Let me just take another look. Though it's perhaps not obvious at first glance, the dude's request is another expression of faith in the principle of sufficient reason. Normally, we understand this as the principle that "everything has a reason", and we quickly assimilate it to the modern, mechanistic claim that "everything has a cause". But, while this latter might be true, it's not what Leibniz has in mind with his principle. Sure, there are always efficient causes of everything that happens to something. There is always a chain of colliding billiard balls leading up to and away from every event. But why, by what reason, do those collisions produce this event? The principle tells us that there is a reason event X can happen to thing Y, a reason which is not merely contingent and accidental, but somehow included in what it means to be precisely thing Y. Sufficient reason insists that if we just look down far enough into a subject we can read its entire biography off at once. The mere concept of a subject is sufficient to explain all the things that happen to it as its life unfolds.
It's clear that we're describing the way the monad includes the entire world. So it might at first seem like the principle of sufficient reason is little more than a restatement of the definition of a monad. While these two are certainly related, the scheme that Deleuze unfolds in chapter 4 is significantly more complicated than this. The key issue is that the principle of sufficient reason is not the only important principle in Leibniz's philosophy, nor, despite its centrality, is the monad the only subject. This is also to say that the way the monad includes the whole world is not the only possible type of inclusion. In fact, Deleuze discusses 4 types of inclusion, which define 4 types of subject, ruled by 4 different principles, as shown in the following chart.
This chart helps us distinguish the baroque and sometimes seemingly contradictory details of Leibniz's philosophy, but I don't want to get bogged down in it. Because it also serves to join these ideas into a system. The overarching point here is that in some sense all these principles are really the same principle, and all these subjects really the same subject, even though each expression of this underlying system is always unique. Deleuze interprets the continuity across this chart as a "creation of concepts" (F, 80) or we might call it a sort of 'becoming of the concept'. It's as if we were laying out everything that a concept can do -- it can stretch all the way from God to the most individual thing, while having various adventures along the way. For Leibniz, the concept becomes a real being in motion, unfolding itself into these different shapes, not a static picture in the head of some hairless ape.
In short, one finds in Leibniz an entire history of the concept that passes through wholes-parts, things and substances, through extensions, intensions, and individuals, and through which the concept itself becomes a subject, in conformity with each level. This is the rupture with the classical conception of the concept as a being of reason: the concept is no longer the essence or logical possibility of its object, but the metaphysical reality of the corresponding subject. (F, 76)
At first, it can be hard to see what's so completely new about this notion of the concept. I mean, what's the difference between a "logical" and a "metaphysical" being? One way to appreciate the change is to consider what it means for a concept to have certain 'properties', or as a Deleuze prefers to put it in this chapter, what it means to predicate something of a concept.
The classical conception of the concept suggests that what we predicate of a thing can be considered its attributes. I am a writer. I think. Ergo, I am a thinking thing. The subject here is fundamentally a noun. We conceive of it as a neutral substrate of sorts that underlies whatever attributes it presents. Some of these attributes may be accidental and others essential, but in either case there is still a distinction between the thing itself and its attributes. We put the thing itself on one side, and everything that happens to it on the other, similarly to the way we divide motion into the mobile object and its successive possible positions. In short, the logical concept separates the thing from its power of acting, and operates on a "subject-copula-attribute schema" (F, 74). This is the only way we can conceive of a neutral and static thing that in principle is without doing anything (there must be some joke about Being and Copulation that Heidegger overlooked).
By contrast, Leibniz's idea of the concept understands the subject as a verb -- "not 'the tree is green' but 'the tree greens…' "(F, 75)
Leibnizian inclusion rests on a subject-verb-complement schema, which since Antiquity has resisted the schema of attribution: a Baroque grammar in which the predicate is above all relation and event, and not attribute. (F, 74)
Instead of being external attributes of the subject, predicates become internal events, and everything which happens to the subject is already included within it. As a result, everything the subject does is already an inherent aspect of it, simply waiting to be unfolded, and we need never attribute any new state to it from the outside. Which is to say that the concept is not a general idea of the thing that remains constant throughout all its changes and which we later make more specific by specifying various attributes. It is no longer merely the logical identity in the equation I am X, Y or Z, or the greatest common denominator, as it were, of everything that happens to it. Instead, the concept becomes a real individual thing. It already completely specifies everything that will happen to it and even the entirety of the world in which it will happen, as if it could 'survey' (as Ruyer put it) its entire trajectory. In short, it becomes a real, almost self-sufficient, metaphysical being, that doesn't need our external help to find its attributes.
Above all, the concept is not a simple logical being but a metaphysical being; it is not a generality or a universality but an individual; it is not defined by an attribute but by predicates-events. (F, 61)
Since I promised not to go into the details of that complicated chart, I think there's only one more point to touch on in this chapter. We've seen Deleuze insist that, in Leibniz's world, predication is never attribution, because the concept is (or can at least become) a real individual. But since this individual stretches to encompass everything, we can no longer look at it as defined by an essence that would underlie and undergo various modifications, or as an essential substance that would take on various shapes and forms. Instead, Leibniz's individual has to be nothing but the unity of all its fluctuations. Every event that happens to it is already part of it, which turns its essence into just a run-on string of verbs. This is the at first counterintuitive consequence of inclusion -- when everything is necessarily included, there no essential core left that is separable from these variations. What we usually think of as an essential subject passing through a particular state becomes a manner of being that appears within the subject. Fundamentally, the subject presented is always the same, and each monad includes the same world, But time allows various aspects of angles to come forwards. Deleuze calls this Leibniz's "Mannerism".
Classicism requires a solid and constant attribute for substance, whereas Mannerism is. fluid: it replaces the essentiality of the attribute with the spontaneity of manners. (F, 78)
It may sound odd to hear Leibniz call the 'manners' of the subject "spontaneous" when we know that he considers its entire history as contained in its concept. But if we associate spontaneity with whatever new event rises from within, in contrast to events determined from the outside through contact with something else, then the term makes perfect sense. The monad never actually encounters anything but itself. It is constructed entirely from the unity of relations between internal events, albeit a unity which always refers back to the whole world the monad must harmonize with or express. This world is folded up into the monad, each of which clearly unfolds only a particular portion of it at any given spatio-temporal point, making each monad a 'manner of being' of the whole world.
This is the second aspect of Mannerism, without which the first would remain empty. The first is the spontaneity of manners which is opposed to the essentiality of the attribute. The second is the omnipresence of the dark depth [fond] that is opposed to the clarity of form, and without which the manners would have no place from which to emerge. The entire formula of the Mannerism of substances is: "Everything in them is born out of their own depths, through a perfect spontaneity." (F, 79)
No comments:
Post a Comment