Bergson, “The Possible and the Real,” summary From: The Creative Mind, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle Andison (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2007), pp. 73-86. The subject of this lecture (which was to be given at the reception of the Nobel Prize) is “the continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty” (73). Bergson is arguing against the view that “a superhuman intelligence which would know the position, the direction, and the speed of all the atoms and electrons of the material universe at a given moment could calculate any future state of this universe” (74). This view suppresses time, since, according to it, the end is encapsulated in the beginning. As Bergson writes, if “you obtain in fact a universe whose successive states are in theory calculable in advance,” then the question is: “What good is time?” (75). Common sense says: “time is what hinders everything from being given at once. It retards, or rather it is retardation. It must therefore, be elaboration.” This raises the questions: “Would it not then be a vehicle of creation and of choice? Would not the existence of time prove that there is indetermination in things? Would not time be that indetermination itself?” (ibid.). Normally, we don’t think of time as creative. Our minds are directed towards action, which requires stable objects to act on. This holds not just for understanding, but also for perception. In Bergson’s words: Our normal faculty of knowing is then essentially a power of extracting what stability and regularity there is in the flow of reality. Is it a question of perceiving? Perception seizes upon the infinitely repeated shocks which are light or heat, for example, and contracts them into relatively invariable sensations: trillions of external vibrations are what the vision of a color condenses in our eyes in the fraction of a second. Is it a question of conceiving? To form a gen (76/77) eral idea is to abstract from varied and changing things a common aspect which does not change.” Note: this is the theory of vibrations and contration of Mind and Matter. This attempt to fix on stable objects and relations (which allow us to make things) leads us to badly frame metaphysical problems. Such problems “arise in fact from our habit of transposing into fabrication what is creation” (77). This habit obscures the fact that “Reality is global and undivided growth, progressive invention, duration” (ibid.). Bergson now gives us some examples of metaphysical problems that arise from such transposition. The first is: what is there something rather than nothing at all—i.e., “why there is being, why something or someone exists”? (78). This leads to the endless search for causes and “the causes of these causes,” etc. (78). But such a problem “arises only if one posits a nothingness which supposedly precedes being” (ibid.). In fact, nothingness is understood, here, in terms “of action and fabrication. “‘Nothing’ designates the absence of what we are seeking, we desire, expect” (ibid.).