Bergson

Bergson is a recurring philosophical interlocutor in Sartre’s account of freedom, consciousness, and memory. Sartre draws on Bergsonian concepts while disputing the idea that consciousness or freedom can be explained by a deeper self or by a merely functional act of selection: both, he argues, must be understood through the projects by which human existence gives itself direction.

Freedom and the will

Sartre invokes Bergson’s “profound self” as a contrast to his own account of freedom. Freedom is not a hidden depth beneath a superficial will, nor a prior faculty that intervenes to break the chain of passion. The self, Sartre insists, is wholly selfness; the will and passions are distinct subjective attitudes through which freedom manifests itself in efforts to attain ends already posited by the for-itself.

This distinction also rejects the idea that freedom is simply identical with voluntary action. Volition and passion differ in how a person pursues an end—in the clarity and organization of the means, and in the degree of reflection—not in the end itself. Because freedom is identical with existence, Sartre holds that it grounds both willing and passionate effort. His criticism of the “profound self” therefore serves a larger argument: freedom cannot be set apart as an inner source behind the acts through which it exists.

Consciousness as selection

Sartre connects Bergson to psychologists who describe consciousness as “selection,” but argues that this account stops short of an ontological explanation. If selection is treated as a gratuitous function of an otherwise substantial consciousness, it remains unexplained how consciousness can select at all. For Sartre, consciousness is a nihilation, and choice is not an additional operation performed by an already constituted subject: to be conscious of oneself and to choose oneself are one and the same.

This criticism becomes especially pointed in Sartre’s discussion of feeling. He recalls Gide’s question about the difference between a willed feeling and an experienced one, then answers that there is no difference: to will to love and to love coincide insofar as loving is choosing oneself as loving through consciousness of that love. The point is not that Bergson directly addresses this example, but that Sartre’s objection to an unexplained theory of selection helps frame his broader account of consciousness as choice.

Memory and the present project

Sartre also refers to Bergson’s concept of pure memory while examining how a person has a past. A past fact may be unchangeable in its brute occurrence, but its meaning depends on the present project through which it is remembered. Even the statement that someone had whooping cough at four or five years of age presupposes a system for dating individual life, trust in other people’s accounts of childhood, and a relation to those witnesses that helps shape the memory’s significance.

In this discussion, Bergson’s “pure memory” names a possible pure matter of memory, but Sartre qualifies the notion: when such matter appears, it does so within a project that includes and gives a context to its appearance. Memory is never presented as an unmediated possession detached from the person’s present orientation. The past remains factually necessary, yet the meaning it has is illuminated through the ends toward which the person projects themself.