Spectrevision Radio

Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.

For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdst. I'm J.F. Martel. In the spring of 1922, in Paris,

Albert Einstein and Henry Bergksin had a debate.

The fact that Einstein's is a household name today, and Berksin, a figure virtually unknown off of university campuses, should give you an idea about who was thought to have won. At the

time of the debate, Berkson was widely hailed as the pre-eminent French philosopher

of his day, and Einstein was a newcomer on the scene that hardly anyone knew. This, however, was the

20s, the time of flappers, Nouveau-Riche, and Joyceian wordplay. It was an era that seemed

almost monomaniacly bent on outing with the old and ringing in

the new. I can imagine that even then, at the height of his fame, Berkson came across as somewhat

quaint to his audience. With his famous analogies of melting sugar cubes, flying arrows,

and mechanical clocks, he must have felt light years behind Einstein's science

fiction world of ghost stars and time-traveling space fairs. Small wonder, perhaps, that almost

everyone, Einstein included, completely missed his point. That point was that the idea of a space-time

continuum was inadequate to the reality that we humans actually experience.

According to Bergson, Einstein imagines a flow of time which, unbeknownst to him, presupposes a deeper time that cannot, for its part, be described as relative.

It must be absolute.

The name that Berkson gave to this deep time,

which everyone experiences directly, but which also defies thought because all concepts presuppose it,

was duration. Duration is the time of life, the time of becoming, the time that each of us

intuit as the most fundamental

reality. Although Berkson agreed that relativity was perfectly suited for measuring events within

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