---
title: "Einstein–Bergson debate"
chunk: 1/3
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"
---

On April 6, 1922, the physicist Albert Einstein and the philosopher Henri Bergson met at the Société française de philosophie and discussed the implications of the theory of relativity on the nature of time. This debate, with the broader discussion it set off, has had wide-ranging implications for Western cosmology and for the prestige of the humanities as compared to science. In 1934, Paul Valéry wrote that the meeting between these two thinkers was the "grande affaire" of the twentieth century.

== Context ==

=== Bergson ===

Henri Bergson was widely viewed as an epoch-defining thinker. For William James, Bergson's Creative Evolution was a work as important for Western philosophy as those of George Berkeley or Immanuel Kant; Jean Wahl concurs, placing Bergson alongside Plato, René Descartes and Kant as one of "the four great philosophers." A cult of personality developed around Bergson following the 1907 publication of Creative Evolution: students would make "mystical pilgrimages" to his summer home in Switzerland; he was referred to as "an enchanter" and "the greatest thinker in the world." His biographer Emily Herring refers to him as being in the early twentieth century "the most famous philosopher in the world." Bergson had a deep influence on the arts: facets of his thinking fascinated Modernists from Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot to the Italian Futurists. He captured the imagination of the wider public as well: his lectures were immensely popular with Parisian society, especially with women (a fact which led to accusations by contemporary critics that his thought was incurably irrationalist and his style effeminate), and, according to legend, the first traffic jam on New York City's Broadway was caused by a lecture Bergson was going to give at Columbia University.
At the heart of Bergson's philosophy is the élan vital, an evolutionary impulse he proposes is behind all change. The élan vital (sometimes translated as "vital impulse") is the energy of life understood as pure creation struggling against entropy and decay. Such a principle is logically called for, according to Bergson, because traditional mechanistic and teleological explanations of change struggle to account for true creative progress, which requires something to be added to the evolving being that was not already latent before. "Life, like conscious activity, is invention, is unceasing creation,” Bergson writes in Creative Evolution. For him, only true creativity can explain the diverse products of evolution in consideration of the continuity of life. The true nature of time, which Bergson calls duration [la durée], is an effect of consciousness where memory accrues and penetrates into the present, meaning that no moment presented to a being can ever be the same as one experienced before. Time is therefore not the series of discrete states of being which our senses inscribe as time, and which Bergson compares to colored beads on the string of the ego. Because the senses are a product of evolution, they cannot comprehend the process of evolution itself; they arose as practical means of understanding how a being can act on a given object, and perceive only that potential for action. Intellect, which is essentially quantitative and pragmatic, cannot understand the qualitative nature of duration and the élan vital; according to Bergson, intellect tends to think of time in terms of space. His philosophy therefore places a specific sort of intuition over intellect in its immediacy of access to reality. This intuition would be a sort of sympathy which would penetrate the object, rather than perceiving only its exterior.
Bergson's philosophy had always had important critics. Bertrand Russell mounted a years-long polemic against Bergson, accusing the latter of anti-intellectualism and poetic vagueness; he specifically objects to a supposed "confusion between an act of knowing and that which is known," and to the political implications of Bergson's doctrine of intuition. In a memorable quip, Russell writes that "intellect is the misfortune of man, while instinct is seen at its best in ants, bees, and Bergson." Isaiah Berlin criticized Bergson as having contributed to the "abandonment of rigorous critical standards and the substitution in their place of casual emotional responses." Georgi Plekhanov wrote an important Marxist critique of Bergson that centers on Bergson's severing of creative power from the force of history. The Catholic Church placed Bergson's works on its Index of Prohibited Books.
When Einstein first expounded his theory of relativity, Bergson was sympathetic, and believed in "the agreement between relativity and my views on space and spatial time." In 1912, Henri Poincaré, an important precursor of relativity theory, had stated that "[t]he time of scientists comes out of Bergsonian duration." Bergson devoted careful study to the mathematics underlying the theory. However, he soon perceived that Einstein's understanding of time would have to be set apart from his own; though he accepted it in the field of physics, he believed that relativity could not be seen as governing the lived experience of time. He would seek to argue that Einstein's theory grafts a metaphysics onto science, and should be seen as viable within the abstract domain of physics, but not in the reality beyond.

=== Einstein ===