Technologies of Difference: Leibniz, Fichte, Bergson
12 Sessions, 1 Sep - 17 Nov 2026
Tuesdays
6:00pm - 8:00pm
About
French philosopher Martial Guéroult, a decisive influence on the generation of the 1960s including Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, held a uniquely titled chair at the Collège de France in the 1950s: the History and Technology of Philosophical Systems. What does it mean to treat a philosophy as a "technology"? For Guéroult, a philosophy is a rigorously constructed architecture of concepts. Philosophers are technologists of thought, building internal structures and rational systems that make possible new forms of intelligibility.
The course takes up this idea of philosophy as a technology by examining one of the central problems of continental thought: the relationship between philosophy, art, science, and technology, through the concept of difference. Difference is no longer understood as a secondary relation between pre-given terms. It becomes a productive, unilateral force - an energetic strike that generates variation, novelty, and new forms of experience. This shift reconfigured how knowledge, artistic practice, and technical activity are conceived.
Throughout the course, we will trace how the concept of difference came to structure much of twentieth-century continental thought, informing the work of thinkers like Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. To grasp the philosophical meaning of difference is to understand one of the main ambitions of contemporary thought: to think beyond the established limits of philosophy and its relation to other forms of knowledge.
Yet this preoccupation with difference did not begin in the twentieth century. Its modern trajectory can be traced back to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, developed through the post-Kantian tradition, and brought to a new intensity in the early twentieth century by Henri Bergson. Across these figures, philosophy gradually shifts from a search for identities, answers, and certainties toward an investigation of processes of variation, emergence, and transformation.
From this perspective, a new configuration of art, science, and technology emerges. Art is reconceived as a process of invention that produces new modes of sensation and experience; science as a practice that constructs models of reality while confronting the limits of those models; and technology as an apparatus that introduces indeterminacy into matter, rather than a neutral instrument. By entering the architecture of these philosophical systems, we encounter philosophy as a living practice that continues to shape how we think about creativity, change, and modern life.
What will we cover?
G.W. Leibniz’s Differential World
Reading Discourse on Metaphysics and selections from Leibniz's writings on the differential calculus, we examine one of the earliest and most ambitious philosophies of difference. Leibniz presents reality as a field of singular perspectives whose identities emerge through their relations.
His philosophy of Perspectivism is therefore neither relativism nor subjective opinion. Each perspective expresses the same world from a unique position, while remaining connected to every other through translation, mediation, and resonance.
Leibniz's mathematical innovations offers a model for thinking continuous variation rather than identities or binary oppositions. His theories of petites perceptions and continuity show how consciousness, nature, and form emerge from countless imperceptible differences operating below the threshold of recognition. Together, these ideas provide a radically relational account of reality in which novelty arises from differential processes.
J.G. Fichte’s Aesthetic Difference
Reading selections from Fichte's Science of Knowledge alongside post-Kantian debates, including Salomon Maimon's critiques of Kant, we explore one of philosophy's most radical redefinitions of difference. Fichte understands difference as the product of human activity. The self comes into being only through acts of self-positing that simultaneously generate limitation, resistance, and objectivity.
We will read Fichte alongside the emergence of German Romanticism and Goethe's Theory of Colours, where similar questions appear in painting rather than philosophy. As Romantic artists abandoned the classical ideal of representation, painting became a process of production in which form emerges from instability rather than preceding it. Goethe likewise understood colour not as a property of objects but as a dynamic relation generated through the interplay of light and darkness.
This convergence between post-Kantian philosophy and Romantic aesthetics marks a decisive turning point in modern thought. Knowledge, artistic creation, and perception are no longer conceived as representations of reality but as productive activities that generate new forms. Fichte's philosophy thus provides one of the conceptual foundations for the Romantic transformation of art, where creation begins not with established forms but with the risk of producing something genuinely new.
Henri Bergson’s Temporal Difference
Through reading from Creative Evolution, we examine his account of duration (durée) as one of the most influential modern philosophies of difference. Against Einstein's spatial conception of time as a sequence of measurable instants, Bergson argues that lived time is a continuous qualitative flow in which the past is preserved within the present and genuine novelty becomes possible. Likewise, against Darwinian accounts that emphasise adaptation through struggle, Bergson conceives evolution as a fundamentally creative process driven by invention and the emergence of unprecedented forms.
Difference is internal to time itself. Reality is composed of ongoing processes whose movement continuously generates new forms. Life, perception, and evolution are creative processes rather than mechanical developments, and the future remains genuinely open rather than predetermined by existing conditions.
Bergson also transforms the practice of philosophy itself. For him, philosophical thinking begins not with solutions but with the construction of problems. Many of the questions inherited from philosophy, science, and common sense are, he argues, falsely formulated because they treat dynamic processes as if they were static things. Before attempting to answer a problem, philosophy must determine whether the problem has been posed correctly. This method of problematization shifts attention from ready-made oppositions to the processes that generate them.
By linking difference, time, and the creation of problems, Bergson presents philosophy as an inventive activity rather than a search for timeless truths. His work would shape twentieth-century thought, influencing phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and later philosophies of difference.
Requirements
This course is designed for anyone with an interest in art, science and technology, and assumes no prior knowledge.
Teacher
Dr. Daniel Weizman
Price
£300
Location
Fitzrovia, London
Our Location
We are located at Fitzrovia Community Centre, 2 Foley Street, London W1W 6DL
Our classes take place in a modern meeting room, just a short walk from Goodge Street and Oxford Circus Underground stations.
The location is fully accessible, with step-free access and facilities to accommodate all mobility needs.
