Bergson's ideas and theories on time and free will

Essay by pstar420University, Bachelor'sA, March 2003

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Time and space. Duration. Two separate entities according to Bergson. As separate as oil and water placed in the same container. He claimed that in order to understand free will, we had to first discern what truly makes up and constitutes the abilities given to us so as to allow for a creature of our coherence to make decisions for ourselves. But when looking at a timeline, given that it is no longer a duration of experience, is it necessarily a line, or a series of lines, or just a dot representing the entity.

Bergson claimed that when looking at the map of a persons experience in life, there is no past and also no future. There is only the entity. The entity has memory, and therefore remembers the ways it has traveled and as such is self-contained. It has no future line either because it has not gotten there yet in its duration of being.

There is also no intersection with other entities because of this.

These ideas lead me to believe that, though the majority of Bergson's ideas make sense, here is where is argument is the weakest. By allowing for a single path, essentially adding space to time in Bergson's theories, we then permit there to be a visible past for us to look back on and therefore we are able to trace where we've been and have a more clear idea of the experience of life. Granted, the apparent unending moment the Bergson called the experience of life seems to be a grouping of experiences, his definition of multiplicities made this idea more solid. But in truth, it should still be represented in other means.

The experience of life and free will are linked though. But in the vastness of time, there are...