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".

voir http://www.situation.ru/app/index.htm

Unpredictable process

We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.

Stephen Jay Gould

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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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What is a chance for living beings ?

Jacques Monod, a French biologist says in his book "Chance and Necessity, Philosophical questions of the modern biology" (1970) that the living beings are distinguished from all other objects in this world by three characteristics (chapter I):

a) They have a plan which at the same time is expressed in their macroscopic structure and carried out through their performances (concept of Teleonomy).
b) An inner determinism (law, mechanism) is responsible for their outer complex structure (autonomous morpho-genesis as a teleonomical apparatus)
c) They are able to conserve, to transfer and to reproduce the Informations of their own structure without changes (reproductive invariability)

The conclusions out of this three characteristics of life as living beings in comparision to Hegel's philosophy are:

a) The teleonomical apparatus is fully logical, rational and fit for conserving and reproducing (chapter I). This could be written by Hegel! It is the Self-actualization of the Concept.
b) Evolution is the product of a contingent change in the inner mechanism (mutation) without any relation to the consequences for the teleonomical macroscopic functions or the plan (chapter VII). This I think is exactly the same as Hegel's statement that within Nature the inner is totally separated from the outer and there is no mediatioin between the two.
c) And therefore after the (CONTINGENT) incident of the changed inner (microscopic) mechanism there is only a rigid NECESSITY of Selection on the macroscopic level of the organism or better of the living concept. But this living concept is very CONSERVATIVE because of its complex regulation, and therefore only such mutations can be accepted which can strengthen the concept or even give it (very seldom) new possibilities (chapter VII). This could be written by Hegel who says that the living concept can only exist as an entire and full concept. Otherwise the macroscopic structure would become a monster, that is an object which would no longer be fit as a living concept.
d) According to the modern theory, Evolution is therefore not the principle or characteristic of Life because its cause lies within the imperfection of the mechanism of conservation (chapter VI) or as Hegel would say: Changes in Nature are based on CONTINGENCY and therefore a development occurs only as process of the Concept and this is not a question for the natural sciences but for the science of philosophy.

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