by Daniel Smith
The entire effort of the Ethics is aimed at breaking the traditional link between freedom and the will (SPP 69). Freedom is a fundamental illusion of consciousness in so far as the latter is blind to causes, imagines possibilities and contingencies, and believes in the willful action of the mind over the body.27 Yet in so far as a mode manages to form adequate ideas, these ideas are either common notions that express its internal agreement with other existing modes (knowledge of the second kind), or the idea of its own essence that necessarily agrees internally with the essence of God and all other essences (knowledge of the third kind).28 Active affects follow necessarily from these adequate ideas, such that they are explained by the mode's own power. The existing mode is free when it comes into possession of its power: that is, when its conatus is determined by adequate ideas from which active affects follow—affects that are explained by its own essence. In other words, humans are not born free—they become free, or they free themselves. The univocity of necessity does not deny freedom; it denies that freedom is a property of the will.
I say that a thing is free which exists and acts solely from the necessity of its own nature, and I say that a thing is constrained (coactus) which is determined by something else to exist and act in a fixed and determinate way … So you see that I place freedom, not in free decision, but in free necessity.29
For Spinoza, freedom is always linked to essence and what necessarily follows from it, not to will and what governs it.
These, then, are the three figures of univocity that Deleuze identifies in Spinoza: the univocity of the attributes (the attributes are said in one and the same sense of God and his creatures), the univocity of cause (God is cause of himself in the same sense that he is cause of all things), and the univocity of modality (God is necessary in the same sense that all things are necessary). Taken together, they effect what Deleuze calls a “pure” ontology: that is, an ontology in which there is nothing beyond or outside or superior to Being. But this is only the first half of the unfolding of the concept of univocity in Deleuze.
UNIVOCITY IN DELEUZE
“Have I been understood?—Univocity versus Analogy—”: such is the Nietzschean gauntlet Deleuze throws down in Difference and Repetition, the third and most important act in the story of univocity. Difference and Repetition links the project of a pure ontology, as developed by Spinoza, with the problematic of difference, as formulated by Heidegger, and in the process goes beyond both Spinoza and Heidegger. The conversion Deleuze effects from identity to difference is as important as Spinoza's move from transcendence to immanence. According to Klossowski's thesis, the concept of God has always functioned as a guarantor of the principle of identity.30 Even in Spinoza, modes are modifications of substance, and the concept of substance (or God) can still be said to maintain the rights of identity over difference. Deleuze's philosophy of difference must thus be seen as a kind of Spinozism minus substance, a purely modal or differential universe (in which the modality of necessity is replaced by the modality of ‘virtuality’ as the condition of the new, or the production of difference).31 Difference and Repetition is an experiment in metaphysics whose aim is to provide a (transcendental) description of the world from the viewpoint of a principle of difference rather than the principle of identity. “In accordance with Heidegger's ontological intuition,” Deleuze writes, “difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate the different to the different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed” (DR 117). Despite his indebtedness to Heidegger, however, Deleuze never subscribed to the theme of the “overcoming of metaphysics.” He describes himself as a “pure metaphysician,”32 a classical philosopher who sees his philosophy as a system, albeit an open and “heterogenetic” system.33 Though obviously indebted to such metaphysical thinkers as Spinoza, Leibniz, and Bergson, Deleuze appropriates their respective systems of thought only by pushing them to their “differential” limit, purging them of the three great terminal points of traditional metaphysics (God, World, Self). Deleuze's historical monographs, in this sense, are preliminary sketches for the great canvas of Difference and Repetition.
Aristotle appears as an important dramatis persona in Difference and Repetition, and for good reason. Aristotle held a famous thesis concerning difference: different things differentiate themselves only through what they have in common. This subordination of difference to identity can be seen in the schematization of Aristotle's ontology known as Porphyry's tree (Figure 2.1). In the middle regions of the tree, specific difference allows a genus or concept to remain the same in itself (identity) while becoming other in the opposing predicates (specific differences) that divide it. This process of specification in turn reaches a limit at either end of the table. At the lower end, a plurality of different individuals can be placed under a single concept only on the condition that a sensible resemblance between the individuals can be perceived. At the upper end, the differences between the highest genera or “categories” can be related to the concept of Being only through an operation that would come to be known as analogy. Aristotle thus subordinates difference to four interrelated principles: identity in the concept and the opposition of predicates (specific difference), resemblance in perception (individual difference), and the analogy of judgment (generic difference). Readers will recognize this quadripartite structure of “representation” as one of the recurring motifs of Difference and Repetition.
Deleuze contrasts the “univocity of Being” point by point with Aristotle's theory of the “analogy of Being,” which dominated medieval philosophy prior to Spinoza. Is Being distributed among beings univocally or analogically? This question concerns a very specific problem: the relation of Being to the “categories.” Kant defined a category as a concept that can be said of every object of possible experience (causality is a category because every object has a cause and is itself cause of other things). Aristotle's formulation amounts to the same thing: the categories are the different senses in which Being is said of beings, they are different senses of the word Being.34 In Heidegger's formulation, the categories are the fundamental “determinations of the Being of beings,” the fundamental ontological predicates.35 But what, then, is the relation of Being, as the most general concept, to the categories, as the highest genera? Aristotle recognized that Being cannot be a univocal genus in relation to the categories, and this for a precise reason: because differences “are.” To predicate Being as an overarching genus would deny the being of difference; or rather, it would mean that the genus “Being” would have to be predicated twice: once to its species, and once to its own differentiae.37 Generic difference must therefore be of another nature than specific difference; whereas a genus in relation to its species is univocal, Being in relation to the categories is necessarily equivocal. The categories, Aristotle concluded, must therefore be related to each other analogically. Every philosophy of the categories, from Aristotle through Kant and Hegel, implies an analogical ontology.
* Aristotle's list of categories: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, modality, state, action, passion.
Figure 2.136
In Aristotle, the analogy of Being has two fundamental forms, both of which would be taken up theologically by later thinkers such as Aquinas. On the one hand, the concept of Being has no content in itself, but only a distributive content that is proportional to the formally different categories of which it is predicated (analogy of proportionality). The “proportionality” involved here need not be understood in a strict mathematical sense (a:b::c:d), since the categories do not need to have an equal relation to Being, but only an internal relation. On the other hand, Being therefore tends to form a hierarchical series, in so far as the category of substance assumes the role of the primary category or the first sense (pros hen) of Being: everything that “is” is a substance, and in turn everything that is a substance has a quality, a quantity, a place, and so on (analogy of proportion).38 These two forms of anal
ogy are what Deleuze terms, respectively, the distributive “common sense” and the hierarchical “good sense” (or first sense) of Being.39
What is wrong with Aristotle's analogical vision of the world? Put simply, it provides an inadequate solution to the Heideggerian problematic of ontological difference. On the one hand, it cannot posit Being as a common genus without destroying the very reason one posits it as such: that is, the possibility of being for specific differences. It can conceive the universality of Being only as a quasi-identity (analogy). On the other hand, it has to relate Being to particular beings, but it cannot say what constitutes their individuality; it retains in the particular (the individual) only what conforms to the general (the concept). An equivocal or analogical concept of Being, in other words, can only grasp that which is univocal in beings. A true universal is lacking, no less than a true singular: Being has only a distributive common sense, and the individual has no difference except a general and reflexive one in the concept.40
Deleuze's thesis in Difference and Repetition is that only univocity can provide us with a truly collective sense of Being (and not merely a distributive sense) by giving us a comprehension of the play of individuating differences within beings (and not mere generalities in a network of resemblances). But this brings us, precisely, to the fundamental problem of a univocal ontology. If Being is said in one and the same sense of everything that is, then what constitutes the difference between beings? There can be no categories (in the Aristotelian–Kantian sense) in a univocal ontology; if we distinguish beings by their substance, or their form, or their generic and specific differences, then we are back in the analogical vision of the world. Yet if we say that Being is univocal, that there is no categorical difference between the senses of the word “Being,” then we seem to fall into the thought of infamy: the thought of the inessential, the formless, the non-specific, the non-generic, the non-categorical. Between God and man, plant and animal, there can be no difference of category, no difference of substance, no difference of form. This is why Deleuze insists that univocity is such a difficult concept to think: How can we say that there are differences between beings, and none the less that Being is said in one and the same sense of everything that is?
Not surprisingly, it was Spinoza who foresaw the only possible type of solution to this problem. At this point, the only difference conceivable is difference as a degree of power (a physics of intensive quantities). The power or intensity of a being is its relation to Being. Why is the idea of difference as a degree of power linked to that of the univocity of Being? Because beings that are distinguished solely by their degree of power realize one and the same univocal Being, except for the difference in their degree of power (or its withdrawal). Difference as a degree of power is a non-categorical difference in that it preserves the univocal sense of Being.41 Beings are no longer distinguished by a qualitative essence (analogy of Being) but by a quantifiable degree of power (univocity of Being). We no longer ask what the essence of a thing is (for instance, man as a “rational animal” or “featherless biped”), but rather what its affective capacities are, since the power of an existing individual is expressed in a certain capacity for being affected.
This move already marks an important practical conversion in philosophy, which Deleuze describes as a shift away from a morality to an ethics. For Deleuze, morality is fundamentally linked to the notion of essence and the analogical vision of the world. In Aristotle, man's essence is to be a rational animal. If he none the less acts in an irrational manner, it is because there are accidents that turn him away from his essential nature; man's essence is a potentiality that is not necessarily realized. Morality can therefore be defined as the effort to rejoin man's essence, to realize one's essence. In an ethics, by contrast, beings are related to Being, not at the level of essence, but at the level of existence. Ethics defines a man not by what he is in principle (his essence), but by what he can do, what he is capable of (his power). Since power is always effectuated—it is never a potentiality, but always in act—the question is no longer, What must you do in order to realize your essence? but rather, What are you capable of doing by virtue of your power? As Eric Alliez has put it, if analogy is theological (onto-theology), univocity is ethical (onto-ethology).42 The political problem, in turn, concerns the effectuation of this power: What conditions allow one's power to be effectuated in the best fashion? Conversely, under what conditions can one actually desire to be separated from one's power? One can see clearly how these ontological questions form the basis for the ethico-political philosophy (and corresponding “existential” notions) developed in Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
We might note here that Deleuze and Emmanuel Levinas, with their respective philosophies of immanence and transcendence, represent two very different approaches to the question of ethics in contemporary thought. If the other is the fundamental problem of transcendence, difference is the fundamental problem of immanence. For Levinas, ethics precedes ontology because it introduces an element of transcendence (the wholly other) that is necessarily “otherwise” than Being. For Deleuze (and Spinoza), ethics is ontology because beings are immediately related to Being at the level of their existence (intensity or degree of power as the element of immanence). This is why Spinoza entitles his pure ontology an Ethics rather than an Ontology; his speculative propositions concerning univocity can only be judged practically at the level of the ethics they envelop or imply.
But these ethical concerns are derived directly from the univocal ontology developed in Difference and Repetition, and the solution it offers to the problem of the ontological difference. Being must be able to account not only for the external difference between beings, but also for the fact that beings themselves are multiplicities marked by an “internal difference”; and the ontological difference must refer not only to the non-categorical difference between Being and beings, but also to the internal difference of Being from itself. The ontological concepts developed in Difference and Repetition are all non-categorical notions that preserve the univocity of Being by comprehending this co-articulation of Being and difference within themselves: “difference in intensity, disparity in the phantasm, dissemblance in the form of time, the differential in thought: opposition, resemblance, identity, and even analogy are only effects produced by these presentations of difference.”43 This is the meaning of Deleuze's formula “monism = pluralism” (univocity of Being = equivocity of difference) (TP 20). It is true that if analogy denies Being the status of the common genus because (specific) differences “are,” then conversely, univocal Being is indeed common only in so far as (individuating) differences “are not” and must not be. This is the second fundamental problem of a univocal ontology that Deleuze confronts and takes to its limit: the (non-)Being of difference is, in fact, the reality of the virtual or the problematic. Univocal being, in other words, always presents itself in a “problematic” form. If one consigns “difference” to the actual or the empirical, to individuals constituted in experience, one inevitably falls back into an analogical or equivocal ontology, and subordinates difference to the rights of identity and negation. A reading of Deleuze's ontology would have to focus on these two fundamental problems.
But why, finally, in the fourth and final act, does univocity disappear from Deleuze's writings? The reason, in the end, is not difficult to discern. Other concepts, like that of the “simulacrum,” meet similar fates.44 Deleuze used Klossowski's concept of the “simulacrum” to think through the problematic of anti-Platonism; outside that context, the concept no longer held any “interest” (since beings no longer “simulate” anything), and was replaced, as it were, by the concept of the agencement or “assemblage.” The same is true for univocity. Univocity was an arrow first shot by Duns Scotus, and which Deleuze then picked up and aimed elsewhere, using it to interpret Spinoza's philosophy, critique orthodox theology, and think through Heidegger's problem of ontological difference through a confrontation with Aristotle. Once its (already c
onsiderable) work was done, Deleuze's moved on. In A Thousand Plateaus, for instance, the logic of est (“is”) gives way to a conjunctive logic of et (“and”), which “overthrows ontology,” and places relations “outside everything which could be determined as Being, One, or Whole”45 This is not an appeal to transcendence, but rather a deepening of immanence, requiring, in later works, the invention of new concepts such as the “plane of immanence,” the “outside,” the “interstice,” and so on.46 What the drama of univocity exemplifies is the dynamic nature of Deleuze's thought, which must be defined and comprehended in terms of its movement.
ESSAY 3
Leibniz
Deleuze on Leibniz: Difference, Continuity, and the Calculus
D
eleuze once characterized himself as a “classical” philosopher, a statement that was no doubt meant to signal his indebtedness to (and affinities with) the great philosophers of the classic period, notably Spinoza and Leibniz.1 Spinoza provided Deleuze with a model for a purely immanent ontology, while Leibniz offered him a way of thinking through the problems of individuation and the theory of Ideas.2 In both cases, however, Deleuze would take up and modify Spinoza's and Leibniz's thought in his own manner, such that it is impossible to say that Deleuze is a “Spinozist” or a “Leibnizian” without carefully delineating the use to which he puts each of these thinkers. Although Deleuze published a book-length study of Leibniz late in his career, entitled The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988), his more profound (and perhaps more important) engagement with Leibniz had already occurred in Difference and Repetition (1968) and Logic of Sense (1969).3 In these earlier works, Deleuze approached Leibniz from a resolutely post-Kantian point of view, returning to Leibniz in his attempt to redefine the nature of the transcendental field. Following Salomon Maimon, Deleuze had argued that, in order for Kant's critical philosophy to achieve its own aims, a viewpoint of internal genesis needed to be substituted for Kant's principle of external conditioning.4 “Doing this means returning to Leibniz,” Deleuze would later explain, “but on bases other than Leibniz's. All the elements to create a genesis, as demanded by the post-Kantians, are virtually present in Leibniz” (20 May 1980). One of these other “bases” was the formulation of a pure principle of difference, which alone would be capable of freeing thought from “representation” (whether finite or infinite), and its concomitant subordination to the principle of identity. As Maimon had shown, whereas identity is the condition of possibility of thought in general, it is difference that constitutes the genetic condition of real thought. In what follows, then, I would like to show how Deleuze uses Leibniz to “deduce” the necessity of a principle of difference from the principle of identity, by making his way through the four fundamental principles of Leibniz's philosophy: identity, sufficient reason, indiscernibility, and the law of continuity. What emerges from Deleuze's reading of Leibniz is, as he himself puts it, “a Leibnizian transcendental philosophy that bears on the event rather than the phenomenon, and replaces the Kantian conditioning” (FLB 163).