by EVAN THOMPSON
Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein fundamentally disagreed about the nature of time and how it can be measured. Who was right?
On the evening of 6 April 1922, during a lecture in Paris, the philosopher Henri Bergson and the physicist Albert Einstein clashed over the nature of time in one of the great intellectual debates of the 20th century. Einstein, who was then 43 years old, had been brought from Berlin to speak at the Société française de philosophie about his theory of relativity, which had captivated and shocked the world. For the German physicist, the time measured by clocks was no longer absolute: his work showed that simultaneous events were simultaneous in only one frame of reference. As a result, he had, according to one New York Times editorial, ‘destroyed space and time’ – and become an international celebrity. He was hounded by photographers from the moment he arrived in Paris. The lecture hall was packed that April evening.
Sitting among the gathered crowd was another celebrity. Bergson, then aged 62, was equally renowned internationally, particularly for his bestselling book Creative Evolution (1907), in which he had popularised his philosophy based on a concept of time and consciousness that he called ‘la durée’ (duration). Bergson accepted Einstein’s theory in the realm of physics, but he could not accept that all our judgments about time could be reduced to judgments about events measured by clocks. Time is something we subjectively experience. We intuitively sense it passing. This is ‘duration’.
Their debate began almost by accident. The meeting in April had been convened to bring together physicists and philosophers to discuss relativity theory, but Bergson came intending only to listen. When the discussion flagged, however, he was pressed to intervene. Reluctantly, he rose and presented a few ideas from his forthcoming book, Duration and Simultaneity (1922). As Jimena Canales documented in her book The Physicist and the Philosopher (2015), what Bergson said in the following half an hour would set in motion a debate that reverberated through the 20th century and down into the 21st. It would crystallise controversies still alive today, about the nature of time, the authority of physics versus philosophy, and the relationship between science and human experience.
Bergson began by declaring his admiration for Einstein’s work – he had no objection to most of the physicist’s ideas. Rather, Bergson took issue with the philosophical significance of Einstein’s temporal concepts, and he pressed the physicist on the importance of the lived experience of time, and the ways that this experience had been overlooked in relativity theory.
Though Einstein was forced to speak in French, a language of which he had a poor command, he took only a minute to respond. He summarised his understanding of what Bergson had said and then shrugged away the philosopher’s ideas as irrelevant to physics. Einstein believed that science was the authority on objective time, and philosophy had no prerogative to weigh in. To end his rebuttal, he declared: ‘[T]here is no time of the philosopher; there is only a psychological time different from the time of the physicist.’
But despite what many have come to believe about the debate that began that night, Einstein was wrong. There is a third kind of a time: a time of the philosopher.
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