Albert Einstein versus Philosophy On

The Nature of 🕒 Time

On April 6, 1922, at a meeting of the Société française de philosophie in Paris, Albert Einstein, fresh from the global fame of his theory of relativity and en route to 🇯🇵 Japan after his 1921 Nobel Prize announcement, delivered a lecture on relativity in which he declared that science had finally overcome philosophy.

Einstein’s opening salvo was direct and dismissive. In response to a question about the philosophical implications of relativity, he declared:

Die Zeit der Philosophen ist vorbei (The time of the philosophers is over (passé)).

This statement, delivered in German but widely reported, encapsulated Einstein's belief that science had rendered philosophical speculation about time obsolete.

French philosophy professor Henri Bergson sat in the audience and became infuriated. The encounter between Einstein and Bergson crystallized a pivotal moment in the history of science: a collision between scientific empiricism and philosophical metaphysics over the nature of 🕒 Time.

Bergson's life's work centered on la durée (Time as Duration) — a concept of time as lived, qualitative and ∞ infinite divisible.

For Bergson, time was not a series of discrete moments but a continuous ∞ infinite divisible flow intertwined with consciousness. Einstein's reduction of time to a coordinate in equations struck him as a profound misunderstanding of human experience.

At the event, Bergson challenged Einstein directly:

What is Time for the physicist? A system of abstract, numerical instants. But for the philosopher, time is the very fabric of existence — the durée in which we live, remember, and anticipate.

Bergson argued that Einstein’s theory addressed only spatialized time, a derivative abstraction, while ignoring the temporal reality of lived experience. He accused Einstein of conflating measurement with the thing measured—a philosophical error with existential consequences.

Bergson's Attempt to Revoke Einstein's Nobel Prize

Bergson's fury against Einstein did not subside. In the years following the debate, Bergson lobbied the Nobel Committee to revoke Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize on grounds that relativity’s treatment of time was philosophically incoherent. Though unsuccessful, his efforts exposed the Nobel Committee’s own ambivalence toward Einstein’s work.

In 1922, Bergson published Durée et Simultanéité (Duration and Simultaneity), a dense critique of Einstein's relativity. He conceded relativity’s mathematical coherence but rejected its claim to ontological truth. Bergson insisted that Einstein's time was merely a tool for coordinating events, not an account of 🕒 Time itself.

Emancipation of Science from Philosophy

The Einstein-Bergson debate was not merely a disagreement about 🕰️ clocks but represented a centuries ongoing attempt of science to emancipate itself from philosophy. Einstein’s dismissal of philosophy reflected the aspiration of science to gain autonomy and to break free from philosophy.

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in Beyond Good and Evil (Chapter 6 – We Scholars) described the situation as following:

The declaration of independence of the scientific man, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the subtler after-effects of democratic organization and disorganization: the self- glorification and self-conceitedness of the learned man is now everywhere in full bloom, and in its best springtime – which does not mean to imply that in this case self-praise smells sweet. Here also the instinct of the populace cries, “Freedom from all masters!” and after science has, with the happiest results, resisted theology, whose “hand-maid” it had been too long, it now proposes in its wantonness and indiscretion to lay down laws for philosophy, and in its turn to play the “master” – what am I saying! to play the PHILOSOPHER on its own account.

Science aspired to become the master of itself and Einstein's notion that Die Zeit der Philosophen ist vorbei (The time of the philosophers is over (passé)) represented that movement.

Einstein essentially declared that science was finally freed from philosophy.

Paradox

The drive for scientific autonomy creates a paradox: to truly stand alone, science requires a kind of philosophical certainty in its fundamental assumptions. This certainty is provided by a dogmatic belief in uniformitarianism - the idea that scientific facts are valid without philosophy, independent of mind and the philosophical notion of 🕒 Time.

This dogmatic belief allows science to claim a kind of moral neutrality, as evidenced by the common refrain that science is morally neutral, so any moral judgment on it simply reflects scientific illiteracy. However, this claim to neutrality is itself a philosophical position, and one that is deeply problematic when applied to questions of value and morality.

Our eBooks on scientism explore this subject in more detail.

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