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Henri Bergson’s Duration vs. Special Relativity: The Historic Clash with Einstein Over the Nature of Lived Time
On April 6, 1922, within the historic halls of the Société française de philosophie in Paris, two intellectual titans of the twentieth century met in an encounter that would redefine the boundary between science and human experience. Henri Bergson , the world’s most celebrated philosopher of intuition and vital flow, sat across from Albert Einstein , the physicist whose revolutionary theory of relativity had dismantled classical Newtonian mechanics. What unfolded was not a mere dispute over mathematical formalism, but a foundational schism regarding the fundamental nature of reality: is time an objective, geometric dimension traversed by physical clocks, or is it an indivisible, qualitative current experienced exclusively through consciousness? The Battleground of Paris: When Intuition Met Metric Geometry By 1922, Albert Einstein’s Special and General theories of Relativity had fundamentally transformed theoretical physics. By demonstrating that space and time are inextricably bound...