Unlimited Becoming

It turns out that the next 2 sub-sections (2.5-6) are contiguous with the first four that we covered last time.  Taken together they deliver on the promise of seeing the duality of active and reactive as expressions of a single underlying principle that Nietzsche calls "will to power".  Before we elucidate this principle though, we should follow one of Deleuze's best suggestions and ask what problem the concept of the will to power is designed to solve.  Though it's in a different context, the opening pages of Steven Shaviro's Without Criteria,  express this problem with admirable brevity.

 

Where does one start in philosophy? Heidegger asks the question of Being: "Why is there something, rather than nothing?" But Whitehead is splendidly indifferent to this question. He asks, instead: "How is it that there is always something new?" Whitehead doesn't see any point in returning to our ultimate beginnings. He is interested in creation rather than rectification, Becoming rather than Being, the New rather than the immemorially old. (WC, Preface)

Like Whitehead, Nietzsche is interesting in Becoming rather than Being.  And I think one of the best characterizations of the ultimate goal of his philosophy would be to see it as an attempt to construct a concept of unlimited Becoming.  How can we imagine a world that keeps on going, that never stops producing qualitatively new phenomena?  Without this, we don't even know what a universe can do.

We've already seen how any vision of the universe that involves some final state, or even some exactly repeated state, limits the possibilities of becoming.  In fact, for becoming to have any finite identity at all would put some limits on it and demarcate something outside of it, some not-becoming.  So one simple way to reconceive the question of an unlimited becoming is to assert that becoming has no opposite.  This is the same thing we were getting at earlier in making an affirmation of becoming and affirming even the being of becoming.  Pure affirmation is always 'of' something that has no fixed identity and no opposite, and hence has no limits.  In a sense, you never actually know what you're affirming.  This idea that becoming isn't an object helped me make sense of the this difficult passage.

But why would equilibrium, the terminal state, have to have been attained if it were possible? By virtue of what Nietzsche calls the infinity of past time. The infinity of past time means that becoming cannot have started to become, that it is not something that has become. But, not being something that has become it cannot be a becoming something. Not having become, it would already be what it is becoming - if it were becoming something. That is to say, past time being infinite, becoming would have attained its final state if it had one. And, indeed, saying that becoming would have attained its final state if it had one is the same as saying that it would not have left its initial state if it had one. If becoming becomes something why has it not finished becoming long ago? If it is something which has become then how could it have started to become? (NP, 47)

We could read this as beginning with the premise that past time is infinite and ending with the conclusion that the world can have no equilibrium state.  Or would could see the infinity of past time here as derived from the idea that, since becoming has no fixed identity as a thing, it cannot be said to have started or stopped.  Where there are no limits, there are no distinct things, and so no arising and passing of those things either.  Becoming is "eternal" not because it is something embedded in time that happens to have a very long, even infinite, duration, but because there is nothing outside becoming.  It is not embedded in time; it is time.  

An infinite and unlimited becoming obviously cannot terminate in a fixed state.  What's more, it cannot even be made to pass through the set of discreet individual states we call the present.  Contrary to what Plato and our common sense imagine, becoming can never be frozen at a particular point, and in this way contained in a series of separated snapshots.  In other words, becoming can't be one moment in time because it must be all of time.

Plato said that if everything that becomes can never avoid the present then, as soon as it is there, it ceases to become and is then what it was in the process of becoming. (NP, 47)

Seeing That Frees cautioned against interpreting the familiar notion of "living in the now" by hypostatizing even the present moment as something with inherent independent existence.  Time too, Burbea claims, is empty, nothing but a fabrication, a synthesis.  Our idea that only the present truly is, that it is precisely what the universe arrives at, even if momentarily, after all that becoming, only begs the question of exactly what's going on in this present moment.  This question may sound puzzling to common sense, but deeper introspection can start to show us that the present is so complicated that it's 'identity' doesn't seem to end. 

That the present moment is not a moment of being or of present "in the strict sense", that it is the passing moment, forces us to think of becoming, but to think of it precisely as what could not have started, and cannot finish, becoming. (NP, 48)

To better communicate his point, Deleuze decides to present this same idea using a simpler terminology that he will carry all the way through his Cinema books.  How does the present pass?  If the present is the only thing that truly is, and the past and the future, by contrast, are not, then what exists which could push the present out of the way, so to speak, in order to turn it into the past of a new present?   Where could this new present have come from?  And what happens to the being of the old present, which we assumed was the entirety of being.  If the present truly had a fixed and limited identity, we would never be able to leave it.  There would have to be some sort of unbridgeable nothingness all around it that separated it from every other present.  If there were something like a "present state of the universe" that fully defined it, then it would make the passage of time a complete mystery, a force that could only be added to the universe from without and arbitrarily.  Instead, Deleuze suggests that we can only understand the passage of time as necessary if we see the present as synthetic -- as a synthesis of past and future.

How can the present pass? The passing moment could never pass if it were not already past and yet to come - at the same time as being present. If the present did not pass of its own accord, if it had to wait for a new present in order to become past, the past in general would never be constituted in time, and this particular present would not pass. We cannot wait, the moment must be simultaneously present and past, present and yet to come, in order for it to pass (and to pass for the sake of other moments). The present must coexist with itself as past and yet to come. The synthetic relation of the moment to itself as present, past and future grounds it relation to other moments. (NP, 48)

We've encountered this idea of the emptiness of the present many times before.  It's the time crystal.   It's the Infinitely splitting present we discovered that Heidegger was unable to see in Zarathustra.  Here the passage of time isn't a motion from one moment to another completely distinct one.  It's not a flip book of drawings that miraculously produce the cinematic illusion.  Instead, the passage of time becomes a re-presentation, a transformation, of a never completed whole.  Every moment which passes is in fact every-moment seem from a new angle.  Every moment is all of time, an eternity of infinite recursive depth, the re-represents itself at every moment.  This makes it exactly the opposite of the infinitely thin slice model we habitually use to turn the present into an object and time into something external.   

Time as recursive splitting is precisely the eternal return.  In a sense, at the limit, there's only one moment, but that moment only exists as an infinite series (or perhaps more accurately as an infinite series of infinite series of ... as Yamada Koun observed, ultimately there's not even one thing).  This differs from our understanding of time as an infinite series of static presents because it reverse the relations between finite and infinite, one and many.  In place of an infinite series of finite moments that pass us by as we count a succession of integer units, ER understands time as a single finite moment, "complete yet unlimited", that is itself already an infinite series.  This reversal of perspective is exactly what makes fractal geometry interesting.  The finite 'unit' is already an infinite sum of terms that are themselves infinite sums.  The image we should have of the Return is as an endless recursive web that reappears within each term that constitutes it.  Keeping this image in mind goes a long way in interpreting some of Deleuze's more difficult passages.

In other words, identity in the eternal return does not describe the nature of that which returns but, on the contrary, the fact of returning for that which differs. This is why the eternal return must be thought of as a synthesis; a synthesis of time and its dimensions, a synthesis of diversity and its reproduction, a synthesis of becoming and the being which is affirmed in becoming, a synthesis of double affirmation. (NP, 48)

What's reproduced in every moment is the diversity of the series that compose it.  It's exactly this continual reappearance of diversity within the moment that the mechanistic view cannot account for.  As we've pointed out, if we atomize time into unrelated instants (perhaps represented as points in the phase space of the universe) we'll never understand how time can pass without invoking the thumb of some external God who flips the pages of our cine de dedo.  And if time doesn't pass on its own, so to speak, we will be stuck in and limited to an eternal present, even if we conceive of this present as an endless circle (closed trajectory in phase space).  The problem is that the self-identical atomic moment can contain no internal structure or diversity.  A time atom is antithetical to the very notion of the passage of time.  

This final state is held to be identical to the initial state and, to this extent, it is concluded that the mechanical process passes through the same set of differences again. The cyclical hypothesis, so heavily criticised by Nietzsche (VP II 325 and 334), arises in this way. Because we cannot understand how this process can possibly leave the initial state, reemerge from the final state, or pass through the same set of differences again and yet not even have the power to pass once through whatever differences there are [now, in the present]. The cyclical hypothesis is incapable of accounting for two things - the diversity of co-existing cycles and, above all, the existence of diversity within the cycle. (NP, 49)

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By this point, you can probably imagine where it goes from here.  The infinite fractal splitting of time into two asymmetrical sides (ie. the eternal return) is the same process as the differentiation of force into two asymmetrical components: active and reactive.  The motor of this process is the will to power.  Which is to say that the will to power is the principle behind the unlimited becoming of the eternal return.  Subsection 2.6 is devoted to elaborating this idea that the will to power is the differential element within force that gives rise to and reproduces the qualitative diversity of active and reactive.  

The basic concept here is relatively simple.  The will to power produces the quantitative difference in power between forces that can never be equalized or canceled.  As a result it thereby produces a qualitative difference between types of forces. 

We must remember that every force has an essential relation to other forces, that the essence of force is its quantitative difference from other forces and that this difference is expressed as the force's quality. Now, difference in quantity, understood in this way, necessarily reflects a differential element of related forces - which is also the genetic element of the qualities of these forces. This is what the will to power is; the genealogical element of force, both differential and genetic. The will to power is the element from which derive both the quantitative difference of related forces and the quality that devolves into each force in this relation. The will to power here reveals its nature as the principle of the synthesis of forces. (NP, 49)

There is a subtlety lurking here though, when we come the question of the exact relation between the will to power and the forces involved in this differentiation.  We can ask: who wills in the will to power?  The answer can't be that forces 'possess' a will to power.  Remember, individual forces have no existence, and hence no will, of their own, but only exist as such once chance brings them together in a relation.  So the will to power does not correspond to a force's innate desire for power.  

The will to power is thus ascribed to force, but in a very special way: it is both a complement of force and something internal to it. It is not ascribed to it as a predicate. Indeed, if we pose the question "which one", we cannot say that force is the one that wills. The will to power alone is the one that wills, it does not let itself be delegated or alienated to another subject, even to force (VP I 204, II 54; "Who therefore wills power? An absurd question, if being is by itself will to power ...") (NP, 49)

Instead, the will to power seems to have an autonomous 'force' of its own, one that allows other forces to express themselves through their difference.  It's a "genetic" principle in the sense that it generates forces as such, and assigns to each what it can do in a given configuration.  Unfortunately, calling the will to power a "principle" that operates beneath or before forces gives us the impression that the will to power by itself has some sort of ultimate metaphysical reality.  Deleuze explicitly cautions against this reading of the term.  

The will to power is, indeed, never separable from particular determined forces, from their quantities, qualities and directions. It is never superior to the ways that it determines a relation between forces, it is always plastic and changing. (NP, 50)

This seems to leave us at a bit of an impasse.  Forces don't have a will to power, a will to domination as some sort of end goal.  But neither is the will to power something that fabricates forces on its own.  In fact, it's quite tricky to understand the reality of the will to power.  It's an element with a huge determining effect on forces, but one without any reality of its own.  It's genetic, as in it generates new stuff, but at the same time merely differential, in the sense that it differentiates already existing stuff that has been placed in relation.  So does the will to power come before or after force?  Deleuze's explanation doesn't really help clear up the mystery either, since it's at precisely this juncture that he introduces the notation Leibniz invented for the "differential element" in calculus -- dx.  

... it [WtP] is added to force as the internal principle of the determination of its quality in a relation (x+dx) and as the internal principle of the quantitative determination of this relation itself (dy/dx). The will to power must be described as the genealogical element of force and of forces. Thus it is always through the will to power that one force prevails over others and dominates or commands them. Moreover it is also the will to power (dy) which makes a force obey within a relation; it is through will to power that it obeys. (NP, 51)

This appears to be the root of the very difficult ideas we find in the second half of D&R.  The differential is a non-element, a non-thing in itself, an infinitesimal nothing, that nevertheless ends up determining the relations of (maybe even producing) real things (in this case forces).  I don't understand this idea yet.  Perhaps this problem is why Deleuze concludes this subsection with an obscure passage about Kant (pg. 51-2).  He feels that a full explanation of the connection between WtP and ER depends on understanding Nietzsche's relationship to Kant, which is the subject of the next chapter: "Critique".  I don't understand yet why we need Kant here.  Perhaps it will end up being related to a seemingly obvious question raised by my comparing time to a power hierarchy --  the synthesis of time in the eternal return involves an infinite fractal splitting, whereas the synthesis of forces involved in the will to power only appears to go one level deep.  That is, it's not clear how the will to power would necessarily involve a reproduction of the split between active and passive.  Or perhaps another way to put this would be to wonder how the will to power can be both genetic and differential at the same time.  These seem as if they could only be two successive steps in a process, and yet Deleuze insists we see them as a single principle.  The only model I can think of that combines these two notions in a single concept is embryogenesis.