---
title: "Einstein–Bergson debate"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein–Bergson_debate"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:17:42.156437+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Duration and Simultaneity ===
Later in 1922, Bergson published Duration and Simultaneity, which was explicitly a "confrontation" with Einstein's theory of relativity. It sought to enlist the facts Einstein drew upon in his theories in service of Bergson's vitalist philosophy. He argued that special relativity is rooted in quantifiable clock-time, and that it fails to capture the true essence of time as duration. Distinguishing between "real" time that can be directly experienced and "imaginary" time (i.e. time dilation and relativity of simultaneity) derived form the relativistic formulas, he specifically takes aim at the twin paradox first proposed by Paul Langevin, and calls for the biological aging process to be distinguished from measurable time. In Langevin's example, a traveler makes a round-trip in a rocket for 200 years as measured on Earth, while he himself only experienced 2 years during the flight (see History of the twin paradox). Bergson erroneously rejected this conclusion by claiming that both twins (Peter on Earth and Paul in the rocket) are interchangeable and therefore must be of same age at reunion:

p.74: We must now repeat for Paul everything we said about Peter: Since motion is reciprocal, the two people are interchangeable. If, earlier, looking into Peter’s consciousness, we witnessed a certain flow. We are going to find exactly the same flow in Paul’s consciousness. If we said that the first flow lasted two hundred years, the other flow will also last two hundred years. Peter and Paul, earth and projectile, will have gone through the same duration and aged equally. [Translation by Jacobson].
The book did not have the success that Bergson had hoped for, and did not dispel the popular consensus that Einstein had won the debate. The failure of Duration and Simultaneity has been understood as representing the end of Bergson's celebrity, though he remains an influential figure in twentieth-century philosophy today.
Partisans of relativity responded, with Jean Becquerel (son of Henri Becquerel), Miguel Masriera Rubio (professor of physical chemistry in Barcelona), and André Metz published articles and books in support of Einstein and against Bergson, with the 1924 issue of the journal Revue de la philosophie featuring a back-and-forth debate between Bergson and Metz.

=== At the League of Nations ===
At the time of the debate, Bergson was president of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (CIC), an academic advisory committee at the League of Nations, and Einstein was a member of this body. Time was a relevant subject for the CIC, as questions of time standardization were high on the list of priorities. However, Einstein and Bergson could not work together; Einstein resigned in 1922, publishing remarks against the CIC and the League of Nations as a whole, and privately naming Bergson's reception of relativity as a factor in his decision. The next year, he was reinstated due to fears that Germans would be underrepresented without him, and after Bergson's speech reintroducing him to the CIC, the debate was brought up again. Bergson and Einstein clashed several more times until Einstein's disparaging remarks about the whole enterprise of the CIC led to Bergson's resignation in 1925. This marked the end of Bergson's public career.

== Legacy ==
Prominent continental philosophers have defended Bergson's ideas against Einstein's. In 1952, upon being elected to the chair Bergson had occupied at the Collège de France, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the founder of French phenomenology, discussed the debate that had taken place thirty years earlier. He proposed that the ascendancy of Einstein's theories had led to a "crisis of reason," and to a prevailing scientism in the face of which "[t]he experience of the perceived world with its obvious facts is no more than a stutter which precedes the clear speech of science." In 1955-1956, Merleau-Ponty delivered a series of lectures on Bergson's challenge to relativity, and in 1959 he delivered the concluding speech at the "Bergson Congress," which also included talks by thinkers such as Gabriel Marcel, Jean Wahl, and Vladimir Jankélévitch. Gilles Deleuze wrote that “Bergson’s confrontation with Einstein was inevitable." According to Deleuze in his seminal Bergsonism, "[Duration and Simultaneity] led to so much misunderstanding because it was thought that Bergson was seeking to refute or correct Einstein, while in fact he wanted, by means of the new feature of duration, to give the theory of Relativity the metaphysics it lacked." Deleuze draws on Bergson's duration for his "Three Syntheses of Time" outlined in Difference and Repetition.
Alan Sokal, meanwhile, sees the persistence of vanquished Bergsonism after the Einstein debate as the "historical origin" of the "science wars," and characterizes contemporary thinkers still influenced by Bergson as irrationalist and atavistic. Gaston Bachelard believed Einstein's victory was definitive. Karl Popper shared this view.
On 4-6 April 2019, the University of L'Aquila, in collaboration with the Gran Sasso Science Institute, held an international conference called "What is time? Einstein-Bergson 100 years later."

== Scholarship ==
Jimena Canales' The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time covers the debate, its significance in the careers of both participants, and its enduring legacy.
In 2021, Einstein vs. Bergson: An Enduring Quarrel on Time, edited by Alessandro Campo and Simone Gozzano, was published by De Gruyter. It is an anthology compiling papers presented at the L'Aquila conference.
See also the 2021 papers by Steven Savitt, What Bergson Should Have Said to Einstein and by Peter Kügler, What Bergson should have said about special relativity.

== References ==