Kant and Henri Bergson on Time and Freedom

welcome everyone to a paper on henry bergson's time and free will and its connection to khand and german idealism more broadly just to let you know the enrollment for my course on german idealism is now open so feel free to enroll following the link down below and perhaps also to mention i'm a i'm an independent scholar and it my work is made possible through donations and contributions from my listeners and viewers and students so if you'd like to support this enrolling in a course or gifting something via paypal for example is highly appreciated so readings of bachzon's time and free will often concentrate on doula duration and less on freedom the title time and free will is of course an addition to the english translation of bergson's essay on the immediate data of consciousness there seems to be a connection between immediacy proper time and freedom bergson writes of course after the crisis of first philosophy or within the crisis of first philosophy he wants to get back to the immediacy of experience as we see also with phenomenology metaphysics though is an attempt of man to explain beings now here we see that freedom is impossible if time is misunderstood with boxing conflated or if it's mixed up with space taken to be a if space is taken to be a homogeneous receptacle time and free will is not from its outset an inquiry into reason and its regulative function its capacity of causing free acts as it is with can't where reason is autonomy but a call to feelings in short to the concept of life which however i find in bergson rather vague i do not see here the concept of life as it is in nietzsche or khan precisely because for example with nietzsche the um the metaphysical underpinnings are simply not there in black son and there is an elon weave it's a mythical life force uh for um for for backs on and that's one's thinking turns towards something like this you know to speak of forces etc then we are back more with myth and no longer with with philosophy really so i wonder whether back to the boxonian approaches proper but what he does see is the importance of time so um pogson who was the translator of time and free will i use that reality or with khan the relation of thought and thing i would say thought and being is quote not to be reached by any elaborate construction of thought it is given an immediate experience as a flux and that's important a continuous process of becoming and of course from boxing so um yes there is here an attempt to overcome ratification in belling song but of course the price he pays is steep um if immediate experience is just the flux we become no better than the most dogmatic follower of heraclitus kratolos who wouldn't even lift as much as a finger because he couldn't name anything in the world anymore you see this is giving up on thinking basically we are two and it seems as though this is a moral demand by black swan quote again from boxing immerse ourselves in the living stream of things and to find the difficulties swept away in its resistless flow poxen address is called the feeling of duration we have when we do quote away with convention and habit and our consciousness gets back to which natural attitude the conception of time backs on criticizes is to his credit mathematical calculable and linear time which is misguided to him at best freedom has been jeopardized all the paradoxes and the pottery surrounding it have been made possible precisely by this false mathematical conception of time and its conflation with space vaccine argues a return to the natural state of time or an intellectual flow of time of course is better is necessary in order to save freedom backs on is of course a follower of nietzsche and together with the dilte he's the strongest early proponent of vitalism which paul nator refers to as a quote much more dangerous impressionism which is which nurtured by nietzsche amounts to the self-deceit of reason that wants to fly over all experience in the act of an immediate grasping of the zepstgi leapt the self-lived subjectivistic impression of every single man end of quote from nato this was my translation from natorp's philosophical systematics the neo-kantians they tried to in the neocanyon way to safeguard to protect thinking from these attacks from the vitalists and others and yes so it's quite important to to see what nato sees here this dangerous impressionism of course beckson might even welcome this attack for it is precisely for the apparently overly rationalistic abstract aspects of khan's philosophy or critical philosophy that quote from black freedom was made into an incomprehensible fact and that's true that is indeed the case so something that's quite striking about kant and this uh is is that reason gives itself its own laws but it is still coming sort of to the subject from the outside the subject the human being is not free but the human being ought to be free and the phenomenal sphere the sphere of simplified of what we see in the world is perfectly causalistic everything is has a cause and an effect and every effect turns into another cause that effect effectuates something else etc and can't say that freedom is an er something undiscoverable unresearchable understandable you could even say capacity or faculty so reason gives itself its own law and the pure intelligible in the numeral about which nothing can be said however so kant wants to deny that so he wants to allow for a realm where there is no necessity outside of time and space but it is true and blackstone is absolutely right here to say freedom becomes with khan to complete incomprehensible fact if you're interested in this you should read religion within the boundaries of mere reason where khan runs into antinomies of reason hitherto unseen more precisely kantian freedom is incomprehensible because the self-performing or the self-autonomous the free act is space but also above what i just said timeless the self is not in duration in proper time it is not this numeral self it is not the heterogeneity of the multiplicity of duration but outside a time that is represented as a straight line kant has to place freedom outside of time and outside of space in the luminal sphere as berkson also knows and allows so it so khan is otherwise just it's a perfectly deterministic or not deterministic but causalistic newtonian phenomenal world or sphere this supposed enter backs on this means it's mechanical this is what person which is to overcome by casting human consciousness into a natural flow which means to immerse oneself in the immediacy of the immediate and the flux of sensation it's quite important to see that this is an important impetus or or desire or drive of of thinking at this time this is not to say that black swan is wrong but it's just the question whether this dangerous impressionism to quote the grand master from marburg paul natorp is indeed appropriate and of course we see with um with heidegger an attempt to think time and being you might have heard of that that one being and time um in us in a way that we're not just in pure immediacy in a sheer givenness even though the young heidegger might have been more but the poets for him can say something immediately but the thinker cannot just say that the thinker must be able to mediate now the problem then is of course that there's a flux of sense data again the official title is essay on the immediate data of consciousness for the paxon so newton's world incidentally is not mechanical however so baxon is wrong here khan's world is not mechanical either for newton the world is god's sensorium in order to save freedom blackson argues and mullah leonard in the paper put it as follows backs on therefore a quote from mullet leonard against khan's reduction of time to a homogenous milieu a container indifferent to what it contains and thereby indistinguishable from space now in my course on german idealism i get into what's the khan there's something strange about it because time is what allows for the mathematician of the world basically and that's really quite frightening so um time all of a sudden becomes important but it actually becomes a way not just of measuring but of almost off homogenizing the world now the important terms here for mullet and leonard are homogeneous and indifferent this is what vitalism wants to move away from and towards feelings compassion is not indifferent baxan uses the example of pity to show not only the calculative ethics is misguided but to construct his argument for duration pity quote from bergson consists in the first place in putting oneself in the place of others in suffering their pain however if that were all that is to it then we might not feel compassionate and compelled to help another feeling intermingling is a horror of the pity of the other person says elevated only by the quote from blacks on need of helping our fellow men and of alleviating their suffering we realize we need to do something about the other suffering to redeem nature for her injustice the important aspect is that all of these effective affective states take place simultaneously heterogeneously rather than successively it is an increasingly intensive yet qualitative progress not quantitative the various emotions are in a constant flux flowing into each other there is no linear progression not a quantitative measurable increase in pity with the suffering other there is a multiplicity of feelings interrelating inter-penetrating each other in the multiplicity these feelings do not contradict each other they are heterogeneous yet not juxtaposed this multiplicity can only be grasped in duration not in linear successive time what we see i think with berkshire and just to mention this on pasar is the impasse after german idealism to take on the charge to think there are of course thinkers like heidegger who are on who are capable but in the immediate aftermath and that's honestly the immediate aftermath but in the immediate aftermath after hegel and shelling there's only there's no one to take on the mandate and i think it's all the more important today to just take you know people like baxter more or less seriously but to move beyond this these these calls to effective states and uh and emotion etc um but to to find out to work out what is the place of reason and genuinely and um what is intelligence what is time or how to think time etc after the earthquake of german idealism on language now briefly on language language turns out to be the main problem or obstacle obstacle to address properly or express multiplicity duration and the heterogeneity of our consciousness even just speaking of different or several states is misguided as this would quantify them even just naming these various feelings as for example in pity bears the danger of turning them into isolated states so you see you see the cratily the great the heroclesian cretalionism um coming in incapable of even lifting as much as i think it must all be in flux language gives names provides terms where description fails this quote this is a quote from berkshire this influence of language backs on argues on sensation is deeper than is usually thought not only does language make us believe in the unchangeableness of our sensations but well i mean certainly in the french language yes but it will sometimes deceive us as to the nature of the sensation felt and of course from rebecca it is not the senses if we only gave in to them that could deceive us but the symbols that constitute a everyday language he proposes words are about symbols placeholders we could say but not bundles of rays as the magnificent osset mandelstam puts it so they're symbols for baxter words and these symbols are without creative power interestingly they're basically dead signifiers for baxon and they cannot properly address quote from berkshire the infinite permeation of a thousand different impressions which have already ceased to exist the instant they are named kind of quote language then is but a collection of death symbols the word with well-defined outlines quote from books on the rough and ready word which stores up the stable common and consequently impersonal element in the impressions of mankind overwhelms released covers over the delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness i do i do and of course but i do wonder though how he can speak of consciousness isn't he so is he not naming giving a symbol as a signifier to something that then must be there and somehow containing all these fugitive impressions so you see there's an impasse of language in back so he's trying to get at something but maybe not uh maybe not the strongest reading of kant um so the flux of the eternal world this beautiful cretesh grateline and a gratylonian world sorry uh um which is simply just complete actually complete unfreedom so that's that's what's so humorous about this is that he wants to get back to freedom but if he had only understood heraclitus and glatulis and the story there it said without naming without language without speaking and saying properly we become unfree we cannot even lift as much as a finger so i think there is and there should be and i will continue this paper at some other point but i think there must be another way to continue the legacy of german idealism and what we find in energon and others and i'll say it again as i said before if you want to support the work feel free to contribute any way you can or sign up to one of my courses newest one is german idealism there's a link to stan below thank you very much

Channel: Johannes A. Niederhauser

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Keywords: philosophy, continental philosophy, henri bergson, kant, bergson and kant, bergson duree, henri bergson duration, german idealism, neokantians, heidegger, paul natorp, kant on time, vitalism, french vitalism, french philosophy, bergson and heidegger, bergson time and free will, bergson on freedom, bergson impressionism, kant time and space, german idealism and french philosophy, kant and french philosophy, bergson duree and time, what is time, philosophy of time, french thinking

Id: 0_97OPrl7Tk

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021