Freedom as retroactivity in Bergson’s Time and Free Will

Abstract The conception of the free act in Henri Bergson’s 1889 Time and Free Will involves the underdeveloped idea that “effects precede their causes” in the motivational structure of the free decision: rather than motives determining the decision, the decision, on this account, gives shape to, and thus brings into existence, its motives. This paper illuminates this peculiar and perhaps counter-intuitive notion of backwards causation in the free decision in the light of Emile Boutroux’s account of freedom in his 1874 On the Contingency of the Laws of Nature , from which Bergson has borrowed key elements of his own analysis. The paper shows how the idea of effects preceding their causes in the free decision is expressed in Bergson’s later doctrine of retroactivity in art history, according to which the present shapes the past. This admittedly difficult doctrine, one that also remains undeveloped in Bergson’s work, has often been misunderstood, even by some of Bergson’s greatest commentators; it is often identified with Bergson’s critique of retrospective illusions in history, but that critique is itself dependent on the positive idea of retroactivity. In this way, the paper shows that and how free action from a Bergsonian perspective involves retroactivity and is thus retroactive freedom.