page_title: Duration (philosophy)
section_title: Physics and Bergson's ideas
hierarchical_section_title: Duration (philosophy) / Physics and Bergson's ideas
caption_attribution_description: English: Albert Einstein during a lecture in Vienna in 1921.
context_page_description: Duration is a theory of time and consciousness posited by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson sought to improve upon inadequacies he perceived in the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, due, he believed, to Spencer's lack of comprehension of mechanics, which led Bergson to the conclusion that time eluded mathematics and science. Bergson became aware that the moment one attempted to measure a moment, it would be gone: one measures an immobile, complete line, whereas time is mobile and incomplete. For the individual, time may speed up or slow down, whereas, for science, it would remain the same. Hence Bergson decided to explore the inner life of man, which is a kind of duration, neither a unity nor a quantitative multiplicity. Duration is ineffable and can only be shown indirectly through images that can never reveal a complete picture. It can only be grasped through a simple intuition of the imagination.
  Bergson first introduced his notion of duration in his essay Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. It is used as a defense of free will in a response to Immanuel Kant, who believed free will was only possible outside time and space.
context_section_description: Bergson had a correspondence with physicist Albert Einstein in 1922 and a debate over Einstein's theory of relativity and its implications. For Bergson, the primary disagreement was over metaphysical and epistemological claims made by the theory of relativity, rather than a dispute about scientific evidence for or against the theory. Bergson famously stated of the theory that it is "a metaphysics grafted upon science, it is not science".
  Bergson's ideas concerning the philosophy of time were somewhat rediscovered after a paper 
  on Zeno's paradox was published in Foundations of Physics Letters and generated interest in 2003. The writer, Peter Lynds, was credited with producing an original new insight. However, it was noted in a journal article shortly after that the ideas in this paper were preceded by Henri Bergson, evidently unbeknownst to Lynds or his paper's referees.
caption: Albert Einstein in 1921
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