Episode #126 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode is part two in a series on Deleuze. I hope you love the show today.

So, just a quick recap, philosophy is the art of concept creation. The thousands of years of philosophers constructing these systems of ontology that try to describe the way things are has universally been thought of as a process of discovery, the effort of people trying to discover fundamental truths that explain the way the world is. To the deconstructionist/postmodern thinkers that Deleuze is doing his work around, this makes the entire history of trying to say the way things are extremely suspect if not entirely devoid of meaning. I mean, after all, based on their worldview, there is no process of discovery going on. There is no truth to be arrived at, just thousands of years of unverifiable speculation. But as we talked about last time, Deleuze makes a crucial turn here that’s going to have massive implications on the direction of philosophy. Like we talked about, Deleuze takes the turn of saying that maybe we should think of the entire history of philosophy as a process of creation rather than discovery.

Now, let’s begin the episode today by talking about why this distinction is so important, and let’s introduce a couple new terms from the work of Deleuze that’s going to let us dive deeper into this stuff. So, when it comes to every ontological system that’s been devised throughout history -- let’s say you were going to try to create your very own ontological system. One thing you’re going to need if you ever want to get it off the ground are stable concepts. Conceptual stability is one of the most important things you could possibly have. Because if your concepts can’t be identified, reidentified, and repeatedly identified every day of the week, then what grounds your system? What holds your system together? For example, the concept we have of the sun, there’s something about that burning ball of gas in the middle of the solar system that rises in the east and sets in the west that allows it to be identified and reidentified every single day. The concept of the sun, to us, is a stable concept.

Philosophers all throughout history have realized that they too are going to need that same level of stability. So what they’ve done all throughout history is to link the stability of their concepts to truth. Now, another way of putting that is to say that philosophers throughout history have mostly linked the stability of their concepts to the identity of what there actually is out there.

Seems like a good strategy, but what if you look at it from a post-structuralist perspective? We don’t have access to the truth. We don’t have the privilege of being able to base conceptual stability on what there is. This is the contrast Deleuze is going to make between ontologies of identity and difference. These two words are going to be extremely important, so please remember them. But the point is, on one hand we have most of the philosophers from history that take the approach of trying to build their system by means of identity, of what there is. And Deleuze is going to fly in the face of all of them and suggest that no criteria can ever make concepts sufficiently stable and that what we should be doing is not focusing on identity, as people have in the past, but differences.

Now, this story gets pretty complex. But I think it begins way back with a thinker we talked about years ago on this podcast, a man Deleuze had immense respect for because he dared to step outside of these ontologies of identity. And that man’s name is Baruch de Spinoza. But for us to understand why Spinoza was so different than everyone around him, we first have to talk about another aspect of these traditional, normal, identity-based ontological systems that have existed since Plato. The idea is that of the need for transcendence to explain things, transcendence.

We touched briefly on this last episode, and we’ll go into more detail now. But it’s really straightforward. The general point is that, throughout the history of philosophy when it comes to the topic of substance within the universe, almost every single philosopher has structured their thoughts on the matter through the filter of dualism with one of the substances being transcendent over the other substance. Let’s give a few examples here. How about the work of Plato? There are two distinct realms to him. There is the world of forms which he would describe as ideal, transcendent, not of this world. And then there’s the world of appearances, which he would describe as an earthly shadow, a copy, non-ideal. Another example later on in history, use any variation you want of the God of the Abrahamic religions. There is the physical world that we navigate, which is exactly that, physical, but also imperfect, non-ideal, a temporary proving grounds, if you will. But then you have God as a substance, non-physical, transcendent, ideal, not of this world. This even happens in the Enlightenment. Take the work of Kant. There is the world of things in themselves, that we can know nothing about. So, in order to preserve transcendence, there emerges the world of human experience where human subjectivity becomes the ideal, the transcendent, capable of creating a world all on its own, different from the material world that we experience.

Now, what Deleuze would want us to notice is that in all three of these cases a hierarchy has been set up. Notice that one of these two modes of being is always superior and the other one subservient. What Deleuze would want to point out is, there’s no absolute reason one of these substances has to be superior and the other one inferior. But isn’t it interesting that all throughout history that’s always the way things have worked out in these transcendent systems? What he’d also want to point out here is that isn’t it interesting that when you consider the times these thinkers created an ethics around their ontologies -- when you consider the answers all these thinkers came up with to questions like “How should one live?” “How might one live?” -- the answers they gave are always that a person should be aiming for that transcendent. You know, Nietzsche talked about this, that there’s always an imperative in these systems, when it comes to the expectations of human behavior, to reach for that transcendent. You know, he talks about how in all these systems, the form of existence that isn’t transcendent is excluded unless it turns against and denies itself. Take any one of our examples, and you can see how that applies here.

What Deleuze is getting at, though, is that the true function of the transcendent in these ontological systems has not been some disinterested, rigorous pursuit of the truth. What the transcendent is -- the reason it needs two or more substances or modes of being for it to be able to work -- the transcendent is a way to install a hierarchy. And the benefit of a hierarchy when creating an ontology is that it allows you to pick and choose certain properties, label them transcendent, and then hold them as superior over other properties that you can then base the rest of your system around. The superior, transcendent qualities usually being things like unity, the non-physical, identity, etc. And these are always held as transcendent over their opposites, things philosophers haven’t typically focused on, things like disunity, the physical realm, and things that seem impossible to define. These lower qualities are going to end up being prime terrain for Deleuze to begin exploring where these transcendent ontologies have left gaping holes in the past.

When it comes to questions like “How should someone live their life?” Deleuze would say the problem so many philosophers have run into in the past is that they tried to use their ontology to set limitations for how someone should be living. Like we said before, the answers to these questions were almost invariably to direct your life towards reaching that transcendent. But what if we flip that around? What if rather than trying to dictate the limits of what a life can be by using ontology -- a question like “How should a person live?” -- what if by creating an ontology you could actually inform and offer a real possibility for someone, a question more like “How might a person live?” Both of these problems are going to be solved by a radical move by Deleuze away from the transcendent. And it’s right here that the importance of Baruch de Spinoza comes into the story. See, because it was Spinoza who seems to be the first person in the history of philosophy to call into question these ontologies of transcendence, step outside the status quo of philosophy, and instead create the very first ontology of immanence.

So let’s talk about what’s meant when I say ontology of immanence so that we can see how it differs from these more classic ontologies of transcendence. First of all, if you’re going to make an ontology of immanence, you need to get rid of the whole substance/hierarchy thing where one reigns supreme over the other. So the word in philosophy that’s sometimes used to describe when this happens is to say that an ontology of immanence must be univocal. What this means is that there’s only one mode of being that exists, one substance. And what falls from that is that there’s no reason to differentiate between different types of being, different tiers on some sort of hierarchy of being that exists. There’s no reason to assume that there are multiple substances, so there’s no reason to assume that there’s some sort of ranking system that those substances are a part of.

This line of thinking is what leads Spinoza to pantheism, the idea that God is everything. The entirety of being -- every rock, every person, every moose -- are all aspect of one larger totality of the universe. And Spinoza would no doubt wonder why something like this wasn’t just the default option. The answer’s probably because all throughout history most of what we’ve had is some variation of a creation story. And, whenever you have any variation of a substance created the heavens and earth, well, the hierarchy and the dual substances are written right into it. Spinoza’s going to ask, what if you had a substance or a God or whatever you wanted to call it, and it created everything that there is, yet it still remained one substance in doing so? Do we have any reason to doubt that that would be possible? Let’s say that it is possible. What would the implications of this be?

What’s going on here at less of a fun-question level and more in the world of the philosophy of the time of Spinoza is that he’s calling into question the two traditional ways philosophers and theologians have claimed the universe came into existence: creation and emanation. Spinoza’s going to eventually offer a third option which he thinks is far more likely, something that will come to be known as expression. So, needless to say, things being univocal can become extremely complicated. One way that this complication arises is that it creates a bit of a problem for Spinoza and then Deleuze when it comes to answering a few basic questions. For Deleuze in particular, one of the questions is, “So things are univocal. There’s no reason to differentiate between modes of being. There’s only one Being with a capital B, yet you just got done talking about how we should be primarily focusing on differences rather than identity. How do you reconcile the two?”

Deleuze would say that if an ontology of immanence doesn’t make immediate sense to us, it’s probably because as human beings, we are so used to thinking spatially. We think of everything in terms of its immediate appearance to us, its relationship to other things around it that are immediate to us. And we think of this whole process as going on inside some sort of cosmic Tupperware container that holds it all in. What you should do, to Deleuze, if you want to understand immanence, is to stop thinking so spatially and start thinking temporally, or in terms of time, because the baggage we bring when it comes to how we think about time is often extremely limiting.

For example, pragmatically as human beings, we have a way we think about time for our everyday life that is undeniably useful when it comes to navigating our modern up-work-home-tv-bed lifestyles and schedules. There are a lot of people out there that use what can best be described as a linear view of time. They think of time as some long line that spans infinitely into the past and future. We even use things called timelines that create a visual of this way of thinking about time. The idea is that along this line is almost an infinite number of points in time. We’re moving along this line from the past into the future, always in the present moment. Now, that’s an important point to emphasize. Based on this view, we are always in the present. And the past, well, once it’s past, we can remember it; we can reflect on it; we can study it. But for all intents and purposes, the past no longer exists based on this linear view. Same thing with the future. We may have plans for the future to try to predict it. But there’s a sense in which the future doesn’t yet exist, only the present moment. And it’s a gift. That’s why they call it the present.

Pinterest memes aside though, I mean, this is a common way that people look at time. And, like I said, it’s no doubt extremely useful when it comes to making sure you’re going to be at the bank at exactly 5pm for your appointment. But there are a bunch of other ways that we could potentially be looking at the idea of time. Some people would be critical of the linear view of time, and they might say something like, “I mean, you can say you’re always in the present moment, moving along this line. But any one of those present moments can be almost infinitely subdivided. You can think that you’re occupying a particular second, but then that second can be split in half, and then that split in half, and then that split in half, and so on. What is the present moment? And how can you ever claim to have a hold on it when it can be almost infinitely subdivided to a duration that’s so small your brain can’t even perceive it?”

But there are other theories. There are other people out there that would say that we actually aren’t occupying the present moment in the way that we think we are, that in reality the only function the present moment really serves is that it’s the point where the past and future meet. Put in a humanistic way, you are both a collection of things you’ve done in the past and a collection of possibilities to be realized in the future. These past and future events act like magnets, constantly influencing you from either side. And your existence in the present moment can more accurately be described as really just where their polarities meet.

But Deleuze is going to offer an alternative take on time, first articulated by a man named Henri Bergson, explained by Deleuze in his book Bergsonism published in 1988. Bergson was highly influential on the thought of Deleuze. And I guess the fact he writes a book about him should be an indicator of that. Now, we could do an entire episode on Bergson’s theory of time. I guess my job here today is just to try to cover the portions that are going to help us in our discussion on immanence. Maybe the best place to start is to talk about Bergson’s theory about how the past and present interact.

So the past is not like the linear view of time that we talked about where it basically doesn’t exist anymore because it’s already past. The past is not something that merely has effects on the present from afar, way back then, like we talked about in the other theory. The past, to Bergson, exists in the present. Let me explain. Bergson would say that we should think of the present as existing in what he calls actuality. Whereas the past, which again exists in a very different way, should be thought of as existing virtually. The best way I’ve seen it put is to think of biology. There are cells that exist in the present, in actuality. Scientists can look at them, study them, compare them to other cells. But simultaneously, there’s a set of genetic code written deep within that cell that has a very real effect on how that cell looks, how that cell behaves, and it’s going to have a massive effect on how that cell’s going to be moving forward. That code exists at some level. But, nonetheless, the scientist can’t see the code. They can’t study it. Now, there is certainly something that exists there, but if we were only looking for the actuality of the present, we would never see it.

This is a good way of thinking of Bergson’s views on the relationship between past and present. The present moment, whatever that is, carries with it the entirety of everything that has ever happened in the past. As he says, the present moment actualizes the virtual, or actualizes the long string of things that have happened in the past. But on that same note, the past has huge effects on what actually happens in the present moment. See, if it seems confusing to have both these in one place, interwoven, that’s probably because you’re picturing time in spatial terms, only in the present moment, only what is actualized to us, just the cell on the slide under the microscope. Whereas if you were to think more in terms of time, the theory might make more sense. The present moment is not a snapshot in time with blackness on either side of it like a linear time-worldview would suggest. The present moment is probably better thought of as a realm, a complex realm where various things from the past, present, and future come to interact. And within this realm, they all exist.

So at this point I’d like to try to tie this theory of time in with the work of Spinoza and ultimately with Deleuze and finally get to the bottom of what one of these ontologies of immanence is going to look like. Remember, the problem anyone’s going to run into first, if they want to create an ontology of immanence, is explaining how, if the universe is univocal and there’s no reason to differentiate between modes or types of being -- what’s with the big focus on difference? How does substance interact and change fundamentally? Questions that are easily answered by transcendence, right? Well, how would immanence explain them if there was only one substance?

You may remember from our Spinoza episodes. But, during his time, substance is primarily explained by thinking of it in terms of substance, attributes, and modes. Let’s define those for a second. We already know what substance is. When it comes to attributes, Spinoza defines attribute as, “By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence.” Or, in other words, attributes are the essences of things. Spinoza defines mode as, “By mode I understand the states of a substance, or that which is in another through which it is also conceived.” In other words, modes are properties of things. And because of that, they usually dictate how something looks in our actual reality. Substances, attributes, and modes.

Now, remember from earlier in the episode, Spinoza’s directly attacking the ideas of creation and emanation as ways to explain the universe because no matter what you do, those two strategies naturally lead to one of those transcendent systems with the hierarchies that we were talking about before. He’s trying to get away from that. So what he does is he introduces the idea of expression. Here’s what he means through the lens of Deleuze’s ontology. Deleuze says that substance expresses itself through attributes, or substance expresses itself through the essences of things. Then, attributes at that point express themselves through modes, or the essences of things express themselves through the individual properties of the things that exist.

Now, if this is boring you, the big point here is the expression because this move allows for something that has never existed before in the history of philosophy. Expression as a process attempts to explain how a substance on its own, without the help of any outside entity like a god, can arrange itself into an infinite number of combinations, each combination a different arrangement of the universe, each version of the universe, on one hand, its own thing, but on the other, just one tiny dot of a long, maybe eternal process of substance immanently expressing itself. What he’s saying here is, the universe, whatever it is, is an expression from something within, not a creation from the outside. Now, you may be saying, “Well, whatever happened to things needing to be univocal? I mean, you’re talking about substances, attributes, modes. Aren’t all these different levels of being?” Well, no. Substance is intrinsically connected to attributes and modes, and the fact you’d even ask a question like that goes to show that you’re probably thinking spatially rather than temporally.

Substance is not some physical thing out there moving around like so many philosophers of transcendence have led us to believe in the past. Substance, to Deleuze, is temporal in nature. The substance that eventually gives rise to this universe that we experience is far more like time than it is like space. And it’s only when you begin to think in terms of time that you can begin to understand it. And time is not time like the average person may think of it. By time, he means something similar to Bergson’s theory of time that we talked about, actualizing the virtual. This is an example of an ontology of immanence. This is an example of something Todd May refers to as, “an ontology that does not seek to reduce being to the knowable but instead seeks to widen thought to palpate the unknowable.” Beautifully put -- to palpate the unknowable. Have you ever seen a doctor that can’t surgically go into someone? They can’t see exactly what’s on the inside of someone, but they have this method of feeling around and pushing and prodding in certain areas to get a general idea of what’s on the other side, though they’ll never know exactly what’s on the other side. That’s a metaphor for this new type of ontology Deleuze is suggesting.

So many philosophers of the past tried desperately to reduce being to knowledge or truth or any of these other ambitious endeavors. But what Deleuze does so well is say, okay, maybe we’ll never get there. Maybe we’ll never know what’s on the other side. Maybe we’ll never grasp the chaos of being. Maybe there is no transcendence, no identity. Maybe at best the only thing we’ll ever have is access to a single identity of the universe. But what we can do is poke and prod around and put our feelers out, infer what’s on the other side, and do our best to produce new ways of thinking that are interesting and useful, thinking that produces new possibilities for life. There’s no reason to abandon philosophy all together.

You may be wondering, “Well, we talked about the past and present. What about the future?” We’re going to be talking about that on the final episode of this series, where we’ll also tie up a few loose ends around the concepts of difference and immanence. But next time I want to take a break from ontology and talk more about the practical side of Deleuze. How did he think about the world around him, politics, economics, many other things? Deleuze is going to offer a picture of the real world that is as unique as his views on ontology.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.