Sep 7, 2025 07:28 PM
Enlightening analysis of the historic debate in 1922 in Paris between Einstein and Bergson regarding the nature of Time. The conventional opinion is that Einstein won and that Bergson wasn't well-versed enough on Einstein's theories. And yet Bergson was still fundamentally right--there is a difference between abstract measurable time and the fundamentally lived time of human experience. I agree with Bergson. We can never explain away the metaphysical nature of the flow of experience. It is the essence of consciousness--of Being-- itself.
https://aeon.co/essays/who-really-won-wh...bated-time
"Bergson began by declaring his admiration for Einstein’s work – he had no objection to most of the physicist’s ideas. Rather, Bergson took issue with the philosophical significance of Einstein’s temporal concepts, and he pressed the physicist on the importance of the lived experience of time, and the ways that this experience had been overlooked in relativity theory.
Though Einstein was forced to speak in French, a language of which he had a poor command, he took only a minute to respond. He summarised his understanding of what Bergson had said and then shrugged away the philosopher’s ideas as irrelevant to physics. Einstein believed that science was the authority on objective time, and philosophy had no prerogative to weigh in. To end his rebuttal, he declared: ‘[T]here is no time of the philosopher; there is only a psychological time different from the time of the physicist.’
But despite what many have come to believe about the debate that began that night, Einstein was wrong. There is a third kind of a time: a time of the philosopher..."
https://aeon.co/essays/who-really-won-wh...bated-time
"Bergson began by declaring his admiration for Einstein’s work – he had no objection to most of the physicist’s ideas. Rather, Bergson took issue with the philosophical significance of Einstein’s temporal concepts, and he pressed the physicist on the importance of the lived experience of time, and the ways that this experience had been overlooked in relativity theory.
Though Einstein was forced to speak in French, a language of which he had a poor command, he took only a minute to respond. He summarised his understanding of what Bergson had said and then shrugged away the philosopher’s ideas as irrelevant to physics. Einstein believed that science was the authority on objective time, and philosophy had no prerogative to weigh in. To end his rebuttal, he declared: ‘[T]here is no time of the philosopher; there is only a psychological time different from the time of the physicist.’
But despite what many have come to believe about the debate that began that night, Einstein was wrong. There is a third kind of a time: a time of the philosopher..."