“By intuition is meant the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known, that is, to elements common both to it and other objects. To analyse, therefore, is to express a thing as a function of something other than itself. All analysis is thus a translation.”

—Henri Bergson, who walked out of life on this day, 1941

“[There is] a centre from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fireworks display—provided, however, that I do not present this centre as a thing, but as a continuity of shooting out. God thus defined, has nothing of the already made; He is unceasing life, action, freedom. Creation, so conceived, is not a mystery; we experience it in ourselves when we act freely.” (Creative Evolution)

Bergson was a leading intellectual with near celebrity status in the mid 20th century, whose public lectures would pack concert halls. It has been a mystery to me how the writing of history culls certain figures and ideas from its progressive narrative. For a demonstration of this phenomenon, look no further than Bergson.

One of Bergson’s famous appearances in his day was a debate with Albert Einstein in 1922 over the nature of time and temporality as such. Einstein, as is well-known, held to a relativistic, block-universe theory of time in which the observer’s perspective is integral only to provide an inertial frame of reference. In other words, time is conceived abstractly, as a mere fourth dimension in addition to the three dimensions of space.

Bergson countered that “time,” per se, cannot be reduced to “the measurement of time” and that the ability to quantify something is not tantamount to having understood the nature of what one is quantifying. Consider the alternative: suppose that time is identical with the units we employ to quantify it. Imagine that an orchid is nine inches tall. That is to say that, if measured, the two-dimensional length of space that its body occupies is nine inches. But abstract nine inches by themselves cannot contain an orchid unless the nine inches are measuring something that can: to wit, the concrete space in which it dwells. Similarly, the measurement of time implies the existence of something being measured that is not reducible to the mere quantitative value.

The beloved phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty weighed in on the debate in a subsequent essay, arguing that Einstein had failed to understand Bergson’s argument and hence had no business opposing against it. Of course, that fact rarely fails to dissuade someone with the prospect of defending his own foregone conclusions against dispute. Regrettably, Einstein was not the only one who failed to understand the irreducible experiential dimension to time which the phenomenologists were indicating and the debate has been mostly forgotten now and even scrubbed from the popular account of intellectual history