The Univocity of Being 2: Distribution and Hierarchy

Every time Deleuze wants to talk about an open space, he will reach for the image of the nomad.  Thinking about nomads is great because it forces us to counteract our now deeply seated prejudice that settling down to a sedentary life on a fixed piece of property as subjects of some state is the natural, inevitable, best and really only way to live.  Even at this early stage of his philosophy, he's clearly making a political and historical point.  Nobody seems to refer to nomads as "subjects".  Their movement is a way to be in the world that clearly locates them in space.  But the space isn't conceived as a closed state totality from the start, and they occupy it in a way that does not make the ground "theirs", that is, does not convert it into "property".  As James Scott confirmed, subject, property, sedentarism, and agriculture all go together, and the nomads are having none of it.

The main thrust of the nomad image in D&R is metaphysical though.  Deleuze is just using the nomad's version of political anarchy to help us see the way we have carried the same state sponsored concepts into the very depths of our metaphysics.  Just think about the loaded terms "subject" and "property".  Is it coincidence that we think of the building blocks of the universe as substantial subjects, each with various properties, each farming its little metaphysical plot of wheat?  So much for philosophy starting from some mythical land of self-evident a priori principles!

I wrote some before about how thinking about embryology can help us understand how an open space and a nomadic distribution works, and those comments are worth revisiting.  Looking at this again now in the context of univocity though, I might shift the emphasis onto a sentence that I didn't quote last time: 

It is an errant and even 'delirious' distribution, in which things are deployed across the entire extensity of a univocal and undistributed Being. It is not a matter of being which is distributed according to the requirements of representation, but of all things being divided up within being in the univocity of simple presence (the One - All).

One of the biggest, but also weirdest, aspects of Univocal Being is that it does not work the way you expect a totality to work.  If you think of it simply as a restatement of the idea that "everything is one", you miss the point -- univocal is not the same thing as unitary.  On the one hand, it's not a closed whole which would be divisible into parts.  In fact, he says univocal being is actually undistributed.  On the other hand, we can't think of it in terms of mystical union either, because this would imply that the distinctions we see are actually illusory, which is to say that they don't exist in the same way as the undistinguished whole.  This is the point of the reference to Parmenides on pg. 36.  There is not a "path of timeless truth" and a "path of changing appearance and opinion" -- the whole idea of univocity is that appearance exists in the same sense as reality so that there's only one way to exist.  So you end up with a non-whole not-dividing itself into parts, and have to make sense of the idea that somehow the parts are the whole.  The whole structure kinda reminds me of something out of one of Cantor's infinite sets.  Or the description of the ground in the first section of this chapter.

This idea that the parts are the whole, or at least equal to the whole occurs again in the discussion of hierarchy. 

There is a hierarchy which measures beings according to their limits, and according to their degree of proximity or distance from a principle.  But there is also a hierarchy which considers things and beings from the point of view of power: it is not a question of considering absolute degrees of power, but only of knowing whether a being eventually 'leaps over' or transcends its limits in going to the limit of what it can do, whatever its degree.

The words 'everything is equal' may therefore resound joyfully, on condition that they are said of that which is not equal in this equal, univocal Being: equal being is immediately present in everything, without mediation or intermediary, even though things reside unequally in this equal being. There, however, where they are borne by hubris, all things are in absolute proximity, and whether they are large or small, inferior or superior, none of them participates more or less in being, nor receives it by analogy. Univocity of being thus also signifies equality of being. Univocal Being is at one and the same time nomadic distribution and crowned anarchy

I'm still struggling to fully the understand the concept of power.  We're obviously talking about some sort of "absolute power" here, not a relative comparison of the power of two distinct forms.  It seems to me that the limit in question can really only be defined after the fact.  You only know what the limit was once you cross it and transform into something else, similar to the way a phase transition works as ice turns into water.  Univocal Being isn't a pre-given totality, and the forms that populate it can't be defined in advance either.   In fact, since Being is univocal, the whole and the parts (wrong terms of course) that come to populate it exist in exactly the same way.  Which I think means we have to conceive of both of them as continually expanding and transforming, though these transformations have to be conceived as themselves discontinuities that create "leaps" and "lines".  Does this mean that we can also only define Being by looking in the rearview mirror?  I'm tempted to link this to the concept of time, but it seems pretty tenuous.  And in the other direction, when we say that something "deploys all its power" are we saying that it's effectively "becoming equal to Being"?  This seems similar to the dissolving of identity one might might associate with buddhism, where the interconnection with the rest of the world has become so intense, that there's no definition of "you" left that doesn't include everything.  But again, I feel like I'm veering into something very abstract and of dubious value here.  

The Univocity of Being 1: Expressive Being

I've been working on this Univocity section (35-42) for a while now and a straightforward translation continues to elude me, so I think we'll just have to wade in at random and see how it goes.  The concept of Univocity is a tough one because of how abstract and metaphysical it sounds.  Beyond even that though, Univocity exhibits a particularly gnarly form of ontological feedback that makes it especially tough.  In other contexts, Deleuze will discuss this concept as the question of immanence (as opposed to transcendence) and describe it as "the very vertigo of philosophy".  To succinctly state the problem: the idea of immanence really bakes your noodle because if everything comes from within, then so does your theory that everything comes from within.  In other words, your thought about things is another thing; there's no way to represent the world without adding to it.  If that recursive structure sounds like it's going to be as navel-gazingly simple as thinking about thinking ad infinitum, try watching some video feedback.

Anyhow, so, I think the first thing to notice about the concept of Univocity, at least as presented in this context, is that it is not Equivocity.  It is explicitly opposed to construing the unity of Being as analogy, which was how Aristotle understood it in the last section.  

The unity of analogy rested on some capacity for third party judgement -- a subject who could judge that two concepts were linked by analogy even though they "really" had nothing to do with one another (in fact, had so little connection that at first we weren't even able to call them "different " but simply "other").  I think my understanding of this point would improve a lot if I read more Kant.  But let's pass over the idea of judgement for now, because anyways Deleuze is about to replace it with a different idea, that of the expressive proposition.  According to Deleuze an expressive proposition has three parts: 1) a thing or mode or designator that does some pointing, 2) something designated or pointed at by those pointers, which, in the reverse directions is expressing itself through the pointers, and 3) the sense or meaning that is expressed by the proposition as a whole.  It's not completely clear to me why Deleuze chooses to introduce propositions and expressions here, other than the connection to Spinoza, who we'll see also believed in Univocity and considered everything an expression of God.  Maybe it also has something to do with the way that this concept of expression forms a circle where the designators point at the designated while the designated expresses itself through the designators, which would seem to obviate the need for a third party judgement.  

Or maybe, to return to our starting point, the whole idea is just to set up the contrast with analogy.  With propositions, we get a model of how different things could designate something in common in the same way, as opposed to analogous but different ways.

What is important is that we can conceive of several formally distinct senses which none the less refer to being as if to a single designated entity, ontologically one. It is true that such a point of view is not sufficient to prevent us from considering these senses as analogues and this unity of being as an analogy. We must add that being, this common designated, in so far as it expresses itself, is said in turn in a single and same sense of all the numerically distinct designators and expressors. In the ontological proposition, not only is that which is designated ontologically the same for qualitatively distinct senses, but also the sense is ontologically the same for individuating modes, for numerically distinct designators or expressors: the ontological proposition involves a circulation of this kind (expression as a whole).

 There's something really odd going on in this quote.  We've become accustomed to thinking of Being as a sort of ontological substance.  So the idea that many designators point to the same substance probably isn't too surprising to us.  This would be another version of the idea that there is one underlying principle behind reality, one type of "stuff" from which it is built (whether you think this is mathematical forms or Absolute Spirit or electrons depends on what age you were born into).  Everything we see is really just a manifestation of this stuff, which is the only stuff that really, ontologically, IS.  Other stuff is just illusion and mere appearance, not real reality.  But in the quote above, we're told that "the sense is ontologically the same" for the appearances that indicated this underlying reality.  "Sense" doesn't seem like an ontological substance though.  It seems like the reality of "sense" would be in the process by which a designated expresses itself through designators that in turn designate it.  Sorry for the mouthful there, but I'm trying to draw the circle I mentioned before that I think he means by the circulation of "expression as a whole".  That a process can be said to be, that it could be an "ontological thing" (see how our everyday language is biased?), is already a pretty strange idea in a Western metaphysics that worships stasis and despises motion.  

But in fact this quote gets even weirder when you realize that this whole discussion started with the name of Duns Scotus.  Now, I don't know spit about medieval theology, but I have gathered that for Scotus, the major point of the univocity of Being was to counteract Aquinas' idea that we only know God through analogy.  When I say that my dog is good and that my neighbor is good I mean to use "good" in the same sense.  But, for Aquinas, when I then say that God is good, I don't mean that in the exact same sense that I meant with my dog or neighbor, I mean it in a merely analogous sense.  Scotus was explicitly denying this and claiming that if we're going to genuinely know God at all, the qualities we attribute to him have to be in the same sense as we attribute them to everything else.  

In effect, the essential in univocity is not that Being is said in a single and same sense, but that it is said, in a single and same sense, of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities. Being is the same for all these modalities, but these modalities are not the same. It is 'equal' for all, but they themselves are not equal. It is said of all in a single sense, but they themselves do not have the same sense.

If we translate this reference to Scotus to our current context, I think we end up with three distinct senses of "being" that the doctrine of Univocity is claiming are all the same.  First, there's the "Being of Being", as it were.  Surely Being is, right?  This is familiar ontological substance sense we employ when we say talk about the unity of what "really exists" (God, electrons, whatever).  Second, there's the "Being of beings".  Normally, we think that these mere appearances are just there to point at the underlying Being, and aren't "really real" durable substances in and of themselves.  Following Duns and Deleuze though, we're now claiming that beings are in the exact same sense that Being is.  I exist and my dog exists and god exists, and while we are all different, in so far as we exist, we all exist in the same way.  Appearance now becomes as real as reality.  Third, I think there's an implication here that the sense itself in which Being is said of everything is an ontological "thing" of its own -- as if there were also a "Being of sense", which could only be a sort of process of the circulation of expression where Being expresses itself through beings that designate it.  And of course, this final sense of Being is the same sense as the first two.  Or perhaps it's better to say that this final ontological sense is the most fundamental one that gives meaning to the first two, which would lead you to a formula like: Being is process, the process of the expression of Being.

To me though this is all getting a bit too academic.  I don't really love the term Being in the first place.  If you want to talk about God, talk about God.  Being seems a thin veneer.  And either way, they are both so abstract that it's hard to be sure you're actually saying anything and not just tossing word salad.  I think I learned something here, but the final formula seems a bit like something a geriatric Heidegger would be saying to his golf buddy.