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June 22, 2006
An article by Mark Hanson on Deleuze and biophilosophy, that recognizes and explores the way that biological research and theory form a central reference point in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy. Hanson says:
Essentially, after starting off from a point of seemingly perfect convergence between philosophy and biology--Bergson's notion of the elan vital--Deleuze drives an ever-widening wedge between the biological notions he appropriates from neo-evolutionism and what he increasingly comes to view as a model of creative evolution too fundamentally bound up with both humanism and a residual representationalism. As I shall argue, what compels Deleuze to distance himself from creative evolution and from a certain Bergson is his (paradoxically very Bergsonian) philosophical aim of furnishing a metaphysics for contemporary science, that is, a metaphysics of the virtual.
Hanson confirms that 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.
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Argueing about human nature never uncovers the unchanging truth. It merely creates new truth which differs from truth in itself because new truth is generated from arguement, while truth in itself exists per se.