Capacity for spontaneous, self-determining action not fixed in advance; Kant postulates it, Bergson claims to ground it in the nature of time.
In lecture order, as Marci Shore presents each view. The time opens that minute of the lecture on YouTube.
It seems to Shore that Bergson never quite proves the link between free will and time's continuity; he suggests it, and even his clearest passage posits more than it proves.
Free will is inseparable from qualitative time: because we live time as an undivided flow, we can act spontaneously, in ways no one could have fixed beforehand.
Put simply Bergson: free will cannot be separated from time lived as one unbroken flow. Because we live time that way, we can act spontaneously, in ways no one could have settled in advance.
You cannot spatialize only the past. Lay elapsed time out like space and the future is spread out too, complete behind a screen; contingency vanishes and our acts arrive ready-made.
Put simply Bergson: if you lay out past time like space, you must lay out the future that way too, as if already complete behind a screen. Then nothing is left open, and our actions arrive ready-made.
A cow or a plant merely is; a human being also exists, meaning it has to make itself through its own choices. Its essence lies in that existing.
Put simply Sartre: a cow or a plant simply is. A human being also "exists": it has to make itself through its own choices, and what it is lies in that making.
Nothingness, for Sartre, is freedom rather than something to dread: what is not yet determined is precisely the open room in which we make ourselves.
Put simply Sartre: where Heidegger's "nothingness" points to death, Sartre's means what is not yet settled about us. That is not meant to depress but to free: it is the open space in which we make ourselves.
Sartrean freedom, like Heidegger's, operates inside a situation already given: I may walk, run or jump, but not fly. Within those limits, though, possibilities never run out.
A person has no reality apart from action: we amount only to what we do, are nothing until we make ourselves, and remain subjects rather than objects.
Put simply Sartre: a person has no reality apart from what they do. We are nothing until we make ourselves through action, and we remain agents who act, never mere things.
1 link between claims that both use the term. Each shows the earlier claim, then the later one that answers it. “Our inference” marks a link Shore does not state outright.
BergsonFree will is inseparable from qualitative time: because we live time as an undivided flow, we can act spontaneously, in ways no one could have fixed beforehand. L7 · 23:13
BergsonYou cannot spatialize only the past. Lay elapsed time out like space and the future is spread out too, complete behind a screen; contingency vanishes and our acts arrive ready-made. L7 · 34:24
Spatializing time is the mirror image: it deletes contingency and with it creative agency.
Terms that appear in the same claims.