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)
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