BERGSON’S MATHEMATICAL LEGACY. FROM BRUNSCHVICG TO DELEUZE

Andrea Colombo

This paper reconstructs the philosophical genealogy that links Henri Bergson, Léon Brunschvicg, and Gilles Deleuze, showing how the problem of mathematics functions as a hidden thread uniting their projects. Against the common opposition between intuition and rationality, Bergson’s philosophy is reinterpreted here as a decisive moment in the French epistemological tradition: his theory of duration and creative evolution transforms the mathematical notion of continuity into a metaphysics of becoming. Brunschvicg, in turn, makes explicit the rational implications of this insight by interpreting the history of mathematics as the progressive self-reflection of thought. Through this reflective rationalism, Bergson’s vitalism is translated into an epistemology of consciousness. Deleuze inherits both legacies but shifts their center of gravity. In Le Bergsonisme, mathematics ceases to be a mere analogy for philosophical concepts and becomes their internal model of genesis. By reading Bergson through the history of modern mathematics — Riemann, Gauss, and the French tradition of epistemology — Deleuze develops a philosophy of the virtual that integrates the vitality of Bergson with the reflexivity of Brunschvicg. The result is a new ontology of immanence, in which mathematics no longer represents order but expresses the creative power of differentiation itself. The paper argues that this lineage — from Bergson’s metaphysics of life, through Brunschvicg’s philosophy of the spirit, to Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism — reveals an enduring continuity between metaphysics and mathematical thought within the contemporary French philosophical tradition.