Conclusion

Simondon uses his concluding chapter to try and situate his theory of individuation relative to two perennial philosophical questions.  First, his theory has clear implications for understanding how Being relates to Becoming.  Second, he sketches out some ethical implications.  Discussing his thoughts on these topics gives us the perfect way to examine what we should take away from Simondon's brilliant, but quite complex, theory of individuation.

While it may at first seem counterintuitive in a book devoted entirely to the concept of individuation, Simondon here at the end reminds us that the individual is just one phase of "the being".  The being does not begin as an individual, and what has been individuated does not exhaust the being.  Instead, the individual is just a phase of being sandwiched between the pre- and trans-individual, the phase in which being becomes something particular through individuation.  Becoming is thus not opposed to Being, but included within it as one of its phases.  Naturally, this has some deep implications for how we think of Being, because we usually understand this concept on the model of the constituted and finished individual.  If the only kind of being were this completely individuated kind, then Being as a whole could be nothing but a creator god or the sum of all the atomic beings -- nothing but another individual.  This is presumably why Simondon rarely uses the term "Being" and instead talks about "the being".  The being, even the being that we normally consider individuated like myself or my cats, is more than just the individual.  As a concrete reality, the being contains within itself something of the pre-individual, some charge of potential that allows it to become.  This same logic applies even to the being we call Being, which for Simondon corresponds to the pre-individual.  Being is constantly overflowing itself in becoming individuated.  As Simondon put it, it phase-shifts with respect to itself.  Individuation is the process of the becoming of being, "the being's becoming", which means that becoming is not something foreign to being that befalls it from the outside, but a dimension internal to being, the dimension through which the being becomes more than itself. 

As always, at the root of the problem is the question of identity.  And what Simondon has given us is a theory of the production of identity designed to account for its existence without taking it for granted.  Since the being is not identical to itself, it is precisely this self-difference that provides the potential for the creation of identity.  Identity crystallizes. The field of being polarizes when its differences begin to resonate internally and drive it into a self-amplifying split between the identity of the individual and the complementary identity of its milieu.  Thus is born the reciprocal relation of figure and ground, subject and object.  There's no question that Simondon's philosophy contributes greatly to our understanding of nondualism by so carefully investigating the mechanism through which duality is produced, including the duality of Being and Becoming.

We can see all the most interesting aspects of this dualizing mechanism in Simondon's analysis of crystallization.  1) The amorphous medium harbors an energetic potential and a singularity that make it capable of becoming more than itself.  In contrast to 'original Being', it begins as both less and more than unity.  2) The crystal appears through a process that splits the amorphous pre-individual into individual and milieu.  These two are not opposites, but complements that could not exist without one another.  3) Then the crystal grows, the split propagates.  In the case of the crystal, the effect of the individual on its environment allows it to propagate indefinitely and unchanged.  But more complex biological or psychic individuations propagate by reciprocally transforming both their environment and themselves.  Their identity is no longer a simple conservation though reiteration, but a continuity of transformation.  All of this is summed up in Simondon's idea that the individual is not a stable substance, but a metastable solution to a problem.  It is a solution in the sense that it resolves some energetic tension in the pre-individual system.  But this solution is neither unique nor a completely stable equilibrium.  And this latent instability opens up the possibility of new problems and new solutions.  The individual is a metastability that leads to more metastability. 

It's a this point that the question of ethics begins.  What 'should' the individual do?  Simply realize the truth that they are much more than a lone individual.  See that they are always paired with a complementary milieu and that their actions have an impact on everything around them.  The ethical force of this vision, however, doesn't stem from the projected impact of our actions on other individuals just like ourselves.  Simondon is not rediscovering the universalizing force of Kant's categorical imperative.  Because the goal is not to act so as to be able to propagate the same action forever (which would be the effect of everyone following the categorical imperative), as if the point of metastability were only to arrive at complete stability.  Instead the goal is to act so as to expand the possibilities of action of the entire system of which our individuality is merely a part or phase.  The prime directive of an ethics metastability is to preserve metastability.  We want our actions to inspire other actions, that continue individuations that in one sense we are, and that in another sense, are just passing through us. 

The moral act is one that can spread out, phase-shift into lateral acts and link up with other acts by spreading out from its single active center. Far from being the encounter of a matter and a form, of an impulse and a norm, a desire and a rule, an empirical reality and a transcendental reality, the moral act is this reality that is more than unity and that spreads out from itself on both sides by joining with other realities of the same type; to reprise Malebranche's formula concerning freedom, according to which man is said to have movement to always go further, it could be asserted that the free act, or the moral act, is one that has enough reality to go beyond itself and encounter other acts. (I, 378 -- The footnote to this reads: In other words, one that contains within itself a power of amplification.)

Those unfamiliar with the cultivation of the Eternal Return may ask why it is 'better' to preserve metastability.  Why is overcoming our self more ethical than preserving our self?  And indeed, from the perspective of a substantialist view of the individual self, one which divides the world into a pure exterior that follows objective laws and a pure interior wherein lies subjective 'free will', there's really no answer to this question.  Once you have separated them, you can't get from 'is' to 'ought'. But Simondon's whole philosophy of individuation runs counter to precisely this split.  We are constantly in the process of constructing our identities, of overcoming ourselves through ourselves and becoming who we are.  Without this constant transformation there is no 'us'.  We do not inhabit a single instant in time but crystallize an entire past trajectory and possible future into an eternal present.  We remain an individual only by being more than an individual.  And if our acts don't create us and recreate us, if they don't amplify what counts as us, then there simply won't be many more acts.  An individual that closes doors as they go eventually ends up surrounded by closed doors -- hemmed in, diminished, and dead.  Opening, instead, leads to more opening, and on to the endlessly repeated cycle of opening that is the Eternal Return -- a gift economy of pure circulation.

The act that is more than unity, that cannot reside and consist only in itself but also resides and is completed in an infinity of other acts, is an act whose relation to other acts is signification and possesses the value of information. By taking generosity as the foundation of morality, Descartes revealed this power of the act to extend beyond itself. But, since he wanted to found a provisional morality, i.e. a morality that only looks ahead, he did not indicate the retroactive force of the act, which is just as important as its proactive force. Each act takes up the past again and encounters it anew; each moral act resists becoming and does not allow itself to be covered over as past; its proactive force is that through which it will always belong to the system of the present, able to be evoked again in its reality, extended, taken up again by an act, later on according to the date, but contemporaneous with the first act according to the dynamic reality of being's becoming. Acts construct a reciprocal simultaneity, a network that does not allow itself to be reduced by the uni-dimensionality of the successive. An act is moral to the extent that it has, by virtue of its central reality, the power to eventually become simultaneous with respect to another act. (I, 378)