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only to be dismissed by an incompetent “assistance” person at the company who does nothing to help. Finally, you slam down the phone receiver, furious, after six hours of futile waiting. It seems quite clear that you are more angry at this point than you were when you first called the cable company. However, if you had read the first section of Time and Free Will, then you might assess your apparent escalating emotional intensity quite differently. For instance, you might ask yourself: is it even possible to ascertain with any certainty the magnitude or degree of your anger at each of these moments during those six hours, starting with the initial irritation, moving to the full-fledged anger, and finally arriving at the flat-out fury? Was the anger that you felt when you were furious twice as strong as when you were irritated? Three times? Ten times? How would you go about measuring the quantity of your anger each time in order to give an accurate number? Or is it perhaps possible, if you look back in your memory with care, that you might see that each of these moments of anger (the initial irritation, the full-fledged anger, and the flat-out fury) were qualitatively, intrinsically, different experiences? It might seem, at first glance, that you felt only one emotion (anger) that got stronger and stronger within you as time passed. You might think this way for a number of reasons: first, there were no radical breaks within you, there was no clear-cut moment when one feeling suddenly changed into something else. Second, there seemed to be only one basic external cause for your anger (the cable company). Finally, it is just easier to say that you were “angry,” rather than to introspectively note the particular shadings of each uniquely “colored” feeling as it occurred and then to search for an appropriate, distinguishing word to match it. As Bergson archly notes, “our language is ill-suited to render the subtleties of psychological analysis” (TFW 13). However, if you look back carefully (especially after internalizing Bergson’s ideas), you might just come to realize that you were not actually more angry at the end of those six hours than you were at the beginning. Instead, what you experienced were not variations of one common theme called “anger,” but rather, each instance of what you felt was inherently, qualitatively, unique. So unique, in fact, that even using separate terms (i.e., “irritation,” “anger,” and “fury”) does not really do it justice, because even here the static nature of the terms masks the reality—an ongoing flux of ever-shifting, qualitative changes of feeling within as time passes. As human beings with a practical, this-worldly orientation, it is quite normal that we would resist this Bergsonian interpretation of our emotional states. As Bergson comments, a “wholly dynamic way of looking” at the ongoing shifts in our feeling-life “is repugnant” to most of us, since we prefer “clean cut distinctions, which are easily expressed in words” as well as “things with welldefined outlines, like those which are perceived in space” (TFW 9). But this desire for clarity and precision does not work well when it comes to noticing, with any subtlety, what is going on within us. Therefore, we might prefer to 34 LIVING CONSCIOUSNESS imagine, for example, that our desire for a new career has grown, whereas in reality , there is no “volume” of desire that has expanded; this “increased” desire does not now take up increased space inside us. The basic problem is that our desire simply is not a separate, clearly delineated, fixed thing that can be measured. What we experience within us is not a change in quantity, but rather it is a change in quality.1 As Mullarkey emphasizes, what Bergson attempts to do in this section of Time and Free Will is to “restore the specificity and novelty” that get stripped away when we try to understand our inner life using quantitative terminology.2 What Bergson wants us to recognize is that our introspective awareness of our own consciousness is, if understood correctly, qualitatively different from what we typically experience in our interactions with the external world. In our day-to-day interactions with the physical world we compare and measure external objects, objects that have clear-cut boundaries in space, that are separate from each other, that stay relatively the same; but we can only compare the different internal phases of...

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