Time And Memory: The Einstein-Bergson Debate's Place in the Analytic-Continental Philosophical Divide (Part One)
Through the clamor of war, across the battlefronts of Europe and the mounting cynicism of critics, the fulfillment of a prophecy was witnessed on the small island of Principe, South Africa in the year 1919. Earlier, in 1905, Albert Einstein created what was later named his “year of miracles,” during which the prophecy was set: given the constraints of relativity, he stated, light when introduced into a high-gravitational system, would warp in an effect known as gravitational lensing. Despite the mathematics of Einstein’s theories being sound (at least, as confirmed by the few who could follow along), empirical demonstrations of the theory lagged behind.[2] In Principe, Arthur Stanley Eddington[3]—a remarkable physicist in his own right—braved both snakes and (the forebearers of) Nazis for a quest that would make him the “Indiana Jones of physics,”[4] where he witnessed first-hand the fulfillment of the prophecy (with less face-melting than the denouement of The Ark of the Covenant, thankfully). Like all good prophecies this one also included an eclipse. Amidst the worry that a coming storm might ruin the whole expedition, a window of opportunity presented itself for a perfect site of observation. As the team hunkered down, they were as entranced as our relatives of old had been at such moments. And, as those ancient ones did, here too there were attempts to read meaning out the sky swallowing one of its one. As predicted, the light bent.
Nonetheless, Einstein still had his opponents. Three years after the Principe eclipse, in 1922 Einstein met perhaps the most important among them (and certainly the most important for the case we are about to argue): the philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson was a superstar, a great and living flame of thought and life. Perhaps one of the last of such deposits of fame in a discipline that was (according to some) entering into a brooding and twilit finale. While many paths of meaning can be sought from their brief exchanges over several decades, one in particular has often been overlooked: namely the importance of these two men for the disciplinary topography of philosophy in the twentieth century. With no pretense to either exhaustion or hegemony as far as explanatory and genealogical importance, our paper argues that the Bergson-Einstein encounter was a pivotal building block for the creation of the Analytic and Continental divide in twentieth century philosophy (hereafter A-C Divide). As B. Bensaude-Vincent wrote in an article, the encounter symbolized the “end of a golden age before the divorce between the two cultures.”[5]
In particular, my paper agrees with several previous historiographical assessments that argue the A-C divide was created largely through historiographical argumentation from the Analytic side (eventually reciprocated by Continental thinkers), which fostered the illusion of a broad historical continuity of Analytic philosophers bolstering the sciences and fighting against a united and anti-scientific Continental frontline, in this instance exemplified by Bergson. To demonstrate the case this paper has three major sections. The first section outlines a few prior attempts to understand the A-C divide historically, concluding that it is more a creation of Analytic philosophers unifying a rather disparate and miscellaneous potpourri of positions under the umbrella of “Continental” primarily by way of their supposed anti-scientism. In the second section we then take a look at the Bergson-Einstein exchange, and how it provided ample opportunity to reinforce some of the emerging historiographical moves being made that were retroactively creating the A-C opposition. In the third and final section we bolster the observations of the second section by showing how the Bergson-Einstein debate in many ways doubled or mirrored the earlier Bergson-Russell debates, which Russell used to construct a historiographical image of Analytic thought noting, for example, that Bergson’s philosophy rests upon “a complete condemnation of all the … knowledge derived from science and common sense.”[6] These characterizations also intersected later with Logical Positivism’s similar attempts at historiography,[7] for example in the work of Einstein’s student, Hans Reichenbach, fostering the idea of a long-standing division between the old and the new, the Analytic and the Continental, when in fact in the moments represented no such distinctions were present or operational.
[1] Quoted in Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking of Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (New York: Cornell University Press, 2017), 1.
[2] Indeed, it was not until the amazing recent discovery of gravitational waves that many considered the theory to be satisfactorily proven. The best recent account of the trials and tribulations of relativity is undoubtedly Matthew Stanley, Einstein’s War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I (New York: Dutton, 2019).
[3] On Eddington and the Principe adventure, see: Matthew Stanley, Practical Mystic: Religion, Science, and A.S. Eddington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), ch.2.
[4] Larry Witham, The Measure of God: Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science and Religion: The Story of the Gifford Lectures (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2005), 121.
[5] B. Bensaude-Vincent, “When a Physicist Turns on Philosophy, Paul Langevin (1911-1939),” Journal of the History of Ideas vol.49 no.2 (April-June 1988): 319-338. Quote on 323.
[6] Bertrand Russell, “Mysticism and Logic,” in Mysticism and Logic ed. Bertrand Russell (London: Allen & Unwin, 1917), 1-32. Quote at 14.
[7] On the dominance of Positivism and Logical Positivism over the historiography of the sciences until recently, see: H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 39-45; Margaret Osler, “Religion and the Changing Historiography of the Scientific Revolution,” in Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives ed. Thomas Dixon et. al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 70-85.
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