is not equivalent to a simple dualism (of the property, predicate, or substance variety). This hypothesis simply states that there are at least some mental facts that are not reducible to or supervenient on physical ones. It does not mean that all mental facts are such. In fact, as Chapter 5 will demonstrate, the mental facts that are not reducible to purely physical phenomena are few and far between. It might be possible that all mental facts or properties are irreducible in this way. It might also be possible that some varieties of theism affirming the reality of the soul require that all mental facts are so. I leave both of these questions undiscussed. Hypothesis 5: Process ontology This hypothesis states that changes and processes (as opposed to substances) are the fundamental stuff of reality. “Objects,” “things,” and “events” are treated in more or less the same way in what follows. Process philosophy has been a live option in the history of philosophy from Heraclitus through Bergson and James into 20th-century philosophy, but it tends to raise eyebrows among analytic philosophers. It is frequently dismissed on the grounds that a process view of reality goes against our basic intuitions. Look around you: you see plenty of individual objects and substances: a cup of coffee, a tree, and a wooden desk. To say that these are processes seems counterintuitive. But look deeper (or slower): the coffee is gradually cooling down, the tree has a blossom on it that it did not have earlier today, and the paint on the table is slowly peeling off and turning into dust that will eventually become part of the carpet.

6 Introduction Everything is in a state of flux. Bergson would say that your delineations of the individual objects are just snapshots of the underlying constantly fluctuating and changing reality. I hazard a guess that anyone who grows plants, processes films, or has a newborn baby is likely to be more sympathetic to this view. These five hypotheses are not defended here, but I hope that the fact that they can generate a coherent picture of God, freedom, and duration might provide further reasons for defending them by philosophers of religion. The “creative synthesis” approach also explains why I work with something that could be called a “toy Bergson.” What Bergson thought plays as much of a role as what I think he should have thought. I aim for a careful and historically sensitive reading of Bergson, but the primary motivation for this project is to bring him into new dialogues with contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that the vast majority of the arguments here would have proceeded in more or less the same way even if (or perhaps especially if) Bergson had not written much else apart from his first book, Time and Free Will (1889). Many Bergson scholars are going to be horrified by this. They will ask: if Bergson is so circumscribed, why bother with him at all? Why leave behind the fascinating picture of reality from Creative Evolution or the unique method of intuition from Introduction to Metaphysics? The model of God’s relationship to time and freedom defended here is constructed from six puzzle pieces, all of which slot into one another: (i) Bergson’s account of free will, (ii) Bergson’s account of the qualitative nature of consciousness, (iii) Bergson’s critique of “spatialised time,” (iv) the minddependence of time and temporal extension, (v) observer-relativisation of existence, and (vi) the dependence of all being on God. The reason why I base my model on Bergson (however circumscribed) rather than anyone else is that his early thought contains, in a bundle, the first four of these ingredients. Some of these components are contentious, and I am certainly committing a “derivation from methodological orthodoxy,” as During and Miquel call it in the Kyoto Manifesto. But I am not cherry-picking. I believe that each one of the components is independently true, and when they are brought together, they can resolve the freedom and foreknowledge problem. Overview This book is composed of two halves. The first half develops a new Bergsonian theory of time. The first chapter is an introduction to Bergson’s views on time and space. The second chapter provides a Bergsonian response to McTaggart’s argument against the reality of time and shows that two distinct temporal layers of reality can be extracted

Introduction  7 from Bergson’s thought: la durée and the B-series. The third chapter relates this framework to the main available ontologies in analytic philosophy. The second half of this book provides an account of how this theory explains the relationship between God and time, given the six ingredients [(i)–(vi)] and the five hypotheses mentioned above. The fourth chapter explains how the theory of time defended in the first half of this book relates to Hypothesis 3, the dependence of all things on God. The fifth chapter introduces Bergson’s theory of free will and critically applies it to the freedom and foreknowledge argument. The final chapter provides a model of the relation between Bergsonian freedom and divine omniscience. The picture that results is one of an intimate connection between the qualitative nature of consciousness, time, the presence of divine creation, and human freedom. Notes 1 Élie During and Paul-Antoine Miquel, ‘We Bergsonians. The Kyoto Manifesto’, trans. Barry Dainton, Parrhesia 33 (2020): 18–19, italics original. 2 Tano S. Posteraro, Bergson’s Philosophy of Biology. Virtuality, Tendency and Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022). 3 Barry Dainton, ‘Bergson on Temporal Experience and Durée Réelle’, in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience, ed. I. Phillips (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 93–106. 4 Clifford Williams, ‘A Bergsonian Approach to A- and B-Time’, Philosophy 73, no. 285 (1998): 379–93, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819198000059. 5 I am grateful to Natalja Deng for this observation. 6 See Bertrand Russell, ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’, The Monist 22, no. 3 (1912): 321–47, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist191222324. 7 See Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Bruno Neveu, ‘Bergson et l’Index’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 4, no. 40 (2003): 543–51, https://doi.org/10.3917/rmm.034.0543. 8 See Fergus Kerr, ‘Aquinas and Analytic Philosophy: Natural Allies?’, Modern Theology 20, no. 1 (2004): 123–39, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0025. 2004.00245.x 9 Andreas Vrahimis, Bergsonism and the History of Analytic Philosophy, History of Analytic Philosophy (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 1, https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-030-80755-9 10 https://bergson.hypotheses.org/global-bergsonism-project. 11 A. W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics Cambridge and (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), xix, https://doi.org/10.1017/ CBO9781139029223. 12 See Matyáš Moravec, ‘Taking Time Seriously: The Bergsonism of Karin CostelloeStephen, Hilda Oakeley, and May Sinclair’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31, no. 2 (2023): 331–54, https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022 .2030670. 13 William Hasker, ‘Analytic Philosophy of Religion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, ed. William J. Wainwright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 421, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195331356.003.0018.

8 Introduction

Introduction  9 ———. ‘Taking Time Seriously: The Bergsonism of Karin Costelloe-Stephen, Hilda Oakeley, and May Sinclair’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31, no. 2 (2023): 331–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2030670. Mullins, Ryan T. The End of the Timeless God. Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof: oso/9780198755180.001.0001. Neveu, Bruno. ‘Bergson et l’Index’. Revue de métaphysique et de morale 4, no. 40 (2003): 543–51. https://doi.org/10.3917/rmm.034.0543. Posteraro, Tano S. Bergson’s Philosophy of Biology. Virtuality, Tendency and Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. Russell, Bertrand. ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’. The Monist 22, no. 3 (1912): 321– 47. https://doi.org/10.5840/monist191222324. Vrahimis, Andreas. Bergsonism and the History of Analytic Philosophy. History of Analytic Philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-030-80755-9. Williams, Clifford. ‘A Bergsonian Approach to A- and B-Time’. Philosophy 73, no. 285 (1998): 379–93. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819198000059.

Part 1

Time and Consciousness

1

Bergson on Time and Space

Writing an introductory chapter about a philosopher is always difficult—it is all the more difficult when the philosopher you are trying to introduce has written about so much. Bergson’s books tackle topics as diverse as psychology, physics, biology, religion, politics, ethics, memory, metaphysics, humour, history, sociology, or anthropology. Where do we start? Since the primary purpose of this monograph is to utilise insights from Bergson’s philosophy within the context of the philosophy of religion, this chapter will take a drastically instrumental approach. The final goal of this book is to construct a solution to the freedom and foreknowledge problem in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. The ingredients that we will need are the following: time, space, spatialised time, duration (la durée), and consciousness. The aim of this chapter is to explain how Bergson understood these. We will add the final ingredient, free will, in Chapter 5. The purpose of this chapter is not merely to provide an exposition of Bergson but also to do so against the backdrop of a moment that was to become crucial for his reception by analytic philosophy: Bertrand Russell’s infamous critique of Bergsonism. Why bother with Russell? Why revisit his critique when Russell misunderstood Bergson so badly? Responding to his critique is both necessary and desirable. It is necessary since it has, for a long time, been one of the best-known critiques of Bergsonian thought in analytic circles and its effects on analytic philosophy as a tradition still linger. If you ask an analytic philosopher what they know about Bergson and the history of analytic philosophy, Russell’s name will likely be one of the first to come up. Dealing with its misunderstandings, which in the long run prevented a fruitful interaction between Bergsonian thought on time and analytic philosophy, is therefore required before the presentation of a new analytic “update” on Bergson. But revisiting Russell’s critique is also highly desirable. Several objections that he directs at Bergson help to clarify some of the central ideas of Bergson’s philosophy: this chapter is therefore not DOI: 10.4324/9781003349044-3

14  Time and Consciousness primarily an account of the Russell–Bergson exchange.1 The exchange serves as a framework for introducing Bergson himself. This chapter will start by summarising some of the central points of Russell’s critique. With them in mind, we will have a look at Bergson’s writings about time and space and see whether—once Bergson has been carefully read and properly understood—Russell’s criticisms can be alleviated. We will close this chapter by noting an important chronological development inherent in the Bergsonian corpus that will prove decisive in the chapters to follow. Russell on Bergson One of the many factors that contributed to Bergson’s virtual disappearance from the stage of analytic philosophy2 was Bertrand Russell’s well-known paper titled “The Philosophy of Bergson” published in 19123 followed by a response from Karin Stephen (née Costelloe)4 and later re-published together with a reply by Wildon Carr.5 The paper more or less set the tone for the majority of later receptions of Bergson’s thought in analytic circles. The timing of this article was not a coincidence. The year prior to its publication saw the first English translation of Bergson’s Creative Evolution, which had been Bergson’s most famous book and significantly solidified his status as an international philosophical celebrity. Russell’s paper is snarky. Unlike, for example, Susan Stebbing’s critique of Bergsonism published just a few years later,6 which has not received nearly as much attention as that of Russell (or nearly not as much attention as it deserves, for that matter), Russell is not particularly fair or rigorous. Adam Riggio has commented that Russell’s paper is a result of a “superficial skimming of the Bergson corpus at best.”7 But once the layers of ironising mockery have been carved off, three crucial targets emerge. The first has to do with what Russell calls Bergson’s “anti-intellectualist” philosophy. The second concerns Bergson’s writings on number. The third attacks Bergson’s theory of images and the relation he postulates between subject and object. For methodological reasons that will become clear at the end of this chapter, we will only address the first two here. Let’s look at them in turn. First, Russell attacks Bergson’s method. He accuses Bergson’s philosophy of being “anti-intellectualist.” Bergson is deemed not to construct his metaphysical system on the solid foundations of intellect and sound philosophical argument. Instead, Russell says, Bergson focuses excessively on feelings, emotions, or poetic imagery. His whole metaphysics is a “philosophy of feeling.”8 A particularly good example of this, Russell thinks, is Bergson’s reliance on the concept of “vital impulse” (élan vital) in Creative Evolution, which is supposed to be inaccessible to science, and which

Bergson on Time and Space  15 Bergson paints in a highly poetic literary style. Not with argument. La durée, the central notion of Bergson’s philosophy which we will encounter in the next section is presented with what seems like purposeful obscurity. An element of Bergson’s thought that particularly irks Russell and that confirms his contention that Bergson goes against intellect is his disdain for mathematics and geometry. “Incapacity for mathematics,” Russell takes Bergson to say, “is therefore a sign of grace—fortunately a very common one.”9 The second of Russell’s objections is even more severe. It concerns Bergson’s understanding of the concept of number. There are several confusions that, according to Russell, plague Bergson’s writings about numbers and mathematics. The first of these is a confusion between number and its visual representation. The second is Bergson’s tendency to confuse “a particular collection with the number of its terms, and this again with number in general.”10 Russell provides an illustration of this confusion: The twelve apostles, the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve months, the twelve signs of the zodiac, are all collections of units, yet no one of them is the number 12, still less is it number in general.11 Bergson seems to confuse these meanings of “number” and reason from the properties of one to the properties of the other. Specifically, this confusion underlies Bergson’s repeated (and, in Russell’s view mistaken) insistence on an intrinsic connection between numbers and space. Was either of these two objections fair? We will now turn to a brief sketch of the key notions of Bergson’s philosophy to see just how justified Russell’s criticism was. Bergson on Time and Space12 Bergson thinks that philosophers have not paid sufficient attention to the metaphysical differences between time and space. They have treated both of them equally. For example, in Creative Mind, he says: [T]ime and space have been placed on the same level and treated as things of a kind; the procedure has been to study space, to determine its nature and function, and then to apply to time the conclusions thus reached. … To pass from one to the other one had only to change a single word: “juxtaposition” was replaced by “succession.”13 What does Bergson mean here? We frequently think about space and time in the same way. Both have dimensions: metres or yards in the case of space and minutes or hours in the case of time. Both of them are divisible: 1 metre

16  Time and Consciousness can be divided into two equal segments of 50 centimetres, and 1 hour can be divided into two equal segments of 30 minutes. They are also mutually related: two objects can exist in one place but not at the same time. Two objects can exist at the same time in different places. In Bergson’s view, the only difference between space and time that has been appropriately acknowledged by philosophers is that in the former, objects are “juxtaposed” (for example, my glass sits next to my lamp on the desk at the same time), whereas in the latter, they exist in “succession” (the right-hand corner of my desk was first empty and then I put the glass there). But apart from this difference, philosophers have generally simply taken categories applicable to space and recycled them for analysing time. With one tiny qualification about succession and juxtaposition. Bergson is unequivocal here about who the main villain is. It’s Immanuel Kant. In the Critique of Pure Reason, space and time are both taken to be homogeneous and devoid of any quality.14 They are homogeneous because they can be divided into units identical in size (50 centimetres over here is the same as 50 centimetres over there; 30 minutes in a cinema is the same as 30 minutes at the dentist’s surgery). And they do not possess any qualities: time is not inherently blue, salty, or boisterous and neither is space. But then, Bergson asks, if they are both homogeneous and have no other quality, what is it that actually makes them different?15 Of course, as far as their function is concerned, Kant’s first Critique postulates a difference: space is the a priori condition of outer sense (even the notion of “outer” already presupposes it), and time is the condition of both inner and outer sense.16 However, the features that he ascribes to each are identical. Bergson thinks that a particularly severe symptom of this confusion is Kant’s frequent appeal to the analogy of a line progressing in space as a representation of the progression of mental states. You draw a line on a piece of paper running from left to right and plot your mental states onto it: feeling hungry at 10:00, being aware of eating lunch at 11:00, and feeling sleepy at 12:00. You think you have represented time; after all, the mental states do seem to proceed in succession, one after the other, from left to right. However, if you truly believe that you have captured time in this way, you too have fallen prey to the confusion between time and space that Bergson warns about: we set our states of consciousness side by side in such a way as to perceive them simultaneously, no longer in one another, but alongside one another; in a word, we project time into space, we express duration [la durée] in terms of extensity, and succession thus takes the form of a continuous line or a chain, the parts of which touch without penetrating one another.17

Bergson on Time and Space  17 We will return to la durée very shortly. For the time being, notice that simply saying that time is like space in all respects except that things in it exist in succession (instead of juxtaposition, the way they exist in space) is clearly not enough to differentiate between the two. Think about the line you have drawn on the paper. Your mental states are present on your sheet of paper simultaneously, side by side, one to the left of another. They are all given to your consciousness at once and you can see them with one single instantaneous glance.18 So where precisely did Kant go wrong? What led him to confuse time with space? In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant draws an intrinsic connection between time and number, through the concept of “counting.”19 At first glance, this makes sense. Imagine you have to count to five: one, two, three, four, and five. As you do so, time passes. How would you be able to count if time did not pass? After all, you do say the numbers out loud, and they correspond to different positions of the hands of a clock. They also exist in succession, that magical ingredient that Kant thought can be added to space to turn it into time. So, it seems like counting presupposes time. Bergson disagrees. The ability to count, according to him, does not require time but space. Initially, this seems strange. As we just saw in the case of counting up to five, we did not require any space at all! There also does not seem to be anything inherently spatial about the individual numbers either. As Russell would doubtless point out at this stage, if one retorts that when visualising number three or four, we imagine, for example, a few dots on a page in a particular constellation, this does not yet make numbers spatial. It is just an accidental feature of the way our mind pictures numbers to itself. When we think about a process like counting up to five, it is difficult to see why Bergson would so strongly insist on the connection between counting and space. However, think about counting to a higher number like 40 or 100. It seems like doing that would require some type of spatial medium to get there: the fingers of your hand, an abacus, or little lines in sets of five on a sheet of paper. The last of these looks quite a lot like our earlier example of the progression of mental states being plotted on a line, a spatial medium. Of course, time is still required for us to get there, to make the lines on the sheet of paper, to extend our fingers, or to move the beads on an abacus. But the whole process has a much closer affinity with space than with time: the lines on the paper, your fingers, and the beads of an abacus exist side by side, juxtaposed. Bergson provides a famous argument for this in Time and Free Will.20 Imagine counting sheep in a flock. If the flock is small enough (say, seven or less), then you can probably just count them in one single mental act by appealing to their configuration in space. So, this way of counting is clearly spatial. What if there are more of them? Well, Bergson says, then you have

18  Time and Consciousness to count them one by one, proceeding in time. But now, Bergson asks, as you are counting sheep number 27, where have the previous sheep been retained? How do you know that the current sheep is number 27? After all, your consciousness passes from one to the other. According to Bergson, the only way the previous 26 sheep can be connected to the current one is by mentally being placed next to the current one in a homogeneous medium, just like the little lines on the paper from our previous example. But a medium where items are juxtaposed or placed next to one another (as opposed to their existing in succession) is space. Not time. This juxtaposition is required for us to retain the images of the previous 26 sheep: For if we picture to ourselves each of the sheep in the flock in succession and separately, we shall never have to do with more than a single sheep. In order that the number should go on increasing in proportion as we advance, we must retain the successive images and set them alongside each of the new units which we picture to ourselves: now, it is in space that such a juxtaposition takes place and not in pure duration [la durée pure21].22 In other words: yes, counting might superficially look like a temporal process, but if you dig deeper, you will find that space was there all along. The type of “pseudo-time” that we appeal to in counting is just one example of what Bergson calls “spatialised time,” a philosophically dangerous blend or confusion of time and space. But there are other examples of this. There is time represented by a line progressing in space that we find in Kant. There is talk about “empty time,”23 suggesting a (spatial) container with things in it or otherwise. There is talk of time going “backwards” or going in a loop just like a train goes backwards on its (spatial) tracks.24 Spatialised time exists, Bergson thinks, just because it is incredibly useful: our calendars represent successive appointments juxtaposed on a single page of a journal, co-existing in two-dimensional space. Empty time indicates sections of our calendars without any appointments. Lines are useful for drawing time axes in history classes. So, if the type of time that Kant talks about and that we encounter in counting, calendars, and time diagrams is “space-infected,” where can we find time proper? Where is real time, if “spatialised” time is, as Bergson famously declares, a mere “ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness?”25 According to Bergson, not all temporality is reducible to or infected by spatiality. The spatial homogeneity we use in everyday practical life is simply a “reaction against that heterogeneity which is the very ground of our experience.”26 This heterogeneity is Bergson’s famous durée.

Bergson on Time and Space  19 La durée and the Colour Spectrum27 La durée (“duration” but usually left untranslated) emerges in Bergson’s first book, Time and Free Will,28 and reappears in all of Bergson’s major works. It is a notion notoriously difficult succinctly to describe, not least due to the fact that, as we will see, there is an inherent incompatibility between la durée and the language that we use to talk about it. Nevertheless, it is not an obscure notion. The language we use to describe it might be imprecise and sometimes a bit strange, but it points to a phenomenon that we can all identify. To simplify things for now (and bearing in mind that it will all become a lot more complicated in the next two chapters), we will just assume that la durée is identical to the stream of mental states, more or less just like Bergson does in Time and Free Will. Here are a few quotes describing la durée: [An] indivisible and indestructible continuity of a melody where the past enters into the present and forms with it an undivided whole which remains undivided and even indivisible in spite of what is added at every instant, …. [A]s soon as we seek an intellectual representation of it we line up, one after another, states which have become distinct like the beads of a necklace ….29 It is a succession of states each one of which announces what follows and contains what precedes. Strictly speaking they do not constitute multiple states until I have got beyond them and turned around to observe their trail.30 [It is a] qualitative multiplicity, with no likeness to number; an organic evolution which is yet not an increasing quantity; a pure heterogeneity within which there are no distinct qualities. In a word, the moments of inner duration are not external to one another.31 What does Bergson mean when he declares that in la durée, “the past enters into the present?” What he wants to say is that in everyone’s stream of mental states, preceding ones qualitatively influence the ones that follow. Your present experience is coloured by your past one. Whenever you read a new book or listen to a new piece of music, your aesthetic experience of it inevitably contains the series of mental states (emotions, memories) you have accumulated prior to the experience itself. They have “entered into the present” experience. Even if you read the same book again, every subsequent reading will be affected by the previous readings, it will, as Bergson says above, “contain what preceded” it. The present experience of reading is not “external” to the past one. This is why la durée is always different; it is a “pure heterogeneity.” Suppose you start with a bucket of

20  Time and Consciousness white paint and continuously pour different coloured paints into it. At every moment of the process, the colour of the original paint in the bucket will be slightly different. A particularly helpful metaphor to clarify several other points from the quotes above is that of the colour spectrum. Bergson uses it himself.32 It illustrates four crucial aspects of la durée: (i) indivisibility, (ii) succession, (iii) multiplicity, and (iv) retrospective spatialisation. Let’s look at these in turn. i Indivisibility. Bergson says that the stream of mental states is an “organic evolution,” that it is “undivided” or that each mental state “announces what follows” and “contains what precedes.” Take the example of falling in love with someone: we can never clearly identify the precise moment at which the feeling of “mild affection” turned into “love.” The transition from one state to another is similar to the gradual progress we experience as our eyes glide over the colour spectrum, which consists of a gradual indivisible change from one colour to another. You cannot say where green ends and blue begins. All divisions of the spectrum into distinct colours (“green,” “dark blue,” “cerulean”) are imprecise. They are the result of our casting of a “spatial” net over the heterogeneous continuity of the spectrum in order to extract distinct elements from it for practical purposes (e.g., selecting which paint to use in painting a new flat). ii Succession. As we saw earlier, simply adding “succession” to space to turn it into time is not enough. So, why does Bergson’s durée include succession, even though it is supposed to be indivisible? The notions of indivisibility and succession might seem like incompatible ones: after all, if there are no external divided elements, then what is doing the succeeding? Here Bergson is beginning to encounter the limits of language in speaking about la durée. But the colour spectrum can help once again. Even though the change from one colour to another is indivisible and gradual, nevertheless, it is obvious that the colours do succeed: one comes after the other. There is, thus, paradoxically, an indivisible succession. iii Multiplicity. Even though the spectrum is indivisible, it is a multiplicity nevertheless. It must be; if it were not, it would simply be one, consisting of just a single colour. Similarly, our stream of mental states cannot be neatly divided into distinct items, “like the beads of a necklace,” as Bergson says. But the stream clearly contains more than just one single mental state. So, it must be a multiplicity. A. E. Pilkington specifically addresses the limits of language that Bergson encounters in his analysis of Bergson’s use of the term “multiplicity:” The notion of “qualitative multiplicity” might seem a contradictory one, since to speak of a “plurality” at all is to envisage the particulars which

Bergson on Time and Space  21 compose it as being in some sense juxtaposed, or collected together. Bergson however is compelled to use whatever resources language offers him, in order to describe duration; to grasp the notion of “pure duration,” one must conceive of a succession, which is not separated into a series of distinct states; it is a series of qualitative transformations which flow into each other.33 iv Retrospective spatialisation. The colour spectrum is also particularly handy for explaining what Vladimir Jankélévitch warns against as the “retrospective illusion” in thinking about la durée.34 This illusion consists of neglecting the radical difference between la durée as it is now and the memory of it in the past, as it was. The way things are in retrospect is not what they were when they were happening. Instead of the spectrum, imagine looking at one of those LED lamps that gradually go through all the colours of the spectrum in a loop. As you are looking at it, you are aware of a gradual qualitative shift from one colour to another. If you want to distinguish different colours, you have to mentally “jump back” by a few seconds and identify that one colour, say, green, has just turned into blue. You can also take all of the colours that you remember from looking at the LED lamp and represent them in the form of the colour spectrum itself. And it is on the spectrum that you can impose divisions of different colours and establish relations of before and after, linking the progression of one colour to another. This is precisely what Bergson has in mind when he says, in one of the quotations, that “strictly speaking [states of consciousness] do not constitute multiple states until I have got beyond them and turned around to observe their trail.” The individual colours cannot be differentiated as you are looking at the lamp: they can only be differentiated once they have become memory. Once they have become the “trail” or “trace” that la durée has left behind. The change in the LED lamp is to the colour spectrum what la durée is to the image it has left of itself in the past: The duration wherein we see ourselves acting, and in which it is useful that we should see ourselves, is a duration whose elements are dissociated and juxtaposed. The duration wherein we act is a duration wherein our states melt into each other.35 This might all look like fairly abstract metaphysics, but Bergson’s vision of reality maps closely onto our experience. A good analogy here may be provided by the case of witnessing important historical events. There is an old Czech proverb: once the battle is over, everyone is a general. Momentous events are often confused and chaotic, involving different actors, persons, historical causes, unexpected outcomes, etc. It is unclear which of them will prove decisive and which are trivial. But once the events are over, we

22  Time and Consciousness can clearly see them divided or divisible into periods, and stages, arising out of specific causes and resulting in specific outcomes. We know what could have or should have been done. Why was it not done? Because what could have been done was not there when it was being done: just like we can identify colours in our experience of the LED lamp by jumping back mentally. And the same is true of events in our private personal histories, the histories of our durées. What has been said so far also illustrates why language is not very well suited for describing la durée. We are all familiar with the experience of la durée, but we are not very well equipped to talk about it. Why is that? Bergson thinks that this is because language consists of individual words that map onto individual units of reality.36 The word “apple,” for example, designates a distinct object with clear outlines. And even words referring to temporal phenomena (e.g., “this afternoon”) still more or less succeed in picking out distinct moments or intervals of spatialised time. But now apply them to the sort of stuff you encounter deep in your stream of consciousness: nostalgia, love, sadness, or regret. Not only do these words not capture the highly individual character of these mental states, but they also fail to capture the way that they melt one into another. Now, the analytically attuned philosopher might be growing a bit suspicious and recall what Russell said about Bergson: that his philosophy does not rely on clear and philosophical argument but purely on poetic imagery. Am I not just positing an obscure and chimeric concept that language and logic cannot grasp? Is la durée a bit like “feeling the presence of a ghost in the room,” an experience that might not be described particularly well simply because its object is an entity that does not exist? We will leave questions about the ontological status of la durée until the very end of this chapter. For the time being, all that is argued is that our stream of mental states is durée-like. For example, our feeling of nostalgia, with all its nuances developing over time, cannot be captured by, say, conceptual analysis. And yet, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time can successfully point us to what it is like. The fact that Proust’s language is poetic, and neither precise nor clear does not mean that nostalgia is not real. Bergson’s point here is that something invaluable is lost when we try to grasp whatever happens in our minds using conceptual forms inappropriate to it. This does not mean that Russell’s mathematics and geometry should be banished but that they should not be applied as tools to an object that is not suited for being analysed by them. Besides, Bergson himself later denied that language cannot be used at all to talk about it. The experience of la durée is not incommunicable, as Stebbing accused Bergson of claiming.37 Bergson’s later works stress that we need different ways of using language, perhaps more “fluid concepts.”38 The following quote from one of the first reviews of Bergson’s 1901–1902 lectures at the

Bergson on Time and Space  23 Collège de France, where he talks about these “fluid” concepts, captures it quite well: In order that we do not fall into arbitrariness, we must not lose all contact with conceptual thought; and the results at which we arrive [by Bergson’s methodology] must always, as much as possible, be translatable into concepts.39 We can delve into la durée, but we can still talk about what we saw there. It’s just that we cannot do it well enough to capture everything about the experience. The Two Multiplicities40 Kant distinguished between space and time. But “time” as he understood it was not really all that different from space. So, Bergson introduces a new distinction that eventually comes to underlie his whole philosophy: it is a distinction between two different multiplicities, of which space (including spatialised time) and la durée are the most pertinent examples. The first multiplicity is quantitative. It includes space and spatialised time; you know you are operating within this multiplicity if you see juxtaposition, division, or countability. It is a numerical multiplicity that is completely devoid of any quality: neither the number 7, for example, nor the stretch of time from 7:00 until 8:00 are salty, blue, or loud. They do not possess qualities. The second multiplicity is qualitative and is instantiated by la durée. It is constantly developing, changing, and evolving. It is indivisible. It is a non-numerical multiplicity composed of pure qualities (think about the example of love or nostalgia that we encountered earlier). In Time and Free Will, the first of these multiplicities corresponds to the external world of objects, and the second corresponds to the internal world of consciousness.41 Divisibility is one of the strongest differentiating criteria between the two. Matter or external objects can mostly be repeatedly divided without changing in kind: if you take one litre of water and divide it in half, you are still left with two half-litres of water. But thinking that you might perform a similar process with la durée is a category mistake. How would you divide your feeling of autumnal melancholia? Vladimir Jankélévitch points out the absurdity of speaking about “half an emotion” or something of the sort42: the same is true, by extension, of la durée, the non-spatial qualitative multiplicity. I said earlier that Bergson considers Kant to be the main villain in the process of “spatialising time,” and in general terms, Kant stands as a frequent target of Bergson’s critiques. But in one crucial respect, Bergson’s

24  Time and Consciousness Time and Free Will and Kant’s first Critique agree: without the synthesising feature of the mind, the external world would be completely discontinuous. It would not endure. It is no coincidence that at least one scholar has suggested that perhaps a more fitting English translation for la durée is “durance,” instead of “duration.”43 There is no continuity in the external world without la durée.44 In an extremely succinct passage in Time and Free Will, Bergson expresses this as follows: “within our ego, there is succession without mutual externality; outside the ego, in pure space, mutual externality without succession.”45 We have already encountered the first idea: that within consciousness, mental states are not divisible and therefore not separate from or external to one another. But equally, in the material world outside of consciousness, objects are mutually external: they do not exist in succession unless they are taken up into la durée which holds them together. In Bergson’s view, we would not be able to talk about time at all if we did not take into consideration the role that our consciousness plays in connecting distinct and independently existing slices of pure spatiality. This is why Bergson frequently says that la durée is le temps fondamental46 or “fundamental time.” The following quote comes from J. R. Lucas’ Treatise on Time and Space, written nearly a century after Bergson’s Time and Free Will. Lucas does not engage with Bergson but perhaps expresses the link between consciousness and time even better than Bergson ever could: … not only is time a necessary concomitant of my existing as a conscious being, but some relation to my existence as a conscious being is a necessary condition of time’s being time. This is one of the most fundamental ways in which time differs from space. We could conceive of a space … that was totally unrelated to us …. But we cannot similarly divorce ourselves from time, or abstract time from all connexion with ourselves. … [I]t is one of the most fundamental ways in which time differs from space, ….47 We will put this point aside for the time being, because it will come to play a crucial role in the construction of the temporal ontology developed in Chapter 3. Now, it might be a good moment to summarise the contours of Bergson’s position. Bergson argues that there are two multiplicities: qualitative and quantitative. (As a matter of fact, the philosopher François Evellin even suggested to Bergson that he should call his first book Quantité et qualité, that is, “Quantity and Quality.”48) La durée is an example of the latter, space and spatialised time of the former. And he thinks that philosophy commits a grave error in thinking of time using categories from the quantitative multiplicity. If we do that, the two multiplicities eventually become mixed, and quantity contaminates the pure quality of la durée. In many passages,

Bergson on Time and Space  25 Bergson goes as far as to use the term “spurious concept”49 ­(concept bâtard50), suggesting that spatialised time results from the illegitimate mixing of two otherwise pure elements.51 Movement of the Pendulum52 But Bergson also offers a diagnosis of how this mixing and contamination happens. The real culprit here is movement. In the phenomenon of movement, la durée and the quantitative multiplicity come dangerously close. Why? Because movement participates both in space (since that is where objects move) and in la durée (that synthesises the different positions of the moving object). In this process, la durée becomes tarnished by space. Frédéric Worms offers an excellent analysis of how this two-way process functions. On the one hand, there is what he calls “temporalisation of space” (temporalisation de l’espace53), the synthesising process through which la durée lends continuity to the external world, connecting the mutual externality into a coherent unity. An excellent illustration of this is Bergson’s example of the movement of a clock pendulum: Outside of me, in space, there is never more than a single position of the hand and the pendulum, for nothing is left of the past positions. Within myself a process of organization or interpenetration of conscious states is going on, which constitutes true duration. It is because I endure in this way that I picture to myself what I call the past oscillations of the pendulum at the same time as I perceive the present oscillation. Now, let us withdraw for a moment the ego which thinks these so-called successive oscillations: there will never be more than a single oscillation, and indeed only a single position, of the pendulum, and hence no duration.54 But this process through which la durée lends continuity to the outside world also has an unwelcome side-effect, what Worms calls “spatialisation of la durée” (spatialisation de la durée55). Bergson says that all movements of objects are first given to consciousness as undivided singular qualities. This is best visible in the case of quickly moving objects like falling stars,56 where we cannot clearly distinguish earlier and later positions. Or the case of the “movement” of colour in the LED lamp from our earlier example. But Bergson says that this applies to all movements. The problem is that since the qualitative impression of movement also corresponds to a distinct spatial trajectory (e.g., the distance that the falling star traverses in our field of vision), we retrospectively end up importing features of the trajectory, such as divisibility, into the movement itself. We do this despite the fact that the experience of the movement was originally given to consciousness undivided. The positions of movement can also retrospectively

26  Time and Consciousness be connected with distinct points of the trajectory. And since the trajectory is spatial and divisible (it is a line in space after all), we come to think of the movement that occurred over it as being spatial and divisible too.57 We are so used to thinking of movement in this way that we even fail to see the initial indivisibility of movement that was given to our consciousness in the first place. Karin Costelloe-Stephen (1889–1953) tried bringing Bergsonism into dialogue with analytic philosophy, defended Bergson against Russell, and her legacy has sadly been nearly forgotten.58 But her insistence on the crucial difference between philosophically analysing change as it is happening and as it has happened is extremely relevant here: It is claimed [by Russell] that if we try to describe change we have always to regard it as change completed and not in process of changing. But change completed is something unchanging. We can therefore only describe what is unchanging, never change itself.59 This point is naturally related to the distinction between la durée and its retrospective spatialisation that we discussed earlier. Things changing are qualitatively different from things changed. This is also why Bergson argues that la durée is not analysable using numbers or measurements. For example, when we measure speed, we think we are measuring space traversed against time: metres per second or “St Andrews to Dundee” per 30 minutes of travel. But time does not actually feature in the process of measurement or the measurements obtained. Imagine you are measuring the speed of a car: you note the stationary position of the car at Point A and relate it to the stationary position of the hands of a clock. The car gets moving and then stops at Point B. Once again, you note its stationary position and relate it to the new position of the hands of the clock. The movement itself or durée does not feature either in the equations or in your final speed. You calculated the speed using change completed, as Costelloe would say. Changing has escaped your attention. Of course, measuring spatialised time is perfectly legitimate for practical purposes like the synchronisation of schedules with clocks and calendars and nowhere does Bergson say that the mathematical description of spatialised time is logically inconsistent or self-contradictory. What Bergson wants to say is rather that the “time” which appears in mathematical equations and is denoted as “t” is not real time. It does not capture the reality of change. It is a compromise between la durée and space. It is time spatialised. Bergson emphatically does not want to say that mathematics and physics are wrong in their treatment of whatever it is that they refer to by the variable “t.” What he is trying to stress is that there is much more to time and temporality than what physics and mathematics will ever be able to

Bergson on Time and Space  27 tell us and that can be captured by “t.” And, as we will see in the second half of this volume, this “more” will turn out to be of paramount importance in considering the question of free will and determinism. Russell Reconsidered Does any of what has been said above respond to the two central charges directed at Bergson by Russell? Let’s consider these one by one. Russell’s objections have been fully dealt with at length by other scholars,60 but here their purpose is to provide a useful framework to further clarify some of the tenets of Bergson’s philosophical method. Russell’s first objection against Bergson consisted of the claim that Bergson’s philosophy is anti-intellectualist. That it relies purely on imagery, poetry, and suggestive visual metaphors. True enough, it is incontestable that Russell has not read Bergson very carefully, but the charge of antiintellectualism was directed at Bergson from other corners too.61 So, it is not completely misguided. What is interesting here is that Bergson’s Creative Mind, which is a sort of self-reflexive bookend on the Bergsonian corpus, opens with the declaration that “[w]hat philosophy has lacked most of all is precision.”62 What type of precision does Bergson have in mind here? He certainly does not mean the type of precision of conceptual analysis characterising Russell’s analytic project. For Bergson, precision consists of appropriately approaching the contingency and particularity of reality, as opposed to merely studying its symbols or representations at an abstract level. This, of course, does not mean that Bergson’s metaphysical project has no place for reasoning, mathematics, or science. What he aims to do is to clearly delineate their domains of application. Just like you would not ask a biologist to explain English literature to you, or a cook to fix your plumbing, Bergson thinks that you should not ask a scientist or a mathematician to talk to you about the metaphysical nature of time: [My aim was] to constitute a metaphysics having a common frontier with science and therefore being able to lend itself to verification on a great many points …. I have asked science simply to remain scientific and not to take on an unconscious metaphysics which then presents itself to the ignorant or the half-educated under the mask of science.63 And Bergson certainly kept to his word: nearly all of his books start with an in-depth engagement with the science of his day: mathematics and psychophysics in Time and Free Will (1889), psychology in Matter and Memory (1896), evolutionary biology in Creative Evolution (1907), and physics in Duration and Simultaneity (1922). Adam Riggio says that

28  Time and Consciousness Bergson was someone “that we would today consider a model of the ­scientifically-informed philosopher.”64 Bergson insisted on the importance of empirical research and in his later works, space comes to adopt a much more positive role, as we will see in Chapter 2. He simply affirmed that a precise metaphysics must keep the two multiplicities mentioned earlier separate. As will become clear in the chapters that follow, it is precisely Bergson’s insistence on careful attention to the relationship between method and subject matter that allows Bergson’s philosophy to be read in a way that enables a fruitful dialogue with analytic philosophy of religion. Russell’s remarks that Bergson’s metaphysics is anti-intellectualist is much like claiming that English literature is anti-scientific because it does not allow biologists to give lectures in the English department. Russell’s claim that Bergson’s metaphysics is propelled by the fact that he is “always driven by means of visual images”65 seems particularly bizarre here. Bergson tries to appeal to all means he can to point his reader to the experience of la durée: be this auditory images,66 tactile sensations,67 or smells.68 Russell’s second objection about Bergson’s confusion regarding numbers is much more nuanced. But here we must again try properly to understand what Bergson is trying to achieve. Bergson is not speaking about arithmetic here. He is not interested in finding an internal contradiction in the philosophy of mathematics: his primary interest is in demonstrating that Kant was wrong to connect counting with time. This is also one of the reasons why Bergson chose to define number as a collection of identical units.69 This might have looked archaic to a mathematician at the beginning of the 20th century, but Bergson chose it precisely because it is a definition that Kant himself operates with in the Critique of Pure Reason.70 Bergson’s primary question is whether we can represent a collection of identical units without appealing to the faculty of space. And, as his example with counting sheep shows, his answer is a resolute no.71 The affinity between numbers and spatiality is introduced primarily to illustrate how la durée becomes contaminated by spatiality, externality, and divisibility. Bergson is not interested in arithmetic but in the role that numbers play in trying to represent and capture the metaphysical nature of la durée. Despite the fact that Russell’s objections are not valid, we cannot just plug Bergson into contemporary analytic discussions. A certain methodology for re-interpreting or re-developing Bergson has to be adopted before he can be brought into discussions with contemporary analytic thought. A good starting point for doing so is observing that Bergson’s philosophy goes through a significant development across his four major books. As a matter of fact, Vladimir Jankélévitch points out that Bergson’s philosophy resembles one of its central notions, la durée.72 Pivotal concepts appear and disappear as it progresses, just like motifs appear, disappear, and reappear in a musical composition. Some themes are abandoned, some

Bergson on Time and Space  29 are re-introduced and applied differently, and some that were latently connected to others are given new significance or different interpretations. According to several Bergson scholars,73 a significant methodological shift happens in Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics from 1903 (later published in Creative Mind). “Intuition”, which is the process of immersing ourselves into the flow of duration and freeing our minds from the spatialising tendencies, suddenly receives an unprecedently central role. Of course, the notion itself is already nascent in Time and Free Will, but it becomes the central concern for Bergson from Introduction onwards. This also corresponds to a notable change in philosophical style: Time and Free Will (1889) and Matter and Memory (1896) occasionally read like a scientific report on psychology, whereas Creative Evolution (1907) is much more speculative and metaphysical in nature. Needless to say, this does not mean that there are “two Bergsons” akin to the separation that scholars apply to “early” and “late Wittgenstein.” But it does mean that depending on where you look, you find different versions of Bergson. If you are an analytic philosopher interested in forming dialogues with Bergsonism, maybe Bergson’s texts written after 1903 are not the best place to start. There is a further reason why we need to be aware of this shift in emphasis. Since the themes that appear in Bergson’s later works look deceptively similar to those that appear earlier (but yet bear different metaphysical or ontological weight, as we will see in the next section), it is very risky to start reading the Bergsonian corpus from Creative Evolution backwards. Many people read Bergson in this way since it was Creative Evolution that gained Bergson international fame and motivated readers to explore his earlier and (at the time) less-known works. The fact that the concerns of Creative Evolution sometimes overshadow those of Time and Free Will or Matter and Memory is evidenced by the way that several Bergsonians responded to Russell’s critique: for example, the notion of “creation” is one of the key weapons that Costelloe-Stephen chooses to rely on in defending Bergson against Russell.74 This notion becomes particularly important for Bergson after the publication of Time and Free Will, where numbers are treated. In the following chapters, I will therefore emphasise Bergson’s earlier works. This does not mean that relying on Bergson’s later notions in forming dialogues between his thought and analytic philosophy is impossible.75 It is just not the sort of methodology I will appeal to here. Controversial as this will be to many Bergsonians, much of what follows in this book could really have been written if Time and Free Will was the only book that Bergson ever wrote. The methodological emphasis on Bergson’s first major work runs throughout this entire book. In the pages that follow, the reader will not encounter the notions traditionally associated with Bergson: be this “élan vital,” “intuition,” or his work on religion from his final book. It is not that these later concepts are uninteresting, quite the opposite!

30  Time and Consciousness Rather, they are too vulnerable to the sort of critique we find in Russell and run the risk of being regarded as too speculative by many of the analytic arguments that the following pages engage with. La Durée, Existence, and the External World: Three Stages We have just spoken about the development of Bergsonian methodology or philosophical style. But there is an even more important development regarding the question of what la durée actually is. When you follow the chronology of Bergson’s works from Time and Free Will, through Matter and Memory to Creative Evolution, you cannot help but notice that la durée “moves out,” or, more precisely, that Bergson extends its applicability from consciousness to the external world and, subsequently, to the whole of evolutionary history.76 At the risk of chopping up Bergson’s philosophical development into distinct segments, this development may be divided into three “stages,” each one of which is associated with one of Bergson’s major works and illustrates the relationship between the mind and the world using different examples. The typology here is not the only one offered by Bergson’s interpreters,77 but it is one that will best serve our purposes for constructing a new Bergsonian theory of time in Chapter 3. Stage 1 corresponds to Time and Free Will from 1889. Here, the paradigm example of the relation between la durée and the world is that of the movement of the pendulum requiring the synthesis of memory that we talked about earlier. In Bergson’s first book, we find a radical dualism between the internal and the external. La durée constitutes true or “real” time which performs the synthesis on individual instantaneous slices of non-temporal external reality. Here is an extremely succinct expression of this idea: Thus in consciousness we find states which succeed, without being distinguished from one another; and in space simultaneities which, without succeeding, are distinguished from one another, in the sense that one has ceased to exist when the other appears. Outside us, mutual externality without succession; within us, succession without mutual externality.78 This extremely compressed quote does require some clarification. By speaking of “simultaneities … distinguished from one another,” Bergson does not mean the simultaneity of different moments of the external world: if reality is “reborn every minute,” then surely these moments cannot all be mutually simultaneous! Rather, the simultaneity of events itself or objects in each one of these slices of reality is being reborn. The phrase “mutual externality without succession” refers to the fact that the individual “slices

Bergson on Time and Space  31 of reality” are “disconnected” without a mind that would connect them into a successive process, in much the same way that it connects the individual sheep in the act of counting. By contrast, “succession without mutual externality” refers to the fact that la durée contains a seamless unified flow of elements. It is this primary immediate succession that is required for the existence of time. As Bergson later says in Duration and Simultaneity: Everyone will concede that in fact we do not conceive of time without a before and after: time is succession. Now, we have shown that where there is no memory, no consciousness, real or virtual, affirmed or imagined, actually present or ideally stipulated, there cannot be a before and an after: there is one or the other, but not both: and we need both to have time.79 Note that Bergson’s point here is much stronger than simply stating that the human mind is required for there to be a representation of time. After all, this would be quite a trivial claim, reducible to saying that “the human mind representing time is required for time to be represented by the human mind.” No, Bergson says more; for him, human subjectivity is constituted by la durée, it is an instantiation of temporality. This is different from my mental representation of, say, a hamburger I had for lunch yesterday: my mental state is not a burger, and there is no lettuce or tomatoes inside my head. The representation of time qua durée, by contrast, is “homomorphic.” It instantiates what it represents. It is important to note that la durée is not some pre-existing “stuff” that this synthesis is effected on, it is primarily given as a simple indivisible unity and only then, in the second instance, retrospectively divided into separate “moments.” The flow of la durée is not “built up” of distinct moments. These are only recognised ex post facto.80 The talk of “multiplicities” is only permitted once we have performed the abstraction from la durée into objective time, once we have performed the retrospective division we spoke about earlier. Time and Free Will establishes a separation between the external “spatialised” multiplicity and the internal temporal durée, in the process resolving a whole host of problems to do with free will, Zeno’s paradoxes, and more general stumbling blocks of Kantian metaphysics. However, Bergson fails to explain how these two different realms are supposed to be related.81 This happens in Stage 2. At Stage 2, roughly corresponding to Matter and Memory from 1896, Bergson relates the two realities to each other by demonstrating that the matter which constitutes the external world has a durée of its own. This durée exists independently of our own, with a different “rhythm” which is phenomenologically inaccessible to us: our durée only contracts the rhythm

32  Time and Consciousness of this external durée into more condensed or concentrated moments.82 The paradigmatic example of Stage 2 is the perception of the colour red. Red is perceived by consciousness as a singular item (say, a patch of the colour red or the surface of a strawberry). However, in itself, it consists of millions of vibrations of the ray of light reflecting off the surface of the red patch: The duration lived by our consciousness is a duration with its own determined rhythm, a duration very different from the time of the physicist, which can store up, in a given interval, as great a number of phenomena as we please. In the space of a second, red light … accomplishes 400 billion successive vibrations. If we would form some idea of this number, we should have to separate the vibrations sufficiently to allow our consciousness to count them or at least to record explicitly their succession, and we should then enquire how many days or months or years this succession would occupy.83 The synthesis required for glueing together the before and the after— previously furnished by the mind—can now be located in matter itself. The external world provides its own durée-like continuity.84 No need for the mind to be present to the swinging of the pendulum. Similarly, the meaning of “movement” changes between Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory. Whereas in the former, “movement” was understood as something peculiar to and inevitably grounded in consciousness, now it is accorded to external matter too. There is real movement outside the mind. Despite Bergson’s proclivity to use a fixed set of examples (such as the famous illustration of the cube of sugar dissolving85), the one with the pendulum never again reappears after Time and Free Will.86 Matter acquires a reality analogous to consciousness, qualitative in its own right, with a durée of its own: [M]ovements, regarded in themselves, are indivisibles which occupy duration [la durée], involve a before and an after, and link together the successive moments of time by a thread of variable quality which cannot be without some likeness to the continuity of our own consciousness.87 But Bergson does not stop there. At Stage 3, two durées (one of matter, one of human consciousness) are no longer enough. In Creative Evolution, Bergson affirms a plurality of durées extended to the entirety of the evolutionary development, creating what F. C. T. Moore refers to as a “super-phenomenology” of everything.88 La durée becomes “a fundamental feature of the Universe as a whole,”89 which acquires its own memory.90 In Creative Evolution, la durée no longer just describes the merely phenomenological experience of the passage of time inside our heads.

Bergson on Time and Space  33 Rather, a multiplicity of real durées in the universe “outside our heads” is what grounds the phenomenology of our durée. The human durée and that of—or rather those of—matter and living organisms are now placed on the same scale, simply differentiated by different degrees of “tension.” Our durée is no longer special. Nevertheless, the move from Stage 2 to Stage 3 is not as radical as the step from Stage 1 to Stage 2. The shift from Stage 2 to Stage 3 consists in extending the applicability of la durée diachronically across the evolutionary development and synchronically elaborating a hierarchy of durées that was merely hinted at in Stage 2. The shift from Stage 1 to Stage 2, by contrast, consists of an “ontologisation” of la durée, of moving it “outside the head” into external reality. Stage 3 then multiplies the number of durées thereby ontologised. One can already see that Creative Evolution was by many taken to postulate a deeply panpsychist project91: if memory is the fundamental mark of consciousness, and memory is now to be found in plants, organisms, and matter, why not accord them consciousness too? For now, it suffices to flag up these three stages. In Chapter 3, we will see that being aware of their development is absolutely crucial for constructing a new Bergsonian philosophy of time.

***

This chapter has shown that Russell’s rejection of Bergson was unjustified and that the objections that Russell directs at Bergsonism can be warded off by properly appreciating the role of “space” in Bergson’s metaphysical system or by attending more carefully to the chronological development of Bergson’s works across time. However, one might ask: even if Russell had not been careful enough a reader of Bergson, should we really be drawing significant methodological conclusions about Bergson’s ability to contribute to analytic discussions from a relatively minor debate in the analytic tradition that took place over a hundred years ago? Is Bergson’s philosophy of time relevant to contemporary discussions about time? The proof is in the pudding; a good way to test out whether Bergson is relevant is to look at one of the most important arguments about time in the history of philosophy. This is what we will do in Chapter 2. Notes 1 For an extensive discussion of this exchange, see Andreas Vrahimis, Bergsonism and the History of Analytic Philosophy, History of Analytic Philosophy (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 117–58, https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-3-030-80755-9. 2 I discuss others in Matyáš Moravec, ‘Taking Time Seriously: The Bergsonism of Karin Costelloe-Stephen, Hilda Oakeley, and May Sinclair’, British Journal

34  Time and Consciousness

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

for the History of Philosophy 31, no. 2 (2023): 331–54. https://doi.org/10.108 0/09608788.2022.2030670. Bertrand Russell, ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’, The Monist 22, no. 3 (1912): 321–47, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist191222324. Karin Costelloe, ‘An Answer to Mr Bertrand Russell’s Article on the Philosophy of Bergson’, The Monist 24, no. 1 (1914): 145–55, https://doi.org/10.5840/ monist191424130. Bertrand Russell and H. Wildon Carr, The Philosophy of Bergson. By the Hon. Bertrand Russell; with a Reply by Mr. H. Wildon Carr and a Rejoinder by Mr. Russell (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1914). L. Susan Stebbing, Pragmatism and French Voluntarism, Girton College Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). Adam Riggio, ‘Lessons for the Relationship of Philosophy and Science from the Legacy of Henri Bergson’, Social Epistemology 30, no. 2 (2016): 222, https:// doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2014.971916. Russell, ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’, 322. Russell, 326. Russell, 335. Russell, 335. Some of the material in this section has previously appeared in an abbreviated form in Matyáš Moravec, ‘A Perpetual Present: Henri Bergson and Atemporal Duration’, European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11, no. 3 (2019): 197–224, https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v0i0.2629. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), 4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge University Press, 1997), A19–49/B33–73; Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as Science, trans. P. G. Lucas and G. Zöller (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), [4:321, 322]. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Co., 1913), 98. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A34/B51. Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 101. Bergson, 101. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A142–43/B182; A241/B300. Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 76–77. Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, ed. Arnaud Bouaniche (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), 58. Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 77. Jiri Benovsky, ‘The Relationist and Substantivalist Theories of Time: Foes or Friends?’, European Journal of Philosophy 19, no. 4 (2011): 491–506, https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0378.2010.00396.x. Peter Geach, ‘The Future’, New Blackfriars 54, no. 636 (1973): 212–13, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-2005.1973.tb05364.x. Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 99. Bergson, 97. Some of the material in this section has previously appeared in Moravec, ‘A Perpetual Present: Henri Bergson and Atemporal Duration’.

Bergson on Time and Space  35 28 Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 73. 29 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 55. 30 Bergson, 137. 31 Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 226. 32 Bergson, 58–59; Henri Bergson, L’idée de temps. Cours au Collège de France 1901–1902, ed. Gabriel Meyer-Bisch (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019), 129. 33 A. E. Pilkington, Bergson and His Influence. A Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 3–4. 34 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, trans. Nils F. Schott (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 11–17. 35 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. W. Scott Palmer and N. M. Paul (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 186. 36 Bergson, L’idée de temps. Cours au Collège de France 1901–1902, 80–81. 37 Stebbing, Pragmatism and French Voluntarism, 147–49; Matyáš Moravec and Peter West, ‘Eddington and Stebbing in the Shadow of Bergson’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2023): 59–84. https://doi. org/10.5406/21521026.40.1.04. 38 Bergson, L’idée de temps. Cours au Collège de France 1901–1902, 17–18. 39 “Cependant, afin de ne pas tomber dans l’arbitraire, il ne faut pas perdre tout point de contact avec la pensée conceptuelle ; et les résultats auxquels on arrivera devront toujours, autant que possible, être traduisible en concepts.” (Léonard Constant, ‘L’idée de temps. Collège de France. - Cours de M. Bergson’, Revue de philosophie 2, no. 6 (1902): 832, my translation, italics.) 40 Some of the material in this section has previously appeared in Moravec, ‘A Perpetual Present: Henri Bergson and Atemporal Duration’. 41 Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 87; for an extended discussion of these two multiplicities, see Keith ­Ansell-Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual. Bergson and the Time of Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 15–16. 42 Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, 7–8. 43 Francis Charles Timothy Moore, Bergson: Thinking Backwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3–4. Ansell-Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual. Bergson and the 44 Time of Life, 35. 45 Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 108. 46 Henri Bergson, Durée et Simultanéité. À Propos de La Théorie d’Einstein, ed. Élie During (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), 42. 47 J. R. Lucas, A Treatise on Time and Space (London: Methuen & Co., 1973), §7. 48 Arnaud Bouaniche, ‘Dossier Critique’, in Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, by Henri Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), 231, note to footnote 1 on p. 85. 49 Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 98. 50 Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 73. 51 Bergson probably got this notion from Plato’s Timaeus, which describes how the sensible and the intelligible intermix to result in the creation of the world. For a discussion, see Bouaniche, ‘Dossier Critique’, 228, note 37. 52 Some of the material in this section has previously appeared in Moravec, ‘A Perpetual Present: Henri Bergson and Atemporal Duration’.

36  Time and Consciousness



































Bergson on Time and Space  37

























38  Time and Consciousness ———. L’idée de temps. Cours au Collège de France 1901–1902. Edited by Gabriel Meyer-Bisch. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019. ———. Matter and Memory. Translated by W. Scott Palmer and N. M. Paul. New York: Zone Books, 1988. ———. The Creative Mind. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946. ———. Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen & Co., 1913. Bouaniche, Arnaud. ‘Dossier Critique’. In Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, by Henri Bergson, 183–322. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013. Constant, Léonard. ‘L’idée de temps. Collège de France. - Cours de M. Bergson’. Revue de philosophie 2, no. 6 (1902): 828–32. Costelloe, Karin. ‘An Answer to Mr Bertrand Russell’s Article on the Philosophy of Bergson’. The Monist 24, no. 1 (1914): 145–55. https://doi.org/10.5840/ monist191424130. Dainton, Barry. ‘Bergson on Temporal Experience and Durée Réelle’. In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience, edited by I. Phillips, 93–106. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. ———. Stream of Consciousness. Unity and Continuity in Conscious Experience. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2000. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1991. ———. Le bergsonisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966. Dolbeault, Joël. ‘Bergson’s Panpsychism’. Continental Philosophy Review 51, no. 4 (2018): 549–64. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9446-8. Dougherty, Matt. ‘Anti-Intellectualism. Bergson and Contemporary Encounters’. In The Bergsonian Mind, edited by Mark Sinclair and Yaron Wolf, 480–93. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9780429020735-42. During, Élie. ‘Dossier Critique’. In Durée et simultanéité. À propos de la théorie d’Einstein, by Henri Bergson, edited by Élie During, 219–44. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009. Elliot, Hugh S. R. Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson. London: Longmans, Green, 1912. Geach, Peter. ‘The Future’. New Blackfriars 54, no. 636 (1973): 208–18. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-2005.1973.tb05364.x. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Henri Bergson. Translated by Nils F. Schott. London and Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as Science. Translated by P. G. Lucas and G. Zöller. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Kouba, Pavel. ‘Le Mouvement Entre Temps et Espace (Bergson Aux Prises Avec Sa Découverte)’. In Annales Bergsoniennes, edited by Frédéric Worms, 2: 207–25. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004. Lucas, J. R. A Treatise on Time and Space. London: Methuen & Co., 1973.

Bergson on Time and Space  39 Moore, Francis Charles Timothy. Bergson: Thinking Backwards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Moravec, Matyáš. ‘A Perpetual Present: Henri Bergson and Atemporal Duration’. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11, no. 3 (2019): 197–224. https:// doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v0i0.2629. ———. ‘Taking Time Seriously: The Bergsonism of Karin Costelloe-Stephen, Hilda Oakeley, and May Sinclair’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31, no. 2 (2023): 331–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2030670. Moravec, Matyáš, and Peter West. ‘Eddington and Stebbing in the Shadow of Bergson’. History of Philosophy Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2023): 59–84. https://doi. org/10.5406/21521026.40.1.04. Pilkington, A. E. Bergson and His Influence. A Reassessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Riggio, Adam. ‘Lessons for the Relationship of Philosophy and Science from the Legacy of Henri Bergson’. Social Epistemology 30, no. 2 (2016): 213–26. https:// doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2014.971916. Russell, Bertrand. ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’. The Monist 22, no. 3 (1912): 321– 47. https://doi.org/10.5840/monist191222324. Russell, Bertrand, and H. Wildon Carr. The Philosophy of Bergson. By the Hon. Bertrand Russell; with a Reply by Mr. H. Wildon Carr and a Rejoinder by Mr. Russell. Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1914. Russell, John E. ‘Bergson’s Anti-Intellectualism’. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 9, no. 5 (1912): 129–31. https://doi. org/10.2307/2013424. Sinclair, Mark. Bergson. London: Routledge, 2019. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781 315414935. Soulez, Philippe, and Frédéric Worms. Bergson. Biographie. Paris: Flammarion, 1997. Stebbing, L. Susan. Pragmatism and French Voluntarism. Girton College Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914. Stephen, Karin. The Misuse of Mind: A Study of Bergson’s Attack on Intellectualism. London and New York: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. and Harcourt, 1922. Vrahimis, Andreas. Bergsonism and the History of Analytic Philosophy. History of Analytic Philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-030-80755-9. ———. ‘Russell’s Critique of Bergson and the Divide between “Analytic” and “Continental” Philosophy’. Balkan Journal of Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2011): 123. https://doi.org/10.5840/bjp20113123. ———. ‘Sense Data and Logical Relations: Karin Costelloe-Stephen and Russell’s Critique of Bergson’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28, no. 4 (2020): 819–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2019.1671311. Williams, Clifford. ‘A Bergsonian Approach to A- and B-Time’. Philosophy 73, no. 285 (1998): 379–93. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819198000059. Worms, Frédéric. ‘Bergson entre Russell et Husserl: Un troisième terme?’. Rue Descartes, no. 29 (2000): 79–96. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40978610.pdf. ———. ‘Les trois dimensions de la question de l’espace dans l’œuvre de Bergson’. Épokhè 94, no. 4 (1994): 89–116.

2

Unreal Time or Real Duration? McTaggart and Bergson

In 1908, the Cambridge philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart (1866–1925) published his famous paper titled “The Unreality of Time.”1 Very few philosophers accepted its eponymous conclusion, namely, that time is not real. Nevertheless, the framework that McTaggart developed en route to that conclusion firmly set the contours that have defined discussions about time in analytic philosophy ever since. One would now struggle to find a volume on the philosophy of time written in English not mentioning McTaggart’s name. This is not the case with the continental tradition of philosophy that was so strongly moulded by Bergson’s thought about duration. While Bergson’s philosophy of time exerted tremendous influence on the role of time in the writings of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, or Deleuze, none of these thinkers was particularly interested in McTaggart’s argument. The silence of Bergsoninfluenced philosophers on McTaggart is analogous to that of most of contemporary analytic philosophy of time on Bergson.2 Each is aware of the other’s existence but engagement lacks. Bergson himself never addressed the argument, and it is unclear whether he even knew of McTaggart or whether he met him in 1920 when he arrived in Cambridge to accept his honorary doctorate, a visit that we sadly know very little about.3 As we saw at the beginning of this study, nearly the entire edifice of Bergson’s philosophy is constructed on the distinction between “duration” (la durée) and “spatialised” time. Is there any connection between these two notions and McTaggart’s argument? And if McTaggart and Bergson did not engage with each other’s thoughts, does that mean that their philosophies talk past each other? What would this engagement have looked like had it actually taken place? As we will shortly see, Bergson’s philosophy can be used not only to respond to the key conclusions of McTaggart’s famous argument for the unreality of time but can also be mobilised to open up a completely new methodological space in contemporary philosophy of time and the philosophy of religion. And it is in this space that the problem of freedom and omniscience in the philosophy of religion must be articulated. DOI: 10.4324/9781003349044-4

Unreal Time or Real Duration? McTaggart and Bergson  41 McTaggart’s Argument Despite the fact that McTaggart wrote a number of important books on Hegel, his legacy for 20th-century philosophy is deeply tied with his argument for the “Unreality of Time” from 19084 and its later re-articulation in the second volume of The Nature of Existence from 1927.5 The various expositions of the argument would fill pages and pages of text,6 here I merely offer a brief sketch of the conceptual machinery McTaggart utilises. He starts by observing that individual positions in time may be distinguished in two ways. One of these is what has come to be called the B-series. This is the ordering that arranges all events in time (the birth of Napoleon, my writing this chapter, and the year 2050) by relations of “earlier” and “later.” Thus, the birth of Napoleon is earlier than my writing this chapter, which is, in turn, earlier than the year 2050. My writing this chapter is later than the birth of Napoleon. The second ordering, which he calls the A-series, uses the determinations of “past,” “present,” and “future” to arrange events. Thus, the birth of Napoleon is in the past, my writing this chapter is present, and the year 2050 is future. Now, McTaggart uses these two different ways of thinking about positions in time to conclude that time is unreal. He first asserts that the B-series cannot capture time, because the relations of “earlier and later” are always the same. They never change. As McTaggart says: If N is ever earlier than O and later than M, it will always be, and has always been, earlier than O and later than M, since the relations of earlier and later are permanent. And as, by our present hypothesis, time is constituted by a B-series alone, N will always have a position in a time series, and has always had one.7 The B-series exists as a set of positions in which nothing at all changes; the year 2050 is always later than the birth of Napoleon and nothing about this fact is ever going to be any different. This leads us to the first of McTaggart’s claims important for a Bergsonian response to the paradox: Claim 1: There is no change in the B-series. So, how about the A-series? Surely, something changes there! My birth was future, then it became present, and then past. The same can be said about the birth of Napoleon or the year 2050. With all events, we observe that their A-series determinations change; they move from the future through the present into the past. However, McTaggart uses an ingenious argument to demonstrate that the A-series is contradictory. He argues for this claim in two steps. The first step is a simple observation that the A-series

42  Time and Consciousness determinations are mutually incompatible. Nothing can be future and past and present. If something is past, it cannot be present or future. If it is future, it cannot be present or past. This leads to the second of McTaggart’s claims: Claim 2: “Past, present and future are incompatible determinations.”8 But surely, as we saw earlier, every event has all of these! The death of Napoleon was future, then it became present and then it became past. But how can the same event have all these incompatible determinations? McTaggart’s second step is to demonstrate that a seemingly obvious way out of this simple problem does not work: It may seem that this can be easily explained. … [I]t is never true, the answer will run, that [an event] is present, past and future. It is present, will be past, and has been future. … The characteristics are only incompatible when they are simultaneous. … But this explanation involves a vicious circle. For it assumes the existence of time in order to account for the way in which moments are past, present and future. Time then must be pre-supposed to account for the A series. But we have already seen that the A-series has to be assumed in order to account for time [because the B-series cannot do the job]. Accordingly, the A series has to be presupposed in order to account for the A series.9 McTaggart goes on to provide another version of the argument, which results not in a vicious circle, but in a vicious regress, where we need to assume another time series, a hyper-series, in which the events successively hold the incompatible determinations. But then, the same problem befalls this hyper-series. And so on. McTaggart then puts both strands of this argument together. We started with the observation that events in time may be arranged either using the B-series or the A-series. The B-series is off the table: nothing in it ever changes, and surely, it would be strange for time not to change. Change, after all, is taken to be the most characteristic feature of time. We then turned to the rather obviously changing A-series to observe that it is sadly self-contradictory. So, it is also off the table. But if one of these has to capture the nature of time, and neither of them can actually do it, that can only lead to one conclusion, which is the third of McTaggart’s claims: Claim 3: Time is unreal. It is worth noting in passing that McTaggart also thought that underlying the A- and B-series was the C-series, which was not just unchanging but

Unreal Time or Real Duration? McTaggart and Bergson  43 also adirectional. Think of it this way. We saw that nothing changes about the positions in the B-series. Nevertheless, the events in the B-series still run in one direction only: Napoleon comes before my writing this chapter and that comes before the year 2050. The series cannot go the other way. By contrast, if we were to apply the C-series to any set of events, all that would be left would be the relation of “inbetweenness,” whereby my writing this chapter is placed between the year 2050 and the birth of Napoleon. But that’s all: on a C-theoretical view, this description is identical to saying that my writing this chapter is placed between the birth of Napoleon and the year 2050. Adrian Bardon used a helpful example to clarify this: the C-series—at least in “The Unreality of Time”—is analogous to the English alphabet.10 Its members are ordered (i.e., “B” comes between “A” and “C” regardless of whether we read the alphabet from A to Z or backwards). Nevertheless, although we are used to reading it in one particular direction (A, B, C, …), there is nothing intrinsically directional about it. No contradiction would arise if we were to read it backwards (Z, Y, X, …) The Great Synthesiser: Duration, Memory, and Time Before trying to imagine what Bergson would have said about the A- and the B-series, some key clarifications are needed. As we saw earlier, Bergson uses an array of terms to describe what la durée is: “time,” “real time,” or “duration.” All of these are opposed to: “objective time,” “spatialised time,” or “scientific time.” Some stipulative decisions on the relationship between these are required. They are as follows: Let “objective time” be the medium that captures relations between objects in the external world. Objective time is the medium discussed in physics and mathematics whose values are denoted by the variable t. Its nature is what the A-, B-, and C-series are supposed to apply to. It is quantifiable. You can divide it into segments (seconds, minutes, hours), and it shares a great deal of properties with space. It is representable diagrammatically, and it allows, in the vast majority of cases, of clear cut-offs between temporally extended objects that exist in it, something we appeal to, for example, when we say that “the football match ends at 16:00.” Objective time carries with it a particular notion of change, namely, things having different properties at different times.11 By contrast, let “la durée” be what is sometimes referred to as “subjective time,” or “temporal experience,” the internal flux of consciousness immediately accessible by phenomenological introspection. As we saw at the beginning of this study, la durée is indivisible, unquantifiable, and indescribable by literal language. It constantly changes. It does not allow clearcut distinctions between its “areas” or “segments.” Change in la durée is the qualitative heterogeneous development of consciousness. “Objective

44  Time and Consciousness time” and la durée are two quite different things. Bergson argued that la durée is the “real” time, whereas objective time is not. He said that it is merely a “ghost of space haunting the reflective consciousness.”12 McTaggart thought that “any theory which treated time as objectively real could only do so by treating time, as we observe it, as being either unreal or merely subjective.”13 For McTaggart, the time “as we observe it”—immediately accessible by introspection—exists, but it is secondary.14 It is nothing more than (illusory) temporal experience. The central question for him to resolve was whether time proper can be deemed “objectively real.” And McTaggart answered with a resolute “no.” For Bergson, by contrast, the relation is the opposite: la durée, or time “as we observe it,” is primary and truly real; it is the bedrock on which objective or “spatialised” time is constructed. The picture of the dependence between la durée and “objective time” that emerges from Bergson’s first book Time and Free Will has the following three moments: 1 We find la durée located at the deepest level of the self. It is the immediately accessible stream of mental states in which memories of the past are retained and qualitatively influence the nature of those that follow.15 The retention of memories that we carry with us and their blending with the present gives us an immediate qualitative perception of change. However confused, nebulous, or incoherent this stream of states is, it is sufficient for instantiating time. As you are reading these lines, suppose that time outside you stopped: the sun no longer moves, drops of rain freeze in midair and the wind ceases to blow. But there is still you, reading these lines or contemplating what just happened to the world outside your window. You instantiate these temporal processes. You are time. The moment we imagine a possible world with consciousness in it (even if it were a consciousness existing as a disembodied spirit), in that very act, necessarily, we must imagine that in that possible world, there exists something inherently temporal. The intuition of a close link between temporality and consciousness, a link that approaches identity in Bergson’s philosophy, is also what lies behind the frequent intuition of theologians that God, if He is to be a conscious individual, may well exist outside of space but must or should display at least some of the properties or behaviours associated with things existing in time.16 McTaggart himself was aware that the link between temporality and consciousness is a very strong one and accepted that although we may doubt the reality of time or even the existence of the external world, our mental states cannot fail to appear to be in time.17 In a paper published a year after the “Unreality of Time,” he used a helpful example to illustrate this. A

Unreal Time or Real Duration? McTaggart and Bergson  45 straight stick placed in water always appears bent to an observer,18 McTaggart says, no matter how much that observer knows that the stick is actually straight. No matter how much the observer has studied the way that the rays of light refract when passing through a liquid, they cannot unsee the stick being bent. They cannot see it as it really is. La durée is not like that. It is highly possible that our internal stream of dynamic experience does not reflect the way the external world is, in much the same way that our perception of the stick does not correspond to the way the stick is in reality. But, unlike the case of the stick, no illusion is happening here: there is no “beyond” the immediately accessible stream. In the case of the stick, there was an independently existing reality where the stick was straight, and which was misperceived as a reality where the stick was bent. True enough, the inherent phenomenal dynamism of that experience itself is something we cannot escape (just like we cannot “unsee” the stick being bent). But in the case of la durée, there is no deeper reality hiding behind it. We may not infer from the present observation of a given star in the night sky that the star is present (many stars no longer exist but their light takes a while to get here),19 but we can more or less infer that our experience of observing the star is present. A talking donkey might or might not be real—but the hallucination of one (if one has it) is as real as can be. Similarly, when we introspect la durée, we are immediately acquainted with change and development, which serves as evidence for change at least “in our heads.” We feel more and more experiences continuously being added to the totality of our memories. These, in turn, affect the current experience. The hole that McTaggart digs himself into by positing a subject and at the same time affirming the unreality of time was brilliantly captured in a key observation by Michael Dummett’s famous reading of McTaggart’s argument: [The conclusion that time is unreal] seems self-refuting in something of the way in which, as McTaggart himself points out, the view that evil is an illusion is self-refuting: that is, if there is no evil, the illusion that there is evil is certainly evil. … Clearly, even if the world is really static, our apprehension of it changes. It does not help to say that we are even mistaken about what we think we see, because the fact would remain that we still make different mistakes at different times.20 2 This immediate experience of temporality, however, is not enough. Suppose all we ever had to experience was a unified indivisible stream of mental states, one blending into another, much like the experience of temporal progress in a dream. How could we make sense of the world? Here, Bergson observes that durée has an additional role to play. Apart

46  Time and Consciousness from giving us the immediate feeling (however deceptive) of “the flow of time,” it is also the seat of memory. And memory is precisely what we need for meaningful retention of the manifold of events in the external world.21 As we saw in the discussion of Bergson’s pendulum example in Chapter 1, Bergson follows Kant in iterating a radical mind-dependence of objective time. He says, in an oft-repeated dictum: “If there is no change in consciousness, there is no time.”22 Time is born at the point where our internal durée “comes into contact with the external world at its surface ….”23 The insight that memory underlies not just our internal stream of mental states but is also deeply connected with the existence of objective time has been defended by Adrian Bardon. Bardon appeals not to Bergson, but to Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. He contends that although temporal passage may well be an inaccurate “projection” onto passageless reality, it is nevertheless a special kind of projection. Its role is much more fundamental than the inaccurate representation of colours or hallucinations; if those went, our representation of reality would still be pretty coherent. Not so with time. Bardon observes that if we simply kept forgetting our memories from one moment to another, reality would simply cease to be coherent.24 The reason why your reading of this sentence makes sense to you is due to the fact that you remember what went on earlier in the paragraph, just like Bergson’s pendulum only appears to be moving because your memory retains its past positions. Bardon refers to the following illustrative example from Robert Paul Wolff: When I count a row of twelve stones, I look at the first one and say “one.” Then I look at the second, think of the first, and say “two” …. The process is repeated up to “twelve” at which time I am aware of myself as having performed a series of connected acts. If I merely found myself saying “twelve” after a while, or if I could recall previous utterances of “one,” etc. but didn’t recognize them as the earlier stages of a single activity whose culmination was the “twelve,” then I could not know that I had just counted twelve objects. ….25 It is not a coincidence that we find the same view in Bergson. He disagreed with Kant about the nature of the dynamism that lies at the basis of our conscious experience: for Kant, the time of the synthesising consciousness was homogeneous and schematisable by counting; for Bergson, it is heterogeneous and radically non-numerical.26 Nevertheless, Bergson agreed

Unreal Time or Real Duration? McTaggart and Bergson  47 with Kant that the synthesising role consciousness plays is central to the way the mind constitutes objective time. The time of the mind is the great synthesiser, regardless of whether we think of it as the homogeneous a priori condition of sensibility in the case of Kant or as the heterogeneous flux of la durée in the case of Bergson.27 3 We started with the immediate introspective experience of dynamic development (1) and then used this development to connect distinct events in the external world to lend them temporal extension (2). But for Bergson, the process does not stop there. In the third stage, the mind looks back at the trace of la durée in memory. What we see there is radically different from our present experience. Our present experience is indivisible, heterogeneous, and constantly moving (recall the LED light example from Chapter 1). Our past experiences, by contrast, are juxtaposed and accessible to consciousness at once. The experiences are fixed. The fixation and identification of distinct temporal positions can only be “achieved on the fixed memory of the duration [la durée], on the immobile track the mobility of the duration [la durée] leaves behind it, not on the duration [la durée] itself.”28 No doubt this fixation is useful: it allows us to see where one event ends and another begins and also gives us the possibility of arranging them in an order of earlier and later. This process, however, is secondary. True enough, la durée is the “great synthesiser,” but it is primarily a unity. The process does not start with individual states which la durée glues together. Rather, we start with an indivisible unity and then retrospectively identify individual states once the synthesis is done.29 But something crucial is lost: the characteristic dynamism that accompanies all our present experiences. Sonja Deppe provides a great analogy to illustrate the relationship between the dynamism of present experience and the stasis of past memory. Imagine you are listening to a melody. You let yourself be carried by its indivisible winding movement from one theme to another. You have direct access to the dynamism of the movement.30, 31 To summarise, from the point of view of the subject, temporality is constructed in three stages, starting with la durée as the foundation: 1 la durée 2 the synthesis of mental states in la durée adding continuity to external fragmented timeless reality

48  Time and Consciousness 3 the retrospective analysis of temporal reality using the medium of “objective time” and the removal of the dynamic phenomenology characteristic of Stage 1 We can conceive of events in the four-dimensional space-time block as existing without the experience of the human mind. But our ability to conceive of this four-dimensional block in the first place requires the process of mental retention of past events in our own experience and the extrapolation of the relations that underlie them across the space-time block. As Deppe argues, although the A-series determinations are usually thought of as being more perspicuously related to the human mind (they are dynamic, after all!), the B-series ones, nevertheless, also require the prior mental synthesis of the events constituting it and thus cannot be separated from the existence of the mind. Mind-dependence, which will be the focus of Chapter 3, therefore cannot be used as a conclusive criterion to distinguish between the A-series and the B-series, since they are both minddependent in one way or another: the A-series directly and the B-series derivatively. In D. C. Williams’ seminal paper “The Myth of Passage” (1951), Bergson—together with other “time snobs,” as Williams calls those stressing the dynamic character of time—gets criticised for thinking that over and above the sheer spread of events, with their several qualities, along the time axis, which is analogous enough to the spread of space, there is something extra, something active and dynamic, which is often and perhaps best described as “passage.”32 Williams gets the order of the story wrong here. The order of dependence for Bergson runs in exactly the opposite direction. It is not that the subject starts with a spread of events in a four-dimensional continuum and then injects passage, temporal “now,” or the feeling of “flow” into it. Rather, we start with the nebulous confused qualitative heterogeneous sense of temporal passage and then use this as a bedrock on which we create the logical construct of “objective time,” the fourth dimension of the block. Putting Space in Its Place: A Bergsonian Response to McTaggart When providing not just a Bergsonian, but any response to the challenge presented by McTaggart’s argument, one must avoid two pitfalls. The first

Unreal Time or Real Duration? McTaggart and Bergson  49 consists of a historically insensitive reading of McTaggart, one which completely neglects the Neo-Hegelian context in which the argument was gestated. This risk is serious. Röngvaldur Ingthorsson has dedicated an entire volume to explaining how later philosophers have misunderstood McTaggart’s argument and how many of the difficulties McTaggartian interpreters ran into resulted from not paying enough attention to McTaggart’s context.33 The other pitfall is an excessive historicising of McTaggart’s argument. If it was impossible to transfer a past philosopher’s insights into contemporary discussions, then philosophy would be a very lonely discipline. It is necessary to read McTaggart accurately, but it is equally necessary to do more than that. I try to avoid the first pitfall by not entering directly into the contemporary arena of discussions about A- and B-series of time. This is partially due to the fact that grasping the differences between the two views has become rather difficult. As we will see in Chapter 3, many of the concerns that have traditionally served as criteria to distinguish them are now extremely hard to pinpoint with precision: do A- and B-theorists disagree about the reducibility of tense? About the existence of the future? About time being dynamic or static? About the status of tenseless language? I avoid the second pitfall by treating McTaggart’s argument at face value. The argument poses a real philosophical problem regardless of its setting within Neo-Hegelianism, and analytic philosophy has always treated it as such. Many of the philosophical notions that McTaggart’s system as a whole operates with have little if any relevance to contemporary analytic discussions about the A- and B-series. Recall that McTaggart’s argument either presupposes or argues for the following claims: Claim 1: There is no change in the B-series. Claim 2: Past, present, and future are incompatible determinations. Claim 3: Time is unreal. Had Bergson engaged with McTaggart’s argument, how would he have responded? It is clear that Bergson would have conceded Claim 1. The B-series is “objective time.” It is a secondary structure extrapolated from la durée and applied to the external world for reasons of practical utility, like arranging events in a schedule or in a timetable. There is no change in it because change proper may only be found in la durée. Objective time is, by its very nature, characterised by the removal of the immediate dynamic phenomenology of change and the extrapolation of the resulting static structure

50  Time and Consciousness from the past into the future. Contrary to what the remarks in some of his early works suggest, Bergson would not regard the B-series as particularly nefarious. He would just insist that we bear in mind its merely derivative character and dependence on la durée. He acknowledged that there was a lifeless static utilitarian medium stemming from real, lived temporality: he called it “spatialised time” or sometimes simply “space.” But he also warned against the metaphysical stumbling blocks of reducing all temporal phenomena to it. A Bergsonian metaphysics has a role for the B-series to play. It aims to “put space in its place,” not to eliminate it altogether.34 How about Claim 2? Simply saying that the A-series “spatialises” time as it relies on discrete moments (it is a series after all) and therefore completely fails to capture the indivisible becoming of la durée is not enough.35 This is because la durée clearly contains a distinction between past and present: indeed, clarifying this distinction is one of the chief aims of Bergson’s Matter and Memory. But if that is the case, can we not just take McTaggart’s argument about the vicious circle in the A-series and apply it to la durée? It is worth noting that one needs only two of those determinations, past and present, attaching to the same thing, to get McTaggart’s contradiction between incompatible properties. So trying to insist, for example, that Bergson frequently denies the reality of the future cannot resolve the problem. The best way to see that la durée is well immunised against McTaggart’s argument against the A-series is to start thinking through the latter’s own example of the death of Queen Anne: Take any event—the death of Queen Anne, for example, and consider what change can take place in its characteristics. That it is a death, that it is the death of Anne Stuart, that it has such causes, that it has such effects—every characteristic of this sort never changes. … But in one respect it does change. It began by being a future event. It became every moment an event in the nearer future. At last it was present. Then it became past, and will always remain so, though every moment it becomes further and further past.36 Now, let us consider the characteristics of the death of Queen Anne from the point of view of la durée. Place yourself mentally in the year 1712, two years before Queen Anne dies. First, when her death is future, its contours are rather vague. You may have seen or have heard about Queen Anne, you know she is going to die at some point, but you do not know what your experience of her death is going to be, how you are going to respond to it emotionally, or who will be present at her deathbed. Perhaps you have never experienced the death of someone before. The event of her death

Unreal Time or Real Duration? McTaggart and Bergson  51 exists in your durée as merely a vague anticipation of a “something” you cannot quite describe or picture to yourself with much precision. Now, move mentally to the year 1714, the year of her death. The death is now present to your durée, and you are directly contemplating it. It is directly accessible to your consciousness: you think about it, are reading the news in the papers, or are actually one of the people witnessing her final breath. The precise characteristics of the event that were so nebulous two years ago take on firm contours. In fact, the contours are being formed right in front of your eyes. Now, move to the year 1716. The Queen is dead. Her death now features in your durée as a memory. Its characteristics are precise and fixed, and you can describe them with complete clarity. This clarity increases even further when you start acquiring more information about the event, for instance, about the number of people present at her deathbed, the cause of her death, or who may have been in a position to prevent it. When considering the transformation of the event “from the inside,” from the perspective of the subject, there are three crucial points to note: First, at each stage of the process (the years 1712, 1714, and 1716), the “thing” you refer to by the term “death of Queen Anne” is different in your durée. The event of the death in memory (in 1716) is fixed; it can be exhaustively described, and it has clear causal chains leading up to it. This appears different in 1712: here the event is characterised by a vague anticipation, based on an extrapolation of already-known elements in memory (individual instances of “queens,” “deaths,” and of seeings of Queen Anne) but with blurry outlines. Second, suppose you have free will. An important characteristic that distinguishes the death-as-future (in 1712) and death-as-past (in 1716) from the subjective standpoint is the possibility of your causal contribution. The death cannot be changed in 1716. The death in 1712 can be changed, either by your attempting to break into Kensington Palace and trying to kill her or by bringing her a medicine you have just discovered that could save her life. Your causal contribution could, however, also be much smaller: you could maybe move the dying Queen into a different room. The idea that there are fixed and clearly defined events of which “death of Queen Anne” is an example and over which glide the determinations of “future,” “present,” and “past” would perhaps be accurate in a world in which we would merely exist as “big viewers” without the ability to change anything in the course of events. But we cannot conceptualise the world in this way when our actions can contribute both to the existence and the character of events to come. For the time being, we will put the question about free will aside and return to it in the final two chapters.

52  Time and Consciousness Third, ask yourself: where did the concept of the “event of Queen Anne’s death” actually come from in 1712? For your 1712-self, it is not a concept like “apple” or “the middle ages” or “England.” All of those you have either observed or read about in books. You may have also heard about or seen Queen Anne and death and deathbeds. But you cannot have experienced the death of Queen Anne in 1712. Bergson himself would have regarded the notion of the “event” of the death of Queen Anne in 1712 in la durée as a dubious entity. This is not only because it is susceptible to the problem of vagueness (did the death begin when the Queen got seriously ill in January 1714 or when she had a stroke in July of the same year? Or when her heartbeat dropped by a particular value?), but, more importantly, its existence significantly depends on the way we use language. Since our previous experiences of other people’s deaths were all unique (the death of a monarch is different from the death of a relative) and can all be subsumed under the same concept (“death”), we come to believe that the phrase “death of Queen Anne” refers to the same entity regardless of whether it is being anticipated, experienced, or remembered by a particular person’s unique consciousness. “The brutal word [le mot brutal],” Bergson says, “stores up the stable, common and consequently impersonal element in the impressions of mankind, overwhelms or at least covers over the delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness.”37 It is a creation of language. On a side note, it is worth remembering that for Bergson, the problem is not simply that rigid and static concepts cannot apply to temporal dynamic reality. The point here is much more subtle. Bergson warns us about the dangers of language that tricks us into thinking that objects being subsumed under identical concepts are identical too. This is much easier to see with words like “sadness,” “love,” or “pain,” because we intuitively feel that we all mourn, love, and suffer in unique ways. But Bergson insists that this is the case with all moments of la durée. Here, since the eternal event (before or after its happening) is designated by the phrase “death of Queen Anne,” we mistakenly think that the contents of the mental events of anticipating it, contemplating it, and remembering it are identical too. Bergson was not opposed to all conceptual thought. His primary concern was with specifying the metaphysical problems resulting from rigidly applying concepts to la durée. Within the typology of concepts, he said there were some more “fluid” and more suitable for being applied to la durée.38 He does not throw conceptual thought, logic, and language out completely: he merely says that they are tools that must be used with extreme caution.39 Returning to the point of view from la durée, it looks like there are three distinct qualitative entities—or “substances” in McTaggart’s

Unreal Time or Real Duration? McTaggart and Bergson  53 language—each corresponding to a different point of objective time (1712, 1714, and 1716, respectively): Substance1: the vague anticipation of the death of someone we know as Queen Anne, characterised by a certain causal openness, our ability to change the character of the real event, and an extrapolation of past experiences of deaths and instances of seeing or hearing about Queen Anne Substance2: the immediate experience of the death of Queen Anne Substance3: the memory of the death of Queen Anne, that is, the precise set of properties characterising the event with an exact date in objective time and causal fixity, our inability to change the character of the event These three are different substances, composed of pure qualities in la durée. Now, we move to the crucial step in the Bergsonian response to McTaggart’s paradox. If Susbtance1, Substance2, and Substance3, all of which are substances of la durée, are different, then there is no one thing to which the three determinations of “past,” “present,” and future” could attach and thus generate a contradiction. Of course, there is the event of the death of Queen Anne described in objective-time terms but that does not concern us here since the Bergsonian has already accepted that objective time should be analysed using the non-contradictory B-series. Here, we are merely talking about la durée. When McTaggart insists that “changes must happen to the events of such a nature that the occurrence of these events does not hinder the events from being events, and the same events both before and after the change,”40 he is right if he means events in objective time. But he is wrong if the same dictum is applied to the contents of la durée. The mental “event” of the death of Queen Anne is different before being experienced and after being experienced, simply because the “event” is constituted by different pure qualities in each case. To use an analogy: when reading a detective story, the objective order of words on the pages of the book and in the plot it tells remains the same before and after reading. But once you have read it, the qualitative impression of reading the same order of words for the second time is different, since, for example, you now know who the murderer is and cannot regard his character without constantly thinking that they are about to kill someone. As you descend into the purely qualitative contents of la durée, it becomes clear that anticipations of objective-time events, their experiences, and memories do not have the same qualities and are thus not the same “things.” Of course, the external-world events being anticipated, experienced, etc., may have identical descriptions in objective time, but, as McTaggart has shown, the objective time of the B-series is immune from contradiction.

54  Time and Consciousness Symptomatic of McTaggart’s neglect of the internal dynamism of experience is the fact that he used an example of an event in his own past: the death of Queen Anne. Recall the discussion of the “retrospective illusion” from Chapter 1. This illusion consists of the belief that for an experiencing subject, future possibilities in the present are qualitatively identical to their past recognition once they have become memory. Something similar happens in McTaggart’s discussion of the Queen Anne example: not least because the event of her death was in McTaggart’s past. That is precisely why he took the event as fixed and precisely defined (see quote above where he says that “every characteristic of this sort never changes”) and then imagined placing himself (or rather “his self”) at different points of the objective-time axis before, at, or after the event. Similarly, we can place ourselves, mentally, before reading the detective story and after reading it, and designate the substance of reading by a single word “detective story.” However, this merely obscures the fact that in la durée, this substance was something completely different before the reading (e.g., a vague anticipation about who the murderer might be) than it was after the reading. The anticipation is replaced by a perception, which is replaced by memory. Had McTaggart used an event that was actually future for him (say, the death of Bertrand Russell), one would be surprised to see him maintain “[t]hat it is a death, that it is the death of [Bertrand Russell], that it has such causes, that it has such effects—every characteristic of this sort never changes.” Note that the separation between our present self and anticipated events is not simply due to our lack of information about the future or the inability to perfectly predict what might happen. The elements of la durée are “epistemically perspicuous,” so to speak: la durée is what it appears to be. They are not like McTaggart’s stick. As Frédéric Worms emphasises, the original French title of Bergson’s Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience) captures the idea that the data of la durée are the data of consciousness: they are not data given to consciousness because they constitute consciousness itself.41 La durée is the “dynamic essence of who we really are, both the inner knower and what the inner knower knows.”42 In la durée, there is nothing more to know than what we know. What is preventing us from knowing whether it will be raining tomorrow is perhaps a lack of information about today’s and yesterday’s weather and the laws of meteorology. By contrast, what is preventing us from knowing the qualitative impression that tomorrow’s weather will make on us is the necessity to live up through all the development of our consciousness which will impact the way we will feel about tomorrow’s weather, “because [our] state tomorrow will include all the life [we] will have lived up until that moment.”43 The death of Queen Anne is an event. What is it for something to be an event? McTaggart defined an event as the “content of a position in time.”44

Unreal Time or Real Duration? McTaggart and Bergson  55 The term “time” in this definition, however, is ambiguous between two different meanings: the time of la durée and “objective time.” If time is understood as the latter, then all events in it are indeed somewhat “static.” But, as McTaggart shows, this does not lead to a contradiction. If, on the other hand, “time” is taken as la durée, then the purely qualitative contents that la durée composes itself of clearly change, in which case they are to be regarded as different events. And since they are different events, no contradiction arises from attaching different determinations to them. As a matter of fact, McTaggart himself almost reaches a similar conclusion: No doubt my anticipation of an experience M, the experience itself, and the memory of the experience are three states which have different qualities. But it is not the future M, the present M, and the past M, which have these three different qualities. The qualities are possessed by three distinct events—the anticipation of M, the experience of M itself, and the memory of M, each of which is in turn future, present, and past.45 Regrettably, he makes this point in a completely different context, in the section of the paper where he argues against the claim that “past,” “present,” and “future” are not relations but qualities. The first part of what McTaggart says in the quotation above coheres with what I have been arguing for. However, the second half does not: it is inaccurate to say that each of the events in la durée is in turn future, present, and past. The “anticipation of M” is never past, since all that is anticipated is always anticipated presently. Of course, the object of the anticipation is always future, but we know this object is an event in objective time. Similarly, the “experience of M” is never future, although, of course, it can be regarded as having been future once it is past. Now, a rather obvious objection presents itself. The Bergsonian removal of the contradiction relied on the fact that la durée is primarily construed as an unceasing novelty: every “moment” (and of course, Bergson would speak of “moments” only very cautiously) of la durée is different. The “death of Queen Anne anticipated” is different from “The death of Queen Anne experienced,” which, in turn, differs from “The death of Queen Anne remembered.” But this seems to pose the following rather strange dilemma: either what I have said above is wrong and the three “substances” of la durée are identical, in which case McTaggart’s paradox ensues. If, however, what I have said above is correct and the “three deaths” are different, a particular problem arises for episodic memory. If the three substances are not the same, how are we able to keep track of the same event through time? How do we know that the current perception, the memory, and anticipation relate to the same event? In short: either the determinations attach to the same event in la durée, in which case la durée is as much

56  Time and Consciousness subject to the contradiction as the A-series is. Or they do not. But in that case, we are unable to keep track of changes through time. Bergson was aware of this problem and provided an account of how to keep track of changes through the heterogeneity of la durée.46 La durée is pure indivisible heterogeneous quality, and so it is indeed the case that every “part” of it is different from another. But this does not mean that we are unable to generalise over the pure qualitative substratum. Although there are three different substances, they present enough similarities to warrant the ability of the subject to track them through time. They are sufficiently different to evade the contradiction but sufficiently similar to be trackable. Two triangle-shaped objects may all be sufficiently similar to allow us to call them “triangles” but still differ in the totality of their qualities: by one being, say, green and another red or by one being wonkier than the other. Similarly, “the death of Queen Anne experienced” is fundamentally different from “the death of Queen Anne remembered” but similar enough to warrant our recognition, if nothing else then at least by the fact that we refer to each by the same set of words. Conceived and Perceived We are now in a position to evaluate the conclusion of McTaggart’s argument: Claim 3: Time is unreal. In 1981, D. H. Mellor published his seminal study Real Time, where he argued that the “real time” philosophers should be focusing on is the B-series. This initially seems to stand in direct opposition to whatever Bergson calls “real time,”47 namely la durée. There is, however, a way of bringing these two claims together, by affirming two different descriptions applicable to temporality: First, there is what Mellor calls “real time.” Bergson calls it “spatialised time.” I call it “objective time.” It is the time of the B-series and the time of mathematics and physics. It is, as Bergson says, time “conceived.”48 McTaggart conceded that although this time lacks the quality of change, it is not self-contradictory. We can call it “real” if we are prepared to accept that it lacks what McTaggart regarded as the fundamental aspect of change, namely, an intuitive sense of experienced temporal becoming. Bergson accepted the existence of this medium, he just refused to call it “time” and regarded it as primarily a utilitarian tool that enables agents to function in society, use language, make calculations about the positions of planets, and perform scientific experiments.49 Nevertheless, he insisted that it is not suitable for capturing the nature of conscious temporal experience and that once it is transferred from the plane of utility into

Unreal Time or Real Duration? McTaggart and Bergson  57 the domain of metaphysics, it results in irresolvable problems.50 This time can be contracted, conceptualised without any privileged “present” and in some cases even considered as lacking direction, thus reducing the B-series even further to obtain McTaggart’s C-series.51 In D. C. Williams’ words, in objective time, “each one of us proceeds through time only as a fence proceeds across a farm: that is, part of our being, and the fence’s, occupy successive instants and points, respectively.”52 Second, there is what Bergson called “real time” or “fundamental time.”53 This is la durée, time “perceived,”54 which analytic philosophy has generally dismissed as mere temporal experience. It is intimately connected with our perception of the world and of ourselves. It consists of the immediate data of consciousness. As we saw earlier, since la durée does not have the topological features applicable to objective time discussed at the beginning of this study (e.g., divisibility into events and their subsequent conceptual juxtaposition), it is not subject to the contradiction that McTaggart found in the A-series. In order for McTaggart’s paradox to get off the ground, we would need to identify discrete events to which the contradictory determinations could attach. But this is impossible in la durée. Unlike the time that operates in physics, there cannot even be a question about la durée running in the opposite direction. True enough, we can form a logically coherent story about processes in the external world going backwards: there is, strictly speaking, no conceptual contradiction in imagining a fallen apple rising back to the branch and then turning into a blossom.55 But we cannot do this with la durée, as this would entail reversing our memory of the past and anticipation of the future.56 It would lead to the following absurd picture: we could have direct immediate access to events existing “in the future,” although we could not do anything about them. We would then feel them “coming towards us” and gradually becoming more and more blurry. At the point at which they became present, we would immediately forget them but somehow obtain the feeling that there is something we can do about them, that we could causally contribute to them. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Benjamin Button—that Williams mentions in passing when he criticises the “time snobs”57—may have his life running in the opposite direction, but his memory is exactly like our own. McTaggart’s conclusion that time is unreal partially results from mixing these two temporal realms: la durée and objective time. If we keep them distinct, we can have our dynamically changing cake and eat the contradiction-free static one too. The A-Series: Trying to Have It All I mentioned above that Bergson himself failed to clearly distinguish between  “objective time” and la durée. When he talks about “real time,”58 he does not mean “objective time.” This has, sadly, led many to

58  Time and Consciousness the mistaken impression that Bergson was an A-theorist, which must be dispelled before moving on. In many respects, Bergson does look like an A-theorist. As a matter of fact, even his views about the dependence of “objective time” (which we now know is co-extensive with the B-series) on la durée look like they were pre-empted by McTaggart himself. In one of the footnotes of The Nature of Existence, McTaggart states that the notion of passage in the A-series has to be present to us before we may even begin to construct the B-series: We cannot have time without change, and the only possible change is from future to present, and from present to past [i.e., the A-series]. Thus until the terms are taken as passing from future to present, and from present to past, they cannot be taken as in time, or as earlier and later [i.e., as the B-series]; and not only the conception of presentness, but those of pastness and futurity, must be reached before the conceptions of earlier and later, and not vice versa.59 What McTaggart says here is clear enough: we have to have the (illusory) dynamic A-series first, before we move on to construct the B-series. Does this not sound almost exactly like Bergson’s earlier claim that the dynamic change in la durée must come before the objective time of the B-series? And if Bergson’s philosophy is based on an opposition between “objective time” and la durée, does identifying the “spatialised” objective time with the B-series not imply that la durée is the A-series? The urge to classify Bergson as an A-theorist by philosophers of time is understandable: on a surface level, we have characteristically A-theoretical claims: about the dynamism of time, the existence of the present, the insufficiency of the B-series to capture becoming.60 I believe that to regard Bergson as an A-theorist is deeply misguided. As matter of fact, it seems that Bergson would have likely identified the A-series as far more troublesome than its B-theoretical counterpart. When Bergson’s writings dealing with the philosophy of time were written (especially Time and Free Will (1889) and Matter and Memory (1896)), the B-theory was not yet around, and his critique of “spatialisation” should, therefore, be taken as attacking the “intuitive” conception of time, which is the A-theory. Many A-theorists have accused the B-theory of “spatialising time,” that is, of making the B-time more like space, because the B-series does not have any privileged point (“the present”), in the same way that space does not have it either (“the here”). However, when Bergson discusses the “spatialisation” of time, he has something completely different in mind: the spatialisation consists primarily in affirming that time is divisible into equal identical segments. It seems to me that had Bergson engaged with McTaggart’s argument, it is likely that he would have regarded the A-series as a naïve attempt

Unreal Time or Real Duration? McTaggart and Bergson  59 to “have it all.” On the one hand, the A-series retains the B-theoretical topology of ordered distinct separable juxtaposed events. On the other hand, it tries to infuse it with features that only apply to la durée: the distinction between past (memory), present (perception/experience), and future (anticipation), the entity of the present, or the feeling of “flow.” Perhaps tentatively, I would argue that it is the A-theory which is the “spurious concept” (concept batârd)61 resulting from the illegitimate mixing of pure spatiality and pure temporality. For the Bergsonian, both the A-series and the B-series are guilty of “spatialising” time. The B-series is spatialised tout court, but the A-theory attempts to smuggle in properties that can only be found in la durée. A good way to see how difficult it is to force Bergson through the meshes of the distinction between A- and B-theories is to ask the question about the “passage of time.” Standardly, A-theoreticians claim that “time passes,” whereas B-theoreticians insist that it does not. The notion of an objective and real “passage of time,” which is part of external reality, is arguably quite obscure but can, according to Huw Price, be understood as the commitment to one or more of the following theses: 1 The view that the present moment is objectively distinguished. 2 The view that time has an objective direction; that it is an objective matter which of two non-simultaneous events is the earlier and which is the later. 3 The view that there is something objectively dynamic, flux-like, or “flow-like” about time.62 The A-theory requires the first of these claims: we need the present to slice reality into the past and the future. The B-theory needs the second claim, otherwise, we would only have the C-series which does not include an objective direction from earlier to later: its terms are related just like two planks in a fence. Can we find any of the claims above in Bergson? As regards the first thesis, Bergson radically rejects the idea that the “now” is constituted by a point in space-time63 but rather argues that the “present” can only be located in the durée of the subject, as the extent of our present attention. We can, of course, retrospectively identify a mathematical “point” at which we imagine ourselves and at which we found ourselves, say, either before or after the death of Queen Anne, but in that case, we are merely operating on the trace or “track” of la durée (akin to the B-series) and not in la durée (which is always currently developing). And even then, the “now” of our durée cannot be mapped onto the “now” of other durées as McTaggart himself recognised when closing off the possibility of locating the objective now in the popular doctrine of the “specious present.”64

60  Time and Consciousness When it comes to the second claim about time having an intrinsic direction from earlier to later, Bergson would, again, argue that without the human mind, the bedrock for the characteristic directionality of time is difficult to locate. Once the B-series has been constructed by the subject, it can be accelerated, stopped, and reversed. In short, we can imagine moving in its spatialised conceptualisation in the same way we can imagine moving around in space. This theoretical construct plays an important role in our practical needs and language but eventually starts to obscure the fundamental nature of la durée. This is where the metaphysician must step in and point back to the immediate data of consciousness. As for the final claim regarding the question of whether there is something objectively “flow-like” about time, Bergson would struggle to see what this is supposed to mean without reference to the subject. The “feeling” of temporal passage is something that can only be qualitatively felt and lived in la durée; it cannot be found in the order of events once these have been converted into distinct entities. The orthogonality of Bergson’s philosophy and Price’s three claims can be stressed even more by clarifying the core of the “spatialising objection.” As we have seen earlier, many analytic philosophers have made an inference from the fact that B-theories are frequently accused of “spatialising time” and from the fact that Bergson frequently opposes la durée to “spatialised time,” to the conclusion that Bergson rejects the B-conception of time.65 This is misleading. Bergson’s claims about spatialisation do not concern what I would call the “operational” features of time (e.g., the ability or inability to move in one direction or another, to locate a privileged location (here/now), to distinguish between two different features of spacetime) but rather its experienced topological properties: the ability to divide it into distinct units, to regard the arrangement of these as analogous to a line in space, or to imagine its full description not requiring reference to the human mind. Warding off the claim about Bergson being an A-theorist is not just an interesting exercise in historical exegesis. Russell inoculated later generations of analytic thinkers with a deep suspicion of Bergson. Relativity theory, which removed the existence of an objective “present” from reality, in turn, made philosophers suspicious of McTaggart’s A-series. So, the belief that Bergson was an A-theorist merely confirmed the general consensus of the analytic tradition that Bergson is not to be trusted. Removing both Russell’s charges against Bergson, as we did at the beginning of this study, and the idea that Bergson is an A-theorist goes a long way in opening up a space for Bergson’s integration into contemporary philosophy of time. What I have sketched in this chapter is perhaps not as radical as it may initially seem. Despite appearances, what la durée describes has appeared in post-McTaggartian philosophy of time. It has just usually been discussed under the heading of “subjective time” or “temporal experience”

Unreal Time or Real Duration? McTaggart and Bergson  61 and regarded as a suspicious peculiarity of the human condition preventing us from fully embracing the “objective time” of physics. It has not been given any significant ontological status. Symptomatic and characteristic of this suspicion is Russell’s famous claim that there is some sense … in which time is an unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality. Past and future must be acknowledged to be as real as the present, and a certain emancipation from slavery to time is essential to philosophical thought. … Both in thought and feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.66 Bergsonian philosophy can provide a framework that indexes the time of science and the time of experience to two different but equally real structures (objective time and la durée) and explains how they are related. McTaggart created a framework that leads to a contradiction. So, he concluded that the thing to which this conceptual framework applies is not real. What he should have concluded is that there is, on the one hand, a reality to which this conceptual network is inapplicable and, on the other hand, a second reality that is dependent on the first but results from the removal of its characteristically “change-like” features. For Bergson, la durée is not illusory. It is real time.

*** This chapter has shown how to relate the A- and B-series to la durée. A-series was rejected, B-series was equated with Bergson’s “objective time,” and la durée was affirmed as real. However, there was a high degree of ambiguity in some of the claims from Bergson used in this chapter. Is la durée required for the representation of the future, present, and past or for the existence of the future and past? If the past exists and the future does not, is this existence simpliciter or existence “in our heads?” What is the relationship between the existence of the “death of Queen Anne anticipated, experienced, and remembered” and the existence of the death of Queen Anne? These questions may only be answered by looking beyond the A- and B-series and relating Bergson to contemporary temporal ontologies. This will be the goal of Chapter 3. Notes 1 Some of the material in this chapter has previously appeared in an abridged form in Matyáš Moravec, ‘A Bergsonian Response to McTaggart’s Paradox’, in The Bergsonian Mind, ed. Mark Sinclair and Yaron Wolf, Routledge Philosophical Minds (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2021), 417–31, https:// doi.org/10.4324/9780429020735-38.

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Unreal Time or Real Duration? McTaggart and Bergson  63 21 Henri Bergson, Histoire de l’idée de temps. Cours au Collège de France 1902–1903 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2016), 79; Henri Bergson, L’Évolution du problème de la liberté. Cours au Collège de France 1904–1905, ed. Arnaud François (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2017), 339. 22 “… quand il n’y a pas de changement dans la conscience il n’y a plus de temps.” (Bergson, Histoire de l’idée de temps. Cours au Collège de France 1902–1903, 160, my translation.) 23 Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 163–64. 24 Adrian Bardon, ‘Time-Awareness and Projection in Mellor and Kant’, Kant-Studien 101, no. 1 (2010): 68, https://doi.org/10.1515/kant.2010.004. 25 Robert Paul Wolff, ‘A Reconstruction of the Argument of the Subjective Deduction’, in Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Paul Wolff (London and Melbourne: Macmillan, 1968), 116. 26 See Keith Ansell-Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual. Bergson and the Time of Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 35. 27 See, for example, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Allen W. Wood and J. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A103. 28 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), 141. 29 Mark Sinclair, Bergson (London: Routledge, 2019), 51, https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315414935; for an excellent discussion of this synthesis, see Jeremy Dunham, ‘Flights in the Resting Places: James and Bergson on Mental Synthesis and the Experience of Time’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31, no. 2 (2023): 183–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2 136138. 30 Sonja Deppe, ‘The Mind-Dependence of the Relational Structure of Time (or: What Henri Bergson Would Say to B-Theorists)’. Kriterion — Journal of Philosophy 30, no. 2 (2016): 107–24. 31 Bergson, The Creative Mind 64. 32 Donald C. Williams, ‘The Myth of Passage’, The Journal of Philosophy 48, no. 15 (1951): 460, https://doi.org/10.2307/2021694. 33 Ingthorsson, McTaggart’s Paradox. 34 Frédéric Worms, ‘Les trois dimensions de la question de l’espace dans l’œuvre de Bergson’, Épokhè 94, no. 4 (1994): 91. 35 This has recently been argued in Sinclair, Bergson, 46–47. 36 McTaggart, ‘The Unreality of Time’, 460. 37 Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 132. 38 See Bergson, L’Évolution du problème de la liberté. Cours au Collège de France 1904–1905, 101; Henri Bergson, L’idée de temps. Cours au Collège de France 1901–1902, ed. Gabriel Meyer-Bisch (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019), 104; Arnaud Bouaniche et al., ‘Dossier critique’, in La Pensée et le mouvant. Essais et conférences, by Henri Bergson, ed. Arnaud Bouaniche et al. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), 436–39, note 15; Jean-Claude Pariente, Le Langage et l’individuel (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973), 21–25. 39 See Bergson, L’idée de temps. Cours au Collège de France 1901–1902, 82. 40 McTaggart, ‘The Unreality of Time’, 460.

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Unreal Time or Real Duration? McTaggart and Bergson  65 Barnard, George William. Living Consciousness. The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011. Bergson, Henri. Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe. Translated by Leon Jacobson. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999. ———. Histoire de l’idée de temps. Cours au Collège de France 1902–1903. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2016. ———. L’Évolution du problème de la liberté. Cours au Collège de France 1904–1905. Edited by Arnaud François. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2017. ———. L’idée de temps. Cours au Collège de France 1901–1902. Edited by Gabriel Meyer-Bisch. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019. ———. Matter and Memory. Translated by W. Scott Palmer and N. M. Paul. New York: Zone Books, 1988. ———. The Creative Mind. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946. ———. Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen & Co, 1913. Bouaniche, Arnaud, Anthony Feneuil, Arnaud François, Frédéric Fruteau de Laclos, Stéphane Madelrieux, Claire Marin, and Ghislain Waterlot. ‘Dossier critique’. In La Pensée et le mouvant. Essais et conférences, by Henri Bergson, 295–612, edited by Arnaud Bouaniche, Arnaud François, Frédéric Fruteau de Laclos, Stéphane Madelrieux, Claire Marin, and Ghislain Waterlot. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013. Butterfield, Jeremy. ‘Seeing the Present’. Mind, New Series 93, no. 370 (1984): 161–76. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/XCIII.370.161. Dainton, Barry. ‘Bergson on Temporal Experience and Durée Réelle’. In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Temporal Experience, edited by I. Phillips, 93–106. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. ———. The Phenomenal Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. https://doi. org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199288847.001.0001. ———. Time and Space. Second edition. Durham: Acumen, 2010. Deppe, Sonja. ‘The Mind-Dependence of the Relational Structure of Time (or: What Henri Bergson Would Say to B-Theorists)’. Kriterion — Journal of Philosophy 30, no. 2 (2016): 107–24. Dummett, Michael. ‘A Defense of McTaggart’s Proof of the Unreality of Time’. The Philosophical Review 69, no. 4 (1960): 497–504. https://doi. org/10.2307/2183483. ———. ‘Bringing about the Past’. The Philosophical Review 73, no. 3 (1964): ­338–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183661. Dunham, Jeremy. ‘Flights in the Resting Places: James and Bergson on Mental Synthesis and the Experience of Time’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31, no. 2 (2023): 183–204. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2136138. Farr, Matt. ‘C-Theories of Time. On the Adirectionality of Time’. Philosophy Compass 15, no. 12 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12714. Ingthorsson, Röngvaldur D. McTaggart’s Paradox. New York: Routledge, 2016. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315559636. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Allen W. Wood and J. Paul Guyer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

66  Time and Consciousness McTaggart, J. M. E. The Nature of Existence. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927. ———. ‘The Relation of Time and Eternity’. Mind 18, no. 71 (1909): 343–62. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/XVIII.1.343. ———. ‘The Unreality of Time’. Mind 17, no. 4 (1908): 457–74. https://doi. org/10.1093/mind/XVII.4.457. Mellor, D. H. Mind, Meaning, and Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Moravec, Matyáš. ‘A Bergsonian Response to McTaggart’s Paradox’. In The Bergsonian Mind, edited by Mark Sinclair and Yaron Wolf, 417–31. Routledge Philosophical Minds. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2021. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780429020735-38. ———. ‘A Perpetual Present: Henri Bergson and Atemporal Duration’. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11, no. 3 (2019): 197–224. https://doi. org/10.24204/ejpr.v0i0.2629. Oakeley, H. D. ‘Time and the Self in McTaggart’s System’. Mind, New Series 39, no. 154 (1930): 175–93. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/XXXIX.154.175. Pariente, Jean-Claude. Le Langage et l’individuel. Paris: Armand Colin, 1973. Pike, Nelson. God and Timelessness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. Price, Huw. ‘The Flow of Time’. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time, edited by Craig Callender, 276–311. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199298204.003.0010. Russell, Bertrand. Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959. Sinclair, Mark. Bergson. London: Routledge, 2019. https://doi.org/10.4324/97813 15414935. Williams, Clifford. ‘A Bergsonian Approach to A- and B-Time’. Philosophy 73, no. 285 (1998): 379–93. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819198000059. Williams, Donald C. ‘The Myth of Passage’. The Journal of Philosophy 48, no. 15 (1951): 457–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/2021694. Wolff, Robert Paul. ‘A Reconstruction of the Argument of the Subjective Deduction’. In Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Robert Paul Wolff, 88–133. London and Melbourne: Macmillan, 1968. Worms, Frédéric. ‘Les trois dimensions de la question de l’espace dans l’œuvre de Bergson’. Épokhè 94, no. 4 (1994): 89–116. ———. ‘Présentation’. In Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, by Henri Bergson, 7–13. edited by Arnaud Bouaniche. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013.

3

Relative Existence Towards a New Bergsonian Theory of Time

The impact that McTaggart’s argument had on the history of analytic philosophy was immense. Not many philosophers accepted the conclusion of the argument, namely, that time is unreal. Nevertheless, the framework of the A- and B-series that the argument uses to reach that conclusion has shaped the contours of analytic discussions about time ever since. If you attend a conference on the philosophy of time, it is likely that many speakers in the analytic tradition will describe themselves either as A-theorists or B-theorists. The former generally believe that the A-series captures the true nature of time and is not contradictory. The latter generally believe that the A-series is contradictory and that the B-series (or something analogous to it) is sufficient to capture what time is all about. Then, there are those who believe that combining the two into an A/B hybrid is possible1 or that the way to go is to think of time in terms of the C-series.2 Whichever position one selects or however one clarifies McTaggart’s original views, it looks like one cannot escape McTaggart’s original framework. Chapter 2 has indicated that Bergson’s philosophy sidesteps the distinction between A- and B-theories of time. However, as we will see below, there is yet another question that Bergson’s philosophy must address: the question of existence. Do the past and the present of la durée exist? And what about events in spatialised time? Does anything exist outside the durée? And what is it? This chapter will aim to answer these questions and suggest that a radical circumscription of Bergson’s philosophical development is required. This will, in turn, enable us to create a new Bergsonian theory of time. In the second half of this volume, we will add a final ingredient to this theory: the existence of God. A/B-Series and Temporal Ontologies McTaggart’s original framework offered several possible responses to the question “How can time be ordered?” It can either be ordered by relations of “past,” “present,” and “future” in the case of the A-series or “earlier” DOI: 10.4324/9781003349044-5

68  Time and Consciousness and “later” in the case of the B-series. (We can put the more complicated relation of “inclusive of” characterising the C-series to the side for the time being.) Nevertheless, there is a different parallel question that very soon emerged and that analytic philosophers turned themselves to. It is the question: “what exists (when it comes to time)?” The response to this question is offered by what I will call “temporal ontologies” here. They fall into three main groups. The first is presentism, which claims that only the present exists. The second is the growing-block theory, which claims that only the past and the present exist. The third is eternalism, which claims that all times exist. There is also the “moving-spotlight” theory which claims that all times exist but that, nevertheless, the present has a special status: it is thought to glide like a moving spotlight over a row of houses, all of which exist.3 We can put the moving spotlight aside for the time being, as it partially depends for its truth on eternalism. Whatever is said below about the existence of various bits of the spatiotemporal block will apply equally to eternalism and the moving spotlight. Now, some might think that the distinction being introduced here (between the three temporal ontologies, on the one hand, and the A/B-series, on the other hand) is superfluous. There are many reasons why one might think that there is an intrinsic connection between the A/B-distinction and the question about ontologies, such that they may be questions about different things (one about “ordering” and the other about “existence”), but that they, nevertheless, map one onto another. Consider the following example: the distinction between Italian passport holders and French passport holders is surely different from the distinction between Italian native speakers and French native speakers. Nevertheless, there is an intrinsic connection between the two. Both sets range over people who were either born in one of the two countries or have a historical connection to them. Similarly, there are indubitable affinities between the B-series and eternalism and the A-series and one of the other ontologies. The first reason why you might want to keep the two distinctions together is the following one. The B-theories order all events by the relations of “earlier” and “later.” And if relations may only hold between things that exist, the only available ontology providing the existence of all events is eternalism.4 Conversely, the growing-block theory and presentism make claims about the existence or non-existence of the past, present, and future. They, therefore, require the existence of those very categories (“past,” “present,” and “future”) which are furnished by the A-series. The second reason why the two distinctions look intrinsically connected lies in the nature of truthmakers. Truthmakers, as their name implies, are what makes propositions true. Thus, the proposition “This apple is red” is made true by the apple and the colour red. The actual physical object

Relative Existence: Towards a New Bergsonian Theory of Time  69 “apple” on the table in front of me and the colour red are truthmakers for the proposition “This apple is red.” Truthmakers also play a role in the philosophy of time. Take the proposition “It rained yesterday in St Andrews.” What makes it true? A good guess is the rain in St Andrews yesterday evening. But that rain is a past event. Surely, it must exist to make the proposition true! The truth of propositions depends on the existence of things they are propositions about. So, when A-theorists produce propositions involving claims about the past, present, or future (just like the proposition about the rain in St Andrews), it seems like they should require the existence of past, present, or future to make those propositions true. The same goes for B-theorists who try to eradicate claims about past, present, and future from their language. Take the proposition “It rains in St Andrews on 20 October 2021.” It does not contain any claim about the “past” or the “present” or the “future.” If you do not know when this book was published, you will not know whether the proposition describes a past, present, or future state. Nevertheless, it requires the existence of rain at a particular time, namely, 20 October 2021. And that time must exist. For all propositions to have truth values, all their truthmakers have to exist. So, all times must exist. So eternalism. Nevertheless, although there is a close affinity between the A/Bdistinction and the distinction between temporal ontologies, we will be treating the two separately here. There are several reasons for this. The first is that even if they do in fact range over the same phenomena, interrogating a historical thinker like Bergson from the point of view of temporal ontologies might reveal something that exploration from the view of the A/B-distinction might not. To return to our earlier example: when one performs a thorough survey of Italian and French native speakers, one discovers cases where the overlap between native-speakerhood and passport-ownership fails (for example, Swiss or Canadian citizens) or where the distinction comes apart (for example, people who were not born in a French- or Italian-speaking country but later became French or Italian citizens by naturalisation). And this in turn reveals a great deal about the distinction that one started with: what does it actually mean to be “Italian” or “French”? Is speaking the relevant language necessary or sufficient? Or neither? What are the historical causes that might make one a French native speaker but not a French national? Does one have to be handed a passport of a French- or Italian-speaking country at birth, so to speak, to be considered a “native” speaker of French or Italian? There is a second reason for treating the two separately. The temporal ontologies themselves are rather easy to define: eternalism claims that all events in time exist, presentism claims that only the present events exist, and the growing block claims that only past and present events exist.5

70  Time and Consciousness However, as further and further layers of philosophical discussions were heaped onto McTaggart’s argument,6 the original rather neat distinction between “relations of earlier and later” and “relations of past, present, and future” became more complicated. A quick glance at the contemporary philosophical landscape offers a plethora of definitions of what the A-theories and B-theories are supposed to be about. Nathan Oaklander’s Ontology of Time identifies A-theories as affirming temporal becoming and the B-series as affirming temporal relations.7 Clifford Williams tries to show that when we closely look at temporal experience, the distinction between the A-series and the B-series disappears.8 Perhaps the distinction is one about the truth value of statements expressing tense (things happening “now”) or those whose truth value is tenseless (things happening “as of a particular time”).9 Maybe the A/B-theorists disagree about which determinations are “more fundamental” to the nature of time.10 Or it could be a disagreement about where to obtain tensed or tenseless truthmakers for tenseless propositions.11 Ryan Mullins recalls: When I discussed an earlier version of [the second chapter of The End of the Timeless God] with the Metaphysics Reading Group at the University of Notre Dame, there was much debate in the room over the meaning of the A-theory and the B-theory. No consensus on the meaning of these theories was reached among the metaphysicians.12 I have had many similar experiences. Mullins then goes on to stress, in a less anecdotal manner, that whereas the general distinction between a “dynamic” and “static” view of time (for example, between a “Heraclitean” or a “Parmenidean” approach) has been around for millennia, the distinction between A- and B-theories is a very new one.13 Since the previous chapter has demonstrated that Bergson’s distinction between “spatialised time” and la durée cannot be easily mapped onto the distinction between A- and B-theories, it is worthwhile exploring whether a fruitful dialogue between Bergson and analytic philosophy (of time and of religion) may be obtained by a return to questions regarding the ontological substratum.14 Third, at first glance, one can easily see that even though—as we saw in the previous chapter—the A/B-distinction cannot be easily applied to la durée, the same is not true of temporal ontologies: questions about the existence of the past, present, and future are still legitimate in the realm of la durée, where a vague separation exists between the past, present, and future. In other words, we may ask questions raised by temporal ontologies about la durée, even though we might not be able to do so with questions raised by the A/B-distinction. The two distinctions are, after all, responses to different questions: one about ordering and the other about existence. And the

Relative Existence: Towards a New Bergsonian Theory of Time  71 two issues sometimes come apart: as is the case with “moving-spotlight” theories that operate with an eternalist ontology (where everything exists) but still rely on the characteristically A-theoretical “present.” Conversely, some theories argue for the characteristically B-theoretical belief about tenseless facts being fundamental to the constitution of reality but at the same time affirm a growing-block ontology.15 Classifying Bergson So far so good. We decided to treat the question about A and B-series (whatever the question was!) as a separate one from the question about temporal ontologies. Chapter 2 demonstrated that Bergson’s distinction between la durée and “spatialised time” cuts across the differences between A- and B-theories of time. We saw that although “spatialised time” maps onto the B-series, la durée does not map onto the A-series. Recall again that the A/B-distinction primarily concerns the question of how events in time may be “ordered.” But since la durée cannot be “ordered,” it cannot be reduced to either the A- or the B-series. We, therefore, ended up with three distinct views on time: the B-series (or “spatialised time”), la durée, and the A-series. The last was rejected as an attempt to “have it all,” leaving the B-series and la durée as the two legitimate ways of thinking about time. However, if we have now decided to treat the A/B-series as a separate issue from the one about “temporal ontologies” (whose primary purpose is to provide answers to the query about “what exists?”), a question naturally arises about the relationship between the temporal ontologies and Bergson. As a matter of fact, the question about the existence of events in time (past and/or present and/or future) was not raised in Chapter 2 at all! We cannot simply bracket off this issue by reiterating that since there are no distinct events in la durée, there can be no ordering (what is there may not be ordered). True enough, la durée is indivisible. But there is still a vague distinction between the past, present, and future. Inquiring about which of these exist is still highly pertinent. Bergson often says that the past and the present exist in a way that the future does not. But we have to ask: when Bergson rejects the existence of the future, is he talking about la durée or about events in spatialised time? If it is only past and perhaps present events that exist, do they exist only “in” la durée, “in our heads,” so to speak, or do they exist simpliciter in the external world? The difference here is crucial: yesterday’s cheeseburger still exists in my memory. But it only exists in reality for someone who is not a presentist: the burger (sadly) belongs to the past. In order for it to exist simpliciter, the past must exist. But then, would Bergson say it exists in the past of spatialised time too? These are all questions that

72  Time and Consciousness the Bergsonian sidestepping of the A/B dichotomy cannot escape. Even worse, a more detailed look at these problems seems to push Bergson into a new dilemma. If, on the one hand, existence is limited to la durée “in our heads” only, then Bergson looks quite a lot like an idealist, an accusation he vigorously defended himself against in Matter and Memory.16 If, on the other hand, existence applies to real events in spatialised time, “outside our heads,” then it looks like it can be simply analysed using B-series, making la durée otiose. So was Bergson an eternalist, presentist, growing-block theorist, or a moving-spotlight theorist? Some heavy exegetical work is required here. Temporal existence is not a topic Bergson explicitly treats; he barely talks about existence simpliciter,17 but even then, it is without any qualifications regarding the differences between the ontological status of the past, present, or future. For instance, Matter and Memory, the book most directly concerned with ontological questions, aims to overcome the distinction between existence “inside the head” (emphasised by idealism) and “outside the head” (emphasised by realism), not between existence in the past and/or present and/or future. Classifying Bergson under one of the temporal ontologies is difficult. When we approached Bergson’s views from the point of the A- and the B-series, we saw that he did not really fit into either. However, in the case of the eternalist/presentist/growing-block distinction, a quick scan of Bergsonian philosophy seems to suggest that he was committed to all three! Some of Bergson’s remarks make him sound like a growing-block theorist. He frequently insists that the past is fully real. Indeed, this is one of the central claims that his Matter and Memory argues for. Conversely, he also frequently emphasises that the future does not exist in any sense, as its existence would negate the radical novelty of temporal becoming. Some Bergsonian commentators have even suggested that rejecting the existence of the future forms the very central claim of Bergson’s philosophy.18 Nevertheless, there are other places where Bergson’s argumentation strongly resembles the language of contemporary presentists, and many scholars have indeed simply assumed that Bergson was a run-of-the-mill presentist. Without the synthesising power of la durée that we explored in Chapter 2, Bergson argues that “everything is in a present which seems to be constantly starting afresh.”19 For example, in Matter and Memory (the very same book we earlier saw defending a growing-block view), Bergson argues that the human brain understood purely as a material object, “never occupies more than the present moment.”20 What prevents this ever-renewing presentism is memory. Once memory is taken out of the picture of reality we are working with, the “universe dies and is born again miraculously at each moment ….”21 If la durée is the only thing that has the capacity to connect the present to the past and if it exists in the mind

Relative Existence: Towards a New Bergsonian Theory of Time  73 only, does that not mean that in the external world, only the ever-renewing present exists? And finally, one can even find passages that give Bergson’s durée an eerily eternalist twist. He frequently mentions that the durée’s present does not have precise boundaries: it expands and contracts. Sometimes, our attention is stretched over a period of a second, sometimes more. In Matter and Memory, he uses this observation to hypothesise a durée whose present would stretch across the entirety of all times: Do we not sometimes perceive in ourselves, in sleep, two contemporaneous and distinct persons one of whom sleeps a few minutes, while the other’s dream fills days and weeks? And would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch the development of humanity while contracting, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution?22 But then, if all of these moments of the development of humanity can be present to a durée at a higher degree of tension, does their presence to such a durée not in turn require their existence? Surely, what is present to consciousness must exist! To be fair to Bergson, maybe in the passage above, he is talking about the representation of those events, not those events themselves. To use the earlier example: the cheeseburger I had for dinner yesterday is present to my consciousness as a representation, even though the cheeseburger no longer exists. A very large scope of history can be represented by something very short, without this entailing that all moments of time are themselves existing. We will address the issue of representation later in this project. But for the time being, it suffices to say that eternalism clearly offers the most straightforward explanation for the presence of all events to this hypothetical durée that Bergson talks about. What is going on? Perhaps Bergson is just being inconsistent. Look at what he says about the coherence between his books: I have written each one of my books whilst forgetting all the others. I throw myself into thinking about a problem: I start from “la durée” and I try to throw light on the problem, either by contrast or by similarity with it. Unfortunately, you see, my books are not always mutually coherent: the “time” of Creative Evolution does not “bond” well with that of Time and Free Will.23 Simply taking Bergson at face value here and saying that he is being inconsistent is surely an option. But it is a cop-out. Is there another way to approach these inconsistencies?

74  Time and Consciousness Ontological and Epistemological Idealisms24 There are many reasons why it is difficult to classify Bergson’s durée under one of the temporal ontologies. One of them is the fact that Bergson is in one way or another trying to capture the relation between the mind and external reality, whereas all three ontologies aim at mind-independent descriptions of time. Presentists, growing-block theorists, and eternalists might disagree about the nature of temporal reality, but they would mostly agree that negotiating the question can be done without including the human observer in the story. But the main reason why classifying Bergson is so difficult is due to the development of the applicability of la durée that was addressed in Chapter 1: in Stage 1, la durée is only located in the human mind and identified with the stream of mental states. By the time you get to Stage 3, la durée becomes the “stuff” of reality, the fundamental building block of Bergson’s ontology. Difficult methodological decisions have to be taken. For the purposes of Bergson’s fruitful interaction with analytic philosophy, where between Stages 1 and 3 do we stop extending the scope of la durée? Do we follow Bergson all the way to Stage 3, affirming a universal becoming and a mindindependent growing-block theory of time (“a growing durée theory”)? Or do we abandon him at Stage 2 and affirm the reality of mind-independent temporal becoming but somehow incorporate the human durée into the theory? Perhaps controversially, this study will opt for the “minimal” option and leave Bergson immediately after Stage 1. We will limit the existence of la durée to human consciousness and deny it of the external world. Even though this move might raise eyebrows with many Bergson scholars, there are three motivations that justify it. The first has to do with the principal aim not only of this chapter but of this entire book: to find a coherent solution to the problem of free will and divine foreknowledge. And as we will see in the second half of this book, it is precisely the separation between the external durée-free reality and consciousness constituted by la durée that will permit the resolution of this problem. The second reason is that following Bergson to Stage 3 would likely make his philosophy immediately vulnerable to the same accusations directed at him by Russell and other early analytic philosophers that we saw in Chapter 1. Recall that it was Bergson’s later works written in Stage 3 that gained him fame and that in many cases were the first to be translated and read (and criticised) by analytic philosophers.25 The time has perhaps come to focus on themes central to his earlier works and to see whether they, seen anew, can be applied to current debates in analytic philosophy of religion. This also allows us to ward off various objections against panpsychism or questions about a rather nebulous distinction between subject and object in Stage 2 that Russell was quick to point out. Third, affirming the reality of a large-scale

Relative Existence: Towards a New Bergsonian Theory of Time  75 durée outside the mind makes Bergson’s position vulnerable to innumerable objections from the special theory of relativity. Bergson at Stage 3 argues that although there are durées at different degrees of “tension,” they still partake of a single universal durée, the durée of the universe, which has its own present.26 The existence of a single present stretching across the universe is precisely what the special theory of relativity denies. Bergson’s stipulation of a hierarchy of co-existing durées that compose the single universal durée with its own present may perhaps work in Newtonian physics, but it is difficult to see how it can be made compatible with relativity’s denial of a single present. As a matter of fact, it was precisely an attempt at harmonising the existence of several durées at different points in the universe that led Bergson mistakenly to postulate a unique single real time of the universe in his infamous engagement with Einstein.27And it was this mistaken postulation that lamentably contributed to the discrediting of the relevance of his views on time in analytic philosophy. Limiting Bergson to Stage 1 specified where la durée was to be found. It constitutes the mind, but it is absent from external reality. But what exactly is the nature of the relation between the mind and this external reality? Answering the first question about where to find la durée is insufficient to answer the question about the relation between la durée located there and the world located “outside.” As we saw earlier, one of Bergson’s motivations for moving from Stage 1 to Stages 2 and 3 was to address the unanswered questions about this connection that Time and Free Will left unresolved. Bergson’s Matter and Memory developed a complex theory about how the durée of human consciousness relates to that outside of it. How can these questions be answered now that the solutions devised by Bergson in Stages 2 and 3 have become unavailable? Specifically, recall that one of the motivations for moving to Stage 2 was to respond to a lurking worry about idealism. If we stick to Stage 1, does the outside world really only consist of unintelligible discrete fragmented positions of spatialised time? Is there really only “simultaneity without succession?” Are we ready to go down the route of full-on idealism if we do not take the one leading to Bergson’s Stage 2? A good way to stop further questions from cropping up is to bring some clarity into what “idealism” actually means. Guyer and Horstmann’s article on idealism in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy distinguishes between “ontological” and “epistemological” idealism. Differentiating between these can serve as a useful starting point in clarifying the relationship between Bergson’s philosophy and idealism. I will use the following definitions: By ontological idealism (OI), I understand the claim that the mind “is the ultimate foundation of all reality, or even exhaustive of reality.”28

76  Time and Consciousness By epistemological idealism (EI), I understand the claim that “although the existence of something independent of the mind is conceded, everything we can know about this mind-independent ‘reality’ is held to be so permeated by the creative, formative, or constructive activities of the mind (of some kind or other) that all claims to knowledge must be considered, in some sense, to be a form of self-knowledge.”29 In simple terms, OI says that the mind constitutes reality. EI says that the mind constitutes knowledge about reality. According to Guyer and Horstmann, Berkeley represents the former view, Kant the latter. OI is the stronger position: committing oneself to OI pretty much requires being an idealist about nearly everything. EI is the softer position: it merely implies being an idealist about knowledge. But Bergson talks about time. What we need is tweaking the definitions above to apply to a particular subset of reality: they need to be idealisms about something. Take an analogy from ethics. One might not be a utilitarian when it comes to all ethical decisions. Nevertheless, one might adopt a utilitarian approach when it comes to, say, medical ethics, if doing so offers more argumentative power than either being a utilitarian about everything or about nothing at all. Similarly, we will refine the definitions of idealism from above to be definitions not about all of reality but about one of its subsets: la durée and time. We get the following: By ontological idealism about time (OIT), I understand the claim that la durée in the mind is the ultimate foundation of time, or perhaps even exhaustive of time. By epistemological idealism about time (EIT), I understand the claim that although the existence of something temporal independent of the mind is conceded, everything we can know about this temporal reality is so permeated by the creative, formative or constructive activities of la durée that all claims to knowledge about such a temporal reality are, in some sense, a form of knowledge about the contents of la durée. In more simple terms, OIT says that there is no time without la durée. EIT that there is no representation of time without la durée; that is, that knowledge about any temporal object is partially knowledge about how that object features in or is represented by the mind. Both OIT and EIT are thus “smaller-scale” idealisms, idealisms about a certain part of reality (time), not about reality as a whole. Similarly to the earlier distinction between OI and EI, OIT is the stronger position: it claims that nothing temporal exists anywhere unless it is somehow grounded in or constituted by la durée. EIT is the softer view: it requires one to believe that our epistemic access to anything temporal has to rely for its explanation on la durée. Note that the

Relative Existence: Towards a New Bergsonian Theory of Time  77 definitions both operate with the terms “time” and “temporal,” even though we saw in Chapter 2 that they are highly ambiguous: they do not distinguish between la durée and “objective time.” This ambiguity is intentional. For now, it suffices to say that they might refer to both la durée or “objective time,” the two senses of “time” or “temporality” clarified in Chapter 2. So much for the definitions. But does either, none, or both of them apply to Bergson’s durée? It is safe to say that Bergson’s durée (from now on limited to Stage 1) is clearly an example of EIT, the softer position. As we saw in Chapter 2, la durée is required for the constitution of “spatialised time.” The immediate introspective access we have to la durée is the first of the three steps in building up the spatialised structure used by the A/B-theories to represent external temporally extended reality. We first start with the immediate experience of indivisible change. This indivisibility is then broken up for the purposes of practical knowledge, namely, the representation of temporal reality in the external world. The “something temporal independent of the mind” in the definition of EIT consists of the external reality “reborn at every instant.”30 The individual slices of this reality are disconnected, fragmented, and discontinuous. They only exist as a coherent temporally extended object once they have come into contact with the synthesising power of la durée. Can we ascribe the much stronger OIT to Bergson’s durée? Here, the situation is much more complex. With la durée at Stages 2 and 3, the answer is evident: Bergson would certainly deny OIT since the universe endures independently of the human mind. But how about Stage 1? At Stage 1, Bergson would deny OI simpliciter. Take the example of the pendulum. True enough, Bergson argues that the movement of the pendulum does not exist without the mind, because the movement is always grounded in la durée. Nevertheless, he would still say that the positions of the pendulum (fragmented, disconnected, discontinuous) are still out there. The positions are part of reality and they themselves are not constituted by the mind. So OI is out of the picture. But how about OIT, the tweaked smaller-scale version of OI? It seems that Stage 1 (unlike the subsequent Stages 2 and 3) is the only part of Bergson’s philosophy that is committed to OIT. La durée in Time and Free Will is the immediately accessible ultimate foundation of time. And crucially, it is itself an instantiation of temporality. The role it plays as a basis for the synthesis of what would otherwise be individual discontinuous fragmented positions of spatialised time in the external world in EIT is secondary. Its primary role is instantiating temporality, in the subject, “in our heads.” Nevertheless, this does not mean that OIT commits Bergson to OI. Whatever occupies the fragmented points of time in the external world (e.g., the positions of the pendulum) still exists, however fragmented and non-temporal it might be on its own, without the human mind.

78  Time and Consciousness Before moving on, this is a good point to summarise where the argument has proceeded so far. Chapter 2 has shown that Bergson’s philosophy evades neat classification into either the A-theories or the B-theories. This chapter has attempted to classify him under one of the existing temporal ontologies, that is, theories about what exists in time. We saw that this classification is made much more complicated by an unclear distinction between ontology and epistemology across Bergson’s diverse philosophical career. As a result, it was necessary to take a methodological decision and to stipulate a cut-off point in Bergson’s development after Stage 1. This does not mean that Bergson’s later works will not be appealed to from this point onwards, but simply that some of their central conclusions will be rejected. At Stage 1, Bergson’s philosophy is committed to OIT but not to OI simpliciter. It is also worth noting in passing that OIT was popular with many early 20th-century British idealists such as Hilda Oakeley (1867–1950) or May Sinclair (1863–1946). These philosophers have, until recently, been nearly forgotten by historians of philosophy, but their strategy in reading Bergson is extremely relevant and interesting for our purposes here. By emphasising the claims made in Bergson’s earlier works, Oakeley and Sinclair have specifically appealed to a philosophy of la durée in defending idealist philosophical systems.31 This trend of reading Bergson in an idealist manner is rare and far overshadowed by discussions of Bergson in analytic philosophy or his later reception in the continental school. But, as the pages that follow will demonstrate, reading Bergson in an idealist manner is highly fruitful. I have discussed the contributions of Oakeley and Sinclair to the history of Bergsonism elsewhere32; however, in the pages that follow, I will mobilise their strategy by utilising Bergson’s view from Stage 1 as primarily a version of OIT. With Bergson’s insights thus circumscribed and refined, have we come any closer to answering the fundamental questions raised by analytic temporal ontologies? Does x Exist?33 The three temporal ontologies start from a realist position, and as such, they presuppose the falsity of EI, OI, EIT, and OIT. Their main function consists of providing answers to the question “Does x exist?” where x refers to an independently existing object or event in time. For example, I ate noodles for dinner last night. Does the event of me eating noodles on 3 December 2021 exist? Eternalism would answer “yes.” For eternalists, everything in time exists: my birth, the year 2021, my eating noodles, this book getting published, and all the way to my death. Growing-block theorists would agree that the noodle-eating exists but not my death or

Relative Existence: Towards a New Bergsonian Theory of Time  79 the year 2030. And finally, if you ask a presentist whether my eating the noodles last night exists, they will say “no.” For them, it is only the present that exists: there is not much beyond my writing the introduction of this sub-section right now. What the three ontologies agree on is that the event of noodle-eating has mind-independent existence; questions about its existence in time might be answered without reference to me. Of course, its location in the time sequence may be related to me (as coming before or after me writing these lines, for example), but its existence should not be. Using the seemingly innocent and straightforward realist question “Does x exist?” for differentiating between the temporal ontologies presents two problems. The first is a problem for the philosophy of religion. It will be treated in the final chapter, but we can already begin to indicate it here. The second problem is for Bergson’s philosophy limited to Stage 1. Let us start with the first of these problems, the one for the philosophy of religion. Prima facie, the orthodox theist claim that all things are present to God seems to require eternalism. This was certainly affirmed by the scholastic authors that we will be exploring in more detail in Chapter 4. The logic here is quite simple: God knows everything that happens in time, including the future. This is because everything is present to God in eternity. But if everything in time is present in divine eternity, then it must all exist. And the view that everything in time exists just is eternalism. Nevertheless, strangely enough, many of the medieval theologians affirming the presence of things to God denied the existence of the future.34 Surely, this means they must have either been growing-block theorists or presentists! We can also find their orthodox view of God’s eternity combined with presentism even in contemporary scholarship.35 But note that intuitively, there seems to be a problem with trying to square the presence of all things to God with growing-block theories or presentism. If all events exist in eternity but at the same time those that are in the future relative to us do not exist—as the medieval theologians claimed—how do we answer the “Does x exist?” question? Take the example of me getting up one morning of the year 2030. Does it exist? On the presentist or growingblock view, the answer is negative. But since the year 2030 and everything that happens in it must be present to God, it looks like we should answer in the affirmative. Can something exist for us and not for someone else (God)? This seems odd! Arthur Prior has already described this problem with extreme succinctness as far back as 1962 when analytic philosophy began to grapple with this question: I simply cannot see how presentness, pastness or futurity of any state of affairs can be in any way relative to the persons to whom this state of affairs is known. What makes this quite impossible to stomach is precisely the truth … that the future has an openness to alternatives which

80  Time and Consciousness the past has not; such openness is just not the sort of thing that can be present for one observer and absent for another—either it exists or it doesn’t and there’s an end to it; ….36 There’s one route available for answering Prior’s worry. Perhaps the claim about events being present to God is fundamentally a view about divine knowledge, not one about temporal ontology. It is supposed to capture the nature of divine cognition, not the nature of temporal reality.37 This would be an easy way out of the problem. But sadly, separating epistemology and ontology to dissolve the contradiction is not as easy as one might think. We already saw an indication of this in the earlier discussion of truthmakers and temporal ontologies. Knowledge is factive. “Truth goes with existence,”38 as D. H. Mellor put it. If something is known and true, it must exist. How can non-existent reality be known? As a result, abandoning presentism and the growing block and going for eternalism instead seemed to many (including Mellor) like the neatest solution.39 Is there a way of avoiding this conclusion? Is it possible to square divine eternity with a noneternalist ontology without obtaining contradictory replies to the “Does x exist?” question? We will return to this problem in the very final chapter. However, by the time we get to the end of this one, the contours of the solution to this problem will already begin to take shape. The second ambiguity about the “Does x exist?” question applies to Bergson’s philosophy. Luckily here, articulating the problem is much less complex. Take the event of me eating the noodles yesterday. Does this event exist? On the one hand, Bergson’s repeated claims about the past existing seem to force an affirmative answer. The event exists as a representation in the past of my durée (in my memory which still remembers how much soy sauce I put over the dish). On the other hand, Bergson’s statements about matter being “reborn at every instant” seem to require a negative answer. Surely, if matter is reborn at every instant, the same must be the case for the event of me eating the noodles. Without me, the event exists much like the presentists say: only in the present. Once the noodles are gone, the event is over. And the empty packet is already in the bin. So, the event does not exist. Is there a way to solve both of these ambiguities? What we need is an ontology of time that, on the one hand, harmonises with Bergson’s durée at Stage 1 and is thus faithful to our immediate phenomenological experience of time and that, on the other hand, fits into classical theist positions about the relation of time and eternity. The easy way out is to simply accept eternalism and get rid of Bergson altogether. However, as we will see later, this would not be a good trade-off as Bergson can provide an extremely convenient solution to the free will and foreknowledge problem. The price is worth paying.

Relative Existence: Towards a New Bergsonian Theory of Time  81 I will argue for a new option. This is an idealist reading of Bergson, which limits la durée to the human mind, that is, it is Bergson of Stage 1. Since the traditional temporal ontologies are realist in nature, the new Bergsonian ontology proposed in the next section is orthogonal to them. We saw earlier that classifying Bergson under one of the three (realist) ontologies was difficult; classifying the refined Bergson of Stage 1 under one of them now becomes impossible since Bergson of Stage 1 is an ontological idealist about time. The new theory of time, which I defend below, focuses on attacking the coherence of the “Does x exist?” question. It suggests that we must change the rules of the game. We have to stop asking “Does x exist?” but rather, in an idealist manner, ask “Whom does x exist for?” In other words, we must take up Prior’s challenge about presentness, pastness, and futurity being relative to persons. In a peculiar twist, the argument offered in the following section could be considered as staging what Bergson would have (and should have) said to Einstein, had the unfortunate 1920s exchange taken place 20 years earlier, before Bergson’s philosophy moved to Stage 2. Whom Does x Exist for?40 Following the formulation of the special theory of relativity, philosophers of time have recognised that simultaneity and succession cannot be extended as absolute relations throughout the universe but may only be limited to a given frame of reference. Two events may happen simultaneously in one frame of reference, but that might not be the case in a different one. “Simultaneously” is as relative as being “on the left of”: it does not make sense to speak of an object being “on the left of” without specifying that it is on the left of something else, just like “simultaneous” does not make sense without specifying which frame of reference the things are simultaneous in. That makes the question “Is x simultaneous with y” misleading. The correct question to ask is “Given a particular frame of reference, is x simultaneous with y?” Note that the relativising of simultaneity has a fascinating consequence for the existence of events. Kristie Miller provides a really useful illustration of this: [S]uppose that John and Bert co-exist, that is, each judges the other to be simultaneous with himself. Suppose that according to Bert, Mary co-exists with Bert. Suppose existence is transitive—if x co-exists with y, and y co-exists with z, then x co-exists with z. Then it follows that John co-exists with Mary. But it is consistent with all that we have said that from John’s frame of reference, Mary does not co-exist with John but instead Mary is located earlier, or later, than John. So if John is

82  Time and Consciousness committed to Mary’s existence, then he is committed to the existence of objects that are not, relative to his frame of reference, in the present. Since we can set up long chains of observers located in different frames of reference, we can derive the conclusion that John ought to be committed to the existence of objects he takes to be very distantly located in the past or future, and likewise for all the other observers in the chain.41 Miller uses this inference to provide yet another supporting argument for eternalism: both the argument above and eternalism, after all, say that all things exist. In the remainder of this chapter, I will show that the inference to eternalism is not inevitable. I will argue that there is another route one can take by rejecting the transitivity of existence assumed by Miller. As a result, we will see that the question “Does x exist?”—to which eternalism is one of the answers—is as badly formulated as “Is x simultaneous with y?” and should instead be replaced with the question “Whom does x exist for?” or more precisely, “Whose durée does x exist for?” This question implicitly presupposes relativising the existence of any temporal object x to the durée of a particular observer, thus appealing to Bergson’s OIT from Stage 1. The argument below is presented in premise form, with the aim of giving more detail on how the individual pieces of the puzzle described independently in this study so far fit together.42 However, the core of what I’m trying to defend here can be summarised as follows: external objects exist in spatialised time. Spatialised time depends on la durée. La durée is instantiated by human observers. That means that the existence of external objects is dependent on and relative to human observers. Here is a more detailed list of the individual premises of this argument that follow from what has been said about Bergson’s durée and temporal ontologies so far: P1: The temporal dimension of a given segment of space-time is an instance of spatialised time. P2: All instances of spatialised time are ontologically dependent for their existence on la durée43 (OIT). P3 (from P1 and P2): The temporal dimension of a given segment of spacetime is dependent for its existence on la durée. P4: La durée is human-observer-relative. P5 (from P3 and P4): The temporal dimension of a given segment of spacetime is human-observer-relative. P6: All temporally extended objects are partially constituted by a temporal dimension forming a segment of space-time, whose existence is human-observer-relative. C: The existence of temporally extended objects is human-observer-relative.

Relative Existence: Towards a New Bergsonian Theory of Time  83 The conclusion, roughly speaking, states that for non-timeless gardenvariety objects (i.e., objects excluding numbers, universals, and the like), asking “Does x exist?” is incomplete. We should instead ask “Does x exist for the durée of a human observer S?” Let us look at the individual premises of the argument and the intermediary conclusions. P1: The temporal dimension of a given segment of space-time is an instance of spatialised time. The fact that the temporal dimension of a given segment of space-time is Bergson’s “spatialised time” should now be clear from the discussion in Chapter 2. It displays all the features that Bergson ascribes to spatialised time that we have observed earlier: divisibility, susceptibility to mathematical treatment, representability by geometrical diagrams (lines, axes, etc.), applicability to material objects, inability to capture the heterogeneous development of mental states, etc. Note again that the “spatialisation” here is not caused by the fact that objective time forms a part of space-time but by the internal topological features that constitute objective time and that are opposed to those that constitute la durée. P2: All instances of spatialised time are ontologically dependent for their existence on la durée. The relation of dependence between spatialised time and la durée in Bergson’s system follows from what was said in Chapter 2. The current chapter then further argued that this relation of dependence is ontological (OIT), namely, that la durée is the ultimate foundation of time. Recall that “time” was left intentionally ambiguous to cover both spatialised time and la durée, the two different temporal realms analysed in Chapter 2. La durée is the ontological ground of all temporality (spatialised or not). It is therefore also the basis for the spatialised structure used by A/B-theorists to describe objective time. But, as Bergson argues at Stage 1, without la durée’s synthesis, the set of the successive states of the external would not exist as a unified structure at all. It would simply consist of individual disconnected fragments of reality existing each by itself without any connection to the others.44 Every instance of the B-structure of objective time is a subset of space-time. But for Bergson, these individual instances depend on la durée. Here, we are getting to the core of the disagreement between Bergson and Einstein. Einstein insisted that the “observer” is merely an illustration and could easily be replaced by a measuring instrument recording light signals and noting positions of simultaneity or succession relative to its position. For Bergson, a real human mind qua la durée was required to synthesise various spatial positions or locations; otherwise, there would be no relations of simultaneity or succession. “Simultaneity” and “succession,” according to Bergson, require a human mind: not only to represent them (EIT) but also to ontologically ground them (OIT). P3: The temporal dimension of a given segment of space-time is dependent for its existence on la durée. The conclusion reached from the preceding

84  Time and Consciousness premises means that every instance of the B-structure should be relativised to a particular instance of la durée. This means that the ordering of events by relations of “before” and “after” varies depending on which particular durée constituting it we pick to relativise it. For some durées, two events could be related by a simultaneity relation; for others, they could be related by a “before and after” relation. Note that due to the idealist interpretation of Bergson that we have adopted, the difference between (i) a reference frame being mind-dependent and (ii) the relations between whatever occupies different points of the reference frame being mind-dependent, is otiose. It is otiose but illustrates something quite important. If temporal dimensions are mind-dependent, then every reference frame is a “triadic” version of the B-series. We start with the dyadic “before” and “after” relation and add to it the mind of a particular observer whose mind is required for its ontological constitution. P4: La durée is human-observer-relative. This premise is no more than a reformulation of what Bergson says at Stage 1: every human mind is a different durée. Recall that we have limited Bergson’s claims about la durée to human observers. This then excludes the possibility of non-human durées at different “degrees of tension.” In Stages 2 and 3, Bergson says that all durées ontologically instantiate time. But it is only at Stage 1 where this ontological instantiation refers to the human mind. P5: The temporal dimension of a given segment of space-time is humanobserver-relative. This simply extends the scope of OIT to instances of spatialised time composing space-time. P6: All temporally extended objects are partially constituted by a temporal dimension forming a segment of spacetime, whose existence is humanobserver-relative. This premise implies the controversial claim that coexistence is not transitive, thus going directly against one of the key moves in the inference to eternalism described by Miller. To see how this might work, let’s take a particular human observer, Emma, a temporal dimension relative to her position in space-time (five minutes) and two temporally extended objects/events that co-exist in her temporal dimension: Emma’s watching an advert on the living-room TV and boiling an egg in the kitchen. Suppose Emma lives on a particularly large spaceship where her kitchen is half a light year away from her living room. In that case, her boiling egg does not co-exist with the advert for another observer, Eleanor, who is passing by on a different ship at a very high speed. The temporal dimension constituting the extension of the four-dimensional event of the boiling egg may exist in her durée when the advert on the TV does not, depending on whether she flies past the kitchen or the living room first. This thought experiment also illustrates another feature of the Bergsonian idealist account of time argued for here: “events,” “entities,” and “objects” are interchangeable terms. This follows from Hypothesis 5 in the Introduction. They simply denote a

Relative Existence: Towards a New Bergsonian Theory of Time  85 “thing”  in  space-time that has three spatial and one temporal dimension, none of the values of which are zero. For example, the event/object of the “chocolate bar on my office desk” is composed of a temporal dimension of a couple of weeks (from when it came out of the machine in the factory until I eat it), and its spatial dimension is about ten by three by two centimetres. This slightly moves away from the meaning “event” has in physics, where instantaneous events having one or more dimensions with zero value are allowed.45 Miller rejects the non-transitivity of co-existence. She says this is partially because it is deeply counter-intuitive.46 Two things should be said here: the fact that something is counter-intuitive does not make it false. Following the discovery of relativity, the counter-intuitiveness of many basic notions must simply be accepted as fact, especially when they cohere with other scientific facts. Second, there is a way of making the notion of frame-relativising existence more plausible. An example of how this can be done—one that significantly shaped the suggested argument above—is the project of Mauro Dorato’s fascinating Time and Reality from 1995. Dorato argues that space-time points should be understood as ontological entities. This means that we can place the weight of relativising ontological qualifications about existence onto them and, by extension, onto reference frames consisting of such points. This blocks the inference from relativity to eternalism.47 Contrary to the general picture underlying the talk of reference frames, Dorato states that there is no single reality that all the different “visions” dependent on individual space-time points are visions of.48 We thus end up with what Robin Le Poidevin has fittingly captured in a review of Dorato’s book as “relative realities.”49 C: The existence of temporally extended objects is human-observerrelative. I will use an analogy here to explain this. Michael Tooley argues that the notions of “existing” and “not existing” are not sufficiently specified. They must be converted into the more precise notion of existing as of a given time.50 He is right. But we must take a step further. The objective time as of which things exist is relative to a given durée, which is always instantiated by an actual real human being. The conclusion of the argument, therefore, implies that the existence and non-existence of temporally extended objects should be relativised to human observers. “Existence” becomes “existence as of a given time,” which in turn becomes “existence for a particular observer.” This obviously entails something like a local growing-block theory of time, one where existence is relativised to individual durées. Past and present objects exist only insofar as they are the present and past of a particular instance of la durée. This is obviously where my account moves away from Dorato’s. And it does so in two respects. First, Dorato’s original view relativises existence to space-time points: I relativise it to human observers occupying

86  Time and Consciousness particular worldlines and generating frames of reference consisting of specific space-time points. Second, as a result, my view is deeply anthropocentric, something that Dorato explicitly rejects.51 The anthropocentricity of my view best comes into focus if we return to the distinction between the two “real times” discussed in Chapter 2. Once la durée has established the fundamental temporal relations of precedence and posteriority that link any two states of the external world and used this to construct objective time, physicists can calculate using objective time without reference to la durée. La durée, which is the ontological foundation of time simpliciter, never features in the mathematical equations that represent it.52 But the ontological question about the relationship between la durée and objective time is primarily a metaphysical one. And that cannot be answered by physics. The Bergsonian scholar has probably begun to detect eerie echoes of Bergson’s unfortunate engagement with Einsteinian relativity in the 1920s.53 Was it not the dangerous fusion of la durée with relativity theory that led to Bergson’s outright wrong conclusions about physics such as denying the reality of the famous twin paradox54 or the postulation of a single real time in the universe? Would it not be better to keep Bergsonian philosophy and physics separate? These are valid questions. However, what the model proposed above does is far less radical than what Bergson did in his Duration and Simultaneity. I am subsuming Bergson’s durée under the physical theory and not the other way around. That way, methodologically, I am merely “attaching” the human-mind-dependent durée to individual points in space-time rather than—as Bergson did—trying to locate a single “real time” hiding under the space-time as a whole and somehow disclosed through a priori reasoning about individual durées. In this respect, my model maintains the link between human consciousness and time that Bergson affirmed in his engagement with relativity55 but rejects the conclusions about physics that he reached. No need to deny the existence of the twin paradox. No need to postulate a single “real time” applicable to the whole universe. Here, we can already see the benefits of limiting Bergson’s extension of la durée at Stage 1. The Einsteinian observers with their durées can happily co-exist in different reference frames. The mismatch between their durées (say, in the famous twin paradox) can be neatly resolved using spatialised time. The immediate temporal experience of this mismatch, by contrast (say, one of the twins being surprised by how quickly the other has aged), has no more import than the mismatch between la durée and spatialised time in everyday life, say, when one realises with surprise how quickly objective time flies at a party.

***

Relative Existence: Towards a New Bergsonian Theory of Time  87 This chapter has shown that Bergson’s philosophy cannot be easily subsumed under either of the available analytic temporal ontologies. The examination of this subsumption has, however, revealed a further inescapable link between the existence of the human mind and time. I suggested that Bergson’s philosophy, when circumscribed to his early works, can be taken to imply an OIT. This further suggests the surprising conclusion that the existence of temporal objects is human-observer-relative. We started by asking whether Bergson’s philosophy fits better into eternalism, presentism, or the growing-block theory and ended up with something that is best described by the awkward phrase “mind-dependent local idealist growingblock theory indexed to the durées of individual observers occupying various worldlines in spacetime.” The questions that this conclusion opens up are numerous. Does the claim about temporal objects’ existence being relative to a human observer not look like an OI simpliciter? Have we not incautiously slipped from claiming that the “existence in time” of an object is observer-relative to claiming that the “existence of an object” is relative to an observer? And what about bits of space-time that aren’t being observed by anyone?” Take the example of the chocolate bar from a few pages back: I did not observe it when it came out of the factory. Does it mean it miraculously sprung into existence when it first landed on my office desk? These are questions that will be resolved in Chapter 4. Notes 1 For a brief overview, see Röngvaldur D. Ingthorsson, McTaggart’s ­Paradox (New York: Routledge, 2016), 113–17, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315559636. 2 Matt Farr, ‘C-Theories of Time. On the Adirectionality of Time’, Philosophy Compass 15, no. 12 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12714. 3 C. D. Broad, Scientific Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1923), 59. 4 See Nathan Oaklander, The Ontology of Time (Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2004), 39, 43–45. 5 It should be said in passing that even the seemingly straightforward distinction between the ontologies becomes more difficult once you dig deeper, as argued recently by Natalja Deng, ‘What Is Temporal Ontology?’, Philosophical Studies 175, no. 3 (2018): 793–807, https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11098-017-0893-6. 6 For a historical overview, see Ingthorsson, McTaggart’s Paradox, 1–6. 7 Oaklander, The Ontology of Time, 18. 8 Clifford Williams, ‘The Metaphysics of A- and B-Time’, The Philosophical Quarterly 46, no. 184 (1996): 371–81, https://doi.org/10.2307/2956448; Clifford Williams, ‘A Bergsonian Approach to A- and B-Time’, Philosophy 73, no. 285 (1998): 379–93, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819198000059. 9 Oaklander, The Ontology of Time, 25. 10 Oaklander, 51.

88  Time and Consciousness 11 Mauro Dorato, Time and Reality: Spacetime Physics and the Objectivity of Temporal Becoming (Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 1995), 3. 12 Ryan T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 23, https://doi.org/10.1093/ acprof:oso/9780198755180.001.0001. 13 Mullins, 25. 14 Craig Callender has recently suggested that perhaps we should move beyond not just the A/B-distinction but also the distinction between the different ontologies. For more details, see Chapter 13 of Craig Callender, What Makes Time Special? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/ oso/9780198797302.001.0001. 15 See Michael Tooley, Time, Tense and Causation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 16 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. W. Scott Palmer and N. M. Paul (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 9–16. 17 Bergson, 146. 18 See, for example, Leszek Kołakowski, Bergson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 2. 19 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), 106. 20 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 149. 21 Bergson, 149. 22 Bergson, 207–08. 23 “J’ai fait chacun de mes livres en oubliant tous les autres. Je me plonge dans la méditation d’un problème ; je pars de la ‘durée’ et je cherche à éclairer ce problème, soit par contraste, soit par similitude avec elle. Malheureusement, voyez-vous, mes livres ne sont pas toujours cohérents entre eux  : le ‘temps’ de l’Évolution créatrice ne ‘colle’ pas avec celui des Données immédiates.” (Albert Béguin and Pierre Thévenaz, eds., Henri Bergson: Essais et témoignages (Neuchâtel: Éditions la Baconnière, 1943), 360, my translation.) 24 Some of the material in this section has been published as Matyáš Moravec, ‘Eternity, Relative Realities, and Ontological Idealism about Time’, TheoLogica 5, no. 1 (2021): 175–96, https://doi.org/10.14428/thl.v5i1.31723. 25 Frédéric Worms, ‘Bergson entre Russell et Husserl: Un troisième terme?’, Rue Descartes, no. 29 (2000): 93–94, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40978610. pdf; Andreas Vrahimis, Bergsonism and the History of Analytic Philosophy, History of Analytic Philosophy (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 122–23, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80755-9. 26 See Élie During, ‘Dossier Critique’, in Durée et simultanéité. À propos de la théorie d’Einstein, by Henri Bergson, ed. Élie During (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), 242. 27 During, 243; Robin Durie, ‘Introduction’, in Duration and Simultaneity. Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe, ed. Robin Durie, translated by L. Jacobson (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999), xii, xxi. 28 Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, ‘Idealism’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2018), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/ idealism/. 29 Guyer and Horstmann. 30 Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe, trans. Leon Jacobson (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999), 30.

Relative Existence: Towards a New Bergsonian Theory of Time  89

32 Matyáš Moravec, ‘Taking Time Seriously: The Bergsonism of Karin CostelloeStephen, Hilda Oakeley, and May Sinclair’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31, no. 2 (2023): 331–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022. 2030670. 33 Some of the material in this section has been published as Moravec, ‘Eternity, Relative Realities, and Ontological Idealism about Time’. 34 Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, 74–75. 35 Brian Leftow, ‘Presentism, Atemporality, and Time’s Way’, Faith and Philosophy 35, no. 2 (2018): 173–94, https://doi.org/10.5840/faithphil2018326100. 36 Arthur N. Prior, ‘The Formalities of Omniscience’, Philosophy 37, no. 140 (1962): 128, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100036780. 37 Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, 86. 38 D. H. Mellor, ‘Special Relativity and Present Truth’, Analysis 34, no. 3 (1974): 74, https://doi.org/10.2307/3327488. 39 D. H. Mellor, ‘History without the Flow of Time’, Neue Zeitschrift Für Systematische Theologie Und Religionsphilosophie 28, no. 1 (1986): 68–76, https://doi.org/10.1515/nzst.1986.28.1.68; see also William Lane Craig, ‘Was Thomas Aquinas a B-Theorist of Time?’, The New Scholasticism 59, no. 4 (1985): 475–83, https://doi.org/10.5840/newscholas19855946. 40 Some of the arguments in this section appear in Moravec, ‘Eternity, Relative Realities, and Ontological Idealism about Time’. 41 Kristie Miller, ‘Presentism, Eternalism, and the Growing Block’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Time, ed. Heather Dyke and Adrian Bardon (Malden, MA, Oxford and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 352, https:// doi.org/10.1002/9781118522097.ch21; the original problem was formulated by Hilary Putnam, ‘Time and Physical Geometry’, The Journal of Philosophy 64, no. 8 (1967): 240–47, https://doi.org/10.2307/2024493; and C. W. Rietdijk, ‘A Rigorous Proof of Determinism Derived from the Special Theory of Relativity’, Philosophy of Science 33, no. 4 (1966): 341–44, https://doi.org/ doi:10.1086/288106. 42 For more details on the technical scaffolding underlying this argument, see Moravec, ‘Eternity, Relative Realities, and Ontological Idealism about Time’. 43 On my account, the relations of “being relative to” and “being dependent on” are transitive. Furthermore, let R designate “being relative to.” Then, if aRb, then (a & c)Rb. For example, if the property of “being to the left of Lewis” is relative to Lewis, then so is the property of “being to the left of Lewis and liking coffee.” 44 The Bergsonian view of external reality advocated here (though Bergson’s Stage 1 view, which this argument depends on, is not a realist one) has strong

90  Time and Consciousness

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

analogies with Fine’s “fragmentalism” defended in Kit Fine, ‘Tense and Reality’, in Modality and Tense: Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 261–320. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199278709.001.0001. See, for example, Tim Maudlin, Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 60. Miller, ‘Presentism, Eternalism, and the Growing Block’, 354. Dorato, Time and Reality: Spacetime Physics and the Objectivity of Temporal Becoming, 147. Dorato, 128, 152. Robin Le Poidevin, ‘Relative Realities’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 28, no. 4 (1997): 541–46, https://doi.org/10.1016/ S1355-2198(97)00020-8. Tooley, Time, Tense and Causation, 37–40. Dorato, Time and Reality: Spacetime Physics and the Objectivity of Temporal Becoming, 137. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Co., 1913), 193. See Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, ‘Le Boulet d’Einstein et les boulettes de Bergson’, in Annales bergsoniennes, ed. Frédéric Worms, vol. 3 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007), 237–58. Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe, 127–34. Bergson, 30–47.

Bibliography Béguin, Albert, and Pierre Thévenaz, eds. Henri Bergson: Essais et témoignages. Neuchâtel: Éditions la Baconnière, 1943. Bergson, Henri. Duration and Simultaneity: Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe. Translated by Leon Jacobson. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999. ———. Matter and Memory. Translated by W. Scott Palmer and N. M Paul. New York: Zone Books, 1988. ———. The Creative Mind. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946. ———. Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen & Co., 1913. Broad, C. D. Scientific Thought. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1923. Callender, Craig. What Makes Time Special? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198797302.001.0001. Craig, William Lane. ‘Was Thomas Aquinas a B-Theorist of Time?’. The New Scholasticism 59, no. 4 (1985): 475–83. https://doi.org/10.5840/newscholas19855946. Deng, Natalja. ‘What Is Temporal Ontology?’. Philosophical Studies 175, no. 3 (2018): 793–807. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0893-6. Dorato, Mauro. Time and Reality: Spacetime Physics and the Objectivity of Temporal Becoming. Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice Bologna, 1995. Durie, Robin. ‘Introduction’. In Duration and Simultaneity. Bergson and the ­Einsteinian Universe, edited by Robin Durie, translated by L. Jacobson, i–xxi. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999.

Relative Existence: Towards a New Bergsonian Theory of Time  91 During, Élie. ‘Dossier critique’. In Durée et simultanéité. À propos de la théorie d’Einstein, by Henri Bergson, 219–44, edited by Élie During. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009. Farr, Matt. ‘C-Theories of Time. On the Adirectionality of Time’. Philosophy Compass 15, no. 12 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12714. Fine, Kit. ‘Tense and Reality’. In Modality and Tense: Philosophical Papers, 261–320. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1093/019 9278709.001.0001. Guyer, Paul, and Rolf-Peter Horstmann. ‘Idealism’. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/idealism/. Ingthorsson, Röngvaldur D. McTaggart’s Paradox. New York: Routledge, 2016. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315559636. Kołakowski, Leszek. Bergson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Le Poidevin, Robin. ‘Relative Realities’. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 28, no. 4 (1997): 541–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/ S1355-2198(97)00020-8. Leftow, Brian. ‘Presentism, Atemporality, and Time’s Way’. Faith and Philosophy 35, no. 2 (2018): 173–94. https://doi.org/10.5840/faithphil2018326100. Lévy-Leblond, Jean-Marc. ‘Le Boulet d’Einstein et les boulettes de Bergson’. In Annales bergsoniennes, edited by Frédéric Worms, 3: 237–58. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007. Maudlin, Tim. Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Mellor, D. H. ‘History without the Flow of Time’. Neue Zeitschrift Für Systematische Theologie Und Religionsphilosophie 28, no. 1 (1986): 68–76. https://doi. org/10.1515/nzst.1986.28.1.68. ———. ‘Special Relativity and Present Truth’. Analysis 34, no. 3 (1974): 74–77. https://doi.org/10.2307/3327488. Miller, Kristie. ‘Presentism, Eternalism, and the Growing Block’. In A Companion to the Philosophy of Time, edited by Heather Dyke and Adrian Bardon, 345–64. Malden, MA, Oxford and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. https:// doi.org/10.1002/9781118522097.ch21. Moravec, Matyáš. ‘Eternity, Relative Realities, and Ontological Idealism about Time’. TheoLogica 5, no. 1 (2021): 175–96. https://doi.org/10.14428/thl.v5i1.31723. ———. ‘Taking Time Seriously: The Bergsonism of Karin Costelloe-Stephen, Hilda Oakeley, and May Sinclair’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 31, no. 2 (2023): 331–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2022.2030670. Mullins, Ryan T. The End of the Timeless God. Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof: oso/9780198755180.001.0001. Oakeley, H. D. ‘The Status of the Past’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 32 (February 1931): 227–50. https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/32.1.227. ———. ‘The World as Memory and as History’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 27 (1926): 291–316. https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/27.1.291. Oaklander, Nathan. The Ontology of Time. Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2004.

92  Time and Consciousness Prior, Arthur N. ‘The Formalities of Omniscience’. Philosophy 37, no. 140 (1962): 114–29. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819100036780. Putnam, Hilary. ‘Time and Physical Geometry’. The Journal of Philosophy 64, no. 8 (1967): 240–47. https://doi.org/10.2307/2024493. Rietdijk, C. W. ‘A Rigorous Proof of Determinism Derived from the Special Theory of Relativity’. Philosophy of Science 33, no. 4 (1966): 341–44. https://doi.org/ doi:10.1086/288106. Sinclair, May. A Defence of Idealism. London: Macmillan, 1917. ———. The New Idealism. New York: Macmillan, 1922. Thomas, Emily. ‘British Idealist Monadologies and the Reality of Time: Hilda Oakeley against McTaggart, Leibniz and Others’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23, no. 6 (2015): 1150–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2 015.1059314. ———. ‘Hilda Oakeley on Idealism, History and the Real Past’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23, no. 5 (2015): 933–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/09 608788.2015.1055232. ———. ‘The Idealism and Pantheism of May Sinclair’. Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5, no. 2 (2019): 137–57. https://doi.org/10.1017/ apa.2018.45. Tooley, Michael. Time, Tense and Causation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Vrahimis, Andreas. Bergsonism and the History of Analytic Philosophy. History of Analytic Philosophy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-030-80755-9. Williams, Clifford. ‘A Bergsonian Approach to A- and B-Time’. Philosophy 73, no. 285 (1998): 379–93. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819198000059. ———. ‘The Metaphysics of A- and B-Time’. The Philosophical Quarterly 46, no. 184 (1996): 371–81. https://doi.org/10.2307/2956448. Worms, Frédéric. ‘Bergson entre Russell et Husserl: Un troisième terme?’. Rue Descartes, no. 29 (2000): 79–96. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40978610.pdf.

Part 2

God, Time, and Freedom

4

Eternity and Bergsonian Time

Look out of the window or around the room where you are sitting as you read this chapter. You will see all sorts of objects: trees, books, and clocks. Each one of these objects is temporally extended: the tree existed several seconds ago, you remember seeing the books on your shelf when you entered the room, and the old clock on the wall has been ticking away for years. As far as you can tell, none of these objects has unextended instantaneous slice-like existence. Their being is stretched through time. What Chapter 3 concluded was that the extended aspect of the objects’ existence depends on you. Or, more specifically, on your durée. Both of these components are crucial: the “dependence” and the “you.” Their dependence on you means that without you, they would not exist as temporally extended objects. Their dependence on you means that their existence as temporally extended objects is relative to you. And by that, I do not mean “you” in general, but you, specifically, as you are sitting down reading this chapter. In other words, for any given object or event, we cannot simply ask “Does it exist?” but we can only ask “Whom does it exist for?” Look out of the window: you see a cloud in the sky. According to the ontology presented in Chapter 3, asking whether the cloud exists is meaningless. We can only ask whether it exists for you or for me. The attentive reader might already begin to feel that this picture of reality is pretty weird. I said earlier that it is only the temporal extension of objects that depends on your durée. It is a “partial” idealism. But how can we prevent this “partial” idealism from sliding into an ontological one simpliciter? What exactly is it that we are left with once we subtract the temporal extension of objects provided by la durée? If the answer is “not much” or “hard to say,” then it really looks a bit like your mind is “producing” the objects that you are observing. There’s a further problem. Suppose that you are sitting in a room and, looking around you, declare that all the objects you observe exist for you. Not only that, but you can also write down very precise descriptions of other features of these objects, not just their temporal extension: the tree is DOI: 10.4324/9781003349044-7

96  God, Time, and Freedom green, the clock is 15 centimetres in diameter, and the third book from the left contains 250 pages. Relative to you. I enter the room later and not only declare the existence of the same objects, but—surprise—their properties are also the same: the clock is just as big as you said, the third book from the left has an equal number of pages and the tree (barring subtle differences between my and your colour perception) is just as you described it. But now, of course, these are features of objects that exist relative to me. How come our two perspectives on this room are so similar? How come the existence of everything, relative to a huge number of individual durées, is all so well coordinated? The aim of this chapter is to answer these worries. It turns out that the ontology defended in Chapter 3 was incomplete: adopting partial idealism (ontological idealism about time) and relative dependence of temporal extension on la durée is just not enough. One more ingredient is needed. This ingredient is the relation between the being of objects and God. I argued that the existence of the temporally extended objects you see around you partially depends on you. The “partially” here is crucial. We will see that indexing the other part of their being, the one that does not depend on you, to God, can plug all the holes in the ontology sketched in Chapter 3. And the final chapter of this volume will show why adopting this highly bizarre ontology is worth it. God’s Relationship to Time or Time’s Relationship to God? Bergson’s Time and Free Will left a massive problem unresolved. In his first major book, Bergson posited a radical dualism between la durée—the internal fluid heterogeneous multiplicity—and spatialised time, the external static homogeneous one. But very little was said about how the two were related.1 This was the project for Matter and Memory, published several years later, or “Stage 2” as we called it in Chapter 1. For reasons outlined there, we have decided not to follow Bergson on this route and instead stick to the picture of reality defended in Time and Free Will or “Stage 1.” So, the solutions in Bergson’s later books (such as claiming that matter has a durée of its own or positing a single flux of the universe) are no longer accessible to us. But a different solution will be defended here: keeping la durée in the human mind, but accounting for the continued existence of material objects and their mutual coordination not by their having a durée, but by matter being the product of divine creative activity. But where do we start? In a seminal volume on God’s relationship to time, Ryan Mullins argued that “it makes no sense to ask what God’s relationship to x is if one does not have a clue what x in fact is.”2 The x here is time. The implication is that a philosopher must first work out a full theory of time and only then move on to discussing how God relates to it. I agree

Eternity and Bergsonian Time  97 only in part. The first half of this book did not appeal to God at all and still managed to generate a new theory of time. In that sense, we did follow Mullins’ methodology. But the theory of time thereby generated turned out to be incomplete and unable to answer questions such as those raised at the opening of this chapter. As we will see in this chapter, which forms the core of the second part of the project, God’s creative activity is the missing piece of the puzzle. It cannot be completely separated from the way in which the theory of time presented in the last chapter was generated. It is a necessary ingredient. Of course, Mullins is right to the extent that fixing the meaning or—for our purposes especially—meanings of the word “time” is an irreplaceable building block in an articulation of a theory of time. But his claim about us “not having a clue what time is” seems exaggerated. We all have a pre-theoretical notion of what “time” roughly refers to. Providing an analysis of what time is (or what “time” and la durée are) was the goal of Part I of this book. Part II of this book articulates a theory of how the thing(s) thereby defined (the “time(s)”) relate to God. A bonus of this theory will be the solution to the freedom and foreknowledge problem in the final chapter. In constructing the theory, we will need three ingredients, the first two of which we have already encountered, and the third which will be discussed in just a few pages. The first ingredient is Bergson’s durée, which provides the synthetic “glue” that makes the existence of objects or events qua temporal objects possible. The second is relativising the existence of temporally extended objects to particular durées. The third ingredient is the dependence of everything that does not depend on la durée on God. A few caveats are needed. This part of the time-theory construction will heavily appeal to insights regarding the God–time relation found in Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Nevertheless, this chapter is not an exegetical exercise in medieval theology. True enough, uprooting the thought of medieval thinkers and re-planting it into the heart of contemporary metaphysics is always fraught with difficulties. And it often heavily distorts what historical thinkers actually meant. I do believe, however, that as difficult as this process might be, it is not only worth it but also required. It is worth it simply because Aquinas and Scotus’ writings are still relevant. And it is required because to make it relevant, their thought has to be accommodated to meet new metaphysical challenges. For instance, many of the facets of medieval debates about time do not harmonise very well with the conclusions of relativity theory or with psychological findings about temporal experience. An “update,” as sensitive as possible, is required. Some readers might begin to be worried about the announced fusion of Thomism and Bergsonism (just as they may have been worried about fusing Bergson with relativity theory in the last chapter). And there are good

98  God, Time, and Freedom reasons for this: early 20th-century Thomist engagements with Bergsonism have not always been very successful, positive, or even friendly. And Bergson’s books even ended up being placed on the index of prohibited books.3 A pivotal point of this critique was Jacques Maritain’s scathing assessment of Bergson in Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism (first edition published in 1913).4 Luckily for our purposes here, it is not as vital to this project to undo Maritain’s critique as it was to undo that of Russell in Chapter 1. Those elements of Bergsonism that Maritain criticises play little role in this volume: Bergson’s critique of intelligence, the opposition of truth and intellect, an emphasis on the élan vital and creative evolution, intuition, a scepticism about concepts, and the claim that la durée is a “substance” lying at the foundation of material reality. This is yet another advantage of cordoning off Bergson’s development from Stage 2 onwards and just sticking to Stage 1. The Circle and the Mountain5 So far, the argument proposed here has derived the key ingredients for the theory of time from two key moments in the history of philosophy: late 19th-century and early 20th-century discussions about time in Bergson and British metaphysics and discussions about temporal ontology in contemporary analytic philosophy. To get the final ingredient (God’s relation to time), we need to go much further back. The ideal place to open the discussion is a medieval dispute between Aquinas and Scotus about the presence of things to eternity. This dispute was motivated by the need to harmonise commitments to two individually intuitive, but mutually contradictory, philosophical claims. The first one of these is a commitment to either a presentist or at the very least a non-eternalist ontology.6 The second is the affirmation that all things are present to God, in eternity, where they exist “all at once,” which seems to require eternalism. A good way to fully appreciate this tension is by closely examining Aquinas’ appeal to two famous metaphors. The first metaphor is that of the relation between the circumference of a circle and its centre. Aquinas says: [E]ternity is present in its presentiality to any time or instant of time. … Let us consider a determined point on the circumference of a circle. Although it is indivisible, it does not co-exist simultaneously with any other point as to position, since it is the order of position that produces the continuity of the circumference.7 The circumference of the circle represents the course of time: there are distinct points on it, just like there are distinct times on the dial of a clock, one

Eternity and Bergsonian Time  99 after another, neither of which exists in the same position as the others. On a clock’s dial, the number “3” is in a different location from the number “4,” it is between the numbers “4” and “2.” So, “where” on the dial can we find eternity in which God abides? On the other hand, the centre of the circle, which is no part of the circumference, is directly opposed to any given determinate point on the circumference. Hence, whatever is found in any part of time coexists with what is eternal as being present to it, although with respect to some other time it be past or future. … The divine intellect, therefore, sees in the whole of its eternity, as present to it, whatever takes place through the whole course of time.8 Eternity can be represented as the centre of the circumference—or of the clock dial, to use the earlier example. Everything is “present” to the centre of the circumference, which is not a part of it, just like there is no number in the centre of the dial and yet all the numbers are directly related to it. This also explains how God can directly know everything that happens in the course of time: just like a flight operator at an airport can see all the planes on the runway from the control tower, even though the planes all exist in different locations. Their pilots cannot see what is around the corner, any more than we can see what the future has in store for us. This metaphor seems to commit Aquinas to the presence of all things in eternity. Things have to be present “there” for God to know them,9 just like the flight operator can only see those planes which really are on the runway. The second metaphor that Aquinas uses is not of his own making but is taken over from Boethius.10 Boethius likens God to an observer standing on top of a mountain and humans in time to travellers moving through a valley. The travellers see sections of their journey one after another (just like we move in time from one moment to the next) and cannot contemplate the entirety of their path at once. God, as it were, sees the entirety of the road at once from the top of the mountain, because it is directly visible for Him, just like individual times are present to eternity.11 There is a tension inherent in both of these metaphors. They both, in a sense, affirm a dynamic view of time (the hand of the clock moving across the dial; the traveller journeying through the valley), while at the same time commit Aquinas to the presence of things to eternity (all the points present to the centre of the circle; the observation of the trajectory of the traveller at once by the observer on top of the mountain). On the one hand, Aquinas seems to affirm an ontology of time that looks like presentism.12 Some scholars even seem to present Aquinas as something like a

100  God, Time, and Freedom proto-A-theorist of ­ time.13 Besides, the belief that only the present exists is not specific to Aquinas but forms part of the metaphysical milieu in which he was operating.14 This dynamism of the temporal realm is present in both of the metaphors we have seen earlier: the circumference of the circle being gradually drawn by a compass over a period of time (or the tips of the hands of the clock moving across the dial) or the traveller journeying through the valley. On the other hand, both of the metaphors express a commitment to the presence of things in eternity. And this, in turn, coheres best with an eternalist ontology or a B-theory of time. If all things are present to God, then they have to exist.15 What does not exist, cannot be present to anyone. And, if you recall Chapter 3, the claim that everything in the temporal realm exists is precisely what eternalist ontologies assert. So, it is not surprising that some scholars have suggested that Aquinas was actually a proto-B-theorist of time.16 Although we had seen earlier that both the metaphors of the circle and that of the traveller contain a presentist view of time, they also have an eternalist slant to them: the traveller’s steps are successive, one after another, but their trajectory or the road they travel on has to exist as a whole for it to be visible from the peak of eternity.17 The tension inherent in the circle metaphor was the starting point of Scotus’ critique of Aquinas and his opposition to the “real” presence of things to God.18 Scotus’ point was simple but powerful. Either the circle is gradually being drawn by a compass, each successive point adding one more moment of time, none of which exists before the tip of the compass creates it, and none of which is present to eternity before it has been drawn. Alternatively, the whole circle is present to the centre, as is required by the presence of things to eternity. But then presentism has to go because it is precisely the belief that not all moments of time exist that forms its core.19 If all of the circle’s points exist on a par (as they do in a circle), then the metaphor does not seem to capture Aquinas’ commitment to presentism. If, on the contrary, the circle is in the process of being drawn (by a compass), then its points are not “yet” present to eternity. It seems pretty hard to see how the presence of things to eternity could be squared with a presentist ontology. Either we posit an eternity to which the entirety of the temporal realm is present, which commits us to eternalism. Or we posit presentism or a growing theory of time, but this pushes out the option of affirming the presence of all things to eternity. Maybe Aquinas should have believed something else than he did, and perhaps there is an inherent cognitive dissonance inherent in his beliefs about time and eternity. All of this, however, would be a superficial reading of Aquinas. As it turns out, there is a much deeper level of Aquinas’ thought. And it explains why the circle and traveller metaphors are just that: metaphors.

Eternity and Bergsonian Time  101 The Big Viewer and Causal Knowledge20 Throughout history, others beyond Scotus pointed out the problems with comparing eternity to the centre of a circle.21 But we will now jump forward by centuries to the very recent past, where a particularly fascinating discussion of this problem took place in analytic philosophy. In a series of articles published in the 1990s, Brian Shanley engaged in a debate with Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann about the presence of things to eternity and about the way that analytic philosophers tend to articulate the relation between eternity and time.22 Shanley argued that Aquinas has been misunderstood because a crucial feature of his metaphysics has been overlooked and that the project of working out a theory of how eternity relates to time relies on a false premise. This project, Shanley says, cannot succeed before the false premise is removed. What is this false premise? We can call it the “Big Viewer” fallacy. It consists of the belief that the goal of a good God-and-time theory is to work out how God can know or observe everything that happens in time. Shanley says that an excessive emphasis on God “seeing things” (for example, from the top of the mountain) perpetuates the picture of God as a “big viewer,” an “omniperceiver,” or an “arch-observer”23 who first created the realm of being and then simply watched it unfold. It reduces God’s role to mere observership of the world. This image, in turn, reduces theological problems about omniscience to simply working out how the self-sustaining independently existing things can be known by God as best as He can. God is just a magnificently good spectator.24 If you start reading a paper on God’s relation to time written by an analytic philosopher in the last half a century, it is extremely likely you will encounter this “Big Viewer” fallacy. For example, William Lane Craig says that “God does not experience events successively as past, present, and future, as we do; rather the whole time line, …, is stretched out before Him.”25 This way of phrasing it implies a picture of reality where the relation of God to His own creation is kind of like that of us looking at a bit of the world stretched out in space before us. Stump and Kretzmann’s seminal paper “Eternity” from 1981 proposes a highly complex relation of ETSimultaneity (based on the special theory of relativity) to explain how God and the temporal realm relate. But again, it assumes that the two can exist pretty much independently and that the main task is to clarify how God can, from eternity, “observe” whatever happens in time.26 Other scholars try to conceive of the relationship between God and time along different “frames of reference”27 or of eternity as a “fifth dimension” in which fourdimensional objects exist.28 Even attempts to explain God’s knowledge as “immediate” (i.e., not depending on time-lagging causal signals) further perpetuate the picture of independently existing things that God must somehow figure out a way of knowing as best as He can.29

102  God, Time, and Freedom So, what is missing from these discussions? What is the insight that is needed to set the discussion back on track and to move away from the Big Viewer fallacy? Shanley and others30 have proposed that the overlooked feature of Aquinas’ metaphysics is the fact that all temporal things depend for their existence on God the Creator. Without properly appreciating this, we will never be able to make sense of the circle or the traveller metaphors. The key presupposition of Aquinas’ metaphysics is the claim that all things are dependent on God for their being. Things need to be kept in being by God the preserver, otherwise they could not continue existing and would, as he says, “fall away into nothingness unless they were sustained in existence by his power, ….”31 Once again, look at the objects in the room where you are reading this book: Aquinas claims that the reason why, one second after another, all of the objects (and you with them) do not simply vanish, is that God upholds their existence and keeps them in being. God does not simply relate to independently existing things external to Him by manipulating them or by observing them. Rather, without God’s sustained preservation, things would not be at all.32 This type of sustaining in existence is, of course, something that only God can do. As you sit in the room, there are all sorts of actions you can take: you can move the clock to a different wall, break it down, burn it, observe it, or hallucinate about it. But you are not the reason the clock is. Norman Kretzmann uses an excellent analogy to illustrate this. Suppose you are making a salad: When you make a salad, you are the (efficient) cause of the salad. And since without you that particular salad would not have been, it might seem right, if a little stilted, to say that you are for that salad the cause of being. But putting it that way exaggerates your role, which might be described more accurately as your being for that salad a cause of being. … You’ve given certain natural things a new inessential (accidental) form: … But neither you nor any other ordinary individual agent is for lettuce the cause of being. All ordinary artificial production can be analysed along the same lines, in terms of altering and moving pre-existing stuff that is ultimately natural.33 Shanley says that this way of looking at the relationship between time and eternity is generally absent from the way that the relationship is discussed by analytic philosophers. God’s knowing what happens in time cannot be neatly separated from God’s creating it. The two must be kept together. The best way to do this, Shanley says, is to think of God’s knowledge of temporal things as “causal knowledge.”34 God does not act in the temporal realm purely as a cause moving around, ordering, or manipulating independently existing stuff: His primary causal interaction with reality

Eternity and Bergsonian Time  103 consists of His preserving it. His primary causation is the causation of being (esse).35 This is radically different from the type of knowledge we, as humans, are familiar with. All of our knowledge relates to independently existing stuff; we do not cause things to be by knowing them or know them because we cause them. As Shanley says: [The divine intellect’s relation to the world] is the obverse of our own: whereas our knowledge passively presupposes the existence of its object and is measured by it, God’s causal knowledge actively precedes and measures what it knows. … God does not know things because they are, but rather things are because they are creatively known by him.36 This is also how God can know the future—not because He is observing it unfold independently from the top of a mountain but as its eternal cause.37 Things do not have to exist “at the same time” as God to be present to Him: [T]he coexistence and presence of time to eternity does not mean that all temporal things exist at the same time as each other or at the same time as God. It is rather that only when considered precisely as the effect of God’s creative activity and thus taken up into the measure of divine eternity, do all temporal beings become present to and coexist with God.38 But how about the metaphors from Aquinas? Is Aquinas himself not guilty of originating the picture that Shanley criticises? After all, the centre of the circle exists quite separately and independently from its circumference, and the traveller in the valley would travel through it regardless of whether anyone were observing them or not. However, when reading Aquinas’ metaphors, we must be careful. They are metaphors. They are mere illustrations of a far deeper theory of God’s relation to time, not its formulation. Aquinas’ choice of the circle metaphor does not rely so much on construing the relationship between the drawn circle and its centre as two independent objects that must somehow be related, but rather on the centre of the circle as a source to which, through an appropriate setting of a distance, all the points on the circumference owe their existence. No centre, no circle. Just like there would be no temporal realm without the eternal God. It should not surprise us that a metaphor—in particular a metaphor trying to articulate the relationship between things and their Creator—while useful in one domain, creates inconsistencies in another. The circle and centre metaphors succeed in expressing the view that every single part of the temporal realm depends on God. But it also fails because it is a spatial metaphor, not a temporal one. The same should be said of the metaphor of the mountain and the traveller. This is even more the case since Boethius’ and

104  God, Time, and Freedom Aquinas’ primary motivation in using it was to illustrate not how eternity and time relate, but how God’s knowledge in eternity relates to things in time. It succeeds in illustrating the latter but not in expressing the former. For Aquinas, God’s knowledge is the cause of things.39 Knowing and causing to be are one. There is a much better metaphor for illustrating the relationship between God and the temporal world than the two we have encountered so far. It is the relationship between an artist and the knowledge they have of their own work.40 Suppose you are making a statue: you know it in your mind as you are creating it. And it is precisely your knowledge of its shape that is its cause. Without it, the statue would not exist. But of course, this metaphor still partially fails (no metaphor can ever be good enough to explain how God relates to created reality!) because you do not cause the rock from which the statue is sculpted to exist. You only know the form and cause it to be, whereas if God were to make the same statue, He would know both its form and the matter that it is made from.41 Nevertheless, the statue cannot exist independently from you as the artist and from the knowledge you have of it. Things Present to God and God Present to Things There is another angle from which the problem of asking how things might be present to God could be addressed. In terms of methodology, we opened this discussion by postulating a temporal realm of things and then asking how they might all be present to God in order for Him to know them, just like we started with the traveller journeying through the valley and then asked where in this analogy we should place God to grant Him perfect knowledge of the traveller’s journey. But the problem also has its obverse version. If all things are present to God, then God must be present to all things.42 This brings us directly to the problem of divine omnipresence, the divine attribute of being present everywhere and at all times. Christian theologians have traditionally wanted to affirm that there is no part of the created realm “left to its own devices.” God is intimately present in all of its parts. Can analytic philosophy get around the problem of relating time and eternity by just approaching it from this angle? Instead of articulating how things are present to God, should we be asking how God might be present to all things? Analytic literature has, since the 1960s, offered at least four ways in which divine presence to things may be fleshed out. The first, usually associated with Anselm and developed in the analytic context by Edward Wierenga, explains divine omnipresence in terms of knowledge.43 God is present in every place, but not contained by every place. He is present everywhere by virtue of being able to sense what is

Eternity and Bergsonian Time  105 happening in all places. God has immediate knowledge of whatever occurs in every single part of the space-time block. An analogy might help here: you are now sitting in your room, reading this book. Once again, look around you. Using your five senses, you can hear the bells ring from the nearby church, smell the flowers on the windowsill, and see all the objects around you. So in that sense, you are present to all these things. Now imagine extending your cognition to include not just the objects around you in the room, but everything in your house, the city you live in, and so on all the way to the whole universe and down to the minutest subatomic particle. That partially illustrates the way God is present to reality. The second option is to think of divine presence to things in terms of power. God is present to all things in terms of having power over every single part of the space-time block. We find this view explicitly defended in Aquinas: “God exists in everything by power inasmuch as everything is subject to his power. ….”44 Another analogy is helpful here: using your hands, you can control and move all the objects around you. Imagine being able to do this with every single part of the space-time block; this might give you a rough idea of what your presence to things by “power” is like. The third option is that of thinking of the relationship between God and the world along the lines of the relationship we have to our own body and the control we have over the actions carried out through that body. A particularly good illustration of this view is Richard Swinburne’s theory of divine omnipresence: we can use some features of the type of relation we have to our own body (e.g., the type of control we have over parts of it, the way we use it to exercise agency in the world, or the way it is a source of knowledge of the external world) to get a better grasp of the way God is related to the universe. Of course, the similarities are only partial. God does not have a physical body and does not depend on one to move stuff around or to acquire information about what goes on in the world around Him. Swinburne summarises this view as follows: I shall understand the claim that God is “omnipresent” as the claim that he can cause effects at every place directly (as an instrumentally basic action) and knows what is happening at every place without the information coming to him through some causal chain—for example, without needing light rays from a distant place to stimulate his eyes.45 The fourth option has recently been developed by Hud Hudson. Hudson bases his notion of God’s presence to things not in terms of sensation, power, or the type of presence we have to our own body, but just on the “literal” everyday garden-variety presence of things to one another. Building upon this basic and familiar notion, he arrives at a highly sophisticated account of “being present at” as a relation of “ubiquitous entension.”46

106  God, Time, and Freedom The gist of this highly technical notion is the intuition that an object may be wholly located at a particular region of space and, at the same time, be wholly located at every subregion of that region.47 Once again, think of an analogy: I am sitting in my office right now, and there is an old rug on the floor. The rug is only wholly located in the space that it occupies: around two by five metres. Its part under my desk (about a half of it, two by two, and a half metres) is not wholly occupied by the whole carpet; it is only occupied by about a half of it. However, God is wholly present to every single region of space, not just a part of God but all of Him. Do any of these proposals take seriously enough Shanley’s dictum that the relationship between God and things must primarily be considered through the lens of creation? Note that already framing the question as trying to articulate how one thing (God) might be present to another (thing) methodologically presumes that any two things thus related may exist independently. This cannot apply to God and things. In each of the options above, the formulation of the question begins by positing God and things and then trying to work out how the former might know or be present to the latter. But for Aquinas, the way God is present to the universe is inseparable from the fact that He is the cause of its being. In the second option above, I quoted Aquinas as saying that “God exists in everything by power inasmuch as everything is subject to his power. ….” But that quote was not complete, and the omitted section here is crucial: God exists in everything by power inasmuch as everything is subject to his power, by presence inasmuch as everything is open to his gaze, and by substance inasmuch as he exists in everything causing their existence, as we said earlier.48 For Aquinas, God is present not only as someone who has power over things and who knows them but primarily as one who is the cause of their being. The fact that in the case of God, the three are coextensive means that it is incredibly difficult for us to find analogies to create a satisfactory account of the presence of things to the divine mind. It is almost as if we had to fuse the metaphor of the circle, of the traveller, and of the artist. Analytic discussions about God and time start by asking how things might be present to eternity. Discussions about omnipresence start by asking how God might be present to things. But what they tend to overlook is that “God” and “things” cannot be postulated as existing independently. Back to Bergson: Dependence on La Durée49 Let’s return to Bergson. Doing that will make things even more complicated than they have been so far. And the point of this section is to raise

Eternity and Bergsonian Time  107 further questions about how the ontological dependence of things on God relates to the Bergsonian temporal ontology developed in the first half of this volume. However, out of the nebula of questions asked here, answers and resolutions will finally begin to emerge. The questions are as follows: how does the dependence of things on God square with the Bergsonian idealist ontology proposed in Chapter 3? Have we not seen there that the existence of objects in time should be relativised to a human observer whose mind is la durée? Does that not contradict the orthodox claim, argued just a few pages back, that things existing in time owe their existence to God? How do objects come to acquire their existence: is it from God who creates them or from la durée that gives them temporal extension? It turns out that both questions can be answered with a single hybrid theory of God and time: we will see that the two seemingly wildly different ontologies (Bergsonian ontological idealism about time developed in Chapter 3 and divine creative knowledge) fit together and that their fusion offers a solution to the freedom–foreknowledge problem. How can such a fusion be achieved? A good way to start is to return to the three different views about the ontological status of la durée in Bergson. We saw in Chapter 2 that one of the reasons that have pushed Bergson to move from Stage 1 to Stage 2 and ascribe la durée to things in the world was an unanswered question about what exactly it is that la durée is supposed to be synthesising. In Stage 3, reality is composed of an infinite number of independently existing durées. In Stage 2, there are at least two durées or two opposite ends of a spectrum: matter and spirit. But in Stage 1, la durée is confined to the human mind. It infuses external reality with continuity by synthesising or glueing together… well, what exactly? Bergson himself seems at a loss here and in one of the most enigmatic statements from Time and Free Will says the following: Hence we must not say that external things endure, but rather that there is in them some inexpressible reason [quelque inexprimable raison50] in virtue of which we cannot examine them at successive moments of our own duration without observing that they have changed.51 Take the example of the pendulum from Time and Free Will, characteristic of Bergson’s philosophy at Stage 1. Bergson argues that the individual positions may only be considered as forming a single movement due to their being retained or synthesised (“glued together”) by la durée. But what exactly is it that la durée is supposed to be synthesising? In Stages 2 and 3, the answer is much easier: la durée contracts the moments of other independently existing durées at different degrees of tension. But this option is

108  God, Time, and Freedom not yet available for Bergson at Stage 1. And Bergson was probably aware of this when he spoke, almost mysteriously, about “some inexpressible reason” in virtue of which the synthesis is possible. Can the ontological dependence of things on God illuminate what precisely this mysterious reason is? There is another problem. Aquinas’ philosophy contains a classification of objects based on their relative mind-dependence or independence. Here’s a useful summary from John F. Wippel: One type enjoys a complete and total being outside the mind; that is, independently from the mind’s consideration. In illustration Thomas cites complete entities such as human beings or stones. A second type enjoys no reality in itself independently of the mind, for instance, dreams or chimeras.52 It turns out that time belongs to neither of these categories: it is neither fully mind-independent (like a stone), but neither is it purely a product of the human mind (like a dream). It falls into a third category: A third kind has a foundation in extramental reality, but depends upon the intellect’s operation for its complete realization. As illustrations Thomas cites universals and time. Each of these enjoys some foundation in extramental reality; but that which makes time to be time, or a universal to be universal, depends upon an intellectual operation.53 This classification is not just an obscure product of medieval metaphysics but can help bring some clarity into the role that mind-dependence of time plays in Aquinas and Bergson. Let us apply this classification to the different views about time that have appeared in the course of this volume. The first approach is exemplified by the predominant analytic methodology, which requires a satisfactory description of time to be mind-independent: if there are features of time that depend on the human mind (for example, if the B-theorists are right and the present is purely mind-dependent or if the C-theorists are right and the arrow of time also depends on the subject), then they should not belong to that description. Time is more like a stone than a dream. The second view was that of McTaggart: time (whether as the A-series or the B-series) is utterly dependent on the human mind and has no place in the description of (Absolute) reality. Time is more like a dream than a stone. Aquinas and Bergson occupy a middle ground in this typology. For Aquinas, time has a foundation in extramental movement (i.e., it is not completely a product of the human mind, as McTaggart would have it), but, on the other hand, following Aristotle, Aquinas argued that for time

Eternity and Bergsonian Time  109 to be time, it needs the human mind for its completion.54 The same is true of Bergson’s views about la durée at Stage 1: on the one hand, time is not completely mind-independent (as is the case from Stage 2 onwards), but, on the other hand, it relates to some sort of quasi-temporal “stuff” “coming in” from the external world. For example, the individual disconnected positions of the pendulum are not themselves “produced” by the human mind. So, we can already begin to see some answers emerging from the chaos of questions we started this section with: Aquinas and Bergson (of Stage 1) have more in common with each other’s views about time than either seems to have with analytic philosophy or with McTaggart’s idealism. We can bring even more clarity and order into the various views about time by further clarifying an ambiguity that was left unanswered in Chapter 3. The final chapter of the first half of this volume concluded with the claim that The existence of temporally extended objects is human-observer-relative. We now know that this statement must be refined and changed into the following one: The existence of temporally human-observer-relative.

extended

objects

is

partially

This adjustment has to be made since we have now seen that both for Bergson and for Aquinas, temporal extension is not completely minddependent (like dreams or chimeras) but still depends on the existence of something (however mysterious it might be for Bergson) in extramental reality. But this second statement, though refined with the claim about the mind-dependence only being partial, is still ambiguous. It can be understood in one of two ways: A Temporally extended objects depend for their existence on the mind of an observer. B Objects qua temporally extended depend for their existence on the mind of an observer. We can use an analogy to explain what this ambiguity consists of. The view that the existence of temporally extended objects depends on the human observer is as ambiguous as the phrase “idealism about coloured objects.” Is it idealism about coloured objects (i.e., an idealism about objects by virtue of those objects having that property) or idealism about colour (i.e., an idealism about a particular property)? Imagine you see a red apple: if you are an “idealist about coloured objects,” are you claiming that the apple

110  God, Time, and Freedom as a whole, in its entirety, is mind-dependent because it is coloured or are you claiming that the colour of the apple is mind-dependent, while other features of the apple, like its weight or chemical composition, are not? There is an identical ambiguity present in the two statements (A) and (B). Statement (A) says that objects are mind-dependent because they are temporally extended (and because temporal extension is mind-dependent). Or in other words, it states that if an object exists in time, it is dependent for its existence on the human mind. But this is idealism simpliciter since all objects (excluding numbers, universals, laws of nature, and the like) exist in time. Objects end up being “produced” by the human mind. Both Aquinas and Bergson (of Stage 1) would reject this view, and I will not defend it here. Not only because it does not advance the solution to the freedom and foreknowledge problem, but also because idealism simpliciter has historically come to be regarded with suspicion by Bergsonians, analytic philosophers, and Thomists, all of whom this volume is trying to bring together. Statement (B) is more nuanced. It says that one property that objects have (temporal extension) is mind-dependent. Or in other words, it claims that those aspects of the constitution of an object which are inherently temporal depend for their existence on the human mind. It is this position that is equivalent to the ontological idealism about time (OIT) argued for earlier. Recall its definition: By ontological idealism about time (OIT), I understand the claim that la durée is the ultimate ontological foundation of time, or perhaps even exhaustive of time. A helpful analogy may here, once again, be provided by the example of colours. “Colours” stand halfway between being purely products of the human mind (e.g., as dreams or hallucinations) and being mindindependent properties of objects (e.g., as mass or chemical composition). The best way to think about them is to say that colours have a foundation in extramental reality (namely in the way that the surfaces of objects reflect light), but that they require (properly functioning) human perception for their completion.55 Similarly, temporal extension is dependent on the human mind, but it is just one feature that objects have. Others (like chemical composition or mass) are mind-independent. Let us apply statement (B) to a particular four-dimensional object in space-time, for example, an apple lying on my desk. As time passes, the apple exhibits several features: colour, mass, smell, taste, or chemical composition. It also has spatial extension (shape, spatial coordinates) and temporal extension (it lies on the table from 14:00 until 14:30 when I eat it). What OIT claims is that the apple’s temporal extension, which partially

Eternity and Bergsonian Time  111 constitutes the event of the apple lying on the table qua event, depends for its existence on la durée. The “apple lying on the table on front of me” requires the human mind in order for it to exist as a unified event, as opposed to existing as an infinite number of disconnected series of positions in space, neither of which is that event. Of course, one could object that these positions conjointly make up the event, but it is precisely the conjunction that ontologically depends on la durée. The same is true of Bergson’s pendulum example. Consider the event of the pendulum swinging from point “A” to point “B.” Certain features of this event have a foundation in extramental reality: the existence of the pendulum itself, its shape, size, weight, and chemical composition. Its individual disconnected and yet-unsynthesised positions in space-time are also mind-independent. Nevertheless, a synthesising durée of an observer is required for these individual positions to be joined together into a single event of “the movement of the pendulum from A to B.” The movement of the pendulum is a “compound” of retrospectively identified individual positions and la durée as a “temporal glue” that holds all of these together. The phrase “retrospectively identified” in the last sentence of the preceding paragraph is really important here and raises the final question that must be answered. As Bergson repeatedly emphasised (and as we have seen in Chapters 1 and 2), the individual positions can only be identified retrospectively, once the event has become memory. The present perception of an event is always unified and indivisible. So, if the presently perceived object is a compound of la durée and a “something” (which is later represented as a series of successive positions in B-structural space-time), what is this “something”? And where does it come from? If we subtracted the mind-dependent temporal extension from the currently perceived object, what would we be left with? Take the example of the pendulum: if the individual positions of the pendulum can only be identified once it has swung, what is it that la durée is synthesising when it is swinging? Back to Aquinas: Dependence on God This is a good point to pause and summarise the current stage of the argument. We started by observing an inherent tension between the affirmation of an eternal God and dynamic becoming in the temporal realm. We then neutralised this tension by repositioning the debate in line with the orthodox emphasis on the ontological dependence of things on God. We further observed an ambiguity inherent in the temporal ontology that Chapter 3 concluded with, namely between the claim that things in time are dependent for their existence on the human mind and the claim that the temporal extension of objects is thus dependent. We neutralised this problem by pointing out that the objects are only partially dependent on

112  God, Time, and Freedom the human mind, to which they owe their temporal extension (though not other features or properties). We were left with one unanswered question: if la durée constitutes the temporal extension of any given object, what else is constitutive of it? We saw that the individual positions (say, of the pendulum) in space-time cannot provide the answer as they are only identified retrospectively, once the synthesis has already taken place. Assuming that they are there when the synthesis is happening would be falling prey to the retrospective illusion that Chapter 1 cautioned against. Is there another candidate for the second part of this compound? As the attentive reader might have already inferred, the answer is timeless divinely created being. Temporal objects are a compound of the temporal glue provided by la durée, which is dependent on individual human observers, and timeless being that comes from God. To put it in other words: in order for the event of “the movement of the pendulum from A to B” to exist, two ingredients need to come together: i The creative activity of God that timelessly provides the being synthesised by la durée. The features of this being are later retrospectively identified as individual positions in space-time using the medium of spatialised time and the B-structure. For example, Aquinas says that God’s eternal causation should be understood as the divine will that its effects should exist “at some time, whenever the divine wisdom has determined.”56 This “at some time” can simply be understood as a position in the B-structure. ii La durée synthesising this timeless being It is in conformity to the human mind that the event of the “movement of the pendulum” is born: God provides timeless being (which is retrospectively analysed using the medium of spatialised time), and la durée provides the temporal synthesis that holds it together as a temporal object or event. The first half of this volume explained how la durée synthesises “stuff” coming in from the external world to produce temporal continuity. This “stuff” is later, when remembered, analysed using the medium of objective time. A lot has been said about one part of this compound, about la durée. Is there much we can say about the other part of the compound, the “stuff” that comes from God? What exactly is this “timeless being”? The cheap way out is to respond to the question in a Kantian tone. Perhaps we are completely ignorant about what it exactly is that God creates. Perhaps la durée that synthesises and holds this “stuff” together is so fundamental to our access to reality that we cannot imagine what the world would look like without it. We might not be able to “see through”

Eternity and Bergsonian Time  113 the temporal lens directly into the “stuff” that is provided by God and then later synthesised by la durée. Similar to the way that we cannot even begin to imagine the way that God “knows” things, we perhaps have no access to what it is that God creates before this gets “glued” together by la durée and then retrospectively analysed using the B-structure. God is the timeless ontological foundation of everything. Our access to everything He creates is so inescapably temporal that there is very little we can say about the creative activity itself. All we can do is look at the process once it is over, retrospectively, and see it through the lens of B-structural objective spatialised time, just like Bergson repeatedly says that when we remember la durée, we are merely operating on the trace that it has left of itself in the past. This answer would not be that surprising: after all, none of us really have the experience of creating being or of looking at the whole process from the outside, either as God or as some sort of extra-temporal extracreation observer. Nevertheless, there is a little bit more that we can say about how the process of creating and synthesising works. It goes like this. For every particular event in space-time, which is retrospectively indexed to B-structural objective time, God is recognised as having been the source of its existence. Every individual point of space-time can retrospectively be recognised as having depended on God. This would be true even if there were no human minds at all. However, for a set of these points to exist as a temporally extended object (as opposed to their forming a set of disconnected positions), they need to have previously been synthesised by la durée. The following quotation from one of Bergson’s lectures is particularly instructive here: How could a link, a relation between two terms, exist otherwise than in a mind? I understand that A exists by itself, that B exists by itself, but a mind is required to establish the relation between A and B.57 Furthermore, we cannot perceive instants of time, only God can do this. His creative and sustaining activity extends even to subatomic particles. We can only access and analyse these instants once they have become part of our memory and have become susceptible to analysis through objective time. Take the earlier example of the pendulum again. As you are looking at it, in the present, you have access to an indivisible experience of movement. However, if you mentally jump back by a few seconds or re-watch a video of the pendulum swinging, you can identify the positions that it occupied. You can then infer that God has created these positions, every single point on the trajectory of the pendulum. But you can only do this after. In your durée (as opposed to its trace), the process is indivisible. It becomes divisible once it’s over.

114  God, Time, and Freedom The temporal ontology argued for in the first half of this volume stated that the question about the existence of a temporal object x must be reformulated as “Whom does x exist for?” The answer to “Does x exist for God?” is affirmative for all x—if they do exist (non-existent objects do not exist for anyone). This is because He is the source of being for every single object that occupies even the infinitesimally small regions of spacetime. Thus, for example, a single flap of a wing exists for God but not for us: all that exists for us is the object of the wing’s movement. Second, the answer to “Does x exist for S?” (where “S” refers to a particular human observer) depends on the particular parameters and content of that observer’s durée, for instance, the durée’s location in space-time, its “degree of tension” etc. And finally, there is no answer to “Does x exist (simpliciter)?” On the theory advocated here, it is simply not a wellformulated question. The model of the way that la durée and divine creation come together to form temporally extended objects has one rather surprising consequence that merits our attention. It can be summarised as the following claim: “Divine creation always happens in a present.” This may sound trivial, but the indefinite article “a” is important here. The statement says something quite different from the claim that “Divine creation always happens in the present.” The model advanced here has no single objective present. The “presentness” of anything is always relativised to a particular durée. As Bergson insists, la durée is always inextricably tied to our present. Its past is merely an instance of spatialised time that allows for geometrical division into distinct events, positions, moments, instants, or intervals. La durée is metaphysically “located” in a given observer’s present. It is my and your present where God provides or creates the “stuff” that our durée synthesises. Once this has happened, the individual temporal objects are retained in memory, and their temporal extension can be analysed using B-structural spatialised time. This is why throughout the preceding texts, so much emphasis has been put on the fact that the individual instants or moments of time proceeding from divine eternity are only retrospectively identified as being “instants” or “moments.” When our durée is synthesising them, they cannot be understood using objective time. The vaguely outlined present of a particular durée (i.e., a present) is the point of contact between divine being-giving activity and its perfection in our mind. In other words, God and any given durée are always present to each other, regardless of where in space-time any given durée is located. This subtle point also explains why God cannot change the past. If divine creative activity is located in a present, the past is always relative to a particular present durée and merely captures an item of memory of the divine creative activity. However, since there is no single objective region of “the past” in space-time as a whole, the exclusion of divine creative

Eternity and Bergsonian Time  115 activity from the region of the past does not imply the inability of God to act in any region of space-time. A good way to illustrate this is by rephrasing the following quote from Eleonore Stump: God cannot change the past—but it is God in particular that cannot change the past. … An omnipotent, omniscient, eternal entity can affect temporal events, but it can affect events only as they are actually occurring. As for a past event, the time at which it was actually occurring is the time at which it is present to such an entity; and so the Battle of Waterloo is present to God, and God can affect the battle. Suppose that he does so. God can bring it about that Napoleon wins, though we know that he does not do so, because whatever God does at Waterloo is over and done with as we see it. So God cannot alter the past, but he can alter the course of the Battle at Waterloo.58 Stump is right about this. We can translate the quote from above into the language of the theory defended here: God cannot change what is in the past of a given durée—but it is God in particular that cannot change that. An omnipotent, omniscient, eternal entity can affect temporal events only as they are being presently synthesised by la durée. As for an event which is past (i.e., related to a particular durée through the medium of objective spatialised time), the point of the now B-structural time at which it was present to our durée is the moment of objective time at which it is present to the durée of such an entity; and so the Battle of Waterloo is present to God, and God can affect the battle. Etc.

Objections59 This “compound” model of reality is not without its problems, and several objections might be raised against it. The first objection comes from physics. According to the special theory of relativity, time is not separate from space; instead, they are simply two aspects of the same thing: space-time. Take the analogy of the apple that we came across earlier: the apple you are looking at has both spatial and temporal dimensions: its three spatial dimensions consist of its length, width, and height. It also has a temporal dimension, namely, that it lies on the table between 14:00 and 14:30. The two seem to be distinct: eating the apple earlier does not change the spatial dimensions the apple has between 14:00 and 14:25. Conversely, moving it to a different location in space does not change its existence between 14:00 and 14:30. As it turns out, this

116  God, Time, and Freedom picture is misleading. The spatial and temporal dimensions are just two different expressions or aspects of space-time. The proportion between them can change. They are interconnected. We just do not observe their interconnection because we do not travel at sufficiently high speeds. So, it seems like they cannot be as neatly separated (and indexed to two different sources of dependence) as I have earlier suggested. Is there a way out of this problem? One possible direction to head into when resolving this issue would be to appeal to Bergson’s claims from Matter and Memory, where he argues for a metaphysical continuum between “time” and “space.” For Bergson, they are just two limit cases of la durée, and one becomes the other depending on how contracted or extended la durée becomes. While this solution seems promising, it is no longer available to us, because we have, once again, closed off Bergson’s philosophy at Stage 1. More importantly, as has been pointed out many times, la durée and the “time” of physics are two quite different animals; even if Bergson’s Duration and Simultaneity seems occasionally confused about whether to treat them as one or two different things.60 The best way to respond to this problem is to simply stick with relativity itself. Apart from limit conditions (i.e., conditions that involve objects travelling at the speed of light61), any event will always have at least a partial temporal extension. And this temporal extension is captured by the theory advocated above; it can be retrospectively described using B-structural objective time and differentiated from space. Even though the “time” of physics is not la durée, it is an example of objective time, which (as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3) is inextricably connected with and ontologically dependent on la durée. In other words, the existence of a given temporal event implies that such an event is being observed by an observer with la durée (see Chapter 3). Once that event has become part of the observer’s past, it can be analysed using objective time which, again, accords with the way objective time is treated by physics. For example, it is subject to the relativity of simultaneity or the applicability of the Lorentz transformations. The second objection is more theological in nature. Does the picture advanced here not give humans the status of “co-creators,” thereby leaving a slightly heretical aftertaste? If the “compound” model of reality implies that objects owe their existence partially to God and partially to the synthesising durée, does that mean that we participate in divine creation? Does it mean that God could not actually create any temporal objects without the cooperation of humans? Here, the analogy with colours that we appealed to earlier is helpful once again. If the perception of colours is grounded in the properties of external objects (i.e., in the way they reflect rays of light) and yet requires

Eternity and Bergsonian Time  117 the human mind for the colours to be fully realised, what does it mean to say that God cannot create, for instance, a red object? I discussed a similar example in an earlier paper by appealing to Kripke’s example of the epistemological and ontological relations between “molecular motion,” “heat,” and “sensation of heat.”62 In Naming and Necessity, Kripke asks: does God need to do anything additional in order for “molecular motion” to be “heat”? It seems that He does not: in the act of creating molecular motion, He creates heat. Molecular motion is heat. However, this does not mean that in the act of creating molecular motion (and, simultaneously, heat), He also creates the sensation of heat. In order to do that, He needs to create human (or other) beings that can sense molecular motion as heat. The same is true of colours: God can create any object that reflects rays of light in particular ways. But the object cannot be red unless there are human or other beings with properly functioning retinas and brains that interpret these rays of light as the colour red. And we can apply the same observations to the case of temporal extension. For God to create a particular object in space-time, he merely needs to create whatever it is that is retrospectively recognised by human beings as the four-dimensional space-time worm existing in the B-structure. However, for this object to be a unified temporally extended object, He needs to create humans with la durée who can synthesise the individual space-time points into a coherent whole. The position advocated here is one of “partial” cooperation in generating temporally extended objects: God provides the timeless esse, and the human mind provides the temporal extension. If the objector is still not happy with this response, a much easier way out is also available. The theological problem here is the implication that there are parts of reality (namely, temporal extension) that do not depend on God but that depend on us. But that is not true because we depend for our existence on God. God gives existence to us, and we give existence to temporal extension. A recent illustration from W. Matthews Grant is highly instructive here: Tolkien brought it about [in The Hobbit] that Smaug dies by means of an arrow shot from Bard’s bow, but the dragon and the archer, the bow and the arrow, and everything else in the story are with the same immediacy dependent on Tolkien.63 The arrow being shot depends on Bard’s shooting it from his bow, but this does not mean that the whole thing does not depend on Tolkien the writer. Consider a third objection. Does my model not imply that it is only us who know temporal objects qua temporal objects? Does that not mean that there is something that God does not know, namely, how to experience temporal reality from our point of view? Recall that earlier we saw

118  God, Time, and Freedom that the type of “causal knowledge” that God has of reality (in virtue of His being the cause of it) is not available or perhaps even imaginable to us. This is the converse of the problem. If it is la durée that generates the temporal dimension of objects, does that not mean that it is only us who know temporal reality qua temporal reality? There are two ways of responding to this. The first possibility is simply to concede the point: yes, perhaps there are certain ways of knowing which are closed off to God: what it is like to be evil, what it is like to exist in time, and perhaps also what it is like to experience colour.64 Maybe knowing temporal objects qua participating in our durée is another example of this. The second way out may be found in an earlier paper where I argued that divine knowledge of temporal reality should be thought of by analogy to that of our own.65 It works like this: according to Bergson, our temporal experience has two overlapping parts: la durée, the present immediate indivisible heterogeneous access to temporal reality, and the trace of la durée in our memory, which is divisible, static, and analysable by spatialised time. But the two (though vaguely separated) are distinct things. The second of these, memory, is required for the analysis of things qua objects in spatialised time. The first is required for the knowledge of objects qua authentically temporal. The best way to think about the way that God knows temporal reality is to think of both of these as overlapping, existing at the same time. Of course, this type of experience is not phenomenologically accessible to us since we are limited by the fact that la durée (present perception) and its trace (memory) are always separate. But their hypothetical overlap can be used as a starting point for imagining what it might be like for God to experience temporal reality. Bergson gives us an idea of this in the following quotation: An attention … sufficiently powerful … would thus include in an undivided present the entire past history of the conscious person—not as instantaneity, not like a cluster of simultaneous parts, but as something continually present, which would also be something continually moving: such, I repeat, is the melody which one perceives as indivisible, and which constitutes, from one end to the other … a perpetual present, although this perpetuity has nothing in common with immutability, or this indivisibility with instantaneity. What we have is a present which endures.66 The final objection returns to a problem about representation that has resurfaced at various earlier stages of my argument. The objector might say that the theory defended here conflates the following two quite different claims: La durée is required for the existence of temporally extended objects.

Eternity and Bergsonian Time  119 La durée is required for the existence of representations of temporally extended objects. What is the difference? Take, once again, the example of the apple. The apple is a material object lying on the table in front of you. But it can also be represented by a drawing, the English word “apple,” the German word “Apfel,” or simply as a mental representation: as you close your eyes, you represent the apple to yourself in your mind. But the apple as such does not exist anywhere inside your brain. The apple and the representation of the apple, say, a drawing, also depend on quite different things: the first on the apple tree that it has grown from and the second on the existence of a sheet of paper and a red crayon. The two also have different properties: the apple contains sugar and is three-dimensional, whereas its representation is two-dimensional and inedible: As Dennett has insisted over and over, a representation can depict a property without having that property …. A representation of red need not be red. A representation of a banana need not be a banana.67 A similar difference applies to the two claims from above. The first states that la durée causes temporally extended objects to be (or at least partially causes them to be), and the second states that la durée causes the representations of otherwise independently temporal objects to be: e.g., by relating them to the human mind. The difference between the two claims is quite important. The main culprit here is the second one of these: “La durée is required for the existence of representations of temporally extended objects.” It might look sophisticated, but in fact boils down to a silly triviality. This is why representations are products of the mind. If la durée is just a faculty of the mind, then it seems pretty straightforward (and trivial) that la durée is required for the existence of these representations. The second claim thus says something not far more sophisticated than the following: the mind which uses a temporal medium (la durée) for the production of its representations is required for there to be representations of these objects in the temporal medium. Or in other words: the thing which represents objects to itself as temporal is required for there to be representations of temporal objects. And the objector might even point out that the confusion here runs much deeper than this and completely undermines the legitimacy of Bergson’s notion of “spatialised time.” One of the examples in Chapter 1 that we used to illustrate this was the example of a calendar containing appointments juxtaposed in homogeneous space. But the calendar is just a representation of these appointments. It does not need to be temporal to represent a temporal phenomenon.

120  God, Time, and Freedom The response to this charge is that in the case of la durée, its objects and the representations of these objects cannot be as neatly separated as in the case of, say, an apple and its drawing. Contrary to the formulation used on the previous page, and as Bergson insists, la durée is not just a faculty of the mind: it is the mind. Recall again the claim emphasised by Frédéric Worms that we encountered in Chapter 2. The original French title of Time and Free Will is Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, or “Essay on the immediate data of consciousness.” This does not mean that the immediate data are given “to” an independently existing consciousness, they are, so to speak, its data, and they are what la durée consists of. And la durée is what enables us to speak about any objects whatsoever in the first place. It forms the bedrock of our access to reality. We cannot divorce ourselves from it. In this respect, Bergson is deeply Kantian: any coherent philosophical description of reality always “hides” la durée somewhere in the process whereby a unified (or “synthesised”) version of the world had been constructed. Of course, Bergson goes against Kant in arguing that la durée is not a “medium” or a “filter” separating us from the world or from our fundamental ego. It is constitutive of the self. So, while a representation of a banana need not itself be a banana, time is different. A representation of (any) temporal reality cannot exist without the fundamental temporal reality, which is la durée. This does not seem to apply to other familiar features of the world: there is nothing prima facie contradictory in conceiving a world with, say, only two dimensions,68 a world without colours, a world where objects have no mass or a world with no space at all. However, even disembodied spirits still have to “endure” in a certain way. So, there is something special about la durée, about the way it constitutes the mind and objects represented by the mind. It is therefore not surprising that the ontological delineations between la durée and the objects which are a product of its synthesis are rather blurry. And that the delineation between statements (A) and (B) from a page 109 is not as easy to pin down as it seemed. If temporal extension depends on the mind of an observer, and if temporal extension is required for objects to be objects, then in a sense, statement (A) is true. And, in a sense, temporally extended objects in fact do depend for their existence on the mind of an observer, even though this dependence is only partial. An earlier-used analogy will help clarify this. Let us put God’s causal knowledge aside for the time being. If we insantly make all people in the universe colour-blind, it no longer makes sense to speak of colours ‘existing’ in that universe at all. Nevertheless, the world as a whole, on that picture, would still be coherent. What would “exist” in that world is a “something” which, when placed in contact with a non-colour-blind human mind, becomes “colour.” By contrast, if we remove all minds simpliciter from the universe

Eternity and Bergsonian Time  121 (thereby removing all instances of la durée), it no longer makes sense to speak of anything temporally extended as “existing” in that universe. The world loses its unity and disintegrates into disconnected slices of reality. The difference between the case of “colour” and durée is the following: the removal of the ability to perceive colours removes the “existence” of colours but not the coherence of the world which contained them. This is not the case with temporal extension. A colour-blind observer is still an observer. A time-insensitive observer is not. Time is not a mere property that can be attached and removed from objects, it is fundamentally constitutive of objects as such. Objects exist by virtue of being represented as temporal. As Bergson’s example with the pendulum illustrated, without the synthesis of la durée, objects would merely be disunified fragmented slices of spatiality. Their temporal extension is not a mere property. It is integral to the existence of a given object. Asking what objects would be once we eliminate their mind-dependent temporal dimension is much like asking what an undeveloped film looks like. No one has ever seen an undeveloped frame of film since the activity of human seeing requires rays of light, and these very rays would destroy any undeveloped film. The fact that we cannot conceive of a possible timeless world with objects is, of course, not evidence for there not being such a world. It is just that when we mentally travel to its door with our gardenvariety objects and let such objects walk in through its door, taking off their temporal cloaks before entering, we no longer know what they are. We peep through the keyhole, we see that something is there, and we can perhaps make out shapes of timeless objects (universals, numbers, etc.), whose home it is, but that’s about it.69 The theory proposed here says that temporal extension generated by la durée is one such fundamental aspect of objects. But perhaps there are others. Kant claimed that it is both time and space that play this fundamental role for the unity and coherence of reality. However, there does not seem to be anything particularly incoherent in conceiving a spaceless world occupied by temporal disembodied spirits. Indeed, even the point-like character of Abbot’s Flatland who occupies a zero-dimensional space still speaks. And the same is true of the example of the calendar from Chapter 1. Bergson’s point is not that time cannot be represented, but rather that when we do represent la durée using a spatial representation, we inevitably and perhaps unconsciously end up importing features of the representation into the object represented. It is like assuming that a banana in a bowl has three syllables and contains the letter “b.” One should think of temporally extended reality not as a fence of wooden planks, each representing a particular feature of the object (chemical composition, origin, mass, and temporal and spatial extension), but rather as a bridge with several bolts. In the case of the fence, one can remove

122  God, Time, and Freedom individual planks at will while the structure remains standing. However, the fundamentality of la durée is much better captured by the metaphor of the bridge. Some sections of the bridge (e.g., railings or statues on top of it) may be removed with the bridge remaining “a bridge.” However, there are others (such as time) which, when removed, cause the entire bridge to collapse. A colourless thing is still an object. A temporally unextended thing is not.

*** The picture of the relationship between God and time is now complete. Using the key elements of Bergson’s philosophy introduced in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 has delineated two metaphysically different notions of time— objective time and la durée—and explained how they are related. Chapter 3 demonstrated the metaphysical role of la durée in the constitution of temporal objects. The current chapter has now shown how such an ontology incorporates the relation between God and the world. Objects are a compound of eternally created being and the synthesis of la durée. One might, however, begin to wonder what the point of all of this was. Why Bergson? The work done in the past two chapters, which has mainly appealed to la durée as the “great synthesiser” required for temporal objects to exist, may have equally well been done with Kant’s philosophy, perhaps with minor adjustments, such as the differentiation between the (present) perception and (past) memory. So, why not just use Kant? We have to remember that the English translation of Bergson’s Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience into English, one that Bergson himself approved, is Time and Free Will.70 We have so far only spoken about time. It is in looking at Bergson’s theory of free will that the main potential of his philosophy for the God–time relation comes into play. Notes 1 See Pavel Kouba, ‘Pohyb Mezi Časem a Prostorem. Bergsonův Zápas s Vlastním Objevem’, in Filosofie Henri Bergsona. Základní Aspekty a Problémy, ed. Jakub Čapek (Prague: OIKOYMENH, 2003), 91–105; translated as Pavel Kouba, ‘Le Mouvement Entre Temps et Espace (Bergson Aux Prises Avec Sa Découverte)’, in Annales Bergsoniennes, ed. Frédéric Worms, vol. 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 207–25. 2 Ryan T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 11, https://doi.org/10.1093/ acprof:oso/9780198755180.001.0001. 3 See Bruno Neveu, ‘Bergson et l’Index’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 4, no. 40 (2003): 543–51, https://doi.org/10.3917/rmm.034.0543. 4 Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

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Routledge  &  Kegan  Paul, 1963), IV.17, §572–581; Aquinas, In Quatuor Libros Sententiarum, 1: Id19Q5a1. For more on this, see Robert Adams, ‘Idealism Vindicated’, in Persons: Human and Divine, ed. Peter Van Inwagen and Dean W. Zimmerman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Colin McGinn, The Subjective View. Secondary Qualities and Indexical Thoughts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). This colour example is, of course, merely an analogy, since colour is not a necessary feature of any object: if we suddenly removed colour from the universe, the erstwhile coloured objects would still be objects. Aquinas, The Disputed Questions on Truth, Q2a4, ad5. “[U]ne relation, un rapport entre deux termes, comment pourrait-il exister autrement que dans un esprit ? Je conçois que A existe par lui-même, que B existe par lui-même, mais la relation de A à B, il faut un esprit qui l’établisse.” (Henri Bergson, L’Évolution du problème de la liberté. Cours au Collège de France 1904–1905, ed. Arnaud François (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2017), 332, my translation.) Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 156–57, https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203928356. Some of the arguments in this section appear in Moravec, ‘Eternity, Relative Realities, and Ontological Idealism about Time’. See, for example, Élie During, ‘Dossier critique’, in Durée et simultanéité. À propos de la théorie d’Einstein, by Henri Bergson, ed. Élie During (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), 278–79, note 24. For a fascinating discussion of how consciousness might work in such conditions, see Barry Dainton, ‘The Silence of Physics’, Erkenntnis, 2021, https://doi. org/10.1007/s10670-021-00450-5. Moravec, ‘Aquinas and Kripke on the Genealogy of Essential Properties’. Matthews Grant, Free Will and God’s Universal Causality. The Dual Sources Account, 38. For more on this, see Zagzebski’s seminal work on ‘omnisubjectivity’ in, for example, Linda Zagzebski, Omnisubjectivity: A Defense of a Divine Attribute (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2013). Matyáš Moravec, ‘A Perpetual Present: Henri Bergson and Atemporal Duration’, European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11, no. 3 (2019): 197–224, https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v0i0.2629. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), 127. Andrew Brook, ‘Kant and Time-Order Idealism’, in A Companion to the Philosophy of Time, ed. Heather Dyke and Adrian Bardon (Malden, MA, Oxford and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 122–23, https://doi. org/10.1002/9781118522097.ch8. See Edwin Abbott, Flatland. A Romance of Many Dimensions (London: Seeley & Co., 1884); Bergson interestingly makes a very similar hypothesis about creatures living in a two-dimensional plane representing time to themselves by introducing a third dimension in Henri Bergson, Durée et Simultanéité. À Propos de La Théorie d’Einstein, ed. Élie During (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009), 150. I am grateful to Pierre Bonnier for this metaphor. Arnaud Bouaniche, ‘Dossier Critique’, in Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, by Henri Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), 220, note 78.

Eternity and Bergsonian Time  127 Bibliography Abbott, Edwin. Flatland. A Romance of Many Dimensions. London: Seeley & Co., 1884. Adams, Robert. ‘Idealism Vindicated’. In Persons: Human and Divine, edited by Peter Van Inwagen and Dean W. Zimmerman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Aquinas, St Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics. Translated by Richard J. Blackwell, Richard J. Spath, and W. Edmund Thirkel. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963. ———. Commentary on the Gospel of John. Translated by Fabian Larcher and James Weisheipl. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010. ———. Compendium of Theology. Translated by Richard J. Regan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. In Quatuor Libros Sententiarum. Vol. 1. Opera Omnia. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann, 1980. ———. On Evil. Translated by Richard Regan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. ———. Summa Contra Gentiles. Translated by J. F. Anderson. First edition. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975. ———. Summa Theologiae. Translated by Thomas Gornall. Vol. 4. Knowledge in God (Ia.14–18). London: Blackfriars, 1964. ———. Summa Theologiae. Translated by Timothy McDermott. Vol. 2. Existence and the Nature of God (Ia.2–11). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1964. ———. Summa Theologiae. Translated by T. C. O’Brien. Vol. 14. Divine Government (Ia2ae.103–9). London: Blackfriars, 1975. ———. The Disputed Questions on Truth. Translated by Robert W. Mulligan. Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company, 1952. Bergson, Henri. Durée et Simultanéité. À Propos de La Théorie d’Einstein. Edited by Élie During. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009. ———. Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Edited by Arnaud Bouaniche. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013. ———. L’Évolution du problème de la liberté. Cours au Collège de France ­1904–1905. Edited by Arnaud François. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2017. ———. The Creative Mind. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946. ———. Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen & Co, 1913. Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by S. J. Tester. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. Bouaniche, Arnaud. ‘Dossier Critique’. In Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, by Henri Bergson, 183–322. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013. Brook, Andrew. ‘Kant and Time-Order Idealism’. In A Companion to the Philosophy of Time, edited by Heather Dyke and Adrian Bardon,

128  God, Time, and Freedom 120–34. Malden, MA, Oxford and Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. https:// doi.org/10.1002/9781118522097.ch8. Craig, William Lane. ‘Was Thomas Aquinas a B-Theorist of Time?’. The New Scholasticism 59, no. 4 (1985): 475–83. https://doi.org/10.5840/newscholas19855946. Dainton, Barry. ‘The Silence of Physics’. Erkenntnis, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10670-021-00450-5. During, Élie. ‘Dossier critique’. In Durée et simultanéité. À propos de la théorie d’Einstein, by Henri Bergson, edited by Élie During, 219–44. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009. Finance, Joseph de. ‘La Présence Des Choses à l’éternité d’après Les Scolastiques’. Archives de Philosophie 19, no. 2 (1956): 24–62. Goris, Harm. ‘Divine Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination, and Human Freedom’. In The Theology of Thomas Aquinas, edited by Rik Van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykov, First edition, 99–122. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. ———. Free Creatures of an Eternal God. Thomas Aquinas on God’s Foreknowlege and Irresistible Will. Leuven: Peeters, 1996. Hudson, Hud. ‘Omnipresence’. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, edited by Michael C. Rea and Thomas P. Flint, 199–216. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfor dhb/9780199596539.013.0010. Khamara, E. J. ‘Eternity and Omniscience’. The Philosophical Quarterly 24, no. 96 (1974): 204–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/2217934. Kouba, Pavel. ‘Le Mouvement Entre Temps et Espace (Bergson Aux Prises Avec Sa Découverte)’. In Annales Bergsoniennes, edited by Frédéric Worms, 2: 207–25. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004. ———. ‘Pohyb Mezi Časem a Prostorem. Bergsonův Zápas s Vlastním Objevem’. In Filosofie Henri Bergsona. Základní Aspekty a Problémy, edited by Jakub Čapek, 91–105. Prague: OIKOYMENH, 2003. Kretzmann, Norman. The Metaphysics of Creation: Aquinas’s Natural Theology in Summa Contra Gentiles II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Leftow, Brian. ‘Aquinas on Time and Eternity’. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 64, no. 3 (1990): 387–99. https://doi.org/10.5840/acpq199064315. ———. Time and Eternity. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1991. Maritain, Jacques. Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Matthews Grant, W. Free Will and God’s Universal Causality. The Dual Sources Account. Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy of Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. McGinn, Colin. The Subjective View. Secondary Qualities and Indexical Thoughts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Molina, Luis de. On Divine Foreknowledge (Part IV of the Concordia). Translated by Alfred J. Freddoso. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1988. Moravec, Matyáš. ‘A Perpetual Present: Henri Bergson and Atemporal Duration’. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11, no. 3 (2019): 197–224. https:// doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v0i0.2629. ———. ‘Aquinas and Kripke on the Genealogy of Essential Properties’. The Heythrop Journal 62, no. 6 (2021): 1025–37. https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.13045.

Eternity and Bergsonian Time  129 ———. ‘Eternity, Relative Realities, and Ontological Idealism About Time’. TheoLogica 5, no. 1 (2021): 175–96. https://doi.org/10.14428/thl.v5i1.31723. Mullins, Ryan T. The End of the Timeless God. Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof: oso/9780198755180.001.0001. Neveu, Bruno. ‘Bergson et l’Index’. Revue de métaphysique et de morale 4, no. 40 (2003): 543–51. https://doi.org/10.3917/rmm.034.0543. Padgett, Alan G. ‘The Difference Creation Makes: Relative Timelessness Reconsidered’. In God, Eternity and Time, edited by Christian Tapp and Edmund Runggaldier, 117–24. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. Pasnau, Robert. Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199567911.001.0001. Rogers, Katherin A. ‘Anselm on Eternity as the Fifth Dimension’. Saint Anselm Journal 3, no. 2 (2006): 1–8. Scotus, John Duns. Ordinatio I. Vol. 4. Opera Omnia. Vatican: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1963. Shanley, Brian J. ‘Aquinas on God’s Causal Knowledge: A Reply to Stump and Kretzmann’. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 72, no. 3 (1998): 447– 57. https://doi.org/10.5840/acpq199872330. ———. ‘Divine Causation and Human Freedom in Aquinas’. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 72, no. 1 (1998): 99–122. https://doi.org/10.5840/ acpq19987216. ———. ‘Eternal Knowledge of the Temporal in Aquinas’. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71, no. 2 (1997): 197–224. https://doi.org/10.5840/ acpq199771244. Stump, Eleonore. Aquinas. London: Routledge, 2003. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9780203928356. Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann. ‘Eternity’. The Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 8 (1981): 429–57. https://doi.org/10.2307/2026047. ———. ‘Eternity and God’s Knowledge: A Reply to Shanley’. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 72, no. 3 (1998): 439–45. https://doi.org/10.5840/ acpq199872329. ———. ‘Eternity, Awareness, and Action’. Faith and Philosophy 9, no. 4 (1992): 463–82. https://doi.org/10.5840/faithphil19929433. ———. ‘God’s Knowledge and Its Causal Efficacy’. In The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith: Essays in Honor of William P. Alston, edited by Thomas Senor, 94–124. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Swinburne, Richard. The Coherence of Theism. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198779698.001. 0001. Wierenga, Edward. ‘Anselm on Omnipresence’. New Scholasticism 62, no. 1 (1988): 30–41. https://doi.org/10.5840/newscholas198862133. ———. ‘Omnipresence’. In A Companion to the Philosophy of Religion, edited by Philip L. Quinn, Charles Taliaferro, and Paul Draper, Second edition, 258–62. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Wippel, John F. ‘Truth in Thomas Aquinas’. The Review of Metaphysics 43, no. 2 (1989): 295–326. Zagzebski, Linda. Omnisubjectivity: A Defense of a Divine Attribute. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2013.

5

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem

You may have wondered, at the beginning of this book, why Bergson dedicated so much time to demonstrating the differences between time and space. What was his motivation? Why did he devote so much time to what looks like a fairly abstract problem in metaphysics? And how is it relevant to the philosophy of religion? A similar question arises regarding the first half of this very book. Why bother constructing an arcane temporal ontology that fuses Bergsonism, idealism, and scholastic metaphysics? What’s the point? The clue is in the name of Bergson’s first book; or rather, in the name of its English translation that Bergson himself approved. It is about Time and Free Will. The main point of this chapter is to address a classical problem in the philosophy of religion: the problem of free will and divine foreknowledge. But before we do that, we need to look at Bergson’s theory of free will, which is inextricably connected with what he has to say about time and space. We will follow a very similar procedure to the one taken in Chapter 1. There we started by looking at Russell’s critique of Bergsonian methodology, then introduced Bergson’s writings on time, and finally returned to Russell’s objections. Here, we will do something similar. We will start by introducing the framework of free will debates in analytic philosophy. We will then explore what Bergson says about free will and how it applies to this framework. The second half of this chapter will then shift the whole discussion into a new field. Our interest will be not just free will but specifically the problems raised by it in the philosophy of religion. The Four Postulates The problem of free will is big enough to occupy the entirety of this volume. What makes discussing the problem even more difficult is not just the number of views on the question but also the hierarchy of their mutual relations. The more you read up on the landscape of contemporary free will discussions, the less clear it is who disagrees with whom and what DOI: 10.4324/9781003349044-8

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  131 about. Does the main conflict revolve around free will and determinism? Or free will and moral responsibility? Or is the real question what free will is actually supposed to be? We cannot do justice to all of the different standpoints regarding free will in analytic philosophy here. So we will just have to limit our focus to the themes in free will discussions most immediately relevant to the foreknowledge problem in analytic philosophy of religion. To put it otherwise, what will be said below about free will in analytic philosophy is not exhaustive. But it should capture the key tenets of these debates or ways of thinking about free will that are then transferred over into discussions about divine foreknowledge in the philosophy of religion. Many of the arguments about free will in these discussions are doubtless valid. But they all proceed within a very specific framework. What Bergsonian philosophy can show is that several of the cornerstones that this framework is constructed on are shaky, to say the least. We will specifically focus on four of these cornerstones, what I will call “the four postulates.” They all seem prima facie intuitive. The first of them is the following one: Postulate 1: Free will and determinism are absolute. The first postulate that many of the analytic discussions rely on states that the question of free will and determinism (be this of the logical, physical, metaphysical, or theological variety) is an all-or-nothing game. You have to pick one of the following four options: (i) there is free will and there is no determinism, (ii) there is free will and there is determinism, (iii) there is no free will and (or because) there is determinism, and (iv) there is no free will and there is no determinism. This seems intuitive enough. What other options could there be? The second postulate is related to the first: Postulate 2: The compatibility of free will and determinism is a general problem. The word “general” means something quite specific here, namely, that it is possible to provide free will arguments in the abstract without necessarily focusing on the particular features of individual free acts. Study cases can come from anywhere. The question is not “Is this particular act free?” but “Is there free will?” or “Is it possible for an act to be free?” The following analogy might help clarify this. Say a physicist is trying to find out whether gold disintegrates when placed in sulphuric acid. Their aim is to find a general response to the question. Therefore, they are not interested in whether this or that particular lump of gold behaves in such and such a way. The lump of gold studied—as long as it has an atomic structure sufficiently similar to the others—can come from anywhere. The equivalent of this

132  God, Time, and Freedom procedure in philosophy is to negate the difference between the qualitative character of individual acts an agent might perform. Asking whether I am free to choose between coffee and tea is the same as asking whether I am free to choose between going for a walk and going swimming. The solution to the free will problem should apply to both cases equally. This brings us to the third postulate: Postulate 3: The principle of alternative possibilities. This postulate states that free will requires the ability to do otherwise, or in other words, when a particular decision-making process is taking place, there is always more than one future possible. (This postulate is separate from the similar claim that moral responsibility requires the ability to do otherwise, made famous by Harry Frankfurt’s canonical thought experiment.1 We will not discuss moral responsibility here.) Naturally, the contemporary analytic landscape offers many conceptualisations of free will that do not require this postulate at all, such as, “agent causation,” “ultimate source compatibilism” or models based on different hierarchies of desire inspired by another canonical argument by Frankfurt.2 But despite the plethora of these definitions, Postulate 3 has come to dominate discussion about free will and foreknowledge in analytic philosophy of religion that we are primarily concerned with here. We come to the final postulate: Postulate 4: Causal laws apply to mental states. This postulate affirms that the notion of causality is applicable to mental states. Much like material objects or chemical substances can enter into causal relationships (for example, a spark causing a body of oxygen to explode), so can mental states. For instance, my mental state of feeling hunger (or picturing a cake) causes me to eat one. Both “hunger” and “eating cake” can be subsumed, according to the final postulate, under the same type of causal relationship that applies in the case of, say, “oxygen + spark” and “explosion.” It has been said above that these four postulates form the “cornerstones” of the framework in which questions about free will are negotiated in analytic philosophy. But what are the actual views about free will that inhabit this framework? We will look at two main groups of them here: incompatibilism and compatibilism. Once again, a caveat is required. This division should merely be considered as a series of running “themes” that figure in analytic treatments of free will. The traditional contrast between incompatibilism and compatibilism no longer exhausts all the primary subdivisions. The two main positions have been further refined and adjusted in recent scholarship to include a plethora of hybrid views,

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  133 Platonic-inspired  theories regarding free will as acting towards “the good”3 or as our being the “sources of our own actions.”4 The division into incompatibilism and compatibilism below aims merely to highlight those analytic responses to the free will problem that end up being carried over into the discussions about foreknowledge in analytic philosophy of religion. Incompatibilism is the view that free will is not compatible with determinism. For the time being, we will ignore the question of whether this determinism is physical, biological, logical, theological, or otherwise. This incompatibility can then further be divided into two varieties, depending on which of the two (free will or determinism) is accepted: libertarians claim that determinism is false and free will exists, and hard determinists believe that determinism is true and free will does not exist. Michael Rota uses the following definition of the libertarian position, a definition that will be particularly revealing when we come to discuss what Bergson would have thought about it: H is free in the libertarian sense iff at least sometimes, (i) there are multiple alternatives for H’s action, and (ii) it is up to H which alternative gets realized.5 The contemporary landscape of libertarian views offers many other options for conceptualising free will. Robert Kane, for example, distinguishes (i) “agent causation,” (ii) “noncausalist or simple determinism,” and (iii)  causal indeterminist or event-causal theories.6 (i) “Agent causation” is the view that the future action, that is, the alternative that gets realised, is up to the agent or the agent’s “self,” as opposed to its being considered as the consequence of a series or chain of events leading up to the moment of taking a particular decision. (ii) “Noncausalist or simple determinism” considers the alternatives realised as uncaused events which may, however, be explained retrospectively by appealing to the agent’s reasons or purposes for taking that particular action. And, finally, (iii) eventcausal determinism (or causal indeterminism) simply states that agents cause their free actions because of the reasons that motivated them for doing so, not, however, in a deterministic manner. While these views are all much more nuanced than the specification of libertarian free will in Rota’s definition, it is the type of picture advocated by Rota that dominates discussions about free will in the philosophy of religion. The picture is this. At a given moment in time, there are several alternatives open before the agent. And it is up to the agent which one of them they pick. At the current moment in time, both coffee and tea are open possibilities with regard to my lunch break. And, if I have libertarian free will, it is up to me which one of them I choose to actualise.

134  God, Time, and Freedom Compatibilism, by contrast, is the claim that free will is compatible with determinism. This means that determinism can be true and yet free will can exist. In this instance, the definition of what free will is can also take many different forms, be it the “ability to do otherwise” or a particular aligning of our willing with specific motives or character we have. A particularly important moment in the development of compatibilism was Harry Frankfurt’s 1971 seminal paper “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.”7 Frankfurt argued for the claim that our desires are not arranged horizontally. There is a hierarchy between them. For instance, I might have a desire to eat a cake. But I might also have a desire for that desire not to be effective, say, if I want to lose weight. I might have a desire to not have a desire to eat cake. Having set up this architecture of desires of the first order and the second order, Frankfurt characterises free will as a specific aligning of our first-order desires with the second-order ones. Jumping forward by a few years, Kane identifies another crucial trend in the compatibilist school, what he calls “reasons-responsive compatibilist views.” He provides the following description of these: Such views require that for agents to be free and responsible, they must be “responsive to reasons,” in the sense that they must be able to recognize and evaluate reasons for action, and be able to act in some manner that is sensitive to a suitable range of reasons.8 Crucially for the compatibilist position, this sensitivity to reasons is enough and there is no need to go into whether determinism is true or false. Now that a very quick sketch of the running themes or motifs in contemporary free will discussions has been drawn, we can see their intricate connection with the postulates we talked about at the beginning of this section. Of course, none (if any) of the positions sketched in the preceding paragraphs endorse all of them. For example, Postulate 1 is not endorsed by the family of free will theories that give indeterminism a role to play in the decision-making process. Perhaps, as some libertarians argue, indeterminism is just one of many ingredients in “a larger goal-oriented or teleological process or activity, in which the indeterminism functions as a hindrance or obstacle to the attainment of the goal.”9 By parity, Postulate 2 does not feature in Frankfurt-type theories of free will. According to the hierarchical theories, some acts are free. Others are not. It all depends on how the different orders of our desires or wills are aligned. Many compatibilist theories of free will do not require Postulate 3, the ability to do otherwise. And Postulate 4 is a special case that we will put aside until the beginning of the next chapter. So the postulates are not dogmata. What is decisive, however, is that each of the major views regarding free will that made it into the negotiation of

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  135 the freedom and foreknowledge problem ends up endorsing at least one of them. We will begin to see this in the next section where Bergson’s theory of freedom will be applied to these postulates. But it is going to become much more apparent in the section that comes immediately after, where we will look at a specific formulation of the freedom and foreknowledge argument in the philosophy of religion. The moral of the story here is pretty straightforward. If every view on free will in the negotiation of the freedom and foreknowledge problem in analytic philosophy of religion requires at least one of the postulates and Bergson can show that each of the postulates is false, then every view on free will used to negotiate the freedom and foreknowledge problem in analytic philosophy of religion is either deficient, standing on shaky grounds, or just outright false. Bergson’s Two Selves: Rejecting Postulate 1 Bergson’s Time and Free Will argues for the radical claim that the absolute opposition between free will and determinism is not a real one. In this respect, Bergson’s view is similar to that of Kant, who is his implicit interlocutor throughout the book, and who regarded the opposition between the two as an antinomy. Philosophers, both Kant and Bergson thought, are wrong when they feel like they have to choose between one and the other. When we understand each of the terms appropriately, the opposition between them dissolves. Kant’s way of arguing for this claim was to distinguish between the noumenal and the phenomenal realm. Bergson chose a different method. He argued that re-establishing appropriate boundaries between la durée and its spatial representation dissolves the problem. In the closing paragraph of Time and Free Will, he concludes that [a]ll the difficulties of the problem [of free will] and the problem itself, arise from the desire to endow duration [la durée] with the same attributes as extensity, to interpret a succession by a simultaneity, and to express the idea of freedom in a language into which it is obviously untranslatable.10 How does Bergson arrive at this claim? What is the link that connects his treatment of the question of time and space with the free will problem? Kant differentiated between the phenomenal and the noumenal self. The first is subject to the laws of causality, and the second is the home of freedom. Bergson introduces a different distinction. Our self is like an onion: on the outside is the “parasitic” self and the “fundamental” self resides at the centre.11 The deepest level of the fundamental self is the heterogeneous durée. The parasitic self, by contrast, is permeated by the realm of

136  God, Time, and Freedom homogeneous space. The individual mental states that appear there are separate and distinctly labelled by language for purposes of social interaction. The parasitic self is la durée projected or translated into the quantitative multiplicity that we encountered in Chapter 1. Imagine yourself falling in love with someone. In la durée, a complex mix of feelings of nuanced shades develops. It is hard to say when your affection for the person turned into love, at what point you started thinking about them all the time, or at what point you became certain you wanted to marry them. The progress of your emotions is always unique, unrepeatable, and constantly evolving. Now imagine that a few years down the line, you fall in love again, perhaps with a different person. Another, new and completely unique process starts evolving. But once you try to communicate how you were feeling now and back then, once you try to describe this to other people within the realms of social life, you end up projecting these unique and private experiences into the realm of spatialised time. Both episodes end up being represented by a single word: “love.” All the nuanced differences between the two disappear. They “solidify.”12 Each one of us, Bergson says, has our own unique way of loving or hating, but all of these individual nuances are designated by identical general terms: But if he [= the psychologist who focuses only on the parasitic self] sees in these various states no more than is expressed in their name, if he retains only their impersonal aspect, he may set them side by side for ever without getting anything but a phantom self, the shadow of the ego projecting itself into space.13 Analytic philosophy has a useful tool that may be used to explain what Bergson is trying to say here.14 Philosophers routinely distinguish between “types” and “tokens.” For example, the first word of this paragraph has two tokens of the letter “a”: the first letter of the word, and the third one. But they are of the same type. The letter “n” is of a type different from the letter “a.” The difference between the fundamental and the parasitic self can be conceptualised using this type-token distinction. At the level of the parasitic self, the two states (e.g., “hearing the kettle boil at 13:00” and “hearing the kettle boil at 14:00”) are sufficiently similar to constitute tokens of the same type. However, once we dig deeper into the fundamental side of the spectrum, it is a mistake to consider, for instance, “my being in love when I was 16” and “my being in love at the age of 30,” as tokens of the same type. This is because the two mental states are radically different. We think that they are both tokens of the same type because we have been tricked into (or habituated into) doing so by language. Just because we apply the same word (“love”) to both.

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  137 Bergson would undoubtedly use his theory of the fundamental and the parasitic self to reject Postulate 1. For Bergson, there is a continuum between free and determined acts in the proportion to which they are related to the parasitic and the fundamental selves. At the level of the parasitic self, the same states reappear. So determinism is possible there. At the fundamental level, they do not. This is why la durée is the seat of freedom. But both of our selves are involved when we act. This is why neither freedom nor determinism can ever be absolute. They admit of degrees.15 Each act we take is to be found on an imaginary continuum between complete freedom and complete determinism. It all depends on the extent to which it springs from our fundamental self or from the parasitic one. Actions like “writing Hamlet” or “realising the futility of being” are closer to the fundamental end of the spectrum; being hungry or thinking about what to have for lunch are on the opposite side. A particular act is both free and determined in much the same way that a pint of shandy is both beer and lemonade: the extent to which it approaches either depends on the proportion between the two liquids. On such a view, Postulate 1 is false: free will and determinism coexist side by side in each one of us just like the two layers of our self do. What’s more, Bergson says that most of us, most of the time, merely operate at the level of the parasitic self. We do not daily write Hamlet or contemplate the futility of being. Most of the time, we are on autopilot. And that is not a bad thing. Alfred Mele provides a helpful example of actions we frequently take where the type of free, conscious deliberation or the forming of intentions is completely useless: the case of driving. Recall your first driving lesson: every single turn, every action you took driving the car was accompanied by heightened attention, perhaps a feeling of fear, and a whirlpool of things that you need to be constantly aware of fully occupying your mind. This is why the first driving lessons tend to be so exhausting. But as you learn how to drive, you can delegate most of these awareness-intense tasks to the parasitic self. Mele appeals to William James’ famous dictum that consciousness is absent in acts where it is of no use: If James is right, by the time drivers have developed the habit of signalling for turns they are about to make, they no longer consciously form intentions to signal for turns (in normal circumstances) and no longer are conscious of being about to signal or even of signalling (in normal circumstances).16 Sadly, as Bergson also says, if we confine our lives to this superficial automatic level, we can end up living our entire lives at the level of the parasitic self, “without having known true freedom.”17 And anyway, free acts are

138  God, Time, and Freedom extremely rare.18 But they do exist. There are moments when we are free, moments of difficult decisions, moments when we act from our fundamental self, when we can fully express who we are by delving into our fundamental level and letting our decision spring from la durée. The mistake that philosophers have made, according to Bergson, is that they have put both types of acts into the same basket: writing Hamlet and signalling for turns. Simple actions and automatic reactions cannot simply be subsumed under the same metaphysical heading as deciding whether to marry someone or not or how to string English words together to write a play or a poem. If you open any introductory volume on discussions concerning free will in analytic philosophy, the chances are the examples used to illustrate free acts are probably something like deciding whether to have tea or coffee or—an example that seems particularly popular with philosophers of religion—of someone mowing their lawn.19 Observing the usual methodology in talking about free will, Bergson observes that philosophers tend to [l]ook at only the commonest aspect of our conscious life, they perceive clearly marked states, which can recur in time like physical phenomena, and to which the law of causal determination applies, if we wish, in the same sense as it does to nature.20 At this point, it might be good to contrast the view advocated by Bergson with some of the ones we saw before in our cursory overview of incompatibilism and compatibilism. Let’s start with Frankfurt’s hierarchical account of the self. On the face of it, Frankfurt’s account superficially resembles that of Bergson. In fact, Bergson’s fundamental/parasitic distinction can perhaps even be articulated in Frankfurtian language: our true personhood consists in an appropriate alignment of our first- and secondorder desires much like our acting is free when the parasitic self does not block the springing of the action from the fundamental one. But Bergson’s account is radically different. This is not just because Bergson does not speak about volitions or intentions (but about the agent as a whole). It is primarily because for him free actions are always placed somewhere on the continuum between freedom and determinism. No matter how much aligning of first- and second-order desires we may achieve, no act will ever be completely determined or completely free. Bergson’s take on freedom should equally be contrasted with the approach assumed by agentcausal accounts of free will.21 These accounts still regard the agent as a single indivisible and static unit. But for Bergson, the “agent” constantly changes, both in terms of the “content” of their durée but also in terms of the proportion to which the fundamental or the parasitic selves participate in a given act. Where Kant stipulated a radical (and arguably somewhat

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  139 obscure) division between the noumenal and the phenomenal self, Bergson maintains that the relation between the fundamental and the parasitic self is continuous and that movement from one level to the other in the process of deliberation is gradual. Bergson’s account of free will thus transcends the frameworks of free will debates that we encountered a few pages back. John Mullarkey uses precisely the fact that both the parasitic and the fundamental self participate in free actions to show the originality of Bergson’s position: Bergson’s position on the issue of free will and determinism is best characterised as a peculiar twist on compatibilism. … Libertarians and determinists build their ideas equally on the axiom of their mutual incompatibility. … Bergson, on the contrary, believes they are compatible because the characteristic that both constitutes durée and differentiates it from determinate homogeneity appears in different degrees at different moments of our conscious existence.22 And Bergson’s twist on compatibilism is very peculiar indeed. Kant claimed that free will and determinism can exist side by side: but the price paid for such compatibility is that each one of them has to be indexed to a different ontological reality. One scholar specifically compared this to saying that “a married couple is compatible, but only as long as they live in separate houses.”23 Bergson’s vision is different. Free will and determinism are compatible because they are intimately intertwined in each individual act. I said earlier that Bergson thought that some people live their entire lives at the level of the parasitic self. But, optimistically, he also suggested that no matter how “encrusted” we are by the automated habits of the parasitic self, the actions of the fundamental one can always unexpectedly rise to the surface, breaking through this habitual crust. Furthermore, the free act is always a product of la durée. But once it has happened, it can always retrospectively—recall the retrospective spatialisation introduced in Chapter 1—be translated into the level of the quantitative multiplicity. No matter how original an action is, it can always retrospectively be connected with various chains leading up to it. Shakespeare’s Hamlet can be seen as a continuation of his previous works and as prefiguring subsequent ones. When viewed retrospectively, the causes were “always” there and the action, to a certain extent, loses its originality, novelty, and unforeseeability. Crucially, Bergson observes that when we examine the action retrospectively, it does not even matter whether it or its opposite happened, since either alternative can always be connected to previous causes looked at in a different manner. Had Shakespeare not written anything at all in the year when he wrote Hamlet, we would doubtless be

140  God, Time, and Freedom able to find different causes for its absence (e.g., exhaustion after finishing Julius Caesar and As You Like It). As Bergson puts it: … if the event can always be explained afterwards by an arbitrary choice of antecedent event, a completely different event could have been equally well explained in the same circumstances by another choice of antecedent—nay, by the same antecedents otherwise cut out, otherwise distributed, otherwise perceived,—in short, by our retrospective attention.24 The mention of “afterwards” and “retrospective attention” are really important for understanding what Bergson is saying here. His theory of free will is inseparable from the relation between la durée and the image it has left of itself in the past. Free acts happen. But once they have happened, they will always look determined. Running Away from the Altar: Rejecting Postulate 2 The following analogy might serve as a good way to wrap up the preceding section. Towards the end of the 18th century, scholars became fascinated by the observation that the number of acts usually taken to depend on free will—such as criminal acts, suicides, or marriages—remains pretty constant from year to year.25 Let’s use the third of these as an example. The number of people who get married remains pretty constant from one year to another. Does this mean that people who get married are not free and are doing so just because it is necessitated by a determinism of probabilities? Consider a particular man living in the 1800s deciding whether to marry a particular woman or not. As Bergson argues, completely free acts are quite rare. Most people tend to follow habit in taking decisions and habits operate at the level of the parasitic self. The feeling of “love” is usually connected with or followed by the notion of “marriage.” So when a person falls in love with someone, they follow the habit instilled into their parasitic self to marry the person they fell in love with. This explains why the number of marriages from year to year appears (or appeared back when people began to notice) more or less the same. Nevertheless, there is no reason why the man in question could not introspect his durée and perhaps break the habits of the parasitic self by marrying someone else, not marrying at all, or living with the person they love out of wedlock— out of disrespect for the institution of marriage, due to some unexpected sense of revolt, or just to annoy 19th-century statisticians. Of course, retrospectively, each one of his actions can be connected by an arbitrary set of antecedents: he married the woman he did because he loved her. Or if he did not marry her, he did not marry her because he had always been a

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  141 bit odd. This does not mean that running away from the altar is required for freedom or that it is sufficient for it. Both the act of marrying and not marrying can be free or not. It all depends on whether it proceeds from la durée or whether it follows out of the habits grown into the layer of the parasitic self. For Bergson, the amount of freedom and determinism present in an act depends on the relation between the agent’s self (or layers thereof) and the particular act. Is it done out of habit or is it a highly original act that expresses our personality? Are we stopping the car at a red light or are we sacrificing our son to Yahweh? This observation can serve as a starting point to see why Bergson would reject Postulate 2. The second postulate states that the question of free will is a general problem. Bergson demurs. He says that the question “Are we free or not?” is a badly formulated one. It should be replaced with one along the lines of “(To what extent) was a particular act a performed by agent S free and (to what extent) was it determined?” This completely shifts the focus away from talking about free will in general to asking about specific acts: this act or that one. For Bergson, a free act is more of an “event” or a “happening” rather than a general constellation of actions, intentions, decisions, possibilities, or connections between causes and effects.26 There is no free will in general.27 And Bergson is committed to this dictum to such an extent that he avoids providing a definition or an analysis of free will.28 Rather, he tries to provide its “characterisation.”29 For Bergson, there is something essentially “artistic” about a truly free act, something that generates completely unforeseeable novelty in the same way that great works of art do. Mark Sinclair’s recent monograph on Bergson describes Bergson’s conception of freedom as “expressivist.”30 And the relation between such an “artistic” free act and the person who has performed it is similar to that between the artist and their work. As Bergson says in Time and Free Will: [W]e are free when our acts spring from our whole personality, when they express it, when they have that indefinable resemblance to it which one sometimes finds between the artist and his work.31 Fully free acts are just as rare as great works of art. Most of the time we are crafting reproductions. No Cupboard of Possibles: Rejecting Postulate 3 In 1941, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges published a fascinating short story called “The Garden of Forking Paths,” the narrative of which revolves around the idea that possibilities in time unfold like paths in a

142  God, Time, and Freedom garden: we come to an intersection, choose either the left or the right path, and walk on.32 The other options are discarded. He then considers the possibility of all of these paths or routes existing simultaneously. The idea of a “garden of forking paths” has become a frequent metaphor to describe freedom of choice as deciding between two different courses of action lying on a branching tree of possibilities. We saw in Chapter 1 that Bergson’s first book rallied against the tendency to spatialise la durée. While this might look like a fairly minor and arbitrary point to do with the metaphysics of time, for Bergson the dangers of spatialisation were intricately connected with the problem of free will. One of the main culprits in the spatialisation was the tendency to represent la durée using a line progressing in space. This tendency has its counterpart in discussions about free will, namely, the proclivity to represent the process of deciding using a branching tree of possibilities. This tendency is particularly dangerous, Bergson thinks, because it commits both libertarians and determinists to the retrospective illusion. They look at the decision once it has been taken and then retrospectively identify motives and possibilities within it. But we already know from the previous section that once the free act has happened, it will always look determined. The branching tree is just one of the many nefarious ways of spatialising la durée. What makes this spatialisation of the free act particularly dangerous is that it tricks us into thinking of free choice as a hesitation between several competing and independently existing possible futures. These are supposed to exist “there” prior to our contemplation of them. A bit like choosing between two different doors. Our decision-making process is then supposed to be comparable to our arrival at a crossroad followed by the taking of one of two already established directions.33 This brings us directly to Postulate 3. A typical instance of this way of thinking can be found in a paper on the foreknowledge problem published just a few years ago by Michael Rota. Rota defines free will as follows: suppose the agent freely chooses option “C.” Then [m]ost libertarians will agree that since C is really a free choice, it must be that in the time before T it was in N’s power to perform C, and in the time before T it was in N’s power to refrain from performing C.34 To put it differently, option “C” coexisted side-by-side with option “nonC” before the agent got to point T to make the choice. Both of the alternative possibilities were there. To most of us, this will seem fairly intuitive. But Bergson’s detailed analysis of this way of looking at freedom demonstrates that such a framework for articulating free will fails and Postulate 3 fails with it. Bergson regards the idea of there being two possible futures between which an

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  143 agent is choosing as metaphysically suspect.35 He points out that apart from simple everyday decisions (deciding whether to have a coffee or not, for example), there are rarely two future options solidified before us as determinate objects of choice. Genuinely difficult decisions consist of a continual oscillation between several tendencies of the self, which grows every moment by passing from one tendency to the other.36 Thinking of free will as deciding between two or more options hides the reality of becoming. It results from a purely practical static representation of what is inherently a dynamic evolution of the decision-making process. To suppose that a spatial tree of branching possibilities could accurately represent the decision-making process is to think of this process as a “sort of stopping of time.”37 And Bergson’s point here is much more radical than simply claiming that we do not know what these possibilities are. It is not just that we do not know what they are. We do not and cannot know it because the possibilities do not exist prior to their appearance in la durée. La durée is not just a never-ending actualisation of possibilities and, consequently, neither are free acts. They are not just possibilities waiting to be actualised. Bergson thinks that we get tricked into believing that freedom consists of deciding between several possibles because we tend to focus on simple acts: mowing lawns, or deciding whether to have coffee or not. Of course, these types of acts do look like they are possibilities waiting to be actualised. But they cannot be used as models for a general characterisation of free will. Philosophy, according to Bergson, tends to construct tools for characterising free will starting with these simple acts and then using them as a model for all others. That is how we end up with a conception of possibles the actualisation of one of which is up to the agent. But in more profound cases of human freedom, this is outright absurd. “When a musician composes a symphony,” Bergson asks, “was his work possible before being real?”38 The tendency to think of free acts along these lines is further exacerbated by the propensity to view the process retrospectively. We look at it once it has happened and then place ourselves, mentally, before its occurrence, just like we place our minds before the death of Queen Anne. Since we are able to trace effects back to their causes in the past, we think that this can be done, ontologically, also when it comes to the future. As Bergson says: As reality is created as something unforeseeable and new, its image is reflected behind it into the indefinite past; … The possible is therefore the mirage of the present in the past; and as we know the future will finally constitute a present and the mirage effect is continually being produced, we are convinced that the image of tomorrow is already contained in our actual present.39

144  God, Time, and Freedom Bergson supplies an interesting anecdote to drive his point home. He recalls how a journalist once asked him what he thought the next great work of literature was going to be. Bergson comments: “I saw distinctly that [the journalist] conceived the future work as being already stored up in some cupboard reserved for possibles ….”40 Bergson then further questions the idea that works of art (as prime examples of the products of human freedom) are “possible” before being real: Hamlet was doubtless possible before being realised, if that means there was no insurmountable obstacle to its realisation. In this particular sense one calls possible what is not impossible. … But the possible thus understood is in no degree virtual, something ideally pre-existent. If you close the gate you know no one will cross the road; it does not follow that you can predict who will cross it when you open it. … [I]t is clear that a mind in which the Hamlet of Shakespeare had taken shape in the form of possible would by that fact have created its reality: it would have thus been, by definition, Shakespeare himself.41 Bergson’s view is highly original. Possibilities only come into existence retrospectively. Free acts are not impossible. But that does not make them “possible” before they happen. The idea that the notion of “possibility” only has retrospective value, once the possibilities have been read into a past act, has been taken up by Emmanuel Picavet within the context of decision theory. Picavet begins his analysis by targeting the geometrical representation of decision-making, which uses the branching trees of possibilities. He notes that thinking of a decision-making process as a hesitation between two possibles ends up bizarrely “reifying” these possibles into distinct things. Instead of their dynamic role within the decision-making process happening in consciousness, we think of them as objects of the external world as, say, two buttons A and B that we are choosing between.42 But in reality, the two possibles which we are deciding between are never available except as already forming part of the fluid stream of la durée, which considers first one, and then the other: Now, the tracks … are only given to the consciousness of a subject if they correspond to an experience of the subject. It is therefore inappropriate to consider them as being given simultaneously: we must recognise that they correspond more to successive experiences of consciousness.43 To further appreciate this point, consider the following example. Say you are deciding between two jobs, one in Aberdeen and one in Birmingham, and you are struggling to make up your mind. You are not immediately

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  145 drawn to one or the other. So you decide to draw up two lists of criteria or features for each option, comparing them and weighing which one is better. You start by thinking about Aberdeen and start mentally listing features of what taking the job there would entail: a1: close to the sea a2: lots of nice pubs a3: horrible weather a4: nice long summers And then you do the same with Birmingham: b1: close to London b2: better train links b3: nicer office b4: better weather In these two lists, a1–n describe individual features of the job in Aberdeen and b1–n of those in Birmingham. The customary way of analysing your final decision is to assume that the agent looks from one possibility to another and then considers which features matter more to them, perhaps even assigning values of preference (in units), and then seeing that, say, Aberdeen, outweighs Birmingham. Schematically, it can be represented like this: [a1(4 units) + a2(2 units) + …] > [b1(3 units) + b2(3 units) + …] For this particular agent, the fact that Aberdeen is closer to the sea (a1) is twice as important as the fact that there are lots of nice pubs there (a2). The fact that Birmingham is close to London (b1) is judged as being of roughly equal importance to the fact that it has good train links (b2). Once everything is put into the calculus, a decision follows. Bergson would find several faults with this analysis. The first is that the two lists leave out the fact that our picking out of these features is already a process that took place in time and expressed our character. For example, it seems like the author of the lists cares a great deal about pubs and London. These features do not exist independently of the agent’s decisionmaking process. Moreover, the process of shifting from one factor to the other, thereby oscillating between “Aberdeen” and “Birmingham” (a1, then b1, then a2, then b2, and so on, perhaps returning to some earlier features later) changes the things we were deciding between. You started with two vague unspecified entities reified into “things” with distinct labels attached to them (“Aberdeen” and “Birmingham”), but then realised that those

146  God, Time, and Freedom things changed in the decision-making process as you were drawing up the list of features to help you decide. Of course, this “fine-graining” of the two objects of choice will never go far enough, since it still “reifies” the individual features of the two options. You replaced two solidified objects “Aberdeen” and “Birmingham” with two sets of solidified features. But it is already a step in the right direction. “Aberdeen” and “Birmingham” gradually took on more specific contours. They became less blurry. They began to produce different impressions on you. Whereas Aberdeen started off at a1 as a place close to the sea, at a4 it becomes associated with the idea of long summers. Not to mention the fact that since past states of la durée qualitatively influence those that follow, the mental impression of the sea perhaps gets included in the idea of long summers (watching sunsets on the beach). Furthermore, it is not only Aberdeen and Birmingham qua possible choices that changed, you changed as well. When considering factor a1, you did not perhaps realise that proximity to London was an important factor. By the time you got to a4, you realised that you have a particularly strong nostalgia for long summer nights on the beach. The usual tendency to think of the decision-making as a fixed agent S and two fixed reified possibilities A and B (taking up a job offer in Aberdeen and Birmingham, respectively) is, upon closer inspection, a misrepresentation of what actually goes on when the decision is in progress. It is an indivisible continuous process in time, a process in which everything changes: both us and the things that we are deciding between. As Bergson comments: [W]hen we have to determine a future state of consciousness, however superficial it may be, we can no longer view the antecedents in a static condition as things; we must view them in a dynamic condition as processes since we are concerned with their influence alone.44 Picavet demonstrates that the situation becomes even more complicated when we throw more factors into the setup.45 Suppose we keep the same parameters of the situation, but instead Aberdeen and Birmingham do not designate jobs that you have already been offered, but jobs you are intending to apply for, having stipulated that you can only submit one application. Now, suppose you find out that you are more likely to be given the job in Birmingham rather than the one in Aberdeen. Do “Aberdeen” and “Birmingham” remain the same things that you were deciding between? Or does one appear in a different light than the other? Knowing the probability of one of these outcomes changes the probability of that outcome itself.46 This even further stresses the importance of considering the outcomes, the agent, and the decision-making process as one indivisible whole. In Picavet’s words: In these conditions, it is rather difficult to represent the choice between the options in the manner of (for example) the choice of a dish in a

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  147 restaurant, since the options are in fact actions with uncertain consequences. … To put it simply: we do not understand the decision if we only consider the objects of choice separately from the choice itself; we must also consider the manner in which they appear to the deciding agents.47 And here, of course, the way these choices appear to the individual agents changes as the decision-making progresses. The features of the retrospectively identified objects of choice do not exist independently of our contemplation of them. We assign values to them depending on the preferences we have as unique individuals. Whereas an agent S might be able to cope with the bad weather in Aberdeen because they like living by the seaside, this is not the case for agent T. And both of these agents can change their preferences as the decision-making unfolds. The preferences of the agent might change in the course of the decisionmaking process and as a result of the decision-making process. Perhaps, as they are deciding, agent S is suddenly overcome by a strange passion for gloomy foggy weather and their preferences begin to resemble those of agent T. The objects of choice exist qua objects of choice as seen through the preferential values of the decision-maker. And these preferential values are not fixed in advance of the decision. It would, therefore, be incorrect to say “Well, S’s preferences are such and such, so these are S’s possibilities with their values assigned.” Of course, the job in Aberdeen and the job in Birmingham, as well as the city of Aberdeen and the city of Birmingham, exist as two independent entities. But as such they do not feature in the decision-making. Inasmuch as they do feature in it, the terms “Aberdeen” and “Birmingham” designate two constantly changing impressions. Symbol and Image The tendency to picture the process of deciding using a schematic diagram of the branching tree also illustrates another crucial distinction within Bergsonian philosophy: that between symbol and image. We can start appreciating the difference between the two by looking at the following definition used by Arnaud Bouaniche: An image is an adequate representation of reality; a symbol creates a correspondence between two elements of a heterogeneous nature. A line on a map is an “image” of the advance of an army, as the army has crossed space: the branches of a given decision are, by contrast, a “symbol,” since when I choose, I do not travel on a path and its branches, but through temporal states.48 The difference between the example of the army and the branches is the following: the line on a map can represent the advance of the army because

148  God, Time, and Freedom both are spatial phenomena. They are commensurable. The branching tree of possibilities and the decision are incommensurable: the former is a spatial object, the latter is a purely temporal one. And, as we saw in Chapter 1, Bergson is particularly concerned about our tendency to “mix” the two and import features that belong only to the spatial representation into the process that it is supposed to represent. The individually subsisting options of decision are one example of such import. For Bergson, it is metaphysically dangerous to draw conclusions—for example, about the number of antecedent possibilities or the point in time at which the decision was taken—from the diagram. Philosophy, according to Bergson, has had an unhelpful habit of “using diagrams which have for us become reality itself.”49 But we must learn to leave the symbolic representation; otherwise, we end up misunderstanding what free will is. By using the “garden of forking paths” model, we treat as an image what is in fact a mere symbol.50 We need to return to reality and not philosophise about its symbolic representation. And this is difficult. Bergson warns that even when we do not explicitly appeal to such diagrams, they are almost always there at the back of our minds.51 Thinking of a temporal process in spatial terms just happens to be incredibly convenient. And although such symbolism is not always explicitly acknowledged, it tends to be presupposed, even if a different form of representation is adopted.52 Not everyone would agree with this. And many philosophers do not think that the mismatch between the “static” spatial representation and the purely temporal “dynamic” process causes any problems at all. Quite the contrary, some might argue that giving the mismatch too much metaphysical weight, however motivated by our intuitions it may be, is unjustified. For example, D. C. Williams argued that one of the reasons why many people struggle to accept the stasis theory of time (of which the B-theory discussed in Chapter 2 is an example) is a discomfort regarding the “mismatch” between reality and its representation that the theory forces us to accept: [T]he conceptual scheme is indifferently flat and third-personal, like a map, while the experienced reality is centripetal and perspectival, piled and palpitating where we are, grey and retiring elsewhere.53 Bergson would disagree with D. C. Williams (and indeed, D. C. Williams lists Bergson among the “time snobs” who put undue emphasis on the dynamic character of reality54). In Bergson’s view, something crucial is lost when we abandon the palpitating reality and focus purely on the conceptual scheme. Nevertheless, the metaphor of the map and reality that D. C. Williams uses is particularly useful for illustrating Bergson’s distinction between symbol and reality. Bergson concedes that the tree of

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  149 branching possibilities adequately represents the past. Once the decision has been taken, we can retrospectively analyse it using the spatial diagram. But what he wants to emphasise is that the diagram cannot represent the ­decision-making as it is happening. He does not question the heuristic assets of the map. But philosophy, in his view, should be providing an adequate account of reality, not of the map itself. If your holiday to France has just been cancelled, you would not feel satisfied if the travel company simply sent you a link to the Google Maps street view of Paris to explore on your way home from the airport instead. J. L. Borges has another great example that illustrates the perils of conflating the features of a representation with the features of the reality that it represents. His short story “On Exactitude in Science” from 1946 describes a fictional empire that became strangely obsessed with creating maps of extreme accuracy. Eventually, these maps started growing in size, to include as much information as possible. In the end, the empire’s cartographers constructed a map that was the size of the empire itself.55 That is the sort of price we have to pay if we want a representation to precisely mirror the reality that it represents. Cuthbert and Iguanas A few years ago I published a public outreach piece on the foreknowledge problem and was surprised by the number of non-philosophers who were familiar with what the problem was about and who decided to get involved in solving it in the comments section.56 Even readers who had never heard of the problem before were vaguely aware that there could be such a problem given certain orthodox parameters of classical theism. A superficial formulation of the problem is surprisingly simple: God is supposed to be omniscient. If He is omniscient (He knows everything), then He knows what I am going to do tomorrow. But that seems to imply that I have to do what God knows I will do since God cannot be wrong. But if I have to do it, then I am not free. That is the gist of it. Let’s look at a more technical formulation of the problem. William Hasker gives the argument in the following form: 1 Suppose that God infallibly believes at time t1 that Cuthbert will purchase an iguana at t3. (premise) 2 The proposition God believes at t1 that Cuthbert will purchase an iguana at t3 is accidentally necessary at t2. (from the principle of the necessity of the past)

150  God, Time, and Freedom 3 If a proposition p is accidentally necessary at t and p strictly implies q, then q is accidentally necessary at t. (transfer of necessity principle) 4 God believes at t1 that Cuthbert will purchase an iguana at t3 entails Cuthbert will purchase an iguana at t3. (from the definition of infallibility) 5 Thus the proposition Cuthbert will purchase an iguana at t3 is accidentally necessary at t2. (2–4) 6 If the proposition Cuthbert will purchase an iguana at t3 is accidentally necessary at t2, it is true at t2 that Cuthbert cannot do otherwise than purchase an iguana at t3. (premise) 7 If when Cuthbert does an act he cannot do otherwise, he does not do it freely. (principle of alternative possibilities) 8 Therefore, Cuthbert does not purchase an iguana at t3 freely.

(5–7)57

What we will do in the rest of this section is go through some of the technical notions used in the formulation of Hasker’s argument and demonstrate that the argument itself relies on or appeals to the postulates that we explored at the beginning of this chapter. (1) Premise 1 introduces the notions that the whole argument hangs on: God, infallibility, an agent (Cuthbert) and an act (purchasing an iguana). Infallibility is straightforward enough. It means that if God believes something, it must be true. God does not believe false propositions. This implies that if God believes that a certain proposition at a given time about a later time is true, the fact referred to by that proposition must occur. In terms of the agent, and the act, the argument proceeds along the following methodological lines: You randomly select an agent, pick a random act, throw in divine infallibility, and demonstrate that the act cannot be free. It all seems like an intuitive way of proceeding. Bergson would disagree. Already in Premise 1, we can identify Postulate 2, namely, the idea that the problem of free will and determinism is supposed to be a general problem. This postulate has to be assumed for the formulation of the

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  151 foreknowledge problem (or its solution) in general, such that it applies to all agents: me, you, or that person over there. This is why “Cuthbert” is selected as a general type of agent. The particular qualitative feature of that agent (Cuthbert) or the action (buying an iguana) should not matter. They are just stand-ins for any agent or any action in general. But as we know, Bergson says that there are no “free acts in general.” Just as there is no “great art in general.” Great art is frequently considered to be great art precisely because it subverts what all the previous pieces of art had in common. Let’s suppose that Cuthbert is a real person and that he is actually buying an iguana. While the application of the term “Cuthbert” refers to a precise set of qualitative features of the agent (his entire history up to the point of deciding)—and perhaps “iguana” to all the iguanas Cuthbert has seen in the past—the event of “Cuthbert purchasing an iguana” is, prior to its occurrence, based on purely impersonal aspects of past instances of purchasing, observing Cuthbert, and all iguanas combined. (The entity here is constructed in a similar way to the future “death of Queen Anne” that we encountered in Chapter 2.) There are many tokens of iguanas and purchases whose mutual differences are insignificant when subsumed under their respective types (“iguana” and “purchasing”) and there is nothing unique about the final act. Of course, this way of deconstructing the problem would probably look ridiculous to Hasker. The immediately obvious objection is that musing on who Cuthbert is or what iguanas he is buying is like asking scientists using the equation E = mc2 to specify whether the m refers to mass over here (a lump of coal) or the mass over there (a lump of gold). The m stands for any mass whatsoever because the specific qualities of mass (whether it is that of coal or gold) do not matter for the validity of the equation. Not so with human agents. There is no “agent in general.” We cannot just use a stand-in (Cuthbert) for any agent because any agent’s specific qualities enter into the free act. The procedure of assuming a “general” agent and a “general” act begins to look much more suspicious if we plug in a more specific agent and an act that is more “one-off” in nature. After all, why couldn’t we, if “Cuthbert” and “purchasing an iguana” are supposed to function as placeholders for any act whatsoever? Try to run the same argument again but instead use the premise that “God infallibly believes at t1 that Shakespeare will write Hamlet at t3.” You will immediately feel that there is something iffy going on. What is the content of God’s belief? What is the thing that the term “Hamlet” is being attached to if Shakespeare has not yet written it? What is the “otherwise” of writing Hamlet? Can Shakespeare decide not to create Hamlet? What would he actually be deciding about? Of course, it will probably be objected that here we just have a possible set of properties of which it may be true that they will be instantiated. But this cannot be the

152  God, Time, and Freedom case with Hamlet: such an instantiation would already be Hamlet even in the state of possibility. The argument about Cuthbert and the iguana may work in the case of simple propositions like people purchasing things. But we already know that these simple acts are to be found at the surface of the ego, in the parasitic self. That is not where free will is to be sought. (2) The notion of “accidental necessity” is opposed to “absolute necessity.” This is a distinction that runs through many of the classical solutions to the foreknowledge problem. If a proposition is absolutely necessary, it is true no matter what. Importantly, it is true no matter what happens in time. Propositions like “all bachelors are unmarried,” “two plus two is four,” or “there are no square circles” are absolutely necessary. By contrast, propositions that are accidentally necessary have the type of necessity attached to propositions about the past. This is what the “principle of the necessity of the past” means: the past is necessary in the sense that nothing can be done about it. “Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo” is accidentally necessary. We cannot do anything about it. But we cannot do anything about it now. There was a point in the past (before the battle of Waterloo) when something could have been done to make it false. Absolutely necessary propositions are not like that, they cannot fail to be true regardless of what happens in time. (7) Premise 7 explicitly asserts Postulate 3, the principle of alternative possibilities. It is worth noting that the principle of alternative possibilities is not just a recent analytic invention insensitively imposed onto the classical foreknowledge problem. We find the same idea in Aquinas too. He specifically says that “[w]e are said to be free in a decision when we can adopt one course and reject another: this is to choose. And so the nature of free decision has to be considered in terms of choice.”58 Premise 7 also illustrates Postulate 1, namely, that freedom and determinism are absolute. Cuthbert can either do otherwise and is free, or he cannot do otherwise and is not. There is no third option available. Solutions So much for the freedom and foreknowledge problem in a recent formulation from analytic literature. As we have seen, the argument relies on or operates with Postulates 1–3. Hasker also provides a survey of the available solutions. Even though it should now be apparent that the free will postulates that Bergson’s philosophy rejects are built into the framework designed to negotiate the problem, we will see that the postulates resurface again in its attempted resolutions. This section will explore three main families of solutions to the problem. It is worth noting that the easiest way of avoiding the argument’s conclusion is simply to deny one of the Hypotheses that we set off with in the Introduction (Hypotheses 1 and 2).

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  153 We can deny infallible foreknowledge or timelessness. However, we will not go into these options here.59 The solutions committed to the orthodox belief in timelessness (Hypothesis 1) and omniscience (Hypothesis 2) can be roughly classified into three groups: The first family of solutions owes its existence to William of Ockham (1287–1347). These responses rely on the observation that perhaps not all facts about the past are quite as necessary as one might think. On the one hand, some facts about the past are fixed and necessary and nothing can be done about them (e.g., the fact that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo). But then, there are other facts about the past that are intrinsically connected to future times. Despite the fact that they are about the past, they cannot be considered as over and done with until their “future component” has come to be. A fact of this sort would be, for example, “Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo 208 years before Matyáš submitted this book for publication.” As I write these lines, the book has still not been submitted. It is not yet over and done with. Therefore, neither is it yet decided that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo 208 years before I submit this book for publication until I submit this book for publication. The past fact depends on when I (freely) decide to submit the book and when. An example of such a fact that Hasker gives is “God believed at 6:00 this morning that John would have a cup of tea for lunch.”60 It looks like John (or the person giving him the tea) has control over that proposition, even though it concerns something in the past. In that specific sense, what we do now affects facts about the past—those facts about the past that include a future-oriented component. Such facts are not fixed. And some of God’s beliefs are supposed to be exactly like that. They are not necessary, either in the absolute or in the accidental sense discussed earlier. As a result, they do not necessitate the truths of future-oriented propositions that those beliefs are about (like Cuthbert buying an iguana).61 The Ockhamist solution, therefore, attacks premise (2) of Hasker’s argument. God’s belief is not accidentally necessary until Cuthbert freely decides to purchase the iguana. We do not need to go into the details of the various perils of the Ockhamist solution (the most notable one being the notion of having power over facts of the past). Crucially for our purposes, we see the first three postulates reappearing again. Postulate 1 (“free will and determinism are absolute”) is clearly present here; the Ockhamist solution does not have space for a gradation of freedom and determinism. It is an all-or-nothing game. Free acts can change the truth of God’s past beliefs, but determined events (“The sun rose at 6:32 in the morning”) cannot. We can also find Postulate 2 here, which insists on the free will problem being a general one: any future-oriented act can be subsumed under God’s past knowledge,

154  God, Time, and Freedom regardless of its content. And Postulate 3 is here too: God’s past beliefs are propositions about future-oriented acts that can turn out otherwise. The second type of solutions originated with Luis de Molina (1535–1600). God’s knowledge regarding free acts, according to Molina, is constituted by “counterfactuals of creaturely freedom,” statements of the following form: If a particular person were in such and such circumstances, they would freely do such and such acts. God has knowledge of these counterfactuals. He then merely providentially arranges for agents to be in the circumstances described by them and— surprise!—the agents do precisely as He expected. However, according to Molinists, this does not mean that the agents do not perform the act freely. Most critics of Molinism target the notion of these “counterfactuals of creaturely freedom.” What accounts for their truth status?62 Can they even take on truth values?63 Do they even count as counterfactuals of freedom?64 Can they really be separated from the circumstances that they are about?65 But again, the main problem here is the commitment to the postulates. A particularly interesting one to note here is Postulate 3. A counterfactual of freedom is simply a subjunctive reformulation of Postulate 3 (the principle of alternative possibilities); the “ability to do otherwise” is merely transposed from the realm of the actual world to the nearest possible world. But, conceptually, it still relies on the pre-existing availability of two different courses of action. The third solution originated with the philosopher Boethius (480– 524). It emphasises Hypothesis 1 from the Introduction. Boethian-style approaches try to solve the foreknowledge problem by appealing to the fact that God exists in eternity. The key intuition behind this method is summarised by Joseph Diekemper as follows: God’s beliefs are not in the past; rather, God and his beliefs are outside of time. So, technically, God does not foreknow anything, as there is nothing for him to foreknow. All the objects of God’s knowledge are eternally existing, tenselessly true propositions, and so are not true at any time, but are true simpliciter. … He can know them by observing all events in time as eternally present to himself.66 The Boethian solution, therefore, neutralises premise (1) of Hasker’s argument. God does not believe anything “at t1.” His beliefs are located outside of time. Recall the example of God on the top of the mountain: He can see the entirety of the path from above, even though the traveller moves on the path with their own freedom, through time.

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  155 The final chapter of this book will aim to articulate a new theory of freedom and foreknowledge. But where do we start? Do any of these families of solutions offer directions for avoiding the three postulates? The Boethian solution seems particularly suitable for our purposes for several reasons. First, it explicitly appeals to divine timelessness: Ockhamism does not, at first sight, seem to require a timeless God and the same could be said of Molinism.67 But the Boethian solution has timelessness at its very core. Second, the Boethian view was taken up by Aquinas’ writings on the foreknowledge problem. Of course, Boethius’ and Aquinas’ “eternity solutions” should not be conflated.68 But, as we will see in the next chapter, it is precisely Aquinas’ emphasis on divine causal knowledge that will allow us to plug Bergson’s understanding of free will into the Boethian eternity solution. This will allow us to evade the three postulates.

***

This chapter had two aims: to provide an overview of Bergson’s philosophy of free will and then to apply it to contemporary discussions about free will in analytic philosophy of religion. Its primary purpose was destructive. It tried to show that the way the freedom and foreknowledge problem is articulated relies on the first three postulates that Bergson would reject. Since all three were undermined, the formulation of the problem has been undermined too. The task of the next chapter is constructive. We will see that Bergson’s philosophy can provide not only a critique of the existing framework but that it can also generate its own account of freedom and foreknowledge. In the final chapter, we will put Bergson’s understanding of free will together with the picture of God and time defended in Chapter 4. The most serious threat to Bergson’s philosophy, however, is Postulate 4, which we have not even begun to discuss, even though it features in premise (3) of Hasker’s argument. We turn to it now. Notes 1 See Harry G. Frankfurt, ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility’, The Journal of Philosophy 66, no. 23 (1969): 829, https://doi.org/10.2307/2023833. 2 Harry Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, The Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 1 (1971): 5–20, https://doi.org/10.2307/2024717. 3 Susan Wolf, Freedom within Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 4 John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas, Four Views on Free Will (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 1–2. 5 Michael Rota, ‘The Eternity Solution to the Problem of Human Freedom and Divine Foreknowledge’, European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2, no. 1 (2010): 165, https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v2i1.359. 6 Robert Kane, ‘Introduction: The Contours of Contemporary Free-Will Debates (Part 2)’, in The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, ed. Robert Kane, 2nd edition

156  God, Time, and Freedom

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 20, https://doi.org/ 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195399691.003.0001. Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’. Kane, ‘Introduction’, 15. Robert Kane, ‘Libertarianism’, in Four Views on Free Will (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 45. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Co, 1913), 221. Bergson, 163–67. Bergson, 130. Bergson, 165. I am grateful to D. H. Mellor for pointing this out to me. Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 156. Alfred R. Mele, Effective Intentions. The Power of Conscious Will (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 37. Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 166. Bergson, 167, 231. Richard Swinburne, ‘Causation, Time, and God’s Omniscience’, Topoi 36, no. 4 (2017): 681, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9396-x; Alvin Plantinga, ‘On Ockham’s Way Out’, Faith and Philosophy 3, no. 3 (1986): 189–90, https:// doi.org/10.5840/faithphil19863322; Nelson Pike, ‘Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action’, The Philosophical Review 74, no. 1 (1965): 31, https://doi. org/10.2307/2183529. Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 238. For a classical formulation, see Roderick M. Chisholm, ‘Human Freedom and the Self’, The Lindley Lecture, 1964. John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 26. Allen W. Wood, ‘Kant’s Compatibilism’, in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Critical Essays, ed. Patricia Kitcher, First edition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 241, quoting Norman Kretzmann. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), 84. O. B. Sheynin, ‘Quetelet as Statistician’, Archive for History of Exact Sciences 36, no. 4 (1986): 298–306, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00357247. Jakub Čapek, ‘Les apories de la liberté bergsonienne’, in Annales bergsoniennes, ed. Frédéric Worms, vol. 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 254. Henri Bergson, L’Évolution du problème de la liberté. Cours au Collège de France 1904–1905, ed. Arnaud François (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2017), 334. Bergson, 65–67. Arnaud Bouaniche, ‘Dossier Critique’, in Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, by Henri Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), 247, note 77. Mark Sinclair, Bergson (London: Routledge, 2019), 74, https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9781315414935. Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 172.

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  157

























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Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  159 Bibliography Aquinas, St Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by Timothy Suttor. Vol. 11. Man (Ia.75–83). London and New York: Blackfriars, 1970. Bergson, Henri. L’Évolution du problème de la liberté. Cours au Collège de France 1904–1905. Edited by Arnaud François. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2017. ———. Matter and Memory. Translated by W. Scott Palmer and N. M Paul. New York: Zone Books, 1988. ———. The Creative Mind. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946. ———. Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen & Co, 1913. Borges, Jorge Luis. ‘On Exactitude in Science’. In A Universal History of Infamy, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, 139–41. London: Penguin, 1973. ———. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. In Labyrinths. Selected Stories and Other Writings, edited by D. A. Yates and J. E. Irby, 44–54. London: Penguin, 1970. Bouaniche, Arnaud. ‘Dossier Critique’. In Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, by Henri Bergson, 183–322. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013. Čapek, Jakub. ‘Les apories de la liberté bergsonienne’. In Annales bergsoniennes, edited by Frédéric Worms, 2: 249–59. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004. Chisholm, Roderick M. ‘Human Freedom and the Self’. The Lindley Lecture, 1964. Diekemper, J. ‘Eternity, Knowledge and Freedom’. Religious Studies 49, no. 1 (2013): 45–64. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412512000170. Fischer, John Martin, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas. Four Views on Free Will. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Flint, Thomas P. Divine Providence: The Molinist Account. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Frankfurt, Harry. ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’. The Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 1 (1971): 5–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/2024717. Frankfurt, Harry G. ‘Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility’. The Journal of Philosophy 66, no. 23 (1969): 829. https://doi.org/10.2307/2023833. Goris, Harm. Free Creatures of an Eternal God. Thomas Aquinas on God’s Foreknowledge and Irresistible Will. Leuven: Peeters, 1996. Hasker, William. ‘Divine Knowledge and Human Freedom’. In The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, edited by Robert Kane. Second edition, 38–54. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/ 9780195399691.003.0002. ———. God, Time and Knowledge. London and Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. ———. ‘The (Non-)Existence of Molinist Counterfactuals’. In Molinism: The Contemporary Debate, edited by Ken Perszyk, 25–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199590629.003.0002.

160  God, Time, and Freedom Jäger, Christoph. ‘Molinism and Theological Compatibilism’. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 5, no. 1 (2013): 71–92. https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr. v5i1.249. Kane, Robert. ‘Introduction: The Contours of Contemporary Free-Will Debates (Part 2)’. In The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, edited by Robert Kane. Second edition, 2–35. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. https:// doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195399691.003.0001. ———. ‘Libertarianism’. In Four Views on Free Will, 5–43. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Mele, Alfred R. Effective Intentions. The Power of Conscious Will. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Moravec, Matyáš. ‘New Year’s Resolutions – If the Future Is Preordained Can We Really Change?’. The Conversation, 31 December 2021. https://theconversation.com/new-years-resolutions-if-the-future-is-preordained-can-we-reallychange-172652. ———. ‘Revealing the Counterfactuals: Molinism, Stubbornness, and Deception’. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 92, no. 1 (2022): 31–48. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s11153-021-09824-9. Mullarkey, John. Bergson and Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Pariente, Jean-Claude. Le Langage et l’individuel. Paris: Armand Colin, 1973. Picavet, Emmanuel. ‘Action et Décision: Le Sens Des Interrogations de Bergson’. In Annales Bergsoniennes, edited by Frédéric Worms, 3: 191–216. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007. ———. Choix rationel et vie publique: Pensée formelle et raison pratique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996. Pike, Nelson. ‘Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action’. The Philosophical Review 74, no. 1 (1965): 27–46. https://doi.org/10.2307/2183529. Plantinga, Alvin. ‘On Ockham’s Way Out’. Faith and Philosophy 3, no. 3 (1986): 235–69. https://doi.org/10.5840/faithphil19863322. Rhoda, Alan. ‘The Philosophical Case for Open Theism’. Philosophia 35, no. 3–4 (2007): 301–11. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-007-9078-4. Rota, Michael. ‘Synchronic Contingency and the Problem of Freedom and Foreknowledge’. Faith and Philosophy 32, no. 1 (2015): 81–96. https://doi. org/10.5840/faithphil201531630. ———. ‘The Eternity Solution to the Problem of Human Freedom and Divine Foreknowledge’. European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2, no. 1 (2010): 165–86. https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v2i1.359. Sen, Amartya K. ‘Rationality and Uncertainty’. In Recent Developments in the Foundations of Utility and Risk Theory, edited by L. Daboni, A. Montesano, and M. Lines. Dordrecht and Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1986. Shanley, Brian J. ‘Eternity and Duration in Aquinas’. The Thomist 61 (1997): ­525–48. https://doi.org/10.1353/tho.1997.0001. Sheynin, O. B. ‘Quetelet as Statistician’. Archive for History of Exact Sciences 36, no. 4 (1986): 281–325. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00357247. Sinclair, Mark. Bergson. London: Routledge, 2019. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9781315414935.

Bergson and the Foreknowledge Problem  161 Swinburne, Richard. ‘Causation, Time, and God’s Omniscience’. Topoi 36, no. 4 (2017): 675–84. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9396-x. Williams, Donald C. ‘The Myth of Passage’. The Journal of Philosophy 48, no. 15 (1951): 457–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/2021694. Wolf, Susan. Freedom within Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Wood, Allen W. ‘Kant’s Compatibilism’. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Critical Essays, edited by Patricia Kitcher. First edition, 239–64. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Zagzebski, Linda. ‘Foreknowledge and Human Freedom’. In A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, edited by Philip L. Quinn and Charles Taliaferro, 291–98. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997.

6

Bergsonian Freedom and Divine Causality

The first five chapters of this book have argued for seemingly unconnected strands of thought. The first chapter defended Bergson against Russell by clarifying what the former meant by “spatialising time.” The second chapter argued that “spatialised time” is one of the two “times” of Bergson’s philosophy, the other and more fundamental being la durée. The third chapter used this insight to generate an idealistic philosophy of time. The fourth chapter defended the fundamental ontological being of reality on God and the fifth introduced Bergson’s theory of free will. This final chapter will weave all of these threads together to generate a model of God, freedom, and duration that safeguards both divine omniscience and human free will. The best way to get started is by observing that the predominant feature of la durée that this volume has been appealing to was its “synthesising” function. We used this function to demonstrate that la durée is the fundamental ontological instantiation of temporality and an ineliminable component of temporally extended objects. We also used it to argue that la durée is not only constitutive of the self but also that it cannot be disassociated from our perception of external reality. Until the previous chapter, no other aspect of la durée—for example, its creation of novelty, unforeseeability, or heterogeneity—played any significant role in any of the arguments. The first four chapters might as well have replaced la durée with time as the a priori condition of sensibility from Kantian metaphysics. Merely using la durée as the “great synthesiser” in the construction of the idealist ontology and its relation to God was deeply anti-Bergsonian. The fundamental cornerstone of Bergson’s entire philosophical enterprise was a critique of Kant and the way Kantian philosophy misunderstood time. Bergson argued that although the Kantians have appreciated the functional role that the mind plays in temporal ontology (the same one that it did in the ontology defended in Chapter 3), they have neglected its qualitative nature.1 Chapters 1 to 4 have only appealed to the functional role. La durée’s qualitative nature only began to feature in Chapter  5 in the response to the first three postulates. This chapter will further exploit DOI: 10.4324/9781003349044-9

Bergsonian Freedom and Divine Causality  163 la durée’s heterogeneity to address Postulate 4 and then show how its rejection opens the way for a new Bergsonian account of freedom and omniscience. Bergson and the Consequence Argument: Rejecting Postulate 4 Bergson’s discussion of the free will problem starts with his in-depth search for what the fundamental disagreement between determinists and libertarians is actually about. According to his interpretation, determinists argue that the same causes always produce the same effect, whereas the defenders of free will claim that the same causes can produce a different one. Say that I am sitting in my office at noon on Monday, there is a cake on the table, and I am hungry. So I eat the cake. According to the determinists, if exactly the same conditions obtained on Tuesday, I would be determined to eat the cake: no other option would be open to me. If on Tuesday I decide not to eat the cake, perhaps there was a hidden factor in my decision-making process that was left out. If the conditions were truly the same, I would behave exactly as I did on Monday. Free will defenders, by contrast, deny this. They claim that even if the conditions were the same again, I could have done differently. The immediate objection that one might put to Bergson is that this way of thinking about causality is outdated. In Time and Free Will, determinists are seen as arguing that for every moment in time, there is only one possible future, whereas we now know that at best we can assign a particular probability to a particular shape that the future might take. But probabilistic causation is nowhere to be found in Time and Free Will. This objection is valid. But, interestingly, Bergson’s argument does not attack the effects or the link between causes and effects. Bergson’s strategy is rather to attack the understanding of the term “cause” that both determinists and free will defenders seem to share. Notice the phrase “same causes” or “same conditions” that appeared throughout the first paragraph of this section. Bergson argues that this phrase is meaningless. No two mental states in la durée are ever identical. If he is right about this, and if no cause or no condition is ever the same, then the definitions of free will or determinism that their respective defenders operate with do not make sense. Why can no cause or condition ever be the same? As we have seen from Bergson’s treatment of la durée, this is because every moment of la durée is unique and unrepeatable. It never occurs again. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, and new elements of the ever-evolving heterogeneity take its place. For Bergson, the same cause will never “appear a second time on the stage of consciousness.”2 This observation is, of course, inseparable from Bergson’s theory of the fundamental and the parasitic self that we looked at in Chapter 5. It is only

164  God, Time, and Freedom the states of the parasitic self, and not of the fundamental self (which is la durée) that can be subsumed under causal relationships. At the level of the fundamental self, which is the qualitative multiplicity of la durée, the mental states are always different and thus escape the laws of causality. By contrast, in the parasitic self, which is the fundamental self projected or translated into quantitative multiplicity, the states can reappear. This is why they can partake of everyday causal relations. As far as the parasitic self is concerned, Bergson says, we are “conscious automatons.”3 Looking at the cake and sitting in my office might be causal factors that reappear. But they are obviously not the types of states that we find if we dig deeper into la durée. The parasitic self is incredibly useful for the mesh of social interactions and habits of practical life. Bergson refers to this mesh as the “veil” (le voile4), the totality of habits that require spatial ways of thought and that enable us to function efficiently in interactions with other people.5 But they are a veil that covers the true heterogeneity that lies underneath. The insistence that la durée is heterogeneous is one of the most fundamental components of Bergson’s philosophy. No two states of la durée are ever the same. Now, Bergson argues that the mistaken assumption that deep mental states can repeat is precisely what underlies the type of causal laws that feature in free will discussions.6 Kant, Bergson thinks, was particularly guilty of this assumption and was thereby led to believe that the same states can recur in the depths of consciousness, just as the same physical phenomena are repeated in space; this at least is what he implicitly admitted when he ascribed to the causal relation the same meaning and the same function in the inner as in the outer world.7 To see that Bergson’s critique of Kant applies equally well to the contemporary landscape, it is best to use what has come to be known as the “consequence argument” against the compatibility of free will and determinism as a study case. In its most general formulation, the argument says something along the following lines: we do not have control over the past. Neither do we have control over the link or the connection between the past and the future. Therefore, we do not control the future.8 The argument has been formulated in many different variations. For our present purposes, let’s use the most canonical version articulated by Peter van Inwagen: If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born; and neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. Therefore, the consequences of these things (including our present acts) are not up to us.9

Bergsonian Freedom and Divine Causality  165 In propositional form, we can reconstruct the argument as follows: P1: No one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature. P2: No one has power over the fact that the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every fact of the future (i.e., determinism is true, and we have no control over whether it is true or not). C: Therefore, no one has power over the facts of the future.10 Suppose it is now 11:00. At 10:55, you put water on the hob to boil. It is a fact of the past and you, therefore, have no control over it: you cannot, at 11:00, change the fact that you put water on the hob to boil at 10:55. You also do not have any control over the laws of nature that govern the boiling of water. But these laws dictate that when water is placed on the hob, it will boil. And (unless you interfere in the process), you have no power over that either. So it seems that, at 11:00, you have no control over the fact that the water will boil at a near point in the future. Of course, you might want to object that you can change the facts about the future by interfering in the process, say, by removing the kettle from the hob. But the consequence argument applies to the movement of your hand too. Your body is a physical object governed by the same laws that apply to the kettle of water. Bergson’s insistence on the unrepeatability of la durée does not apply to the external world of material objects. In the external world, the kettle I put on the hob every morning is the same from day to day. Of course, strictly speaking, the “facts” about the past are always generalisations: one billiard ball hitting another is never composed of exactly the same number of atoms from one experiment to another, and yet, we can predict where the second one will travel when hit by the first. Laws of nature do not have to range over particular facts, events, actions, or happenings. They can range over types thereof. While strictly speaking every billiard ball has a different mass and, strictly speaking, it has a different shape, the differences between the individual tokens of billiard balls are negligible. They may be subsumed under a single type: “billiard ball,” or rather “a sphere of roughly such and such shape and roughly such and such weight.” Can the same be said about mental states? Recall Postulate 4: Postulate 4: Causal laws apply to mental states. If Postulate 4 were true, then mental states would simply be facts subsumable under causal relationships.11 This would mean that the consequence argument could easily be reformulated to apply to la durée. If we have no power over our past mental states and over the fact that past mental states entail future mental states, then (if mental states entail our actions)

166  God, Time, and Freedom we have no power over our actions. In the same way that instantiations of certain types of movements of a billiard ball in one direction determine the instantiation of later types of events of another billiard ball moving in another direction, we could equally well say that types of one mental state (e.g., “anger”) determine the future mental state and the action that results therefrom (“shouting at someone”). This threat to the freedom of la durée is significant. If true, it would make the validity or non-validity of the first three postulates more or less irrelevant. If la durée is subject to causal laws that govern any two of its states, then there is no fundamental self. And Bergson’s critique of the framework of the foreknowledge argument is irrelevant too. If there is no free will, it does not really matter how we formalise it (since there is nothing to formalise) or how we relate God’s omniscience to free acts (since there are no free acts). Bergson’s philosophy, however, offers a way of responding to this challenge. For Bergson, the difference between the internal and the external multiplicity, between the fundamental and the parasitic self, is central for articulating questions about free will. Several given states of the external world (like the movements of billiard balls in space) can be considered as tokens of the same type. But, as we saw in Chapter 5, the moments of la durée are always uniquely tokened. Once a mental state has occurred in la durée, it is never instantiated again.12 This is precisely why, in Bergson’s view, the usual notions of causality cannot apply to the ever-changing qualitative multiplicity. The concept of causal law relies on the possibility of things reappearing in the same shape and form again. This cannot be the case with the immediate data of consciousness. As Miravalle comments: The great category mistake enters in, says Bergson, when we insist on having causes for every conscious event. The error lies in conceiving our mental states as separate pieces, with some bits here and other bits there, all of which need to be connected with causes.13 The unrepeatability of mental states is what guarantees the inapplicability of causal laws to them. And if causal laws do not apply to la durée, then neither can the consequence argument. Alice and Flamingos We can use the insight that the consequence argument applies to the external quantitative multiplicity but not to la durée to argue as follows: P1: The facts about the past come in two varieties: (i) facts occurring in objective time time (i.e., facts about the external physical world) and (ii) facts occurring in la durée (mental states).

Bergsonian Freedom and Divine Causality  167 P2: No one has power over the facts about the past. This applies both to (i) facts occurring in objective time and (ii) facts occurring in la durée. P3: Laws of nature together with facts about the past do not entail future facts occurring in la durée. C: Laws of nature together with facts of the past do not entail every fact about the future. Some comments on the premises above are in order. P1 states that there are two sets of facts about the past: those of the external multiplicity (and, by extension, the parasitic level of the self) and those of the internal multiplicity (la durée and the fundamental self). (“Facts about the past” is simply shorthand for “facts about events that occur at times in the past.”) That such a distinction exists follows from Hypothesis 4 in the Introduction to this book. P2 simply states that nothing can be done about the past, be this the past of the external multiplicity or of la durée. Our past mental states are what they are and there is nothing we can do about them now. P3 follows from the observation that laws of nature only apply to facts about the external world. They do not apply to la durée. So, as the argument concludes, they do not entail future facts about la durée but only facts about the external multiplicity occurring in objective time. Now, although we got the result we wanted (we neutralised the second premise of the consequence argument), we ended up with a bizarrely bifurcated picture of reality.14 On the one hand, the future states of la durée (e.g., the feeling of satisfaction I will experience once I finish writing this chapter) are not entailed by causal laws. But, on the other hand, facts about the future occurring in objective time (e.g., the event of me opening a can of beer as a result of the satisfaction I experience once I finish writing this chapter) are. What a strange conclusion! It initially seemed like the division of facts of the past into those about la durée and those about the external multiplicity was harmless. True enough, one set consists of uniquely tokened types and the other of types with potentially several tokens, but both subsets were still fixed, determinate, and causally unaffectable. But since the consequence argument only applies to one of these subsets, we ended up with a strange picture of the future. Some facts in it are entailed by laws of nature (i.e., the facts about the external quantitative multiplicity occurring in objective time) and some (i.e., facts about la durée) are not. What is the relation between them? There must be some sort of connection since facts about la durée ordinarily entail facts about the external world. For example, the can of beer would not be in my fridge had it not been for my mental state of anticipation of finishing this chapter. Luckily, there is a way out of this problem. The argument above completely ignored the difference between la durée and the trace it has

168  God, Time, and Freedom left of itself in the past. We seem to have fallen prey to the retrospective illusion. But this can easily be rectified in two steps. First, observe that any action taking place in the future is entailed both by facts or events occurring in objective time but also by facts in la durée. My future act of leaving the coffee shop is entailed both by external facts about the past (e.g., my years of developing caffeine addiction or where the shop was built) but also by facts about la durée (e.g., my deep feeling of resentment towards the coffee shop’s owner). The future act depends on both of these. However, as we have seen previously, la durée is always present. In other words, facts about la durée only ever exist in the present. Never in the past or future. That they do not exist in the future is clear enough; assuming that they exist in the past is the retrospective fallacy we encountered in Chapter 1. This means that there are only the following sets of facts: a set of past objective-time facts b set of present la durée facts c set of future objective-time facts There are only ever present la durée facts. What does this mean in practical terms? Focus on your current state of mind. If you look back into the past, you will see facts about objective time: time intervals, times on the clock, but also the trace of la durée in the past refracted through spatialised time. The same is the case if you look into the future; by projecting recombinations of elements that you have experienced in the past into it (recall the case of Substance3 from the Bergsonian articulation of the Queen Anne example in Chapter 2). However, if you truly focus on your present, that is where you will find la durée. Bergson frequently insisted on the fact that la durée is only ever found in the present. Once it becomes past or once it is projected into the future, it spatialises. Second, we can use this observation to eliminate the bifurcation of reality into two levels. La durée has a causal effect on objective-time facts. My feeling of longing to return to Scotland (a deep-seated present fact about la durée) causes me to transport the set of atoms that composes my body to the set of atoms that compose the city of Edinburgh. My durée affects the external multiplicity and the shape that the external world will take in the future. The set of future objective-time facts is causally dependent on present facts about la durée. By appealing to this insight, we can formulate an updated version of the earlier argument: P1: Facts about the future depend on (i) la durée, (ii) past objective-time facts, and (iii) causal laws. P2: We can have power over la durée. C: We can have partial power over facts of the future.

Bergsonian Freedom and Divine Causality  169 What is this power, mentioned in P2, over the present facts of la durée? For Bergson, this consists in the power that we have, at rare moments, to descend into the fundamental self, introspect its deep states, and focus on the private, unique, personal, creative facts that constitute our character, letting them rise to the surface. The “can” in P2 is tied to Bergson’s repudiation of Postulates 1 and 2. Our power to be free is not a given. We do not always have it. It appears rarely and only at moments of intense deliberation. But we can have that power if we abandon the parasitic self and dive into the fundamental level. On a more technical note, the argument above relies on the hidden premise P3: P3: If I have power over x, I have partial power over (x & y). If I have power over Cécile, but not over Danceny, it is still true that I have partial power over them as a couple. If I can ruin even the tiniest bit of icing on the cake, I have partially ruined the whole cake. If I have power over some facts about the future, I have partial power over the facts of the future. La durée inserts our power over the shape of the world into the concatenation of objective-time facts governed by causal laws. Both are required: la durée and causal laws. A world where we had no power over objective-time facts would be the type of world implied by the consequence argument. But a world where we had complete power over the shape of the world would be incoherent. We should not expect to have complete power over all the facts occurring in objective time. No matter how hard we delve into our fundamental self, we will never be able to change the movement of the planets. But we do have power over some future facts, those that result from the mixture of our present deliberation, objective-time facts, and the laws of nature. The following passage from Peter Geach is extremely instructive here: If men are to act freely there must be both some determinism and some indeterminism in the world. … [M]en would not be capable of free action if all their instruments and the materials they acted upon behaved with individual capricious ways: we should be in the predicament of Alice trying to play croquet with live flamingos for mallets and live hedgehogs for balls. But equally we could not play croquet if the ball and mallets moved and impinged on one another as the stars in their courses, in a way that could be predicted regardless of the rules of the game or the players’ aims.15 La Durée and Singular Causation Before we apply all of the above to the freedom and foreknowledge problem, we have to make a brief detour.

170  God, Time, and Freedom The preceding discussion has been pretty silent on what “causal laws” precisely mean here. This silence was intentional. Bergson clearly meant his theory to apply both to “laws of nature” and to the types of causalities that we might incorrectly try to ascribe to the indivisible dynamic progression of mental states. He denied that any causation could ever apply to la durée, though he did agree that there was still a certain “prefiguration,” “preformation,”16 or “emanation”17 of one mental state from another. In either case, the discussion above vaguely understood “causal laws” to be generalisations over phenomena in the external world. This understanding of causality required these phenomena to be tokens of types over which such generalisations could range. I argued that events in the external world can be understood as tokens of general types. But la durée may not, since the states of la durée are always uniquely tokened. If we encounter mental states that look like they could be subsumed under generalisations, they are states of the parasitic self. We then used this observation to negate Postulate 4. The implicit idea behind this manoeuvre was this: since causality ranges over types, and the mental states of la durée are always uniquely tokened, causal laws cannot range over la durée. But this move was fallacious. Analytic philosophy has developed a theory of causation that does not necessarily rely on generalisations. This is the theory of singular causation. Singular causation is causation understood as this causing that (e.g., this glass of water spilling causing this paper to disintegrate) as opposed to causal links ranging over multiple generalised phenomena (e.g., “water causes paper to disintegrate”).18 This implies that causality does not necessarily require types and generalisations, and it can easily range over tokens. Singular causation is, as David Armstrong defines it, “a direct relationship between one token state of affairs and another such.”19 At first sight, this might seem like a good thing. Singular causation resonates pretty well with what Bergson says about the one-off nature of the causal relationship linking any two (retrospectively individuated) mental states. In Time and Free Will, for example, Bergson declares that “a deepseated inner cause produces its effect once for all and will never reproduce it.”20 Once we have accepted that every mental state is uniquely tokened, these tokens can be linked by relations of cause and effect, without implying that they are tokens of a type. At most, they are tokens of a “singular type,” a type that has just one instantiation. The Bergsonian can then rejoice that the type of relationships that Bergson posits between mental states can be articulated in contemporary analytic language. But simply equating Bergson’s “prefiguration” of la durée with singular causation can have deeply troubling consequences. This is because analytic philosophers have managed to find a way to build necessity into singular causation.21 And if necessity can be built into singular causation, the

Bergsonian Freedom and Divine Causality  171 equating of Bergson’s “prefiguration” with it completely negates Bergson’s original point of using la durée’s uniqueness to show that human agency escapes the “meshes of [causal] necessity.”22 Does this mean that Postulate 4 is true after all and that la durée can be subsumed under causal laws and fed directly into the consequence argument? Not necessarily. A closer look into what necessity means when attached to singular causation shows that singular causation can be what Bergson had in mind. Let’s take a recent article by M. J. García-Encinas as an example. García-Encinas defends the possibility of necessity in singular causation. She faults Hume with presuming that if something cannot be known a priori—and it seems like most statements of causation cannot be known in this way—then it cannot be necessary. This is wrong. We know from Kripke that there can be a posteriori necessities.23 Singular causation is one of them. However, upon closer inspection, García-Encinas’ necessity is not the type of necessity that Bergson was so worried about. Not all necessities are equal. García-Encinas appeals to Kripke’s account of necessity to show that the link between cause and effect is necessary in the same sense as the link between Hesperus and Phosphorus is: it is an example of a posteriori necessity. But this understanding of necessity merely means that this effect can only have this cause, not that the effect is “necessitated,” “determined,” or “forced” by the cause. The following quote from GarcíaEncinas is particularly instructive here: [C]ausation is necessary in the sense that a given effect cannot have a different cause from the one it actually has, for if it had it would be another effect (which is contradictory); and a given cause cannot have a different effect from the one it actually has, for if it had, it would be another cause (which is contradictory).24 Bergson would probably agree that if this is all that is meant by necessity, then the defender of la durée does not need to worry about free will being under threat. If “necessity” means nothing more than that this mental state is what it is because it is causally linked to that mental state that preceded it (and that it can be no other), it is perfectly compatible with Bergson’s insistence on every mental “cause” only ever producing its effect once. So is Bergson’s “prefiguration” of la durée an instance of singular causation after all? My intuition is that the conceptual similarities here should not be over-emphasised. It does not seem that we can do with la durée what can be done with singular causation. Articulating it in terms of counterfactuals is just one example.25 Furthermore, most analyses of singular causation focus exclusively on physical processes or events, and it is not altogether clear to what extent such a causal relationship could be applied

172  God, Time, and Freedom to purely mental phenomena. The link between singular causation and laws of nature is already difficult enough; the link between singular causation and mental states would probably be even more tricky to work out. In either case, to end this detour, singular causation need not trouble us here. The theory here assumes that causality does not apply to la durée. But if it does, then it must be singular (not general) causality. And if it is singular causality, then the type of necessity involved in it does not negate what Bergson says about free will but seems compatible with it. Temporal Fatalism and Causal Determinism Since Bergson’s philosophy neutralised the first three postulates that were the cornerstones of Hasker’s argument against the compatibility of free will and divine omniscience, it would now be tempting to just close this book and declare that the foreknowledge problem is resolved. If the first three postulates were false, then the freedom and foreknowledge problem that we encountered in Chapter 5 dissolves. And if the consequence argument does not apply to la durée either, then free will is real and is inextricably tied to la durée just like Bergson thought. Sadly, things are not that easy and we are not out of the woods just yet. While Bergson’s philosophy may have assuaged the threats to free will from natural causality, putting God into the picture brings in a new threat. A good way to start appreciating the severity of the problem at hand is to differentiate between two separate issues pertaining to human free will as they are discussed in Aquinas. Harm Goris calls these the problem of “temporal fatalism” and the problem of “causal determinism.”26 The problem of “temporal fatalism” is diachronic. It concerns the relation between the temporal present and the future truth of propositions forming God’s knowledge of the temporal realm: [T]he immutability of God’s eternal foreknowledge, signified in human language by a past tense, seems to lead to fatalism. For it implies the temporally antecedent truth (“fore-truth”) of propositions about contingent future events and thus a necessary outcome of these events.27 The problem here, in simple terms, is this. If God knew yesterday what I will do tomorrow, then the propositions about what I do tomorrow have to be true. If they are true, then I cannot do otherwise and have no free will. This is the problem of freedom and foreknowledge discussed in the previous chapter. It is precisely this problem that Bergson’s analysis of free will discussed in the present chapter and the previous one applies to. As we have seen, according to the temporal ontology proposed in Chapters  3 and  4,

Bergsonian Freedom and Divine Causality  173 there is no independently existing future in la durée to which the truth of propositions could attach. So the problem does not get off the ground. The problem of “causal determinism,” by contrast, is synchronic. It concerns the divine causation of being which is one of the central components of the temporal ontology from Chapter 4. God’s will in causing esse is always necessary. It never fails. So, Goris asks, how can there be any contingencies at all?28 If everything depends on God, then my actions depend on God too. But if my actions depend on God’s giving being to them, how can I resist and do otherwise?29 Recall that the temporal ontology proposed in Chapter 4 relied heavily on God’s “causal knowledge” suggested by Brian Shanley. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann have criticised Shanley precisely on these grounds: “If God causes human acts,” they ask, “then in what sense is it possible for any human being to act otherwise than she does?”30 It seems like emphasising God’s creation of being and moving away from the “Big Viewer” picture causes more problems than it resolves: On Shanley’s view, if a human will is in state A, God knows that it is, and his knowing it causes the will to be in state A. And it is very hard to see how God’s causing the will to be in state A doesn’t constitute coercing the will to be in state A.31 In the end, Shanley is forced to appeal to the inexorably mysterious nature of divine creation. He affirms that “Aquinas’s silence about exactly how it all works is not an oversight or a failure of nerve, but rather an acknowledgement of the limitations of human thought in the face of divine transcendence.”32 We saw that Bergson’s philosophy can deal with the diachronic problem of “temporal fatalism.” But can the temporal ontology developed in the first four chapters help when it comes to the synchronic problem of “causal determinism”? Bergson’s lack of a ready-made temporal ontology makes things difficult. Since we plugged in this gap in his metaphysics with a combination of ontological idealism on the diachronic side and divine causation of being on the synchronic side, the latter inevitably ushers in the problem of Goris’ causal determinism. The Diachronic Problem: Free Will and Temporal Ontology This section will provide further details on how the temporal ontology advocated in Chapter 4 averts the problem of “temporal fatalism.” The next section will do the same with the synchronic problem of “causal determinism.”

174  God, Time, and Freedom F. C. T. Moore says that the primary purpose of Time and Free Will was to destroy an old structure of thought, whereas the project of Matter and Memory was to rebuild it.33 We have used Bergson’s writings from Stage 1 in more or less the same way, by applying them to undermine the argument against the compatibility of free will and divine omniscience. But we have not rebuilt anything yet. And Bergson’s own apparatus for rebuilding what Stage 1 has destroyed is not available to us, since we decided to limit la durée to the human mind. So we have to start where Time and Free Will left off and continue from there. In his 1904–1905 lectures at the Collège de France, Bergson talks of organisms as “contingency machines,”34 analogously to the way he speaks about living beings in Matter and Memory as “zones of indetermination.”35 We will limit this claim to human beings here. Bergson himself later conceded that there is something unique about the type of contingency introduced into the universe by humans (as opposed to that introduced by other living beings).36 If Bergson is right about this, then there is something special about the contingency springing from human activity. This does not imply, of course, in the way that Bergson later imagined in his engagement with Einstein, that our human frame of reference should be used as a basis for extending a single absolute real time ticking away throughout the universe. But it does imply that la durée does not only ground the existence of the temporally extended universe. It also enables us to change the shape of the universe itself. The usual picture implied by analytic theories of time consists of a spacetime block to which our immediate perception is related as the perception of colour is to a particular object. The block would be the same with or without our perception of it. On the theory advocated here, by contrast, free will brings in its own causation which directly impacts the shape of the space-time block itself. We earlier came across Aquinas’ and Boethius’ metaphor of the travellers journeying on the path seen by God from the top of the mountain. A much better metaphor here would be one of our building a house to get to its top floor. It is we who determine how tall the building is going to be, which stairs lead to the top, and how we use the bricks on the floors below to access it. The Bergsonian picture of the universe developed here is deeply anthropocentric. There may not be a unique future or a unique present in terms of objective time, but there is only one unique future affectable by conscious acts. It is the part of the space-time block contingent with respect to the present in which an individual durée exists. The word “individual” is really important. The Bergsonian picture of reality defended here is deeply egocentric too. There is only one future relative to your durée or mine, not to any la durée “in general.” It does not particularly matter whether the laws of nature describing the universe are deterministic (as Bergson thought)

Bergsonian Freedom and Divine Causality  175 or probabilistic. What matters is that you and I can make a difference to your and my future, either in the sense of “making an absolute difference in what would otherwise obtain without us” or in the sense of “making a difference in the probabilities of future events” through conscious duréedependent activity. If the existence of objects in the future is relative to and partially dependent on an individual durée and if la durée is intrinsically connected with free will, then its progressive unfolding can be used to ground the direction of time. This is particularly fitting since we know from Chapters 2 and 3 that “time,” however understood, is inseparable from the human mind. And again, I mean that in the idealist sense: it is your mind and mine, not “mind in general.” There is only one future in objective time, but there is only one future for you and for me, not for “humans” or “our frame of reference” or something of the sort. Richard Swinburne says that “the future is that realm of the logically contingent which it is logically possible that an agent can now affect.”37 The theory defended here denies the existence of a single future. Your future is that realm of the logically contingent which it is logically possible that you can now affect. For Bergson, free will is the domain where la durée and objective time intersect.38 Whereas la durée is purely mental, it is the shape it takes that results in creative novel action in the external world. Without the mind, the world, on its own, is governed by causal laws that may show indeterminacy or indeterminism, but not conscious decision-making. The mind, however, has an effect on the particular shape the world takes. A good way to contrast the view advocated here with others is by seeing how the Bergsonian model of agency answers the question: “Why do we not know the future?” The first response comes from Pierre-Simon Laplace, who regarded the universe as fully deterministic. He thought that the only reason why we do not know the precise shape that the future was going to take had to do with the limited amount of information we have about the current and past state of the universe. We just do not know enough: We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the  beings who compose it … would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes. The human mind offers, in the perfection which it has been able to give to astronomy, a feeble idea of this intelligence.39

176  God, Time, and Freedom Bergson frequently referenced this passage and criticised it for reasons which should now be obvious40: astronomy works with objective time which can be contracted. La durée needs to be lived through. The second response to the question of why we do not know the future comes from presentism or the growing-block theory: we do not know the future because it does not yet exist. There is nothing there to be known. The third response is the eternalist one: we do not know the future because we are causally separated from it. But it does exist. According to the idealist Bergsonian view defended here, you do not know your future simply because you do not yet know how you are causally going to affect it. You do not know what sort of character you are going to be by the time you get to the point of objective time which you are anticipating as the point where you will decide. Your current you will not be taking that decision and you cannot project yourself into the decisionmaking process because what you are projecting will no longer exist. As Bergson says: The reason why it is absurd to say that an action, a free action, could have been foreseen if we know perfectly the conditions and the character [of a person], is that we can never know perfectly the character, for the simple reason that it does not yet exist as it will [exist] at the moment when the decision will be taken, ….41 The self we will be when we take that action will have been in the process of being created until the very moment when we act. In his De Interpretatione, Aristotle provided one of the best-known arguments for logical fatalism: his famous sea-battle paradox.42 Consider the following two propositions: 1 There will be a sea battle tomorrow. 2 There will not be a sea battle tomorrow. Aristotle assumes that only one of these has to be true. Suppose it is the first one. Well, if it is true, then the sea battle will happen tomorrow and there is nothing we can do about it. Suppose it is the second one. If that one is true, then the sea battle will not happen tomorrow and there is nothing we can do about that. In both cases, there is nothing we can do about the battle either happening or not happening. No matter what will (or will not) actually happen, it is already entailed by the fact that at most one of these propositions has to be true.43 Aristotle’s argumentative moves need not worry us. The argument is also much more sophisticated than I have made it to be here. A more interesting question is: why do we feel so uncomfortable about the conclusion

Bergsonian Freedom and Divine Causality  177 of the argument? It is because it stands in a grey area between natural causality and human agency. We do not feel particularly uneasy about the fact that we cannot do anything about the sun rising tomorrow. But we would feel very uneasy if we were told that we could not do anything about, say, feeling existential anguish in a week’s time. Whether the sun will or will not rise tomorrow is determined, and it is obvious we cannot do anything about it. It excludes all possibility of our conscious causal contribution. Not so with existential anguish. The counter-intuitiveness of Aristotle’s conclusion regarding the sea battle consists of the intuitive feeling that there should be something we could do to either stop or launch the battle ourselves. Perhaps we could travel to the location of the battle and successfully convince all the soldiers to go home. The sea battle that is future for us stands precisely at the intersection of our own mental life (say, our moral conviction that we are obligated to stop sea battles) and of the external world (it is an event happening nearby). Not all layers of the future are equal. Just like the fundamental self, the future is arranged in spheres or layers around la durée. At the deepest fundamental self of la durée, there is complete freedom, at the furthest level (movements of planets and galaxies), complete determinism. The fact that there is a continuum between the immediately internal (over which we can have significant power) and the distantly external (over which we have none) is well illustrated by the climate crisis and questions about the Anthropocene. What were previously regarded as processes governed by unaffectable laws of nature (wind, rain, and changing of seasons) now become strangely consequent upon human free decisions. One could feasibly imagine a situation where we shoot rockets at distant planets to remove them from their orbits, thus letting the causality of la durée “leak” further and further into the purely natural. The Synchronic Problem: Divine Omniscience and Human Agency But where is God in all this? The diachronic picture of our relation to the future has to be supplanted with the divine causation of esse, capturing the most fundamental ontological relation between God and human agency.44 On Aquinas’ view, the fundamental divine causation of being comes together with authentic free human activity to produce an effect: the divine causation of esse is transcendental and sustains genuine free human agency.45 I agree. But to avoid the conclusion of Hasker’s argument (and the diachronic problem of temporal fatalism), free will has to be understood along Bergsonian lines. The divine causation of esse is synchronically related to the diachronic relation between la durée and the free act. In the simplest terms, this means

178  God, Time, and Freedom the following: once la durée results in a free act, God gives being to that very act. God gives it being but the shape and nature of the action are still dependent on la durée. The divine giving of being does not prevent la durée from being free, thus circumventing Goris’ causal determinism. A detailed suggestion for conceptualising the synchronic axis of divine causation (without the diachronic account of Bergsonian free will defended here) has recently been developed by Hugh McCann.46 McCann emphasises the fact that divine causation of esse includes human actions. To see this, imagine a particular action, say boiling a cup of tea. Sit in your chair and imagine this. The action has mental existence in your head. Now, McCann asks, what needs to be done in order for the action to exist? What needs to happen in order for it to have real existence, not just mental existence?47 McCann points out that its existence must have a source and goes through a list of candidates for this source.48 The first possible source that McCann considers is mental content. Sadly, this does not work. “Causes are supposed to be concrete things. The contents of our mental states are, by contrast, abstracta, and abstracta are generally considered to be causally inert.”49 The mental content leading to the action we take might provide an explanation, but explanation is not causation. It is worth noting that the same applies to la durée. Bergson’s duration cannot sustain itself in existence. This is why just articulating the diachronic account of Bergsonian free will is not enough. La durée also cannot sustain in existence the temporally extended objects that it grounds: they owe their existence to it only partially, as we have seen in Chapters 3 and 4. God’s causation of esse is indispensable. The second candidate that McCann looks at is laws of nature. But this does not work either. Causal laws do not speak about existence. Causal processes are not a case of “the past conferring existence on the future.”50 The final candidate that McCann looks at is agent causation. Mental content or laws of nature cannot confer existence to an action. But maybe the agent performing the action can do so. In a sense, my boiling the kettle seems to be the case of me giving the event of the kettle boiling existence. Unfortunately, agent causation cannot do the job, since it leads to a vicious regress. Why? If agent causality is used to account for the existence of an action that results from it, then what could possibly account for agent causation itself? We have replaced the trouble of explaining the existence of an action with the trouble of explaining the existence of a particular instance of agent causation.51 Having gone through these failed options for explaining the existence of an action, McCann observers that there remains another, more viable option: Neither agents nor events turn out to be much good at existence conferral. … But the issue need not be left at this. There is a third sort

Bergsonian Freedom and Divine Causality  179 of causation, namely the primary causation ascribed in traditional theology to God as creator.52 McCann’s suggestion is particularly suitable for our purposes because it specifically links the divine causation of being with agency and free will. It can therefore be used to provide the link between the Bergsonian account of free will on the diachronic axis and the divine causation of being on the synchronic axis. This ensures that we retain free will on the diachronic axis (using Bergson) and the dependence of things on God on the synchronic one (as defended in Chapter 4).53 The following passage from McCann is particularly instructive: [W]e need to realize that on this picture God never makes us do anything, in the sense in which worldly causes are said to make things occur. … Our decisions and actions lose none of their spontaneity or intentionality, because God’s role as primary cause is to provide simply for their existence. … That my decision to dine at the Asian restaurant owes its being to God’s creative act does not prevent its being prompted by my desire for Asian food, or its teleological explanation as a means of fulfilling that desire.54 McCann is right. My account, however, adds that the decision to dine at the Asian restaurant should be analysed using Bergson’s account of free will. The esse of the act depends on God, its shape or form depends on la durée. This is missing from McCann (and Shanley too), whose account of agency is not Bergsonian and relies on some of the postulates that Bergson rejects.55 Re-Creationism and Occasionalism I hazard a guess that most people who try to visualise the way that God created the world picture Him setting things in motion and then observing whatever unfolds in it—like Boethius’ observer from the top of the mountain—and occasionally interfering with human affairs. We already saw in Chapter 4 that this way of looking at things is incorrect. It turns out that the alternative model of God’s relation to time defended in this book, one that tries to avoid this detached “Big Viewer” fallacy, looks very similar to another theological view about divine creation: re-creationism or “continuous creation theory.” Before we wrap up, a few words need to be said about the relationship between the Bergsonian theory of free will and re-creationism. The re-creationist theory states that in the end there is not really that much of a difference between God’s causing the being of things and His keeping or sustaining them in being. Or in other words, there is no

180  God, Time, and Freedom difference between the divine action of creating a thing and sustaining it in existence.56 This is equivalent to the view that the only reason why the universe survives from one moment to another (instead of falling into nothingness) is that God is continuously creating or recreating it from one moment to the next.57 Some scholars have recently argued that re-creationism is, in fact, the orthodox Christian position.58 Things do not have a “self-sustaining” physical feature that would enable them to persist from one moment to another. This has to be provided by God.59 And one might certainly appeal to a host of biblical texts to support the continuous creation theory (e.g., Colossians 1:17; Hebrews 1:3). Aquinas seems to say something very similar to it60 and so does Augustine.61 The Bergsonian theory of freedom and foreknowledge overlaps with re-creationism in a number of interesting ways. First, there is the claim about God’s continuous creation of timeless reality which is being synthesised by la durée. If God stopped providing this reality, there would be nothing for la durée to synthesise. Second, there is also the claim that the causation of la durée and divine provision of being converge in the free act. As we saw in the discussion of McCann’s argument, without God’s giving being to the act, the free act could not happen. So where is the problem? Why have theologians been reluctant to accept re-creationism? There have been several objections put against the continuous creation theory. Due to the similarities between it and the Bergsonian model defended here, the same objections apply to the latter. The first objection against re-creationism revolves around the charge of occasionalism. Occasionalism is the view that there are not really any genuine causes at all beyond God. True enough, other causes in the world, like your freely causing an act to take place may look like genuine causes, but, in fact, they are mere “occasions” for God to exercise His own causality on which everything depends.62 No agent ever has their own powers and, by extension, neither do they have free will. It might look like they do, but it is purely God recreating reality one moment after another. So the risk here is that by adopting re-creationism (where everything that happens in the universe has to be sustained by God), we have thrown free will out of the picture altogether. The problem is best assuaged by remembering that McCann’s account of God conferring existence on our actions does not remove the unique distinctive creative causality of la durée. Of course, McCann does not articulate the relation between an agent and free actions using Bergsonian duration, but the quote below is particularly instructive in explaining why the continuous divine causation of esse does not necessarily imply occasionalism: From my point of view, there are of course possibilities to be settled, and I alone decide my destiny by employing my will as I do. But I am not

Bergsonian Freedom and Divine Causality  181 pre-empted in this by God. That he should approve, and thereby lend existence to my decisions, in no way undercuts my autonomy in making them, nor does it diminish my responsibility for every intention I form, and every action I undertake.63 To paraphrase this in the language of the Bergsonian theory: the fact that God gives esse to our actions does not remove the freedom of la durée understood along Bergsonian lines. The second major problem with re-creationism, one that is particularly pertinent to our theory, is that it seems to invite a rather unwelcome picture of God’s relation to temporal reality. Andrew Pavelich warns about this: The image that emerges is one of God as a kind of filmmaker, who creates successive frames of a film, and does so in time, and then strings them together sequentially, generating time for the characters of the film.64 This image runs into the usual problems connected with the eternal creation of the temporal realm: the universe is not, on this view, “genuinely temporal” at all.65 It merely looks like it is to the characters in it, but in reality, it exists in much the same way as B-theorists think it does: as a series of states of affairs (the frames of the film from Pavelich’s metaphor) at different locations of the space-time block. The image of God as a filmmaker also seems to imply that God might very well change the past, in the same way that previous frames in a film may be edited at any given point. Pavelich thinks this goes heavily against our general intuitions regarding what “time” is: While it may make sense to God that one earthly moment happened before another, we are working on the assumption that divine time is not ours—and hence it would not therefore make any earthly sense to say that there is a past or a future. … The conclusion to reach from these considerations is that on a re-creationist picture, time—at least insofar as we can understand it—is not real.66 The best way to respond to this second objection is to clear up some ambiguities inherent in the passage just quoted. Note that Pavelich talks about “genuinely” temporal reality, or “time,” or the question of time “not being real.” These are all terms that we have spent a great deal of effort trying to clarify in the first two chapters of this volume. These clarifications are useful here too. And the primary point on which to rely in addressing Pavelich’s second objection is the distinction that Bergson draws between la durée and its trace. Bergson himself strongly argued against thinking of the world with the help of the “cinematographic” metaphor.67 The individual slices of the

182  God, Time, and Freedom time film may only be recognised retrospectively, once they are in the past of la durée. In la durée, as it is developing, time is indivisible. The existence of these individual frames or “slices” of reality, which constantly “begin anew”68 may only be recognised ex post facto, since, at the moment when the reality that constitutes them was being created, they were part of the indivisible present. When God creates (or, rather, re-creates), there are no such slices. Once He has created, they belong to the past. And (as we saw in Chapter 5), not even God can change the past. God always creates in a particular present of a given durée. It is therefore not surprising that He cannot cause creative change somewhere where His creative activity is not located, namely, in the durée’s past. The same goes for the claim about there being no past or future or the claim about time not being real: as we saw in Chapter 2, we have to distinguish between la durée (which is real, but indivisible) and objective time (which is also real, but coextensive with B-theoretical time). The universe is “genuinely temporal” in both senses. It is genuinely temporal both because it is constituted by la durée, but also because la durée’s trace is B-theoretical. And B-theorists certainly think that B-theoretical time is “real time.” The machinery of appealing to two “real times” allows the re-creationist to maintain both that God creates (or is recognised as having created) one moment after another but also to maintain that time is fully real. Wrapping Up The preceding chapters of this volume have argued for a diverse set of points: for temporal ontology affirming two real “times” (la durée and objective time), for ontological idealism about time, for divine causation of being, and for a Bergsonian account of free will. It is time to wrap up and summarise how the different pieces of the puzzle fit together. This chapter has responded to two problems of divine foreknowledge: the synchronic problem of temporal fatalism and the diachronic problem of causal determinism. These problems provide a useful framework for summarising the Bergsonian account of freedom and foreknowledge articulated here. The diachronic axis provides an account of the past, the present, and the future. The present is a given durée, the past is spatialised objective time, and the future is the direction in which reality is constantly being created by God and us. The qualitative difference between the past, present, and future relative to any given durée guarantees that the Bergsonian account of free will escapes Postulates 1–4, and, by extension, the problem of temporal fatalism. On the synchronic axis, God is posited as the timeless source of being and His causation of esse is coextensive with His knowledge of the world. A given agent whose mind is la durée (located in the present of the diachronic

Bergsonian Freedom and Divine Causality  183 axis) synthesises the timelessly provided esse into continuous temporally extended reality. This reality is, nevertheless, indivisible in the present; its division can only be performed on the trace of la durée in the past of the diachronic axis. And the same applies to free acts, where the divine duréebased causality constantly shapes the divinely provided esse. This ensures that we can locate a source for every human action, which, however, does not impede there being free will on the diachronic axis. This view has one important consequence. Ontologically, the present is crucial. It is la durée. It is where creation happens. The present is “pushed forward” by us as agents whose minds synthesise the divinely provided timeless being in intimate two-level cooperation with God as its source. Our future, and the particular shape it takes, is constantly changed by our free actions. The future is constantly being created by God’s provision of esse and durée’s freedom.

***

Bergson insisted that free will is creative, but that it does not create out of nothing.69 In a similar vein, Ingthorsson criticises the growing-block theory for holding that new slices of reality come into existence. He thinks that affirming a continuous addition of being to the already existing past requires creatio ex nihilo, which, according to him, is “as occult as magic and miracles.”70 I disagree. This addition of new reality to that which already exists is exactly what my theory affirms. The fact that a theory of God, freedom, and duration ends up having at its heart divine creation out of nothing is, in my view, an argument for that theory rather than against it. The take-home lesson of this book is the following: the present holds the key to explaining divine causation. The relation between the indivisible durée and divine esse in the present is the “melting pot” in which our mind’s contact with divine creativity occurs. Everything else (the breaking down of the past of la durée into segments, the extrapolation of temporal sequence into the future, the setting up of objective time and its systematisation by science, etc.) happens ex post facto. Notes 1 Henri Bergson, L’idée de temps. Cours au Collège de France 1901–1902, ed. Gabriel Meyer-Bisch (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019), 67–69. 2 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Co, 1913), 199. 3 Bergson, 168. 4 See Bergson, L’idée de temps. Cours au Collège de France 1901–1902, 77. 5 Arnaud Bouaniche, ‘Dossier Critique’, in Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, ed. Henri Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013), 233, note 59.

184  God, Time, and Freedom





















­

Bergsonian Freedom and Divine Causality  185 26 Harm Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God. Thomas Aquinas on God’s Foreknowledge and Irresistible Will (Leuven: Peeters, 1996), 54. 27 Goris, 61. 28 Goris, 55, 62; see also W. Matthews Grant, Free Will and God’s Universal Causality. The Dual Sources Account, Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy of Religion (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 1–10. 29 Hugh McCann, ‘Free Will and the Mythology of Causation’, in Alternative Concepts of God. Essays on the Metaphysics of the Divine, ed. Andrei A. Buckareff and Yujin Nagasawa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 234–52, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198722250.003.0014. 30 Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, ‘Eternity and God’s Knowledge: A Reply to Shanley’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 72, no. 3 (1998): 441, footnote 8, https://doi.org/10.5840/acpq199872329. 31 Stump and Kretzmann, 442, footnote 11. 32 Brian J. Shanley, ‘Divine Causation and Human Freedom in Aquinas’, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 72, no. 1 (1998): 116, https://doi. org/10.5840/acpq19987216. 33 Francis Charles Timothy Moore, Bergson: Thinking Backwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5. 34 “L’organisme c’est … une machine à contingence.” (Bergson, L’Évolution du problème de la liberté. Cours au Collège de France 1904–1905, 115, my translation.) 35 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 39. 36 See Bergson, L’Évolution du problème de la liberté. Cours au Collège de France 1904–1905, 118. 37 Richard Swinburne, ‘God and Time’, in Reasoned Faith: Essays in Honor of Norman Kretzmann, ed. Eleonore Stump (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), 211. 38 I am grateful to Frédéric Worms for this observation. 39 Pierre Simon de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, trans. Frederick Wilson Truscott and Frederick Lincoln Emory, First edition (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902), 4. 40 See for example Bergson, L’Évolution du problème de la liberté. Cours au Collège de France 1904–1905, 302–03. 41 “La raison pour laquelle il est absurde de dire qu’une action pourrait être prévue, une action libre, si l’on connaissait parfaitement les conditions et le caractère, c’est qu’on ne peut pas connaître parfaitement le caractère, par la raison très simple qu’il n’existe pas encore tel qu’il sera au moment où la décision sera prise.” (Bergson, 119–20, my translation; see also Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), 8. 42 Aristotle, The Categories. On Interpretation, trans. Harold P. Cook, Loeb Classical Library (London and Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1962), IX, 135. 43 This (highly simplified) reconstruction is based on Robin Smith, ‘Aristotle’s Logic’, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Winter 2022, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2022/entries/ aristotle-logic/. 44 See for example St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. T. C. O’Brien, vol.  14. Divine Government (Ia2ae.103–9) (London: Blackfriars, 1975), IaQ105a5.

186  God, Time, and Freedom 45 See Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God. Thomas Aquinas on God’s Foreknowledge and Irresistible Will, 301; Brian J. Shanley, ‘Beyond Libertarianism and Compatibilism: Thomas Aquinas on Created Freedom’, in Freedom and the Human Person, ed. Richard Velkley, vol. 48, Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 85. 46 McCann, ‘Free Will and the Mythology of Causation’. 47 McCann, 235–36. 48 McCann, 236. 49 McCann, 236. 50 McCann, 245. 51 McCann, 243. 52 McCann, 247. 53 Although I do not argue for this, I believe that the view defended here is compatible with the traditional account of primary and secondary causation. Prima facie, there does not seem to be any reason why the non-temporal primary causation of esse and the secondary durée-based causation would not map onto the Thomistic model of concurrence and of providence. For more on this, see the recent “dual sources” account defended in Matthews Grant, Free Will and God’s Universal Causality. The Dual Sources Account. 54 McCann, ‘Free Will and the Mythology of Causation’, 248. 55 For a commitment to Postulate 3, for example, see McCann, 234. 56 Jonathan L. Kvanvig and Hugh McCann, ‘Divine Conservation and the Persistence of the World’, in Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism, ed. T. V. Morris (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 15. 57 Andrew Pavelich, ‘On the Idea That God Is Continuously Re-Creating the Universe’, Sophia 46, no. 1 (2007): 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0010-y. 58 Kvanvig and McCann, ‘Divine Conservation and the Persistence of the World’, 15. 59 Kvanvig and McCann, 37–41. 60 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 14. Divine Government (Ia2ae.103–9):IaQ104a1. 61 St Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, vol. 1 (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 1:IV.12. 62 Pavelich, ‘On the Idea That God Is Continuously Re-Creating the Universe’, 12. 63 McCann, ‘Free Will and the Mythology of Causation’, 250. 64 Pavelich, ‘On the Idea That God Is Continuously Re-Creating the Universe’, 17. 65 Pavelich, 18. 66 Pavelich, 18. 67 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 7. 68 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 139. 69 Bergson, L’Évolution du problème de la liberté. Cours au Collège de France 1904–1905, 118. 70 Röngvaldur D. Ingthorsson, McTaggart’s Paradox (New York: Routledge, 2016), 127, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315559636.

Bibliography Aquinas, St Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Translated by T. C. O’Brien. Vol. 14. Divine Government (Ia2ae.103–9). London: Blackfriars, 1975.

Bergsonian Freedom and Divine Causality  187 Aristotle. The Categories. On Interpretation. Translated by Harold P. Cook. Loeb Classical Library. London and Cambridge, MA: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1962. Armstrong, D. M. A World of States of Affairs. Cambridge Studies in Philosophy. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Augustine, St. The Literal Meaning of Genesis. Translated by John Hammond Taylor. Vol. 1. New York: Newman Press, 1982. Bergson, Henri. Histoire de l’idée de temps. Cours au Collège de France 1902–1903. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2016. ———. L’Évolution du problème de la liberté. Cours au Collège de France 1904– 1905. Edited by Arnaud François. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2017. ———. L’idée de temps. Cours au Collège de France 1901–1902. Edited by Gabriel Meyer-Bisch. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2019. ———. Matter and Memory. Translated by W. Scott Palmer and N. M Paul. New York: Zone Books, 1988. ———. The Creative Mind. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946. ———. Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen & Co, 1913. Bouaniche, Arnaud. ‘Dossier Critique’. In Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, by Henri Bergson, 183–322. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013. Danks, David. ‘Singular Causation’. In The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning, edited by Michael R. Waldmann, 201–16. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199399550.013.15. Davidson, Donald. ‘Mental Events’. In Essays on Actions and Events. Second edition, 207–27. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. https://doi.org/10.109 3/0199246270.001.0001. Ellis, Brian. ‘Causal Laws and Singular Causation’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61, no. 2 (2000): 329. https://doi.org/10.2307/2653654. García-Encinas, M. J. ‘A Posteriori Necessity in Singular Causation and the Humean Argument’. Dialectica 57, no. 1 (2003): 41–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1746-8361.2003.tb00254.x. Geach, Peter. Providence and Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Goris, Harm. Free Creatures of an Eternal God. Thomas Aquinas on God’s Foreknowledge and Irresistible Will. Leuven: Peeters, 1996. Ingthorsson, Röngvaldur D. McTaggart’s Paradox. New York: Routledge, 2016. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315559636. Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity. Malden, Oxford and Victoria: Blackwell, 1981. Kvanvig, Jonathan L., and Hugh McCann. ‘Divine Conservation and the Persistence of the World’. In Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism, edited by T. V. Morris, 13–49. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1988. Laplace, Pierre Simon de. A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities. Translated by Frederick Wilson Truscott and Frederick Lincoln Emory. First edition. London: Chapman & Hall, 1902.

188  God, Time, and Freedom Matthews Grant, W. Free Will and God’s Universal Causality. The Dual Sources Account. Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy of Religion. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. McCann, Hugh. ‘Free Will and the Mythology of Causation’. In Alternative Concepts of God. Essays on the Metaphysics of the Divine, edited by Andrei A. Buckareff and Yujin Nagasawa, 234–52. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198722250.003.0014. McKenna, Michael, and D. Justin Coates. ‘Compatibilism’. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, 5 November 2019. https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/compatibilism/. Miravalle, John-Mark L. ‘The Trinity’s Choice: Oppy, Bergson, and God’s Decision to Create’. Philosophy and Theology 27, no. 1 (2015): 153–69. https://doi. org/10.5840/philtheol20155825. Moore, Francis Charles Timothy. Bergson: Thinking Backwards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pavelich, Andrew. ‘On the Idea That God Is Continuously Re-Creating the Universe’. Sophia 46, no. 1 (2007): 7–20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-007-0010-y. Shanley, Brian J. ‘Beyond Libertarianism and Compatibilism: Thomas Aquinas on Created Freedom’. In Freedom and the Human Person, edited by Richard Velkley, 48: 70–89. Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007. ———. ‘Divine Causation and Human Freedom in Aquinas’. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 72, no. 1 (1998): 99–122. https://doi.org/10.5840/ acpq19987216. Smith, Robin. ‘Aristotle’s Logic’. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, Winter 2022. https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/win2022/entries/aristotle-logic/. Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann. ‘Eternity and God’s Knowledge: A Reply to Shanley’. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 72, no. 3 (1998): 439–45. https://doi.org/10.5840/acpq199872329. Swinburne, Richard. ‘God and Time’. In Reasoned Faith: Essays in Honor of Norman Kretzmann, edited by Eleonore Stump, 204–22. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Van Inwagen, Peter. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. ———. ‘The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism’. Philosophical Studies 27, no. 3 (1975): 185–99. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01624156. Zagzebski, Linda. ‘Eternity and Fatalism’. In God, Eternity and Time, edited by Edmund Runggaldier and Christian Tapp, 65–80. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011.

Conclusion

Russell presented the critique of Bergson discussed in Chapter 1 to The Heretics Society in Cambridge in March 1912. In the published version of the talk, he made the following claim: One of the bad effects of an anti-intellectual philosophy, such as that of Bergson, is that it thrives upon the errors and confusions of the intellect. Hence it is led to prefer bad thinking to good, to declare every momentary difficulty insoluble, and to regard every foolish mistake as revealing the bankruptcy of intellect and the triumph of intuition.1 Over a hundred years after Russell made these remarks, in September 2019, Bergson and analytic philosophy met in Cambridge again, at a two-day workshop which attempted to undo the rejection of Bergson by the early analytic philosophers.2 In his paper presented at the event, Frédéric Worms joked that Henri Bergson actually “invented analytic philosophy” but only to criticise it.3 According to Bergson, the division of knowledge attainable by particular immediate experience (what Bergson called “intuition”) and that accessible by general abstract reasoning (“analysis”) offered two ways of thinking about reality. The first path was Bergson’s own, the second was opted for by Russell and the analytic tradition. One of the aims of this study was to bring these two paths together again on the turf of the philosophy of religion. This book has provided a new model of God’s relation to time based on Bergson’s philosophy and showed that such a model is consonant with the core of the Thomistic solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge and human free will. The human present turned out to be the key intersection between God, freedom, and duration. I would like to close this book with two more general speculative remarks: the first about the future of interactions between Bergson and analytic philosophy of religion, the second about the freedom and foreknowledge problem as such.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003349044-10

190 Conclusion The first point has to do with Bergson and analytic philosophy. In the Introduction to this book, I mentioned that translating Aquinas into the language of analytic philosophy is fraught with difficulties. Despite this, “Analytical Thomism” is very much alive in contemporary academia.4 It seems that there is currently a similar movement towards “Analytic Bergsonism,” that is, towards a general way of thinking along Bergsonian lines but at the same time using the methods and stylistic precision of analytic philosophy. As a matter of fact, this is already postulated by the Kyoto Manifesto. We need to imagine—why not?—an analytic Bergson, a philosophically clean-shaven Bergson, as Deleuze said about Marx. Such experiments are not intended for the perverse pleasure of watching Bergson turn in his grave.5 If such a movement of “Analytic Bergsonism” were to arise, I very much hope that this book is not the last contribution to it from a philosopher of religion.6 Since analytic philosophy of religion is a thriving area of research, the avenues where Bergson could be relevant are innumerable. The first topic that comes to mind is the philosophy of religious language. In the talk mentioned at the opening of this Conclusion, Worms observed an inherent tension in the original French title of Bergson’s seminal La Pensée et le mouvant from 1934. The title is enormously difficult to translate (hence the rather strange English title Creative Mind). There is an intentional ambiguity inherent in the French term “pensée” between “thought” (i.e., the noun la pensée) and “that which has been thought” (i.e., the past participle of “penser”). The second of these contrasts radically with “le mouvant” (the present participle of “mouver”). The most accurate translation of the French original would thus be something like “That Which Has Been Thought and That Which Is Moving.” Bergson repeatedly insisted that reality is always, in a sense, confined to the present, and thought and language to the past. Therefore, he concluded, concepts and words cannot adequately capture reality. Where I defined the 1910s and 1920s as crucial moments in analytic philosophy of time for its engagement with Bergson, one could look further beyond the 1960s and 1970s as key moments in analytic philosophy of language and explore whether a fully worked-out Bergsonian philosophy of religious language is possible. This exploration could prove particularly fruitful considering the fondness Bergson had for the usage of metaphors and the existence of a long tradition of thinking about religious language along metaphorical lines.7 But there are other sub-fields of philosophy of religion where Bergson’s thought is highly relevant. For example, an enormous amount of work could be undertaken on modality and its role in the philosophy of religion. If Bergson’s thought on actuality being prior to possibility is correct, how does this reposition the frequently iterated claim that God creates the best possible

Conclusion  191 world or at least from among the best? There have already been several brief attempts at relating Bergson’s thinking to possible-world semantics.8 But exploring a full Bergsonian account of possibility, contingency, necessity, and their relation to God would provide new and exciting ways of thinking about modal questions in analytic philosophy. Similarly, analytic philosophers could be interested in the potential of Bergson’s writings on mysticism9 for the philosophy of religious experience or religious pluralism. A particular focus here should be given to Bergson’s final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, which did not feature in this monograph at all. The second general point is about the topic of the monograph: the freedom and foreknowledge problem. It might surprise the reader to find out on the final pages of this book that its author is an agnostic. Why, then, did I become so fascinated by the freedom and foreknowledge problem? There are several reasons for this. The first is that although I do not know whether God exists, I feel pretty certain that the purported incompatibility of freedom and foreknowledge cannot be used as an argument against His existence in the way that, for example, the problem of evil is sometimes used to demonstrate the internal incoherence of the notion of God. The second is the puzzling simplicity of the problem: the riddle can pretty much get going with fairly minimal and purely philosophical presuppositions about the nature of God and free will. (Whether the problem can be resolved without more specific doctrinal or theological commitments is less obvious to me.) The third reason why philosophers should be interested in the foreknowledge question (even if they disbelieve in the existence of God or if it is not the case that they believe in the existence of God) is that the problem lies at the intersection of various non-theological questions about the nature of time, freedom, or persistence. The non-theist may thus learn a great deal from addressing it, just like students—in the words of one magazine article published when I was starting my undergraduate studies in theology—should study theology even if they do not believe in God.10 The fourth, and main reason, why I have decided to write about this problem is that by its very nature, God-talk exposes the limitations of human language and the tools used to reason about reality. It has always seemed to me that the philosophy of religion was one of the few areas where the sometimes rather suffocating strictures of analytic philosophy permit and require loosening. Some think that such a loosening is an argument against the legitimacy of God-talk. I think, by contrast, that this loosening should be exploited for the introduction of new voices, like that of Bergson, into analytic methodology. Notes 1 Bertrand Russell, ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’, The Monist 22, no. 3 (1912): 337, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist191222324. 2 The papers were later published as the inaugural issue of a new journal in Bergson studies, see Matyáš Moravec, Caterina Zanfi, and Frédéric Worms, eds.,

192 Conclusion

3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10

‘Reassessing Bergson’, Bergsoniana 1, no. 1 (2021), https://doi.org/10.4000/ bergsoniana.280. Frédéric Worms, ‘Thinking in Bergson’s Philosophy’ (Reassessing Bergson, Pembroke College, Cambridge, 2019). For a classical overview of this movement, see Paterson Craig and Matthew Pugh, Analytical Thomism. Traditions in Dialogue (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006). Élie During and Paul-Antoine Miquel, ‘We Bergsonians. The Kyoto Manifesto’, trans. Barry Dainton, Parrhesia 33 (2020): 19. It certainly is not the first. See Anthony Feneuil, ‘Percevoir Dieu? Henri Bergson et William P. Alston’, ThéoRèmes 2 (2012), http://journals.openedition.org/ theoremes/310. See Janet Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). A. W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 414–19, https://doi.org/10.1017/ CBO9781139029223; James W. Felt, ‘Why Possible Worlds Aren’t’, The Review of Metaphysics 50, no. 1 (1996): 66–68. Anthony Feneuil, Bergson. Mystique et Philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011). Tara Isabella Burton, ‘Study Theology, Even If You Don’t Believe in God’, The Atlantic, 30 October 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/ 2013/10/study-theology-even-if-you-dont-believe-in-god/280999/.

Bibliography Burton, Tara Isabella. ‘Study Theology, Even If You Don’t Believe in God’. The Atlantic, 30 October 2013. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/ 2013/10/study-theology-even-if-you-dont-believe-in-god/280999/. Craig, Paterson, and Matthew Pugh. Analytical Thomism. Traditions in Dialogue. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. During, Élie, and Paul-Antoine Miquel. ‘We Bergsonians. The Kyoto Manifesto’. Translated by Barry Dainton. Parrhesia 33 (2020): 17–42. Felt, James W. ‘Why Possible Worlds Aren’t’. The Review of Metaphysics 50, no. 1 (1996): 63–77. Feneuil, Anthony. Bergson. Mystique et Philosophie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011. ———. ‘Percevoir Dieu? Henri Bergson et William P. Alston’. ThéoRèmes 2 (2012). http://journals.openedition.org/theoremes/310. Moore, A. W. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139029223. Moravec, Matyáš, Caterina Zanfi, and Frédéric Worms, eds. ‘Reassessing Bergson’. Bergsoniana 1, no. 1 (2021). https://doi.org/10.4000/bergsoniana.280. Russell, Bertrand. ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’. The Monist 22, no. 3 (1912): ­321–47. https://doi.org/10.5840/monist191222324. Soskice, Janet. Metaphor and Religious Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. Worms, Frédéric. ‘Thinking in Bergson’s Philosophy’. Pembroke College, ­Cambridge, 2019.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abbot, Edwin 121 absolute necessity 152 accidental necessity 152 agent causation 132–133, 178 Albert the Great 123n9 Analytical Thomism 4, 190 Analytic Bergsonism 190 analytic philosophers 2–3, 5, 60, 68, 74, 101–102, 110, 170, 189, 191 analytic philosophy 1–3, 6–7, 13, 98, 101, 104, 109, 130–136, 138, 150, 170, 189–191; and Bergsonism 26; NeoHegelianism 49; of religion 28, 74, 131–133, 135, 155; time in 40, 75; time perceived 57 Anne, Queen of Great Britain 50–52, 59 Anthropocene 177 “anti-intellectualist” philosophy 14, 27 Aquinas, Thomas 2, 4, 97, 98, 102, 108, 123n9, 125n54, 174, 180; Commentary on the Sentences 123n9; dependence on God 111–115 Aristotle 4, 108, 176–177; De Interpretatione 176 Armstrong, David 170 A-series/theory 41–42, 48, 50, 56, 57–61; and temporal ontologies 67–71 Bardon, Adrian 43, 46 Benjamin Button (Fitzgerald) 57

Bergson, Henri-Louis 1–3, 108, 126n68, 189; anti-intellectualist philosophy 14, 27; as A-theorist 57–58, 60; and consequence argument 163–166; Creative Evolution 14, 27, 29, 32–33; Creative Mind 15, 27; dependence on la durée 106– 111; Duration and Simultaneity 27, 31; and foreknowledge problem 130–155; Introduction to Metaphysics 29; la durée 15 (see also la durée); La Pensée et le mouvant 190; Matter and Memory 27, 29, 31–32, 50, 72–73, 75, 96, 116, 174; vs. McTaggart’s view of time 44; multiplicities 23–25; overview 3; rejecting Postulate 4 163– 166; Russell on 14–15, 27–30; on space 15–23; on space vs. time 23–25; spatialising objection 60; temporal existence 72; on time 15–23; Time and Free Will 6, 17, 19, 23–24, 27, 29–30, 32, 44, 54, 96, 107, 120, 135, 141, 163, 170, 174; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion 191 Bergsonian freedom 7, 162–183 Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism (Maritain) 98 Bergsonians 1–2, 7, 29, 110; temporal ontology 107; time, and eternity 95–122

194 Index Bergsonism 2–3, 13–14, 26, 29, 130; history of 78; and Russell 33; and Thomism 97–98 big viewer: and causal knowledge 101–104; fallacy 101–102, 179; God as 101, 173 Boethius 99, 103, 154–155, 174, 179 Bonaventure 123n9 Borges, Jorge Luis 141; “On Exactitude in Science” 149; “The Garden of Forking Paths” 141 Bouaniche, Arnaud 147 British metaphysics 98 B-series/theory 41–43, 49–50, 100, 148; and real time philosophers 56; and temporal ontologies 67–71; see also objective time Carr, Wildon 14 causal determinism 172–173, 178, 182 causal knowledge 102, 118, 173 causal laws 132, 164–171, 175, 178 Christian theologians 104 cinematographic metaphor 181 circle: centre of 98–101; circumference of 98–99; and mountain 98–100 colours 110, 116–117, 120–121 colour spectrum, and la durée 19–23 Commentary on the Sentences (Aquinas) 123n9 compatibilism 132–134, 138–139 conscious automatons 164 consciousness 30, 32; and objective time 46–47; and temporality 44; and time 24; see also human consciousness consequence argument: Bergson and 163–166 continental tradition of philosophy 3, 40 contingency machines 174 continuous creation theory 179 Costelloe-Stephen, Karin 14, 26, 29 counting 17; and space 17 Craig, William Lane 101 creation 29; divine 114, 116, 173, 179, 183 Creative Evolution (Bergson) 14, 27, 29, 32–33

Creative Mind (Bergson) 15, 27 creative synthesis 2, 6 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant) 16–17, 24, 28 C-series 43, 59 Cuthbert 149–152 decision theory 144 De Interpretatione (Aristotle) 176 Deleuze, Gilles 40, 190 dependence: on God 111–115; on la durée 106–111 Deppe, Sonja 47, 48 determinism 131; causal 133, 172–173, 178, 182; compatibility of free will and 131–132, 139, 163–165; complete 137, 177; event-causal 133; noncausalist or simple 133 diachronic problem: free will 173–177; temporal ontology 173–177 divine causality 162–183 divine cognition 80, 123n9 divine creation 114, 116, 173, 179, 183 divine eternity 114 divine foreknowledge 1, 74, 130–131, 182, 189 divine omnipresence 104–105 divine omniscience 177–179; see also omniscience divisibility: qualitative multiplicity 23; quantitative multiplicity 23 Dorato, Mauro 85–86; Time and Reality 85 Dummett, Michael 45 Duration and Simultaneity (Bergson) 27, 31 During, Élie: “We Bergsonians: The Kyoto Manifesto” 1 entension 105 epistemological idealism 74–78 eternalism 68, 78 eternalist ontology 71, 100 eternity 99; and Bergsonian time 95–122; as centre of circumference 99; divine 114; and time 101–104 “Eternity” (Stump and Kretzmann) 101 event, defined as 54 event-causal determinism 133

Index  195 external objects 23, 82, 116 external reality 107, 162 extramental reality 108–111 Fischer, John Martin 133 Fitzgerald, F. Scott: Benjamin Button 57 foreknowledge problem: Bergson and 130–155; Cuthbert and Iguanas 149–152; four postulates 130–140; no cupboard of possibles 141–147; rejecting Postulate 2 140–141; rejecting Postulate 3 141–147; solutions 152–155; symbol and image 147–149 Frankfurt, Harry 132, 134, 138; “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” 134 freedom: Bergsonian 162–183; as “expressivist” 141 “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” (Frankfurt) 134 free will 131; and determinism 131–132, 139, 163–165; and omniscience 162–163, 172, 174; and temporal ontology 173–177 fundamental self 135, 137–139, 164, 166–167, 169, 177 fundamental time 24, 57 García-Encinas, M. J. 171 Geach, Peter 169 “Global Bergsonism” 3 God: as big viewer 101, 173; dependence on 111–115; existence of future 79; and human freedom 5; present to things 104–106; relationship to time 96–98; and time 3 Goris, Harm 172–173, 178 Grant, W. Matthews 117 growing-block theory 68 Guyer, Paul 75–76 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 137–139, 144, 151–152 Hasker, William 3, 149–150, 153, 155, 172, 177 The Heretics Society in Cambridge 189 Horstmann, Rolf-Peter 75–76

Hudson, Hud 105 human agency 177–179 human consciousness 74–75 human freedom 1; and God 5; see also freedom human-observer-relative: la durée 84; temporally extended objects 84–85 Humeanism 4 idealism 130; about coloured objects 109; ontological 96, 107, 110; partial 95–96 iguanas 149–152 image 147–149 incompatibilism 132–133, 138 indivisibility, la durée 20 infallibility 150 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 22 Introduction to Metaphysics (Bergson) 29 intuition 6, 29, 44, 106, 154, 171, 189 James, William 137 Jankélévitch, Vladimir 21, 23, 28 Kane, Robert 133, 134 Kant, Immanuel 16–18, 28, 46, 120–122, 135, 138–139, 162–164; Bergson’s critique of 162, 164; Critique of Pure Reason 16–17, 24, 28; phenomenal and the noumenal self 135–136; philosophy 122, 162; on space and time 23 Kantian metaphysics 162 Kretzmann, Norman 101, 102, 173; “Eternity” 101 Kripke, Saul 171; Naming and Necessity 117 Kyoto Manifesto 1, 6, 190 la durée (duration) 15, 30–31, 54–56; 95–97, 111; change in 43; and colour spectrum 19–23; in Creative Evolution 32–33; dependence on 106–111; human consciousness 74; human-observer-relative 84; indivisibility 20; and memory 47; metaphysical nature of 28;

196 Index multiplicity 20–21; as pure heterogeneity 19; qualitative multiplicity 23; retrospective spatialisation 21; and self 44; and singular causation 169– 172; vs. spatialised time 40, 71; succession 20 La Pensée et le mouvant (Bergson) 190 Laplace, Pierre-Simon 175 Maritain, Jacques: Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism 98 Marx, Karl 190 Matter and Memory (Bergson) 27, 29, 31–32, 50, 72–73, 75, 96, 116, 174 McCann, Hugh 178–180 McTaggart, J. M. E. 2, 40, 108–109; Bergsonian response to 49–56; from la durée point of view 52–53; The Nature of Existence 41, 58; temporality and consciousness 44; time as (illusory) temporal experience 44; unreality of time 40–43; “The Unreality of Time” 40 Mele, Alfred 137 Mellor, D. H. 56, 80; Real Time 56 memory 46; and la durée (duration) 47 metaphors 99; cinematographic 181; spatial 103 metaphysics 102; Aquinas 102; British 98; contemporary 97; Kantian 162; medieval 108; scholastic 130 Miller, Kristie 81–82 Miquel, Paul-Antoine: “We Bergsonians: The Kyoto Manifesto” 1; see also Kyoto Manifesto Miravalle, John-Mark L. 166 molecular motion 117 Molina, Luis de 154 Molinism 154–155 monotheistic religions 1 Moore, Adrian 3 Moore, F. C. T. 174 mountain and circle 98–100 movement 77, 107, 125n54; of “Analytic Bergsonism” 190; extramental 108; indivisible experience of 113; of the pendulum 25–27 moving-spotlight theory 68

Mullarkey, John 139 Mullins, Ryan 4, 96–97 multiplicity: la durée 20–21; qualitative 20–21, 23; quantitative 23 mysticism 191 “The Myth of Passage” (Williams) 48 Naming and Necessity (Kripke) 117 The Nature of Existence (McTaggart) 41, 58 Neo-Hegelianism 49 non-eternalist ontology 80, 98 noumenal self 139 Oakeley, Hilda 2, 78 Oaklander, Nathan: Ontology of Time 70 objections 115–122 objective time 43–44, 48, 55, 56; characterisation of 50; and consciousness 46–47; Williams on 57; see also time objects: external 23, 82, 116; idealism about coloured 109; temporal 87, 97, 112, 114, 116–119, 122 occasionalism 180; re-creationism and 179–182 Ockhamism 153 omniscience 4–5, 7, 40; and free will 162–163, 172, 174 “On Exactitude in Science” (Borges) 149 ontological idealism 74–78, 96, 107, 110 ontological idealism about time (OIT) 110 ontological reality 139 ontology: eternalist 71, 100; noneternalist 80, 98; presentist 100; temporal (see temporal ontology) Ontology of Time (Oaklander) 70 orthodox Christian position 180 parasitic self 135–141, 152, 163–164, 166, 169–170 partial idealism 95–96 Pavelich, Andrew 181 phenomenal self 139 “The Philosophy of Bergson” (Russell) 14 philosophy of feeling 14 philosophy of religion 2–3, 79

Index  197 Picavet, Emmanuel 144, 146 Plato 35n51 Platonic-inspired theories 133 power 105 presentist ontology 100 Price, Huw 59 principle of alternative possibilities 132, 142, 152, 154 Prior, Arthur 79–81 process ontology 5–6 Proust, Marcel 3; In Search of Lost Time 22 pure duration 21 qualitative multiplicity 20–21, 23 quantitative multiplicity 23 reality: compound model of 115–116; external 107, 162; extramental 108–111; material 98; ontological 139; temporal 117–118, 120–121, 181 real time 56 Real Time (Mellor) 56 re-creationism 179–181; and occasionalism 179–182 relativity theory 97, 101, 115–116 religion: analytic philosophy of 28, 74, 131–133, 135, 155; monotheistic 1; philosophy of 2–3, 79 religious experience 191 religious pluralism 191 representation of time 31 retrospective illusion 54 retrospective spatialisation, la durée 21 Riggio, Adam 14, 27–28 Rota, Michael 133, 142 Russell, Bertrand 2, 13–14, 61, 130, 162, 189; on Bergson 14–15, 27–30; “The Philosophy of Bergson” 14 scholastic metaphysics 130 Scotus, John Duns 97–98, 100, 101 self: fundamental 135, 137–139, 164, 166–167, 169, 177; noumenal 139; parasitic 135–141, 152, 163–164, 166, 169–170; phenomenal 139 Shakespeare, William 139, 144, 151; Hamlet 137–139, 144, 151–152 Shanley, Brian 101, 173

simultaneity 30, 81, 83, 84 Sinclair, Mark 141 Sinclair, May 78 singular causation 170; la durée and 169–172 Société des amis de Bergson 3 space 50; Bergson on 15–23; and counting 17; as homogeneous 16; Kant on 16; quantitative multiplicity 23; and time 16–17 spatial homogeneity 18 spatialised time 18, 50, 56, 77, 119, 162; and la durée 83; vs. la durée 40, 71; quantitative multiplicity 23; temporal dimension of space-time 83 spatial metaphor 103 Stebbing, Susan 14 Stump, Eleonore 101, 115, 173; “Eternity” 101 subjective time 43 succession, la durée 20 Swinburne, Richard 105, 175 symbols 147–149 synchronic problem: divine omniscience 177–179; human agency 177–179 temporal dimension of space-time 83 temporal existence 72 temporal experience 43 temporal fatalism 172–173 temporality: and consciousness 44; stages of 47–48 temporal objects 87, 97, 112, 114, 116–119, 122 temporal ontology 24, 80, 98, 111, 114, 130, 162, 182; and A-series 67–71; Bergsonian 107; and B-series 67–71; free will and 173–177 temporal reality 117–118, 120–121, 181 “The Garden of Forking Paths” (Borges) 141 theism 4–5, 149 theory of relativity 81 things present to God 104–106 Thomism 2, 4; and Bergsonism 97–98 Thomists 2, 110 time 2; Bergson on 15–23; conceived 56; and consciousness 24; and eternity 101–104; and God 3; as homogeneous 16; Kant on

198 Index 16; of la durée 55; meanings of the word 97; and number 17; objective (see objective time); perceived 57; relationship to God 96–98; and space 16–17; spatialised 119, 162 Time and Free Will (Bergson) 6, 17, 19, 23–24, 27, 29–30, 32, 44, 54, 96, 107, 120, 135, 141, 163, 170, 174 Time and Reality (Dorato) 85 Tooley, Michael 85 truthmakers 68–69 The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Bergson) 191 unreality of time 40–43 “The Unreality of Time” (McTaggart) 40

Van Inwagen, Peter 164, 184n11 “vital impulse” (élan vital) 14 Vrahimis, Andreas 3 “We Bergsonians: The Kyoto Manifesto” (During and Miquel) 1; see also Kyoto Manifesto Wierenga, Edward 104 William of Ockham 153 Williams, Clifford 70 Williams, D. C. 48, 57, 148; “The Myth of Passage” 48; objective time 57 Wippel, John F. 108 Wolff, Robert Paul 46 Worms, Frédéric 54, 120, 189–190 zones of indetermination 174