Steve Emmons, USFWS
In this time of growing authoritarianism that aims to escalate the impacts of climate change I recently hosted my fourth John Lewis national day of action on the anniversary of the passing of that voting rights hero. His words “When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something” are now resonating with many people. Still, a good number of them don’t know what they can or should do, also wondering if what they do will make a difference. This essay is written as a guide for people to find what they can and should do and how to make effective choices. Elie Wiesel wrote, “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.” The YOLO (you only live once) attitude is untenable, for as our present crisis proceeds beyond its first crucial stage, Lewis reminded us, “Our children and their children will ask us what did you do?” In the face of the Trump administration’s efforts to erase Blacks and their history veterans of the Black struggle in America are rising to Lewis’ challenge: “We must never ever give up, we must never ever give in, we must keep the faith, and keep our eyes on the prize.”
Having earlier celebrated Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day, we think of freedom from slavery, racial discrimination and now increasingly freedom of speech, the press and more fundamental rights. Yet when confronted with the need to act so many people say, “I can’t,” because they feel bound by material or social constraints. To the Enlightenment’s ideology of material determinism have been added newer doctrines of market and social determinism which define people as components of the “system,” lacking true moral autonomy. Yet human freedom of the will is obviously indicated by ecological science, for we have utterly failed to comply with the natural order. Our freedom is therefore a double-edged sword which we can use for good or evil, and in what follows I will explain how we may most positively live free.
In previous writings I have maintained that freedom consists in breaking out of narrow identities and acting multidimensionally to serve one’s own natural interest along with those of the nested larger natural wholes of which they are parts. These wholes have been treated as organisms of progressively greater scale that ultimately function in a unified fashion in accordance with the fundamental principle of ecology. Such functioning is purposeful, and this fact has led me to revive major elements of Aristotle’s teleological philosophy in which things function in an eternally cyclic manner.
Although that philosopher was acquainted with fossils, evolution had no place in his system. His was in fact an exception to the pattern of human culture that typically contains myths and theories of natural and human history. The Enlightenment introduced the idea of progress which was later developed by others including Darwin with his theory of evolution and Marx’s dialectical materialism. In 1907 Henri Bergson put forth a particularly radical view in his book Creative Evolution that drew out the full implications of his earlier insights into the true nature of time. Bergson brought attention to self-evident facts about time and our experience of it that are key to understanding and realizing human freedom.
The central fact of time is that the present is, and the past is not, as Fleetwood Mac declared in the lyrics, “Yesterday’s gone. Yesterday’s gone.” Yet we find in our experience of time, specifically of its duration upon which Bergson concentrates in his 1896 Matter and Memory, that the present is prolonged into the past. That is, our consciousness of time is of an interval in which ever-new content is experienced as progressively passing from present perception into memory.
For him the universe is no kind of thing or things but rather an extended Becoming which creates the present anew at every successive moment while prolonging the present into the past in moments of duration. Within the total continuously extended Becoming the human body is, like all other objects, a center of action that conditions them all while in turn being conditioned by all of them. Ultimately changing in a kaleidoscopic manner at every moment, the action of these centers mostly repeats the past, functioning in an habitual manner. Thus the past is preserved in them as present repetitions of that past in which have accumulated the modifications of all past moments. This accumulation Bergson calls “bodily memory” and accounts for every action of the body that is performed more or less automatically without thought, reflection or deliberation.
A second kind of memory consists of memory images such as my visualization, now in 2025, of the house where I lived in 1958 and which no longer exists. At each moment of Becoming, Bergson contends, my present images pass away into the past which is a separate realm in which they remain throughout my life. From there they re-enter present experience to supply content, structure and duration as well as to render it actually conscious.
Bergson’s scheme is very unusual, but it follows from the fundamental fact that the present is, and the past is not. While I accept his basic view of freedom, there are some points of his which can be amended to provide a better and more timely interpretation. I therefore present a summary of his position, after which I put forth my own.
Becoming is immediately experienced in intuition, a particular experience of extended indistinct qualities over a brief interval in which present content is perceived to fade into the past, becoming memory that subsequently interpenetrates present perception. It therefore exhibits duration which is the prolonging of the present into the past. In intuition one both observes and lives Becoming – the continual creation of the universe anew at every present moment that passes into the past and re-enters the present as memory that interpenetrates it. Becoming is thus a self-evident fact of experience.
While Bergson’s Becoming universe is in no way physical, it is rather analogous to the universe understood according to field theory. His objects are centers of action with particular qualities that lack spatial boundaries, ultimately like electromagnetic fields that are all co-extensive with the whole universe. At rest, so to speak, they exert “virtual action” upon the objects around them which may pass into real action. To illustrate, as I sit under an apple tree, a particular apple exerts its “virtual” gravitational action on me which becomes real action when it falls and hits me.
Similarly, the body, a center of action, radiates virtual action which, when it encounters external objects, is reflected back as images of the body’s virtual action upon those particular objects. Again, the comparison with gravity is useful – the gravitational force of the apple hanging on the tree upon my body is partially determined by the corresponding force of my body, prefiguring its impact when it falls and hits me.
The body is therefore surrounded by images that represent objects insofar as they can be affected by it. Whether we understand this in terms of the philosophy of Becoming or field theory, this is a self-event fact of experience: our visual experience of things indicates potential action that we may apply to them, especially in regard to their spatial qualities. Their outlines indicate where we may touch them, pick them up and move around them, as perspective indicates how far we must move to make contact with them.
A consequence of the body being a center of action whose action is indefinitely extended is that images are located outside the body, approximately in the place of their objects. This is another self-evident fact of experience: my visual images are not inside but outside of my head. Bergson makes clear that experience is not in the body, but rather the body is in experience.
At every moment of time the body is accumulating its experience in the form of habitual motions. Accordingly its virtual action is the projection of certain such motion in a virtual state that is determined by some intention. For our action is always intentional, causing us to see chiefly what we want to see – a further self-evident fact of experience.
The bare reflection of the body’s virtual action from an external object is what Bergson calls pure perception and is a momentary present phenomenon which is succeeded by the virtual action passing into real action. Our habitual experience and activity is rather of this nature, although it is fully exemplified by the amoeba which immediately reacts to sensations produced by its contact with objects.
In contrast with that organism, humans perceive objects at a distance, with the interval of space being also an interval of time in which the body considers whether and how to act as its virtual action does not immediately pass into real action. Rather, for Bergson the body prolongs the present pure perception by projecting onto it memory images that are reflections of past virtual actions. Conscious experience according to him is thus a matter of overlaying momentary present perceptions with memories, making the world of constant flux appear to consist of solid, enduring objects. He likens the process to cinematography in which a rapid succession of still photographs produces the illusion of solid enduring objects moving about.
Therefore as we watch the moving picture, so to speak, we deliberate over what we shall do. We may be at a fork in a path, wishing to pick the easier route. This may not be immediately apparent, so we call up memories that illuminate visual details such as a patch of mud or a plant that, on close inspection is found to be poison ivy. After reviewing the conditions we choose a route, and our virtual action of proceeding on that path passes into the real action of walking upon it.
Although ultimately the world is universal Becoming in which everything changes at every successive present moment of time in a kaleidoscopic manner, centers of action such as the body are structured, and Bergson explains how conscious perception of external images is tied to the motions of the body by way of its sensori-motor apparatus. The body projects virtual action onto external objects which is reflected off of them then transmitted through the senses into the body’s system of physical motion. Thus, I see the image of the street before me as something upon which I can walk, so I proceed to move my legs forward to perform that act. Studying the scene before one involves a present image affecting the body through which memory images are projected onto it, altering that image which in turn affects the body anew, with the circuit being completed repeatedly until the choice of action is made. The degree to which the sensori-motor system is developed is the measure of an organism’s freedom to perceive options for action and make choices.
Bodily memory of actions is habit in which the body’s past is preserved as the continual cumulative repetition of that past in each successive present moment. Immediate action is a function of habit, and virtual action is the projection of bodily memory. Image memory, on the other hand according to Bergson is the preservation of perceptions in the past, from which they re-enter present experience to overlay present images of pure perception. The past is therefore a semi-separate realm in which all of one’s memory images accumulate and is of a spiritual nature.
This last notion is indeed strange – that the past co-exists with the present in some mysterious separate and spiritual realm and that every particular perceived image that we have ever had is preserved intact there. I will presently explain why we can dispense with this element of Bergson’s philosophy and replace it with a more plausible account that retains his otherwise mostly true insights.
First, however I will move on to his further thoughts on the progress of human freedom in Creative Evolution. As he explained in Matter and Memory, the body’s sensori-motor system constitutes a switchboard, so to speak, by which stimulations originating as external images and overlaid with memory images may be freely directed to move this or that part of the body to perform some action. To the extent that this sensori-motor system is elaborated an agent is free.
Their physiology plus access to memory images therefore afford humans a superior degree of freedom. Despite the appearance of evolutionary progress, Bergson denies any purpose to Becoming, but moving beyond biology, he emphasizes the gains in freedom furnished by technology. Cinematographic perception, he says, “spatializes” Becoming by presenting it as an apparently homogenous space filled with solid extended bodies. Consequently our action is chiefly directed at the seemingly inert physical properties of things that are the focus of modern science and technology. These have given humans truly promethean power and freedom to act upon and control nature. To Bergson writing in 1907 this seemed like a good thing, although in his view of evolution regression can and does occur.
At this moment the idea of continual human progress is being disproven before our eyes on nearly every front. Still, human freedom is real, and past experience and history are tremendously rich resources upon which we can draw in the manner indicated by Bergson to sustain ourselves, our species and the planet.
To proceed I will first separate the useful, self-evident and true elements of his philosophy from the implausible and insufficient portions. It is a fundamental fact that the present is, and the past is not, yet historical conceptions of time have mostly disregarded it. The Greeks’ framework was eternity, and Newtonian science posited elementary bodies that moved about but otherwise continued to exist unchanged over time. Post-classical mechanics has the universe composed of energy in which, as Heraclitus had insisted, everything continually changes. On top of this, natural history reveals that there is not just rearrangement of permanently existing objects or regular alteration of their properties, but true novelty arising in the world.
The universe therefore is not now and forever a fixed thing, but rather, it Becomes through a process of absolute and continual creation, coming into existence anew at every successive present moment of time. Becoming is a process in which absolutely new content is created in the present that is integrated into the immediately past content which is effectively recreated with this modification. All this occurs continuously while the immediate present comes into being and the immediate past passes away.
Bergson is absolutely correct in asserting that most of our present perception is memory images, and this is evident as while we look at something we may not notice slight changes occurring in it. We literally see it as remaining the same, and this is the effect of memories overlaying present perceptions. For the same reason we may not notice slight changes such as signs of aging in the appearance of familiar persons and objects in our successive perceptions of them.
The past is preserved in the present, but not exactly as Bergson describes it. He says that bodily memory comes about from the reproduction of the body’s past in the present. Thus, I learn some movement with my body such as a dance step, and this action passes away into the past. Then, according to him, as the body is continually recreated this motion is retained in it as a bodily memory. However, what is retained is not the performance of the step, as this would mean that it actually continues, but the ability to repeat it in the future. The performance of the step in the present modifies the body so that its continual recreation contains the ability to later repeat it.
Bergson’s implausible claim that image memories pass away into and are forever preserved in a mysterious past realm can be resolved in a similar way. Present images originate in the body with intentions that direct virtual habitual actions onto surrounding objects from which they are reflected as images. If such virtual action immediately passes into real action conscious perception is minimal. However if the subject pauses to examine the object, Bergson has memory images re-entering perception from the past to overlay the present image. This is unnecessary because bodily memory, being the source of the initial image, can furnish the rest.
Another huge limitation in Bergson’s account of experience is that he confines it to actual present objects. The projection of intentional virtual actions upon present objects to produce images is a plausible explanation of that, but much more goes on in real experience. To give a simple example: I look at my Asiatic lily and see that the stalk is hanging down. My desire is that it should stand upright, and Bergson would have me react by reaching out and drawing it up with my hands. Yet this is not what I do, nor do I just perceive the plant in front of me. Initially I see it, then I visualize it held upright by a stake, for I have the habit of staking drooping lilies. My bodily habit gives rise to an imaginary image of a stake with tie bars attached to the plant that I actually see before me. I then go fetch a stake and some tie bars, return to the plant and tie it up. It may happen that when I try to push the bamboo stake into the ground I find that it’s too hard and the stake won’t go in. So my thought moves to a metal stake; I fetch one of those and a hammer, then pound the stake into the ground and fasten the lily to it.
Bergson concentrates on images of objects upon which our attention and action are focused. However our bodies are surrounded with a multitude of images, all of which reflect our virtual action upon them. Not only is our spatial scope vast, but so is our temporal range. So much of what we do is directed at future objectives, toward which present actions are steps or for which present states are viewed as stages. Thus, I look at my budding ironweed and imagine the blooms that I expect to soon see.
A great quantity of our conscious images are therefore just memories or of an imaginary nature, and Bergson scarcely attends to them. In my view they have a simple explanation. Our external images originate with virtual action that carries with it the intention to perform some kind of real action. Alternatively, we may wish to not act but only form some image. So the virtual action is checked, producing an image that stands apart from any external object and therefore appears ethereal, fleeting and fragmentary. Such a memory image may in the absence of its object be a fairly full representation of it because, though that object supplied this detail in the past, the previous experience so altered the body that it is able to reproduce that content at a later time.
Much of our experience, especially in our information age, is of a mental nature that takes place “inside our heads.” Yet it is, as I have indicated, ultimately of a physical nature, and a great deal of it is in the form of language. While without elaborating, Bergson says that language is symbolic, we know thanks to Wittgenstein that language has a very considerable life of its own. Moreover, that life is largely physical. The French philosopher observes that “talking to oneself” silently involves subtle motions of the mouth that amplified constitute actual speaking but is here more fragmentary and abbreviated. Thinking in the form of language therefore chiefly takes place not in the brain but in the mouth!
A final issue I have with Bergson is how he explains consciousness. While intuition of duration is presented as a simple fact, he says that images become conscious when pure present perceptions are overlaid with memory images that re-enter the present from the spiritual past. We can do better than accept this notion of a parallel spiritual world wherein all our memories are stored intact and miraculously become conscious upon re-entering the present and merging with some content there.
The shortcomings of Bergson’s thought can be overcome, as I shall presently show by amending the system of philosophy I presented in Being Alive: A Guide for Human Action. He is not alone as the author of an imperfect scheme, for every philosophy has weaknesses; in fact the Western tradition has advanced through challenges and resolutions to them in succeeding works. While philosophers strive to fully fortify their ideas against dispute, their primary motivation is moral: to present an interpretation of the world that moves people to a kind of action that they judge will serve the world well in the historical conditions of their day.
We need to understand the world differently, so my objective here is to provide a worldview in which people and things are not only defined differently, but directly experienced in a new way that leads to action to secure democracy and environmental well-being. The present dominant paradigm consists of science and neoliberal political economy, and these disciplines must be understood as so many models and operations that aim to control nature. Science confines itself to consideration of material and efficient causality – what things are made of and what activates their functions – while the sole final cause or purpose of science is “progress.” Apart from that the scientific enterprise is amoral, indeed has become increasingly immoral. Neoliberalism is a pseudo-science hatched out by right-wing economists, within which there is only one human relationship, namely competition. Nearly fifty years after being launched by Thatcher and Reagan it is now reaching its zenith with Trump’s authoritarian plutocracy.
Science certainly has beneficial applications, but it is only a tool or method essentially no different in my view from cooking technique: one follows a recipe and gets the thing the recipe is for. There’s nothing moral about the recipe or the food produced by following it. Moral philosophy is therefore independent of science except insofar as it provides guidance for its practice.
In setting itself above technology philosophy has traditionally claimed to constitute ultimate truth, and over history a number of different and opposing systems have asserted this distinction. Yet the criteria for truth has remained what Plato set down: true belief with an explanation, so the key is what experience is selected as true belief. For Plato and Aristotle it was the intuition of Forms or essences; for the Rationalists it was mathematical ideas; for the empiricists sense perception, and for Bergson it was intuition of duration. All of these are self-evident facts of experience which form the foundations of the several systems that furnish their explanations. Apart from satisfying the criteria, a philosophy must effectively serve the moral needs of the time. None have ever brought about a paradise on earth, but they can be judged to be more or less successful.
In addressing moral needs philosophies set priorities, focusing on some matters and experiences and ignoring others, so they can also be judged as more or less complete as they address the issues of a particular time. By this standard Bergson’s work, insofar as it presumes to explain all of human experience is incomplete since it fails to acknowledge the kind of awareness that is growing among environmentally-minded people, which is intuition of life in a variety of forms.
Whether on an individual or collective scale, this latter intuition is basically Aristotle’s intuition of essences. So now that the highest object of our concern is life, I correct Bergson’s omission by adding essences to his system along with my other revisions. In Being Alive I also bring Aristotle up to date by recognizing that the vital functions of essences and therefore their lives extend beyond the boundaries of their bodies as they also form collective essences. While they are not objects of intuition for him, essences of this nature are actually present in Bergson’s work as his centers of action.
In our experience, as we perceive his images we also intuit the essences of the things around us with the images and the intuitions existing outside our bodies approximately in the location of their objects. The images do reflect our potential action upon the objects, so there’s no question of “objective” perception independent of a human subject. With intuition we know what things are for us – a chair isn’t just a particular colored shape; it’s a piece of furniture to sit on. So here we are with Bergson’s intentions for action with my body surrounded by images and intuitions, all of which reflect my potential action upon them. They form an extended sphere of consciousness at the center of which is my body. Consciousness is not constructed by the re-emergence of memory images from the past but is rather an elementary function of my essence whereby it conjoins with external essences to form images and intuitions of them.
In my essentialist worldview the body is a center of action that forms parts of so many nested and intersecting living units that by nature include communities and ecosystems. Bergson’s universe is also continuous, and this is how virtual actions are projected onto their objects. I’m not really separate from the thing I see over there; what I am and my present disposition condition it, so my image of it reflects that disposition. Likewise with my intuition: I can see a rock as merely a rock or as something to use as a hammer, a missile and so forth.
For me consciousness is a function of my essence alongside bodily functions and forms, as I have stated in previous works, a sphere around my body. It isn’t absolutely distinct from physical functions, as we observe conscious experience pass continuously into bodily action. Sense perception serves, as Bergson says, to present choices to the subject for courses of action and is therefore virtual action in the form of conscious images that are of a different nature than the physical body. This is a simple fact which is only made mysterious by people who wish to reduce psychic phenomena to physical processes.
The body is a living whole that performs a variety of functions as a whole. Accordingly my perception reflects the totality of my situation at every moment, and this is why my total experience is always colored by my mood. This is not to say that the body can’t perform different unrelated functions such as walking and chewing gum at the same time.
Bergson has the body acting in its own self-interest, with the rest of the universe being indifferent to it, but reciprocity in nature is a fact. We think of ourselves as imposing our wills on external things, but insofar as we and they are parts of organic wholes, notably ecosystems, other objects willfully support our actions. This may inspire feelings of gratitude in us or unusual joy as in the exceptional experience Aldo Leopold describes of several diverse natural agencies uniting to bring him the exquisite pleasure of catching a fish in the Alder Fork. We aren’t all-powerful, and things act in their own self-interest as well, such as that of a rock that obstructs our motion.
Since I have covered these topics in previous writings I will move on to the focus of this essay: how time and thus freedom figure in my synthesis of Aristotle and Bergson. External perception, by making us aware of objects at a distance from our bodies gives us time to decide upon our next action. Presenting a panorama of images it gives us virtually unlimited choices which are conditioned and ranked, so to speak, by our present intention. So, strictly speaking, my image of a blue mountain off in the distance offers me the option of going off and climbing it, but my attention is on the images of what is immediately before me.
In contrast to Aristotle’s world which is an eternal present, my life is historical. My past isn’t stacked up in memory images stowed away in some past realm, but in my substance which is preserved over time through the continual creation of the universe in which the ever-new present is integrated into the continually recreated past. My past experience therefore accumulates in my body, altering it every moment of time while providing the ability to repeat past actions and recreate past conscious images. Thus my disposition or intention at every moment is that of my historical self which contains all of its bodily and conscious memories.
The “Good Oak” chapter of Sand County Almanac is an excellent metaphor for individual human histories. Each year a tree adds a ring to its trunk which is affected by accompanying environmental conditions within the human historical context. Similarly with people: one’s own history contains much content from what continually goes on around their body. Peter Berger’s 1966 volume The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge summarizes the core truth of how society conditions the individual. As for the historical dimension, Faulkner stated it perfectly: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”
So the self which conditions the images we see that present options for action is a self with a history that goes back ultimately to the dawn of time. As Bergson has the subject making free choices presumably in their own self-interest, he takes pains to avoid any form of teleology. Intentions for him appear to be situational, while freedom is a good in itself and not a capacity for achieving any other kind of moral objectives. But what we want now is guidance for making choices that effectively benefit humanity and the earth in our current historical situation.
Novelty is introduced into the universe at every moment of its continual creation as it is integrated into the continually recreated past. Our past experience accumulates, and it is the totality of that which we bring to bear on our perception of an ever-new present world. Between the present countless images of objects arrayed in our visual space and our vast historical background, our options, that is, our freedom for action, is virtually limitless. The whole aspect of the scene and our choices are determined by our particular intention in the situation, and we decide which possible course of action fulfills our desire of the moment.
Intention is desire and purpose, a truth that Bergson cannot escape. Life and all of our functions are driven by desire, but the exercise of habit suppresses desire and life. Berger explains how human behavior is institutionalized or established as customs that children are brought up to follow and which are continually reinforced in adult life. People may live their whole lives accepting their present culture and functioning in accordance with it in an habitual manner. They obviously get away with this so long as the world situation remains fairly stable, however that time has now ended. Although those who cling to habit can’t imagine any different way of life we have infinitely rich historical reserves upon which we can not only draw but continue to build for a future of greater resilience and freedom.
At this time we have a purpose, which is basically to establish the ecological civilization that rejects the current myth of ceaseless material progress and radical individualism. The past continuously interpenetrates the present in smooth transitions, that is, effectively; change is seen to work rather than not work. So among our historical resources I have chosen to reintroduce Aristotle’s philosophy which offers a number of now practical principles.
Our present priority is life, and, in contrast with the mechanism and dynamism of the modern age, Aristotle’s focus is on organisms. Further, in our time people seek immediate conscious unity with natural life, which is precisely Aristotle’s intuition of essences. The latter was banished by Enlightenment orthodoxy, but today as always intuition of essences is a self-evident fact of experience. I have stated that Bergson’s centers of action are essentially essences to which he adds the new attributes of greater extension in space and time.
Aristotle confines the functions of essences within the boundaries of their physical bodies, but this position is untenable in light of ecological understanding. Things functionally conjoin with objects around them in the process of fulfilling their own functions which are reciprocal. Thus in collecting pollen to feed itself the bee fulfills the flower’s reproductive function for which the latter initially attracted the bee. Universal reciprocity is exemplified by gravitational force.
Essences are the very lives of things, and in addition to individual lives we now recognize a multitude of collective lives or essences such as the beehive and ecosystems. Things therefore must be considered not only as individuals but as organic parts of any number of intersecting and nested wholes. Accordingly a major objective of a new culture is to abandon the notion that one is nothing but their individual body or self.
Reconciling Aristotle’s final causality with Bergson’s creative evolution is a bit tricky, For the Greek things not only strive to fulfill their functions or essence, they strive to achieve the perfect form. In addition these forms are of an eternal generic nature, so they must not ever change or evolve beyond their generic character. Yet it is admitted that things have a multitude of accidental attributes, therefore variations exist, and, moreover, being embodied in matter means that forms are never perfectly actualized. Although we in fact see species changing before our eyes and also have the massive fossil record, there is otherwise a very high degree of consistency in nature. Things do function in mostly uniform ways, and organisms normally breed true. As they exhibit generic habits things function to the best of their individual ability to live as individuals and as parts of the countless organic wholes to which they belong. These are their final causes in their multiple identities, so while all the parts of the universe qua parts have as their telos acting in service to the whole, the whole itself has no particular purpose, as Bergson affirms.
Our Aristotelian heritage combined with elements of Bergson’s philosophy and science provides a true and practical alternative ontology as well as an epistemology. Another extremely important benefit of reviving ancient Greek philosophy is its insistence on reason. Our time has sunk into a high degree of irrationality with emotions serving as the grounds for thoughts and actions. I have briefly described how images of memory and imagination are formed in my revised version of Bergson, and I have no wish to fully analyze our infinitely complex process of thinking. It does figure immensely in our lives and choices for action, and, providing for the proper use of intuition, we must think rationally and not capriciously.
For the Greeks man’s purpose was to be a good person by practicing, indeed aspiring to the perfection, of the four classical virtues – courage, wisdom, justice and temperance. Historically these were superseded by the Christian values of faith, obedience to God and humility. Modern culture has emphasized freedom defined as the God-given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Like the progress of technology, classical liberal ethics have come to deliver the opposite of what they originally promised with economic oppression, tyranny and looming environmental collapse. The Greeks were no strangers to such threats as, preoccupied with perfection and ideals, they struggled with the idea of democracy.
At this moment in America our checks and balances have been neutralized, giving way to an authoritarian president who is rapidly becoming a bloody tyrant. It therefore falls on the people to carry out the Resistance, and recent history shows examples of how this is the way that democracies recover from autocratic coups. We must come together, as Bernie Sanders has said, with “we” being everyone acting as individuals with everyone else for a common purpose. The classical virtues are very much needed today as we recall that courage for the ancients was the premier virtue because the practice of the others requires it. John Lewis said, “You cannot be afraid to speak up and speak out for what you believe. You have to have courage, raw courage.”
Over history the understanding of justice has undergone change. From the minimum of criminal justice it has expanded to include economic and social justice and now environmental justice. This last has referred principally to protecting people from disproportionate environmental impacts, especially pollution from major sources. However in our time of raging climate change, not only all people must be accorded environmental justice, but all natural things as well – species, waters, lands, even the atmosphere.
Our collective human experience – our history – is an infinitely rich resource from which we can draw to move forward at this time. Part of our problem is that the myth of progress has greatly devalued the knowledge of history, for which the Greeks had a deep appreciation. Our educational practices therefore desperately need to restore it. Knowledge of and understanding of current affairs are also woefully inadequate thanks to corporate consolidation of news media and the dominance of entertainment media.
The Greeks focused their attention not on what is, but rather what ought to be – the perfect man and the ideal state. As I have stated, purpose for Bergson is restricted to immediate actions with freedom itself being the product of the progressive increase in human physical ability over the course of evolution. Still for him all action is purposeful, aiming to fulfill some intention. So again, it is evident that our action must aim at some goal, and insofar as the goal is comprehensive, there must be an ideal. This is the ecological civilization which at this time most people, who don’t think about ideals, are most likely to dismiss as fantasy. Yet to the extent that people lack goals, their action leads nowhere, and lacking common goals they go in different directions, making little progress and possibly cancelling out each other’s individual progress. Getting people to agree on a comprehensive goal is therefore a serious job in itself along with the additional task of getting them to agree on the means of advancing that goal.
In the present state of the Resistance many individuals and groups are doing different things, and thankfully there is some high-level leadership that is uniting several of them. Still, we have a good number of people not knowing what they can do and also wondering if the options they see will have significant impact, or any at all. To them are addressed Lewis’ words “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” Worse than feeling despair, those who do not act renounce their freedom.
So I shall now describe how to live free in this supremely challenging time. We have multiple identities as a human individual and as parts of innumerable larger living wholes. Although we are called to act in different ones at different times, actions that most advance the ideal are those that serve ourselves and as many of these other wholes as possible. Such action, while virtuous, is not necessarily free, as it can be merely the exercise of especially environmentally-friendly customs.
In contrast with such habits, freedom is as Bergson describes it – action that originates with an intention that defines our images of target objects as those of some repeated past action. Perception doesn’t immediately give way to action; rather we examine the object, successively projecting virtual actions onto it that reveal different aspects of it and therefore different options for our action. At length we freely make a choice, and our perception passes into the chosen act. Actions exhibit degrees of freedom ranging from those which, while not quite reflexive, minimally engage our attention to those over which we deliberate, bringing considerable past experience to bear upon our choice.
The freedom of even elaborately thought-out actions may still be limited insofar as they embody conventional wisdom and are of limited benefit to the world. For we are all of our identities, and to act in only one or a few is to limit our agency.
Considering the spatially far-reaching impacts of possible actions is one part of our freedom. Another is the good use of the past as a resource. Abundant personal experience is valuable, but so is extensive and intelligent understanding of history. The current situation in America reveals parallels with the rise of Nazi Germany and the Roman Empire. We project, as it were, our past experience of reading relevant histories onto our present experience to recognize it as fascism and imperialism. Such awareness illustrates how indirect experience of things in the past determines direct experience in the present if a person is oriented toward historical understanding. It is evident that a huge number of people today aren’t; history has little relevance to them as their attention is focused almost entirely on the present. Making use of past experience therefore requires specifically seeking its illumination, which can be a routine element of one’s reception of information.
Not to go into the weeds on this, thoughts seem to come forth in the way that I have described the genesis of images of memory and imagination: one projects some virtual action with the intention of it stopping short of real action, forming only an ethereal, fleeting and fragmentary image. These spawn more, so association of ideas occurs and, under the direction of intentions, trains of thought. One can collect more or fewer thoughts on some subject or formulate a question and intentionally pursue an answer. This process mirrors that of visually searching to find some object. Another analogy is trying to remember someone’s name by calling up memories of them or reciting the alphabet to identify one of its letters. The search is a purposeful endeavor that is fulfilled when the correct name comes to mind and gives one a feeling of satisfaction.
Free action in the highest degree therefore requires thinking about what one does, having extensive experience and knowledge and finally being oriented toward universal benefit which can take the form of holding the ideal in one’s mind. Present circumstances, as we know, are rather unfavorable, and one is tempted to think that their individual actions are so small that they cannot have enough impact to make them worthwhile. But this is where Bergson’s thought uplifts us.
The universe is created anew at every moment of time with its novelty being continually integrated into the recreated past. What confronts us at every present moment is an essentially brand-new world to which we must apply the total past accumulation of our bodily and image memories. Exercising our freedom we choose some action which becomes added to that accumulation and ultimately affects the whole universe. We understand this ripple effect that seems uncertain and therefore inconsequential. Yet the action adds to our own histories which, with this addition, we then apply to our next action that can compound the effect of the last action in the world plus its efficacy as memory. This process is exemplified by musicians who improve and diversify their ability with practice.
With persistence we do indeed make progress toward our goal, adding new techniques, repeating what works and discarding what doesn’t. While the ecological civilization has countless parts, the ideal is one, so as we maintain that singular vision, we work on building the parts, taking care that none are in conflict with each other. As the whole universe is continually created anew at every moment, so are its parts, which means that every part shares in continual absolute creation. Therefore our actions don’t just ripple away into space but contribute to the ongoing creation of the world and literally build it for the immediate future. By nature the universe is an ecosystem in which all the parts serve each other, and although human freedom permits us to act contrary to it, ultimately nature is our ally, both without and within ourselves.
As parts of natural communities including human ones, we desire the functional harmony of all the parts, that is, justice. We therefore naturally love justice and the ideal of universal justice in the world represented by the ecological civilization. Such love powerfully motivates us as it also moves the rest of the world to support our effort.
Sensory images and those of memory and imagination are inseparable from intuitions. As I have often repeated, we know what the things around us are through intuition. In Aristotle the objects of intuition are the forms of things – their archetypes, and these forms are embodied in matter which render them more or less functional. Thus I look at a bedroom dresser and immediately know what it is, but also realize that it may be in bad condition with missing drawers, damaged wood or a tilt. In my system things have essential generic functions even though these are not for all time as Aristotle has them. In any case we do have an innate sense of what is right in the world, that is, what is just.
The social construction of reality can replace this with contrary habits; for, exercising freedom, people can act against nature. They can come to accept and even enjoy the degradation of nature and human life, and this is why they must be provided with the ideal and brought to embrace it. This was Plato’s objective in writing The Republic, a project that was extremely difficult in his time and has remained so. To follow John Lewis’ precept “When you see something that is not right…” you must first recognize injustice when you see it and second have some idea as to what is an appropriate reaction to it.
As individual agents we clearly see that realizing our intentions is greatly enhanced by the support of other people. In fact much of our trouble is precisely people obstructing them in the first place. Our success therefore depends on recruiting people to join our effort. Because people are so divided with their own agendas, that is, habits, or those of their identity groups, progress is variable, analogous to the action of fungi that I described in Living Like a Fungus. While the purpose is the unchanging ideal, small successes are achieved that can produce the thrilling sense, like in the Grateful Dead song that “everything lead up to this day.” This is awareness of the cumulative progress of action over time.
At every moment the scene changes in a kaleidoscopic manner, and one must go on applying their ever-growing experience to what is mostly the task of engaging people in action for a common purpose. When in our time people demand immediate gratification and satisfaction guaranteed they need to understand, again as John Lewis put it, “Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part. And if we believe in the change we seek, then it is easy to commit to doing all we can, because the responsibility is ours alone to build a better society and a more peaceful world.”
Against scientific notions that reduce the universe to the determined or probabilistic motions of elementary entities, the action of DNA or social conditioning we have the ability to freely contribute to the continual absolute creation of the world, shaping its course into the future. Knowing this is more important than ever as humans now have so much power over nature and centralized power over global humanity. Our responsibility is nothing less than to save democracy and the natural world for the future.
At this moment we still have considerable capacity to exercise our freedom, but forces are moving fast to destroy that. Taking control of education, revising and erasing history they aim to destroy the very idea of freedom. Up to this point I have focused on freedom to choose options in everyday life, but there are larger spheres in which we must exercise our freedom while we still have it. The great expansion of government has turned us into mostly consumers of government services rather than citizens performing the functions of governing. Citizen action is now urgent, especially with justice at stake as well as even the recognition of climate change and environmental degradation.
A major motivation for much of my writing in the last several years has been my wish to increase citizen engagement. In fact this is why I turned to Aristotle in the first place as he held that man by nature is a political animal. Updating his philosophy I have insisted that people’s primary identity is as citizens. As fascism advances we must act in multiple capacities including as consumers, neighbors, educators and students. Yet our principal power is as citizens, again while we still have it.
The political dimension of human life cannot be underestimated as it conditions the scope of our lives and freedom. The images I perceive present options for my action, such as walking here or there, however, I can’t do this if I’m imprisoned. Neither should I walk across a street if a signal says, “Don’t Walk.” Laws are essential parts of our lives as political animals that can aid us in living fully or seriously restrict us. At this time we urgently need to preserve our fundamental freedoms that are being rapidly eroded, but we must also recognize the ways in which government has created and sustains our life-denying political economy. For the most part people have no choice but to work in enterprises that are destructive to the environment, exploit and harm people. Fully living by serving ourselves and all the organic wholes of which we are parts and making the maximum use of our freedom to do this requires a political order that supports it. Pursuing the ideal in the political arena creates the very conditions that make its realization possible.
Collective action is vital, but we must never forget that our freedom is ultimately individual and that we should never surrender our faculty of judgement to the herd. We must always think about what we are doing, judging whether it is working or not to advance our immediate, intermediate and ultimate goals.
At this time there is much organizing and activism aimed at halting rising authoritarianism. While the goal is supremely multi-dimensional with every particular sector under attack, the target is singular: the Trump administration. So many campaigns present opportunities for people to get engaged, and to succeed the majority of the people must do so. Yet our action must not be one-dimensional. According to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, our situation is due to the atomization of the population to which people have responded by joining identity groups, the most well-marketed of which is MAGA. Our world is fragmented or, as one of my volunteers said, “fractured.” To achieve our minimal goal of saving democracy people must come together across issues as well as within communities.
People’s lives are multi-dimensional as they form parts of many intersecting and nested though degraded wholes that exist not only in the past and present but also reach into the future. By far the strongest motivation for many people is concern for their children’s future. In the Resistance movement everyone must, as Fred Ross Sr. counseled, become temporary organizers continually recruiting more people to join it. This is not to be done as the Religious Right has with proselytizing people into their authoritarian machine but by embracing their myriad needs.
People demand immediate gratification and guaranteed satisfaction, but these are not possible. As recruits their most urgent need is for accurate information about how the regime is hurting them in the present and will continue to do even more so in the future. The Resistance must also lay out their solution which in the short term is to reverse MAGA rollbacks then increase well-being with policies such as Medicare for All, campaign finance reform and bold climate action. MAGA wants people to forget about climate change, but its effects are very much here and now, as are the means of combatting it.
Mass action is composed of individuals who must all participate in building it. In recent cases of people overthrowing tyrants the numbers of those taking to the streets are astronomical, and we must aim for the same through so much individual outreach. Here one’s knowledge and experience – our accumulated past – are all important. Who do we know? What do we know about them? What connections do we have with them either as actually shared or similar past experience? Who are our common acquaintances?
We must educate ourselves, learn about others’ experiences and look for models of action. Such full-spectrum activity expands, fortifies and diversifies our capacity for seeing, even generating opportunities, acting upon them and forming intentions that all snowball. One becomes an agent of change by taking action, echoing Aristotle’s position that one becomes virtuous by practicing virtue. In the same spirit Ursula Le Guin said, “You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution.”
While some efforts will succeed and others will fail just our action bends, as they say, the arc of the universe toward justice. In the final training for the 2025 John Lewis National Day of Action Good Trouble Lives On Co-Director of the Transformative Justice Coalition Darryl Jones told the hosts of the nearly 1700 scheduled events that he fully expected the events to be successful, but that the participants had already succeeded just in the act of taking the courage to step up and host their events.
All such action builds both our resources for action and capacity for insight. As the world is always changing we must continue to evaluate what we are doing. What is working; what isn’t? Such evaluation is especially important for collective action, as groups have a knack for falling into routines and too often lose sight of their goal. Lewis was adamant that we keep our eyes on the prize. We have short-term goals that lead up to the final goal which is the ecological civilization that incorporates the beloved community. Progress toward this last component is presently occurring in sanctuary communities in which neighbors unite to support and shield immigrants.
The world is not a machine, much less a collection of serendipitiously acting entities that might with luck form constructive relationships. Rather it is alive, an organism containing infinite parts and parts of parts. Our advanced physiology, specifically our sensori-motor apparatus, paired with our body’s retention of all our past experience gives us immense ability to exercise freedom. We achieve the greatest freedom by choosing to act for our individual benefit and for that of all the wholes of which we are parts, for we are all of these things, as we also rationally draw upon the vast store of personal and historical human experience. Our action, which applies past experience, is directed at the present, while its effects will persist into the future. We literally co-create the universe at every moment of time. Its future; its fate is in our hands.
Insofar as we act in some of our identities but not all or even as members of identity groups opposed to the natural order we are unfree. Also acting in ignorance or irrationally is unfreedom. Supreme unfreedom is not functioning as individual rational agents at all, as Zygmunt Bauman said, not like swimmers but rather plankton.
Life is love and, as Swedenborg said, “A man’s life is his love.” By nature we love life in all of our identities in which we strive for justice among all things. This motivation exists in all of us, and, not only is it powerful, it reveals opportunities to act for justice all around us. As we freely act on these not only our impact, but our intentions, experience, power and freedom grow. There is so much we can do individually, but our impact is orders of magnitude greater with a large number of people together implementing intelligent strategy.
The universe is alive, perpetuating itself into the future by continually creating itself anew at every moment of time, while by nature all of its parts simultaneously serve their own lives as well as the life of the whole. For us to live with such purpose is to live universally, imbued with the motivation, force and direction of universal life. As we serve the other parts of the universe, they serve us. By employing our full natural agency, the full natural resources in ourselves and our full individual histories that ultimately reach far into human and natural history we leverage natural forces.
By nature we are free, so none of this happens automatically. Also by nature we are both rational and political animals. So living universally requires robust civic engagement and continual exercise of intelligence. Harm is escalating fast, so we must practice rapid response – promptly assessing developments and making sound choices for action. Simone de Beauvior regarded the corresponding action of the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation as peak freedom.
The impact of each person’s persistent effort snowballs, and the collective impact of many people working for a common purpose is an avalanche. Nature is our ally, but thanks to human freedom, it has sunk into an extremely degraded condition, most especially in its human sector. Consequently the need for an intelligent strategy to mobilize people to save democracy and the planet is most urgent. Here our consideration of nature is crucial, as we pay particular attention to people’s humanity. Finally, as John Lewis said, “We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us.” It is a world-historical opportunity to live free.
Phila Back 