Whitehead, Bergson, Duration

Whitehead argues, against Bergson, that the spatialization of Duration is not an Intellectual distortion of lived experience, but is fundamental to the constitution of any physical object. In other words, his target is not so much the structure of Bergson's concept of Duration per se, but Bergson's denigration of physicality, in general. However, Whitehead's own concept of Duration provides the resources for a direct criticism of Bergson's concept of Spatialization. His does not preclude the possibility of intra-Durational contemporaneity. Furthermore, the consciousness of Contemporaneity entails a consciousness of Spatiality, i. e. as obtaining between any two contemporaneous elements. Now, as Deleuze notes, Bergson is ambivalent about the possibility of intra-Durational Pluralism, which shows that he, at minimum, entertains a concept of non-distorted Spatiality. Regardless, in Bergson's account, any Intuition is a consciousness of a process that is contemporaneous with the Duration of the Intuition of it. Hence, Whitehead's stronger argument against Bergson is that Duration is essentially Spatial, with respect to which the Spatializations that constitute ordinary lived experiences are only a special case.