Deleuze begins his chapter on "Action and Reaction" with one of his favorite quotes from Spinoza: "We do not even know what a body can do". Here's the full quote from the Elwes translation.
"I have just pointed out that the objectors cannot fix the limits of the body's power, or say what can be concluded from a consideration of its sole nature, whereas they have experience of many things being accomplished solely by the laws of nature, which they would never have believed possible except under the direction of mind" (Spinoza's Ethics, Part 3, Proposition 2, Note)
While this may at first suggest a reduction of mind to body that anticipates modern neuroscience by 300 years, that's not how Spinoza saw the situation. For Spinoza, mind and body are strictly parallel. Anything that we think the mind is capable of, the body is likewise capable of in its own terms. What he's objecting to is our habit of inserting a mysterious and a-causal mental interiority into the natural world to account for any part of it we don't understand. We already saw that this was precisely what Nietzsche objected to in the Christian ideas of divine grace and free will -- our inability to see a meaning within existence leads us to posit a transcendental meaning outside of it.
Spinoza's parallelism between mind and body has always struck me as a somewhat odd doctrine because of its obvious redundancy. Nevertheless, this redundancy does at least serve to dethrone the mind from the privileged position it has occupied since the inception of philosophy. For Spinoza, the mind is at least no more important than the body. Nietzsche and Deleuze, however, take this same logic a step further and assert that the (conscious) mind is in fact the distinctly less powerful and less important of the two. Once the parallelism has been broken this way, we do find that there is a sort of reductionism involved in asking what the body can do. But the reductionism at work here is not based on our typical idea of reducing an immaterial mind to a merely material body. Instead, by pursuing Spinoza's question, Deleuze will end up dethroning the entire duality between spirit and matter, and reducing both of them to asymmetric expressions of a third term -- the will to power.
To eventually understand this subtle reductionism, we need to first examine how Deleuze defines the body and uncover what role the conscious mind plays in this definition. A body is defined as simply any relation of forces. We saw from the outset of the book that 'force' makes a peculiar fundamental metaphysical unit because it never exists by itself, but only in relation to other forces.
Every force is related to others and it either obeys or commands. What defines a body is this relation between dominant and dominated forces. Every relationship of forces constitutes a body - whether it is chemical, biological, social or political. Any two forces, being unequal, constitute a body as soon as they enter into a relationship. (NP, 40)
A body, then, is what holds forces in relation, or perhaps more accurately, it simply is a relationship of forces. Since forces have no inherent or a priori relation, the body is a product of the chance collision of various forces. This makes the fact that it forms at all "astonishing" (in Nietzsche's words). In other words, the identity of a body can never taken for granted but is always constructed by forces that have come into contact. While for the sake of simplicity we will often speak of a body as composed of just two forces -- active and reactive, dominant and subservient -- it's clear that any actual body is composed of the many forces and their various relationships that give the body a hierarchy. Finally, it's important to note that this definition of a body has nothing to do with its materiality. As Deleuze says explicitly, a body may be physical, chemical, biological, social or political depending on the forces involved. It's not clear to me whether this means that the forces themselves belong to these domains, or, more likely, that forces have no inherent domain but that the hierarchy of their relations defines various domains. So here we can already see a break with the material-immaterial dualism I mentioned before. A body is neither of these two sides, or both simultaneously.
What happens when two different forces come into relation? One of them is stronger, more active, more powerful than the other. Each force has a quantity of power, and, for reasons we'll see in a minute, these quantities are never equal. As a result, one force overpowers another and dominates it, while the second submits to it as an emissary submits to its master or a tool to the designs of its user. In the case of humans, the more powerful force constitutes the body, while the less powerful force is what we think of as 'us' -- our consciousness. Our consciousness is actually a tool of the body, its 'subject', emissary, or slave.
To remind consciousness of its necessary modesty is to take it for what it is: a symptom; nothing but the symptom of a deeper transformation and of the activities of entirely non-spiritual forces. (NP, 39)
The body is thus higher than consciousness in the hierarchy of forces that constitute our organism. The body commands and consciousness obeys. The body is active, and consciousness reactive.
[Attentive readers may notice that we seem to be using the term body ambiguously to refer to both the stronger term in a relation of forces, as well as to the relation as a whole (which necessarily comprises both a stronger and weaker term). This turns out to be a strategic ambiguity on the part of Deleuze. The higher term in a relation of forces is always unconscious. As a result, we aren't able to identify it as easily as we can the lower, conscious, level of a relation, and end up inferring it by seeing this lower level as a symptom. Since we aren't directly conscious of the stronger term (the body), our access to it is only through seeing the weaker term (consciousness) as a weaker term. Thus, in practice, we discover the unconscious body only as a relation that must include consciousness as one of its parts]
The notion that our consciousness is a slave to the body is a total inversion of our normal way of seeing things. Nevertheless, there are a few ways to make this idea more approachable. Consider that on an evolutionary time scale, consciousness seems to be an extremely rare and late-breaking phenomenon. How could it not be a tool of the body, something that would adaptively serves the ends of the body, under those circumstances? Consider as well that we actually already conceive of our consciousness as determined or dominated by a larger force, though we don't often think of the relationship in quite those terms. We usually call this force 'reality', or the 'external world'. And we call the relation of consciousness to this superior force 'representation'. In fact, we call a consciousness not dominated by reality in this way 'deranged', even though such a consciousness would at first glance appear to have more freedom of action. If a properly functioning mind is merely the mirror of nature, it must also be the servant of nature. This is what Deleuze is alluding to in comparing the Freudian to the Nietzschean conception of consciousness.
Like Freud, Nietzsche thinks that consciousness is the region of the ego affected by the external world (VP II 253/WP 524, GS 357). However, consciousness is defined less in relation to exteriority (in terms of the real) than in relation to superiority (in terms of values). This distinction is essential to a general conception of consciousness and the unconscious. In Nietzsche consciousness is always the consciousness of an inferior in relation to a superior to which he is subordinated or into which he is "incorporated". (NP, 39)
So while it may seem counterintuitive to think of consciousness as inferior, Nietzsche is, in a sense, merely being more explicit about the fact that our consciousness is only a small part of a larger whole. Instead of taking the reality of the exterior world for granted, Nietzsche begins with the more fundamental relations of power that are implicit in our conception of this world. At its core, reality is what commands us, what we can't change, what we're forced to accept. We rightly ascribe this power of command to something external to our ego, but we err in hypostatizing this larger force. We don't really know what's out there because it is, by definition, outside of and more powerful than our consciousness.
In Nietzsche consciousness is always the consciousness of an inferior in relation to a superior to which he is subordinated or into which he is "incorporated". Consciousness is never self-consciousness, but the consciousness of an ego in relation to a self which is not itself conscious. It is not the master's consciousness but the slave's consciousness in relation to a master who is not himself conscious. (NP, 39)
If we want to replace the concept of reality with the concept of the body, we need to be careful not to slip into thinking of the the body as my body. My body belongs to my conscious ego. The body is the superior force that constructs precisely this ego as its tool or servant. Consciousness is not the possessor of the body, but on the contrary is possessed by it. This means that there's a certain deliberate vagueness in the way Deleuze is using the term body. He doesn't mean to deny that consciousness is to some extent a tool of the biological body of an individual organism. But he also doesn't want to limit the concept in this way and foreclose on other, more abstract bodies that also dominate consciousness.
"Consciousness usually only appears when a whole wants to subordinate itself to a superior whole . . . Conscious- ness is born in relation to a being of which we could be a function" (VP II227). This is the servility of consciousness; it merely testifies to the "formation of a superior body". (NP, 39)
If we ask ourself what "superior body" "incorporates" our human consciousness, I think the most obvious answer is not our individual biological bodies, or even our personal energy bodies, but the social body. I wouldn't care to argue that this is the only superior body our consciousness is but a part of, but it seems clear to me that a significant fraction of our ego's reactions are programmed by fairly general societal forces. Of course these forces are as diverse as they are contradictory, so maybe it would make more sense to say that our conscious ego is the inferior term constructed at the nexus of many bodies. So while the point of this first subsection (2.1) is to put consciousness in its place as an inferior and reactive force, the superior and active force to which it corresponds is largely left open.
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The point of seeing consciousness as the inferior force in a relation is not to somehow deny the reality of consciousness and condemn it as an illusion. The existence of the master does not negate the slave. The point is not to say that inferior forces have no power. Rather, the point is to see these as forces. Inferior or reactive forces are a type of force. They possess the type of force that belongs to a tool or agent which is made to serve a master. But we can only understand the forces of this type if we see that they do not exist on their own, but always as the inferior terms in a relation.
Inferior forces do not, by obeying, cease to be forces distinct from those which command. Obeying is a quality of force as such and relates to power just as much as commanding does: "individual power is by no means surrendered. In the same way, there is in commanding an admission that the absolute power of the opponent has not been vanquished, incorporated, disintegrated. 'Obedience' and 'commanding' are forms of struggle." (VP II 91/WP 642) Inferior forces are defined as reactive; they lose nothing of their force, of their quantity of force, they exercise it by securing mechanical means and final ends, by fulfilling the conditions of life and the functions and tasks of conversation, adaptation and utility. (NP, 40)
We've seen that consciousness is one of these reactive forces. But it is only one example of a general class. It turns out that much of our modern scientific worldview is unwittingly constructed from reactive forces that have been divorced from the body to which they belong. Consider the basic concept (though perhaps not the actual practice) of science. Science only deals with things that follow laws. The whole point is to find out what is fully determined to happen, what must happen, according to the laws of nature. The domain that it investigates, and the manner in which it pursues the investigation are specifically designed to strip the subject matter of any activity of its own. In physics, matter is inert. It merely obeys laws which are not themselves material. Even in biology, we interpret organisms as nothing more than machines for duplicating themselves, and lionize the evolutionary law that relegates the forces that create and modify these organisms to chance. In other words, we always conceive the subject matter of science as entirely reactive, and pack all the true activity of nature into a separate world of general laws. These laws project the dominant and determining forces into another world, a world which, conveniently, our reactive consciousness is uniquely equipped to understand.
It is inevitable that consciousness sees the organism from its own point of view and understands it in its own way; that is to say, reactively. What happens is that science follows the paths of consciousness, relying entirely on other reactive forces; the organism is always seen from the petty side, from the side of its reactions. The problem of the organism, according to Nietzsche, is not an issue between mechanism and vitalism. What is the value of vitalism as long as it claims to discover the specificity of life in the same reactive forces that mechanism interprets in another way? The real problem is the discovery of active forces without which the reactions themselves would not be forces. (NP, 41)
Part of the goal in discussing reactive forces is to restore these to their rightful place as forces. They have a power of obeying or executing which properly belongs to them, even if this power is always steered by and in service of an active force. But of course, part of the goal is also to bring the active forces back into this world and reverse the mysterious separation of the two sides of force. Active forces are harder to characterize because they always escape consciousness. These unconscious forces don't operate according to the principle of identity and following the rules of law that consciousness understands. Instead, these are the forces that give rise to identity, that create forms and that represent an immanent law unto themselves. Seeing the world through the lens and categories of consciousness makes active forces nearly invisible, which is why science ends up describing a cold and mechanistic world. Restoring activity to the natural world means putting the creative and self-organizing force back into matter in exactly the manner popularized by Manuel de Landa.
Perhaps the easiest place to notice the conspicuous absence of actives forces in our habitual view is in the case of biology. Just where we would expect to find some creative action, some life, we are told there is only a tendency to establish and reestablish the identity of the organism. Our actions as living organisms are all purported to serve the self-evident goal of maintaining us within a viable equilibrium that itself serves only as a means for producing an identical copy of this equilibrium tending machine. But where are the forces that create this identity and equilibrium to begin with? What forces within life produce this machine for reproducing a reproduction (of equilibrium state), and what forces allow it to adapt when a new equilibrium is called for? This is why Deleuze mentions the failure of vitalism. If we understand vitalism as the principle that there is some inner life force or will to survive leading an organism to preserve and duplicate itself, then vitalism merely describes the same equilibrium seeking behavior as mechanism. In either case, where is the force that would explain why just this equilibrium, or why there's any equilibrium at all? Within Darwinism, the answer is clear -- chance is the only force that can initially give rise to an organism and chance is the only force that can modify it. Yet chance is explicitly outside the theory of natural selection and outside the domain of life as such. Which leads us back to a question that our esteemed colleague over at the Capitalist Axiomatic posed more than a decade ago: What is evolution a theory of? Do we think that nature is only capable of following laws and reproducing forms and never creates new ones? This question lies under Nietzsche's critique of Darwinian evolution.
"What is active? - reaching out for power" (VP II 43/WP 657). Appropriating, possessing, subjugating, dominating - these are the characteristics of active force. To appropriate means to impose forms, to create forms by exploiting circumstances (BGE 259 and VP II 63/WP 647). Nietzsche criticizes Darwin for interpreting evolution and chance within evolution in an entirely reactive way. He admires Lamarck because Lamarck foretold the existence of a truly active plastic force, primary in relation to adaptations: a force of metamorphosis. (NP, 42)
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Section 2.3 begins to address a tricky question left hanging by our definition of a body as a relation of active and reactive forces. If what makes a force active is simply its greater quantity of power relative to its reactive partner, then why are we introducing a qualitative difference between the two types of forces? Why can't we just reduce the strength of a force to a single number? The answer is basically that there is no single, global scale for quantifying force that would apply to all forces at once. The fact that there is no single real force capable of dominating 'existence as a whole' means that no absolute scale can be imposed on force. It's like a good friend once told me in defense of his decision to drink Budweiser: "there ain't no king of wines". Instead, all we can find in the absence of a global coordinate system are local relations of power. Power is a manifold. As a result, we discover that while a force is characterized by a quantity of power, differences in this quantity cannot be reduced to a simple quantity of difference, but actually give rise to different qualities.
... differences in quantity cannot be reduced to equality. Quality is distinct from quantity but only because it is that aspect of quantity that cannot be equalised, that cannot be equalised out in the difference between quantities. Difference in quantity is therefore, in one sense, the irreducible element of quantity and in another sense the element which is irreducible to quantity itself. Quality is nothing but difference in quantity and corresponds to it each time forces enter into relation. (NP, 43)
The subtext here is that Nietzsche's previous critique of the tendency of science to see matter (and the body) as homogenous, inert, stuff, is not made in the name of a romantic appeal to some irreducible spiritual quality. On the contrary, there is nothing but quantity. It's just that quantity is more complex than we usually give it credit for. Echoing Spinoza, we might say that we don't even know what quantity can do.
This same line of thinking casts a new light on the idea of affirming chance. When we sought to affirm all of chance at once, in a single throw of the dice, we stumbled over the fact that no existing force was capable of appropriating all the others. There is no largest force. So the affirmation of chance had to proceed from affirming the Return of a single moment, a single fragment of chance. When completely affirmed though, it turned out that this fragment was ultimately connected to and dispersed in a larger totality that had the power to bring it back again (and launch it out again, endlessly). We do not affirm chance globally and as a totality, but locally and piece by piece. This appears to conflict with the idea of affirming chance all at once, but that is the paradox of ER. When we affirm the power of a force -- whether it is active or reactive -- we find it connected to other forces, which are in turn connected to yet other forces, in a series of local patchworks that extend indefinitely. Since everything is connected to everything, but not in any order, Deleuze can introduce a contrast between chance and a continuum. Like power, chance is a manifold, a holey-space that cannot be defined in its entirety from a single perspective.
By affirming chance we affirm the relation of all forces. And, of course, we affirm all of chance all at once in the thought of the eternal return. But all forces do not enter into relations all at once on their own account. Their respective power is, in fact, fulfilled by relating to a small number of forces. Chance is the opposite of a continuum (on the continuum cf. VP II 356). The encounters of forces of various quantities are therefore the concrete parts of chance, the affirmative parts of chance and, as such, alien to every law; the limbs of Dionysus. (NP, 44)
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Section 2.4 continues the theme of Nietzsche's relation to science and culminates in a comparison between two types of scientific cosmology and the cosmology of Eternal Return. The basic idea is the same one we've already seen. Science proceeds by equalizing difference. Whether it's particles that obey the laws of physics or organisms that obey the laws of evolution, the 'subjects' of a science are all equivalent when it comes to these laws. The goal is to see the world as an inert and undifferentiated material; it's all the same stuff, just with different numbers attached to it. We've seen that Nietzsche is opposed to this type of reductionism.
Rightly or wrongly Nietzsche believes that science, in the way it handles quantities always tends to equalize them, to make up for inequalities. Nietzsche, as critic of science, never invokes the rights of quality against quantity; he invokes the rights of difference in quantity against equality, of inequality against equalization of quantities. (NP, 45)
[ Note that the first words of this quote allude to a question Deleuze chooses to skip over. Is Nietzsche right about science, or is he critiquing a straw man? After a long discussion of this we would inevitably conclude that the answer is yes. Surely Nietzsche's hypostatization of 'Science' results in something of a caricature. At the same time, I think we can recognize a large majority of scientist's worldviews and a huge chunk of scientific activity in this caricature. It's simply not all that science could be.]
The essence of quality does not lie in some supplementary spiritual dimension. It escapes our conscious scientific concepts to become the hard problem of qualia not because it is mysteriously added to the material world, but because it is the irreducible element of differentiation within the world. It stems from the fact that two interacting forces cannot be made perfectly equal and interchangeable.
This is why his whole critique operates on three levels; against logical identity, against mathematical equality and against physical equilibrium. Against the three forms of the undifferentiated. (NP, 45)
The fact that the world cannot exist in an undifferentiated state is really a corollary of the metaphysics of force we have been describing. It's another way of saying that existence is necessarily linked to diversity and multiplicity. Or that it is empty of intrinsic nature and always dependent on a way of seeing that simultaneously fabricates an active and a reactive force.
While it's not immediately obvious, the Eternal Return encapsulates this idea of the always differentiated. It affirms the world as an unlimited becoming that can never be grasped as a total identity, never fall into a cycle which repeats the same state as equal, and never come to rest in an equilibrium. In other words, it is designed to reject all three forms of the undifferentiated.
It's probably obvious from the name how ER rejects the idea of a single straight line of existence that begins with the The Word and ends with Eschaton. The universe has no transcendent goal or meaning and is not ruled by a divine plan. Existence is not a single identity that can be totalized in this way. Nor, however, is it the meaningless increase in entropy that inevitably ends in the equilibrium of heat death. Nietzsche argues that if it were possible to reach an equilibrium, the universe would already have done so (we'll investigate this idea more in the next section). The difference between forces can never be canceled out in equilibrium. Nietzsche opposes the Return to both of these interpretations of existence. It produces neither identity nor equilibrium, but an endless circulation where everything comes back again and again.
Probably less obvious is the way the Return also rejects the repetition of the same. The touchstone is always: what returns is not the same thing but everything. This distinguishes the return from a cyclical cosmology, where the universe (perhaps due to ergodicity?) eventually returns to the same state where it 'started'. Once a state is duplicated at the 'end' though, the laws of physics insist that the system as a whole will endlessly repeat the exact same cycle. Here again, we see science associated with a form of the undifferentiated. Start and end must be exactly equal states, with no difference between them. In addition, this point on the circle we've labeled start/end is entirely arbitrary, and not fundamentally different from any of the other states, all of which are endlessly duplicated. The irreducible difference in quantity (quality) becomes mere quantity of difference through the trajectory of the cycle, and is finally zeroed completely as the circle closes. Just like it rejected an endpoint for existence, ER rejects the limit on becoming that this cosmology necessitates. What returns is not the same state. After all, how could exactly the same state ever repeat? It wouldn't be a return if it was identical to the first time. How would we ever know it was the second go-round? Either we need some force outside existence to count the number of repetitions of this state, or, if we make this counting force part of existence, then there was no repetition after all. Nietzsche's Return is not the repetition of the identical but the synthesis of the difference between the first and second (and Nth) times.
According to Nietzsche the eternal return is in no sense a thought of the identical but rather a thought of synthesis, a thought of the absolutely different which calls for a new principle outside science. This principle is that of the reproduction of diversity as such, of the repetition of difference; the opposite of "adiaphoria". (NP, 46)
It is not the 'same' or the 'one' which comes back in the eternal return but return is itself the one which ought to belong to diversity and to that which differs (NP, 46)
The eternal return affirms the unequalizability of any two moments, but it does so precisely by putting them into a relation. I assume Deleuze will later explore how this is related to the definition of force.
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