There are a lot of reviews here complaining about the edition. Unfortunately amazon tends to lump all editions together so I would just like to say that the negative reviews do not apply to the Dover edition (the edition with the blue cover and the profile picture of Bergson on it). I would highly recommend buying the Dover edition. I have read it twice and I did not encounter a single error either time through. It is also quite cheap.
The book itself is really excellent. Bergson was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth-century but he does not seem to have the stature today that he once had. I think there are probably a few reasons for that (the dominance of phenomenology in the Continental tradition and language analysis and symbolic logic in the analytic tradition, as well as the fact that Bergson tied some of his ideas to biological theories of his own time which have not held up well). There has been a resurgence of interest in Bergson to some degree which I think is at least partly due to Bergson's undoubted influence on Gilles Deleuze whose star is currently rising. Bergson had a tremendous influence on a whole host of important Continental philosophers (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Deleuze, etc.) so, if for no other reason, he is worth reading as necessary background to those thinkers.
I happen to think that Bergson is worth studying in his own right and not just in terms of the influence he had on later philosophers. Bergson's primary preoccupation was with the nature of time and no one (including, I think, Husserl and Heidegger) spent as much time thinking about time as Bergson did. The nature of time is one of the most interesting, but also one of the most difficult, topics within metaphysics and Bergson had some very important things to say about it.
In Time and Free Will Bergson attempts to defend the notion of free will by arguing that the standard critiques of free will (as well as the standard defense) rely on an inadequate notion of time. It is impossible to summarize Bergson's subtle argument in an amazon review but, basically, the critics (and defenders) of free will have tended to understand time as a homogenous medium like space. Bergson believes that space is the only homogenous medium and that time is pure heterogeneity. The reason for that is that each moment includes the previous moment as a part of its past so that each new moment is totally new. Since no two moments can ever be exactly alike it is impossible to predict the future (the predictions of science, for example, rely on an identity between initial conditions which Bergson, due to his understanding of time, believes is impossible in the life of consciousness).
This is not only an inadequate summary of Bergson's central argument in this book it also fails utterly to get at the true value of this book. What makes this book so valuable and exciting is not necessarily its central thesis but the brilliant analysis of time and the life of consciousness that Bergson provides. I believe that philosophy is inherently a method for making distinctions that ordinary consciousness tends to pass over. Bergson's brilliance lies in the way in which he dissects our ordinary experience of ourselves and reveals the ways in which our standard understanding of ourselves is in fact a misunderstanding. Bergson reveals the life of consciousness operating beneath the distortions of language and conceptual understanding. There is a reason why modernist writers like Marcel Proust, who were attempting to describe the life of consciousness or experience in their works, found Bergson to be such an inspiration.
While Bergson's central argument is certainly interesting and important what is most important are the ways in which Bergson's analysis will completely change the way the reader understands themselves. What more could you possibly ask from a philosophy book?
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Top reviews from other countries
Dana
Great ideas, still interesting and relevant.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 9, 2021Christian
I didn't like the quality of the paper that much
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 22, 2017Amazon Customer
Don’t waste your money.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 30, 2019