74 The Economist April 9th 2022
Culture
ScienceandphilosophyTime v the machine
A
century ago, on April 6th 1922, the
world’s most famous philosopher de
bated against the most famous physicist
and lost. Henri Bergson, a French thinker
who caused Broadway’s first traffic jam
when he gave a lecture in New York, had
challenged the notion of time advanced by
Albert Einstein, the discoverer of relativity.
Bergson was putting his thoughts into
book form when Einstein came to Paris.
At a gathering hosted by the Société
française de philosophie, which followed a
talk by Einstein on relativity, they finally
locked horns. Bergson summarised part of
his forthcoming book, “Duration and Si
multaneity”. Einstein’s rebuttal was with
ering. There is “no such thing as a philoso
pher’s time”, he asserted. Bergson’s version
of it was merely “psychological time”.
Their stilted “nonconversation” was a
“major anticlimax”, says Elie During, a
(living) French philosopher. Bergson’s rep
utation waned; Time magazine named
Einstein its “person of the century”.
Lopsided though the contest was, phi
losophers and scientists still ponder it. At
stake is not just the momentous question
of what time is. The debate was a key eventin the separation of sciences and human
ities into what C.P. Snow, a British novelist,
later called “two cultures”. Einstein saw
science as “the ultimate arbiter of truth”,
says Jimena Canales, author of “The Physi
cist and the Philosopher”, a book about the
episode. Bergson insisted that science did
not have the last word. Their clash, Ms Ca
nales says, raised the question, “What is
the relation between the subjective and the
objective, and can we have a form of
knowledge that includes both?”
The philosopher was in the time busi
ness long before the physicist. Bergson
published his first book, “Time and Free
Will”, in 1889, when Einstein was ten years
old. Initially an adherent of the idea that
the world works like a machine, in the
course of investigating evolution he en
countered what he came to regard as
science’s mistaken notion of time.
This views time in terms of space: an
hour measures onetwentyfourth of the
Earth’s rotation. While useful, clock time
misses what is most important about time,
Bergson decided, namely “duration”. Rath
er than being disconnected from the past,
the way one point on a ruler is separatedfrom another, the present is suffused with
it. Music is an example: each instant con
sists not only of itself but of what came be
fore it. “Pure duration is the form that the
succession of our states of consciousness
adopts when the self lets itself live, when it
stops establishing a separation between its
present and former states,” Bergson wrote.
The passage of time—the present bil
lowed with the past—provides escape from
a clockwork universe. This approach does
not deny the importance of matter, but
places life partially outside it. It is duration
that permits novelty, both in the life forms
that emerge from evolution and in the acts
that proceed from the exercise of free will.
Bergson applied his most famous epithet
to life’s struggle with the material world,
with which it is also bound up: élan vital.
People’s very identities are the “temporal
synthesis that is duration”, as Mark Sin
clair puts it in a recent book on Bergson.
His ideas were hugely influential. The
literature of his day teems with Bergsonian
characters, living between durational and
clockwork worlds. T.S. Eliot (who heard
him speak) seems to lament the splaying of
time in space in “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock”, writing of the evening “spread
out against the sky/Like a patient etherised
upon a table”. For the narrator of “In Search
of Lost Time”, the memories awakened by a
madeleine’s taste are enough to abolish
clock time. Bergson married a cousin of
Marcel Proust, the novel’s author, who was
best man at his wedding. A spellbinding
writer himself, Bergson won the Nobel
prize in literature in 1927.Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson disagreed about the nature of time.
One hundred years later, their dispute still resonates→Alsointhissection
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