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Bergson was right, even if he was also wrong, and Einstein was wrong, even if he was also right. For these reasons, we need to take a closer look at what was really going on in this debate.

This was the momentous state on which Einstein addressed the philosophical society of Paris. Bergson, an intellectual celebrity well known for his impressive oratory, said he came only to listen and not to speak. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, however, the discussion flagged, and Bergson was called on to address the gathering. Yielding to the amicable insistence of the society, Bergson rose and presented extemporaneously a few ideas from his soon-to-be-published book, Duration and Simultaneity.

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Bergson's concern was the temporality of time - time's passage. Einstein refused to countenance it other than a mere psychological phenomenon. There are perceived events, which Einstein declared to be mental constructions, and there are the objective events of physics measured by clocks. But Einstein hadn't addressed Bergson's point, let alone his argument. Bergson was saying that we can't make sense of the concept of clock time without referring to something that is not a reading of a clock. Namely, the moment in which we find ourselves. The event that is occurring, which we know only as duration (la durée). That is the moment in which any clock must be read because clocks don't read themselves. Bergson was pointing out that you must experience time as duration before you can abstract time as an abstract point in a space-time diagram. Our experience of time precedes the mathematization of time needed to build a clock.

Some physicists and philosophers continue to deny this point, claiming that the observer in relativity theory doesn't have to be a living being or a conscious subject, but could just as likely be a photographic plate, or a clock, or a computer. But this is a grave mistake, one that perfectly exemplifies the amnesia of experience in The Blind Spot.