I've complained about this section being too abstract. So maybe it helps to step back for a second and ask, as Delueze himself did in "H" as in History of Philosophy: what problem are we trying to tackle with this concept of Univocity?
One might wonder why the problem isn't stated clearly by a philosopher since it certainly exists in his work, and Deleuze maintains that it's because one can't do everything at once. The philosopher's task is already that of exposing the concepts that s/he's in the process of creating, so s/he can't expose the problems on top of that, or at least one can discover these problems only through the concepts being created. Deleuze insists: if you haven't found the problem to which a concept corresponds, everything stays abstract. If you've found the problem, everything becomes concrete.
So, let's recap. Concretely, our goal in this chapter is to come up with a concept of difference in itself that does not reduce difference to a comparison of pre-established identities. We're working to start metaphysics from Difference rather than Identity.
We saw how Aristotle's concept of difference as specific difference (between the sort of orthogonal forms of reality, if you will) was actually parasitic on the identity built into the generic concept these differences divide up. When we then asked, "what do all these differences have in common?", we discovered that they all have Being in common -- they all are -- but that they cannot have it in common in the same way they have the respective genres they divide in common, but only in an analogous fashion. So, all these specific differences are supposed to point to the same unique underlying identity, Being, in an analogous way. In a Christian context, this idea will get converted into the idea that Being = God and that we can't really know God directly, because all the terms we would use to describe him (good, wise, etc ...) are really just petty human terms that only apply to him by analogy, since, of course, he's so much more.
Univocity is meant to flip the table on Aristotle. What do things have in common, insofar as they exist? Their difference. Their only common identity is their difference. But they all express this common difference in the same way. That's important because it's what makes the differences in common. Without the univocal expression of difference, we would just have chaos, differences jutting everywhere, or some empty word play that called difference an identity. So the concept of univocal Being is meant to invert Aristotle's answer to the question of what everything that exists has in common. Instead of some single identical essence they all posses or point to, things actually have in common the process of pointing, and the way that this process, which itself is always the same, produces something different every time it happens.
You can see that the idea of Univocal Being shifts us to a different metaphysical level; we've moved from talking about the identity of a "thing" to whatever "identity" might mean for a process. It also puts Being and the different beings on the same metaphysical level. God isn't removed from beings through abstraction; instead he himself has to become a being, a process, of his own, since all things are said to exist in the same way. Saying that "the Identity of Being is Difference" may sound like just an abstract formula, or like rearranging terms in a tautological equation, and on some level it surely is. But remember, this is the sort of stuff they used to literally nail you to a cross for saying. It's a pretty complete dethroning of the typical image of God. He loses any substantial identity. He loses any static eternity (if there's anything outside time here, it would only be the process of differing). I mean, a God that develops? Who differs even from himself from one moment to the next? Nobody ever really killed anybody over a metaphysical disagreement. But it's easy to see how thinking about God like this might lead you to think about all sorts of things differently. After all, if even the deepest elements of existence change and develop, how stable can kings and nations and churches and monetary systems really be? And thinking any of those things can change has been a great way to get yourself killed for thousands of years running now. Make no mistake, it's a dangerous idea.
The problem of this chapter isn't really to construct a new idea of Being though, it's to find a new concept of Difference. I think the key way that Univocal Being is supposed to help us with that is revealed in this brief section (pg. 37-39), even though the main thesis is delivered as a sort of downpayment on what the concept will look like when we get this battle-star fully operational:
We must show not only how individuating difference differs in kind from specific difference, but primarily and above all how individuation properly precedes matter and form, species and parts, and every other element of the constituted individual. Univocity of being, in so far as it is immediately related to difference, demands that we show how individuating difference precedes generic, specific and even individual differences within being; how a prior field of individuation within being conditions at once the determination of species of forms, the determination of parts and their individual variations. If individuation does not take place either by form or by matter, neither qualitatively nor extensionally, this is not only because it differs in kind but because it is already presupposed by the forms, matters and extensive parts.
Univocal Being is meant to help us think through the way that individuating difference is prior to specific difference.
To understand this distinction, it helps to back up again to the problem Aristotle was trying to solve when he invented the concept of specific difference. As we saw, the goal was to develop a set of essential forms that could be recombined to cover all the specific examples of a particular generic concept. These specific differences that were the real and essential building blocks of the world -- the form of the flying squirrel, the form of the rhododendron. Of course, there could be many copies of each of these in actual fact. But that wasn't really essential. What was important was that we could classify everything under one or another combination of specific differences.
Except, now, wait. How are we to explain the fact that we see two particular squirrels? This scheme doesn't seem to do anything to explain why there are any particular number of squirrels, or really any actual squirrels at all. All we can do is recognize something that falls into the class, and say, "ah, there exists at least one squirrel instance". Why here? Why now? Why two of the little fuckers pissing on me while I try to light a campfire and drink whiskey out of a tin cup? The specific differences that constitute the forms of Aristotle's world just sort of drop out of the sky. They don't come and go or develop. They are already fully constituted but float free of the actual world, ready to be instantiated. When we ask how any of these particular squirrels came to be, we discover that there's not really an answer. The two squirrels just exist by analogy. They're two copies made from the same mold; they're "really", or "essentially", the same thing. Which is tantamount to saying that the actual squirrels are basically illusions. It occurs to me that Deleuze is here making Aristotle the one guilty of the accusations that are usually leveled at Plato's theory of the forms. Here is how he phrases this idea of the way Equivocal Being and Specific Difference inevitably conspire to produce the disconnect between the forms we use to represent the world, and the real world.
For analogy, as we have seen, rests essentially upon a certain complicity between generic and specific differences (despite their difference in kind): being cannot be supposed a common genus without destroying the reason for which it was supposed thus; that is, the possibility of being for specific differences.... It is not, therefore, surprising that from the standpoint of analogy, everything happens in the middle regions of genus and species in terms of mediation and generality - identity of the concept in general and analogy of the most general concepts. It is henceforth inevitable that analogy falls into an unresolvable difficulty: it must essentially relate being to particular existents, but at the same time it cannot say what constitutes their individuality. For it retains in the particular only that which conforms to the general (matter and form), and seeks the principle of individuation in this or that element of the fully constituted individuals.
By contrast, Univocal Being and Individuating Difference completely change this picture. Instead of seeing two copies of squirrel form and observing that their commonality is "analogous instantiation of squirrel form", we're going to say that the two squirrels have in common their difference. The individuating difference that actually produced two squirrels in this case. What these things have in common, insofar as they exist, is that they were articulated as individuals. They were constructed. And, in fact, they're never really done being articulated as individuals. They have in common this continuing process of articulation. They have only their difference-ing, their differentiating, their differing, in common. The process by which they become distinct from everything else.
By contrast, when we say that univocal being is related immediately and essentially to individuating factors, we certainly do not mean by the latter individuals constituted in experience, but that which acts in them as a transcendental principle: as a plastic, anarchic and nomadic principle, contemporaneous with the process of individuation, no less capable of dissolving and destroying individuals than of constituting them temporarily; intrinsic modalities of being, passing from one 'individual' to another, circulating and communicating underneath matters and forms. The individuating is not the simple individual.
This may make it sound like there's no real squirrel at all. As if the fixed, fully individuated squirrel we see is just some sort of illusion and all that's really there is some eddy in a very slowly flowing fluid. And ... well ... that's basically right. There is no eternal squirrel form in nature. But the illusion is not the actual squirrel, it's the idea of the pre-existing squirrel form. If there's an illusion here, it's our theory of squirreldom, not the reality of appearances (and even that can't be an illusion because, of course, all the ideas in our head are part of nature as well). This is the perspective of univocal being and individuating difference -- a world without fixed forms and identities. The concepts are meant to describe a world which is in continual flux, and where difference isn't something that happens between fixed forms that magically fell out of the sky, but is the act of differing that produces (or destroys) actual individuals.
This should clearly start to remind us of the discussion of embryogenesis. The world of univocal being is a world where all the forms are specified step-by-step, by the gradual breaking of symmetries in a chemical soup that differentiates a space as it develops. Individuating difference is differentiation, and univocal being is the egg. And because I happened upon this squirrel analogy, I think we can even get a glimpse of the way the same metaphor can be scaled up to address evolution. Since there's no fixed "squirrel form", any individual squirrel actually implies a whole population of squirrels, from which this particular squirrel has been articulated or individuated as distinct. There's never one wolf.
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