BERGSON’S CONNECTED WORLD

In contrast to Einstein, Langevin, Becquerel, and many other scientists who stressed how the effects
of relativity could be explained simply by reference to contemporary communication technologies,
Bergson did not think that any of these examples led to those conclusions. Hidden within their
technical explanations lay certain assumptions about what meaningful communication really was.
Debates about Einstein’s work, he argued, could not be solved by recourse to technical explanations
involving procedures for sending and receiving “optical signals.”11

In 1913, when the philosopher was invited to become president of the Society for Psychical Research
in London, he wrote one of his strongest statements defending the possibility of some sort of
telepathy or clairvoyance between observers at a distance. Bergson explained how even as simple a
fact as their interest in having him speak there proved that the span “across the two hundred and
fifty miles of space” between Paris and London was not a barrier preventing a different sort of
nonphysical and indirect connection to occur between them.

During these years, telepathy was often invoked as an example of forms of communication that
could not be explained in terms of the simple causal transmission of signals. But its meaning changed
rapidly. When compared directly against new communication technologies based on
electromagnetic transmission, telepathy was for the most part discredited. Numerous experiments
had clearly disproved it. Yet many scientifically literate researchers continued to believe that not all
forms of communication should be considered in these limited terms. Bergson, who was well aware
of the limitations of telepathy, at times invoked it in a broader sense: to elucidate aspects of
communication that could not be understood by reference to a simple causal-transmission model.
Scientists’ accounts of time dilation often took for granted the transfer of meaning.

In Duration and Simultaneity Bergson considered the case where the twins’ could be seen by “a
supreme consciousness” who was capable of “communicating telepathically with both.” That
“consciousness” would indeed see the effects of time dilation. But “from the point of view of
physics, that argument does not count,” since “no message could be transmitted, no causality could
be exercised at a speed faster than that of light.”13 Throughout the rest of his book, Bergson
explained how neither electromagnetic communication nor telepathy in the usual sense of the word
nor positing “a supreme consciousness” would lead to Einstein’s conclusions. He discounted the first
case because it assumed a concept of communication so narrow that it sidestepped questions of
meaning and agreement. Paul and Peter could go on disagreeing forever, never settling on the
“paradoxes” of relativity, namely the “multiple times that flow more or less rapidly, upon
simultaneities that become successions, and successions simultaneities, whenever we change our
point of view.”14 He discounted the other two because they clearly fell outside the realm of
contemporary science.