The Physicist and the Philosopher: Two Times That Organizations Must Navigate

On April 6, 1922, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson met for a public debate in Paris—the topic: the nature of time.

Einstein represented physics. Time, he argued, is what clocks measure. It's relative—bending with velocity and gravity—but it's objective, mathematical, external to the observer. There is no special "now"; past, present, and future are equally real in the block universe—the physicist's time.

Bergson represented philosophy. Time, he countered, is fundamentally experienced. Duration (durée) is the felt flow of consciousness—irreducible, qualitative, lived from the inside. Clock time is an abstraction, useful but derivative. The philosopher's time.

Einstein won, historically speaking. Physics absorbed the prestige of relativity; Bergson's reputation faded. The measured time became the real time.

But the question they were debating—which kind of time is fundamental?—hasn't gone away. It shows up, unresolved, in every organization.

The Two Times

The distinction Bergson and Einstein argued about appears under many names:

Call them whatever you like. The point is that they're different kinds of time, with different properties, requiring different approaches.

Clock time is what calendars track and schedules optimize. It's divisible, fungible, exchangeable. One hour is like another. Time management operates here. So does project planning, utilization metrics, deadlines.

Lived time is what humans actually experience. It contracts and expands with attention, meaning, engagement. A flow state lasts forever and no time at all. A boring meeting stretches interminably. Motivation, creativity, and wellbeing exist in lived time.

The modern organization runs almost entirely on clock time—and then wonders why its people experience burnout, disengagement, and emptiness.

The Organizational Blind Spot

Management science emerged in the clock-time paradigm. Frederick Taylor's time-and-motion studies, Gantt charts, utilization rates, billable hours—the entire apparatus assumes that time is homogeneous, measurable, and optimizable.

This assumption isn't wrong. Clock time is real, and optimizing it produces real efficiencies.

But it's incomplete. Organizations that see only clock time become blind to an entire dimension of human experience:

The efficiency paradox. Maximizing clock-time utilization often destroys lived-time quality. Back-to-back meetings fill the calendar efficiently and leave people exhausted. Sprints that consume every available hour hit deadlines and hollow out the team. The clock says things are working; lived experience says otherwise.

The productivity mystery. Some hours produce breakthroughs; others produce nothing despite equal duration. Clock time can't explain this. Lived time can—engagement, attention, meaning aren't evenly distributed across clock hours.

The motivation puzzle. Why do people disengage from work that's well-compensated and intellectually interesting? Clock time sees the hours; lived time knows whether those hours feel meaningful or empty, flowing or stuck.

The burnout blindness. Burnout isn't about clock hours worked. It's about lived-time depletion—what Bergson would recognize as the exhaustion of duration. You can work sixty hours and feel energized, or forty hours and feel destroyed. Clock time can't see the difference.

What We're Observing

When we look at organizations through both temporal lenses, certain patterns become visible:

The measurement trap. What gets measured gets managed—and clock time is measurable. Lived time isn't. So organizations optimize what they can see (hours, utilization, throughput) while the thing they can't see (quality of experienced time) deteriorates.

The scheduling fallacy. Calendars treat all time as equivalent. But 9 AM and 3 PM are not the same for everyone—chronotypes differ, energy fluctuates, attention varies. Scheduling for clock efficiency often schedules against lived-time reality.

The presence problem. Clock time says the meeting happened. Lived time asks whether anyone was actually there—present, engaged, attending. An hour-long meeting might contain five minutes of lived presence. The clock can't tell the difference.

The density question. How much can be packed into an hour? Clock time suggests the answer is fixed. Lived time suggests it depends enormously on attention, meaning, and engagement. Some hours are dense with experience; others are thin.

The Integration Challenge

Neither time is more real than the other. Organizations need both.

Clock time enables coordination. Without shared calendars, deadlines, schedules, collective work becomes impossible. The discipline of clock time is necessary for any complex system.

Lived time enables humanity. Without attention to how time actually feels—its quality, not just its quantity—organizations burn out their people and wonder why talent leaves and creativity stalls.

The integration challenge is holding both in view: managing clock time efficiently while protecting lived-time quality. This isn't about choosing Bergson over Einstein. It's about recognizing that both were describing something real.

What This Might Mean

We don't yet have a theory of organizational time that integrates both dimensions. But we're observing some preliminary patterns:

Rhythm matters more than hours. The pattern of time often matters more than the amount. Intense work followed by recovery can sustain lived-time quality even at high volume. Unrelenting moderacy can deplete it.

Transitions are temporal. The shift from one kind of work to another, from meeting to focus time, from collaboration to solitude—these transitions exist in lived time even when they're invisible in clock time.

Meaning isn't uniform. Some work fills lived time with significance; other work empties it. The clock counts both the same.

Attention has temporal structure. When attention is present, lived time is rich. When attention fragments, lived time becomes scattered and thin. Protecting attention is protecting the quality of lived time.

What to Look For

In your own context, you might observe:

• Where clock-time metrics are healthy but people are depleted—the gap between measured and lived time
• Where the same calendar hours produce vastly different experiences for different people
• When utilization optimization degrades the quality of the time being utilized
• Whether transitions between work modes are accounted for or invisible
• What happens to lived-time quality as clock-time pressure increases
• Where meaning concentrates—which hours feel full, and which feel empty

The question Einstein and Bergson contested—what kind of time is real?—turns out to be the wrong question. Both kinds are real. The question is whether organizations can see both.

That's a different kind of temporal intelligence—and it's one most organizations haven't developed.

Temporacy is investigating the hidden temporal structures that shape organizational life. The Einstein-Bergson debate offers one lens for seeing what's usually invisible: the distinction between measured time and lived time. We're exploring what this means for organizations navigating both.