What Lights in the Depths of Fluctuation - A Source of Freedom that is Neither Chance nor Causation (1890s) Bergson, "Time and Liberty"

What Lights in the Depths of Fluctuation - A Source of Freedom that is Neither Chance nor Causation (1890s) Bergson, "Time and Liberty"
Bergson's problem in "Time and Freedom" is the modern framework itself, which tries to understand free action in terms of either chance or causality. Chance is an unpredictable fluctuation from outside, and causality is a scheme in which external conditions inevitably force a result. However, these are only perspectives that attempt to categorize actions from the outside, and do not capture the internal generative process from which free actions emerge. Free action is not a fact that fits into this external classification, but a qualitative event that is released when the whole personality matures, and its root lies in the persistence of inner consciousness, not in the external. Bergson emphasized that the human interior is not a collection of memories, emotions, values, and experiences, but a continuous flow that melds and overlaps them all. This persistence is not something that can be isolated in parts, nor can it be quantified and explained in terms of factors. When a cer
tain action occurs, it is not the addition of factors such as anger, reason, or experience, but a process in which the continuity of the personality is condensed into a whole at that moment and crystallized in a single moment. Therefore, even if we accumulate external factors, we cannot reach the free act itself. This is because the act is not a collection of parts, but rather the expression of my qualitative state as a whole. For Bergson, the position that equates freedom with chance is a misunderstanding that reduces freedom to a groundless random phenomenon. There is no room for unity, responsibility, or maturity of personality in an act reduced to chance. Determinism, on the other hand, regards acts as necessarily determined by antecedent conditions, but this causal scheme is merely a line of explanation created when looking back on an act after it has become a past event, and does not capture the thickness of the moment in which the act is generated. In recent neuroscie
nce and complex systems research, the decision to act is understood not as a simple input-output process, but as a nonlinear switching process that occurs when the state of the brain as a whole exceeds a threshold, and is explained as the generation of a dynamic network involving emotional expectations and memories. This resonates with Bergson's insight that action is not the sum of many factors but a qualitative leap of the entire personality. Freedom is not a midpoint between chance and causality, but a phenomenon that opens up to a dimension that does not belong to either of them, an event in which the persistence of the personality crystallizes into a decision that takes on the whole at that moment.