The emphasis of chapter 5 shifts from the subject to the world. Since the whole world is contained within each subject, there is a sense in which these are the ultimately the same thing. Nevertheless, a single possible world still has many subjects, and there are many possible worlds. So it's a mistake to think that the monadic subject and the world are identical. This scheme immediately presents a question. Why is it that there only seems to be one actual world? In other words, what's special about this world and these subjects?
Leibniz answer to this question is well known -- this is the best possible world, and all the things that happen in it are therefore 'for the best'. But as Halpern observed, this apparently sunny optimism hides a dark premise. The Best world is not an Ideal world nor a Necessary world. In fact, it's not even a Good one in the sense in which Plato defined this as a descent from a moral and metaphysical Ideal. Leibniz defends God's choice of this world in the same way that Churchill defended democracy.
How strange is Leibniz's optimism. Once again, it is not that the miseries of the world are lacking—the Best flourishes only on the ruins of the Platonic Good. If this world exists, it is not because it is the best, but rather the inverse: it is the best because it is, because this is the world that is. The philosopher is not yet the Inquirer he will become with empiricism, still less a Judge, as he will become with Kant (the tribunal of Reason). He is a Lawyer or an Attorney, God's attorney: he defends God's Cause, in accordance with the word that Leibniz invented: "theodicy." Of course, the justification of God in the face of evil has always been a commonplace of philosophy. But the Baroque is a long period of crisis, when the ordinary consolations are no longer holding. What takes place is a collapse of the world, such that the attorney has to rebuild the world—the same world exactly—but now on another stage, and related to new principles capable of justifying it (hence the role of jurisprudence). To the enormity of the crisis there must correspond an exasperation of the justification: the world must be the best world, not only in its totality, but in its every detail or in each of its cases. (F, 92)
Here Deleuze isolates the problem that Leibniz's metaphysics is meant to solve. By the time of the Baroque, people are beginning to lose faith in the wisdom of God. The world starts to seem too complex and disparate, to be moving too quickly, for it to correspond to some static divine blueprint. Deleuze suggests that this is the beginning of a disillusionment with the Ideal that leads towards Nietzschean nihilism (perhaps we should add a step 2.5 to "How the 'True World' Finally Became a Fable: History of an Error"?). Leibniz, though, tries to halt the progression before it gathers momentum. So he proposes to replace the immediate clarity and comprehensibility of the divine plan with a faith that, while the details may be counterintuitive and stretch off to infinity, there is a principle at work behind each and every one of them.
But what happened, in this long history of "nihilism," before the world lost its principles? Closer to us, it was necessary for human reason to collapse, as the last refuge of principles, the Kantian refuge: it dies through "neurosis." But even earlier, a psychotic episode was necessary, the crisis and collapse of all theological Reason. This is where the Baroque assumes its position: Is there a way of saving the theological ideal, at a moment when it is embattled on all sides, and when the world cannot stop accumulating "proofs" against it, violences and miseries, at a time when the earth will soon tremble…? The Baroque solution is the following: we will multiply principles—we can always pull out a new one from our sleeve—and consequently we will change its use. We will no longer ask what giveable object corresponds to this or that luminous principle, but rather what hidden principle corresponds to this given object, that is to say, this or that "perplexing case." Principles as such will be put to a reflective use: a case being given, we will invent its principle: this is a transformation of Law into a universal Jurisprudence. (F, 91)
Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it's an ethos. The best possible world, this world, may indeed be pretty bad, but Leibniz rescues it with his faith in the principle of optimization. If we keep this fundamental problem in mind, the pieces of Leibniz's metaphysics begin to fit together. Since we can't actually find another world to compare it to, the operational definition of 'the best' world becomes one of continuity and convergence of disparates. Surely a world where the pieces didn't match or some were missing would be sub-optimal. But so would one that consisted entirely of hexagons. That is, we seek precisely the Baroque marriage of unity and variety as evidence of the best.
How can we construct a single convergent world out of completely disparate monads? Or, if we begin from the other direction, how can we partition a given world into separate monads which each include it in its entirety? Deleuze broached this topic back in chapter 2, when he discussed the "torsion" of the fold between the world and the soul. In some curious way, these two each come 'before' the other. The world only exists in the monads which include it, but the monads are fabricated by God expressly for this world. Now we see that there is a principle of optimization or resonance that governs the stabilizing feedback loop between these two. If we relax this principle, we can imagine an infinity of possible worlds each with an infinity of monads, but without any guarantee that any of these worlds reach a point of closure that would allow each to be included in its infinite set of compatible monads. In other words, for a possible world to come into actual existence, we have to be able to fold it up in an infinity of different shapes. But for each of these shapes to be as they are, they have to be able to be unfolded into a single compatible world. We can imagine possible shapes different from the ones we find in this world. But in doing so, at the same time we would also need to imagine an entirely different world, a completely different 'sheet' that we could then fold into a whole different set of shapes to go with it. In short, you cannot change just one thing because of how tightly interwoven everything is. Somehow you have to independently specify both the whole structure and all its details, but then they have to miraculously match. There are no stable independent building blocks, and there is no final blueprint. How does God even get started with a problem like this?
Deleuze has a unique interpretation of how Leibniz goes about solving this problem, and it brings us back to what Simondon called the pre-individual, or what Deleuze in other places calls the transcendental field. The idea is basically that before there are monads and before there is even a world (in some sense) there is a "pure emission of singularities" (F, 83). These are the events of the world, the inflections or bifurcations that occur at each moment. But before they can compose a world or condense into various monads, God has to select the 'best' singularities, that is, the ones that will all converge. He has to knit together the continuity of the world. At first it may not seem to make sense to talk about a convergence or a continuity of singularities. After all, aren't they, you know, singular? But we need to keep in mind the basic image of the fold -- the infinitely varying curve of the world swings back and forth, and each of its singularities of inflection opens a new a region of the curve included under a certain
point-of-view, a region which extends up to the next inflection point. That is, a singular point can be prolonged over a series of ordinary points so that it joins up with another singular point. We saw that this was precisely how the principle of continuity could be reconciled with the principle of indiscernibility. Now, however, instead of thinking of the continuity of the world as given, we need to consider it as composed. Imagine if each inflection point could be a bifurcation point, as if the curve could continue in two different directions or along two dimensions. In fact, the curve of possible worlds is constantly bifurcating in this way, threatening us with Borges' infinitely infinite and ever-ramifying garden of forking paths (F, 85). It's only Leibniz's principle of optimization that guarantees the continuity of the world, and the converge of the singularities into a single curve. The world isn't pre-planned as an Ideal blueprint in God's head. He constructs it freely as he goes along. But he always chooses the best bifurcation at each moment, and so brings only one world into existence with his choices.
The principle of indiscernibles establishes cuts; but the cuts are not lacunae or ruptures of continuity; on the contrary, they divide [répartissent] continuity in such a way that there are no lacunae, that is to say, in the "best" way (hence the irrational number). (F, 89)
This idea that God is engaged in some form of calculation in creating the world leads us back to our departure point. 'The Best' is the outcome of this calculus of optimization. It's also the reason that Deleuze can cast Leibniz as one of the line of thinkers who see the world as a game. Of course, Nietzsche imagines a divine game of chance, whereas for Leibniz God plays a game of skill. But in both these cases there is a freedom of play and variation that opposes the work of logical necessity.
Described from God's perspective, the game of the world sounds kinda static. In creating the world, God appears to 'win' once and for all by choosing the best world and the best monads. Does this mean that only God has any freedom in this scheme, and that the individuals are no more than literally pawns? It certainly seems that the condition of optimization requires all the parts to fit together with a perfect, rigid precision that would leave no room for change or improvisation. But here we should recall the strange status of the monad -- it is not a piece of the world, but includes the entire world, albeit from a certain point-of-view. God is able to read off the entire history of the world from the folded up fine print in each monad, while from the monad's point of view, the world unfolds in time, as an infinite series of actions or events. Nevertheless, it is the same world that only actually exists folded up into the monads or unfolding through them. This fact allows Deleuze to lend Leibniz's scheme a dynamism that preserves a certain type of individual freedom.
How does this work though? The key to understanding the freedom of the individual lies in the distinction between predication and attribution that Deleuze introduced in the last chapter. A monad is not like a 'soul atom' in the sense of having some solid and separable essence that might then undergo various modifications as it bumps into other monads. Because everything that happens to it is already included within the monad, we might expect Leibniz to argue that the monad is free because it is self determined. But this formulation could easily involve a subtle assumption about how the free act would be determined by the monad's essential self. As we've seen, the monad doesn't have any essence apart from the unity of its modifications. It is the inclusion of inflections, a being necessarily in motion, a verb, not a noun. So freedom is less a question of internal determination by some stable central core than in acting in way that expresses the entirety of the monad at once. Instead of being determined by an essential point, freedom consists in following an inclination that leads us to include more and more of ourselves. The image Deleuze gives us is of inclination or motive as a pendulum of variable amplitude. This is contrasted to the image of determination as a balance of 'reasons' that needs a central fulcrum to operate. The pendulum is free when its amplitude can increase to a maximum, that is, where its inclination and its motion reinforce or resonate with one another.
We have to start with the minute inclinations that fold our soul in every direction, at every moment, under the action of a thousand "little springs": uneasiness or disquiet [inquietude]. This is the model of the pendulum, the "Unruhe," [restlessness] which replaces the balance. An action is voluntary when the soul, rather than submitting to the effect of the sums into which these minute solicitations enter, instead gives itself a certain amplitude that makes it fold, in its entirety, in one direction or toward one side. (F, 94)
In a way, it's almost as if the free act duplicates the relationship of inclusion between the monad and the world -- the free act in the present includes the entire past and future of the monad in the sense that it resonates with everything that leads up to it and follows from it. Thus it expresses the entirety of the monad.
If inclusion is extended to infinity in the past and future, it is because it concerns first of all the living present that, in each instance, presides over their distribution. It is because my individual notion includes what I am doing in the present moment, what I am in the process of doing, that it also includes everything that pushed [pousée] me to do it, and everything that follows from it, to infinity. This privilege accorded to the present refers precisely to the function of inherence in the monad: it does not include a predicate without giving it the value of a verb, that is, the unity of a movement in process [le movement en train de se faire]. Inherence is the condition of freedom, and not its impediment [empêchement] (F, 95)
God's freedom lies in 'tuning' an infinity of monads so that they each harmoniously express the best possible world. Individual freedom lies in 'tuning' each present moment so that it expresses the entirety of a monad, the whole sweep of its life. But if the world is composed of moments of monads, we might wonder whether these two freedoms could ever come into conflict. Does God see to it that everyone maximizes their freedom at every moment? This seems impossible because there seem to be cases where my present freedom, my maximum expression, is at the expense of yours. It's in this context that Deleuze explores Leibniz's theory of damnation.
However, this possibility of progress, or of the soul's expansion, seems to run up against the total quantity of progress in the world, this quantity being defined by the convergence of all the regions that correspond to the compossible monads. And this would be true if time did not exist—that is, if all existing monads were simultaneously summoned to the elevation that makes them reasonable. But things do not work that way: the souls destined to become reasonable await their hour in the world, and are first of all only sensitive souls who sleep in Adam's seed, bearing only an "official act" [acte scellé] that marks the hour of their future elevation, like a birth certificate [acte de naissance] (F, 99)
Technically, Deleuze separates the idea of freedom from the idea of progress. So there's no conflict between the freedoms as I have suggested (see pg. 97) but between the progress of one monad towards increasing its amplitude or becoming 'elevated' and the progress of other monads. The damned regress rather than progress. But they do this freely. I'm glossing over this distinction for the sake of brevity. The point is that good things happening to one soul seem to necessarily imply bad things happening to another. There can be no saved souls if there are no damned ones, no Christians without heathens. The precision mechanism that God so skillfully creates -- the best of all possible world -- requires the suffering of the damned. The unfolding of one soul to its maximum potential requires the folding of another into a hardened mass. The whole game is in motion, and the spontaneous unfolding in places requires a folding in others. But it is a Baroque mechanism, a Baroque dance (F, 93) where one dancer retreats while the other advances, their varying push and pull perfectly matched, but the opposites still requiring one another.
Leibniz's optimism is founded on the infinity of the damned as the sub-basement [soubassement] of the best of worlds: they liberate an infinite quantity of possible progress, and this is what multiplies their rage, they make possible a world in progress. One cannot think the best of worlds without hearing Beelzebub's cries of hatred, which make the lower level tremble. (F, 100)
It's hard not to read a passage like this from a political perspective.
No comments:
Post a Comment