Philosophical reflections on difference emerged in response to a metaphysical tradition that prioritized identity and confined difference to a gap or variation between fixed entities. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this assumption was overturned as thinkers began to conceive of difference not as secondary or derivative, but as constitutive of reality itself.

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Hegel’s dialectical logic foregrounds difference as an active, mediating force within the very movement of thought, refusing to treat contradiction as an error to be eliminated or an imperfection to be resolved. Instead, for Hegel, contradiction is the dynamic engine of development, the generative tension that drives the unfolding of the intellect, history, and reality. Difference is thus not a static opposition between already-formed terms, but the productive movement through which terms themselves take shape, transform, and sublate into new forms.

Martin Heidegger radicalized this shift by formulating the concept of “ontological difference,” drawing attention to the forgotten distinction between Being - the sheer, enigmatic fact of existence - and beings, the particular entities, objects, and subjects that appear within it. In retrieving this split, Heidegger sought to loosen philosophy’s fixation on categorizing and mastering beings, and to open thought toward the more originary question of the meaning of Being itself. Difference here becomes the very horizon of thought: the unbridgeable yet generative gap that allows beings to appear and gives philosophy its urgency.

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Henri Bergson, in turn, relocates difference into the heart of lived time (durée), refusing the spatialized, segmented model of time inherited from mechanistic science. For Bergson, time is not a neutral container for events but a qualitative, ever-flowing continuum in which novelty emerges. Difference is woven into this flow: each moment is a creative advance that cannot be reduced to fixed points or measurable intervals. In this sense, difference is the very texture of reality as it is lived - dynamic, evolving, and always in the process of becoming.