The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (131 page)

In
Chapter 15
, §7(a), I discussed the affinity between Nietzsche and Spinoza. Deleuze emphasizes this affinity and endorses all that these two thinkers most fundamentally share. This is reflected in the ideas that we have just been considering. For at the heart of what they most fundamentally share is a celebration of activity, an affirmation of life, in all its diversity. Deleuze, like both of them, rejects the idea that life needs somehow to be justified, whether by some
telos
towards which everything is striving or by some transcendent structure in terms of which everything makes sense. Nature has no grand design. Nor is there anything transcendent to it. The celebration of activity and the affirmation of life are the celebration and the affirmation of immanence. And they reside in an ethic of empowerment, a
concern with how things can be,
¹⁶
not in a morality of obligation, a concern with how things ought to be (
Ch. 2
, §3).
¹⁷

Deleuze is able, using resources that he has culled from Nietzsche, to recast many of Spinoza’s key ideas. Thus recall Spinoza’s notion of an affect, a person’s felt transition from one degree of power to another (
Ch. 2
, §4). Affects are becomings.
¹⁸
They involve active forces becoming reactive and reactive forces becoming active. The sad passive affect that a man feels if he loses a limb, for example, is a disempowerment in which previously active forces are separated from what they can do. (But the man has new capacities
qua
amputee. He can now operate a prosthetic limb for instance. He can also relate empathetically to other amputees. He can even forgive the perpetrators of his misfortune, if such there be. There is now a new man in whom new active forces can go to the limit of what they can do.
¹⁹
)

Here is another example, this time harking back to Bergson as well. Consider Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s shared concern with how things can be. And consider Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge. These are intimately related. Such knowledge is knowledge, in some sense, of how things can be (or, as Deleuze is apt to put it, of what bodies can do
²⁰
). But in
what
sense? After all, such knowledge is particular, not general. So it cannot be, in the first instance, knowledge of possibilities that extend beyond the real. There is, however, a compelling alternative. It is knowledge of virtual powers that are part of the real.
²¹

There is one crucial respect, however, in which Deleuze uses Nietzschean resources not so much to recast what he finds in Spinoza as to extend it. In fact in many ways this is the very heart of his own philosophy, the very heart of his own most general attempt to make sense of things. I shall close this sub-section with an outline of what I have in mind. (The rest of the chapter should further clarify it.)

Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Deleuze all reject the radically transcendent.
²²
Or in terms that Deleuze borrows from the scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus, they are all committed to ‘the univocity of being’ (Duns Scotus (
1987
), pp. 19–20). (To say that being is univocal is equivalent to saying that there is nothing radically transcendent because both are ways of saying that there is nothing whose being has to be understood differently from the
being enjoyed by us and by the things with which we interact.) Yet Spinoza believes in an infinite substance of which we and the things with which we interact are but finite modes. And although finite modes express the essence of substance, they are of a radically different kind from it. So is this not, already, a repudiation of the univocity of being? No. Spinoza is able to accede to the univocity of being by counting substance itself as expressive. Here the attributes are crucial. Just as finite modes express the essence of substance through its attributes, in the sense, for example, that a body expresses the essence of substance
qua
extended, so too, Deleuze urges, substance expresses itself through its attributes (e.g.
Spinoza
, pp. 27 and 59). On Spinoza’s view, not only is substance extended, it is extended
in just the same sense in which bodies are extended
(e.g.
Spinoza
, pp. 46ff.). Substance may be of a radically different kind from finite modes, but its being does not have to be understood any differently from theirs.
²³

So far, for Deleuze, so good. But this is where he thinks that Nietzsche enables us to take a vital step further. For Nietzsche shows that we can understand the univocity of being involved here in terms of difference, of becoming, of endless novelty. It is as if, for Nietzsche, the modes assume a priority which brings us to a reconception of substance. Substance, for Spinoza, retains its identity throughout all change. On Nietzsche’s view, nothing retains its identity throughout all change except eternal return itself.
²⁴
This is consonant with the univocity of being because it makes all being the being of difference, of becoming, of endless novelty. (Eternal return itself is ever different, ever new.) Moreover, for reasons sketched above, it is integral in making all being an object of affirmation. And so it is that Nietzsche is able to develop the ethics to which Spinoza gave prior expression. In a famous sentence on the final page of
Difference and Repetition
Deleuze summarizes his thinking as follows:

All that Spinozism needed to do for the univocal to become an object of pure affirmation was to make substance turn around the modes –
in other words, to realise univocity in the form of repetition in the eternal return
. (p. 304, emphasis in original; cf. ibid., pp. 40–42, and the quotation from Deleuze in Joughin (1990), p. 11)

For all that, it is Spinoza who in Deleuze’s view deserves credit for having first helped us to a proper understanding of the univocity of being. This is why Spinoza is, for Deleuze, ‘the “prince” of philosophers’
(quoted in Joughin (
1990
), p. 11; cf.
What Is Philosophy
, p. 48).
²⁵

(b) Hegel

If Spinoza is the prince of philosophers, then Hegel is the villain among them. ‘What I most detested,’ writes Deleuze, reflecting on his historical work, ‘was Hegelianism and dialectics’ (‘Letter to a Critic’, p. 6). We saw part of the explanation for this in
Chapter 7
, §6, where I emphasized the profound differences that separate Hegel from Spinoza. Chief among these differences, and chief among the reasons for Deleuze’s opposition to Hegel, is the fact that for Spinoza substance does not involve any negation, whereas for Hegel the life of substance is played out precisely through processes of negation, through what Hegel calls ‘the labour of the negative’ (Hegel (
1979
), Preface, ¶19). The same chasm separates Hegel from Nietzsche (cf.
Ch. 15
, §7(b)). Deleuze writes:

Three ideas define the dialectic: the idea of a power of the negative as a theoretical principle manifested in opposition and contradiction; the idea that suffering and sadness have value … ; the idea of positivity as a theoretical and practical product of negation itself. It is no exaggeration to say that the whole of Nietzsche’s philosophy, in its polemical sense, is the attack on these three ideas. (
Nietzsche
, pp. 184–185; see also ibid., pp. 185ff.)
²⁶

(c) Leibniz

I mentioned earlier that Leibniz is one of the philosophers to whom Deleuze devotes a book. But Deleuze makes frequent reference to Leibniz elsewhere too. Mostly, Leibniz appears as another source of inspiration. Thus Deleuze draws instructive and fascinating parallels between the notion of expression involved in Leibniz’ idea that each monad is an expression of the whole world and the notion of expression involved in Spinoza’s idea that each attribute, and each mode of each attribute, is an expression of the essence of substance (
Spinoza
, Conclusion). And he puts Leibniz’ notion of a possible world to creative work in an account of the relation between the self and the other. Here is his summary of the central idea:

[The] terrified face [of the other] (under conditions such that I do not see and do not experience the causes of this terror) … expresses a possible world: the terrifying world. (p. 260; cf.
What Is Philosophy?
, pp. 17ff.)

Deleuze is here fastening on a very basic link between our encounters with others expressing how they take things to be and our very conception of a
way things might be.
²⁷
Deleuze’s greatest Leibnizian inspiration, however, may well lie, not in Leibniz’ philosophy, but in his mathematics, in his pioneering work on the calculus.
²⁸
I shall have more to say about this in the next section.

(d) Hume

Hume is another philosopher whom Deleuze champions, not least because Deleuze sees himself as a radical empiricist (see e.g.
What Is Philosophy?
, pp. 47–48). But his reading of Hume leads him to a striking new definition of empiricism. In
Chapter 4
, §1, I gave a more or less standard definition of empiricism as the view that all sense-making derives from sense experience. Deleuze would take exception to this definition. Not that he would have any quarrel with its accuracy. His quarrel would be with how useful it is. This quarrel would in turn be due, in large part, to how much the definition presupposes. In particular, it presupposes whatever is required for there to be sense-making in the first place, including a sense-maker. But no position that deserves the title ‘empiricism’ can acknowledge a sense-maker that is not just as much within ‘the given’, or the immanent,
²⁹
as the data of sense
experience themselves. What really marks a position out as empiricist, therefore, in Deleuze’s view, is that it has some account of how the sense-maker, or the subject, is ‘constituted inside the given’ (
Hume
, p. 109). And what consolidates it in its empiricism, he further urges, taking his inspiration from Hume, is that it holds the subject to be constituted, not so to speak at the origin of the given, but downstream, where it constitutes
itself
(ibid., p. 87). Thus Hume insists that the subject is not itself a datum of sense experience. Rather, there are associations between the data of sense experience which issue in the idea of a subject which is in turn conceived as that which makes the associations.
³⁰

When an empiricist says that all sense-making derives from sense experience, then, really this is secondary in Deleuze’s view. It is just a way of registering that all sense-making must ‘await’ the constitution of a sense-maker somewhere beyond what is originally given. And it serves its purpose – if it does – by in effect acting as an implicit definition of ‘derives from’ and ‘sense experience’. (See
Hume
,
Ch. 6
, passim.)
³¹

(e) Kant

This brings us naturally to Kant, who in these terms is certainly not an empiricist (
Hume
, p. 111). This in turn signals the chief respect in which Deleuze departs from Kant. For Kant, the subject is antecedent to the given. What is given is given,
ab initio
, to the subject.
³²
And what is given to the subject
in experience
, as Kant understands that notion, is always independent of the subject. This enables Kant to identify conditions of experience that are not themselves given in experience. Relatedly, it enables him to identify conditions of experience that determine, not just how experience is, but how it must be. (See
Kant
,
Ch. 1
, passim.)
³³

A radical empiricism of the kind that Deleuze favours recoils from the idea that experience has conditions of either of these kinds. It can accede only to conditions of experience that (i)
are
themselves given in experience
and (ii) apply exclusively to what is real, not also to what is merely possible. Not that Deleuze denies that experience has conditions. On the contrary, he would be the first to insist that it does have them. So how can he sustain his empiricism? By appeal to the virtual. Virtual conditions satisfy both (i) and (ii). (Cf. p. 69, and
Logic of Sense
, Appendix 3.
³⁴
)
³⁵

(f) Heidegger

Daniel W. Smith notes that the title of Heidegger’s great work
Being and Time
is echoed in the title of Deleuze’s great work
Difference and Repetition
(Smith (
2001
), p. 170). This is significant. There is a profound sense in which Deleuze is addressing Heidegger’s question of Being. And there is a profound sense in which his answer to that question involves identifying Being with difference and time with repetition (as we have already glimpsed, and as the rest of this chapter should help to clarify).