The Physicist and the Philosopher

Reviewed by: The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time by Jimena Canales Daniel Wiley (bio) Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015, 488pp. $35.00 cloth. Since the industrial revolution, the extensive comingling and application of modern science and technology to the mechanization of production, transportation, communication, and timekeeping to solve economic and political problems has contributed to transform experiences and concepts of time.1 The development and implementation of new technologies into diverse social processes has often heightened demands for speed, precision, accuracy, and, ultimately, still newer technologies that, when implemented, impose unique temporal logics on the communities in which they have been imbricated. Since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, a critique of the priority given to the temporal dynamics of capitalist technoscience at the expense of configurations commensurate with natural human psychological and biological rhythms has become prominent.2 However, drawing on the example of philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres, and Bruno Latour, a small group of writers has sought to leave behind binary interpretations and disciplinary attachments that oppose “physical” or “scientific” time, on the one hand, to “psychological” or “lived” time, on the other. This third position recognizes that scientific and technical developments may not only create relations of alienation or exploitation, but also open horizons where novel understandings of what time is and peoples’ relationship to it are contested and institutionalized in historically specific ways that remain open to appropriation and revision for new circumstances.3 Jimena Canales’s latest book, The Physicist and the Philosopher, is a welcome contribution to this third position. She eschews the entrenched dualism of physical and psychological time. And she refuses to take analytic refuge in the related binary terms of subject and object, science and philosophy, nature and politics, or the “real” world and the “lived” world. Instead, Canales historicizes the twentieth-century development and ossification of the split between “objective” physical time and “subjective” psychological time. Her history centers on an event: the first and only meeting of the physicist Albert Einstein and the philosopher Henri Bergson in Paris on April 6, 1922 at the Société française de philosophie. She argues that this event, though not the origin of the dualisms under investigation (“they precede it and surpass it”),4 contributed to [End Page 406] hypostatizing a rigid separation between the two understandings of time. This separation ultimately functioned to propel the institutionalization of divisions between the sciences and humanities and the subordination of the latter to the former. The book is divided into four parts of varying length, each of which analyzes an “in-between territory” where the connections masked by dualistic concepts become accessible.5 Analysis of material in print by both Einstein and Bergson, including personal correspondence, and an extensive array of primary source material form the basis of each part. Part 1, “The Debate,” describes the context and contents of the argument between Einstein and Bergson as well as the basic intellectual currents to which each thinker’s work responded. At the debate, Einstein, a rising star in an increasingly interconnected world, articulated his theory of relativity.6 Spurred especially by experimental results indicating the velocity of light by Michelson and Morley, Einstein argued that absolute time—“the time of the philosophers”—does not exist.7 Rather there are two distinct concepts of time: one physical and one psychological. The latter is completely inadequate for making precise determinations of time and is subject to variation from person to person and therefore cannot be relied upon. Physical time determined by scientific instruments like clocks provides the only objectively meaningful measure for understanding time in the view of the physicist. Bergson disagreed. “All I want to establish is this: once we admit the theory of relativity as a physical theory, all is not finished.”8 For the world’s most famous philosopher, the scientific reduction of time to a function of spatial measurement created on untenable metaphysics that excluded intuitive comprehension of the élan vital animating the temporal unfolding of matter and mind

Einstein · Epistemology · Physicist · Physics · Theoretical physics · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Philosophical and Theoretical Analysis · Philosophy · Philosophy, Science, and History · Mathematical Physics

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