I. The Debate

April 6, 1922. Paris. The French Society of Philosophy.

The hall was packed.

Two men were on the panel. One was in his early forties, recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on relativity (the citation, formally, was for the photoelectric effect). His name was Albert Einstein.

The other was in his sixties, the most influential philosopher in Europe. His books outsold those of any living philosopher in Europe and America. When he had lectured at Columbia University in 1914, his arrival had caused the first traffic jam in the history of Broadway: people had lined up around the block to hear him. His name was Henri Bergson.

The subject of the debate was time.

Bergson spoke first, for about half an hour. He spoke about what he had been saying for decades: the time measured by physics is not the whole of time. There is another kind of time — he called it duration, durée — the time of consciousness, the time as lived in experience, the time that cannot be measured by clocks. The time of physics is borrowed from a spatial metaphor. We imagine time as a line, divisible into segments, reversible. But the time of consciousness is not like that. The time of consciousness cannot be reversed. The time of consciousness cannot be cut into segments — your present moment contains your past and your anticipation, in one indivisible whole.

He finished and sat down.

Einstein stood up.

Einstein spoke briefly. The most important sentence he said that day became, in the years that followed, a defining verdict in the history of philosophy:

"The time of the philosophers does not exist. There is only a psychological time, different from the time of the physicists."

The meaning was clear. What Bergson had described was not time. It was subjective experience. Real time was the time of physics, the time read off the clock, the time that appears in the equations of relativity. The philosopher had thought he was speaking about time. In fact he had been speaking of something else, perhaps a state of mind, but not time.

The hall was silent.

Bergson did not, in that moment, manage a strong reply.

The verdict of the twentieth century is clear: Einstein won. From then on, Bergson grew steadily marginalized in Anglophone philosophy. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, and that prize, in some quarters, came to mark his demotion in the eyes of the scientific community ("only a literary figure"). After the Second World War, with the rise of analytic philosophy, Bergson disappeared from mainstream philosophy curricula for several decades.

But.

Looking back today, the thing Bergson was speaking of really exists.

II. Duration

Bergson was nineteen.

He was at the École normale supérieure in Paris. He was among the strongest students of his cohort — his classmate was Jean Jaurès, who would later lead the French Socialist Party and be assassinated in 1914. Both of them were at the top of their class. Bergson's strengths were mathematics and physics. At eighteen he had solved a geometry problem left open by Pascal; the solution was published in a mathematical journal. He had assumed he would become a mathematician.

After graduation he went to teach in provincial secondary schools. First in Angers, then in Clermont-Ferrand. He taught mathematics, physics, and philosophy from the lectern of a French lycée.

One day in Clermont-Ferrand, he ran into a problem.

He was teaching his students a problem about motion. An object moves from point A to point B at a constant velocity. What is its velocity at any given instant?

This is a standard problem in calculus. Derivatives. Instantaneous velocity. Bergson had been rigorously trained in mathematics; he knew how to compute it.

But that day he stopped.

He looked at what he had written on the blackboard. He suddenly realized something —

What he had written as "instantaneous velocity" required cutting an interval of time into infinitely many infinitely small intervals, and looking at how far the object moved within each. The mathematical operation was legitimate. The number it produced was useful. But hidden inside the operation was a strange assumption: that time can be cut into segments.

Can it?

If time really can be cut into segments, there should be a smallest segment of time — one that cannot be cut further. But that is not how calculus works. In calculus, time is cut into infinitely small pieces, always being cut, never reaching a smallest unit. This is a mathematical procedure, not a property of time itself.

Then what is time itself like?

Bergson could not finish the lesson that day.

He later wrote in his notes that, in that moment, he felt for the first time that the time he had written on the blackboard was borrowed from space. He had imagined time as a line (a spatial figure), then cut the line into segments (a spatial operation), then said one segment is one second, one segment is one millisecond, one segment is infinitely small (all spatial logic).

But the time he himself experienced was not like that.

The time he himself experienced was a flow. The present moment he was experiencing contained everything he had just experienced — not as a separate segment, but as part of this present — and contained also his anticipation of what was coming next, also as part of this present. This flow was not a line. There were no separable segments inside this flow. There was no direction in this flow that could be reversed: what he had experienced could not be uncrossed; what he had not yet experienced could not be experienced in advance.

He called this flow duration. Durée.

The French word means simply "lasting" or "continuing"; there is nothing mystical about it. Bergson used it to refer to that lived time inside consciousness — the time that is not segmented, not spatialized, not measurable by clocks — the time that can only be experienced from inside itself.

He thought of this on the lectern of a secondary school. He was in his early twenties. Across his lifetime, he developed this initial intuition into a complete philosophy.

His doctoral thesis (published 1889, Time and Free Will in English) was devoted to it. All his major later works — Matter and Memory (1896), Creative Evolution (1907), The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) — built on the same initial intuition.

Duration is not the subjective version of physical time. Duration is another kind of time.

Physical time is seen from outside. You take a clock; the hand moves; you measure. This kind of time belongs to space, to objects, to causal chains. It is highly useful. The whole of physics is built on this kind of time.

Duration is experienced from inside. You need no instrument. Your consciousness itself is duration. When you remember laughing yesterday, that laughter is not a vanished past — that laughter is still in your present. When you anticipate someone you will see tomorrow, that person is not a non-existent future — that anticipation is already in your present. The present of duration has thickness.

Physical time has no thickness. The present of physical time is a single instant; an instant has no length.

The present of duration has thickness. Your present contains your past and your future.

These two kinds of time are not two measurements of the same thing. They are two different things.

Bergson spent his whole life saying this. The 1922 debate was, after he had been saying this for decades, the moment when a thirty-something physicist declared in one sentence that what he had been speaking of "did not exist."

Einstein's sentence was correct at the level of physics. Physical time does not require duration in order to function. A physicist doing physics can leave duration out entirely.

But Einstein did something larger. He locked the word time onto physical time, and then used the locked term to declare that what Bergson was speaking of "is not time."

This was an act of absorption. And after absorption, comes the declaration that the other does not exist.

III. Laughter

Let us leave the question of time for a moment, and look at another side of Bergson.

In 1900, at age forty-one, by then a professor at the University of Paris, Bergson published a small book called Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic.

It is short, around forty thousand words. It is about comedy.

Comedy. Bergson.

The combination is at first slightly odd: a philosopher who speaks of the deep time-structure of consciousness writes a book about laughter. But once you read it, you see the two are two faces of one thing.

Bergson asks: what makes us laugh?

Not happiness. Happiness makes us smile, but it does not make us laugh aloud. What makes us laugh has a particular structure. Bergson believed he had identified that structure —

The mechanical encrusted upon the living.

The simplest case is this: a man is walking along, on his own rhythm; there is a banana peel; he steps on it; he slips. We laugh. Why? Because this man, who is in principle a conscious, flexible being capable of adjusting to his situation, in that moment behaves like a mechanical device: his body, by inertia, continues forward, without adjusting to the new situation (the ground became slippery). He has become a predictable, mechanical, rigid thing.

Laughter is the response to this falling of life into machinery.

Bergson uses this principle to analyze nearly every type of comedy. The recurring catchphrase is the mechanical encrusted upon language. The single-trait character (Molière's miser) is the mechanical encrusted upon personality. The mistaken identity (mixed-up twins) is the mechanical encrusted upon identity. Mimicry, especially of someone's small mannerisms, is the reduction of a person to a repeatable mechanical pattern.

Each kind of comedy is the recognition of, and recoil against, the mechanization of life.

This is the other face of the doctrine of duration.

The doctrine of duration says: the time of consciousness is flowing, unrepeatable, internally creative. Each moment is new. Each moment cannot be reduced to a chain of prior causes.

The doctrine of laughter says: when something that should be flowing — a person's behavior, a person's language, a person's reaction — becomes unflowing, becomes predictable, repeatable, describable in mechanical terms — our consciousness immediately registers this, and answers with laughter.

Laughter is the immune system of duration.

Laughter is consciousness's refusal to be reduced to machinery.

There is also something deeper that Bergson noted in this book. Comedy, he said, requires that the audience set aside its sympathy for a moment. If you see the slipping man and instantly think he might be hurt, you will not laugh. You will be worried. The comic effect arises only because, in that second, you treated him as an observable mechanical apparatus, not as a conscious being like yourself.

Laughter is not malicious. But laughter contains a brief dehumanization.

Bergson's tone in saying this is calm. He does not denounce laughter; he is analyzing it. But he is pointing to something underneath it: at the moment laughter happens, the one being laughed at is, in that instant, not being treated as another.

This is structurally connected to Round Six's theme. In 1922, when Einstein said "the time of the philosophers does not exist," the posture of that moment was close to the posture Bergson described as laughter — treating the other as an analyzable mechanical apparatus, rather than another consciousness like one's own.

But Bergson's own posture was not that posture. The way Bergson speaks of laughter is calm. He never laughed back at Einstein. He never said "the consciousness of the physicists does not exist."

He held his position.

IV. Two Times

Let us return to time.

The two kinds of time Bergson spoke of — physical time and duration — were, during his lifetime, not generally accepted as a real distinction by most scientists. The verdict of the 1922 debate held through the second half of the twentieth century. Even today you can hear, in many philosophy and science classrooms, summary judgments along the lines of "Bergson did not understand relativity" or "Bergson was refuted by Einstein."

But there is one simple modern experience that makes the distinction between two kinds of time impossible to deny.

Anesthesia.

You go in for surgery. The anesthesiologist injects the anesthetic. You are lying on the operating table. You feel a slight dizziness. Then you wake up. You are in the recovery room.

Three hours have passed.

Three hours have passed in physical time. In those three hours, the earth turned through a certain angle, the clock hands moved a certain distance, the equipment in the operating room cycled a certain number of times, your body was opened and stitched closed, your cells metabolized a certain quantity. All of this took place in physical time. If a friend was sitting beside you, that friend experienced three hours — perhaps anxious, perhaps spent on a phone, but in those three hours your friend had a complete consciousness time.

But your consciousness time does not contain those three hours.

Not "those three hours felt compressed." Not "those three hours went quickly." Those three hours do not exist in your consciousness time.

You go from the dizziness directly to the waking. There is nothing in between.

If you accept only physical time, this fact has nothing special about it. Brain activity was suspended, so "subjective experience" was suspended. This is a standard physicalist explanation.

But this explanation evades a question: where did that suspended "subjective experience" go?

Not where the brain activity went — the brain activity is still running; it is physical. Where did that stretch which should have been experienced as time, that stretch of duration, go?

If duration is merely a derivative of physical time, then it should persist as physical time persists. Brain activity is running, time is running, you should feel that stretch, however dimly.

But you do not.

You will not say "I felt those three hours pass somewhat dimly." You will say "those three hours did not exist for me."

"Did not exist" is not the language of physical time. Physical time does not "not exist." Physical time either passes or does not pass, and that passage or non-passage is a physical event, independent of whether you noticed it.

But duration can not exist.

This is the cleanest modern proof of Bergson's claim.

Duration is not the subjective version of physical time, because duration can vanish while physical time continues. The two are not on the same dimension. They are two different things.

Einstein in 1922 did not have this example to hand. Anesthesia in 1922 was nothing like as developed as it is today; he would not have used anesthesia as an example. Even if he had, he would likely have said: "That is just a suspension of the brain's physical processes. Subjective experience is the response of brain activity." This is the standard absorptive move: physical time absorbing consciousness time.

But that absorption cannot answer one simple question —

Where did your consciousness time of that stretch go?

Not where the brain activity went — brain activity is still running (anesthesia does not stop the whole brain). Where did that stretch which should have been experienced as time go?

The physicalist answer is: "It does not need to be experienced. It objectively passed." But that is exactly the point — duration is the kind of thing that exists only in being experienced. It vanished not because it was compressed, but because it exists only in being experienced. When experience stops, it stops.

Physical time does not exist in being experienced. Consciousness time exists only in being experienced.

Two kinds of time. Two modes of existence.

This is what Bergson spent his life pointing at.

V. The Two Sources

1. Bergson was seventy-three. He published his last major work.

The Two Sources of Morality and Religion.

The book had taken him a long time. He had begun thinking about it in the early 1920s, and worked on it for nearly a decade. By that point he was suffering severely from rheumatoid arthritis. His hands could barely write. He dictated to a secretary, who took it down; then he revised.

The book is about morality and religion. But its central argument is continuous with what he had been saying his whole life about time.

He says there are two kinds of morality, and two kinds of religion.

The first kind of morality he calls closed morality — morale close. This is morality as rules, as duties, as the demands a community makes upon its members. Its function is to stabilize the community. Its scope is the community itself: you have moral obligations to your own people; you do not, to outsiders. It is sustained by upbringing, custom, social pressure. Within the community it is highly effective. Beyond the community it does not extend.

The second kind of morality he calls open morality — morale ouverte. This is not morality as rules. It is morality as a call. It comes from certain individual people — he names a few: Socrates, Christ, the Buddha, Saint Francis — these people are not enforcing a community's rules; they are pointing toward something beyond the present community. Their morality is not closed but open: open to all, including strangers, including enemies. It does not extend by pressure; it extends by attraction. Those who see them are moved by something, and walk in that direction of their own accord.

The first kind of morality keeps the community in being. The second kind makes it possible for the community to expand.

This distinction is the same thing as the distinction between two times, in another register.

Physical time is spatialized, segmented, calculable — it belongs to the "closed" side. Closed morality is also segmented (these are us, those are them), also calculable (this is allowed, that is forbidden).

Duration is flowing, indivisible, creative — it belongs to the "open" side. Open morality is also flowing (it cannot be fully defined by rules), also indivisible (it does not draw a line between us and them), also creative (each act of care is new, not the application of a rule).

Bergson's account of two religions follows the same structure.

The first kind of religion he calls static — its function is to stabilize the community. It works through ritual, myth, taboo. It is highly useful. Almost every human society has had some form of it.

The second kind of religion he calls dynamic — at its core are individual figures who have had a direct mystical experience of something they call God, or something else, and from that experience have brought back a new way of being, and who, by that new way of being, attract others to follow. The Christian mystics, certain Buddhist practitioners, certain Sufis of Islam — these are the bearers of dynamic religion.

Static religion maintains boundaries. Dynamic religion breaks through them.

When this book was published in 1932, Europe was sliding rapidly toward the closed side. German nationalism was rising. Antisemitic movements were intensifying. The distinction between "us" and "them" was hardening in every country. Bergson saw this trend. The book was not abstract philosophy. It was a warning to its time.

Closed morality does not open of itself. Static religion does not turn dynamic of itself. For closure to open, someone has to pay a cost.

When he finished the book, Bergson was seventy-three. His hands could barely move. He did not know how much time he had left. He knew what was coming for Europe.

Nine years later, he gave proof that he understood his own book.

VI. Registration

June 1940. German troops entered Paris.

The Vichy government was set up in the south of France. In October, Vichy issued the Statut des Juifs, excluding Jews from public office, from teaching, from medicine, from law. In 1941 a further law required all Jews to register with their local police precinct.

Bergson was eighty-one. He was gravely ill. He could barely walk. The arthritis caused him acute pain in every movement. He was a member of the Académie française, a Nobel laureate, one of the most respected philosophers in Europe. The Vichy government took the initiative of writing to him: he could apply for an exemption as an "honorary non-Jew." His rank was sufficient; his accomplishments were sufficient; he did not have to register.

Bergson refused.

He insisted on going to register. He wanted to write on the document, with his own hand, that he was a Jew.

His family and friends tried to dissuade him. In his condition, standing in line outside for hours was dangerous. His rank was more than enough; the Vichy government would not object to his not going — they had themselves offered the exemption. He had only to write back accepting it.

He did not accept.

One day in early January 1941, in Paris, in temperatures below zero, Bergson — in pajamas under a winter coat, in a wheelchair pushed by an attendant — made his way to the local police station. He waited in line outside for several hours, with the other Jews. When his turn came, he wrote on the form that he was a Jew. He signed it.

He went home and developed pneumonia.

On January 4, 1941, Bergson died. He was eighty-one.

Paris was under occupation when he died. The Académie française wrote an obituary, but the obituary had to pass German censorship. He was Jewish; his works were banned in Germany.

Why did he insist on going to register?

He left no explanation. He did not write down his reasoning for the decision. There are some things he is reported to have said in the recollections of family and friends, but no systematic explanation.

Looking back today, the logic of the act is clear.

Bergson's whole life of philosophy had been the assertion that consciousness time is real, that duration is real, that open morality is real, that dynamic religion is real — that these things are not derivative of physical time and the closed society, but are something else. Their distinguishing feature is that they cannot be segmented, cannot be absorbed, cannot be reduced to the application of rules.

The "exemption" the Vichy government offered him was the logic of segmentation: people of your kind are this segment; people of that kind are that segment. Your segment can be exempted, because you have accomplishments.

To accept the exemption was to accept the logic of segmentation.

To accept the logic of segmentation was to admit "these people and those people are different kinds."

To admit that was the posture of closed morality — drawing the line between us and them, between those with accomplishments and those without, between the exempt and those required to register.

Bergson had spent his life teaching open morality. The core of open morality, in his own teaching, was the refusal to draw a line between us and them.

If he accepted the exemption, he himself would be drawing the line — placing himself in the segment of "exempt Jews," and other people in the segment of "Jews who must register."

He could not do that. What he had been saying all his life would not let him do that.

So at eighty-one, in pajamas under a coat, in a wheelchair, in subzero weather, he stood in line for several hours and wrote Jew on the form with his own hand.

This act was the lived form of the doctrine of duration.

Duration cannot be segmented. Open morality does not draw a line between us and them. Bergson's body, on that day, demonstrated that the two were the same thing.

He was dead three days later.

VII. He Was Not the Loser

By the verdict of 1922, Bergson lost the debate. By the standard narrative of the second half of the twentieth century, Bergson was a sentimental, imprecise philosopher who had been outpaced by the scientific age. By the tradition of Anglophone analytic philosophy, Bergson was barely discussed.

We have written one essay on him. We have not written him as a "wronged genius." We have not written him as "a prophet misunderstood by his time."

We have only written what he did.

He thought of the concept of duration. He developed it across a lifetime into a complete philosophy. In 1922 he failed to refute, in the moment, a single sentence from Einstein. In 1941 he used his own body to defend, on a January morning, what he had been saying all his life.

That is enough.

He does not need to be vindicated. He does not need to win. He did what he could do, he held the position he could hold, and he did not cross the boundary he should not have crossed.

Aquinas wrote eight million words and stopped, acknowledging that what he had written was straw. Bergson lectured on duration his whole life and stopped, in front of a Vichy exemption letter, in order to register.

Two stoppings. Two acknowledgments of the negativa. Two ways of placing oneself on the side of the other.

Aquinas stopped at the boundary, because he knew that beyond the boundary was God. Bergson stopped at the exemption letter, because he knew that beyond the exemption letter was a group of people who had been drawn outside the line.

Neither of them crossed that boundary. Both of them placed themselves on the open side of it.

Einstein said the time of the philosophers does not exist. Bergson, with the body of an eighty-one-year-old, replied: that kind of time exists. It exists in every present moment I am experiencing right now. It exists on that road I took to register. It exists in those several hours I waited in line with the other Jews.

It does not need your acknowledgment to exist. It already existed in the very moment I experienced it.

VIII. The Bridge

There is one more figure on the bridge tonight.

Hypatia stands in the middle of the bridge, the astrolabe in her hand. Aquinas stands beside her, his hands empty. Bergson walks up.

He is not tall. He wears a dark suit, and metal-rimmed spectacles. His beard is neatly trimmed. His hands cannot move very well — the arthritis makes every motion slow. He uses a cane.

He walks even more slowly than Aquinas.

He sees Hypatia. He recognizes her. He read books from the line of commentaries on her work — when he studied Greek mathematics at the École normale, he read Ptolemy, and the line of that text passed through her hands. He sees Aquinas. He has lectured on Aquinas in the history of philosophy. He knows that Aquinas was doing the same work of acknowledging the negativa, only in a different vocabulary.

He reaches the middle of the bridge.

He stops. He nods slightly to Hypatia. He nods slightly to Aquinas. They nod back to him.

He does not immediately find a place to stand. He stands first and looks for a moment at the bridge.

Far down the bridge, Socrates is sitting. Plato is crouching, drawing a diagram. In the middle gather the figures drawing equations, watching corn, writing poems, reading star charts, writing novels. Bergson recognizes some of them. He has read their books; with some, he taught at the same university.

He sees Einstein.

Einstein is at another section of the bridge, drawing a spacetime diagram — a four-dimensional coordinate system, light cones. He is absorbed in the work. He does not look at Bergson.

Bergson watches him work for a moment.

Then Bergson does something.

He does not walk over. He does not say anything. He only, from where he is standing, nods slightly in Einstein's direction.

The gesture is light. Einstein does not see it. But everyone else on the bridge sees it.

That gesture is reconciliation.

It is not "I won." It is not "you were wrong." It is "you draw your spacetime diagrams. I keep my duration. We are at different parts of the bridge, doing different things. We are each doing the work that is ours to do."

Hypatia sees the gesture. She tilts the astrolabe slightly so that the moonlight falls more precisely across the markings.

Aquinas sees it too. He says something to Bergson — in Latin; Bergson catches about half of it. Bergson answers in French. Both of them smile a little.

Six hundred years lie between them. But they have done the same thing.

At the far end of the bridge, the figure who has always been looking into the distance has, in this round, twice looked at someone — at Hypatia, and at Aquinas.

This time, he is looking at Bergson.

Bergson knows. Bergson lowers his head slightly. The bow is not gratitude — gratitude would carry a trace of being granted something from above. The bow is acknowledgment: I see you, you see me, we are each doing the work that is ours.

The figure at the far end nods, lightly, in return.

This is the third time he has looked at someone in this round. This is the first time the one being looked at has met his gaze.

Bergson keeps walking, slowly, toward the middle. He reaches Hypatia and stops.

In the night air, the markings on the astrolabe glow with a cold light. The moon moves slowly across the sky. Physical time is running. Consciousness time is also running. Both kinds of time are running. They do not cancel each other. They are simply different things.

Bergson holds no instrument.

But he has his own present — a present that contains his discovery on a lycée lectern at nineteen, and the silence after the 1922 debate, and the cold of that January morning of registration, and this very second when he stands on the bridge — a present that cannot be cut into segments.

He stands.

His present is thick.^[1][2]

Han Qin (秦汉) · @hqinjarsy · Great Lives