The Physicist and the Philosopher

Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time

Jimena Canales

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400865772
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia della scienza

The explosive debate that transformed our views about time and scientific truth On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson's theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who gained fame as a philosopher by arguing that time should not be understood exclusively through the lens of science, criticized Einstein's theory of time for being a metaphysics grafted on to science, one that ignored the intuitive aspects of time. The Physicist and the Philosopher tells the remarkable story of how this explosive debate transformed our understanding of time and drove a rift between science and the humanities that persists today.Jimena Canales introduces readers to the revolutionary ideas of Einstein and Bergson, describes how they dramatically collided in Paris, and traces how this clash of worldviews reverberated across the twentieth century. She shows how it provoked responses from figures such as Bertrand Russell and Martin Heidegger, and carried repercussions for American pragmatism, logical positivism, phenomenology, and quantum mechanics. Canales explains how the new technologies of the period—such as wristwatches, radio, and film—helped to shape people's conceptions of time and further polarized the public debate. She also discusses how Bergson and Einstein, toward the end of their lives, each reflected on his rival's legacy—Bergson during the Nazi occupation of Paris and Einstein in the context of the first hydrogen bomb explosion. The Physicist and the Philosopher is a magisterial and revealing account that shows how scientific truth was placed on trial in a divided century marked by a new sense of time.

PART 1

THE DEBATE

CHAPTER 1

Untimely

On April 6, 1922, Einstein met a man he would never forget. He was one of the most celebrated philosophers of the century, widely known for espousing a theory of time that explained what clocks did not: memories, premonitions, expectations and anticipations. Thanks to him, we now know that to act on the future one needs to start by changing the past.

Why does one thing did not always lead to the next? The meeting had been planned as a cordial and scholarly event. It was anything but that. The physicist and the philosopher clashed, each defending opposing, even irreconcilable, ways of understanding time. At the Société française de philosophie—one of the most venerable institutions in France—they confronted each other under the eyes of a select group of intellectuals. The “dialogue between the greatest philosopher and the greatest physicist of the 20th century” was dutifully written down. It was a script fit for the theater.¹ The meeting, and the words they uttered, would be discussed for the rest of the century.

The philosopher’s name was Henri Bergson. In the early decades of the century, his fame, prestige, and influence surpassed that of the physicist—who, in contrast, is so well known today. Bergson’s reputation was at risk after he confronted the younger man. But so was Einstein’s. The criticisms leveled against the physicist were immediately damaging. When the Nobel Prize was awarded to Einstein a few months later, it was not given for the theory that had made the physicist famous: relativity. Instead, it was given “for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect”—an area of science that hardly jolted the public’s imagination to the degree that relativity did. The reasons behind the decision to focus on work other than relativity were directly traced to what Bergson said that day in Paris.

The president of the Nobel Committee explained that although “most discussion centers on his theory of relativity,” it did not merit the prize. Why not? The reasons were surely varied and complex, but the culprit mentioned that evening was clear: “It will be no secret that the famous philosopher Bergson in Paris has challenged this theory.” Bergson had shown that relativity “pertains to epistemology” rather than to physics—and so it “has therefore been the subject of lively debate in philosophical circles.”²

The explanation that day surely reminded Einstein of the previous spring’s events in Paris. Clearly, he had provoked a controversy. These were the consequences. He had been unable to convince many thinkers of the value of his definition of time, especially when his theory was compared against that of the eminent philosopher. In his acceptance speech, Einstein remained stubborn. He delivered a lecture that was not about the photoelectric effect, for which he had been officially granted the prize, but about relativity—the work that had made him a star worldwide but which was now in question.

The invocation of Bergson’s name by the presenter of the Nobel Prize was a spectacular triumph for the philosopher who had lived his life and made an illustrious career by showing how time should not be understood exclusively through the lens of science. It had to be understood, he persistently and consistently insisted, philosophically. But what exactly did he mean by that? As it turns out, Bergson’s philosophy was as controversial as Einstein’s physics.

What led these two brilliant individuals to adopt opposite positions on nearly all the pertinent issues of their era? What caused a century to end as divided as the twentieth did? Why did two of the greatest minds of modern times disagree so starkly, dividing intellectual communities for years to come?

THAT EVENING

On that “truly historic” day when the two met, Bergson was unwillingly dragged into a discussion he had explicitly intended to avoid.³ The philosopher was by then much more senior than Einstein. He spoke for about half an hour. He had been prodded by an impertinent colleague, who had been in turn pressured to speak by the event organizer. “We are more Einsteinian than you, Monsieur Einstein,” he said.⁴ His objections would be heard far and wide. “Bergson was supposed by all of us to be dead,” explained the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, “but Relativity, oddly enough at first sight, has resuscitated him.”⁵

The physicist responded in less than a minute—including in his answer one damning and frequently cited sentence: “Il n’y a donc pas un temps des philosophes.”⁶ Einstein’s reply—stating that the time of the philosophers did not exist—was incendiary.

Einstein had traveled to the City of Lights from Berlin. When his train arrived at the Gare du Nord, “photographers, reporters, filmmakers, officials and diplomats awaited him in imposing numbers.” The scientific celebrity decided to descend by the other side of the tracks, escaping surreptitiously, like a robber. He made his way through dangerous cables and warning signs before arriving at a tiny door that led to the boulevard de la Chapelle, which, in the afternoon, was as empty as the Sahara Desert. Safe from the cameras and the crowds, Einstein laughed like a child.⁷

The physicist’s visit was “a sensation that the intellectual snobbery of the capital could not pass up.”⁸ Intellectuals were not the only ones excited by his presence. It literally set off “crowds in a craze,” quickly enthralling unsuspecting Parisians.⁹ An observer described an “unfettered frenzy by the public at large around certain of Einstein’s commentators.”¹⁰ Einstein’s trip “reanimated and brought to the stage of a paroxysm the curiosity of the public for the scientist and his work.”¹¹

What Einstein said next that evening was even more controversial: “There remains only a psychological time that differs from the physicist’s.” At that very moment, Einstein laid down the gauntlet by considering as valid only two ways of understanding time: physical and psychological. These two ways of examining time, although scandalous in the particular context that Einstein uttered them, had a long history. With Einstein, they would have an even longer one—becoming two dominant prisms inflecting most investigations into the nature of time during the twentieth century.

The simple, dualistic perspective on time advocated by Einstein appalled Bergson. The philosopher responded by writing a whole book dedicated to confronting Einstein. His theory is “a metaphysics grafted upon science, it is not science,” he wrote.¹²

Einstein fought back with all his energy, strength, and resources. In the years that followed, Bergson was largely perceived to have lost the debate against the younger physicist. The scientist’s views on time came to dominate most learned discussions on the topic, keeping in abeyance not only Bergson’s but many other artistic and literary approaches, by relegating them to a position of secondary, auxiliary importance. For many, Bergson’s defeat represented a victory of “rationality” against “intuition.”¹³ It marked a moment when intellectuals were no longer able to keep up with revolutions in science due to its increasing complexity. For that reason, they should stay out of it. Science and its consequences should be left to those who arguably knew something about it—the scientists themselves.¹⁴ Thus began “the story of the setback, after a period of unprecedented success, of Bergson’s philosophy of absolute time—unquestionably under the impact of relativity.”¹⁵ Most important, then began the period when the relevance of philosophy declined in the face of the rising influence of science.

Biographers who write about Einstein’s life and work rarely mention Bergson. One exception, a book written by a colleague, paints a picture of eventual rapprochement between the two men.¹⁶ But other evidence shows just how divisive their encounter was. A few years before their deaths, Bergson wrote about Einstein (1937), and Einstein mentioned Bergson (1953) one last time. They underlined—once again—just how wrong the perspective of the other remained. While the debate was for the most part removed from Einstein’s legacy, it was periodically brought up by many of Bergson’s followers.¹⁷ The simple act of reviving the discussion that took place that day in April 1922 was not a matter that could be taken lightly. Not only is the incident itself divisive—its relevance for history is still contested.

The two men dominated most discussions about time during the first half of the twentieth century. Thanks to Einstein, time had been finally “deposed from its high seat,” brought down from the lofty peak of philosophy to the practical down-to-earth territory of physics. He had shown that “our belief in the objective meaning of simultaneity” as well as that of absolute time had to be forever “discarded” after he had successfully “banished this dogma from our minds.”¹⁸ The physicist had shown that “space by itself, and time by itself” were two concepts “doomed to fade away into mere shadows.”¹⁹

Bergson, in contrast, claimed that there was more to Time than scientists had ever wagered—and he meant scientists of all stripes, ranging from Darwinian evolutionists to astronomers and physicists. To explain those aspects of Time that were most important and that scientists constantly disregarded, Bergson would frequently capitalize the term. He associated it with élan vital, a concept translated worldwide as “vital impulse.” This impulse, he argued, was interwoven throughout the universe giving life an unstoppable impulse and surge, ever productive of new unexpected creations, and imperfectly grasped by science. Although science could only deal with it imperfectly, it was the backbone of artistic and creative work. Bergson’s influence on literature was seen as spreading to Gertrude Stein, T. S. Elliot, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and numerous others who introduced breaks, twists, and turns in narratives where the future appeared before the past and the past after the future.²⁰

Einstein’s and Bergson’s contributions appeared to their contemporaries forcefully at odds, representing two competing strands of modern times. Vitalism was contrasted against mechanization, creation against ratiocination, and personality against uniformity. During these years, Bergson’s philosophy was often placed next to the first in these pairs of terms; Einstein’s work frequently appeared alongside the second.²¹ Bergson was associated with metaphysics, antirationalism, and vitalism, the idea that life permeates everything. Einstein with their opposites: with physics, rationality, and the idea that the universe (and our knowledge of it) could stand just as well without us. Each man represented one side of salient, irreconcilable dichotomies that characterized modernity.

This period consolidated a world largely split into science and the rest. What is unique about the appearance of these divisions and subsequent incarnations is that after the Einstein and Bergson encounter, science frequently appeared firmly on one side of the dichotomy. Other areas of culture appeared on the other side—including philosophy, politics, and art.

The stature of both men was envied by many of their contemporaries. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, once described himself as having “little claim to be named beside Bergson and Einstein as one of the intellectual sovereigns” of his era.²² The confrontation between them was “a controversy that presently separates the two most renowned men of our times.”²³ Although Einstein’s brain was paraded in formaldehyde as the perfect embodiment of the organ of genius, the locks of Bergson’s hair kept at his barbershop were “treated as holy relics.”²⁴

“Early in this century, two very prominent, and originally independent, lines of thought collided,” explained a physicist and historian who put his career on the line by siding with Bergson. “On the one hand … was the system of Bergson. … On the other hand, the physical theory of relativity, which … dominated scientific thought,” he continued. “It was inevitable that one or the other of these views should give way,” he concluded.²⁵ More recently, the debate between them continues to be widely perceived as inevitable. “Bergson’s confrontation with Einstein was inevitable,” wrote the famous philosopher Gilles Deleuze, more than half a century after their meeting.²⁶ And thus we find these two men playing key roles in the salient divisions of modern times. Can we move beyond them?

Bergson’s defeat was a decisive turning point for him personally, when the fame, wisdom, and caution of the elder was tested by the impetuous braggadocio of the younger, but it was also a key moment marking the rise of the authority of science vis-à-...