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The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson and the Debate that Changed our Understanding of Time

In March 1924, French author André Gide opened his journal and jotted down a few thoughts about the theories of his compatriot, the then world-famous philosopher, Henri Bergson. He predicted that, because Bergson was so representative of his own time period, future historians would exaggerate the influence he had on his contemporaries. It is hard to imagine nowadays that Bergson was once one of the most famous intellectual figures in the world, discussed in philosophical, literary, religious, political and scientific communities, but also outside of intellectual circles. His lectures at the Collège de France were so crowded that people had to resort to climbing up the side of the building of the prestigious Parisian institution; a conference he gave, in French, at Columbia University in 1913 caused one of the first ever traffic jams on Broadway. Bergson engaged with the scientific theories of his time, ranging from psychology to biology and physics. However, as Jimena Canales shows in The Physicist and the Philosopher, if there is any truth to Gide’s prediction it is not to be found in the history of science, where little attention has been paid to the reception of Bergson’s theories within scientific communities. Scholars interested in Einstein’s life and work have rarely given much importance to the event at the centre of Canales’s book: his meeting with Bergson at the Société française de philosophie in Paris on April 6, 1922. After declining several times, Einstein finally accepted an invitation to deliver a talk about his theory of relativity before the crème de la crème of French philosophers. During the questions following the talk, Bergson was unwillingly drawn into the discussion. The philosopher insisted that Einstein’s theory did not tell the whole story about time and that there was still room for a philosophical discourse beyond physics. Science proposed a convenient symbolism for representing time but never revealed its true nature. Einstein’s response was short but scathing: ‘The time of philosophers does not exist’. Einstein believed his theory to be an objective account of time. Subjective appreciations of time also existed but were the concern of psychologists, not physicists. There was no room, however, for Bergson’s metaphysical time, ‘duration’. Einstein went down in history as having won the debate. However, as is almost always the case, meticulous research like the kind demonstrated by Canales reveals that the received narrative doesn’t do justice to the complexity of the situation. The four parts of the book zoom in and out, from the individuals to their environment, and back and forth in time. Canales opens with Einstein and Bergson’s first meeting and closes on some of their final words at the end of their lives, with both men reflecting on the significance of their dispute. The second and third parts deal respectively with the different thinkers involved (‘The Men’) and their environment (‘The Things’). Canales first covers the propagation of the debate beyond the Société française de philosophie and beyond the borders of France, with intellectuals, religious figures and scientists taking sides. The debate spread to the