Sep 20, 2023 10:28 PM
https://iai.tv/articles/time-doesnt-belo..._auid=2020
INTRO: It has become a dominant view in the philosophy of time that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity showed that the passage of time is an illusion, and that in fact the past, present, and future all coexist. But the philosopher Henri Bergson, a contemporary of Einstein’s, was a strong critic of the theory’s portrayal of time. Bergson emphasised the cultural and technological context in which Einstein formulated relativity and argued that a theory of time that relies on clocks but doesn’t understand their history and significance, is incomplete, writes Jimena Canales.
As you explore in your book The Physicist and The Philosopher, there was a contemporary of Einstein’s, the philosopher Henri Bergson, who didn’t buy the relativistic picture of time. What was Bergson’s main objection?
Bergson’s main objection against Einstein’s work was that it was smuggling in a certain metaphysics into science, without acknowledging its presence. This metaphysics was nothing extraordinary—just the contrary—it was basically run-off-the-mill materialistic. Bergson ended his controversial and complex book with a simple sentence, “Einstein is the continuator of Descartes.” Bergson’s objections were therefore more than simply objections about the Einsteinian notion of time. They were about the role of science vis-à-vis other forms of knowledge. Bergson felt he had a “duty” to defend these other forms of knowledge from being snuffed out by some of the claims made in the name of science. “The idea that science and philosophy are different disciplines meant to complement each other,” he wrote, “arouses the desire and also imposes on us the duty to proceed to a confrontation.”
[...] Bergson has been frequently interpreted as aiming to recuperate the feeling of time’s passage which Einstein considered illusory. Einstein, in an entry of his travel diary commenting on Bergson’s Duration and Simultaneity read him as a philosopher who “objectivized” psychological aspects of time. Heidegger also portrayed him this way when he explained that the term “time” in Being and Time “means neither the calculated time of the ‘clock,’ nor ‘lived time’ in the sense of Bergson and others.” Those interpretations are much too simplistic. Bergson was interested in investigating the area where the subjective and the objective meet and the area where life and matter connect. He did not want to stand on either dichotomy. His most significant contribution was to analyse how those concepts were “riveted” to each other and why.
[...] It is a mistake to ask Bergson for a single unchanging definition of time, because time changes throughout time: “time is what happens, and also what makes everything happen”. (“Le temps est ce qui se fait, et même ce qui fait que tout se fait.”) Consider, for example, how different pre-modern notions of time are from ours....
[...] Einstein’s definition of time has none of these radical elements and might even be responsible for leading us to forget about them. In his work, time is closely tied to what clocks measure. To Bergson’s dismay, it did not include clock makers, clock users and those events external to the clock that make time meaningful...
Do you think contemporary philosophers should, like Bergson, question the picture of reality that theoretical physics is offering us, and focus on the conceptual and perceptual preconditions of science?
A central motivation of my work is to point out that in addition to knowledge, we need knowledge about knowledge—the latter can help us obtain a better understanding that includes the sciences, arts and humanities. We have first order knowledge of things, a second order one about things, but we can also begin to develop a third order knowledge that includes knowledge about itself... (MORE - missing details)
INTRO: It has become a dominant view in the philosophy of time that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity showed that the passage of time is an illusion, and that in fact the past, present, and future all coexist. But the philosopher Henri Bergson, a contemporary of Einstein’s, was a strong critic of the theory’s portrayal of time. Bergson emphasised the cultural and technological context in which Einstein formulated relativity and argued that a theory of time that relies on clocks but doesn’t understand their history and significance, is incomplete, writes Jimena Canales.
As you explore in your book The Physicist and The Philosopher, there was a contemporary of Einstein’s, the philosopher Henri Bergson, who didn’t buy the relativistic picture of time. What was Bergson’s main objection?
Bergson’s main objection against Einstein’s work was that it was smuggling in a certain metaphysics into science, without acknowledging its presence. This metaphysics was nothing extraordinary—just the contrary—it was basically run-off-the-mill materialistic. Bergson ended his controversial and complex book with a simple sentence, “Einstein is the continuator of Descartes.” Bergson’s objections were therefore more than simply objections about the Einsteinian notion of time. They were about the role of science vis-à-vis other forms of knowledge. Bergson felt he had a “duty” to defend these other forms of knowledge from being snuffed out by some of the claims made in the name of science. “The idea that science and philosophy are different disciplines meant to complement each other,” he wrote, “arouses the desire and also imposes on us the duty to proceed to a confrontation.”
[...] Bergson has been frequently interpreted as aiming to recuperate the feeling of time’s passage which Einstein considered illusory. Einstein, in an entry of his travel diary commenting on Bergson’s Duration and Simultaneity read him as a philosopher who “objectivized” psychological aspects of time. Heidegger also portrayed him this way when he explained that the term “time” in Being and Time “means neither the calculated time of the ‘clock,’ nor ‘lived time’ in the sense of Bergson and others.” Those interpretations are much too simplistic. Bergson was interested in investigating the area where the subjective and the objective meet and the area where life and matter connect. He did not want to stand on either dichotomy. His most significant contribution was to analyse how those concepts were “riveted” to each other and why.
[...] It is a mistake to ask Bergson for a single unchanging definition of time, because time changes throughout time: “time is what happens, and also what makes everything happen”. (“Le temps est ce qui se fait, et même ce qui fait que tout se fait.”) Consider, for example, how different pre-modern notions of time are from ours....
[...] Einstein’s definition of time has none of these radical elements and might even be responsible for leading us to forget about them. In his work, time is closely tied to what clocks measure. To Bergson’s dismay, it did not include clock makers, clock users and those events external to the clock that make time meaningful...
Do you think contemporary philosophers should, like Bergson, question the picture of reality that theoretical physics is offering us, and focus on the conceptual and perceptual preconditions of science?
A central motivation of my work is to point out that in addition to knowledge, we need knowledge about knowledge—the latter can help us obtain a better understanding that includes the sciences, arts and humanities. We have first order knowledge of things, a second order one about things, but we can also begin to develop a third order knowledge that includes knowledge about itself... (MORE - missing details)
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