BRIEF NOTES ON:
Deleuze, G. (1992) Expressionism in
Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans Martin
Joughin. Zone Books: New York
[This is far too complex and contextual for me to
manage to summarize in any extensive way. I
have read it instead as a more detailed exposition
of the arguments that are just stated in Deleuze's shorter book
on Spinoza. This one goes into much more
depth about the ways in which Spinoza defends his
views, on monism and univocity, for example,
against earlier philosophers, especially
Descartes. There also clear entanglements
with scholasticism and theology which are beyond
me. All I can get is a gloss.
Incidentally, some of the difficulties I have
already experienced with Deleuze on Spinoza and
Deleuze on Leibniz are explained, rather
reassuringly as arising from difficulties in
translation. For example, 'comprehension' is
a much more general term in French, involving both
understanding and inclusion, the latter as in
comprehensive schools or comprehensive insurance
policies, I suppose. Equally mysteriously,
the fold is seen as a much more general
distinction, not something that just happens in
external reality, but something that divides inner
and external reality, which I began to grasp
reading Deleuze on
Foucault, especially the last chapter.
Similarly, the French terms expliquer and
impliquer carry more general meanings than
the formal operations of spelling things out and
logically trying to see implications].
Part 1 The Triads of Substance [sounds like Dr
Who]
For me, the key thing is to recognize that this is
about expressionism. Expressionism is a
mechanism that combines universal substance,
particular attributes, and specific modes.
These are not joined together by models of
causality, nor by processes of analogy (apparently
Spinoza sees analogy as anthropomorphic, at least
when it is used to try to understand God).
God is not an initial creator. Instead, he
expresses himself in attributes, and those
attributes express essences, and essences appear
in different ways in modes. (Philosophers
must forgive any imprecision in my
expressions here). This preserves God, but as
universal substance or nature -- pantheism, the
critics said, apparently. Such a model implies
univocity not dualism, including not Cartesian
dualisms between thought and matter. It
permits us to understand what is going on through
explication and implication. We can see that
modes imply attributes, attributes imply essences,
and they also imply an underlying single
substance. Similarly, we can see that
substance explicates itself, first in the form of
attributes and then in the form of modes.
This seems to me that this then serves the purpose
that Deleuze says he is after in his
Introduction—a model of reality that works through
immanence, connecting the virtual with the
empirical or actual, not as a matter of causes,
but as a matter of expression. This is only
my initial understanding, but it helps to grasp
the processes of actualization spelled out in more
detail in Difference
and Repetition.
We are offered a homely analogy to help us
understand classic expressionism —the seed
expresses the tree so that 'what is expressed is
at the same time involved in its
expression'. Attributes do not just reflect
essences, rather essences are constituted by
attributes that express it (80). God does
not just manifest himself in the world, but he
expresses himself, it is part of his constitution,
his essential nature [and other alternative
conceptions of God are seen as confusing propria
with essence, specifically all the qualities of
omnipotence and perfection and so on are propria
compared to the essence of God which is to exist
as an infinite or absolute substance. The
suspicion that they are propria arises
from Spinoza's argument that they are just
anthropomorphised, through the process of
eminence. Such absolute infinity provide
sufficient reason for things to exist [earlier,
there had been some discussion of the notion of conatus
or self preservation. Apparently, Leibniz
wanted to argue that God wished to preserve
himself in his manifestations, while Spinoza sees
that only modes display conatus, and that
there is another link between the virtual and the
actual, through expressionism, not dependent upon
attributing any particular will to God].
The end result of the discussion and debate
with Descartes and with Leibniz [who actually met
Spinoza apparently] is a threefold formulation of
substance (actually, the second attempt, and the
third one is hinted at below too, concerning
infinity) : '(1) All forms of being are equal and
equally perfect, and there is no inequality of
perfection between attributes; (2) Every form is
thus unlimited and each attribute expresses an
infinite essences; (3) All forms thus belong to
one and the same substance, and all attributes are
equally affirmed, without limitation, of an
absolutely infinite substance' (81-82).
Notice that in the middle of that argument is a
denial that numerical difference expresses real
distinctions, which is probably some sort of basis
for Deleuze's discussion of difference?
Spinoza seems to be suggesting that attributes are
infinite and therefore must be distinct, while
numerical relations imply the same form. As
usual, all this depends on the definitions or
axioms with which he began. As an example of
that, try this bit on page 74: 'If absolutely
infinite being did not exist there would have to
be a reason for this non existence; this reason
would have to be internal, and so absolute
infinity would have to imply a
contradiction'].
There is also in there somewhere an implication
that we can only understand what's going on by
explication and implication. As I have
noted in comments on Deleuze's other book on Spinoza,
this formulation was also trifled with in
Althusser's attempts to explain economic
determinism in a non-causal and non-positivist
manner (see diagram) .
'The economic' at the most general level is what
is expressed in the more specific levels in the
social formation, and explication and implication
works to help us understand this? Deleuze admires
this model at one stage in Diff and Rep,
seeing the most general level of the economic as
providing the problems to which the other levels
offer limited solutions.
It also helps explain my personal puzzlement
(which you will see now and then in my notes on
other works so far), about Deleuze's insistence
that inanimate objects 'express' themselves. He
(and Guattari) use this form to argue that there
is nothing special about human expression.
Somehow, Hjemslev's linguistics is connected to
this argument as well. Of course, it only
works as an account of objective reality IF you
see reality as structured like that in the first
place, with common properties (attributes) running
between the actual and the virtual. So it is a
definitional argument really. I'm still
sceptical enough to insist that this is only so
because Spinoza and Deleuze have interpreted it
that way in the first place. No doubt there are
sound arguments,mostly based on exposing
contradictions in Cartesian dualism, I am no
philosopher, but the whole thing seems to depend,
as usual, on some special pleading of an abductive
kind, masquerading as logical deduction from
axioms, with some slippery definitions at the
heart of it all, and ambiguous uses of the term
'must': a close reading of this book would reveal
that easily enough.
Among other rejections of Descartes, Spinoza wants
to revise his view that because a person exists as
a thinking being, and those thoughts include the
notion of God, those thoughts must have actually
been caused by something even more perfect.
Deleuze explains the comment, that you find
elsewhere, that Descartes had got to this point of
view 'too quickly', that is he quickly jumps to
attributing to God this status as a more perfect
being, although, for Spinoza, this is a
description of propria and not
essence. There is also a strange argument
about Descartes thinking that it was as easy for
God to go ahead and create a human being with
powers to grasp ideas as not to do so.
Instead, Spinoza proposes further thinking about
power and the power of things to exist, depending
on the notion of the essence of God as absolute,
not just as a perfect being. Ultimately, his
own proof of God is going to turn on the argument
that humans do not have the power to preserve
themselves, so their preservation must depend on
some higher power: '1. The more something
has of reality or perfection, the more existence
does it involve…;2. Whatever has the power
to preserve itself ...requires no cause of its
existence [either possibly or
necessarily]...;3. I am imperfect, and so
have no necessary existence, and have not the
power to preserve myself; I am preserved by
something else, something else that must
necessarily have the power to preserve itself, and
must therefore exist necessarily' (88)
Be that as it may, the discussion led on to issues
raised with the point about conatus
earlier. Existence involves having a degree
of power, a capacity to exist. Only infinite
being can exist necessarily, with no external
cause, so the more reality or perfection in a
thing, the more power it has, the more likely it
is to exist. What is it that has the power
to bring modes into existence and preserve
them? The answer must be the attributes not
the modes themselves, because modes are mixed, and
are also subject to influences from other
bodies. Whenever powers to exist modes have
arise from their being part of a bigger whole, and
the same goes for the other levels What gives
attributes this power is that they contain the
essences of modes, but they also are contained
themselves in nature. Nature has the power
to come into existence, through attributes and
then through modes. For Spinoza, this is the
only way nature can come into existence, so,
roughly, the self preservation of nature must
involve actualizations through attributes.
So again we can use implications to see what gives
modes the power to exist, and we must use
explication to understand the dynamics of this
process.
There are also implications for thought, which is
closely tied to the power of existing. So
knowledge of our own human bits of perfection,
human attributes like justice and charity, leads
us to see these as communications between us and
God, a mere set of the infinite attributes that
god possesses—so our power is to be part of the
infinite power of God, '"explicated" by our
essence itself' (92), and these are infinite
powers explicated in our essences, and those of
all finite things. Once we've been granted
these essences, we can develop powers up to the
maximum they provide, a power of acting and being
acted upon: only God is not acted upon.
Deleuze notes here that modes have both fixed
essences and variable powers. Finally,
substances only exist by producing an infinity of
things, and we can grasp this in in thought.
Part 2 Parallelism and Immanence
Why does God create anything? [This is an
issue that's always interested me how and why the
virtual bothers to actualise itself. DeLanda sees it
is entirely a matter of changing the energy
settings of different vectors, almost as an
unintended consequence?]. Spinoza reminds us
that God is infinite and therefore possesses
infinite attributes. It is a mistake to
assume that he has creative powers or wills, since
that would be to try to grasp him with an analogy
with human beings, and also involve some logical
difficulties [the only one I think I understood
was suggesting that if he exercises his will in a
particular direction, that implies he could have
done otherwise, which would make him arbitrary, or
we are forced to explain evil as something that
did not come from God's will. I also like the
argument that revelation, as in the Bible, can
tell us nothing about the essence of God since it
is all about moral codes and precepts for living
-- a bit like Deleuze's view that opinion is the
enemy of philosophy]. Instead of creation,
God simply expresses his infinite essence, as a
part of the essence itself, because he must.
Expression follows an interesting staged course,
first to attributes, whose essences are part of
the universal essence, then those attributes
express themselves in modes, first infinite and
then finite. 'One may see in this the triad
of substance "descending" into the attributes and
communicating itself to the modes' (110).
Modifications are also expressions, this time
secondary ones, of attributes. This helps
Spinoza move beyond the normal ideas of causality,
since we retain a notion of independent things and
autonomous series. The attributes are equal
but separate, and so they cannot cause each
other. Instead, they each display the same
process, which affects all the different modes,
hence the idea of a parallelism. There is also the
idea that modes have something in common even
though they differ in the attributes to which they
relate—it is the same process of modification, a
further stage in expression. I think the
argument is there is no other kind of
modification, despite the infinity of attributes,
except expression in the mode of the essence of
the attribute, which is itself an expression of
the absolute essence of substance. The
modification is an expression of substance, while
actual modes require attributes as an intermediary
step. This difference is one between an
ontological and a formal process
respectively. Infuriatingly, the argument
goes on to say 'modification has no existence
outside the modes expressing it', which is either
highly consistent or circular: Deleuze thinks it
shows that expression is simply the opposite
process of comprehension [as in explication and
implication] [See above for the ambiguity of
'comprehension'].
The same structure applies to ideas or thoughts
[despite some difficulties which I did not follow,
and which were resolved by appealing to the nature
of God as having two powers -- one to exist and
one to think. Every thought corresponds to a
thing,and vice versa. I trhink the issue is that
this would produce an infinity of ideas except
that, again, the thought of God imposes a
consistency]
Sorry but at this point I had to give up. It is all
too 'philsosophical' for me, increasingly dependent
on you knowing Descartes as well as Spinoza and
being familiar with C17th conceptions of cause etc.
There are hair-splitting logical arguments where if
you accept a point on page 15, you have to draw a
conclusion pon page 30 after a great deal of
convoluted argument and redefinition. I htink the
short book on Spinoza is good enough for me at the
moment
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