3 comments
Here’s a critical examination of Bergson worth reading: <a href="https://ia803207.us.archive.org/31/items/jstor-27900381/27900381.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://ia803207.us.archive.org/31/items/jstor-27900381/2790...</a>
Some of the observations in the article are distilled in a wonderful way by Alan Watts. To paraphrase, most people think of time in terms of cause and effect. So things in the past cause things in the present to happen like a clockwork machine. This is definitely the view of the world you learn in physics 101.<p>But what if we have it on its head? What if instead we thought of the past like the wake of a ship that we are operating. The past is real in that you can discern where you came from by looking at the wake. But it would be a grave error to think that the wake of the ship caused the boat to move forward.
Something similar was also discussed by Borges, who quipped "each new author creates their own precursors".<p>You can check this apparently paradoxical idea here: <a href="https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1951-borges-kafkaandhisprecursors.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://gwern.net/doc/borges/1951-borges-kafkaandhisprecurso...</a>
The wake is like our perception of the past from the present. But there was a real past, but we cannot ever see it truthfully.
To me Bergson was a charlatan. The kind of intellectual that would have loved to squash quantum physics, consciousness, and free will together. It's quite positive that he mostly forgotten.
I'm not entirely sure about the claim in your second sentence, as Bergson was very skeptical of scientific metaphors, analogies, and similar concepts. I'm fairly certain that his ideas are carefully defined to explain free will without relying on scientific vocabulary.