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’.
To read more, click here.