What Bergson should have said about special relativity

Abstract

The debate between Einstein and Bergson is a salient episode in the history of modern physics and a telling example of the interaction between science and philosophy. This paper initially discusses five reasons why Bergson criticised Einstein for giving up absolute time. The most important one was Bergson's commitment to an intuitionist, anti-Kantian metaphysics informed by common sense. Apart from that, he knew that the theory of special relativity permits "duration" (durée) in the form of the passage of proper time, to which Bergson referred as "real time". Neither static eternalism (which excludes temporal passage) nor dynamic eternalism (which, like the former, claims the existence of the future) are acceptable from Bergson's philosophical perspective, which acknowledges the role of temporal experience and everyday thinking in addition to science and metaphysics. He understood temporal passage as creation of new existence, anticipating what later became known as the growing block theory of time. The pointy relativistic variant of this theory, which divides the universe into blocks of growing past light cones, does justice to large parts of his philosophy, including the distinction between the actual and the virtual. Supporters of Bergson's account of duration should adopt this theory of time.

What Bergson Should Have Said to Einstein

“…I am grateful to the coorganisers of the conference (Theo Borgvin-Weiss, Florian Fischer, Matyáš Moravec, Sam Sokolsky-Tifft, and Zoe Walker) for inviting me to this meeting. While my paper was in press, it has come to my attention (4 June 2020) that a second paper arguing that Bergson should have embraced local passage in relativistic spacetimes (Kügler, 2020) was published online by Synthese (28 May 2020). It was received by that journal 11 December 2019.…”