It's nearly always a strawman, waiting for someone to come along and rescue it with a steelman. And that seems to be what Bergson is trying to do.
I mean yes, of course, the undergraduate Physics student is being handed a packet of metaphysics when they get the Einstein lectures on SR and GR. And it's very seductive, if you can crack through enough of the math to hear the music in it. The idea that Einstein is a "continuator of Descartes" just means you can learn all that stuff, get A's in every single class at Cal Tech or someplace else, and in the end you are still left with the exact same Dualism.
That might be a valid critique of Science in general, but I don't see how it attacks Einstein. There is also a more subtle point about the history of measurement. We started to depend on accurate measurement of time when we needed it to circumnavigate the planet. Even without Einstein we still needed the Lorentz and Fitzgerald corrections to the classic Newton equations. It would have happened without Einstein, and maybe we'd have different metaphysics in that case. That idea is more interesting to me than what Bergson seems to be offering.
I mean yes, of course, the undergraduate Physics student is being handed a packet of metaphysics when they get the Einstein lectures on SR and GR. And it's very seductive, if you can crack through enough of the math to hear the music in it. The idea that Einstein is a "continuator of Descartes" just means you can learn all that stuff, get A's in every single class at Cal Tech or someplace else, and in the end you are still left with the exact same Dualism.
That might be a valid critique of Science in general, but I don't see how it attacks Einstein. There is also a more subtle point about the history of measurement. We started to depend on accurate measurement of time when we needed it to circumnavigate the planet. Even without Einstein we still needed the Lorentz and Fitzgerald corrections to the classic Newton equations. It would have happened without Einstein, and maybe we'd have different metaphysics in that case. That idea is more interesting to me than what Bergson seems to be offering.