Time and Memory: The Einstein-Bergson Debate's Place in the Analytic-Continental Philosophical Divide (Part 3)

BERGSON AND EINSTEIN

The main encounter between Einstein and Bergson occurred on April 6, 1922 and is only called a “confrontation” to the extent that a drive-by shooting can be called a meet-and-greet. Bergson spoke for a half an hour, giving polite but mostly non-descript answers about topics of disagreement—as Canales puts it in general “Bergson never wanted to take sides in discussions organized around major divisions,” precisely because he saw his philosophy as “making connections.”[1] Having been prodded by “impertinent colleagues” Bergson mostly wanted to avoid any trouble that evening. However, due to the hounding of his colleagues, Bergson eventually mentioned to Einstein with some reluctance that “we are more Einsteinian than you, Monseiur Einstein.” By this, Bergson intended to mean that his philosophy not only preserved the best insights of relativity, but went further by ensuring that “time” was not reduced to mere clock-time but retained elements of what Bergson termed “duration.”[2] Such a position was also that of Duration and Simultaneity, whose somewhat reserved subtitle With Reference to Einstein’s Theory did not give too much away in terms that revealed the crackling and antagonistic positions within attempting to out-Einstein, Einstein.[3] Life for Bergson was full of the “elan vital” or “vital impulses” that could only be analyzed through themselves and not via reduction to impersonal “third person” or “objective” categories. Time, as part of this structure of life’s movement, likewise exceeded all attempts to reduce it to the moving hands of the clock or the sterile measurements of men in labcoats. Our intuitive apprehension of time was not merely a subjective representation, but tapped into a reality above and beyond science, one that existed to provide information only insofar as the flow of its duration was maintained.[4]

This challenge did not go without response. Nearly without hesitation Einstein uttered the phrase “Il n’y a done pas un temps des philosophes”—that is, “the time of the philosophers does not exist.”[5] For Einstein, anything other than clock-time, or time that was measured, was merely a subjective fancy. The stark alternative between the hoary discipline of philosophy and the young upstart science was here placed in stark display. In part this was exacerbated by cultural differences: in France cutting-edge physics was still more often than not presented at philosophical rather than scientific meetings because of the lingering memory of many like Pierre Duhem who easily combined physics with broader scientific issues (relativity was no different, having been presented primarily at philosophical meetings). In England, “science” and “scientist” had a much more hermetically sealed domain, away from metaphysics and broader issues. Thus Einstein—whose reputation had by this time begun to reach monumental levels—who was clearly on the side of science, would have been seen by the English as upholding what was becoming a fairly commonsense separation.[6]

More than this, Einstein’s was in his mind the only side. Analytic philosophy as such had a problem: how to ally with Einstein while yet maintaining its distinctiveness as philosophy from science per se?[7] The Vienna Circle (and the Berlin Circle) revered Einstein for many reasons, not least of which because it was believed that he fatally undermined Immanuel Kant’s project as well as its neo-Kantian variations. Relativity meant that an a priori (or synthetic a priori) categorical notion of time could not be trusted. Just as importantly, the notion that there are synthetic a priori truths at all—the existence of which often being thought as a danger to the positivist project, relying as they did on empirical demonstration and observation statements—were likewise undermined.[8] This was so precisely because it was demonstrated that extremely counter-intuitive notions of time contained in relativity in opposition to the a priori(which was in reality Kant placing Newton amongst the transcendentals and calling it an a priori) could be empirically verified. Einstein pulled out the Newtonian rug from the Kantian project (or took the roof off the transcendental categories of understanding).[9] Thus, even before the encounter with Bergson, positivism and the Analytic side generally had been in support of Einstein’s project, as they saw in their own attacks on the Kantian-Newtonian bulwarks the implicit beginnings of something like relativity. Since at least 1915 Einstein had been in correspondence with Vienna Circle member Moritz Schlick, for example, writing to him “your exposition is also quite right that positivism suggested [relativity] theory, without requiring it.”[10]

Continuing to show that their philosophical project bolstered Einstein yet without losing its character as philosophy was an important goal.[11] In this regard the existence of someone like Bergson—whose fame was of such stature it is difficult today to imagine[12]—was an embarrassment to say the least. Bergson, who wrote things like “the time that the astronomer uses in his formulas, the time that clocks divide in equal parts, that time, one can say, is something else,” than the duration he spoke of and which he was using against Einstein’s interpretation of his own system.[13] Part of the difficulty—a major part—was that the vocabulary being used sounded not just increasingly alien in a context in which the sciences ruled. As with Carnap’s infamous accusation against Heidegger, it began to seem uncertain if Bergson’s terms even rose to the level of being true or false. That is, when Bergson said things like clocks not measuring duration but “counting simultaneities,” did this actually mean anything? Or was it a sort of mystical word game? “The philosophers constantly dance around the dichotomy: the psychologically real and the physically real,” wrote Einstein. He said he thought Bergson was making the rather dismal blunder of “objectivizing psychological aspects of time.”[14] Was this what the philosophy of time was? Some like Hilary Putnam in 1967 could famously side with Einstein and simply say “I do not believe that there are any longer any philosophical problems of time.”[15] Most philosophers found this rather incredible, and so dismissed Bergson in a manner that did not stop at seeing him merely as a deviant philosopher, but as warping the project of philosophy itself, became of great importance if those like the Positivists were to maintain face, but as philosophers. Not least of which, this distancing involved emphasizing philosophy’s intrinsic relation to science. Bergson traded on a sharp distinction between metaphysics and science. While metaphysics could not ultimately be done without science for Bergson, the notion that metaphysics could have some type of ultimate veto power over the sciences horrified the positivists and placed him and the phenomenologists who had been (oddly enough) closely allied to theologians, too close to sounding like the baseless musings of those theologians to Carnap and others.[16] As such, the historical project representing a grouping of recidivistic philosophy separate from “Analytic” philosophy’s fundamental progress in parallel with the sciences appeared as a key method.

For many, as such, the supposed defeat of Bergson in the confrontation of Einstein and its fallout afterward represented “the story of a setback, after a period of unprecedented success, of Bergson’s philosophy of absolute time—unquestionably under the impact of relativity [and his loss to Einstein.”[17] As the most thorough investigator of the Bergson-Einstein confrontation, Jimena Canales, remarks, “for many Bergson’s defeat represented a victory of ‘rationality’ against ‘intuition.’”[18] He continues:

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. 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.[19]



But such world-defining and grandiose terms were not to stay in the stratosphere. Soon, at the hands of the positivists and the rhetoric of Bertrand Russell, the difference between two worlds instead was squeezed into the difference between two philosophies—the Analytic, and the Continental: to be Bergsonian was to be “Continental … disconnected from empirical reality … antiscience.”[20] And to be sure many other debates that themselves gained the label of being on one side or another of the A-C divide often moved in similar terms. Carnap, for example, “tried hard to show how physics did not need to engage with these other disciplines and could fare better if purified from them.”[21] This was, ironically, championing the very method in Einstein that Edmund Husserl had earlier condemned,[22] and which Heidegger continued to criticize. Heidegger, explicitly referred to the Einstein-Bergson debate and praised Bergson as proffering “the most intense analyses of time that we possess,” despite Heidegger believing they were imperfect and could be vastly improved.[23] On the other hand, in his lectures “The History of the Concept of Time,” he notes his research was motivated “by the present crises of the sciences” which he largely blamed upon Einstein and implicates the emerging positivism of his time as well, whereby despite the fact that “in physics the revolution came by way of relativity theory,” Einstein nonetheless retains an Aristotelian notion of time—namely that time is described by its measurement, rather than as the ground of finitude and (one could argue) the basis that Heidegger takes it to be for the analysis of Dasein.[24] And so, memories continued to build around a division that seemed to exist everywhere except in reality, where, though “the issues at stake” are often “very different from those of the Einstein-Bergson debate, yet authors frequently draw connections between [their respective] conflicts. Bergsonian philosophy and the large swaths of Continental philosophy connected to it were seen as the direct predecessors of a new enemy” of the sciences and Analytic philosophy.[25]



RUSSELL AND BERGSON

To be sure, Einstein and Bergson did not agree with one another. However, it is a complicated affair to understand exactly where their differences lay. Ironically, those who decry Bergson’s “metaphysical” approach to science tend to forget that it was Bergson who was accusing Einstein of losing sight of science and imposing an unthinkable metaphysics upon it. It is also clear that Bergson understood relativity much better than he was initially given credit for, and certainly was not advocating for irrationality. Yet, the A-C divide is often one that moves that the level of impression, and as such the Einstein versus Bergson is thus a key to this genre of retroaction we are arguing was so vital to the eventual construction of the A-C divide in the 1950’s.[26] We might point for example to the so-called “Royaumont Colloquium.” While recent studies have shown that it in no way actually represents the opposition of two clear cut sides (fitting the general pattern of complexification that we have seen), this almost does not matter as the general “recollection” and “impression” surrounding this event is that it was a very uncouth war of card-carrying members of both Analytic and Continental practitioners.[27] While Gilbert Ryle may not have been as rude as the apocryphal memories of him say, it was clear for example that he cared very little that he was representing an intentional caricature of Continental thinkers like Merleau-Ponty. Similar caricatures of Einstein and Bergson reached a height in the so-called “Science Wars” in the 1990’s which “perpetuated the view that Bergsonian, Continental, and postmodern philosophy were anti-science … disconnected from empirical reality,” despite the fact that “many scientists—including Poincaré, Lorentz, and Michelson” were actually close to Bergson.[28] Ironically however, especially in America, however influential the debate was it became something of a “vanishing mediator” forgotten to time. For example, despite Bergson’s importance to the French version of Sokal and Bricmont’s Intellectual Imposters, in the English version the chapter devoted to the Bergson-Einstein debate and its fallout was omitted due to what was perceived as its obscurity to American audiences.[29] Reinforcing the placement of Bergson as representative of the Continental side was Bergson’s resurrection in the 1990’s through the work of Gilles Deleuz and Felix Guattari.[30]

On the other end of time from our own at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century before the Einstein debate, Bergson was being used by Bertrand Russell for his own autobiographical reflections about how he and Moore set the tone for the British Analytic movement away from Kantianism, Idealism, and the like.[31] This was fairly handily slotted in to the later historiography as a conflict driven by the divide, when it in fact is better understood as a token that helps retroactively produce the divide, as Vrahimis has argued.[32] Represented by Russell as “a revolt against British Idealism, in the name of British realism and common sense, by two British philosophers”[33] the beginning of Analytic (or at least, British Analytic thought) supposedly began by Russell and Moore heroically turning away from that history of failed philosophy just mentioned above. In this way Russell also set the precedent for the Analytic tendency to represent Continental thought as regressive and “siding with the old ways of thinking.”[34] In other words Analytic thought was bolstering its connection to science by distancing itself from the fact that for many the history of philosophy is a long sequence of either failure or ambiguous stalemates that circle around perennial (read: unresolvable) issues.[35] Even today this strategy remains, where those like Richard Rorty can claim that we “should treat the history of philosophy as we treat the history of science,” namely that we should affirm progress and be willing to assert “that we know more than our ancestors.”[36] By admitting that this was the case, but was only a problem for “those folks over there”[37] in terms of Continental thought, it appears this is in part the root cause for Analytic philosophy’s rather startling lack of engagement with its own history or the history of philosophy more generally.[38]

Reichenbach writes, for example, on “recent” (that is, mid-century) textbooks of philosophy that they typically have a chapter on the nineteenth century that names those “like Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Spencer, and Bergson [emphasis added], and records their systems as though they were philosophical creations in line with the systems of earlier periods. But the philosophy of the systems ends with Kant, and it is a misunderstanding of the history of philosophy to discuss the later systems on a level with those of Kant or Plato. Those older systems were expressive of the science of their time and gave pseudo answers when no better answers were available. Yet [the newer works just named] would better be compared to the dead end of a river that after flowing through fertile lands finally dries out in the desert.” And then the screws start to turn:

The history of philosophy, which up to the time of Kant manifested itself in the form of philosophical systems, should be regarded as continued after Kant not by the pseudosystems of the imitators of a great past, but by the new philosophy that grew out of the science of the nineteenth century and was continued in the twentieth century. Within the short period of its existence, this philosophy has undergone a rapid development, paced by the progress of science during the same period. In particular, the results evolving from Einstein’s theory of relativity and Plank’s quantum theory … [differing] greatly from that of the nineteenth century. Just as the new philosophy originated as a by-product of scientific research, the men who made it were hardly philosophers in the professional sense. They were mathematicians, physicists, biologists, or psychologists. Their philosophy resulted from the attempts to find solutions to problems encountered in scientific research, problems which defied the technical means thus far employed and called for a reexamination of the foundations and the goals of knowledge. … It was not until our generation that a new class of philosophers arose [that is, the Analytic philosopher], who were trained in the techniques of sciences, including mathematics, and who concentrated on philosophical analysis. These men saw that a new distribution of work [between this new, that is “Analytic” philosophy and science] was indispensable …The philosopher of the traditional [that is, those which are coming to be forcefully associated with Continental] school has often refused to recognize the analysis of science as a philosophy and continues to identify philosophy with the invention of philosophical systems. He does not realize that philosophical systems have lost their significance and that their function has been taken over by the philosophy of science. The scientific philosopher is not afraid of such antagonism. He leaves it to the old-style philosopher to invent philosophical systems, for which there still may be a place assignable in the philosophical museum called the history of philosophy—and goes to work.[39]



This contrast between old-style philosophy that results in bloated philosophical systems versus the new philosophy that esteems clarity and which is, in Reichenbach’s word “trained in the techniques of the sciences,” is replicated earlier in Russell. In fact, in some sense Russell is perpetuating a distinction that John Stewart Mill started when he differentiated between the Anglo-Saxon empirical tradition, and the “Continental” Coleridge-inspired philosophy which was “romantic, reactionary, poetic.”[40] Nonetheless, despite Russell’s apparent readiness to classify his opponents into oblivion, he read a remarkable range of authors both in terms of topic and in terms of their nation of origins.[41] And, despite Russell seeing Bergson as representative of an older way of thinking, to many it was just the opposite and Bergson was an innovative modernizer. The categories therefore seem quite unstable in practice, whatever Russell’s theory about them may say.



Conclusion

From the start Russell thought Bergson to be imaginative, but perhaps too much so as his work lacked argument.[42] Moreover, from early on—in particular Russell’s review of Bergson’s work on laughter—Vrahimis notes characteristics “that would become part of the formation of the stereotypical ‘Continental’ philosopher who, taking himself too seriously, abuses his authority …by overstepping their boundaries.”[43] Despite all of this, these remain mostly unformed tendencies that will later be picked up and hardened by way of hindsight creating a more “Whiggish” picture out of these exchanges. The idea that in critiquing Bergson, Russell is engaging in combat between two and only two parties is nowhere present. Enough other elements of the typical A-C divide are present, however, and easily taken up and catalyzed by memories of the Einstein-Bergson debate. It certainly was not the only cause of the later divisions. But the thought that Bergson was anti-scientific, anti-rationalistic, mystical, imprecise, and so on, while Einstein—the paradigmatic figure of the sciences of the 20th century (and perhaps all time) was the antithesis of all of this. With Russell’s polemicizing it seems that Bergson is a pivotal if often forgotten aspect of what was later constructed as the A-C divide. In fact, in part though Bergson was forgotten because Heidegger took over the territory evacuated by neo-Kantianism, Heidegger nonetheless paralleled Bergson in the minds of many, with Carnap’s critiques of Heidegger as anti-scientific, anti-rational (indeed irrational), and so forth, mirroring the rhetoric used against Bergson while also promoting a position similar in broad outlines to that of Russell and Einstein (if nonetheless different in particulars). Far from being the result of essential differences, however, the A-C divide seems rather to have been constructed out of a series of thoroughly contingent confrontations turned into a continuous story. As was already mentioned, it therefore seems that memories continued to build around a division that seemed to exist everywhere except in reality, where, though “the issues at stake” are often “very different from those of the Einstein-Bergson debate, yet authors frequently draw connections between [their respective] conflicts. Bergsonian philosophy and the large swaths of Continental philosophy connected to it were seen as the direct predecessors of a new enemy” of the sciences and Analytic philosophy.[44]

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[1] Canales, Physicist and the Philosopher, 36.

[2] In particular, the disagreement between Bergson and Einstein is best represented by the so-called “Twins Paradox” whereby twins are set off, one stationary, one at near-light speed, with them coming back having aged at shockingly different rates due to the relation of time and one’s relative speed. While there is no room to get into it here, part of the problem is that Bergson disputed the appropriate nature of the analogy, which many misinterpreted as Bergson rejecting the experimental verifications of relativity otherwise accomplished. Understanding this hardly resolves the gulf between the two giants, but it is an important point very often overlooked.

[3] Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein’s Theory trans. Leon Jacobson (New York: Bobs-Merill Company, 1965).

[4] In particular, Bergson rejected the equation of time with space (Duration and Simultaneity, 6-7). Moreover, Bergson is of the opinion that too many are trying to directly make a philosophy out of Einstein’s physics (Duration and Simultaneity, 8-9) and so he wants to hold the two genres of discourse apart so as to complement one another.

[5] Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher, 4.

[6] Bensaude-Vincent, “When a Physicist Turns on Philosophy,” 321.

[7] Again, there were constructive philosophical answers to this. Reichenbach mused, for example that “It was not until our generation that a new class of philosophers arose, who were trained in the technique of the sciences, including mathematics, and who concentrated on philosophical analysis. These men saw that a new distribution of work was indispensable, that scientific research does not leave a man time enough to do the work of logical analysis, and that conversely logical analysis demands a concentration which does not leave time for scientific work—a concentration which because of its aiming at clarification rather than discovery may even impede scientific productivity. The professional philosopher of science is the product of this development.” (Rise of Scientific Philosophy, 123). In this sense Bergson is actually quite similar in how he envisions philosophy’s relation to the sciences (Duration and Simultaneity, 9-29).

[8] This is a complex topic on its own, of course. Many positivists like Carnap (at least in his earlier work) retained a the synthetic a priori. See: Friedman, A Parting of the Ways, 63.

[9] For example, Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, 125: “Ever since the death of Kant in 1804, science has gone through a development, gradual at first and rapidly increasing in tempo, in which it abandoned all absolute truths and preconceived ideas. The principles which Kant had considered to be indispensable to science and nonanalytic in their nature have been recognized as holding only to a limited degree. Important laws of classical physics were found to apply only to phenomena occurring in our ordinary environment. … [This is] the disintegration of the synthetic a priori.” Emphasis in the original.

[10] Quoted in David Edmonds, The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2020), 26.

[11] Critiques that note Analytic philosophy (even positivism) merely liquidate philosophy into the sciences by, for example, the Frankfurt School, have been shown to be quite overblown and in their own way unfair caricatures that are “othering” Analytic thinkers in a mirror image of what this paper claims Analytic philosophy did to create “Continental” thought. See for example Andreas Vrahimis, “Scientism, Social Praxis, and Overcoming Metaphysics: A Debate Between Logical Empiricism and the Frankfurt School,” History of the Philosophy of Science vol.10 no.2 (2020). Michael Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

[12] He was likened to giants such as Socrates and Plato. More than this, he was a celebrity in his own way, drawing literally hundreds—even thousands—to his lectures. See: Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher, 

[13] Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, 37.

[14] Albert Einstein, Collected Letters and Papers of Einstein (Munich: Piper, 1996), 283.

[15] Hilary Putnam, “Time and Physical Geometry,” Journal of Philosophy 64 no.8 (1967): 247. This is similar to the capitulation that Urmson made at Royaumont. See: Overgard, “Royaumont,” 906-907.

[16] Carnap, as with most of the Vienna Circle, did not disavow metaphysics just because it broke the rules of logic and common sense, but also because it was equated with pernicious forms of religion. “Metaphysics originated in mythology,” wrote Carnap who also likened it to musicians without musical ability. In Carnap’s mind, metaphysicians could continue to write their poetry, but they should disavow that they are doing philosophy. Bergson and Heidegger were both prime examples of this. See: Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” in Logical Empiricisms at Its Peak, ed. Sahotra Sarkar (New York: Garland, 1996), 60-81. Quote at 68.

[17] Paul Andrew Ushenko, “Einstein’s Influence on Contemporary Philosophy,” in Albert Einstein: Philosophers-Scientist edited by Paul Arthur Schlipp (La Salle: Open Court, 1949), 609.

[18] Canales, Physicist and the Philosopher, 5-6.

[19] Canales, Physicist and the Philosopher, 6.

[20] Canales, Physicist and the Philosopher, 351.

[21] For example in Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics.”

[22] “Einstein’s revolutionary innovations concern the formulae through which the idealized and naively objectified physis is dealt with. But how formulae in general, how mathematical objectification in general, receive meaning … of this we learn nothing; and thus Einstein does not reform the space and time in which our vital life runs its course” (from “The Vienna Lecture,” in The Crisis of the European Sciences).

[23] Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 149.

[24] Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 2-3, also 9.

[25] Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher, 351.

[26] Canales, Physicist and the Philosopher, 29-31.

[27] Soren Overgaard, “Royaumont Revisited,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy vol.18 no.5 (2010): 899-924; Vrahimis, Encounters, 110-159; Chase and Reynolds, Continental Versus Analytic, 35-37.

[28] Canales, Physicist and the Philosopher, 351.

[29] Canales, Physicist and the Philosopher, 351-352.

[30] Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 173-212.

[31] Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1954), 42-62.

[32] Vrahimis, “Russell’s Critique of Bergson.”

[33] Bell, “The Revolution of Moore and Russell,” 194.

[34] Vrahimis, “Russell’s Critique of Bergson,” 126-127.

[35] Stephen Gaukroger, in his recent book on “failure” as a philosophical category that “the deeper worry is that physics is being made the measure of all things, a wholly unexamined view that underlies much modern analytic philosophy. And of course it is the tendency in analytic philosophy to assume that it can model itself on the sciences that allows it to imagine itself to be closer to a path of progress than other disciplines in the humanities. By assimilating philosophy to science, [analytic] philosophers blithely assume that they have done enough to take the question of the value of philosophy out of the realm of mere self-assessment, at the same time significantly lessening the relevance of any understanding of its history.” (The Failures of Philosophy: A Historical Essay (Jew Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2020), 2-3). 

[36] Richard Rorty, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” in Philosophy in History edited by R. Rorty et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 49-76. Quote at 49. This is a bit odd, considering Rorty is also well known for what by most accounts appears to be a strong type of relativism.

[37] This of course mimics Gilbert Ryle’s language at the Royaumont Colloquium.

[38] When the history of philosophy is in fact engaged by Analytic philosophy, this is often not qua history, but only insofar as history provides examples of puzzles to solve.

[39] Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, 122-123. Italics have been added for emphasis.

[40] Bell, “Moore and Russell,”; Vrahimis, “Russel’s Critique of Bergson.”

[41] Vrahimis, “Russell’s Critique,” 6-7.

[42] Bertrand Russell, The Collected Works of Bertrand Russell: Logical and Philosophical Papers 1909-1913 vol. 6 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 318.

[43] Vrahimis, “Russell’s Critique,” 16.

[44] Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher, 351.