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discover that there is no permanent “John” or “Jane” underneath the flux of sensations, perceptions, emotions, and thoughts that make up our conscious experience. What we think of as our “self” is, for associationists, nothing more than a makeshift grouping of these isolated, fragmented, and discontinuous mental “elements.” In fact, even the seeming complexity of our mental life was from this perspective also illusory. Associationists claim that, like the physical world, our inner world is nothing more than the rearrangement of an assortment of basic, relatively simple, unchanging mental “elements” that passively combine and recombine, appear and disappear—in essence bumping into each other like internal billiard balls cascading and rebounding within the psychological counterpart of physical space—that is, the homogeneous, empty, inert container of time. Further (and this is crucial), associationists argued that our belief in our ability to initiate actions, our belief that we are able to make decisions that are genuinely free, is also illusory. They claimed, instead, that just as various physical atoms combine and recombine in ways that are strictly determined and utterly predictable to create the complex physical world that we inhabit, in the same way, the configuration of the mental atoms that make up our present conscious state of awareness are nothing more than the completely predictable and utterly determined end result of prior internal interactions, interactions that are strictly governed by psychological laws (such as contiguity, succession, resemblance) that are just as coercive and implacable as the laws that govern the physical world. A Substantially Flowing Self Time and Free Will, in many ways, can be seen as a sustained and multifaceted attack against this associationist understanding of the consciousness and the self, as well as an attempt to articulate a viable philosophical alternative to those (like Kant) who claimed that there was an unchanging transcendental ego underneath the ever-shifting, yet separate and encapsulated, sensations and feelings and thoughts that make up the tumultuous inner world of the associationist self. Bergson acknowledges that, from a certain point of view, the associationist claims make a type of sense. If we posit that the external world seems to be, for all practical purposes, a collection of separate, self-contained objects which interact with each other in predetermined, mechanical ways, then it is understandable that, by a type of psychic osmosis, we might well come to see our inner world in the same light. He is willing to concede that it may indeed be necessary in day-to-day life to think that our consciousness is broken up into separate beads of clearly labeled thoughts and feelings and sensations. The problem is, however, that we frequently confuse these artificial linguistic constructions for ALTERNATIVE UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE SELF 47 the actual nature of consciousness itself. As Bergson points out, “associationism thus makes the mistake of constantly replacing the concrete phenomenon which takes place in the mind by the artificial reconstruction of it given by philosophy, and of thus confusing the explanation of the fact with the fact itself” (TFW 163). Furthermore, as Bergson argues, once we imagine that durée is nothing more than “beads” of consciousness “bumping” into each other in a lawful, predictable manner, once we have artificially separated the “elements” of our consciousness by acts of our attention, then it is understandable that we might seek to reconnect them by imagining that these psychic “beads” are threaded together on an unchanging, formless ego. In order to make sense of the perceived unity, stability, and continuity of our selfhood in light of the seeming crowded cacophony of various emotions, sensations, and thoughts that seem to jostle and shout and mutter in our inner world, it makes a certain type of sense to think of ourselves as a stable, unchanging ego that is undergoing a series of separate, “distinct psychological states, each one invariable” (CM 175). However, as Bergson goes to great lengths to emphasize, there is another possibility. As Garrett Barden points out, associationists like Hume “correctly failed to discover an underlying subject but incorrectly failed to attend to and understand the enduring subject.”1 The truth, for Bergson, is that there is no unchanging ego which serves as a “rigid, immovable substratum nor distinct states passing over it like actors on a stage. There is simply the continuous melody of our inner life—a melody which is going on and will go on, indivisible , from the beginning to the end of our conscious existence” (CM 176). Close inspection reveals that this...

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