The Folds of Matter

In my previous rant, I mentioned in passing that the first chapter of The Fold is relatively straightforward except for its somewhat subtle and unusual conception of how matter and souls are related.  Since this is an important issue that connects the concept of the fold to that of the individual, I want to spend a moment considering it in more detail.  Roughly speaking, the idea is that it's the unity of the individual soul that causes matter to fold up around it.

Deleuze begins by introducing us to the "Baroque House", and even provides an architectural diagram.

The house has a lower, material, floor that is open to the world, and an upper, spiritual floor that is sealed shut on itself, even though it communicates with the lower floor through some sort of mechanism we'll explore later.  At first, this might seem like the simple dualistic view we often associate with Christianity.  On the one hand we have 'bad' matter (complex, divisible), and on the other we have the 'good' soul (simple, unified, indivisible).  While this isn't completely wrong, it's too simple a scheme to represent Leibniz's philosophy.  For starters, Deleuze emphasizes that both floors of the house are folded.  The soul is thus already more complicated than our usual simple and point-like conception of it.  And Leibniz's idea of matter also turns out to be quite a bit more complex than the atomic conception of it that we still hold dear. 

The idea that matter is composed of parts was hardly revolutionary in Leibniz's time.  Descartes had already built his own dualistic philosophy on this basis.  But a part is not the same thing as a fold, even if both have something to do with the subdivisions of matter.  Further, for Leibniz, as we'll see, matter can have specifically organic folds that can't be reduced to mere mechanism and which testify to the presence of, but should not be confused with, 'organic souls' that are already mixed into matter.  So the lower floor of the house is already quite complex.  It is folded in two qualitatively distinct ways (inorganic and organic) and it is 'leavened' with souls sprinkled throughout. 

But Leibniz's scheme contains an even more startlingly original idea -- the upper floor, the soul, is also folded.  While it's a unitary individual, it nevertheless has a complicated internal structure.  The soul is immaterial, but it is not simply an undifferentiated point.  This is clearly a preview of the monad.  The indivisible spiritual atom actually contains everything that will happen to it, along with the entire world in which it will happen, folded up inside.  So we might say that the usual dualistic view of matter and soul is only a starting point for Leibiniz, not somewhere to rest.

In this first chapter, Deleuze only discusses the two types of folding of matter, and leaves the question of how exactly the soul itself is folded for later.  But he also discusses a second way in which a simple dualistic conception of the relation between matter and soul fails to capture what Leibniz has in mind.  Not only are both levels of the house themselves folded, but they are folded together into one another.  The two floors of the house are really distinct, but nevertheless totally inseparable.  In fact, this concept of distinction combined with inseparability could almost serve as a shorthand for the whole concept of the fold.  For Leibniz, matter and soul are not merely separate realms that can be contingently related by, say, Descartes's pineal gland.  They are inherently related by being folded on top of one another not just once, but over and over again on an infinite variety of scales.  Souls are everywhere 'folded into' matter as if they had been kneaded into dough.  So the two floors here are actually strangely mixed up and inseparable, not simply sitting on top of one another like oil on vinegar.

But then, how exactly are they really distinct?  To answer this, I think we have to retrace the details of the two ways matter is folded in order to see how these folds actually imply that something qualitatively distinct has been folded into their 'hollows'.  

The first fold of matter is the inorganic fold.  Dead matter, for Leibniz, is infinitely divisible.  Which, first off, is to assert that it doesn't have any indivisible atoms.  But it is also to assert that its continuity is not a matter of merely aggregating pure points.  Apparently, Descartes conceived the continuum of the real number line in this fashion, that is, as simply a collection of all the individual points between zero and one.  By contrast, Leibniz thinks of this continuum as an endless process of division by folding.  Within each fold we can always make another fold, ad infinitum, without ever reaching a set of disjoint points.  This "labyrinth of the continuum" is Leibniz's image for matter as a whole, and is meant to account for both its continuity as well as its separation into distinct, rigid bodies.  I find this a very interesting shift in perspective -- matter is not a collection of unitary building blocks, but instead of linked infinities.

The idea seems to be that this infinitely folded structure gives matter its elastic properties, which is the key to understanding why 'rigid' matter behaves as it does.  For example, Leibniz famously thought that the effect of the collision of two billiard balls could not be explained by simply saying that one ball caused the other to move.  He thought that each individual ball moved only under its own force, almost as if it had some internal monadic will.  Thus the first ball merely triggered a potential movement that the second ball had harbored all along.  This sounds goofy in the context of classical physics, but makes more sense if we transpose the question to the domain of quantum mechanics.  Particle accelerators only do interesting work because two atoms don't simply "bounce off" one another like billiard balls.  And even our common sense notion of rigid bodies transferring energy breaks down when we start to ask why the second ball is rigid rather than simply assuming it.  It's only the internal structure of the ball that permits it to respond as a rigid body under certain conditions.  So it's behavior actually is kinda determined 'from within', and the energy and momentum supplied by the first ball serving more as trigger than a direct cause.

Since matter is infinitely divided by being folded over on itself again and again, it already has both a structure at every level, as well as a connection between levels that determines the elasticity of bodies under different conditions.  As a result, it can vary between acting like a fluid and acting like a marble.  The image of a fold may be puzzling here, but it makes more sense when you see it in action.  Matter can compress and expand like an accordion, and it can do this at many levels simultaneously.  This permits it both a structure and a fluidity, the combination of which Deleuze will characterize as "spring" (ressort).  'Rigid' bodies are simply very tightly coiled springs.  But even then, they can fold up under some circumstances and unfold under others.  In a way, it's almost as if even inorganic matter can 'breathe', or as Deleuze says it is, "... an almost muscular conception of matter that puts the spring everywhere." (F, 5 -- using Smith page numbers).  As a result, the model we should use for it is less a collection of marbles than a series of vortices within vortices or waves within waves that can expand on one level while contracting on another (see footnote 14 to chapter 1).

All of these characteristics draw inorganic matter closer to how we think of organic matter.  But for Leibniz there's still an important distinction between these two.  Or rather, it's not a distinction between two types of matter, but between two types of foldings that a single matter can undergo.  Inorganic folding is compressive-elastic, whereas organic folding is plastic and developmental.  Both folds go to infinity as nested fractal structures, but the force that produces folding and unfolding is different in the two cases.  The movement of each inorganic fold is produced by forces exterior to it, where pressure of neighboring folds either press it into a folded position, or pull it into an unfolded position.  By contrast, each organic fold has a life of its own, an interior motive force of its own. This force, however, doesn't cause matter to expand and contract but to develop and regress, to unfold or refold its organic potential. 

Clearly fascinated by the invention of the microscope, Leibniz frequently talks about the tiny organisms inside even the smallest bit of matter, so that:

each portion of matter can be conceived as like a garden full of plants, or like a pond full of fish. But each branch of a plant, each organ of an animal, each drop of its bodily fluids is also a similar garden or a similar pond" (Monadology, 67).  

Every living thing acts as an ecosystem for a whole host of still smaller living things, some of which may one day even outgrow the pond in which they're born.  But unlike inorganic compression, this organic folding isn't just a matter of a changes in size and rigidity; the organisms inside the fish are not just more fish.  The organic introduces a qualitative variety into the world that contrasts with the merely quantitative folds of the inorganic.

Nevertheless, Leibniz still considers organic folding completely material.  He believes in organic souls, though it's not these souls that cause matter to take on an organic form.  His idea is that, just as matter is infinitely divisible, it is also infinitely alive.  We never reach a smallest unit of the organic any more than we reach an inorganic atom.  Deleuze expresses the infinite organic folding as the difference between a mechanism and a machine.  The various human technologies we usually call machines are technically mechanisms.  This is because, while they may consist of some sub-assemblies that could function as machines in their own right, if we carry our analysis further, we quickly reach parts that are nothing more than inert functional pieces that can't operate as machines in their own right.  By contrast, an organic machine is so perfect that every part of it is also a machine, ad infinitum.  Thus, there's never really a production of organic form, but only an unfolding of an infinite variety of forms that already existed, but were folded up from the beginning, awaiting their unfurling.  Organic forms are like seeds scattered through all of matter, lying dormant until their unfolding into trees. 

It's finally at this point where we can start to see why the house needs a second, immaterial, floor.  Organic matter is still material.  Indeed, it's sort of infinitely material -- the forces which organize matter into organic forms exist in an infinite variety and at every scale.  But then, where do these forces come from?  They're qualitatively distinct from the compressive-elastic forces that 'animate' inorganic matter, and Leibniz doesn't see them emerging from the action of those forces.  Instead, they've always been there.  On this point, Deleuze devotes a couple pages to updating Leibniz's idea of preformation, but I think I'll spare you the details.  The point is that every apparently 'new' organism appears from the unfolding of an already existing organism that had merely been hidden within the infinite folds of another.  Since organic folding is as infinite as the inorganic, this progression has no beginning, and we are left wondering where these organic forms came from.  It's only with a series of qualitative folds that an infinite regress becomes problematic.  The question is what produces the unity of these forms at every level.

Masses and organisms, masses and living beings, thus fill the lower floor. Why then is another floor needed, since the sensitive or animal souls are already there, inseparable from organic bodies? ... Of course, everything in the body takes place machinically, in accordance with plastic forces that are material, but these forces explain everything except the variable degrees of unity to which they lead the masses they are organizing (a plant, a worm, a vertebrate…). The plastic forces of matter act on masses, but they subject them to real unities that they themselves presuppose. They make an organic synthesis, but they presuppose the soul as the unity of the synthesis, or as the "immaterial principle of life." It is only here that an animism finds itself joined to organicism, from the standpoint of pure unity or union, independent of any causal action. The fact remains that organisms would not, on their own account, have the causal power to fold themselves to infinity, and to subsist in the ashes, without the soul-unities from which they are inseparable, and which are inseparable from them. (F, 10)

In other words, we need to invoke the level of the soul because the behavior of matter displays not only efficient, but final causes.  It has true unities at which it appears to aim.  It is not simply an agglomeration of quantitative inorganic folds that happen to be occasionally pushed into a qualitative organic form.  And the organic forms themselves unfold in a logic of development that seems to aim at something -- namely, the rational human soul.  It's really the possibility of these 'ends' that forces us to admit the upper level of the house.  We have to account for the fact that animals like us feel ourselves to be more than simply determined machines.  We have to account for the fact that we feel distinct and 'higher' than merely material entities, not only as a species, but individually.

But this is the whole problem: What happens to bodies that are destined, from the semen of Adam which envelops them, to become human bodies? Juridically, one could say that they carry the seeds of [en germe] "a kind of sealed act" that marks their fate. And when the time comes for them to unfold their parts, to attain the degree of organic development proper to man, or to form cerebral folds, their animal soul at the same time becomes reasonable, by gaining a higher degree of unity (mind) ...  

Now, in any case, this becoming is an elevation, an exaltation: a change of theater, of rule, of plateau, or of floor. The theater of matter gives way to that of minds, or of God. (F, 10)

However, once we admit this metaphysical dimension of finality that goes beyond matter and unifies efficient causes in our own case, it turns out that we find it everywhere folded into nature.  Animal souls too must possess something of this dimension, and even inorganic matter seems to behave as if it were 'animated' by something internal to the 'springiness' of its folds.  So while we first encounter the need for a metaphysical dimension by considering our own human existence, we quickly find ourselves projecting this dimension back into the whole material world, folding all kinds of souls in amongst the matter.  

At this point in Deleuze's text, this logic still seem a little vague to me.  But I think we're seeing a preview of the same sequence that Ruyer cannily followed in NeoFinalism.  We naturally and intuitively assert a finalism when we think of our own unity of thinking.  In fact, the cogito is axiological -- we cannot self-consistently assert that we are mere meaningless machines.  But once we introduce this meaningful "metaphysical transversal" that constitutes a new immaterial dimension of reality we cannot confine it to the human brain.  We find it again in the embryo and even down at the level of the quantum particle.  It's not that everything we usually think of as a form possesses this dimension.  This is not panpsychism; there are still 'things' that are pure material aggregates, like, say, a (non-crystal) rock; nor is there a single organism which contains all the others as parts.  But organisms, along with the souls that account for their unity, are everywhere.  As Deleuze puts it:

For Leibniz, as for the Baroque, the principles of reason are veritable cries: Not everything is a fish, but there are fish everywhere … There is no universality, but there is a ubiquity of the living.   (F, 8)

Sandwich à la merde

While I was a gold star student in my freshman high school class, the fact this was the only year I've studied French means that my command of the language is somewhat rusty.  Nevertheless, I feel confident that the title reflects the most accurate two word review (in English, at least) of Tom Conley's translation of The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque.  Since you might be tempted to dismiss this act of linguistic hubris, allow me to show you abundant evidence of editorial and translatorial malpractice.  You can download a scan of Conley's translation here.  You can download a scan of the original French version here (or an excerpt of the first chapter here).  Even my teenage French is sufficient to identify the problems when comparing these two.  But for corroboration, we can also consult a fragmentary English translation prepared by Jonathan Strauss, as well as an unpublished translation by Daniel W. Smith. 

Reading Deleuze is never easy.  But in his solo work (ie. outside the collaborations with Felix Guattarri) the problem is usually not a linguistic one; the problem is not the overly complex grammar and vocabulary that often make French philosophy so infamous.  Instead, the problem is that a relatively spare and dry style conceals a complex and exuberant philosophical content.  Luckily, this is just what you pay us the big bucks for.  Here at FPiPE we've been translating French Philosophical content into Plain English for over 6 years now!  So let me begin with a brief overview of the philosophical content of the chapter, so that we can better see the confusions Conley's many errors are liable to introduce. 

The basic idea is pretty simple.  What distinguishes Leibniz's philosophy is an obsession with infinite folding.  His view of things always seems to involve some sort of recursion -- any one thing is already double, and each of these aspects is in turn itself double, and so on ... ad infinitum.  A fold of course already involves two sides.  But each fold is always within another fold, and also contains other folds within it.  In short, the fold is a fractal concept.  It's clear that initially the two sides of the fold are matter and soul.  On the one side we have extensive matter, and on the other we have the immaterial soul.  These sides are distinct and never touch causally, yet they somehow communicate or resonate with one another.  Each of them is, in its turn, itself also folded and refolded.  Matter folds together inorganic and organic matter, interleaving these as butter and pastry in a croissant.  And then each of these these types of matter is constituted by a distinct type of folding.  Inorganic matter is characterized by a compressive and elastic folding that creates an infinite hierarchy of objects of varying solidity.  The simplest metaphor for these inorganic material objects is the vortex, and for Leibniz, it is vortices all the way down -- matter is indefinitely divisible; we never reach a void or any homogeneous atomic units.  Organic matter is also folded, though along a qualitative rather than quantitative axis.  Each organism contains other organisms folded within it, which allows for a whole series a future organisms to unfold.  Unlike the vortices of matter, which are all the same type of object at different scales, each level of organic fold is different.  As a result, organic folding and unfolding appears to us in the form of evolution and devolution, developing or reducing the complexity of organic forms.  And that -- aside from a somewhat subtle point about how souls, while distinct, are not simply 'above' matter but actually everywhere mixed into it like, say, raisins in pain aux raisins -- completes the basic outline of the first chapter.

Now let's examine how the combination of terrible editing and Conley's appalling translation makes this relatively simple scheme much harder to understand. 

1) The first error I find is a relatively simple and comparatively harmless one.  Conley has:

A "cryptographer"' is needed, someone who can al once account for nature and decipher the soul, who can peer into the crannies of matter and read into the folds of the soul. (pg. 3)

Deleuze in the original:

Il faut une « cryptographie » qui, à la fois, dénombre la nature et déchiffre l'âme, voit dans les replis de la matière et lit dans les plis de l'âme

I know from a past footnote that "qui" can be either "who" or "which".  But in this case isn't it obvious that Deleuze is searching for a type of thinking and not a particular thinking person?  Strauss and Smith both preserve the clear impersonal "cryptography" as opposed to gratuitously turning it into the personal "cryptographer".  Like I say though, this minor ad lib on Conley's part doesn't create important philosophical confusion.  To be honest, I only discovered it when I had already found so many much larger errors that I went looking for more. 

2)  I was first alerted to the possibility that Conley's translation had problems by the following passage:

The text also fash­ions a way of representing what Leibniz will always affirm a correspondence and even a communication between the two levels. between the two labyrinths, between the pleats of mailer and the folds in the soul. A fold between the two folds? And the same image, that of veins in marble, is applied to the two under different conditions. Sometimes the veins are the pleats of mailer that surround living beings held in the mass, such that the marble tile resembles a rippling lake that teems with fish. Sometimes the veins are innate ideas in the soul, like twisted figures or powerful statues caught in the block of marble. Matter is mar­bled, of two different styles. (pg. 4)

As you can see, Deleuze is discussing the first fold, between matter and soul.  It seems the same image of a marbled tile could apply to either side of the fold.  But then the final line becomes puzzling.  Does it indicate that only matter is marbled, and that this matter is marbled "of two different styles"?  Not only does this sentence sound clunky in English (what was wrong with "in two different ways or manners"?) but it introduces a real confusion the first few times you read it in context.  I mean, what exactly are the two styles in which matter is marbled?  And weren't we talking about the differences and similarities between matter and soul?  Indeed, it turns out we were.  Here is the original:

Il n'en forme pas moins une façon de représenter ce que Leibniz affirmera toujours, une correspondance et même une communication entre les deux étages, entre les deux labyrinthes, les replis de la matière et les plis dans l'âme. Un pli entre les deux plis? Et la même image, celle des veines de marbre, s'applique aux deux sous des conditions différentes : tantôt les veines sont les replis de matière qui entourent les vivants pris dans la masse, si bien que le carreau de marbre est comme un lac ondoyant plein de poissons. Tantôt les veines sont les idées innées dans l'âme, comme les figures pliées ou les statues en puissance prises dans le bloc de marbre. La matière est marbrée, l'âme est marbrée, de deux manières différentes.

Even I can see that Conley's final line is missing a crucial clause.  The soul too is marbled, though in a different way, which makes perfect sense in the context.   Perhaps we could chalk this up to an editorial mishap.  But the same passage contains another pretty obvious error when it translates "en puissance" as "powerful".  What exactly is a powerful statue caught in marble? What would make it powerful, and how would this convey the marbling of the soul?  To restore some sense to the image we have to replace "powerful" with "potential" as Smith, Strauss and the first fucking google result for "en puissance french translation" all do.  A potential statue caught in a block of marble clearly "marbles" it the simple sense of giving it some internal differentiation and figuration that might be analogous to innate ideas in the soul.  It's quite lovely to think of our actual world as "marbled" by all the things we think it could be.

3) In the next paragraph, I found myself confused about exactly what error was being attributed to Descartes:

From this, however, we would not conclude, in the second place, that even the most refined matter is perfectly fluid and thus loses its texture (according to a thesis that Leibniz imputes to Descartes). Descartes's error probably concerns what is to be found in different areas. He believed that the real distinction between parts entailed separability. What specifically defines an absolute fluid is the absence of coherence or cohesion; that is, the separability of parts, which in fact applies only to a passive and abstract matter (pg. 5)

What does the bolded sentence even mean?  What does the noun clause, "what is to be found in different areas" refer to?Descartes's error is certainly that he believed that,"a real distinction between parts entailed separability".  So why is it only "probably" Descartes error?  Is Deleuze expressing some doubt about what the error concerns, or about what is to be found, or even about which areas we're talking about?  In fact, he's not saying anything like that.

On n'en concluera pourtant pas, en second lieu, que la matière même la plus subtile soit parfaitement fluide et perde ainsi sa texture, suivant une thèse que Leibniz prête à Descartes. C'est sans doute l'erreur de Descartes qu'on retrouvera dans des domaines différents, d'avoir cru que la distinction réelle entre parties entraînait la séparabilité : ce qui définit un fluide absolu, c'est précisément l'absence de cohérence ou de cohésion, c'est-à-dire la séparabilité des parties, qui ne convient en fait qu'à une matière abstraite et passive

For starters, even my teenage French alerts me to the fact that "sans doute" shouldn't be rendered as "probably".  We can also see that there's no space in the original for what the error "concerns".  In fact, as far as I can see there's no noun clause at all in the French, and "qu'on retrouvera dans des domaines différents" is an adjective clause which modifies Descartes' error of believing that real distinction entails separability.  It seems Descrates made this same error repeatedly and in several different domains.  Which is "probably" why both Smith and Strauss translate it exactly that way.  Here is Smith's version:

No doubt Descartes' error, which appears in different domains, is to have believed that the real distinction between parts entails separability.

[UPDATE: I have been informed by more authoritative sources (Dr. M, private correspondence) that "sans doute" can in fact be translated as "probably".  My high school French teacher is sans doute disappointed in me.]

 4)  Here are another couple small mistakes that create possible confusions, though both of these could conceivably be the editor's fault.  Conley has:

Two consequences result that provide a sense of the affinity of matter with life and organisms. (pg. 6)

and:

But it becomes increasingly probable and natural when an infinity of indeterminate states is given (already folded over each other), each of which includes a cohesion at its level, somewhat like the improbability of forming a word by chance with sepa­rate letters, but with far more likelihood with syllables or inflections. (pg. 7)

The corresponding originals are:

Il en sort déjà deux conséquences qui font pressentir l'affinité de la matière avec la vie, avec l'organisme.

Which makes it crystal clear that life and the organism (singular) are being used as synonyms and not two separate things matter could have an affinity with. 

and:

D'autre part, la formation de l'organisme resterait un mystère improbable ou un miracle si la matière se divisait même à l'infini en points indépendants, mais devient de plus en plus probable et naturelle quand on se donne une infinité d'états intermédiaires (déjà repliés) dont chacun comporte une cohésion, à son niveau, un peu comme il est improbable de former au hasard un mot avec des lettres séparées, mais beaucoup plus probable avec des syllabes ou des flexions

I was confused upon first reading that there were an infinity of indeterminate states, since it seemed like the point of this passage was to assert that inorganic matter already has a structure in itself that organic matter can build on.  That is, inorganic matter is precisely determinate, and not just a random bunch of atoms and void.  Of course, this pre-structuring of the inorganic is exactly intermediate between a (hypothetical) atomized matter and organic matter.

5) Then we find this howler:

If the world is infinitely cavernous, if worlds exist in the tiniest bodies, it is because everywhere there can be found "a spirit in matter," which attests not only to the infinite division of parts but also to progressivity in the gain and loss of movement all the while conservation of force is realized. (pg. 7)

I don't even think this is a coherent English sentence.  "All the while conservation of force is realized," is a sentence in its own right, but here it isn't connected to the rest of the sentence by a comma or anything, so it appears as a kind of non-sequitur.   Here is the original: 

Si le monde est infiniment caverneux, s'il y a des mondes dans les moindres corps, c'est parce qu'il y a « partout du ressort dans la matière », qui ne témoigne pas seulement de la division infinie des parties, mais de la progressivité dans l'acquisition et la perte du mouvement, tout en réalisant la conservation de la force.

It seems to be saying that, because it is animated by a sort of "spirit", matter can divide into parts or gain/lose movement without violating a law of conservation of force.  Accordingly, Smith translates this as:

If the world is infinitely cavernous, if there are worlds in the smallest bodies, it is because there is "a spring everywhere in matter," which testifies to not only the infinite division of parts but also progressivity in the acquisition and loss of movement, all the while retaining the conservation of force. 

So perhaps Conley simply reversed "while" and "the" and omitted a comma.  This still leaves a substantive different between their respective choices of "spirit" and "spring" as a translation of "ressort".  Given that Deleuze has been talking about the "elastic" forces of matter the latter seems much better.  Later, this "ressort", this springiness of matter, will serve as an indicator that even inorganic matter is marbled throughout with souls.  But as always with Leibniz, it's important to differentiate between material and spiritual forces, since the two never actually have any causal interaction.  Matter doesn't have a spirit, but its spring testifies to the irreducible presence of the spiritual.

6) The same paragraph contains another gratuitous omission.

Bref, pour autant que plier ne s'oppose pas à déplier, c'est tendre-détendre, contracter-dilater, comprimer-exploser (non pas condenser-raréfier, qui impliquerait le vide).

... becomes:

In short, to the extent that folding is not opposed to unfolding, such is also the case in the pairs tension-release and contraction-dilation (but not condensation-rarefaction, which would imply a void). (pg. 7)

While it's a small issue, why on earth would you choose to leave out "compress-explode" when it's right there?

7)  Next comes a more confusing error from the very same page.  Deleuze's completely clear statement that all matter is the same but that the forces acting on it are different ...

La matière organique n'est pourtant pas autre que l'inorganique (et la distinction d'une matière première et se- conde n'a rien à voir ici). Inorganique ou organique, c'est la même matière, mais ce ne sont pas les mêmes forces actives qui s'exercent sur elle.

... gets tangled up in questions of what other forces (presumably passive) are exerted on it:

Organic matter is not, however, different from inorganic matter (here, the distinction of a first and a second matter is irrelevant). Whether organic or in­ organic, matter is all one; but active forces are not the only ones exerted upon it. (pg. 7)

8)  Finally, the rest of chapter 1 seems to be okay; we find only one more confusing and again completely own-goal type error on page 9.  Conley tells us:

Thus the universe is neither a great living being, nor is it in itself an Animal: Leibniz rejects this hypothesis as much as he rejects that of a universal Spirit. (pg. 9)

This construction is puzzling because it seems to suggest that "a great living being" and "an Animal" are two distinct things that the universe might be, and that both of these are also distinct from a "universal Spirit".  But the way you construct neither/nor in French turns to be identical to how you do it in Spanish -- ni X ni Y.  And, you'll be neither surprised nor étonné to find that this construction is nowhere in the original.

Aussi l'univers n'est-il pas un grand vivant, il n'est pas l'Animal en soi : Leibniz refuse cette hypothèse, autant qu'il refuse celle d'un Esprit universel

It's obvious that "un gran vivant" and "l'Animal" are used as synonyms in a stylistic repetition here.   At this point it seems Conley is ad libbing like a politician without a teleprompter.  Is he translating here, or trying (unsuccessfully) to write the Quixote?  How did he and the University of Minnesota Press get away with this?  Why aren't there campus protests and picket lines, letters to Senators and outraged Facebook posts going viral?  Has the whole world gone crazy!? Am I the only one who gives a shit about the rules!?  Mark it zero!

------

So there. I've satisfied my most nitpicking impulses.  Luckily, something useful came of the pedantic desire to catalog these errors.  In searching for a pdf of the French original, I came across a full manuscript of Smith's unpublished translation.  I've already sent this off to be printed and bound, and then we can throw Conley's version into the fire. 

 

Leibnizing

I came across Richard Halpern's book on Leibniz in the old fashioned way -- by perusing the shelves at my local bookstore.  While I'm not normally a big reader of academic secondary literature (unless we're counting Deleuze's readings in this category) I thought I'd bow to serendipity and take in a contemporary perspective before returning to The Fold.  It turns out that Halpern has concocted an interesting and vaguely Deleuzian reading of Leibiniz that focuses on the use of analogy in his philosophy.  Since Halpern is a retired literature professor, it's not surprising that he begins by examining the explicit metaphors that appear frequently in everything from Leibniz's letters to his most abstract writings.  But Halpern's thesis is much broader than a merely literary one.  He wants to connect Leibniz's writing style to the content of his philosophy and show us how one of the distinctive things about Leibniz is the way he maps different areas of knowledge onto one another, folding them over, as it were, till they productively touch, thereby creating synthetic concepts that borrow from the many disciplines that interested him.  It's a convincing portrait of "a philosopher in motion" (as the subtitle has it) -- an intellectually restless man often called the last "universal genius", who made major contributions in many fields, and yet who curiously never produced anything like a magnum opus comparable to Spinoza's Ethics.  If there's anything like a flaw in the book, it would be Halpern's own restlessness and corresponding lack of depth.  Not infrequently, he will open up an interesting and complex issue only to make a fairly summary pronouncement about it before moving on (eg. the discussion of panpsychism on pg. 134).  In fairness though, this approach not only suits his own thesis, but keeps the book to manageable dimensions.  Overall then, the book didn't do that much to deepen my understanding of any particular concept Leibniz created, but it did give me a better appreciation of his breadth of thought, as well as make me consider his style of writing for the first time.  I think it could also be a useful and accessible (if somewhat unusual) introduction to Leibniz for someone who isn't going to read the primary material.

One of the reasons that Deleuze associates Leibniz with the Baroque is his aesthetic and philosophical obsession with the concept of unity-in-variety.  The way this description applies to the monad is pretty obvious, but it fits just about every metaphysical concept Leibniz created as well.  This is the best of all possible worlds because it harmoniously includes maximal diversity.  Every body supports an entire world of smaller bodies within it ad infinitum.  A single clear perception is a selection or highlighting or synthesis of the confused murmur of an infinity of tiny microperceptions that extend to the whole universe.  While Leibniz himself always seems sanguine about the coexistence of these two dimensions, we might say that the book's main aim is to show us the many ways in which the principles of unity and variety tug him in opposite directions without pulling him apart.  

Accordingly, Halpern provides us with a variety of illustrations of how this tension works.  For example, he shows us how Leibniz has a tendency to overload his writing by "clumping" metaphors.  Instead of just picking one analogy to illustrate some philosophical point, he provides a whole related group of them.  Yet instead of simply reinforcing his main point, these metaphors often end up complicating it in unexpected ways.  Each of them is different enough that what is supposedly a literary device for reducing abstraction and confusion can actually generate even more of it.  For Halpern though, this is not merely a literary quirk.  It's indicative of a whole style of thinking that he calls "conceptual blending".  Leibniz is constantly mapping different areas of knowledge onto one another even when he doesn't always develop these connections as explicit analogies.  But these isomorphisms don't end up repeating an idea so much as putting it in variation.  Just like with the literary analogies, we're soon confused about which domain provides the canonical model of a concept, and which constitutes its copy.  There are so many analogies that theoretically converge on a single point that in practice we are led off in divergent directions.

To illustrate this effect, Halpern devotes a long chapter to comparing the monad to an infinite mathematical series (eg. the harmonic series).  The analogy is fairly obvious.  Each monad perceives the entire world.  But this world is constructed of other monads with the same type of perception.  So the internal state of each monad at a given moment would consist in certain large clear terms that correspond to other monads it finds itself closely connected to, together with a whole infinity of smaller confused terms that correspond to monads that are 'further away' (in some topological sense -- monads have no extension and no location in extensive spacetime).  And we can redouble the same analogy by considering the second (and third, and n-th) order effect whereby each 'other' monad contains a perception of the 'original' one, which 'original' in turn contains a perception of this image of itself ... creating an infinite series like the reflections of two mirrors facing one another.  In fact, the monad is analogous to an infinite series of infinite series of ... remarkably like Indra's net.  This already makes the monad pretty complicated.

Halpern carries this analogy deeper by pointing out that so far we haven't actually characterized the monad in itself, but just its series of perceptions.  The monad itself would be the law that defines the successive terms in the series (eg. ∑(1/n) in the case of the harmonic series).  This law lays out the entire series of the monad's perceptions all at once from the beginning.  It unifies the monad as a substantial entity with a predetermined set of perceptions that are a consequence of its essence, and not simply the result of randomly bumping into other monads.  This is a crucial feature of Leibniz's "windowless" monad, which somehow packs its entire history -- the sum total of everything that will happen to it and everything that can be truly predicated of it -- into a simple definition.  In itself, each monad is a soul existing outside of space and time, but it unfolds in a law-like manner within it.  Perhaps led by my mention of the harmonic series, the mathematically inclined may justifiably wonder how any such series of series could converge and how any such law could be specified.  It seems to strain credulity to suggest that the infinite variety of a single monad's predetermined perceptions could be unified by a single formula, and yet we need an endlessly reflecting infinity of these to compose a harmonious world.  In short, the monad seems to be an almost impossibly perfect concept.

Halpern completes the analogy between the monad and an infinite series by suggesting that this ideal completeness gives the monad precisely the ontological status often attributed to mathematical objects themselves.  They exist outside of space and time, in some noumenal realm, and yet they can be realized approximately within it, in exactly the way a vibrating string realizes the harmonic series. So perhaps a monad is not so much like an infinite series as it is an infinite series -- its substance is mathematical.  What begins as a straightforward analogy carries us to the point where we become confused about which of its terms is the 'real' one.  And yet Halpern concludes by observing that even at this point, we cannot simply identify a monad with a mathematical series.  There's still more to the concept than this.  In particular, it's not clear what it would mean for a mathematical object to be free, as Leibniz believes the monad to be.  The isomorphism between the monad and an infinite series is not the only possible perspective on the concept.  As deep as they may go, for Halpern, Leibniz's analogies never provide a definitive perspective.  No analogy is perfect, which is why he adds another and another, in an infinite series whose path to convergence gets more and more complicated.    

We could read through Halpern's whole book by duplicating examples like this one.  The very substance of Leibniz's concepts are these harmonious isomorphisms, and yet their endless multiplication seems to suggest that there's really no 'best' analogy.  Despite these spiraling levels of complexity and recursion, he always seems to complacently believe that everything will converge in the end.  There's a striving towards unity that is perpetually mired in detour.  But in the interests of time, let me skip to what I thought was the best chapter in the book, which I also think most cleanly illustrates this war between the centripetal force of unity and the centrifugal force of variety.  Chapter 19 is entitled: "Dark Leibniz". 

Leibniz was, infamously, an optimist. He claimed we live in the "best of all possible worlds".  God has created the world in such a way that every part of it, every monad, is harmoniously adjusted to every other according to a principle of maximization.  This is the famous doctrine of "pre-established harmony" that explains not only how an infinity of different monads can coexist, and even how an extensionless monad's perceptions can miraculously correspond to a soulless and mechanical matter's motion without any possibility of causal interaction between these.  Halpern, however, shows us a number of passages where the sunny Leibniz seems to have a pretty dark imagination.  His Theodicy particularly seems to rather vividly imagine the sufferings of the world before rather blandly defending the idea that they must all be for the best.  In fact, there even appear to be moments in which Leibniz imagines a somewhat sadistic God who voluntarily adds suffering to his creation to enhance its overall aesthetic effect in the way a composer enhances the glory of a harmonic resolution by a preceding dissonance.  This immediately brings up the question of which metric we use to judge this world 'the best'.  We can think of any number of things that could be maximized, and it's hard to see how even God could make it all optimal on every dimension all the time.  As a result, it's easy to turn Leibnizian optimism inside out -- "the best of all possible worlds" can quickly become "this world is as good as it gets".  The latter implies a sort of dark optimism that borders on Stoic fatalism.  This world is constant suffering and misery, but rejoice, ... any other would be even worse!  Here it feels like the sheer variety of possible worlds threatens to totally overwhelm us, and the harmonious unity we're promised acts almost like a consolation prize.  And indeed, this is how Leibniz's pre-established harmony appears to many folks.  Which leads Halpern to astutely observe that, "Leibniz's genius was to have produced an almost universally repellent form of optimism -- one that is therefore productive of pessimism" (pg. 195).  The precarious balance between unity and variety can end as a moral war between light and dark.  And Leibniz chose both sides in different ways.