Monday morning, the first semester of the academic year. I hear the English table clock in my living room strike 7:30. I put on my glasses, get up, switch on the radio, feed my cat, take a shower. At ten minutes past eight I hit the road in order to take the train to the university. An hour later I am in front of the students, waiting for them to unpack their bags. My thoughts are lingering and I realise that I am wearing my acetate glasses. Why did I wear these and not my other pair? Searching for answers I come to realise that at home, ‘I [was] a conscious automaton, and I [was] so because I [had] everything to gain by being so.’ I start with my lecture.

Henri Bergson in Time and Free Will makes use of the seemingly trivial event of waking up in the morning so as to conceptualise the difference between habitual and free activity. Getting ready for work in automaton-mode does not allow for one's thoughts to linger. In such a state, the striking of the clock ‘merely stirs up an idea which is, so to speak, solidified on the surface, the idea of rising and attending to my usual occupations’. The impression of the clock hour has coupled with a fixed idea, and the consequential act follows the impression ‘without the self interfering with it’. This ‘interference’ should be read as virtual and is not actualised when getting up is habitually done. We rarely change our mind in automaton-mode. And in equally seldom cases we can trace back why we have done something the way we did it during the morning chores. Bergson argues that this does not imply the correctness of associationist or determinist philosophies of the self. Both these theories have taken their exemplars from ‘acts, which are very numerous but for the most part insignificant’. Associationism and determinism alike make ‘retrograde movements’, and ‘from this results an error which vitiates our conception of the past; from this arises our claim to anticipate the future on every occasion’. Bergson invites us to start from other acts for philosophical purposes.