The Present Passes

If there's one thing we know about the present, it's that is passes.  All things are impermanent.  The present doesn't pass by accident though; it must pass.  That's because we're talking about a lived present, an experienced duration, not some abstract slice of time with infinitesimal thickness that we would continually pierce as we move along a timeline.  In fact, another way of restating the active-passive distinction is to say that before we can be inside time in a psychological sense, before we can move from a remembered and represented past to a projected future, time has to be inside us, as the contractions of stuff we are made up of.

That we are in time looks like a commonplace, yet it is the highest paradox.  Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we are, in which we move, live, and change.

In Difference & Repetition the present must pass because it only takes form on the basis of its own repetition.  The present here is defined as the coming together of something that can be repeated, that is, something which will pass and come again.  Understanding this circularity unlocks some of the weirder passages in this first section, particularly the stuff about pleasure and fatigue.  For example, I puzzled a while over this one:

Whether pleasure is itself a contraction or a tension, or whether it is always tied to a process of relaxation, is not a well-formed question: elements of pleasure may be found in the active succession of relaxations and contractions produced by excitants, but it is a quite different question to ask why pleasure is not simply an element or a case within our psychic life, but rather a principle which exercises sovereign rule over the latter in every case. Pleasure is a principle in so far as it is the emotion of a fulfilling contemplation which contracts in itself cases of relaxation and contraction. There is a beatitude associated with passive synthesis, and we are all Narcissus in virtue of the pleasure (auto-satisfaction) we experience in contemplating, even though we contemplate things quite apart from ourselves.

The passage becomes clearer when you understand that pleasure as a principle is really the feeling of maintaining a self or repeating it from moment to moment.  Pleasure is the principle of the construction of our identity as something that can be repeated.  It is the self-fulfilling prophecy of the contraction of other things that leads to the perpetuation of us.  We are always pleased with our selves.  Narcissus falls in love with a beautiful face reflected in the water, a face which happens to be his own.  Pleasure is a principle and the passive synthesis a "beatitude" because it is the feeling of this self-love, really a self-creation, a self-contemplation.  We don't just happen to enjoy ourselves; we are self-enjoyment, self-satisfaction.

But this auto-satisfaction also contains the seed of its own failure.  It has to be constantly repeated.  It only comes together on the basis of the contraction of things outside itself, and all contraction is made on the basis of some habit of repetition.  A self is a difference, a creation, drawn from the habits of the world, and it needs those habits to repeat for that difference to repeat itself.  A self only contracts the "habit of being" through repetition, which is why we couldn't imagine a perpetual present that contracted an infinite succession of instants -- it would require the universe to be repeated in its entirety.  The fact that the series of excitations and relaxations that define us must be constantly repeated is what leads Deleuze to talk about fatigue.

The duration of an organism's present, or of its various presents, will vary according to the natural contractile range of its contemplative souls. In other words, fatigue is a real component of contemplation. It is correctly said that those who do nothing tire themselves most. Fatigue marks the point at which the soul can no longer contract what it contemplates, the moment at which contemplation and contraction come apart. We are made up of fatigues as much as of contemplations. That is why a phenomenon such as need can be understood in terms of 'lack', from the point of view of action and the active syntheses which it determines, but as an extreme 'satiety' or 'fatigue' from the point of view of the passive synthesis by which it is conditioned.

The active synthesis he's referring to here would be something like, "I need water".  It's active because it presumes a subject, an object, and an action connecting them, in this case chugging.  The object of the action can either be around or not -- right now you can lack water.  But beneath this action, remember, there is always a contemplation.  There's really no "I" to begin with without my habit of drinking.  That habit is part of my self-definition.  So while I can lack the action of drinking, "I" cannot stop contemplating water.  But this contemplation is nothing but the habit I've contracted of drinking.   If that habit is not repeated, it's as if "I" have tired of myself.  Fatigue is meant to be the opposite of the self-creation that brings together the present; it's like the self-undoing that causes the present to pass.  This isn't a negation of the present though, as if it became something other than itself (ie. as if it became the past).  The passing is part of the present.  I think it's important not to conceive of fatigue as negation.  It's more like a marker at the end of the present.  Fatigue makes contemplation have to start again.

More precisely, need marks the limits of the variable present. The present extends between two eruptions of need, and coincides with the duration of a contemplation. The repetition of need, and of everything which depends upon it, expresses the time which belongs to the synthesis of time, the intratemporal character of that synthesis. Repetition is essentially inscribed in need, since need rests upon an instance which essentially involves repetition ...

Every contraction is a presumption, a claim - that is to say, it gives rise to an expectation or a right in regard to that which it contracts, and comes undone once its object escapes.

I know this all sounds like such a self-referential mouthful.   I'm finding it particularly hard to describe how contemplation and contraction could come apart when it seemed that a contemplation was really defined as a contraction.  It's as if a repetition considers its own possibility of ending or something.  Perhaps an easier way to discuss -- the circular causality of contemplation, or the repetition of need, or the passing of the present, or the relation of contraction and fatigue, or whatever you'd like to call it -- is to compare a contemplation to a question.

Need expresses the openness of a question before it expresses the non-being or the absence of a response. To contemplate is to question. Is it not the peculiarity of questions to 'draw' a response? Questions present at once both the stubbornness or obstinacy and the lassitude or fatigue which correspond to need. 'What difference is there...?' This is the question the contemplative soul puts to repetition, and to which it draws a response from repetition. Contemplations are questions, while the contractions which occur in them and complete them are so many finite affirmations produced in the same way as presents are produced out of the perpetual present by means of the passive synthesis of time.

The question that we, as organisms, put to the world is how we can exist.  We are a difference in the world that makes a difference ... to us.  All of our needs have to be seen in light of this question.  To say that we need food and water and air is first to acknowledge their vital relevance to there being an us.  As finite creatures, there are millions of things we lack, but these factors pass by unnoticed because they aren't relevant to our existence, their repetition is not central to creating the relationship that we are.  At the same time, we can tire of a question, we can say that a factor no longer matters ('"what difference does it make?").  At the limit, maybe we can even tire of ourselves, not in the sense of self-negation, but simply because we are too tired to recreate ourselves every moment from scratch.  We lose our "habit of being".

To the first synthesis of time there corresponds a first question-problem complex as this appears in the living present (the urgency of life).

The way Deleuze defines a self may seem very strange.  But we always have to remember the world of pure difference, the world without identity that is the starting point for Deleuze.  The problem in such a world is always  "How do you make a self?"  There is no essence or identity which might define us internally.  So the only way to make your self is by passing outside yourself, by drawing a difference from the habit of repetition of something other than you, and then becoming that repetition that you are.  As loyal readers no doubt recall from pg. 41, the idea that to be is to be repeated was the whole point of the Eternal Return.

That identity not be first, that it exist as a principle but as a second principle, as a principle become ... Nietzsche meant nothing more than this by eternal return.  Eternal return cannot mean the return of the Identical because it presupposes a world (that of the will to power) in which all previous identities have been abolished and dissolved. Returning is being, but only the being of becoming. The eternal return does not bring back 'the same', but returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes. Returning is the becoming-identical of becoming itself. Returning is thus the only identity, but identity as a secondary power; the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to the different, or turns around the different.

Difference and Repetition and Difference and Repetition

We've talked about the active and passive synthesis.  We've talked about elements and cases.  These are both different ways of passing from one repetition to another through a difference that draws something new from the first repetition, and hence imagines a new thing that can itself be repeated in the second repetition.  Deleuze paints these two as orthogonal axes.

Between a repetition which never ceases to unravel itself and a repetition which is deployed and conserved for us in the space of representation there was difference, the for-itself of repetition, the imaginary. Difference inhabits repetition. On the one hand - lengthwise, as it were - difference allows us to pass from one order of repetition to another: from the instantaneous repetition which unravels itself to the actively represented repetition through the intermediary of passive synthesis. On the other hand - in depth, as it were - difference allows us to pass from one order of repetition to another and from one generality to another within the passive syntheses themselves. The nods of the chicken's head accompany its cardiac pulsations in an organic synthesis before they serve as pecks in the perceptual synthesis with grain. And already in the series of passive syntheses, the generality originally formed by the contraction of 'ticks' is redistributed in the form of particularities in the more complex repetition of 'tick-tocks', which are in turn contracted.  In every way, material or bare repetition, so-called repetition of the same, is like a skin which unravels, the external husk of a kernel of difference and more complicated internal repetitions. Difference lies between two repetitions.

The cover art for my edition, with its 2D matrix of "differences" and "repetitions", does a pretty good job of illustrating the concept.

Before moving on, I should probably restate each of these two axes one more time to make sure I understand them.  Loyal readers should feel free to skip this part if it seems repetitive.

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The first axis, lengthwise, moves us from repetition-in-itself -- which basically doesn't exist, or is some sort of vanishing limit in a world of pure atomic flux -- to repetition-for-us -- which is where we can perceive and count the repetitions of a thing like a chiming clock by using our memory and understanding.  In the middle, we pass through repetition-for-itself, which is the passive synthesis.  The middle point is the moment of creation of a subject and a thing simultaneously.  It draws a general difference from the world, which means that it constitutes itself as a subject that contracts disparate moments into a form, but it only does this by positing itself as some particular thing that can be repeated in turn.  

The constitution of repetition already implies three instances: the in-itself which causes it to disappear as it appears, leaving it unthinkable; the for-itself of the passive synthesis; and, grounded upon the latter, the reflected representation of a 'for-us' in the active syntheses.

It's tempting to rephrase the two ends of this first axis as process and product.  For example, wheat in general IS the form of a process of contracting earth and humidity, but any particular stalk of wheat is one product of this process that must be taken up as an element in further contractions.   That "must" is an important aspect of this story, because without it, we just have the abstract idea of wheat, without any actual wheat.  It's the key to the fractal circularity and self-reference of the concept Deleuze is trying to create.  It's the key to the "unraveling" he talked about above, where external difference is taken up in more complicated internal repetitions.  I think it's also the key to time and immanence, but I see this only dimly, so we'll have to come back to that.

The second axis, in depth, takes us from elements to cases.  Both elements and cases are types of passive synthesis; any given synthesis could be of either type and there's a natural tendency to move from one type to another.  Elements get contracted into cases, which themselves serve as new elements that repeat and are contracted in turn.  The movement along this second axis is again characterized by the way that the general difference drawn from repetition that forms an element (there exists an A, tick-tick) is converted into a particular difference (A1 and A2, or A and B, tick-tock) that defines a repeating case.  So we can go from one passive synthesis to another, ie. move in a dimension orthogonal to the one defined by the active-passive axis.

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In either case, the movement is from one repetition, through general difference, to another repetition.  Then that second repetition moves through particular difference to yet another repetition.  Etc ...  The circular structure is quite a mouthful to describe if you try to trace it out fully.  I think the idea is not just that the process continues indefinitely higher, constructing new larger units of repetition as it goes, but also that we can follow it inductively in the opposite direction, ever deeper, by realizing that there are smaller units underlying any unit we might have taken as given.  For what it's worth, here's my attempt to capture all this in a diagram.  Your mileage may vary.

There's clearly a curious structure here that I've tried to illustrate with my loopdeloops.  Difference lies between two repetitions.  But in one case it's a general difference, and in the other case it's a particular difference.  Which means that the particular difference is serving as a general difference between another set of repetitions.  As a result, we can reverse the formula. 

Difference lies between two repetitions. Is this not also to say, conversely, that repetition lies between two differences, that it allows us to pass from one order of difference to another? Gabriel Tarde described dialectical development in this manner: a process of repetition understood as the passage from a state of general differences to singular difference, from external differences to internal difference - in short, repetition as the differenciator of difference.

The footnote at the end of this quote is also worth reading.  I don't know a whole lot about Gabriel Tarde beyond this little pamphlet I read maybe 5 years ago.  But I think I still understand what Deleuze wants to get at by flipping our perspective on what is between what.

From this point of view, repetition is between two differences; it is what enables us to pass from one order of difference to another: from external to internal difference, from elementary difference to transcendent difference, from infinitesimal difference to personal and monadological difference. Repetition, therefore, is not the process by which difference is augmented or diminished, but the process by which it 'goes on differing' and 'takes itself as its end'.

The idea that difference-in-itself is something, or better yet, some process, that can keep on differing, that can go to this formless extreme, was the core idea of the first chapter.  We already know from Deleuze's history of univocity that the high point of thinking difference-in-itself is Nietsche's Eternal Return.    So the way for difference to be exactly what it is, the way for it to continue its endless process of differing, is through repetition.  Difference is another fractal concept.  Each difference is composed of a whole host of smaller differences ad infinitum, and the way we pass from one difference to another is through a repetition which differentiates difference.

In the very next paragraph Deleuze will start to talk about the fact that the present necessarily passes.  It is part of the definition of the present, of duration, as it is constructed by the passive synthesis.  To illustrate the point he asks us to imagine a perpetual present that would not pass.

We could no doubt conceive of a perpetual present, a present which is coextensive with time: it would be sufficient to consider contemplation applied to the infinite succession of instants. But such a present is not physically possible: the contraction implied in any contemplation always qualifies an order of repetition according to the elements or cases involved.

To synthesize a perpetual present we would need to consider all the instants of the universe together.  He says this isn't physically possible because contracting the entire history of the universe together as one thing would imply its repetition.  Contraction is actually defined in this recursive fashion, as something that must be repeated, as something that refers inherently to an outside, to another entity.  Can "all of time" be repeated though? And where would you have to sit down to dinner to see two copies of the universe?   And yet, conceiving of the entire universe as repeating again and again is exactly what the Eternal Return is asking us to do.  So while it may not be physically possible, I suspect at some point Deleuze will provide another way this synthesis that contracts the whole universe into one present can happen.

Active and Passive

In an earlier episode, I talked a bit about why Deleuze might call the passive synthesis, the habits of the world, the habits that we are, "contemplations".  The point was that these habits function like a sort of proto-mind that can create a repetition.  They pull an identity out of the flux by contracting two repeating elements into a case, which can then itself be repeated. They imagine (literally give image to) a form that did not exist before.  Since we normally think of imagination as a property of the mind, it makes some sense to call these contemplations.

However, Deleuze has a second reason for calling the passive synthesis a contemplation.  He wants to distinguish it from the active synthesis which can be built on top of it, and which clearly has to do with action.  For action, we need an actor, a subject, an already completed self that can count particular instances of a repetition and compare them in an "auxiliary" space.  In fact, when we think of the word habit, we usually think of habitual action patterns that tie a particular instance of a stimulus to some general response.  These work like input-output relations -- I ring the bell, Spot salivates.  The question we're asking now though is how stimulus and response got associated to being with. 

What is in question throughout this domain that we have had to extend to include the organic as such? Hume says precisely that it is a question of the problem of habit.  However, how are we to explain the fact that - in the case of Bergson's clock-strokes no less than with Hume's causal sequences - we feel ourselves in effect so close to the mystery of habit, yet recognise nothing of what is 'habitually' called habit? Perhaps the reason lies in the illusions of psychology, which made a fetish of activity. Its unreasonable fear of introspection allowed it to observe only that which moved. It asks how we acquire habits in acting, but the entire theory of learning risks being misdirected so long as the prior question is not posed - namely, whether it is through acting that we acquire habits ... or whether, on the contrary, it is through contemplating? Psychology regards it as established that the self cannot contemplate itself. This, however, is not the question.  The question is whether or not the self itself is a contemplation, whether it is not in itself a contemplation, and whether we can learn, form behaviour and form ourselves other than through contemplation.

Before we can carry out the action, there had to be some process by which the input-output machine got wired up to produce that response if given that stimulus.  That linking, that learning, that adapting, is a process of thinking, of contemplating, that occurs before we can act.  We imagine connections because we find repetitions in the world that are salient to us, which is to say ones that allow us to keep repeating.  Humans are not the only ones doing this sort of thinking; it is an organic an evolutionary thinking.  You might object that many of our habitual actions rise to the level of instincts that were selected for by evolution.  But instinct is just another name for habit operating at a different time scale.  Instincts too had to get programmed by contracting the elements of an environment into an action ... relevant to repeating an organism.  That contraction is a contemplation because it occurs before or beneath the action and renders it possible.  In fact, these contemplations create the space of possible actions as they (the contemplations) occur. 

It's important to understand that Deleuze is not saying that the self contemplates an action before acting the way I (briefly) contemplate having my third martini before drinking it.  Instead the self IS a contemplation.  Contemplation is like the creation of a possibility, the creation of a thing in a world without form, a creation which necessarily proceeds through repetition.  It's not simply the consideration of one of several possibilities that were already available.  I'm going to come back to this creative aspect of contemplation in another post because it's crucial to understand the way that contemplation is self-actualizing, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

Right now though, we're just focused on how the level of passive contemplation can get overlooked if we focus exclusively on activity.

Action is constituted, in the order of generality and in the field of variables which correspond to it, only by the contraction of elements of repetition. This contraction, however, takes place not in the action itself, but in a contemplative self which doubles the agent. Moreover, in order to integrate actions within a more complex action, the primary actions must in turn play the role of elements of repetition within a 'case', but always in relation to a contemplative soul adjacent to the subject of the compound action. Underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject. We speak of our 'self' only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who says 'me'. These contemplative souls must be assigned even to the rat in the labyrinth and to each muscle of the rat. Given that contemplation never appears at any moment during the action - since it is always hidden, and since it 'does' nothing (even though something is done through it, something completely novel) - it is easy to forget it and to interpret the entire process of excitation and reaction without any reference to repetition - the more so since this reference appears only in the relation in which both excitations and reactions stand to the contemplative souls.

It's easy to interpret Pavlov's dog by simply saying that the excitation of the bell causes the re-action of salivation.  But that neglects the fact that somewhere along the way Spot had to contemplate -- that is to contract -- the ever varying sensation of sound with the instinctual reaction to food.  In this case, it's easy to see that if these two are two far apart in time, or if one of the elements is simply too irrelevant to the dog (aka not food), this contraction won't occur.  The contemplation at work here is the linking of elements that perpetuate the case called Spot.  She thinks a lot for a dog.

Elements and Cases

Early in this second chapter, Deleuze gives two examples of other philosophers who have touched on the problem of repetition.

We've already covered his reference to Hume in exhaustive detail.  We saw that his account of why we believe in causality involved a two step process.  Step one: nature presents to us A and B in constant conjunction and our imagination passively synthesizes them as related events, two ends of a chain.  These are what I have been calling the habits of nature (as they pertain to our organism).  Deleuze will also term these contractions, durations, contemplations, or lived presents.  They are what happens "in general", and below the level of conscious representation.  Step two: our mind then begins to habitually move from the idea of A or the appearance of any particular A to the idea of B.  This mental habit is actually what we mean by our feeling of causality.  This is an active synthesis performed by a full blown human mind.

We haven't talked about his reference to Bergson, but the point is largely the same; we want to highlight the way the active synthesis our mind performs when comparing distinct copies of a thing is based on a prior passive synthesis, made by our imaginative subconscious, that these are in fact qualitatively "the same" thing.  Bergson is actually a pretty clear writer though, so it's worth quoting the source in full.

Whilst I am writing these lines, the hour strikes on a neighbouring clock, but my inattentive ear does not perceive it until several strokes have made themselves heard. Hence I have not counted them; and yet I only have to turn my attention backwards to count up the four strokes which have already sounded and add them to those which I hear. If, then, I question myself carefully on what has just taken place, I perceive that the first four sounds had struck my ear and even affected my consciousness, but that the sensations produced by each one of them, instead of being set side by side, had melted into one another in such a way as to give the whole a peculiar quality, to make a kind of musical phrase out of it. In order, then, to estimate retrospectively the number of strokes sounded, I tried to reconstruct this phrase in thought : my imagination made one stroke, then two, then three, and as long as it did not reach the exact number four, my feeling, when consulted, answered that the total effect was qualitatively different. It had thus ascertained in its own way the succession of four strokes, but quite otherwise than by a process of addition, and without bringing in the image of a juxtaposition of distinct terms. In a word, the number of strokes was perceived as a quality and not as a quantity: it is thus that duration is presented to immediate consciousness, and it retains this form so long as it does not give place to a symbolical representation derived from extensity.

The point of both examples is to describe two different levels of repetition -- active and passive.  The rest of this first part of the chapter turns out to be entirely about the passive synthesis.  Presumably we'll come back to the active one at some later point.  

But why give two examples, if they illustrate the same point?  Deleuze does this to illustrate a different type distinction we can make within the concept of repetition, namely the distinction between the repetition of elements and the repetition of cases.  The cases-elements distinction is orthogonal, as it were, to the active-passive distinction.  We can get a handle on it if we plow through this paragraph, which totally baffled me for a while.

No doubt Bergson's example is not the same as Hume's. One refers to a closed repetition, the other to an open one. Moreover, one refers to a repetition of elements of the type A A A A ... (tick, tick, tick, tick ...), the other to a repetition of cases such as AB AB AB A ... (tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick ...). The principal distinction between these two forms rests upon the fact that in the second case difference not only appears in the contraction of the elements in general but also occurs in each particular case, between two elements which are both determined and joined together by a relation of opposition. The function of opposition here is to impose a limit on the elementary repetition, to enclose it upon the simplest group, to reduce it to a minimum of two (tock being the inverse of tick). Difference therefore appears to abandon its first figure of generality and to be distributed in the repeating particular, but in such a way as to give rise to new living generalities. Repetition finds itself enclosed in the 'case', reduced to the pair, while a new infinity opens up in the form of the repetition of the cases themselves. It would be wrong, therefore, to believe that every repetition of cases is open by nature, while every repetition of elements is closed. The repetition of cases is open only by virtue of the closure of a binary opposition between elements. Conversely, the repetition of elements is closed only by virtue of a reference to structures of cases in which as a whole it plays itself the role of one of the two opposed elements: not only is four a generality in relation to four strokes, but 'four o'clock' enters into a duality with the preceding or the following half-hour, or even, on the horizon of the perceptual universe, with the corresponding four o'clock in the morning or afternoon. In the case of passive synthesis, the two forms of repetition always refer back to one another: repetition of cases presupposes that of elements, but that of elements necessarily extends into that of cases (whence the natural tendency of passive synthesis to experience tick-tick as tick-tock).

Let's get that translated into Plain English.  It's a bit of a technical point, but it actually helps to illuminate a bunch of other opaque bits in this section.  

Basically we have two types of repetition:

1 = Bergson = repetition of elements = closed repetition = general form of difference = A, A, A, A, ... = {A} 

2 = Hume = repetition of cases = open repetition = particular form of difference = AB, AB, AB, A ... = {AB}

The question is how these two are related.  The answer is that they are constantly converting into one another.  How so?  

We have to start by thinking about the initial problem of this chapter -- don't we paradoxically have to have some difference to be able to talk about a repetition?  At first we imagined that this difference was created in the mind of the person doing the recognizing of the repetition.  Later we discovered a passive synthesis that operated below the level of the mind, but nevertheless still drew a general sort of difference from the repetition.  

Repetition 1 -- of elements -- illustrates this synthesis pretty well because it shows us a difference we might call "the general fact that there is A".  Starting from the assumption of an atomized world, all those individual instances of A weren't exactly the same.  Technically, there is no A.  But they were good enough for government work, as my father used to put it, and somehow, for some purpose, they were contracted into the existence of a thing we call A.  The general difference drawn from the world's habit of repeating something like A is that there is an A.  In other words, the difference drawn is the existence, really the very creation, of A.  This sounds a bit circular because it is.  Hold off on that part though.

Repetition 2 -- of cases -- obviously could illustrate the same point because it shows us the general fact that there exists the connection AB.  But there's a more specific form of difference at work in this type of repetition because there's a difference within each of the elements, the difference between A and B.  At first this seems to make it a totally different case from repetition 1.  But Deleuze is going to show us how to get from 1 to 2 and back again.

What do you need to have to have an A?  How can the difference "there exists A" be created in the world?   Well, we need there to be at least one repetition of A.  That is, we need to have seen what an A is at least twice.  For there to be "an" A, there need to be at least two instances A1 and A2.  

[This is one of the odd aspects of Deleuze's concept of repetition.  "A" single multiplicity requires at least 2 heterogenous elements.  On a side side note, it occurs to me that this may be the more interesting approach to the concept of non-duality as you sometimes hear it in Buddhism -- it obviously means "not two"; but if they wanted to say "one", then why not just say that instead?  Seems like non-dual means not-two, but also not-one either.]

Now we've re-conceived the general fact that there is such a thing as an A as the particular difference that holds together A1 and A2.  We've reduced the repetition of A to its minimum, which turns out to be that there was an A1 followed by an A2.  If you just rename these A and B, you can see how we went from the closed repetition of the element A to the open repetition of cases where we assert that all A will be followed by B.  If you think back to Bergson's clock and think about the ticking rather than the chiming, you'll notice that for some odd perceptual reason we often reduce a long string of identical instances to an alternation of two types.  I'm sitting here listening to my gutter drip as I type, and there's a duck-rabbit sort of gestalt flip that takes me from hearing drip-drip-drip-drip to hearing drip-drop-drip-drop.  

We can also go back the opposite way if we think about how the two ends of the chain are held together as one relation.  After all, the story of repetition 2 is that the case AB is repeated as if it were an element in its own right.  Earlier when I wrote that the existence of A required A1 and A2 you may have been tempted to object that you could perfectly well think of only one copy of a thing, or, in fact, you could even conceive of no copies of a thing.  All you have to do is think about the idea of that thing, and think that the one instance you saw is unique.  Actually though, this reasoning involves a hidden second copy of A.  It requires the idea of A, the set of all A, {A}.  A repetition of elements is closed, it keeps repeating the form of element A, only by virtue of this idea {A} that serves as a second element that differs from any particular A.   Which is to say that {A} functions as B in an open repetition of the case called: "a particular A will be followed by the idea of A" -- ie. AB = A{A}.  So you might define the repetition of the element A to be the same thing as the repetition of the case A{A}.

When Bergson says something as simple as "the clock struck four" there are actually a number of ideas at work that serve to "make" the general difference "four o'clock". First, you need the idea of four, as a qualitative description of a characteristic of the "musical phrase" of the chiming.  That idea has to distinguish it from 3 or 5 strokes, or even from hearing a music that contains no individual strokes at all.  You also need the idea of four o'clock as a sort of meaningful event to begin with.  Why else would you have made note of the fact that these sounds should be grouped together and distinguished from the rest of the commotion around you?  The general identity of the repeated element four o'clock depends upon its particular place in a repeating case that we call "telling time".  The repetition of this overall context, this series of four o'clocks, is necessary for us to distinguish it as an entity and differentiate it from 3:00 and 5:00.  Finally, you need to have an idea of this particular 4:00 that distinguishes the 4AM element from the 4PM, which is the largest difference of elements before the case itself would repeat. 

To summarize in less technical terms: for an element to be repeated, it has to be embedded in a meaningful context or case that recognizes it as a repetition.  But for the context to be defined enough to function as the means of identifying a repetitive element, it itself needs to be repeated as an element.  The two convert back and forth into one another and the cycle never ends, very much along the lines we saw earlier with the twin repetitions of organism and environment.

Difference therefore appears to abandon its first figure of generality and to be distributed in the repeating particular, but in such a way as to give rise to new living generalities. 

... the generality originally formed by the contraction of 'ticks' is redistributed in the form of particularities in the more complex repetition of 'tick-tocks', which are in turn contracted.'

More is More

After those long technical discussions of Hume and Whitehead, I'm feeling the need for a Plain English interlude.  I've been mulling this one for at least a month or two now, ever since I read Todd May's Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (thanks to CF for ferreting this out of the rhizomatic spread of secondary literature on Deleuze) right after zooming through Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything.  While I read the latter too quickly to really understand all the subtleties of OOO, and it is anyhow only intended as an introduction, I think I got the basic gist of his "theory of everything".   

I would summarize my understanding of it as follows: the world is made up of objects.  Consider your mind blown.  But seriously, the idea is actually not too far from what we were talking about with Whitehead -- all objects are real.  Physical objects like tables and scientific objects like electrons and mental objects like Justice and fictional objects like Sherlock Holmes are all real.  Reality, in turn, is nothing but the collection of all objects, all of which are equally real.  There aren't any special objects whose distinction in kind give them higher status in some hierarchy.  That is, OOO has a flat ontology.  In particular, for Harman, subjects are objects too.  Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that he thinks that objects are subjects too; he's not claiming that every object is conscious, but he does say that every object has a sort of real interior self, just by virtue of existing.  All real objects have an "inwardness".  

So, how do we interact with and know about the real objects that make up the world?  Or, since we ourselves are also objects(/subjects) in this theory, how do any two objects interact with one another?  Basically, they don't.  Real objects, defined as the sort of inner being or essence of objects, never touch.  When we interact with an object, we can never interact with the real object in itself.  We merely encounter a sensual representation of the object with certain sensual qualities.  "The table", as we normally use the term, is a sensual object that holds together all the sensual qualities like straight legs and coffee rings that we experience in everyday life.  But we never directly interact with the real table, the essence of what the table really is, in-and-for-itself.  No matter how closely we look, its inwardness withdraws from us.  The best we can do, according to Harman, is to use metaphors and art to trick ourselves into thinking a bit about how the inwardness of the table must be something sorta like the inwardness of our own experience of ourselves.  Through art, we substitute the direct experience of our own inwardness in for the withdrawn essence of the object.   All of our everyday experience of the table, whether we are using it to change lightbulbs, or carefully admiring the way its slight wobble has just resulted in another coffee ring, is just experience of the sensual table and its sensual qualities.  We only start to approach the real table when we break with our everyday experience of using or examining the table and try to have an aesthetic experience of the table.  Even through the method of aesthetics though, we can never actually reach a direct experience of the real table.  Inspired, I guess, by that late Heidegger's idea that Being "withdraws" at the same time that it "discloses a world", Harman thinks that the world of real essences exists, but continually runs away from us.  It is impossible to experience it other than through our abstractions.  

It's an interesting theory, approachably presented, and the book is pretty short.  But I spent the whole time feeling like this concept of withdrawal was needlessly vague and entailed an almost mystical belief that the real world was out there ... somewhere, just beyond our grasp.  The initial trajectory of the theory makes sense to me.  I like the idea of a flat ontology that doesn't put the human subject in some sort of privileged position.  Once we dethrone the mind and start asking how it got built, we're going to find it very hard to justify why it alone, of all the objects in all the universe, is somehow uniquely capable of knowing the true nature of reality.  Every experience for a finite being is partial, essentially incomplete.  No object knows the true nature of reality.  All objects experience all other objects through the abstractions of what part is relevant for them.  I buy this so far.

But why would you attribute this fact to some hypothetically final real world fleeing off into the distance?  Why would it do this?  Wouldn't it make more sense to say that the process is never complete simply because it creates more world as it goes?  What if there's no essential real object there to withdraw, but there is more object created every time we interact with it in a new way?  If we just keep looking, we'll see more.  Naturally, this creation of more stuff through interaction doesn't require humans.  But couldn't we just say that any time two objects interact, they create more of themselves, extend themselves, get deeper, maybe "realer"?  Wouldn't this be a much clearer explanation of the mechanism of "withdrawal" that would also obviate the need for postulating any finished object doing the withdrawing?  Why would we want to believe in a static world that dangles in front of us like a carrot when we could believe in a dynamic world that we can expand into.  I would definitely prefer to be inside an indefinitely expanding ball to being stuck outside a closed one I can never reach or penetrate.  Being doesn't withdraw -- but there is always more Being.

The idea that there is always more is rightly central to Todd May's introduction to Deleuze.  I think this is the most important thing that Deleuze teaches.   There is always MORE than you think.  Don't settle for explanations that give you less, that put limits on what can be or what can be thought, that turn your experience into illusion.  Be an empiricist.  An open ended pluralist.  Here is how Todd May phrases it.

     There is one world, one substance, a single being.  It is not governed or judged by a world or Being outside it.  There is no transcendence. "The idea of another world, of a supersensible world in all its forms (God, essence, the good, truth), the idea of values superior to life, is not one example among many but the constitutive element of all fiction." Being is not something other than the world we live in.  It is that world.

     This does not mean that there is only what is present to us.  There is more than meets the eye.  Being folds itself, unfolds itself, refolds itself into the specific forms that constitute the world of our experience.  Being, or substance, inheres in what presents itself to us, but is always more than any presentation.  To understand this we must think temporally rather than spatially.  Spatial thinking can give us only the phenomenology of our world, the structure of appearances. Temporal thinking can penetrate that world to show us what those appearances might be made of, and how they might become different.

Perhaps I've sold it short, but my impression of OOO is that it believes the real world is out there, existing at some determinate location, finished.  Our experience of it may change over time, but that's an epistemological, not an ontological question.  For Deleuze, by contrast, the world is growing, or at least unfolding.  It becomes different.  It doesn't just move.  It changes.  May sums it up pretty well in his final paragraph.

      Deleuze's ontology is not a resting place; it is not a zone of comfort; it is not an answer that allows us to abandon our seeking.  It is the opposite.  An ontology of difference is a challenge.  To recognize that there is more than we have been taught, that what is presented to us is only the beginning of what there is, puts before us the greater task of our living.  We have not finished with living; we are never finished with living.  However we live, there is always more.  We do not know of what a body is capable, nor how it can live.  The alternatives of contentment (I have arrived) and hopelessness (There is nowhere to go) are two sides of the same misguided thought: that what is presented to us is what there is. 

       There is more, always more.

 

I think the deep reality of this more, the actuality of all these infinite possibilities, is the cornerstone of Deleuze's philosophy, the thing he never wanted us to lose sight of.  Interestingly enough, Stengers comments on a very similar Plain English core to Whitehead's philosophy.

Thus, on December 15, 1939, when he was quietly discussing the Bible with Lucien Price, Whitehead
[ ...] I suddenly [ ...] stood and spoke, with passionate intensity, "Here we are, with our finite beings and physical senses in the presence of a universe whose possibilities are infinite, and even though we may not apprehend them, those infinite possibilities are actualities" (DANW, 111).

 

... there is a risk of losing the movement and neglecting what philosophers seek to bring to life, thanks to their concepts, and especially what they are trying not to lose, what they are afraid to lose, that which, as the case may be, they cry out. Whitehead will not ask, will never ask of experience that it admit its finitude. Any resemblance between one Whiteheadian statement and another coming from elsewhere will be declared null and void if the latter orients thought, in one way or another, toward a mode of judgment that turns the infinite possibilities that haunt our experience into a temptation that must be resisted.

What are these possibilities which are actualities if not our thoughts?  And not just ours, but all the thoughts of all the things.  Thinking makes more reality.  It is more reality.

Humility on Hume

Well, I'm just learning all sorts of things lately.  A while back I wrote down some thoughts about Transcendental Empiricism.  I mentioned in passing that this was to be distinguished from the simple empiricism of David Hume.  Attributing this view to Hume was based on probably a handful of paragraphs I read in college.  It's the kind of cartoon version of Hume you may have encountered where he says something like, "Correlation is not causation.  All we can ever know is that every time A happens then B seems to happen, but we can't ever know that A caused B".  This seems like a simplistically empirical idea because it implies some subject who comes fully furnished with a concept of what causality would be.  The more complex and interesting (and still empirical) question would be to ask how we got this idea of causality to begin with.  Simple empiricism treats the subject as if it had many elaborate and fully formed theories of what the world might well be like, but happened to have its eyes closed.  Maybe the world is filled with red balloons, or exclusively sausages, or very small rocks that float.  All of these are a priori equally possible.  And then the subject opens its eyes, takes in the data, and voilá, turns out the answer was #9 on the list: bottlecaps.  This sort of empiricism starts with too many non-empirical assumptions.  It's only empirical about the very last point of reality; it just won't let you deduce absolutely everything from first principles.  But it lets you get 99% of the way there with your eyes closed.

Turns out Hume wasn't such a simple empiricist after all.  Now that we've actually encountered him for the first time in D&R, I've put a little time into reading more about what he actually said.  I still haven't really read any Hume, mind you, but I have looked at this useful page from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, as well as the essay on Hume included in Pure Immanence.  His discussion of the idea of causality, in particular, seems to have been much more subtle than I realized.  It connects to both Darwinism and the version of atomism we saw in Whitehead.  It can help us understand the importance of habit in this first section of Chapter 2.  And it's just plain interesting in its own right.  Let me start the discussion with a summary of some of the key points in that Stanford entry.

Hume thinks perception can be divided into two categories, impressions and ideas.  Impressions include the original and primary sense data we get from our eyes, etc ... as well as the secondary or reflective feelings and desires we experience all day long.   Ideas seems to be basically the less immediate re-presentations of the original impressions; things like the idea of an object, memories, daydream images, etc ...

He uses perception to designate any mental content whatsoever, and divides perceptions into two categories, impressions and ideas.

 

Impressions include sensations as well as desires, passions, and emotions. Ideas are "the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning" (T 1.1.1.1/1). He thinks everyone will recognize his distinction, since everyone is aware of the difference between feeling and thinking. It is the difference between feeling the pain of your present sunburn and recalling last year's sunburn.

 

Hume distinguishes two kinds of impressions: impressions of sensation, or original impressions, and impressions of reflection, or secondary impressions. Impressions of sensation include the feelings we get from our five senses as well as pains and pleasures, all of which arise in us "originally, from unknown causes" (T 1.1.2.1/7). He calls them original because trying to determine their ultimate causes would take us beyond anything we can experience. Any intelligible investigation must stop with them.

 

Impressions of reflection include desires, emotions, passions, and sentiments. They are essentially reactions or responses to ideas, which is why he calls them secondary. Your memories of last year's sunburn are ideas, copies of the original impressions you had when the sunburn occurred. Recalling those ideas causes you to fear that you'll get another sunburn this year, to hope that you won't, and to want to take proper precautions to avoid overexposure to the sun.

At first, the contrast of the terms "impressions" and "ideas" might lead you to think along the lines of a simple empiricism where the impressions are just the input of sense data and the ideas are somehow the program manipulating that data and relating the impressions -- as if the mind operated on the data it gets from the world, thereby linking input data to output action.  But that's not what's going on here.  In Hume's classification, both types of impressions, along with our ideas, are just so much data of experience.  Much like we saw with Whitehead, the empirical givens of our perception are not limited to simple sensory impressions like "flashing red blob and high-pitched noise", but include ideas like "siren", and reflective impressions or sentiments like, "oh shit, let's eat those before the cop pulls up".  All of these things are the atoms of our experience.  The ideas aren't ways of connecting sense impression atoms.  In fact, Hume will go on to assert that each simple idea is correlated to a simple impression, as if the two flickered past in parallel processions, rather than ideas intervening between sensations to connect them.

In the Treatise, Hume qualifies his claim that our ideas are copies of our impressions, making clear that it applies only to the relation between simple ideas and simple impressions. He offers this "general proposition", usually called the Copy Principle, as his "first principle … in the science of human nature":

 

All our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv'd from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent. (T 1.1.1.7/4)

Deleuze points out in his essay on Hume that the fears and wants and hopes that constitute our secondary impressions are likewise not programs for connecting primary sense datums.  They are impressions of movement or the relationship between other ideas and impressions, but they don't themselves constitute that link.  We are moved from the impression of a hot day to the idea of the pain of last summer's sunburn to the impression of fear of pulling that boneheaded move again.  But these just parade by us as so many distinct perceptions.  

So how does Hume think ideas or impressions get linked up then?  Through force of habit.  This is where his deep empiricism lies.  Neither impressions nor ideas have any inherent link between them.  They are the atomic units of perception that get linked only through our actual experience in the world.  Deleuze calls this Hume's assertion that "relations are external to their terms", regardless of whether the relations are between ideas or between impressions.

Hume's originality -- or one of Hume's originalities -- comes from the force with which he asserts that relations are external to their terms.  We can understand such a thesis only in contrast to the entire endeavour of philosophy as rationalism and its attempt to reduce the paradox of relations: either by finding a way of making relations internal to their own terms or by finding a deeper and more comprehensive term to which the relation would itself be internal.  "Peter is smaller than Paul": How can we make of this relation something internal to Peter, or to Paul, or to their concept, or to the whole they form, or to the Idea in which they participate?  How can we overcome the irreducible exteriority of relations?  Empiricism has always fought for the exteriority of relations.  But in a certain way, its position on this remained obscured by the problem of the origin of knowledge or of ideas, according to which everything finds its origin in the sensible and in the operations of a mind upon the sensible

Simple empiricism says that we have to base our knowledge of the world on sense data instead of just pure rational speculation.  But it assumes that there is a mind around with a particular a priori structure that naturally relates one bit of sense data to another.  In other words, simple empiricism says that relations are exterior to the sense data terms, but still interior to a mind.  It postulates a mind that has a built in program of ideas (like, say, the idea of causality or the idea of similarity) that relate sense data as variables inside some equation.  Hume is going to go a step further and question how the mind got this ability to relate terms.  How and why do we move from one impression to another?  But also, how and why do we move from one idea to another?

Hume effects an inversion that would take empiricism to a higher power: if ideas contain nothing other and nothing more than what is contained in sensory impressions, it is precisely because relations are external and heterogenous to their terms -- impressions or ideas.  Thus the difference isn't between ideas and impressions but between two sorts of impressions or ideas: impressions or ideas of terms, and impressions or ideas of relations.  The real empiricist world is thereby laid out for the first time to the fullest: it is a world of exteriority, a world in which thought itself exists in a fundamental relationship with the Outside, a world in which terms are veritable atoms and relations are veritable external passages; a world in which the conjunction "and" dethrones the interiority of the verb "is"; a harlequin world of multicolored patterns and non-totalizable fragments where communication takes place through external relations.  Hume's thought is built up in a double way: through the atomism that shows how ideas or sensory impression refer to punctual minima producing time and space; and through the associationism that shows how relations are established between these terms, always external to them, and dependent on other principles.  

I almost want to rephrase Hume's categories here to say that ideas are really just a kind of impression; ideas are impressions too.  This seems to me to draw out the deeper empiricism we're talking about because it emphasizes that fact that the ideas in our mind have no deep and special place in the universe of "things" we experience.  In particular, they are not some sort of privileged force for linking and organizing those things, they are just more things themselves.  Empiricism means accepting that everything we are aware of in perception is real, and not disqualifying some things as merely derived from others by an equation that transforms an identity from one side to the other.  Elsewhere Deleuze says that, "I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist".  This is why empiricism insists on the exteriority of relations, to preserve the independent reality of each of the things we experience, to not reduce one thing to another.  Which conversely means that every relation we experience as an idea or impression is like a new creation -- "is" gets transformed into "and".  This idea and then that idea is actually a new idea.  Later this conjunction may be repeated, we may find habits and patterns in experience, but for an empiricist, these forms are more like a reappearance, a new production of the "same".  I think that's the message of this comment on Samuel Butler:

... 'for even the corn in the fields grows upon a superstitious basis as to its own existence, and only turns the earth and moisture into wheat through the conceit of its own ability to do so, without which faith it were powerless ...'. Only an empiricist can happily risk such formulae.

There's no form of wheat that pre-exists the conjunction of elements that constitute it.  Which means that the wheat simultaneously comes from "Outside" those elements and simultaneously creates itself as a thing -- it's hard to non-paradoxically describe this kind of circular self-positing conjunction or relation.

Naturally, we want to know more about this "Outside" and about how relations are created between atoms that are not internal to the atoms, nor to some larger form or concept that pre-exists their combination.  Hume has an answer to this question; there are principles of association that operate like gravity to draw ideas together.

Although we are capable of separating and combining our simple ideas as we please, there is, nevertheless, a regular order to our thoughts. If ideas occurred to us completely randomly, so that all our thoughts were "loose and unconnected", we wouldn't be able to think coherently (T 1.1.4.1/10).

 

This suggests that there is a secret tie or union among particular ideas, which causes the mind to conjoin them more frequently, and makes the one, upon its appearance, introduce the other. (Abstract 35)

 

Hume explains this "tie or union" in terms of the mind's natural ability to associate certain ideas. Association is not "an inseparable connexion", but rather "a gentle force, which commonly prevails", by means of which one idea naturally introduces another (T 1.1.4.1/10).

 

Hume identifies three principles of association: resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and causation. 

 

Like gravitational attraction, the associative principles are original, and so can't be explained further. Although the associative principles' "effects are everywhere conspicuous" their causes "are mostly unknown, and must be resolv'd into original qualities of human nature, which I pretend not to explain". Accordingly, we should curb any "intemperate desire" to account further for them, for doing so would take us illegitimately beyond the bounds of experience (T 1.1.4.6/12–13).

 

Hume doesn't try to explain why we associate ideas as we do. He is interested only in establishing that, as a matter of fact, we do associate ideas in these ways.

Atomic ideas get associated because they exhibit resemblance, or continuity, or causation.  These principles together constitute the nature of the human mind.  This explanation sounds okay at first, but feels more disappointing the more you think about it.  We move from one idea to another that resembles it, from a picture to the person it looks like.  But wait, how did the mind decide that these two ideas resembled one another enough to permit a connection?  It seems like we're begging the question.  We're still not explaining the cause of the attraction between the ideas, just the fact that they are attracted.  Deleuze points out that this disappointment reveals our misunderstanding of Hume's empiricism.

What is a relation?  It is what makes us pass from a given impression or ideas to the idea of something that is not presently given.  For example, I think of something "similar" ... When I see a picture of Peter, I think of Peter, who isn't there.  One would look in vain in the given term for the reason for this passage.  The relation is itself the effect of the so-called principles of association, contiguity, resemblance, and causality, all of which constitute, precisely, a human nature.  Human nature means that what is universal or constant in the human mind is never one idea or another as a term but only the ways of passing from one particular idea to another.  Hume, in this sense, will devote himself to the concerted destruction of the three great terminal ideas of metaphysics: the Self, the World, and God.  And yet at first Hume's thesis seems disappointing: what is the advantage of explaining relations by principles of human nature, which are principles of association that seem just another way of designating relations?  But this disappointment derives from a misunderstanding of the problem, for the problem is not of causes, but of the way relations function as effects of those causes and the practical conditions of this functioning.

The mind is actually a passive sort of machine in Hume's theory.  It's not actively associating two ideas.  It's as if some other force outside the mind caused the attraction of those ideas, and the mind merely follows that link.  The relations our mind makes between things are not the cause of their association, but rather that effect of the way our mind is caused to work.  If we let the mind be the cause of the principles of association, if we allow that it invents these connections itself, then we end up explaining the relations we experience by saying that we experience relations.  Turns out this circularity is actually key to Hume's account of why we conceive relations like causality, but in an unexpected way.

Causal inferences are the only way we can go beyond the evidence of our senses and memories. In making them, we suppose there is some connection between present facts and what we infer from them. But what is this connection? How is it established?

 

In the past, taking aspirin has relieved my headaches, so I believe that taking aspirin will relieve the headache I'm having now. But my inference is based on the aspirin's superficial sensible qualities, which have nothing to do with headache relief. Even if I assume that the aspirin has "secret powers" that are doing the heavy lifting in relieving my headache, they can't be the basis of my inference, since these "secret powers" are unknown.

 

Nonetheless, Hume observes, "we always presume, when we see like sensible qualities, that they have like secret powers, and expect that effects, similar to those we have experienced, will follow from them" (EHU 4.2.16/33). Since we neither intuit nor infer a priori that similar objects have similar secret powers, our presumption must be based in some way on our experience.

 

But our past experience only gives us information about objects as they were when we experienced them, and our present experience only tells us about objects we are experiencing now. Causal inferences, however, do not just record our past and present experiences. They extend or project what we have gathered from experience to other objects in the future. Since it is not necessarily true that an object with the same sensible qualities will have the same secret powers that past objects with those sensible qualities had, how do we project those experiences into the future, to other objects that may only appear similar to those we've previously experienced?

 

Hume thinks we can get a handle on this question by considering two clearly different propositions:

 

(1) I've found that headache relief has always followed my taking aspirin;
and
(2) Taking aspirin similar to the ones I've taken in the past will relieve my present headache.

 

There is no question that "the one proposition may be justly inferred from the other", and that "it is always inferred". But since their connection obviously isn't intuitive, Hume challenges us to produce the "chain of reasoning" that takes us from propositions like (1) to propositions like (2) (EHU 4.2.16/34)

 

(1) summarizes my past experience, while (2) predicts what will happen in the immediate future. The chain of reasoning I need must show me how my past experience is relevant to my future experience. I need some further proposition or propositions that will establish an appropriate link or connection between past and future, and take me from (1) to (2) using either demonstrative reasoning, concerning relations of ideas, or probable reasoning, concerning matters of fact.

 

Hume thinks it is evident that demonstrative reasoning can't bridge the gap between (1) and (2). However unlikely it may be, we can always intelligibly conceive of a change in the course of nature. Even though aspirin relieved my previous headaches, there's no contradiction in supposing that it won't relieve the one I'm having now, so the supposition of a change in the course of nature can't be proven false by any reasoning concerning relations of ideas.

 

That leaves probable reasoning. Hume argues that there is no probable reasoning that can provide a just inference from past to future. Any attempt to infer (2) from (1) by a probable inference will be viciously circular—it will involve supposing what we are trying to prove.

 

Hume spells out the circularity this way. Any reasoning that takes us from (1) to (2) must employ some connecting principle that connects the past with the future. Since one thing that keeps us from moving directly from past to future is the possibility that the course of nature might change, it seems plausible to think that the connecting principle we need will be one that will assure us that nature is uniform—that the course of nature won't change—something like this Uniformity Principle:

 

[UP] The future will be like the past.

 

Adopting [UP] will indeed allow us to go from (1) to (2). But before we can use it to establish that our causal inferences are determined by reason, we need to determine our basis for adopting it. [UP] is clearly not intuitive, nor is it demonstrable, as Hume has already pointed out, so only probable arguments could establish it. But to attempt to establish [UP] this way would be to try to establish probable arguments using probable arguments, which will eventually include [UP] itself.

So we can't reason our way into justifying why we experience a relation of causality.  It's an effect of the way our minds are built, caused by something other than the mind.  I think Hume believes the same of the other principles of association, but this is particularly clear in the case of causality, for reasons Deleuze points out.

It is special because it doesn't simply go from a given term to the idea of something that isn't presently given.  Causality requires that I go from something that is given to me to the idea of something that has never been given to me, that isn't even giveable in experience.  For example, based on some signs in a book, I believe that Caesar lived.  When I see the sun rise, I say that it will rise tomorrow; having seen water boil at 100 degrees, I say that it necessarily boils at 100 degrees.  Yet expression such as "tomorrow", "always", "necessarily", convey something that cannot be given in experience: tomorrow isn't given without becoming today, without ceasing to be tomorrow, and all experience is experience of a contingent particular.  In other words, causality is a relation according to which I go beyond the given; I say more than what is given or giveable -- in short, I infer and I believe, I expect that ...

If the mind didn't invent causality as a principle of association and doesn't control it (but is controlled by it) then where does it come from?  What causes our belief in causality?  Hume's response here is again habit.  But there's a kind of subtle twist here.  Because now we are not (we cannot) be talking about the habits of the world, or the patterns of our sense experience where A is followed by B.  We cannot experience causality directly.  We are referring to the habits of our mind where the appearance of A leads to the idea that B will appear, because it is inevitably caused by A. 

Since we're determined—caused—to make causal inferences, then if they aren't "determin'd by reason", there must be "some principle of equal weight and authority" that leads us to make them. Hume maintains that this principle is custom or habit:

 

whenever the repetition of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation … we always say, that this propensity is the effect of Custom. (EHU 5.1.5/43)

 

It is therefore custom, not reason, which "determines the mind … to suppose the future conformable to the past" (Abstract 16). But even though we have located the principle, it is important to see that this isn't a new principle by which our minds operate. Custom and habit are general names for the principles of association.

 

Hume describes their operation as a causal process: custom or habit is the cause of the particular propensity you form after your repeated experiences of the constant conjunction of smoke and fire. Causation is the operative associative principle here, since it is the only one of those principles that can take us beyond our senses and memories.

  

The habit in question here is the direct experience of the constant conjunction of two terms in a relation.  This is our experience of the belief in causality, as a sort of force operating on our minds.  As a belief or expectation, it seems to fit under what Hume described at the beginning as the secondary impressions.  We've experienced a repetition of the conjunction of smoke and fire, which leads us to experience our mind moving naturally from smoke to fire in the form of the belief that one is the cause of the other.  This statement might seem a little obvious till you realize that Hume is actually saying that these two connections each occur independently.  The world gives us a series of external impressions of smoke-then-fire, smoke-then-fire.  And then our minds, as a result of being built the way they are, presuming the uniformity of nature, give us an internal impression of the belief that fire causes smoke.  The two run on parallel tracks, the external impressions connected by habits of the world, and the internal impressions connected by habits of our mind.  

But how does an idea come to be conceived in such a manner that it constitutes a belief?

 

Hume's explanation is that as I become accustomed to aspirin's relieving my headaches, I develop a propensity—a tendency—to expect headache relief to follow taking aspirin. The propensity is due to the associative bond that my repeated experiences of taking aspirin and headache relief have formed. My present impressions of taking an aspirin are as forceful and vivid as anything could be, and some of their force and vivacity transfers across the associative path to the idea of headache relief, enlivening it with enough force and vivacity to give it the "strength and solidity" that constitutes belief.

 

Since I don't know how aspirin relieves headaches, it is fortunate that there is "a kind of pre-established harmony between the course of nature and the succession of our ideas" that teaches me to take aspirin when I have a headache. Custom, Hume maintains, in language that anticipates and influenced Darwin,

 

is that principle by which this correspondence has been effected; so necessary to the subsistence of our species, and the regulation of our conduct, in every circumstance of human life. (EHU 5.2.21/55)

 

It's interesting to again end up back at Darwinism.  The world has its habits, and our minds have theirs.  If the two aren't mutually adjusted, we won't be around for long.  Clearly, we don't now think this correlation happens because of some pre-established harmony, but through learning, or adaptation in the broader case.  This is how we get one set of connections to match up with another, how we learn to swim.  It's not a theoretical question knowing how to swim.  It's a pragmatic question of believing that we can.

Deleuze sums the situation up in this passage of his Pure Immanence essay, which clearly provides the starting point for Chapter 2 of D&R:

The functioning of the causal relationship can then be explained as follows: as similar cases are observed (all the times I have seen that a follows or accompanies b), they fuse in the imagination, while remaining distinct and separate from each other in the understanding.  This property of fusion in the imagination constitutes habit (I expect ...), at the same time as the distinction in the understanding tailors belief to the calculus of observed cases (probability as calculus of degrees of belief).  The principle of habit as fusion of similar cases in the imagination and the principle of experience as observation of distinct cases in the understanding thus combine to produce both the relation and the inference that follows from the relation (belief), through which causality functions.

Holds for Feet

The passive synthesis is meant to capture the way the world structures itself in a way that our conscious human mind can later grab onto.  This synthesis of time is a contraction of unrelated instants made possible when two instants are generally, or habitually, repeated.  There's a circularity here because the repetition leads to the contraction, but the contraction is the basis for our ability to define a repetition.  I think what we're essentially saying is that the object repeated, and the subject receptive to this repetition are produced at the same moment, through one movement.  Repetition is literally the cause of itself.  It is, as Deleuze says, "for-itself", in the sense that repetition produces repetition as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

All of this sounds ridiculously abstract, and I think it may help to kinda jump ahead in the story and relate it to the circularity at the heart of Darwinism.  The "theory" of evolution is not a theory at all, but, in the ordinary sense of the term, a tautology.  Who survives?  The fittest.  Who are the fittest?  Well, the ones who survive and reproduce.  Without an independent theory of why these organisms are the fittest, we just have a circular reference error.

[Sidebar: Some folks try to avoid this tautological aspect by thinking of evolution as a theory of why we see such amazing diversity in the natural world.  As in -- Q: Why are there so many different species of finch? A:  Evolution by natural selection.  The theory talks extensively about how things make identical copies of themselves, and about how we'll find lots of the ones who are good at this, and none of the ones who are bad at it.  But when you ask the theory to tell you why there are so many different kinds of copiers, and why the kinds change over time, it just says "variation", or its molecular counterpart "mutation".  Which means that the exchange is more accurately -- Q: What's your theory for why there are so many different kinds of finch?  A: Chance.  Hard to call that a theory, no?]

Nevertheless, while it's not exactly a theory, Darwinism still brings up an interesting thought.   It suggests to us that the forms we see in the world didn't drop from the sky.  Instead, it claims that they were produced by the world, and adapt to changes in it.  In fact, it leads us to think about a giant co-evolutionary system where there really are only distinctions of spatial and temporal scale between organisms and environment.  The world is stable enough that this particular piece of it is able to make a copy of itself.  Or, said differently, the repetition of some aspect of the environment that we usually call "stable identity over time" allows for another repetition that we usually call "an organism".  But we know that there is an organism because it itself is a repetition in the environment, that allows for another repetition, etc ... ad infinitum.  Basically, reproduction actually defines what an organism is.  The fly floating in your soup of amino acids is identified as that bundle of amino acids that keep reappearing.  There's no "fly form" existing out there apart from that repetition.  Darwinism suggests that organisms stitch time together the same way we were talking about last time with the passive synthesis.  Or, to put it more precisely, it's not that organisms do this stitching so much as that they are this connection or contraction.  The tautology of Darwinism starts to dissolve when you look at it as a theory of how the units that are to be repeated get formed to begin with.  These fully defined and separated organisms or genes shouldn't be the starting point for the theory, but the endpoint.  

It might seem like a stretch to invoke Darwin here to aid in interpreting Deleuze's passive synthesis.  Let me produce some quotes to make it more plausible. 

... perceptual syntheses refer back to organic syntheses which are like the sensibility of the senses; they refer back to a primary sensibility that we are. We are made of contracted water, earth, light and air - not merely prior to the recognition or representation of these, but prior to their being sensed. Every organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations. At the level of this primary vital sensibility, the lived present constitutes a past and a future in time. Need is the manner in which this future appears, as the organic form of expectation. The retained past appears in the form of cellular heredity.

Remember that the goal was to get something between the pure flux of the material world, and the recognizing, representing, and counting human mind.  The logical candidate for this is clearly our organic body.  The idea is that this body already is a passive synthesis of elements that exploits a repetition (in the world) to create a repetition (of itself).  

Passive synthesis ... it constitutes our habit of living, our expectation that 'it' will continue, that one of the two elements will appear after the other, thereby assuring the perpetuation of our case.

There are a few other quotes that may help flesh out this idea, but to be useful, we need to keep in mind that: passive synthesis = contraction = habit = contemplation.  The last two terms in that equation may appear strange.  Remember the problem though.  We're looking for something below the level of our minds that would explain how they attach to the world in a way stable enough for us to recognize a repetition.  When we call this stable attachment "habit" we don't mean our habits, as in our habits of thought or action.  We mean nature's habits.  Organisms are like passive habits of nature itself.  These operate below the level of a fully formed mind, but constitute exactly the kind of proto-mind we're looking for.  That's why Deleuze is going to call them "contemplations".

A soul must be attributed to the heart, to the muscles, nerves and cells, but a contemplative soul whose entire function is to contract a habit. This is no mystical or barbarous hypothesis. On the contrary, habit here manifests its full generality: it concerns not only the sensory-motor habits that we have (psychologically), but also, before these, the primary habits that we are; the
thousands of passive syntheses of which we are organically composed.

No one has shown better than Samuel Butler that there is no continuity apart from that of habit, and that we have no other continuities apart from those of our thousands of component habits, which form within us so many superstitious and contemplative selves, so many claimants and satisfactions: 'for even the corn in the fields grows upon a superstitious basis as to its own existence, and only turns the earth and moisture into wheat through the conceit of its own ability to do so, without which faith it were powerless ...' What we call wheat is a contraction of the earth and humidity, and this contraction is both a contemplation and the auto-satisfaction of that contemplation.

You can really see the circularity at work in that quote.  Wheat simply is the possibility of certain elements combining to constitute a thing, which makes an actual thing ... called wheat.  Lather, rinse, repeat, as the shampoo used to instruct.

What we call wheat is a contraction of the earth and humidity, and this contraction is both a contemplation and the auto-satisfaction of that contemplation. By its existence alone, the lily of the field sings the glory of the heavens, the goddesses and gods - in other words, the elements that it contemplates in contracting. What organism is not made of elements and cases of repetition, of contemplated and contracted water, nitrogen, carbon, chlorides and sulphates, thereby intertwining all the habits of
which it is composed? 

-----------------

Hopefully, we have some idea now of what Deleuze has in mind by the passive synthesis of habit.  We should be wrapping up.  But then wait, what's with the title of the post?  Unfortunately, it's a long story.  As my loyal readers are doubtless aware, throughout my reading of Difference and Repetition, I have had Whitehead's philosophy in the back of my mind.  Particularly the version of it expounded by Isabelle Stengers in her Thinking with Whitehead.  In discussions with my esteemed colleague from Tejas (the artist formerly known as Hobitronix), I once used the term "foothold" to describe something like the passive synthesis that structures the world enough for us to recognize objects in it.  I have an experience of a building at time T1 and another experience of a building at time T2.  Do I just completely invent the idea that these are "the same" building?  If I don't, then doesn't that indicate that there is some real structure in the world that I'm grabbing onto for this recognition?  In a temporally atomized world, that structure, "the building", is actually a stitch in time that connects two atomic experiences.  This is the problem of Cleopatra's Needle I wrote about a while back.  I think the current discussion of the passive synthesis helps illuminate the same territory with different terms.  It seems that the world must provide us some foothold that allows us to grab onto it.  Or some place for our minds to stand in it in order for them to operate effectively.  

The mixing of the metaphors you may have noticed in those last two sentences turns out to be fortuitous.  This is where the thrill of the wind in our hair and the bugs in our teeth as we're live blogging really hits the fan!  Because you don't use a foothold to grab onto stuff.  You stand on a foothold in order to grab onto an object.  As a sort of shorthand, I remembered the term "foothold" as Whitehead's description of this problem of how there needs some sort of connection between moments in order for there to be an an object for us to grasp.  Going back over it though, I've realized that this was wrong, albeit in a useful way.  In fact, foothold and object are distinct, but form an inseparable pair.  Basically, for recognition, we need an object to recognize, and we need a place for US to do the recognizing from.  We need a foothold in the world that supports our subjective stance, and we need objects out there to grasp.   

I'd like to explore this corrected definition of foothold as Whitehead used it in The Concept of Nature.  It requires a little background and introduces a new set of terms, but I think it may help us understand Deleuze better.  Also, FPiPE is deeply committed to boring readers stiff with over-complete responses to their requests!  So here we go.

Whitehead starts from what seems a simple empiricist position -- "nature is what we are aware of in perception".  The seeming simplicity of this starting point is illusory though, because Stengers spends many many pages distinguishing it from, "nature is what we perceive".  

If Whitehead had written "nature is what we perceive," a version seem­ingly close to the initial statement, what would have followed was almost automatic. What do you perceive? A grey stone. What does what you perceive authorize? The affirmation that "this stone is grey." In contrast, the question "what are you aware of in the perception of this stone you call grey?" blocks the pedagogical series of explanations. A contrast in­sinuates itself, between the words immediately available for saying "what" we perceive, and the question, open for its part, of what we are aware of "in perception." An indefinite constellation of components becomes per­ceptible, which "that stone is grey" -- that statement apparently so simple and transparent -- had skipped.

What we are aware of in perception at a given moment might be just a grey blob in the visual field, or the fact that said blob is rapidly approaching our head and we should duck, or that we're discussing this stone with another stoner ... the list goes on and on.  The point is that a world filled with objects is not the only thing we are aware of in perception.

Thus language habitually sets before the mind a misleading abstract of the indefinite complexity of the fact of self-awareness (CN, 108). (I'm leaving the reference numbers and italics on her quotes from Whitehead, so you can distinguish who's who).

Of course, by the same token this is not to say the we are not aware of objects.  The goal here is not to relegate objects to the status of illusion, and to say that we are only really aware of bare visual sensations like grey blobs.  In perception we're aware of all kinds of things, at all different levels.  Whitehead's definition of nature is refreshingly expansive.  If you're aware of it, if it's having some impact on your perception, it's nature.  Fundamentally, I think this means that there can be no such thing as illusions, in a deep sense.  Everything that you are aware of is a real part of nature.  Sure, what you are aware of might be a totally lousy guide to action, but that constitutes an additional fact about a real experience, not a refutation of the existence of the experience.  

[ . . . ] everything perceived is in nature. We may not pick and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon (CN, 29).

I really like this broad-minded version of empiricism.  The simple empiricist claims that we should base our view of the world on "data".  That's fine as far as it goes, but begs the question of what exactly we are given.  The full range of "data" we actually get can't be confined either to simple sensory impressions, nor fancy theoretical constructs like electrons.  The goal is to come up with a concept of nature broad enough so that all of our experiences can be called "natural".  Stengers characterizes this as a philosophy of resisting the dogmatic claims of specialized knowledge of all types -- scientific, psychological, mystical, etc ...  The problem is not that any of these are wrong, and that we need to adjudicate which one should constitute the base data that we build a world on.  The problem is just that they are all partial.  When one or another type of knowledge tries to claim that it provides the uniquely correct description of base reality it ends up splitting a single nature we are aware of in perception into categories.

To the positive definition of the problem -- the construction of a con­cept of nature such that everything we are aware of in perception belongs to it -- there thus corresponds a negative definition, the determined rejec­tion of any theory that makes "nature bifurcate." And nature "bifurcates" as soon as, in one way or another, the mind is called to the rescue, qua responsible for "psychic additions," to explain the difference between what we are aware of and what is supposed to belong to nature. 

The theory of psychic additions would treat the greenness [of grass] as a psychic addition furnished by the perceiving mind, and would leave to nature merely the molecules and the radiant energy which influence the mind towards that perception [ . . . IWhat I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses [ . . . I Thus there would be two natures, one is the con­jecture and the other is the dream. Another way of phrasing this theory [ . . . I is to bifurcate nature into two divisions, namely into the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of aware­ness. The nature which is the fact apprehended in awareness holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet. The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured system of molecules and elec­trons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature (CN, 29-31).

We're all familiar with this modern bifurcation of nature.  Science tells us that, "Nature is a stupid business, bereft of sounds, odors and colors; it is only matter in a hurry, without end and without meaning (SMW, 54)."  However, since we are undoubtedly aware of all these qualitative factors in our perception, we will have to find a place for them in Whitehead's concept of nature.  His definition of nature precludes either of the typical scientific moves made to address this problem -- either to say that nature is composed of two substances, matter and mind (dualism), or simply to say that mind and qualities are not real (simple materialism). Both approaches bifurcate nature, the first explicitly, and the second implicitly, by saying that some experiences are real and others mere illusion.

Stengers points out throughout her book that Whitehead always proceeds as a mathematician; first he defines the scope of the problem, then he proceeds to construct a solution.   So, if the problem is, "what concept of nature would cover everything we are aware of in perception?" the solution will be, "a nature that is composed of events".

What we discern is the specific character of a place through a period of time. This is what I mean by an "event." We discern some specific character of an event. But in discerning an event we are also aware of its signifi­cance as a relatum in the structure of events (CN, 52).

First of all, the point will be to exhibit what is declared by these events that happen "at the same time," that is, "now."

These are the events which share the immediacy of the immediately pres­ent discerned events. These are the events whose characters together with those of the discerned events comprise all nature present for discernment. They form the complete general fact which is all nature now present as disclosed in that sense-awareness. It is in this second classification of events that the differentiation of space from time takes its origin. The germ of space is to be found in the mutual relations of events within the immediate general fact which is all nature now discernible, namely within the one event which is the totality of present nature. The relations of other events to this totality of nature form the texture of time. The unity of this general present fact is expressed by the concept of simultaneity (CN, 52-53).

You can probably see that an event is the original name for what I've been calling the temporal atom.  So far, I've been a bit vague about the term, implying that it refers to something like: "the entire state of the universe at a given instant".  As if this were specified as: proton A at location (x,y,z) and proton B at location (a,b,c) and etc ... at instantaneous time T.  Since it was just a device to motivate the deconstruction of identity over time, this image was fine.  Now we have to be a little more precise though, since we know that protons are only one of the things in nature, and thus can't be its ultimate building blocks.  

Whitehead's definition of event makes it into something closer to, "the whole world right now from a given point of view".  Since the problem starts with what we are aware of in perception, the event must be like a sort of "atom of perception".  It's not the state of a material universe.  In fact, it's closer to thought than matter.  At this point in Whitehead's philosophy, the point of view that defines an event is explicitly human; it's our perception in question here.  Later, his definition of event will broaden to accommodate non-human, and even non-organic perception, turning it into something similar to Leibniz's monad.  But for now, what he means by event is basically everything we are aware of in one moment of our awareness.  Each moment that our awareness shifts would constitute a new event.  The event arises and passes, but it is always presented to us as "now".

It is an exhibition of the process of nature that each duration happens and passes. The process of nature can also be termed the passage of na­ture (CN, 54).

We should pause to appreciate a few odd things about Whitehead's definition of the event.  I've called this "temporal atomism" because each event has a unity and is unique, but actually, these are very strange atoms.  First off, they are more like thoughts than they are like things.  They are tied to perception and take place "through a period of time", as a process; they have a sort of thickness to them.  You might think of them as mental atoms of a certain size (or "duration" as Whitehead terms it).  They are actually not quite what we would normally call thoughts though, because these events are not in a mind, but in nature.  In perception, we are aware of events.  It's not that we, or our awareness, are the event.  Whitehead is here taking the fact of our mental awareness for granted, and asking what features nature has to have to support that awareness.  Second, unlike separate physical atoms, events are inherently tied together and relate to one another in some structure.  Even one moment of awareness includes an awful lot of stuff, a significant chunk of which we would call unconscious.  In fact, one of Whitehead's big aims here is to dig under our conscious awareness and make sure that we attribute everything we are aware of in perception to nature.

It is because of this habit of letting constant factors slip from con­sciousness that we constantly fall into the error of thinking of the sense­ awareness of a particular factor in nature as being a two-termed relation between the mind and the factor. For example, I perceive a green leaf. Language in this statement suppresses all reference to any factors other than the percipient mind and the green leaf and the relation of sense­ awareness. It discards the obvious inevitable factors which are essential elements in the perception. I am here, the leaf is there; and the event here and the event which is the life of the leaf there are both embedded in a totality of nature which is now, and within this totality there are other discriminated factors which it is irrelevant to mention (CN, 108).Not only does experience include the "now" as a constant factor, but also the "here."

And now, mirabile dictu, I come to my point.  Because the "here" and "now" that we usually neglect to mention are none other than the footholds that need to exist in nature to support a mind, and the "there" accounts for the objects we grab onto.  The whole connection to Deleuze's passive synthesis becomes apparent when you see that here and there and now are factors in nature that seem a lot like what we usually attribute to mind, but that operate beneath it and allow for our representative consciousness.  Events come and go, arise and cease, but there are factors that are repeated in them.  We don't create these factors, but without them there would be no us.

Expe­rience, for Whitehead, is always situated and always includes a locus standi, or a perspective, or viewpoint. And he is bold enough to call this point of view "event here," included in what we are aware of.
This locus standi in nature is what is represented in thought by the con­cept of "here" namely of an "event here." This is the concept of a definite factor in nature. This factor is an event in nature which is the focus in nature for that act of awareness, and the other events are perceived as re­ferred to it. This event is part of the associated duration. I call it the "per­cipient event." This event is not the mind, that is to say, not the percipient. It is that in nature from which the mind perceives (CN, 107).

The event that provides you with a point of view belongs to the great impersonal web of events. Your standpoint testifies to the whole of nature, is connected to the whole of nature, even if it takes on the particular meaning that is required by the interpretation of perception as yours. This interpretation may be spe­cious, but that does not make it illusory. But what we "know instinc­tively" is not that our consciousness possesses a point of view, but rather that the "here" of this viewpoint is ours.

Our "percipient event" is that event included in our observational present which we distinguish as being in some peculiar way our stand­ point for perception. It is roughly speaking that event which is our bodily life within the present duration [ . . . ] The distant situation of a perceived object is merely known to us as signified by our bodily state, i.e., by our percipient event [ . . . ] In the course of evolution those animals have sur­vived whose sense-awareness is concentrated on those significations of their bodily states which are on the average important for their welfare. The whole world of events is signified, but there are some which exact the death penalty for inattention (CN 187-188).

Interesting how evolution comes up in this context for Whitehead as it did for Deleuze.  

The complete foothold of the mind in nature is represented by the pair of events, namely, the present duration which marks the "when" of awareness and the percipient event which marks the "where" of awareness and the "how" of awareness (CN, 107). Here, "foothold" does not designate the act of taking hold but what the mind, or knowledge, requires from nature, what it needs to be offered by nature if its operations are not to be illusory, if the trust that leads us to speak of a knowledge about nature is to be confirmed. And insofar as what nature "offers" articulates a pair of events as "constant" factors, the mind's foothold in nature does not found any judgment that goes beyond the con­crete fact: "there has been a foothold." Hence the image of the mountain­ climber evoked by the term Whitehead chooses: "foothold." The mountain­eer's climb depends, and counts, on a ledge found by her hand or foot. If the vertical wall were completely smooth, there would be no mountain-climber: the mountain-climber's mode of existence requires that of the ledge that of­fers her a foothold.

Well, so, that was a lot of Whitehead. I think the reason that I was drawn to put them together here is that they seem to be solving the same problem in similar ways.  Both start with an atomized series of "nows" flashing past and wonder how any of those moments can illustrate something more permanent, something that would go beyond the current event which appears and is gone.  Their goal is to avoid enclosing everything interesting about the order of the world, the connections between events, in the mysteries human mind.  Whitehead's here and now are like a contraction or a slice or a node in a vast network of events. They constitute stability in a whirlwind world, "factors in nature without passage".  Without this order in the world, how would the mind invent it?