Abstract

The debate between Einstein and Bergson is a salient episode in the history of modern physics and a telling example of the interaction between science and philosophy. This paper initially discusses five reasons why Bergson criticised Einstein for giving up absolute time. The most important one was Bergson’s commitment to an intuitionist, anti-Kantian metaphysics informed by common sense. Apart from that, he knew that the theory of special relativity permits “duration” (durée) in the form of the passage of proper time, to which Bergson referred as “real time”. Neither static eternalism (which excludes temporal passage) nor dynamic eternalism (which, like the former, claims the existence of the future) are acceptable from Bergson’s philosophical perspective, which acknowledges the role of temporal experience and everyday thinking in addition to science and metaphysics. He understood temporal passage as creation of new existence, anticipating what later became known as the growing block theory of time. The pointy relativistic variant of this theory, which divides the universe into blocks of growing past light cones, does justice to large parts of his philosophy, including the distinction between the actual and the virtual. Supporters of Bergson’s account of duration should adopt this theory of time.

Highlights

  • After the famous debate between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein in Paris in 1922, the world gradually became convinced that Bergson had lost the game

  • That the objectification of psychological time cannot be blamed for Bergson’s “prejudices about time” (Ray 1991, p. 25) becomes clear when we consider that physicists bridge the gap between psychology and physics as well, for example, when they speak of observers who experience time

  • Bergson’s error was to deny that this calculation has physical meaning, by denouncing coordinate time as “imaginary”. This conclusion cannot be justified by the fact that coordinate time is derived from proper time and, in contrast to the latter, cannot be measured. Nor does all this explain why Bergson believed that the proper times in different frames of reference must run at the same pace, to which he referred as “the unity of real time” (1965, pp. 73 and 82)

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Summary

Introduction

After the famous debate between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein in Paris in 1922, the world gradually became convinced that Bergson had lost the game. 238–256), Bergson’s additional assumption that the past exists and grows in time has largely been neglected, at least in discussions of his criticism of special relativity This assumption is today known as the “growing universe” or “growing block” theory of time and had already appeared in books that Bergson published around the turn of the twentieth century. Of some of his conceptual devices, including “real time” as well as “actual” versus “virtual”, whose meanings are often blurred by Bergson’s literary style of writing Those familiar with current discussions in the metaphysics of time will know that STR is traditionally taken as an argument for eternalism (“past, present, and future exist”), there are relativistic versions of presentism (“only the present exists”) and the growing block theory (“past and present exist”). Bergson’s philosophy is one available path after the obstacles have been removed

The objectification of psychological time
The real and the imaginary
Intellectual intuition
Common sense
Local passage and static eternalism
Growing block theory and dynamic eternalism
Growing past light cones
Conclusion
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