Sandwich à la merde

While I was a gold star student in my freshman high school class, the fact this was the only year I've studied French means that my command of the language is somewhat rusty.  Nevertheless, I feel confident that the title reflects the most accurate two word review (in English, at least) of Tom Conley's translation of The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.  Since you might be tempted to dismiss this act of linguistic hubris, allow me show you abundant evidence of editorial and translatorial malpractice.  You can download a scan of Conley's translation here.  You can download a scan of the original French version here (or an excerpt of the first chapter here).  Even my teenage French is sufficient to identify the problems when comparing these two.  But for corroboration, we can also consult a fragmentary English translation prepared by Jonathan Strauss, as well as an unpublished translation by Daniel W. Smith. 

Reading Deleuze is never easy.  But in his solo work (ie. outside the collaborations with Felix Guattarri) the problem is usually not a linguistic one; the problem is not the overly complex grammar and vocabulary that often make French philosophy so infamous.  Instead, the problem is that a relatively spare and dry style conceals a complex and exuberant philosophical content.  Luckily, this is just what you pay us the big bucks for.  Here at FPiPE we've been translating French Philosophical content into Plain English for over 6 years now!  So let me begin with a brief overview of the philosophical content of the chapter, so that we can better see the confusions Conley's many errors are liable to introduce. 

The basic idea is pretty simple.  What distinguishes Leibniz's philosophy is an obsession with infinite folding.  His view of things always seems to involve some sort of recursion -- any one thing is already double, and each of these aspects is in turn itself double, and so on ... ad infinitum.  A fold of course already involves two sides.  But each fold is always within another fold, and also contains other folds within it.  In short, the fold is a fractal concept.  It's clear that initially the two sides of the fold are matter and soul.  On the one side we have extensive matter, and on the other we have the immaterial soul.  These sides are distinct and never touch causally, yet they somehow communicate or resonate with one another.  Each of them is, in its turn, itself also folded and refolded.  Matter folds together inorganic and organic matter, interleaving these as butter and pastry in a croissant.  And then each of these these types of matter is constituted by a distinct type of folding.  Inorganic matter is characterized by a compressive and elastic folding that creates an infinite hierarchy of objects of varying solidity.  The simplest metaphor for these inorganic material objects is the vortex, and for Leibniz, it is vortices all the way down -- matter is indefinitely divisible; we never reach a void or any homogeneous atomic units.  Organic matter is also folded, though along a qualitative rather than quantitative axis.  Each organism contains other organisms folded within it, which allows for a whole series a future organisms to unfold.  Unlike the vortices of matter, which are all the same type of object at different scales, each level of organic fold is different.  As a result, organic folding and unfolding appears to us in the form of evolution and devolution, developing or reducing the complexity of organic forms.  And that -- aside from a somewhat subtle point about how souls, while distinct, are not simply 'above' matter but actually everywhere mixed into it like, say, raisins in pain aux raisins -- completes the basic outline of the first chapter.

Now let's examine how the combination of terrible editing and Conley's appalling translation makes this relatively simple scheme much harder to understand. 

1) The first error I find is a relatively simple and comparatively harmless one.  Conley has:

A "cryptographer"' is needed, someone who can al once account for nature and decipher the soul, who can peer into the crannies of matter and read into the folds of the soul. (pg. 3)

Deleuze in the original:

Il faut une « cryptographie » qui, à la fois, dénombre la nature et déchiffre l'âme, voit dans les replis de la matière et lit dans les plis de l'âme

I know from a past footnote that "qui" can be either "who" or "which".  But in this case isn't it obvious that Deleuze is searching for a type of thinking and not a particular thinking person?  Strauss and Smith both preserve the clear impersonal "cryptography" as opposed to gratuitously turning it into the personal "cryptographer".  Like I say though, this minor ad lib on Conley's part doesn't create important philosophical confusion.  To be honest, I only discovered it when I had already found so many much larger errors that I went looking for more. 

2)  I was first alerted to the possibility that Conley's translation had problems by the following passage:

The text also fash­ions a way of representing what Leibniz will always affirm a correspondence and even a communication between the two levels. between the two labyrinths, between the pleats of mailer and the folds in the soul. A fold between the two folds? And the same image, that of veins in marble, is applied to the two under different conditions. Sometimes the veins are the pleats of mailer that surround living beings held in the mass, such that the marble tile resembles a rippling lake that teems with fish. Sometimes the veins are innate ideas in the soul, like twisted figures or powerful statues caught in the block of marble. Matter is mar­bled, of two different styles. (pg. 4)

As you can see, Deleuze is discussing the first fold, between matter and soul.  It seems the same image of a marbled tile could apply to either side of the fold.  But then the final line becomes puzzling.  Does it indicate that only matter is marbled, and that this matter is marbled "of two different styles"?  Not only does this sentence sound clunky in English (what was wrong with "in two different ways or manners"?) but it introduces a real confusion the first few times you read it in context.  I mean, what exactly are the two styles in which matter is marbled?  And weren't we talking about the differences and similarities between matter and soul?  Indeed, it turns out we were.  Here is the original:

Il n'en forme pas moins une façon de représenter ce que Leibniz affirmera toujours, une correspondance et même une communication entre les deux étages, entre les deux labyrinthes, les replis de la matière et les plis dans l'âme. Un pli entre les deux plis? Et la même image, celle des veines de marbre, s'applique aux deux sous des conditions différentes : tantôt les veines sont les replis de matière qui entourent les vivants pris dans la masse, si bien que le carreau de marbre est comme un lac ondoyant plein de poissons. Tantôt les veines sont les idées innées dans l'âme, comme les figures pliées ou les statues en puissance prises dans le bloc de marbre. La matière est marbrée, l'âme est marbrée, de deux manières différentes.

Even I can see that Conley's final line is missing a crucial clause.  The soul too is marbled, though in a different way, which makes perfect sense in the context.   Perhaps we could chalk this up to an editorial mishap.  But the same passage contains another pretty obvious error when it translates "en puissance" as "powerful".  What exactly is a powerful statue caught in marble? What would make it powerful, and how would this convey the marbling of the soul?  To restore some sense to the image we have to replace "powerful" with "potential" as Smith, Strauss and the first fucking google result for "en puissance french translation" all do.  A potential statue caught in a block of marble clearly "marbles" it the simple sense of giving it some internal differentiation and figuration that might be analogous to innate ideas in the soul.  It's quite lovely to think of our actual world as "marbled" by all the things we think it could be.

3) In the next paragraph, I found myself confused about exactly what error was being attributed to Descartes:

From this, however, we would not conclude, in the second place, that even the most refined matter is perfectly fluid and thus loses its texture (according to a thesis that Leibniz imputes to Descartes). Descartes's error probably concerns what is to be found in different areas. He believed that the real distinction between parts entailed separability. What specifically defines an absolute fluid is the absence of coherence or cohesion; that is, the separability of parts, which in fact applies only to a passive and abstract matter (pg. 5)

What does the bolded sentence even mean?  What does the noun clause, "what is to be found in different areas" refer to?Descartes's error is certainly that he believed that,"a real distinction between parts entailed separability".  So why is it only "probably" Descartes error?  Is Deleuze expressing some doubt about what the error concerns, or about what is to be found, or even about which areas we're talking about?  In fact, he's not saying anything like that.

On n'en concluera pourtant pas, en second lieu, que la matière même la plus subtile soit parfaitement fluide et perde ainsi sa texture, suivant une thèse que Leibniz prête à Descartes. C'est sans doute l'erreur de Descartes qu'on retrouvera dans des domaines différents, d'avoir cru que la distinction réelle entre parties entraînait la séparabilité : ce qui définit un fluide absolu, c'est précisément l'absence de cohérence ou de cohésion, c'est-à-dire la séparabilité des parties, qui ne convient en fait qu'à une matière abstraite et passive

For starters, even my teenage French alerts me to the fact that "sans doute" shouldn't be rendered as "probably".  We can also see that there's no space in the original for what the error "concerns".  In fact, as far as I can see there's no noun clause at all in the French, and "qu'on retrouvera dans des domaines différents" is an adjective clause which modifies Descartes' error of believing that real distinction entails separability.  It seems Descrates made this same error repeatedly and in several different domains.  Which is "probably" why both Smith and Strauss translate it exactly that way.  Here is Smith's version:

No doubt Descartes' error, which appears in different domains, is to have believed that the real distinction between parts entails separability.

[UPDATE: I have been informed by more authoritative sources (Dr. M, private correspondence) that "sans doute" can in fact be translated as "probably".  My high school French teacher is sans doute disappointed in me.]

 4)  Here are another couple small mistakes that create possible confusions, though both of these could conceivably be the editor's fault.  Conley has:

Two consequences result that provide a sense of the affinity of matter with life and organisms. (pg. 6)

and:

But it becomes increasingly probable and natural when an infinity of indeterminate states is given (already folded over each other), each of which includes a cohesion at its level, somewhat like the improbability of forming a word by chance with sepa­rate letters, but with far more likelihood with syllables or inflections. (pg. 7)

The corresponding originals are:

Il en sort déjà deux conséquences qui font pressentir l'affinité de la matière avec la vie, avec l'organisme.

Which makes it crystal clear that life and the organism (singular) are being used as synonyms and not two separate things matter could have an affinity with. 

and:

D'autre part, la formation de l'organisme resterait un mystère improbable ou un miracle si la matière se divisait même à l'infini en points indépendants, mais devient de plus en plus probable et naturelle quand on se donne une infinité d'états intermédiaires (déjà repliés) dont chacun comporte une cohésion, à son niveau, un peu comme il est improbable de former au hasard un mot avec des lettres séparées, mais beaucoup plus probable avec des syllabes ou des flexions

I was confused upon first reading that there were an infinity of indeterminate states, since it seemed like the point of this passage was to assert that inorganic matter already has a structure in itself that organic matter can build on.  That is, inorganic matter is precisely determinate, and not just a random bunch of atoms and void.  Of course, this pre-structuring of the inorganic is exactly intermediate between a (hypothetical) atomized matter and organic matter.

5) Then we find this howler:

If the world is infinitely cavernous, if worlds exist in the tiniest bodies, it is because everywhere there can be found "a spirit in matter," which attests not only to the infinite division of parts but also to progressivity in the gain and loss of movement all the while conservation of force is realized. (pg. 7)

I don't even think this is a coherent English sentence.  "All the while conservation of force is realized," is a sentence in its own right, but here it isn't connected to the rest of the sentence by a comma or anything, so it appears as a kind of non-sequitur.   Here is the original: 

Si le monde est infiniment caverneux, s'il y a des mondes dans les moindres corps, c'est parce qu'il y a « partout du ressort dans la matière », qui ne témoigne pas seulement de la division infinie des parties, mais de la progressivité dans l'acquisition et la perte du mouvement, tout en réalisant la conservation de la force.

It seems to be saying that, because it is animated by a sort of "spirit", matter can divide into parts or gain/lose movement without violating a law of conservation of force.  Accordingly, Smith translates this as:

If the world is infinitely cavernous, if there are worlds in the smallest bodies, it is because there is "a spring everywhere in matter," which testifies to not only the infinite division of parts but also progressivity in the acquisition and loss of movement, all the while retaining the conservation of force. 

So perhaps Conley simply reversed "while" and "the" and omitted a comma.  This still leaves a substantive different between their respective choices of "spirit" and "spring" as a translation of "ressort".  Given that Deleuze has been talking about the "elastic" forces of matter the latter seems much better.  Later, this "ressort", this springiness of matter, will serve as an indicator that even inorganic matter is marbled throughout with souls.  But as always with Leibniz, it's important to differentiate between material and spiritual forces, since the two never actually have any causal interaction.  Matter doesn't have a spirit, but its spring testifies to the irreducible presence of the spiritual.

6) The same paragraph contains another gratuitous omission.

Bref, pour autant que plier ne s'oppose pas à déplier, c'est tendre-détendre, contracter-dilater, comprimer-exploser (non pas condenser-raréfier, qui impliquerait le vide).

... becomes:

In short, to the extent that folding is not opposed to unfolding, such is also the case in the pairs tension-release and contraction-dilation (but not condensation-rarefaction, which would imply a void). (pg. 7)

While it's a small issue, why on earth would you choose to leave out "compress-explode" when it's right there?

7)  Next comes a more confusing error from the very same page.  Deleuze's completely clear statement that all matter is the same but that the forces acting on it are different ...

La matière organique n'est pourtant pas autre que l'inorganique (et la distinction d'une matière première et se- conde n'a rien à voir ici). Inorganique ou organique, c'est la même matière, mais ce ne sont pas les mêmes forces actives qui s'exercent sur elle.

... gets tangled up in questions of what other forces (presumably passive) are exerted on it:

Organic matter is not, however, different from inorganic matter (here, the distinction of a first and a second matter is irrelevant). Whether organic or in­ organic, matter is all one; but active forces are not the only ones exerted upon it. (pg. 7)

8)  Finally, the rest of chapter 1 seems to be okay; we find only one more confusing and again completely own-goal type error on page 9.  Conley tells us:

Thus the universe is neither a great living being, nor is it in itself an Animal: Leibniz rejects this hypothesis as much as he rejects that of a universal Spirit. (pg. 9)

This construction is puzzling because it seems to suggest that "a great living being" and "an Animal" are two distinct things that the universe might be, and that both of these are also distinct from a "universal Spirit".  But the way you construct neither/nor in French turns to be identical to how you do it in Spanish -- ni X ni Y.  And, you'll be neither surprised nor étonné to find that this construction is nowhere in the original.

Aussi l'univers n'est-il pas un grand vivant, il n'est pas l'Animal en soi : Leibniz refuse cette hypothèse, autant qu'il refuse celle d'un Esprit universel

It's obvious that "un gran vivant" and "l'Animal" are used as synonyms in a stylistic repetition here.   At this point it seems Conley is ad libbing like a politician without a teleprompter.  Is he translating here, or trying (unsuccessfully) to write the Quixote?  How did he and the University of Minnesota Press get away with this?  Why aren't there campus protests and picket lines, letters to Senators and outraged Facebook posts going viral?  Has the whole world gone crazy!? Am I the only one who gives a shit about the rules!?  Mark it zero!

------

So there. I've satisfied my most nitpicking impulses.  Luckily, something useful came of the pedantic desire to catalog these errors.  In searching for a pdf of the French original, I came across a full manuscript of Smith's unpublished translation.  I've already sent this off to be printed and bound, and then we can throw Conley's version into the fire. 

 

Leibnizing

I came across Richard Halpern's book on Leibniz in the old fashioned way -- by perusing the shelves at my local bookstore.  While I'm not normally a big reader of academic secondary literature (unless we're counting Deleuze's readings in this category) I thought I'd bow to serendipity and take in a contemporary perspective before returning to The Fold.  It turns out that Halpern has concocted an interesting and vaguely Deleuzian reading of Leibiniz that focuses on the use of analogy in his philosophy.  Since Halpern is a retired literature professor, it's not surprising that he begins by examining the explicit metaphors that appear frequently in everything from Leibniz's letters to his most abstract writings.  But Halpern's thesis is much broader than a merely literary one.  He wants to connect Leibniz's writing style to the content of his philosophy and show us how one of the distinctive things about Leibniz is the way he maps different areas of knowledge onto one another, folding them over, as it were, till they productively touch, thereby creating synthetic concepts that borrow from the many disciplines that interested him.  It's a convincing portrait of "a philosopher in motion" (as the subtitle has it) -- an intellectually restless man often called the last "universal genius", who made major contributions in many fields, and yet who curiously never produced anything like a magnum opus comparable to Spinoza's Ethics.  If there's anything like a flaw in the book, it would be Halpern's own restlessness and corresponding lack of depth.  Not infrequently, he will open up an interesting and complex issue only to make a fairly summary pronouncement about it before moving on (eg. the discussion of panpsychism on pg. 134).  In fairness though, this approach not only suits his own thesis, but keeps the book to manageable dimensions.  Overall then, the book didn't do that much to deepen my understanding of any particular concept Leibniz created, but it did give me a better appreciation of his breadth of thought, as well as make me consider his style of writing for the first time.  I think it could also be a useful and accessible (if somewhat unusual) introduction to Leibniz for someone who isn't going to read the primary material.

One of the reasons that Deleuze associates Leibniz with the Baroque is his aesthetic and philosophical obsession with the concept of unity-in-variety.  The way this description applies to the monad is pretty obvious, but it fits just about every metaphysical concept Leibniz created as well.  This is the best of all possible worlds because it harmoniously includes maximal diversity.  Every body supports an entire world of smaller bodies within it ad infinitum.  A single clear perception is a selection or highlighting or synthesis of the confused murmur of an infinity of tiny microperceptions that extend to the whole universe.  While Leibniz himself always seems sanguine about the coexistence of these two dimensions, we might say that the book's main aim is to show us the many ways in which the principles of unity and variety tug him in opposite directions without pulling him apart.  

Accordingly, Halpern provides us with a variety of illustrations of how this tension works.  For example, he shows us how Leibniz has a tendency to overload his writing by "clumping" metaphors.  Instead of just picking one analogy to illustrate some philosophical point, he provides a whole related group of them.  Yet instead of simply reinforcing his main point, these metaphors often end up complicating it in unexpected ways.  Each of them is different enough that what is supposedly a literary device for reducing abstraction and confusion can actually generate even more of it.  For Halpern though, this is not merely a literary quirk.  It's indicative of a whole style of thinking that he calls "conceptual blending".  Leibniz is constantly mapping different areas of knowledge onto one another even when he doesn't always develop these connections as explicit analogies.  But these isomorphisms don't end up repeating an idea so much as putting it in variation.  Just like with the literary analogies, we're soon confused about which domain provides the canonical model of a concept, and which constitutes its copy.  There are so many analogies that theoretically converge on a single point that in practice we are led off in divergent directions.

To illustrate this effect, Halpern devotes a long chapter to comparing the monad to an infinite mathematical series (eg. the harmonic series).  The analogy is fairly obvious.  Each monad perceives the entire world.  But this world is constructed of other monads with the same type of perception.  So the internal state of each monad at a given moment would consist in certain large clear terms that correspond to other monads it finds itself closely connected to, together with a whole infinity of smaller confused terms that correspond to monads that are 'further away' (in some topological sense -- monads have no extension and no location in extensive spacetime).  And we can redouble the same analogy by considering the second (and third, and n-th) order effect whereby each 'other' monad contains a perception of the 'original' one, which 'original' in turn contains a perception of this image of itself ... creating an infinite series like the reflections of two mirrors facing one another.  In fact, the monad is analogous to an infinite series of infinite series of ... remarkably like Indra's net.  This already makes the monad pretty complicated.

Halpern carries this analogy deeper by pointing out that so far we haven't actually characterized the monad in itself, but just its series of perceptions.  The monad itself would be the law that defines the successive terms in the series (eg. ∑(1/n) in the case of the harmonic series).  This law lays out the entire series of the monad's perceptions all at once from the beginning.  It unifies the monad as a substantial entity with a predetermined set of perceptions that are a consequence of its essence, and not simply the result of randomly bumping into other monads.  This is a crucial feature of Leibniz's "windowless" monad, which somehow packs its entire history -- the sum total of everything that will happen to it and everything that can be truly predicated of it -- into a simple definition.  In itself, each monad is a soul existing outside of space and time, but it unfolds in a law-like manner within it.  Perhaps led by my mention of the harmonic series, the mathematically inclined may justifiably wonder how any such series of series could converge and how any such law could be specified.  It seems to strain credulity to suggest that the infinite variety of a single monad's predetermined perceptions could be unified by a single formula, and yet we need an endlessly reflecting infinity of these to compose a harmonious world.  In short, the monad seems to be an almost impossibly perfect concept.

Halpern completes the analogy between the monad and an infinite series by suggesting that this ideal completeness gives the monad precisely the ontological status often attributed to mathematical objects themselves.  They exist outside of space and time, in some noumenal realm, and yet they can be realized approximately within it, in exactly the way a vibrating string realizes the harmonic series. So perhaps a monad is not so much like an infinite series as it is an infinite series -- its substance is mathematical.  What begins as a straightforward analogy carries us to the point where we become confused about which of its terms is the 'real' one.  And yet Halpern concludes by observing that even at this point, we cannot simply identify a monad with a mathematical series.  There's still more to the concept than this.  In particular, it's not clear what it would mean for a mathematical object to be free, as Leibniz believes the monad to be.  The isomorphism between the monad and an infinite series is not the only possible perspective on the concept.  As deep as they may go, for Halpern, Leibniz's analogies never provide a definitive perspective.  No analogy is perfect, which is why he adds another and another, in an infinite series whose path to convergence gets more and more complicated.    

We could read through Halpern's whole book by duplicating examples like this one.  The very substance of Leibniz's concepts are these harmonious isomorphisms, and yet their endless multiplication seems to suggest that there's really no 'best' analogy.  Despite these spiraling levels of complexity and recursion, he always seems to complacently believe that everything will converge in the end.  There's a striving towards unity that is perpetually mired in detour.  But in the interests of time, let me skip to what I thought was the best chapter in the book, which I also think most cleanly illustrates this war between the centripetal force of unity and the centrifugal force of variety.  Chapter 19 is entitled: "Dark Leibniz". 

Leibniz was, infamously, an optimist. He claimed we live in the "best of all possible worlds".  God has created the world in such a way that every part of it, every monad, is harmoniously adjusted to every other according to a principle of maximization.  This is the famous doctrine of "pre-established harmony" that explains not only how an infinity of different monads can coexist, and even how an extensionless monad's perceptions can miraculously correspond to a soulless and mechanical matter's motion without any possibility of causal interaction between these.  Halpern, however, shows us a number of passages where the sunny Leibniz seems to have a pretty dark imagination.  His Theodicy particularly seems to rather vividly imagine the sufferings of the world before rather blandly defending the idea that they must all be for the best.  In fact, there even appear to be moments in which Leibniz imagines a somewhat sadistic God who voluntarily adds suffering to his creation to enhance its overall aesthetic effect in the way a composer enhances the glory of a harmonic resolution by a preceding dissonance.  This immediately brings up the question of which metric we use to judge this world 'the best'.  We can think of any number of things that could be maximized, and it's hard to see how even God could make it all optimal on every dimension all the time.  As a result, it's easy to turn Leibnizian optimism inside out -- "the best of all possible worlds" can quickly become "this world is as good as it gets".  The latter implies a sort of dark optimism that borders on Stoic fatalism.  This world is constant suffering and misery, but rejoice, ... any other would be even worse!  Here it feels like the sheer variety of possible worlds threatens to totally overwhelm us, and the harmonious unity we're promised acts almost like a consolation prize.  And indeed, this is how Leibniz's pre-established harmony appears to many folks.  Which leads Halpern to astutely observe that, "Leibniz's genius was to have produced an almost universally repellent form of optimism -- one that is therefore productive of pessimism" (pg. 195).  The precarious balance between unity and variety can end as a moral war between light and dark.  And Leibniz chose both sides in different ways.

Earth Moves

In The Fold, Deleuze mentioned the unfamiliar name of Bernard Cache several times.  Upon investigation, it turns out Cache's Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories (written in 1983 but never published) was a significant influence on Deleuze's Leibniz book (published in 1988).  Of course, Cache was heavily influenced by attending Deleuze's seminars, to the point where Earth Moves' dedication is: "For Gilles Deleuze".  So by reading this just in advance of our re-reading of The Fold, we'll be able to follow a full cycle of the intellectual feedback loop.  

Cache's book is also very interesting in its own right, as I know of no other example of someone actually attempting to use Deleuze's ideas to analyze a subject that the master himself hadn't broached.  Cache is an architect and furniture designer, and you could consider Earth Moves a sort of Deleuzian theory of architecture.  This description, however, doesn't really do it justice.  Even though Deleuze's style is recognizable regardless of what subject he approaches -- whether it's Spinoza or Nietzsche, painting or film -- he never created a system that one could simply apply to a given subject matter.  So while Cache's approach to architecture definitely has a Deleuzian 'way of seeing', and occasionally a bit much of the master's allusive writing style, it's not immediately clear how his theory qualifies as 'Deleuzian'.  In fact, in the main text, Cache never mentions Deleuze at all, and the idea of the singularity is the only concept we can point to that is borrowed directly.  Instead, Cache accomplishes something much more subtle than a mere application -- it's as if he tried to rebuild Deleuze's non-dual philosophy from scratch in a new setting.  This change of terms, together with the fact that the setting has an inherent connection to concrete images, makes the book particularly useful for our individuation project.  Here, I'll try to approach it in the same loose interpretation style that Cache uses rather than going through it chapter by chapter; we may come back to some of the details when we return to The Fold.

Imagine that the surface of the earth is just one great big piece of cloth.  In this flat and depopulated world, there is nothing but the cloth.  No animals, no people, no buildings, just the topographic undulations of the surface.  But the cloth is remarkably flexible, and it can deform at infinite variety of scales, both spatially and temporally.  It can plunge down to create valleys and push up to form mountains.  It can fold back over on itself to create the appearance of volumes.  And any of these structures can surge or ripple across it, the way a tsunami travels the breath of the ocean even though the water just moves up and down.  We should think of it by analogy to Mandlebrot's space filling fractals -- a topologically two dimensional object whose constantly varying curvature seems to conjure a third dimension from nowhere.  Everywhere we look, we discover that solid objects turn out to be the nested folds of this surface.  We too are nothing but these folds, and our looking itself nothing but a loose stitch that temporarily pins the fabric to itself.  

Folding provides another interesting metaphor for the non-dual, and perhaps a particularly useful one since it immediately makes clear how emptiness and non-duality relate.  All the solid and separate volumes that appear to populate the surface are hollow.  They are perfectly real, perfectly differentiated structures, but if we were to pull the whole fabric taut again, we would find they disappear without a trace of essence.  But Cache's analysis goes much further than this lovely metaphor.  He breaks the fold down into three components -- the inflection, the vector, and the frame.  Nominally, each of these refers to a specific aspect of a real construction site; the whole classification is inspired by an interesting meditation on the history and topography of Lausanne (it turns out that the whole book was inspired by Godard's short film about Lausanne).  While the concepts have a wider applicability, the simplest way to understand them is still to think of the architecture and urban planning context that Cache begins with.  Consider these diagrams that refer to the topography of Lausanne (pg. 13).

Before anyone shows up, the earth around the future site of the city has a shape (this would actually be diagram zero, with no arrows at all). Overall it rises from the level of the lake on the left, to the plains on the right, though not in a straight line.  Usually, we are immediately drawn to see the landscape in terms of the various high and low points in this diagram.  So we might say that the city is characterized by a couple of distinct hills separated by a prominent valley.  Instead, Cache encourages us to think of this diagram more abstractly.  In fact, the surface in itself doesn't have high and low points.  If we rotate the diagram at an angle, these extrema would change position.  Maximum and minimum are not inherent properties of the curve itself, but depend on the axes, the vectors, we impose on it.  Of course, when we are talking about the earth and architecture, gravity is the default vector we are always forced to deal with.  But it's important to see that this vector comes later, as a function of how we intend to use the surface.  If we look at just the curve itself, independent of axis or orientation, it's not the minima or maxima that jump out at us, but the simple fact that it varies -- first it bends one way and then it bends another.  No amount of rotation or translation or even scaling erases these bends, which are defined by the fact that the curve is convex here and concave there.  The labels convex and concave are purely nominal and depend on which way we approach it, but their difference, and the inflection that leads us from one to the other is not.  Inflection is an inherent part of the curve, what cache calls the atom of a curve or surface.  So, interestingly enough, it's these inflection points that we usually associate with the second 'derivative' of the curve that actually provide its original description.  After inflection comes the vector which orients the surface, and then finally there is the frame, which holds together both the extrema and the inflections which separate them as part of a single landscape.  In the case of Lausanne, this frame is dramatized by a combination bridge and tunnel that draws together distinct parts of the city that would otherwise be separated by hills and valleys.  Folding always involves these three moments: 1) inflection 2) vector 3) frame.

For Cache, architecture is the art of framing.  Our buildings frame the activities of living and working.  Our windows frame a connection between the interior of these spaces and their surrounding.  Even our very bodies are frames for our biological life, hollow spaces created by a fold that lets us ingest the outside and digest it on the inside.  And of course, we put frames around our art.  Cache discusses how all of these shapes serve to create a relatively stable and protected space that is meant to allow something to happen inside.  Normally, we might see the shape of the frame as something we simply impose on the world for our own purposes.  But following the metaphor of folding, Cache has a more immanent explanation of the origin of the frame.  It's more like a crystallization of an amorphous and constantly varying landscape into a fixed shape.  

This is explicitly meant to recall Simondon's theory of individuation as crystallization.  Before the frame, we have only something like an amourphous milieu, filled with fluctuations of energy (inflection), and various polarizations (vectors) that will enable the medium to crystallize, but we don't have any concrete individuals.  In Cache's terms this is the sort of intrinsic dis-orientation of the surface where it dissolves into nothing but completely chance fluctuations that don't even rise to the level of inflections (I'm not sure whether to think of this as the limit of a perfectly flat surface or an infinitely randomly crumpled one, a sort of white noise surface). It's pretty hard to even talk about this ungraspable sea of difference.  But somehow it has the potential to become every solid crystalline object we find.  In Simondon's scheme, it does this through the intervention of a seed.  Some asymmetry appears in the surface, an inflection which instills it with what Cache calls a tendency.  This isn't a full polarization of the medium which would correspond to a vector orienting the surface from the 'outside' and defining minima and maxima.  Instead, these tendencies are vectors that point perpendicular to the tangents of the surface, and converge towards some center of curvature.  We might call them the intrinsic vectors of the surface, and they appear in conjoined convex/concave pairs on opposite sides of the inflection point.  They provide a sort of seed polarization that enables a fold to crystallize on the surface.  In short, Cache considers Simondon's scheme less as a kind of splitting into phases than a kind of folding, and he maps the three components of a process of individuation -- amorphous pre-individual medium, seed, and crystal -- onto the three components of folding -- inflection, vector, and frame.

This is already an interesting change of metaphor that elucidates certain troublesome aspects of Simondon's theory.  First, it gives it an even stronger non-dual flavor because it immediately explains the apparent duality of a splitting or phase transition as simply the folding of a single surface.  Second, it goes a long way to help us understand Simondon's insistence that 'higher' individuations like the biological, psychic, and social, are not constructed on top of a completed physical individuation, but are inserted within it.  The levels don't form a pyramid, but create a sort of hierarchy of neoteny, as if they were a nested set of detours on the way to complete crystallization.  Thus, biological life, for example, is all the more successful in being a 'defective' aperiodic crystal that doesn't completely solidify the environment once and for all but crystallize  metastable forms.  Here Cache gives us the great image of fold within folds.  We can imagine that the surface being folded never actually returns to touch itself and create a completely closed form.  Instead, within each fold of fabric there remains enough slack to create another fold, and so on ... The surface folds up again and again, just like Mandlebot's fractal constructions.  The same process of inflection, vector, fold is applied at a infinite variety of scales, such that new individuals are produced within the frame of the original.  This model makes it much easier to understand how Simondon's physical individual is still bathing in the amorphous energy of the pre-individual, and how this leads it through further individuations towards the trans-individual.  The single surface never closes and is never exhausted, it simply continues to fold. 

Though the idea of a fractal folding appears quite late in the book, it is central to understanding Cache's overall point.  Because while he presented the series inflection → vector → frame in its logical order, he thinks that in terms of activity this series runs in reverse.  That is, vectors only start to exert force on a surface after passing through a frame that selects and stabilizes them, almost as if they needed a ground to push against in order to have an effect.  Likewise inflections only appear to us as transitions between extremes defined by these vectors.  In other words, every new fold happens within a previous fold, ad infinitum ...  Every new individuation is an extension or deepening or differentiation of one that was already underway.  Or conversely, every frame implies a larger out-of-frame, some unfolded exterior context or milieu in which it arises, but one which is nevertheless itself a folded frame at a larger scale.  Obviously, this perspective fits perfectly with the way Simondon's theory posits an always incomplete individualization that maintains itself in a state of metastable feedback.  A bit of the formed crystal becomes the seed that polarizes the medium and allows for the crystal to grow by sucking in new material.  If this feedback loop works too well, however, the crystal grows to consume the entire medium, converting everything into copies of a single geometric frame and completely sealing the fold.  All the interesting living forms we find somehow avoid this extreme.  They are formed inside a frame that is not completely closed and actually introduce new centers and new variations in the partially enclosed surface that prevent it from sealing shut as a finished crystal.  No life is possible at the pole of the amorphous pre-individual milieu.  But a crystal is equally dead.  Cache attempts to illustrate how life is a process of folding that always happens within the hollow space opened by another fold with a diagram of the surface of the earth (pg. 117).

Finally, the same concept of fractal folding can carry us into the mystery of what is always philosophy's most difficult question -- how can we, by hypothesis just a tiny fold within a fold within a fold of this great surface, imagine that we see its whole structure stretched out before us?  If his theory is correct, how can Cache come up with it?  Wouldn't this sort of all encompassing perspective only be available at the level of the first fold, the largest frame?  More generally, if each fold or frame forms a subject at the center of its curvature, wouldn't this subject be almost closed on itself, able to perceive only further folds that happen within itself?  I think both of these objections would hold if the surface only curved in one direction.  But I think the type of infinite space-filling curve we're talking about precludes this possibility.  Instead, our image of the surface should be something more like the infinite spiraling complexity of the border of the Mandelbrot set (minus its topological closure as curve).  It quickly becomes almost impossible to tell whether a point is on one side of the curve or another.  Thus there are centers of curvature and nearly closed frames that constitute subjective forms on both sides, and one side's infolding becomes the other's unfolding.  If we label one side the soul and the other the body, we can start to understand how these are completely distinct, and yet both inseparable and even entangled hollows created by the process of crenulation.  So which side are we on?  Are we looking in or out?  Or to bring it back to the architectural question Cache (almost) explicitly asks (pg. 72) -- which way does a house face? 

The Dharma of Finalism

I enjoyed NeoFinalism so much that I want to end our encounter with it on a more personal note.  I found the book to be a real challenge and an eye opener that encouraged me to rethink a lot of my habitual views.  While I wouldn't have considered myself a materialist before, I do think I still clung to a certain reductive step-by-step causalism or mechanism.  Ruyer has really opened my eyes to the way that the insistence that every thing must have smaller non-thing parts (ie. that everything is empty) is, while both true and important, not the whole story.  There's a flip side to emptiness.  Things do in fact appear, phenomena happen. Or perhaps it would be better to say: the fact that there are no essential inherently existing substances does not mean that there are no activities.  This might be something like what people mean by suchness.  The way Ruyer makes these pure insubstantial activities the building blocks of his metaphysical universe gives a new spin to the notion of Idealism.  Ideas do not exist exclusively inside the brains or minds of hairless chimps.  They are not objects seen by subjects, but are themselves subjects, "autosubjective" forms of absolute survey.  They form a real dimension of being, a "metaphysical transversal" whose properties seem much less mysterious and mystical if we understand them by analogy to Square's interaction with Sphere.

You can see that I've already started mixing dharma concepts with this reading of Ruyer.  While I'm not interested in trying to compare or reconcile the two as systems, I do want to note a few of the points of resonance between Ruyer's ideas and my current practice.

The most obvious connection is the way Ruyer's absolute domains of survey are just like the experience of Awareness.  When I settle into Empty Awareness or MahaSati, I find something akin to space, a container behind or beneath the objects it contains.  Space of course is a traditional metaphor for Awareness.  But Awareness is only like space; the two are subtly distinct.  Space as we normally experience it is actually a combination of space and time.  We infer it from the accumulation of the movement of objects.  The accumulation is very rapid, and the objects can be very subtle (eg. just the movement of attention itself), but nevertheless with sufficient concentration, we can see how space itself is constructed step-by-step.  Awareness, by contrast, is not constructed.  It is given all at once in its entirety and excludes even the possibility of movement.  It is the 'space' in which spacetime can be constructed, and it seems to know all of itself at once, without needing any investigation.  The analogy to a domain of absolute survey is clear.  The traditional idea that Awareness is aware of itself exactly parallels Ruyer's concept of "autosubjectivity".  Awareness is a (non-substantial) being that is simultaneously a knowing. 

The second point of contact is closely related to the first.  Awareness is not a conceptual construct (until I start trying to write about it).  It is not the same as what I normally call ideas or concepts, which are objects that might appear within Awareness, but should not be confused with it.  It's more a sense of embodied presence, though the 'body' here would, following the traditional classification of the mind as one of the six sense doors, explicitly include mental content.  All the objects of perception, including mental perception, are on one side, while Awareness is something entirely different.  This resonates perfectly with Ruyer's insistence on the primacy of the organism over the brain.  While he speaks of domains of absolute survey as 'conscious', he repeatedly insists that he is referring to a "primary consciousness" of the organism, the embryo, that gives rise to the brain as a tool.  Psychological consciousness and its mental events are, just like the Buddhists insist, secondary phenomena.  In neither case is this meant to denigrate the mind as a type of awareness.  For Ruyer the brain is an equipotential surface analogous to the organism, and of course nirvana is not the same as unconsciousness.  But there is a clear order of development between these two.  This raises the question of whether we could think of meditation as a process of accessing the primary consciousness of our organism.  This would be something like a coupling or resonance between this primary consciousness and our cerebral consciousness.  While an intriguing thought, I'm not sure how useful this idea really proves, since in the end every type of absolute domain -- whether physical, organic, or conscious -- is ultimately analogous to every other.  Though perhaps it can at least reinforce our attempt to stretch beyond our cerebral consciousness and consider an Awareness that we are but that is not 'ours'. 

The final point of comparison bears on the question of freedom.  Early on, we examined Ruyer's idea of freedom.  Ruyer's absolute domains are free in the only sense that matters -- they feel free, their action of existence is free and self-positing.  Debates about free will and determinism are completely sterile if we understand freedom as merely the opposite of determinism.  The freedom of in-determination, of some eruption of quantum chance or pure internal will into an otherwise completely determined universe, is not the sort of freedom we should want.  This freedom from all determinate limits is indeed an illusion.  Nevertheless, there's still an important distinction between feeling free and not feeling free.  We encountered this same issue in Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche -- the feeling of freedom is the feeling of self determination, the paradoxical feeling of being simultaneously the one who commands and the one who obeys.  It's a feeling of there being no resistance to a power of acting, the zone where we are not separated from our power of acting.   Ruyer's scheme provides another angle on this question by suggesting that all absolute domains are primordially free activities, but that they can nevertheless be 'colonized' by other domains.

The act and the actualization that perfectly obey the idea or theme for which they aim would manifest its dynamism without the I-act of the "agent" experiencing it as an "impression of force." But it is enough—this is practically always the case, owing to the internal hierarchical structure of beings—that a gene be actualized for the force to be experienced as well as manifested, for the manifestation of an idea, an instinct, a haunting memory to be impeded by an external or internal obstacle and the impression of force to appear immediately in both the impeded being and the impeding being. Then there is struggle, the effort of two beings or two subindividualities in conflict, whose resolution will be the constitution of a more unitary system. This is why, if force in its essence results from the physicochemical nature of the unitary domain, the impression of force results from the relative alterity of two interacting domains or of two subindividualities in a complex domain. The felt force is always the "ideal" or the "virtue" of an "other" experienced from the outside. When the alterity is absolute, the "other" seeks to eliminate me. When it is relative, the other acts by trying to "convert" or "persuade" me, and I act on him in the same way. We think we are speaking in metaphors when we apply these psychological descriptions to force in general, when we speak of the "force" of an authority that persuades us and converts us to its ideal. But in fact we discover here the truly primary nature of force. (NF, 209)

I find this an interesting quote in a number of respects.  The first line recapitulates Ruyer's equation of an absolute domain with free activity.  But since this freedom literally defines the being of the individual domain, it's not as if there's any effort or force exerted to be free.  In and of itself, the individual is free in just being -- though this being is inherently active.  This seems similar to what the idea of wu wei or the non-doing of shikantaza is pointing towards.  Or as the Tibetans often put it, we are already free -- it's not something that requires a special practice or effort.

On the other hand, our free activity is never alone.  Ruyer hasn't gone into the question of the power dynamics between absolute domains, but this idea of colonizer and colonized seems similar to what we saw with Nietzsche's notion of the master and slave.  The last line, in fact, could come almost straight out of Deleuze's book on Nietzsche -- we can identify the will to power with the action of colonization that brings together a unified domain constructed of other individuals.  When these other individuals are brought together in the right way, they become us, or as Ruyer puts it, we "possess" them in the manner in the manner of a spirit possessing a shaman.  But of course, we are sometimes ourselves possessed by another individual.  This seems like it would correspond to a becoming reactive, to becoming the pure mechanism or tool or organ of another finalist activity than the one which defines us.  In other words, colonization tends to convert us into a step-by-step machine.  Our experience of effort, of limitation, of reactivity -- in short, of unfreedom -- is then at bottom an encounter either with some other recalcitrant individual that does not wish to be colonized, or of our own resistance to being colonized.  And the way to overcome this feeling is not to aspire to the impossible role of always being the colonizer, but to so harmonize ourselves with the other individuals 'above' and 'below' ourselves that all our individual activities become simultaneously compatible.  This sort of non-violence may be impossible within a Nietzschean view, but it seems to consonant with the aim of Ruyer's theological myth.

The Royal We

In retrospect, it's obvious that an avowed Neo-Platonist's philosophy will end with a new myth.  In the end, it's even the same old myth, really the only myth -- the story of how the divine appears in the world, and the story of how, by recognizing or remembering the divine, we tend to converge with it.  Ruyer self consciously ends his masterpiece with a modern version of the metaphysical myth, and at the same time assures us that there is no way to turn this myth into objective knowledge.  For Ruyer, all metaphysics is mythical by its nature.  So the myth is not just his optional flight of poetic fancy, but is necessitated by a world of individual transspatial forms.  This is because each form is in a sense closed on to itself, an absolute autosubjectivity that ultimately knows nothing beyond its self, even if it also knows that this self appears to have boundaries.  Naturally though, we are just one of these forms.  So the connection with the other forms is never through direct observation, but only through analogy, inference, or the sort of 'divine seeing' we call intuition -- in short, through myth.  Nevertheless, if it should happen that all the individual forms are in truth One, why then our myth would become reality, and repeating it to ourselves would turn us, and everything else, into God.

Ruyer's theory poses the same problem as every metaphysical theory, the problem that leads us to call them myths.  How can a particular creature, that is clearly a limited part of the universe, someone encompass the whole thing from a divine perspective? How can we be us and at the same time be God?  Every metaphysics suffers from this problem because it takes the God's eye view and attempts to exhaustively describe reality as if from outside (NF, 225)  The attempt can't help but fall into contradiction or infinite regress when we try to describe our describing, etc ... In a sense, we might even consider this the opposite paradox of the axiological cogito with which we began.  Any particular meaningful statement we make -- even, "the world is meaningless" -- automatically proves that there exist meaningful statements.  By contrast, every total metaphysical theory we propose creates a contradiction in the every act of proposing it.  One activity is self-positing, the other self-negating.  We exist; therefore we are not everything.

The problem of how we can articulate a theory of everything from within everything corresponds to the problem Ruyer faces in defining the notion of God within his system.  He has told us that all real beings are absolute domains, unified forms of activity held together by their striving for a transspatial Ideal.  And he's shown us many of these individuals, along with the three broad classes they fall into -- physical quanta, organic forms, and consciousnesses.  His universe is constructed entirely of these fibers of individuality that split and bifurcate and transform into one another.  Since these seem to occur in a sort of 'colonial' hierarchy where individuals subsume sub-individuals and in their turn become the 'material' for super-individuals, the question arises of whether there is a largest individual.  More precisely, the question arises of whether this theoretical largest individual would actually count as an individual?  Is the totality of the universe, the collection of all finalist activities, itself a finalist activity, an absolute domain?  Does the universe as a whole aim for some Ideal?  As with metaphysics, we encounter here a paradox of self-reference when we try to apply the concept of finalism at this largest scale.  If the only real entities are the individual finalist activities, then their collection is not itself an individual, which proves that finalism actually isn't universal, and perhaps even implies that there is no such real thing as 'the universe'.  On the other hand, if we say that this totality forms an individual which claims to be the largest finalist activity, we run into a problem of infinite regress, since it seems we would always need to add this largest activity to the set of all activities to create a new larger set, and so on ...

If every finality presupposes agent, unitary domain of work, and ideal, does the finality of the world, that is, the fact that it is assembled in such a way as to render particular finalist activities possible, require in its turn agent, unitary domain, and ideal? God as Sense of senses or End of ends is thus no more intelligible than God as Cause of causes or Being of beings. In both cases, one is caught between an infinite regress and the negation of the concept one sought to raise to the second power—which seems to reduce the concept itself to a fantasy.  Either the Sense of senses is senseless or we have to search for the sense of the sense of senses, and so forth. (NF, 240)

If the only realities are individual finalist activities, then a God which transcends these and orders them as if from outside would not be real.  But without a God, we have no explanation of why the individual finalist activities exist nor why they form continuous fibers and even seem to compose the elaborate and often harmonious tapestry we call the Cosmos. God, it turns out, is a problem whether he exists or not.

Ruyer's solution to this problem is very interesting.  He advocates a form of gnosticism.  That is, he thinks God indeed exists, but that he hides himself.  Here is how his myth ends.

In brief, the creation of real beings is so successful that beings are at once free and yet made to work in a direction in which creation would encounter no obstacle. Provided they labor and exploit their faculties, they discover all that is indispensable to their existence: energy, material, fields of action of all kinds. To the point that they sometimes believe themselves to be true gods, children of chaos, the only conscious beings, the sole beings capable of judgment, choice, and projects. Creation is carried out so well that it remains invisible to the creatures. God guides beings without impelling them. And when beings, while benefiting from the resources of creation and using their language and brain to speak, declare that they have realized that God is only a myth, it is at that moment that God is satisfied and can proclaim his creation good. (NF, 227)

Of course, the original gnostics believed that God was hidden because he was removed from the world, hidden behind it, in transcendence.  By contrast, Ruyer's God is hidden in plain sight, hidden within the world, immanently.  This is a very difficult thought that can seem like attempt to square the circle.  He ends up asserting the reality of distinct individual finalist activities at the same time that he asserts their unity.  Ruyer has naturally been preparing the ground for this conclusion throughout the book by highlighting the analogy between and continuity of the three types of individuals he's discussed.  All his individuals have the same overall form of absolute survey.  Nevertheless, this threatens to reduce the world to a single individual at the root of the analogy.  It's only if I keep in mind that the way the individuals are distinct is different from the way they are the same -- if diversity and unity happen on different conceptual 'levels' -- that I can see this as a solution to the problem.  All the individuals are different expressions of the same process of individuation.  God is the structure of this process rather than any particular example of it.  He is embedded in the world without being of it. 

There is one and only one way of escaping the contradiction: to identify God not with a being, a sense, or an activity transcendent to the world but with the two poles of all finalist activities whose totality constitutes the world. God is thus supreme Agent as well as supreme Ideal; and "Creativity" cannot be distinct from a God who is at once and indissociably Agent and Ideal. (NF, 240)

Only finalist activities exist. God also exists.  Yet God is not himself a finalist activity.  He is Finalist Activity.  Process. The Form of all activity.  God is the structure of freedom, the structure of striving after an Ideal, the structure of the actual-virtual, Agent-Ideal split and the Activity of being/knowing this split implies.  Ruyer has already told us that this is a mythical and somewhat mystical conclusion.  Activity in itself is ungraspable and unknowable except through its expression in the particular activities that we are.  And yet the endless bifurcation and colonization of these activities never exhausts the Form of Activity.  It's a peculiar and paradoxically satisfying ending for NeoFinalism -- precisely because it isn't one.

Finalism's Family Feud

Broadly speaking, Ruyer's goal in the next two chapters (18 and 19) is to distinguish his theory of finalism from related theories that today go under the names of vitalism and panpsychism.  For this reason he surveys a number of authors who represent each of these schools of thought.  Since I'm not familiar with most of these thinkers, it makes little sense to go into the details.  However, I do think it's clarifying to understand some of the subtleties involved in why Ruyer's theory differs from these other, better known, alternatives to reductionist materialism.

Let's define vitalism as the idea that there is a specifically vital force that exists outside the realm of the physical.  This is obviously not a single theory, but a broad category of theories that Ruyer actually calls "organicism".  What all of these theories have in common is positing at least two types of order in the universe -- a deterministic step-by-step casual 'order' of physical particles, and a separate holistic order of sense, meaning, and purpose which constitutes the vital.  There can be significant differences in how these theories think the two type of order relate -- Kant saw the physical world evolving deterministically, but still "as if" it followed a divine plan, so that both sides were real but never touched (NF, 192), others thought the vital force could directly influence the physical in some magical fashion, and still others, like Merleau-Ponty, that the physical was effectively a subset of the vital, in the sense that to be is to be perceived by a living being (NF, 199).  But they all think of the vital order as categorically distinct from the physical.

For Ruyer, none of these alternatives are quite right because for him the vital isn't really separate. Earlier we called him an monist idealist.  And this is still a fine description as long as we keep in mind that for Ruyer, Ideas are independent real entities that don't need to be inside the mind of hairless chimps or any other living thing.  Indeed, they are the only real entities, and as a result they cannot be parallel to or in interaction with or even contain within themselves a physical world which, for Ruyer, does not have a separate real existence.  Everything is Ideas -- domains of absolute survey that exist as "autosubjects".

As a domain of absolute survey, an organic form is altogether different from a physical Gestalt, and yet it is not a "perceived form." It is an abuse of language to say that the organic form is "perceived by itself," as though it had to present its own image to itself, like a man who looks at himself in a mirror instead of looking at others. It is an abuse of language to consider the autopossession of self, the "for-itself," the autosubjectivity of every being as self-knowledge or self-perception. This "texture-knowledge," this primary consciousness, is not knowledge; it is being. Perception's mise-en-scène must not be transported into the absolute survey of form-being and of activity-being. (NF, 199)

As a result, while Ruyer can often sound superficially like a vitialist because of his emphasis on the efficacy of transspatial entities, and his constant appeal to the centrality of the organism, his theory goes much further than vitalism's attempt to put life or consciousness back into contact with matter.  In fact, there's no need to do this as matter and consciousness are both already life.  Ruyer illustrates this with a wonderful image that he assumes everyone has seen.

Let us imagine three humans A, B, and C on the model of Ripolin's famous poster. The first, A, is just an automaton but very sophisticated, made up of metallic cogs and dynamic systems of equilibrium. B is a living man but is deaf and blind and even temporarily deprived of every psychological life in the ordinary sense. The third, C, observes the first two. The first is certainly not a true form. Its "form" is constituted as a whole only in C's perception. It does not maintain its structure on its own, and it requires external maintenance and repairs. But B, an organism without psychological and sensory consciousness, is indeed a true form, because he is living and can be distinguished from a corpse, and be- cause his organism actively maintains its structure (e.g., the stomach does not digest itself and the neural cells do not chemically degrade). This form does not depend on C's perceptive image of B. B's brain has a proper form and activity, which are no doubt less "molar" than if B were not temporarily unconscious, but less "molecular" than if he were dead. Our three humans represent three levels: physical, vital, and psychologically conscious. Gestalttheorie as much as mechanism seeks the unity of the three levels by starting from A. Merleau-Ponty as well as idealists seek this unity by starting from C's interpretations. We seek it by starting from B, or from C as living, because B as a living organism is the type of normal and in fact universal being: it is an autosubjective form, an absolute domain, self-surveying, which is synonymous with "self-perceiving." A is merely a step-by-step assemblage of elementary beings. As to C, it is identical to B, with the difference that he perceives A and B through healthy sensory and cerebral assemblages. This perception is secondary relative to C's life: to perceive, to be psychologically conscious, one has to be alive. To have a conscious "image" of another being, one has in the first place to be a "true form." (NF, 199)

This image helps us clarify that Ruyer's Ideas are primary relative to consciousness.  Consciousness is inside Ideas, the vital precedes the cerebral, and not vice versa.  But of course it may still leave us with the impression that the vital is somehow qualitatively distinct from the physical.  This is only true, however, if we conceive the physical on the model of 19th century machines, ie. in the sense of classical physics.  If we instead conceive of the physical as Ruyer does, using the quantum physics appropriate to his era (and still appropriate to ours), we find that "the physical" is already 'vital' on its own. 

The "particles of matter" are domains of action that become, in their interaction, a single domain and share their energy. The modern conception of bonds turns an interacting system into "a kind of organism in the unity of which the elementary constitutive unities are nearly absorbed" and which therefore acts as a systematic unity and not as a sum of elementary actions. So, like the problem of the origin of life, the problem of the origin of so-called vital—it would be better termed "microorganic"— force no longer arises. Macroscopic organisms are progressively formed along the lineage of individuality of the universe, through colonization, dominated division, and hierarchical association of microorganisms, that is, of molecules. "Vital force" does not differ in nature from physical force, from the force of internal bonds of atomic physics's unitary domains of action, whose "force," as it appears in classical physics, is merely a statistical resultant. (NF, 202)

So in reality, the middle character in Ripolin's image is equivalent to all three of them.  Consciousness is a development of vital force and matter is already a vital force.  So not only are the three in continuity with one another, but they all exhibit the same "true form", the same type of absolute survey.  Ruyer's 'vitalism' goes all the way up and all the way down, which is why it merits the new name 'finalism'.

While we could think of Ruyer as a vitalist if we bear in mind certain caveats, we could also call him a panpsychist given other clarifications.  We saw that the problem with panpsychism is right there in the name -- it inevitably ends up modeling all entities on the human psyche (NF, 74).  By contrast, we've seen that finalism models all entities -- including the psyche and matter -- on the organism.  Ruyer has spent a good deal of the book distinguishing the way the organism as a domain of absolute survey is distinct from the step-by-step causality of what we usually call 'the physical' (though which we should perhaps should refer to as the macrophysical to avoid confusion).  Thus we've had lots of discussions about how we cannot reduce the meaningfulness of organic activity to the meaningless interaction of particles.  However, Ruyer has spent much less time distinguishing the organism from its seemingly much closer avatar -- the conscious mind.  We know the vital is primary relative to the psychological, but what exactly distinguishes these two? 

I construe the survey of "Psycho-Lamarkism" in chapter 19 as an attempt to more carefully specify exactly what's wrong with panpsychism.  Why is the psyche a bad model for the organism?  Roughly speaking, the problem is that the psyche is too substantial.  We conceive our psychological continuity as the continuity of a substantial self that exists inherently before it goes out and acts in the world.  Its development then becomes a step-by-step process of the accumulation of experiences -- the psyche learns by accumulating knowledge as a result of its encounters with the outside world.  I think this is why Ruyer is describing it as "Lamarckian".  NeoDarwinism reduces the phenotypic agent to an illusion, a mere byproduct of the true genetic unit that is being reproduced and selected.  But Lamarckism requires a real agent that can possess acquired traits in order to be able to pass those on.  We might imagine a type of Lamarckism where the random mutations accumulated in any cell of the organism would be passed on to its progeny (if we replace "any" with "germ line" we reduce this theory to Darwinism).  But this wouldn't really be a case of the inheritance of acquired traits in a strong sense, and it certainly wouldn't help explain how an organism's learned adaptations to an environment could be passed on.  In short, Lamarckism requires learning, and learning requires a substantial agent called the psyche. 

We can ask as a matter of fact whether every Lamarckism is not psychological. By psycho-Lamarckism, we mean the conception that explains the internal finalist assemblage and the de facto adaptation of organisms to their environment or to their living conditions as the result of an accumulation of direct individual efforts, psychological in nature and similar to the conscious effort. (NF, 210)

By contrast, Ruyer's finalism is built on the idea of an activity without a substantial agent.  His ideal individual is inherently active, and its activity is given all at once, across time as a trans-spatiotemporal unity that only appears as a development when we look at it from the outside.  There's no static continuing substance here that could develop by acquiring properties.  There's no agent that could learn anything by accumulation.  In a sense, all of Ruyer's individuals are born fully formed, though this form actually spans the entire life of what we would think of as the psychological self or organic individual.  And when he speaks of a continuity of fibers, this doesn't result from the development of each individual segment involved, but from the transformation of one individual into another, the 'lighting up' of a new fiber segment that lay darkly hidden in the bundle stretching back to the beginning of the universe.  It's like the continuity of each torch lighting the next by touching a relay that has been waiting all along to meet it.  Obviously, this is not how we normally think of the continuity of our self.  We imagine ourselves as a single continuous flame, and if this consciousness is perhaps passed from moment to moment, this evolution of momentary selves is Lamarkian, not Darwinian.  In short, the psyche is a bad model for the organism because we habitually tend towards a flawed (ie. non-Buddhist) model of our self.  Obviously, this opens the door to thinking of ourselves as much more fundamentally organisms than consciousnesses, a thought I'll try to come back to in a later post.

So if Ruyer's ideal individuals cannot appear as a development -- either through a Darwinian evolution that would reduce them to chance variations, or a Lamarckian evolution that would slowly accumulate them around a central core -- how can they appear?  How are they constructed?  In fact, they aren't constructed at all.  They exist eternally as Platonic types.  And they appear through memory.  They are 'invoked' or 'incarnated' in the world in the same mysterious way that a memory pops into our consciousness.

The critique of psycho-Lamarckism (especially if the loophole of natural selection is rejected) leads us very closely to metaphysics, to the metaphysical element of reality. The type cannot be explained by psycho-Lamarckian action; and because it also cannot be explained by the formula mutations + adaptive selection, it remains only to accept it as a primary fact.

... the finality of the "type" forces us to admit straight away a kind of metaphysical and theological initial emplacement, a primary plan(e). The historical character of the evolution of types and species must not veil their ideal and systemic characters. The types and species invent themselves in time, but this invention is guided, predestined. In some sense, organic memory is a ready-made pseudo-memory. Instinct, which has all the traits of memory, is no doubt a pseudo-memory for the individual. The pace of evolution compels us to go further and to admit that it is even a pseudo-memory for the species. It is a "reminiscence" memory, through the apperception of a "type," a memory with a determined program, a memory that is inseparable from a predestined invention. (NF, 220)

 

The Unfolding Continuity of Embryology

After our in-depth discussion of the fibrous structure of universe, let's step back for a moment and try to pinpoint the crucial difference between viewing the universe as a collection of material particles and viewing it as a collection of ideal fibers.  The chapter on "neomaterialism" (15) indicates that this difference is sometimes more a question of attitude than on of arguing over facts (NF, 156).  For example, Ruyer point out that Schrödinger's famous thesis that the organism is an aperiodic crystal can equally well be read as asserting that an aperiodic crystal is an organism (NF, 154).  In that case, where exactly does the difference between neomaterialism and neofinalism lie?  Ruyer locates it in "the recognition of lines of individual continuity" (NF, 162) but what exactly does this mean? 

From a high level, I think the easiest way to approach this question is through the central metaphor of Neofinalism -- the embryo.  Everyone can see that what begins as an embryo ends up as an adult organism.  The obvious question is where this order comes from.  Ruyer's answer is, in short, that the whole structure of the organism, along with its differentiated parts, is there from the start as an Ideal Individual.  This ideal form is like a continuous virtual thread that links and organizes every stage of development as a means to an end.  By contrast, the neo-materialist and (as we'll see in the next several chapters 16, 17) neo-Darwinist accounts explain this order as nothing more than chance.  These theories banish the notion of Ideas existing from the beginning and operating across time, and reduce everything to the blind mechanism of material particles interacting moment to moment.  Any order, up to and including the mind of the theorizing scientist, which arises from these mechanisms is illusory, epiphenomenal, and just a matter of speaking.  While we can always trace the adult organism back to the embryo through a series of step-by-step chemical reactions that form an actual thread, when we reach this starting point we discover that it is 'just' another collection of molecules.  In a real sense, these theories imply that the embryo 'just happens' to produce an organism, or, if we scratch deeper, we discover random mutations that 'just happen' to produce the viable embryo.  

So with NeoDarwinism and NeoMaterialism, there's always an actual thread of step-wise causal segments that unfold in time, but these events are, by hypothesis, not shaped by a continuous virtual line that operates across time.  This situates the key difference between the ideal and the material in our understanding of time.  Is time an empty space-like container that only exists conceptually as sub-divided into instantaneous moments like so many tiny line segments?  Or does time have an indivisible reality of its own that underlies the integration of these moments into a continuous line (similar to Bergson's duration?).  Ideas are inherently active entities that cannot be reduced to a single moment, things that die or dissolve if you try to hold them still, whereas the essence of material things lies in their static instantaneous substance, though they may later happen to move around.  It's akin to the difference between seeing the real number line as just a collection of points that happen to look continuous, and seeing it as a continuum that can be differentiated into a collection of points.  Notice that each view converts into the other when you take them to their limits.

Precisely because a line is continuous virtually, it can only actualize itself discontinuously.  Despite the fact that it's there as a virtual from the beginning, the adult organism still comes into actual existence through the steps of embryonic development.  An actual organism differs radically from an actual embryo, and yet there is an ideal continuity that stretches between these two.  Similarly, an actual molecule differs from an actual organism, and yet the organism is a form of development of the molecule, something, as Spinoza would have said, that the molecule "can do", just like thinking is in turn something that the body can do.  I think this gets to the root of why Ruyer's description of fibers can be confusing at times -- the continuity of the virtual fiber isn't distinct from the transformation of one actual entity into another.  In short, the cosmic embryo at the heart of Ruyer's scheme never really stops developing.  Which explains why even this far into a book called Neofinalism Ruyer has yet to clearly tell us what end any of his subjects work towards.  Ideal individuals, as absolute surfaces, stretch across time and impose a norm on a certain domain of spatiotemporal forms.  They organize these into something that looks like a development.  But this isn't a development towards the last form in this series -- it isn't a goal directed development towards an equilibrium form defined in advance.  Ruyer repeatedly talks about improvisation and freedom and the fact that the end of the organism isn't simple self-maintenance, but it's still easy to slip into thinking that ideal individuals are effectively just copies of the actual individuals that appear stable to us.  Instead, ideal individuals are like a vector of activity, a tendency that holds together the trajectory of a certain stretch of fiber.  But this stretch is in continuity with sub-individuals which came before it and super-individuals which follow it, just as the formation of our embryonic limb is in continuity with the bilateral differentiation which precedes it and the digital differentiations which will follow it.  Each stage in the process is a separate tendency, a distinct and well defined potential of the initial embryo that contains them all simultaneously, but in an ordered continuity of unfolding.  Thus, each new level is a development of the previous one, and not a new composition (NF, 155), a memory and not a creation or emergence. 

After that abstract rhapsody, let's return to the text.

Another way to approach the importance of Ruyer's theory of fibers is to contrast it in detail with the reductionist tendency of neo-materialism, and this is exactly what he does in chapter 15.  Ruyer chooses Schrödinger's classic What is Life? to represent the neo-materialist position.  Since I happened to have it sitting on the shelf, I was able to quickly read through this justly famous little set of lectures.  It brilliantly drives home the now commonplace but actually rather mind-blowing point that the entire organism develops from a single particular molecule.  And reading it illuminates Ruyer's equally brilliant critique of the way Schrödinger misinterprets his own thesis as a reduction of the organism to a molecule.  In fact, what Schrödinger discovers here fits perfectly with the central idea of the wave mechanics he helped invent -- the molecule is already an 'organism', so it cannot be a question of reduction, but of the continuity of 'organic' development across what we think of as distinct levels.  As we saw last time, the quantum particles that appear to form the simplest unities are nevertheless still domains of absolute survey just like the organisms and consciousnesses that will develop from them.  All these levels are equally real individuals that exist in continuity alongside one another on the same ideal plane, even if when they are unfolded in actuality they appear as separate levels of composition. 

Schrödinger's lectures distinguish two ways that order can appear in the universe, which he calls "order from disorder" and "order from order" respectively.  Most of macroscopic physics, at least insofar as it pertains to biology, is based on the central idea of statistical mechanics -- order can arise from disorder when the number of independent parts becomes large.  This accounts for why we see very precise phenomenon like the equilibrium distribution of positions and speeds of gas molecules in a volume, even though the underlying motion of the molecules is quite random. By contrast, the order we see in an organism is not an order created by thermodynamic equilibrium.  Though the organism is composed of many many molecules, its visible order is a development of the order already present within just a tiny fraction of those molecules -- the well ordered aperiodic crystal we now call DNA.  In some sense, the organism is like a giant molecule, an amplification of the order present in its tiny embryonic molecular seed.  And of course, the structure, stability, and mutability of this seed are all due to quantum effects that hold it together as a unit.  While Schrödinger construes this observation as a reduction of the organism to a "clock-work" system (WL, 81), he uses this term in a sense we don't normally give it now.  He explicitly opposes a clock-work system to a statistical one.  An example of a purely clock-work system would be something like the friction-less pendulum, not the actual mechanical linkages of a watch one has to periodically wind.  That is, a clock-work system is an ideal one, one whose behavior is deducible from first principles as a dynamic mathematical form that continues in perpetuity.  In fact, no real physical system is truly a clock-work until we reach the realm of the quantum, either because we examine such a small form, or because we cool a larger one down to absolute zero (WL, 84).  In either case, we reach a moment when actual things stop behaving like substantial particles and start behaving exactly like mathematical ideas.  Which is to say that Schrödinger's clock-work is precisely the ideal individual that Ruyer characterizes as a domain of absolute survey.  So it turns out that Schrödinger, who explicitly tells us that his conclusion that the organism is a clock-work sounds ridiculous (WL, 82), is a neofinalist without realizing it!  His 'order from order' is exactly the line of developmental continuity of an ideal fiber that Ruyer has been discussing.  And it is exactly opposed to the 'order from disorder' that is merely a consequence of the law of large numbers which we invoke when we deal with a statistical aggregate that doesn't constitute a true individual fiber in Ruyer's sense.  In Ruyer's eyes, Schrödinger's only failure lies in not accepting the implications of his own conclusion, implications which the father of quantum mechanics was in a perfect position to appreciate.   

In the following chapters on neoDarwinism (16 and 17), Ruyer goes on to deal with the next logical step in the attempt to reduce the inherent trans-spatiotemporal unity of the organism to the illusory outcome of a purely statistical and step-by-step causal process.  Sure, we can hear a critic say, the organism is not a statistical phenomena in the physicists normal sense of something at thermodynamic equilibrium.  Granted, it's order derives from a development or amplification of the order already present in its genome.  But the order of this genome is itself the result of natural selection, a process that in the final analysis is just a differential sorting of fortuitous mutations.  So the adult organism reduces to the genome (as Schrödinger suggested and modern genetics supposedly confirms) and the genome reduces to chance, without the need for any finalist activity along the way.  As a result, the neo-reductionist argues, Ruyer's fiber of development is nothing more than an after the fact anthropocentric imposition of coherent form on evolution's random walk.

Ruyer produces some powerful arguments against these objections, not least of which is a version of the very first argument he made in the book -- the neo-reductionist incoherently claims that the meaning of the universe is its meaninglessness, that it's only order is disorder (NF, 166).  And, certainly, I don't know a single scientist that behaves as if they are nothing more than a random sequence of genetic variations.  But this is just the beginning of his critique, and these chapters are both quite technical refutations of the overly grandiose interpretations of evolutionary theory that pass as orthodoxy these days.  While I'll spare us the details, I do think there are two main points worth highlighting.  As always, Ruyer is not critiquing the veracity or usefulness of specific scientific fact, but only the sophomoric philosophical interpretation imposed upon these facts (ie. Dawinism and Materialism).  So he accepts that both natural selection and genetics are real forces shaping organisms, while rejecting the pretense that these theories explain everything about the organism.  His two main points are then simply: 1) the failure of the "Democritean" ambition (NF, 177) of the theory of natural selection to eliminate any possible form of order other than accumulations of chance and 2) the failure of of genetics to uncover a one-to-one correspondence between phenotype and genotype (NF, 187).  Together these failures open up the space for us to consider other sources of order in the organic world that do not operate in the step-by-step causal manner these theories insist upon.  And this of course is Ruyer's deepest point -- there are sources of order outside space and time