Difference in itself

Still, despite Deleuze's distancing from creative evolution, something substantial persists across his changing relation to both Bergson and biology.

Namely, his commitment to a notion of internal difference, or difference in itself. This commitment motivates Deleuze's initial adherence to Bergson's creative evolutionism no less than his later "break" with Bergson over the status of intensity as well as the correlated model of creative involution he develops together with Guattari. The initial impetus driving Deleuze's effort to rehabilitate the fraught notion of the elan vital and with it, the very career of Bergson as philosopher, was nothing other than the notion of internal difference. As he reconstructs it in his 1956 essay, "Bergson's Conception of Difference," and then again in his 1966 Bergsonism, the elan vital introduces an explosive force internal to the process of evolution (internal difference) that is capable of accounting for the positive power of time as a source of creative invention. With the progress of his own
philosophical career, Deleuze soon found reason to temper his initial adherence to Bergsonism--and specifically, to Bergson's
derivation of internal difference from qualitative difference--without in any way abandoning his own commitment to
internal difference.

As early as Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze traces qualitative difference or difference in kind (together with quantitative difference or difference in degree) to a fluid continuum of intensity, thereby eschewing Bergson's argument that qualitative difference is itself one of two tendencies being differentiated and thus, a tendency internal to difference that, as Deleuze puts it, "show[s] the way in which a thing varies qualitatively in time".

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Primacy of time when we e-write

Downplaying space in favour of time .

Bergson is presented by Foucault as being chiefly responsible for a pervasive tendency of contemporary philosophers to downplay space in favour of time.

In 1978, during an interview with Watanabe, he refers to 'a kind of latent Bergsonism which dominated French philosophy' , cautiously qualifying his initial statement with a rather ambiguous remark :

' I say Bergsonism, I'm not saying this was the actual Bergson, far from it. There was a certain privilege of all temporal analyses over space, which was held as something dead and inert.'

In fact, it turns out that what Foucault wishes to oppose is rather something like an existentialist or vulgarly marxist over-valorization of historicity and historical consciousness at the expense of the 'reactionary' categories of spatiality. The reference to 'a Bergsonian valorization of time' does not only function as a philosophical cliché. It may in fact best be explained from an auto-biographical perspective. It is with the academic primacy of Bergsonian time (or Bergsonian primacy of time) that Foucault himself had to struggle in the fifties and sixties, as he tried to foster a new form of investigation invested in the constructions of space - sites, boundaries, thresholds, where power inscribes its marks.

Ironically, however, similarly sweeping accounts of the influence of Bergson on twentieth century French thought lead other commentators to radically divergent claims : Martin Jay, for example, traces back the 'denigration of vision' in French philosophy to the Bergsonian critique of spatialization as a specific mechanism of intellectual and social control, a critique which is supposed to bear its effects everywhere, from Luckàcs (whose concept of reification owes much to 'spatialization') and the Marxist tradition, up to Foucault himself.

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Pure time and mathematical time

Bergson distinguishes between two forms of time: pure time and mathematical time. Pure time is real duration. Mathematical time is measurable duration. Real time is continuous and indivisible. Mathematical time is divisible into units or intervals which do not reflect the flow of real time.

According to Bergson, real time cannot be analyzed mathematically. To measure time is to try to create a break or disruption in time. In order to try to understand the flow of time, the intellect forms concepts of time as consisting of defined moments or intervals. But to try to intellectualize the experience of duration is to falsify it. Real duration can only be experienced by intuition.

In the intellectual representation of time, a succession of distinct states or events is presented as a spatialized form of time. Time is conceptualized as an ordered arrangement of defined events, rather than as an endless flow of experience in an indivisible continuity. The intellect analyzes time as having measurable duration, but the flow of real time can only be known by intuition.

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Downplaying space in favour of time

Bergson is presented by Foucault as being chiefly responsible for a pervasive tendency of contemporary philosophers to downplay space in favour of time.
In 1978, during an interview with Watanabe, he refers to 'a kind of latent Bergsonism which dominated French philosophy' (Foucault 1994-1:576), cautiously qualifying his initial statement with a rather ambiguous remark : 'I say Bergsonism, I'm not saying this was the actual Bergson, far from it. There was a certain privilege of all temporal analyses over space, which was held as something dead and inert.'

In fact, it turns out that what Foucault wishes to oppose is rather something like an existentialist or vulgarly marxist over-valorization of historicity and historical consciousness at the expense of the 'reactionary' categories of spatiality. The reference to 'a Bergsonian valorization of time' does not only function as a philosophical cliché. It may in fact best be explained from an auto-biographical perspective. It is with the academic primacy of Bergsonian time (or Bergsonian primacy of time) that Foucault himself had to struggle in the fifties and sixties, as he tried to foster a new form of investigation invested in the constructions of space - sites, boundaries, thresholds, where power inscribes its marks.

Ironically, however, similarly sweeping accounts of the influence of Bergson on twentieth century French thought lead other commentators to radically divergent claims : Martin Jay, for example, traces back the 'denigration of vision' in French philosophy to the Bergsonian critique of spatialization as a specific mechanism of intellectual and social control, a critique which is supposed to bear its effects everywhere, from Luckàcs (whose concept of reification owes much to 'spatialization') and the Marxist tradition, up to Foucault himself (Jay 1993:191-208, 430).

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Bergson's concept of time

In Creative Evolution Bergson argued that the creative urge, not the Darwinian concept of natural selection, is at the heart of evolution. Man's intellect has developed in the course of evolution as an instrument of survival. It comes to think inevitably in geometrical or 'spatializing' terms that are inadequate to lay hold of the ultimate living process. But intuition goes to the heart of reality, and enables us to find philosophic truth.


Bergson's thinking and concept of time has influenced greatly Arnold Hauser, Claude Simon, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Santayana, and such authors as Péguy, Valéry, and John Dos Passos. Whitehead expanded Bergson's notions of duration and evolution from their applications to organic life into the phycial realm. It is said that for Marcel Proust, whose cousin Bergson married in 1891, the philosopher gave the idea for the great novel of reminiscence, À la recherche de temps perdu (1913-27). Sartre also paid tribute to Bergson, and Martin Heidegger, whose ontology is echoed in existentialist writing, used some of Bergson's concepts, such as "no-being". However, Bergson's influence on existentialism is not straight forward and in his own time the philosopher was considered an empiricist.

On the other hand, Bergson's argumentation frustrated such philosophers as the empiricist Bertrand Russell, who criticized his thoughts in 1914 and later returned to them in History of Western Philosophy. Philosophers have pointed out that Bergson did not satisfactorily show how intuition could work apart from intellect. Albert Einstein found serious mistakes from Bergson's DURÉE ET SIMULTANÉITÉ À PROPOS DE LA THÉORIE D'EINSTEIN (1921), dealing with Einstein's theory of relativity. Bergson had opposed in 1911 Einstein's ideas, but then his view had changed and he introduced the concept of non-linear time. Bergson is generally regarded as having lost his public debate with Einstein, but some of the leading physicists have devoted articles to his work.

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