Thanks to Adam for bringing this video to my attention.
Bruno Latour speaks above about how contemporary philosophy should re-interpret the verdict of the 1922 exchange between the metaphysician Henri Bergson and the physicist Albert Einstein. He finds a re-interpretation of this debate important especially in light of the new ecological constraints upon 21st century thinking.
Traditionally, it is reported that Einstein won out over Bergson, dealing a swift scientific blow to the authority of philosophical intuition in cosmological discussions. Most came away from the exchange between these early 20th century thinkers of “time” believing that Bergson had been unveiled as a psychologist or an artist pretending to understand science. For Einstein, there is no such thing as “philosopher’s time”–the living duration in which subject and object co-emerge, as Bergson might say; instead, Einstein marks two kinds of time: psychological time, which is a subjective illusion generated by relative motion, and physical time, which is objective reality existing eternally in the mind of God. He does exactly what Latour urges us not to: that is, he opposes theory to lived experience, the universal to the local.
The asymmetrical time of conscious existence, where egg shells only shatter and never reassemble, is deemed by Einstein to be illusory. The flow of physical time is deemed reversible, no matter what the psyche seems to suggest about the steady aging of the body and the inevitable approach of death. From Einstein’s geometer God’s perspective, the regret of living bodies in response to their past, and the anxiety in the face of their future, is for naught: the truth is, the future has already taken place, and at no moment along the way did a “hesitation” or a “decision” ever occur.
There is no “life” in Einstein’s cosmos: no possibility of growth toward novelty and no actuality of achieved habituality or decay; there is only the illusion of freedom amidst the stasis of eternity. Latour argues that Einstein represents a renewed attempt at Cartesian reductionism of nature, just this time with a more complex coordinate geometry of curved time-space. Einstein didn’t want to admit that the bifurcation he enacted between psyche and cosmos constitutes a set of metaphysical wagers. He backgrounded the metaphysical commitments of techno-science, since it was necessary to appear properly disinterested in an age of positivistic hyperbole. Nowadays, under the constraints of our ecological crisis, where the facts of nature and the values of psyche cannot be so easily separated, philosophy can regain its authority relative to techno-science by foregrounding the bifurcation of nature enacted by the latter and attempting to construct viable–by which I quite literally mean to say livable–metaphysical alternatives.
A relevant paper on Bergson’s argument with Einstein concerning special relativity and perception.
A.N. Whitehead, another process thinker heavily influenced by Bergson, also critiqued Einstein’s interpretation of relativity. For more on this, see the section on space-time in my essay on contemporary physical cosmology (HERE: “Physics of the World-Soul”).
