462 The CelebraTion of false Problems: The sTrange exPerienCe of The moderns I shall begin with an observation and, on the basis of it, propose a possible reading of Bruno La- tour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthology of the Moderns: the moderns have been inordinately fascinated with false problems. They have celebrat- ed the ones they inherited, invented a whole rat of multifarious new ones, and have tried to impose them on everyone they have encountered. Admit- tedly, every age has its share of false problems, but rarely have they been taken so seriously: they have involved controversies, oppositions, and exclusions from the public arena, been identiied with the very exercise of thought, and have established the gener- al forms of legitimate knowledge. Nothing has seemed more serious to the moderns than the great questions – the mise-en-scène of these false problems – in which dual forms of experience were ranged against each other: How could knowledge match up with the forms of existence of the world, that “famous adequatio rei et intellectus, at best good enough to serve as a crutch for an elementary philosophy exam” (La- tour 71)? How could purely constructed, heterono- mous beings acquire a life of their own, actual auton- omy? What might the conditions for free action be in a universe with deterministic laws? These ques- tions, repeated endlessly as a kind of recurrent refrain, though risible because of the scholarly seriousness surrounding them, have shaped modern experience. I take this notion of a false problem from Henri Bergson who deined it as a badly analyzed compos- ite or, in the terms of Inquiry, an amalgam (“Amal- gam”). A false problem is always a confusion between two orders of reality, between two categories, be- tween heterogeneous qualities. Bergson gives an example which he regards as paradigmatic: the prob- lem of freedom. This is the typical case of a false prob- lem that obsesses the moderns. We ask how an action could really be free when it takes place within the laws of nature. How could it be indeterminate if, at the same time, it may be subject to forms of physical determinism? Bergson’s answer, which in the form of its argument parallels what is at issue in Inquiry, is that there is implicit confusion in these questions – an amalgam, which is all the more operative for never having been cast into doubt. In the very last lines of Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Bergson writes: The problem of freedom has thus sprung from a misunderstanding: it has been to Didier Debaise is a research professor at the National Fund for Scientiic Researchand the Université libre de Bruxelles, where he teaches contemporary philosophy. His main areas of research are contemporary forms of speculative philosophy, theories of events, and links between American pragmatism and French contemporary philosophy. He has recently published a new book entitled L’appât des possibles (2015). Didier Debaise