"Bergson is hardly quoted now. We have forgotten the major philosophical event he was for the French university and which he remains for world philosophy, and the role he played in the constitution of the problematic of modernity. Isn’t the ontological thematization by Heidegger of being as distinguished from beings, the investigation of being in its verbal sense, already at work in the Bergsonian notion of durée, which is not reducible to the substantiality of being or the substantivity of beings? Can we continue to present Bergson according to the alternative suggested by the banal formula in which the philosophy of becoming is opposed to the philosophies of being? Do we not find, moreover, in Bergson’s last works, a critique of technical rationalism, which is so important in Heidegger’s work? Creative Evolution is a plea for a spirituality freeing itself from a mechanistic humanism… Bergson is the source of an entire complex of interrelated contemporary philosophical ideas; it is to him, no doubt, that I owe my modest speculative initiatives."