Will Power

How do we imagine the power of our will?  Typically as some sort of transcendent force that stands above or outside our thoughts and actions and guides them (or doesn't, as the case may be).  We also go the extra step of taking ownership of this force, or identifying our self with it.  It is, after all, "our" willpower.  For example, if I am sitting and meditating I might think of myself as using "my" will's "power" to "control" the focus of my attention. 

Naturally, the obnoxious quotes in that last sentence are meant to suggest that perhaps none of those concepts really apply.  Maybe it is not my will.  Maybe there is will, but I am not the owner of it.  And maybe it doesn't have some magical power to control anything the way a driver steers a car or a maker imparts a form, but maybe there is still power associated with this will.  

What if we thought of a "will" as a real thing, with real power, but a thing which is sort of free floating (relative to the individual) and a power which consists solely in engendering it's own repetition.  One way to think about this would be to say that each moment of intention -- say, the intention to focus on my breathing -- is a kind of atom of will.  This is the type of temporal atomism I was earlier attributing to Whitehead.  This instance of will would not be "mine".  It would be more accurate to observe that "there is some willing going on".  And the effect of this instance of will would not be to control or dictate any sort of future in which I am, in fact, focusing on my breathing.  Its real power is in being able to bring about a new state of willing that is "the same" as the first.  Here the quotes are to indicate that it's clearly not the same will, since we're treating each moment as a separate entity.  In other words, the real power of the will is in the ability to repeat itself, and thus string together a type of identity over time, just the way a seed has the power to shape the environment into a a tree which (hopefully) produces another seed.  Another way to put this would be to say that the will acts like a sort of "lure" that leads the world in a certain direction, though when the world catches up to the lure, it has created a new lure that continues the direction, and so on ...  A bit like a fella leading a horse on by sitting in the saddle and dangling a carrot in front of it.  Which is what a meditation often feels like.

Hegel and Leibniz

This chapter is turning into quite a compressed history of philosophy.  First we had Aristotle.  Then the rebel tradition of Scotus-Spinoza-Nietzsche.  Now we get a whole long section (pg. 42-50) on Hegel and Leibniz.  Unfortunately, my knowledge of Leibniz is borderline zero, and my knowledge of Hegel is the cartoon understanding one gleans from scraps of undergraduate reading about the "master-slave dialectic".  I suspect my knowledge of Hegel is destined to remain forever in its current state.  Never did care much for the dialectic, whether in Hegel or in the more messianic aspects of Marx.  It always struck me as explaining things ass-backwards by starting with the conclusion and so turning all of history into a just-so story to justify the present (or near future, in the case of Marx).  Leibniz, however, I'm interested in exploring further.  The monad seems related to Whitehead's "actual occasion".  I'm also curious about the philosophy of the co-inventor of calculus and one of the first people to cotton on to binary numbers.  But man, I can't read everything.  At least not all at once.  Which means that we're going to have leave this section with only a fairly vague understanding of Delueze's comments about these guys.

I think it's okay to stay with the 30,000 foot view of this section because the takeaway is very clear.  Hegel and Leibniz both come up with a concept of difference that goes beyond the finite organic representation Aristotle constructed with his genus and species system.  Deleuze calls this new system "infinite orgiastic representation".  It comes in two flavors depending on your starting point: starting from the infinitely large (Hegel) we find that difference or determination is fundamentally contradiction, or starting from the infinitely small (Leibniz) we find that difference is "vice-diction".  Both schemes change our way of thinking about the part-whole relationship.  With Aristotle, the parts were related to the whole as organs are related to a body, that is, as parts of an organic or organized whole.  Hegel and Leibniz come up with two different ways of saying essentially that the part is the whole.  For Hegel, the infinitely large whole differentiates itself into a finite "part" which contradicts that infinity, but is then reabsorbed, as it were, into the infinity when it meets the contradiction of the contradiction.  This is the boring concentric circle of the dialectic where thesis meets antithesis and annihilates itself in a burst of light and neutrinos to leave us with a synthesis that is identical to where we started.  If this sounds like a wordy double negative, that's because it is.  Leibniz, by contrast, starts with the infinitely small, and is somehow the opposite of Hegel.  Frankly, I don't understand the Leibniz section well enough to even summarize it yet.  

But all of this is a bit academic, because the punchline is that neither Leibniz nor Hegel offers us a concept of difference in itself that does not ultimately derive from identity.  That's why Deleuze continues to call their schemes "representations".  The basic issue is the concentric circles in the case of Hegel and the way all the series of infinitesimals in Leibniz always converge on his belief in the "best of a all possible worlds".  

The point is that in the last resort infinite representation does not free itself from the principle of identity as a presupposition of representation. That is why it remains subject to the condition of the convergence of series in the case of Leibniz and to the condition of the monocentring of circles in the case of Hegel. Infinite representation invokes a foundation. While this foundation is not the identical itself, it is nevertheless a way of taking the principle of identity particularly seriously, giving it an infinite value and rendering it coextensive with the whole, and in this manner allowing it to reign over existence itself.

Like I said, I'm not clear how this critique applies to Leibniz, but it makes sense to me in the case of Hegel.  If everything is destined for a certain endpoint development of "Absolute Spirit" (or commie utopia in Marx) then there's no real history or development or movement at all.  All particular things or moments in history become like virtual particles popping in and out of existence and getting us nowhere -- in fact, there's even a Feynman diagram for the dialectic.  Any difference that would limit or mark off some part of the whole is produced by a contradiction and then reabsorbed as the contradiction of that contradiction.  The whole negates itself and negates the negation of itself, and unsurprisingly, we get back the identity of the whole.  

Hegelian contradiction does not deny identity or non-contradiction: on the contrary, it consists in inscribing the double negation of non-contradiction within the existent in such a way that identity, under that condition or on that basis, is sufficient to think the existent as such. Those formulae according to which 'the object denies what it is not', or 'distinguishes itself from everything that it is not', are logical monsters (the Whole of everything which is not the object) in the service of identity.

Anyhow, the point of the section is clear.  Neither Hegel nor Leibniz produce the concept of difference in itself that Deleuze is looking for.   Both of them still start with the premise of identity, though this time phrased in the form of a double negative.

Whitehead and Scotus meet on a scenic backroad

Even though Nietzsche's Eternal Return is going to be the most important part of this section on the history of univocity (pg. 39-42) I did spend a little time inconclusively thinking about what Deleuze says regarding Scotus and Spinoza.  

Particularly the part about Spinoza, since I've at least read the Ethics.  I think I get the basic idea -- for Spinoza, everything is a modification or expression of God in a particular way; God is Nature, or the universe conceived as substance.  Nature always speaks with the single voice of God.  But I've always found myself a little puzzled by why Spinoza felt the need to add another layer to the equation -- he has God (substance) and the modes (things) but also attributes.  What are the attributes?  Well, in the Ethics he only discusses thought and extension, though he states that there are actually an infinite number of attributes (God being absolutely infinite and all; I've always wondered what the other attributes are).  They are like categories that all the modes have in common, but that they also share with substance as well, since God has the same attributes.  Here's how Deleuze puts it:

Spinoza organises a remarkable division into substance, attributes and modes. From the opening pages of the Ethics, he shows that real distinctions are never numerical but only formal - that is, qualitative or essential (essential attributes of the unique substance); and conversely, that numerical distinctions are never real, but only modal (intrinsic modes of the unique substance and its attributes). The attributes behave like real qualitatively different senses which relate to substance as if to a single and same designated; and substance in turn behaves like an ontologically unique sense in relation to the modes which express it, and inhabit it like individuating factors or intrinsic and intense degrees. From this follows a determination of modes as degrees of power, and a single 'obligation' for such modes: to deploy all their power or their being within the limit itself. Attributes are thus absolutely common to substance and the modes, even though modes and substance do not have the same essence.

This idea that various modes (which is Spinoza's name for all the stuff around us) have the attributes in common struck me as vaguely related to the idea of repetition, or at least of recognition, since these attributes seem to reappear in every mode.  I don't really think of the attributes as "objects", but somehow this commonality put me in mind of Whitehead's equally puzzling idea of "Eternal Objects".  It would take way too long to try and adequately explain what Whitehead had in mind by eternal objects, and in any case I've never felt I completely understood it.  My general impression would be that eternal objects are what allow for the possibility of the repetitions from time T to time T+1 in the atomic scheme I attributed to Whitehead last time.  These are called "eternal" because they are not in time in the same way as the temporal atoms that compose that scheme, but somehow kind of persist, or maybe reincarnate, across time, outside the pure and undivided flux.  When you ask Whitehead for an example of an eternal object, he is most likely to come back with something like "the color blue", or "a particular type of sound" -- ie. what these days people would call "qualia", or types of qualitative experience.  At first, this might suggest that these eternal objects could be Spinoza's missing attributes.  Maybe, but then why are we calling these attributes (extended, blue, etc ...) "objects" now?

A few years ago I read Isabelle Stengers' book Thinking with Whitehead.  This improved my understanding of his philosophy by leaps and bounds, especially since it is not an exposition of Whitehead's complete and final philosophical scheme (which in any case doesn't exist) but a historical journey through the problems that led him from mathematics to metaphysics, and the concepts he came up with to address them.  So I looked back through that book in an attempt to get a better handle on why Whitehead created the concept of an eternal object.  And it's feakin' complicated.  However, I did find a relatively straightforward discussion of why Whitehead created the concept of "objects" before he started calling them eternal.  Here are some of the relevant quotes from TwW; remember to situate yourself in a temporally atomized, post-endo-cannabinoid-phase-transition, world without forms before you read these:

Stengers quoting Whitehead:

I use recognition for the non-intellectual sense-awareness which connects the mind with a factor in nature without passage ... I am quite willing to believe ... that there is in fact no recognition without intellectual accompaniments of comparison and judgement.  But recognition is that relation of the mind to nature which provides the material for the intellectual activity.

Things which we thus recognize I call objects.

Objects are the elements in nature which can "be again".

Day by day and hour by hour we can find a certain chunk in the transitory life of nature and of that chunk say, "There is Cleopatra's Needle."  If we define the needle in a sufficiently abstract manner we can say that it never changes.  But a physicist who looks at that part of the life of nature as a dance of electrons, will tell you that daily it has lost some molecules and gained others, and even the plain man can see that it gets dirtier and is occasionally washed ... The more abstract the definition, the more permanent the Needle.

Recognition and abstraction essentially involve each other.  Each of them exhibits an entity for knowledge which is less than the concrete fact, but is a real factor in that fact.  The most concrete fact capable of separate discrimination is the event.  We cannot abstract without recognition and we cannot recognize without abstraction. 

Note: Cleopatra's Needle is some mini-Washington monument type thing, and every colonial power seems to have pilfered one from Egypt.  

Stengers herself:

"Say, there it is again."  Cleopatra's Needle, for instance, which rises in downtown London.  What we are aware of in the perception of the Needle, a fortiriori because we can designate it by a name, certainly implies those intellectual faculties known as memory and judgement.  No matter what those terms refer to, moreover, knowledge is ultimate, that which the concept of nature must refrain from explaining.  But if nature is not to bifurcate, with the mind being held responsible for everything that "is again," for everything that acts as a landmark, it must offer a foothold for memory and judgement.  The concept of nature must include what is required by the experience of "recognizing Cleopatra's Needle."  "Object" is the name Whitehead gives to this requisite, which is presupposed by knowledge but does not explain it.  

Some background might help here.  Stengers construes Whitehead's early philosophy as focused on the problem of how to avoid a "bifurcation of nature" that would leave the natural world as this colorless, odorless collection of atoms whizzing about, and pack all qualitative experience (including the experience of any identity) away as a construct of the human mind.  He is targeting the sort of "apples aren't really red; they are just a collection of molecules that happen to reflect a certain wavelength of light" type of naive materialism that scientist's tend to resort to when backed into a philosophical corner.  This means that if you have the experience of seeing Cleopatra's Needle "again", even if we grant your mind wonderful and unexplainable powers of recognition and memory, unless your mind is just completely fabricating this identity wholesale, there must be some aspect of reality that allows you to recognize the thing.  You aren't necessarily recognizing the identity of the "thing itself" -- in fact, you are explicitly recognizing just some abstract aspect of the identity-less flux -- but if you're not just to be making the whole thing up as a brain in the vat type illusion, something about that flux must really lend itself to that recognition, even though it seems like this implicates something beyond the flux itself.

Here's Whitehead later on:

The explanatory purpose of philosophy is often misunderstood.  Its business is to explain the emergence of more abstract things from the more concrete things.  It is a complete mistake to ask how concrete particular fact can be built up out of universals.  The answer is, "In no way."  The true philosophic question is, How can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its own nature?  In other words, philosophy is explanatory of abstraction, and not of concreteness.

Now, all this is interesting, you might say, but we've gone a long ways from the original question, which was: can we use Whitehead's idea of eternal objects to help us illuminate what Deleuze is saying about Spinoza, and hence better understand his concept of univocity or difference?  And the answer so far seems to be, "In no way".  But, and this is the punchline it turns out, the very next paragraph in Stengers book does do something to help us understand Duns Scotus a little better, and can even add something to our earlier discussion of signs.

Here's Stengers again:

Indeed, in The Concept of Nature, Whitehead seems to me to come close to the man his contemporaries named the "doctor subtilis," Duns Scotus.  Subtle indeed was the position of Duns Scotus, who, faced by the alternative that either "universals" are relative to knowledge or else they belong to reality, refused to choose.  For Scotus, all abstract features that fit a multitude of different individuals, all the distinct "quiddities" that allow me to describe them at different levels of abstraction, do indeed belong to what is described.  Yet when I enumerate them and define them qua attributes of this individual, I treat them as if they were actually, that is, numerically, distinct (a horse is an animal, a mammal, a herbivore, an ungulate ...) whereas ontologically they are only "formally" distinct, composing the individual as a unique concrete being.  The same is true of Whiteheadian objects: like the subtle doctor's plurality of "forms," they are the "respondents" of "that which" we recognize, name, judge, and compare: that is, what these operations answer to and also what can eventually answer for them.  Yet, although they exhibit themselves as abstract or permanent, they cannot be isolated from the concrete event, which, for its part, passes without return.

The Whiteheadian object may also make one think of the signs of Charles Saunders Peirce, which is rather appropriate since Peirce placed his undertaking under the banner of Duns Scotus.  Indeed, Peirce's sign is real, although its meaning requires an interpreter to make it signify.  It is real because the person who interprets does not fashion signs in a mute or "insignificant" world: she requires signs in the way Whiteheadian recognition requires objects.  Signification is ours, no doubt, but the fact that there is a sign liable to signify is not the product of a "psychic addition" alien to what we call reality.

Now this is interesting.  Apparently Scotus was saying that the attributes of existing things are really distinct aspects of the thing, but that they do not thereby amount to properties of the thing, in the sense that a property belongs to some substantial subject.  It's as if the thing nomadically inhabits the attribute, or partakes in it, without converting it into a "property".  In fact, everyone can share in the common property, even God, just to different degrees.  The attributes or forms that we're talking about in the case of Scotus and (so far) with Whitehead may at first still seem a lot like the specific differences that were the underlying forms of Aristotle's theory.  After all, Whitehead is calling them "objects" and Stengers is reaching for taxonomic examples to illustrate Scotus.  And in some sense I think they are still like that, and await transformation into attributes by Spinoza and eternal objects later in Whitehead's philosophy.  But there has actually already been a major shift here.  Because the direction of abstraction, so to speak, has been reversed.  With Aristotle, the real and essential stuff was just the form, the identity, and from that you could knock off as many numerically distinct copies as you like.  This idea left us completely unequipped to deal with the world we actually experience directly, and in particular with why there should be more than one copy of any of these forms, and any difference between these copies.  With Scotus or early Whitehead, we can already see that the concrete individual beings (or atoms or occasions as Whitehead likes to say) are the fundamental stuff of experience, and that the forms we use to link them together into identities, while still real things in their own right, not just magically invented by the human mind, are the abstract bit.  In other words, we've taken the first step towards making the difference fundamental, and the identity derivative.

Later on with Whitehead, this mistaken direction of abstraction will acquire a specific name -- the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.  I've found over the past decade or so that this has become one of my go to phrases, because once you understand it, you see it everywhere.  For example, when the physicist tells you that the world is "really" made out of protons and electrons.  See, there they are, under the scanning electron microscope.  "Really"?  The world is made out of incredibly abstract mathematical concepts invented by some hairless chimps?  Well, sure, those electrons are real, objective, whatever you like to call it -- not just "subjective" and in the heads of scientists.  But they are just an aspect of reality, doubtless a useful way to describe it for many purposes.  An electron cannot be "right there" because it's an abstraction, not a stone, lying about with a certain spatial position.  Naive materialism confers on the electron a concreteness that is completely misplaced.  

Finally, there's this intriguing bit about signs that helps me understand Peirce (whom I have also not read) a little better.  A sign is not something that we arbitrarily attach to the world to transmit meaning, like the way "tree" as a set of symbols arbitrarily makes us think of leafy greens to which it has no inherent relation.  There may be a "psychic arbitrariness" that our human minds add to the world via language, but the world gave us some material to work with first.  That material was a sign.  The tree stood out, in certain aspects, to us chimps, who have a certain constitution for noticing these things.  It was individuated, for one. Spatially located, for another.  The tree was a sign waiting to happen.  Or maybe it's better to say that the "tree process" has aspects or singularities that can mean various things as they are taken up by other parts of the world.  I can't claim to fully understand this line of thought yet.  For one, I think I'm in danger of mixing up aspect or attribute which things have in common and singular mode which differentiates them.  But I like this idea -- the world is full of real, objective signs ... that only mean something when a properly attuned interpreter comes along to pick them up.  An interpreter cannot add meaning to the world without there being some order in it to begin with.

The Univocity of Being 4 -- The History of Univocity

The second half of this section on univocity is taken up with Deleuze's whirlwind tour of the three most important figures in the philosophical history of the concept.  Unfortunately, I haven't read any Duns Scotus.  And dealing with Spinoza is tough and would take us very far afield.  So I think I'll focus on the way Nietzsche's Eternal Return illustrates univocity, especially since this is clearly going to be the most important concept in a book about difference and repetition.

Let me start with an image that I attribute to Whitehead.  Whitehead always called himself an atomist.  Normally the concept of atomism refers to spacial atoms. The state of the world at any given time T involves the position of these atoms in space, and the state at some later time T+1 involves the same atoms at different positions.  Mostly we don't think about it, but this type of description of the state of the world obviously presupposes the identity of the atoms between T and T+1.  It's not like the curtains drop, everything winks out of existence, and when they come back up, it's a whole new set of atoms, just in different places.  We presume a continuity of identity of the spatially located atoms across time -- ie. we say that the same atoms simply moved.  

We don't have to look at it that way though.  We could remove the assumption that the world was naturally divided up into atoms that have a stable identity over time.  In which case we would come up with a different type of atom, a temporal atom.  Each atom would consist of the state of the entire world considered as an undivided whole at a given time.  This atom obviously can't move.  It appears, and then it disappears in the next instant.  Each atom in this case is completely unique.  If there are similarities between two of these atoms, it can't be because they have components with stable identities throughout time because time itself has been atomized in this scheme.  Those similarities, say some overlap in the spatial patterns at a particular location, can only be called repetitions.  The paperweight sitting on my desk at time T is not "the same" paperweight that sits there at time T+1, it merely reflects a world at time T+1 that repeats the paperweight aspect the world at time T.  What we usually think of as identity across time, is really repetition, or propagation from one time atom to another.  That repetition can't taken for granted, because what we're really given are just different time atoms, but it can happen sometimes.

If you really want to bake your noodle, now try imagining that both space and time are independently atomized.

All this is just backdrop to help us imagine the world that fits with the idea of the Eternal Return.

Eternal return cannot mean the return of the Identical because it presupposes a world (that of the will to power) in which all previous identities have been abolished and dissolved. Returning is being, but only the being of becoming. The eternal return does not bring back 'the same', but returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes. Returning is the becoming-identical of becoming itself. Returning is thus the only identity, but identity as a secondary power; the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to the different, or turns around the different. Such an identity, produced by difference, is determined as 'repetition'. Repetition in the eternal return, therefore, consists in conceiving the same on the basis of the different.

This world of the will to power is clearly the same one we were discussing last time in the context of squirreldom.  In order of explain the actual world with a particular set of squirrels in it, we need to lose the idea that there was any such thing as "squirrel form" that you could just pour Being into to manufacture a real squirrel.  Instead, univocal Being encouraged us to see the world as a pure flow of becoming, a proverbial Heraclitean river, where real squirrels weren't manufactured from pre-existing squirrel-molds, but were individuated from the flux, each squirrel absolutely unique, a singular eddy of sorts.  

How do you know when something is individuated enough to exist as a "thing"?  When is has the power to come back, to repeat, even though this "repetition" really means that it is a different thing every time.  It's less repetition, than reproduction -- or better yet, production, again, of something capable of producing itself, again.  This is actually the same fractal infinite series we saw in the introduction in the context of festivals.  The power of a singularity is the ability to repeat as an infinite series, which in mathematics actually even goes by the name of a "power series".  Infinite expansion is a weird sort of "identity" though, because each time you come "back" you've actually changed into something else.  The only "you" here will be in the process of coming back, each time going beyond your original self to be transformed into something different.  In fact, univocal Being says that's the only way to "be" at all.

The Univocity of Being 3: The Being of Difference

I've complained about this section being too abstract.  So maybe it helps to step back for a second and ask, as Delueze himself did in "H" as in History of Philosophy: what problem are we trying to tackle with this concept of Univocity?

One might wonder why the problem isn't stated clearly by a philosopher since it certainly exists in his work, and Deleuze maintains that it's because one can't do everything at once. The philosopher's task is already that of exposing the concepts that s/he's in the process of creating, so s/he can't expose the problems on top of that, or at least one can discover these problems only through the concepts being created. Deleuze insists: if you haven't found the problem to which a concept corresponds, everything stays abstract. If you've found the problem, everything becomes concrete.

So, let's recap.  Concretely, our goal in this chapter is to come up with a concept of difference in itself that does not reduce difference to a comparison of pre-established identities.  We're working to start metaphysics from Difference rather than Identity.  

We saw how Aristotle's concept of difference as specific difference (between the sort of orthogonal forms of reality, if you will) was actually parasitic on the identity built into the generic concept these differences divide up.   When we then asked, "what do all these differences have in common?", we discovered that they all have Being in common -- they all are -- but that they cannot have it in common in the same way they have the respective genres they divide in common, but only in an analogous fashion.  So, all these specific differences are supposed to point to the same unique underlying identity, Being, in an analogous way.  In a Christian context, this idea will get converted into the idea that Being = God and that we can't really know God directly, because all the terms we would use to describe him (good, wise, etc ...) are really just petty human terms that only apply to him by analogy, since, of course, he's so much more.

Univocity is meant to flip the table on Aristotle.  What do things have in common, insofar as they exist?  Their difference.  Their only common identity is their difference.  But they all express this common difference in the same way.  That's important because it's what makes the differences in common.  Without the univocal expression of difference, we would just have chaos, differences jutting everywhere, or some empty word play that called difference an identity.  So the concept of univocal Being is meant to invert Aristotle's answer to the question of what everything that exists has in common.  Instead of some single identical essence they all posses or point to, things actually have in common the process of pointing, and the way that this process, which itself is always the same, produces something different every time it happens.  

You can see that the idea of Univocal Being shifts us to a different metaphysical level; we've moved from talking about the identity of a "thing" to whatever "identity" might mean for a process.  It also puts Being and the different beings on the same metaphysical level.  God isn't removed from beings through abstraction; instead he himself has to become a being, a process, of his own, since all things are said to exist in the same way.  Saying that "the Identity of Being is Difference" may sound like just an abstract formula, or like rearranging terms in a tautological equation, and on some level it surely is.  But remember, this is the sort of stuff they used to literally nail you to a cross for saying.   It's a pretty complete dethroning of the typical image of God.  He loses any substantial identity.  He loses any static eternity (if there's anything outside time here, it would only be the process of differing).  I mean, a God that develops?  Who differs even from himself from one moment to the next?  Nobody ever really killed anybody over a metaphysical disagreement.  But it's easy to see how thinking about God like this might lead you to think about all sorts of things differently.  After all, if even the deepest elements of existence change and develop, how stable can kings and nations and churches and monetary systems really be?  And thinking any of those things can change has been a great way to get yourself killed for thousands of years running now.  Make no mistake, it's a dangerous idea.

The problem of this chapter isn't really to construct a new idea of Being though, it's to find a new concept of Difference.  I think the key way that Univocal Being is supposed to help us with that is revealed in this brief section (pg. 37-39), even though the main thesis is delivered as a sort of downpayment on what the concept will look like when we get this battle-star fully operational:

We must show not only how individuating difference differs in kind from specific difference, but primarily and above all how individuation properly precedes matter and form, species and parts, and every other element of the constituted individual. Univocity of being, in so far as it is immediately related to difference, demands that we show how individuating difference precedes generic, specific and even individual differences within being; how a prior field of individuation within being conditions at once the determination of species of forms, the determination of parts and their individual variations. If individuation does not take place either by form or by matter, neither qualitatively nor extensionally, this is not only because it differs in kind but because it is already presupposed by the forms, matters and extensive parts.

Univocal Being is meant to help us think through the way that individuating difference is prior to specific difference.  

To understand this distinction, it helps to back up again to the problem Aristotle was trying to solve when he invented the concept of specific difference.  As we saw, the goal was to develop a set of essential forms that could be recombined to cover all the specific examples of a particular generic concept.  These specific differences that were the real and essential building blocks of the world -- the form of the flying squirrel, the form of the rhododendron.  Of course, there could be many copies of each of these in actual fact.  But that wasn't really essential.  What was important was that we could classify everything under one or another combination of specific differences.  

Except, now, wait.  How are we to explain the fact that we see two particular squirrels?  This scheme doesn't seem to do anything to explain why there are any particular number of squirrels, or really any actual squirrels at all.  All we can do is recognize something that falls into the class, and say, "ah, there exists at least one squirrel instance".  Why here? Why now? Why two of the little fuckers pissing on me while I try to light a campfire and drink whiskey out of a tin cup?  The specific differences that constitute the forms of Aristotle's world just sort of drop out of the sky.  They don't come and go or develop.  They are already fully constituted but float free of the actual world, ready to be instantiated.  When we ask how any of these particular squirrels came to be, we discover that there's not really an answer.  The two squirrels just exist by analogy.  They're two copies made from the same mold; they're "really", or "essentially", the same thing.  Which is tantamount to saying that the actual squirrels are basically illusions.  It occurs to me that Deleuze is here making Aristotle the one guilty of the accusations that are usually leveled at Plato's theory of the forms.  Here is how he phrases this idea of the way Equivocal Being and Specific Difference inevitably conspire to produce the disconnect between the forms we use to represent the world, and the real world.

For analogy, as we have seen, rests essentially upon a certain complicity between generic and specific differences (despite their difference in kind): being cannot be supposed a common genus without destroying the reason for which it was supposed thus; that is, the possibility of being for specific differences.... It is not, therefore, surprising that from the standpoint of analogy, everything happens in the middle regions of genus and species in terms of mediation and generality - identity of the concept in general and analogy of the most general concepts. It is henceforth inevitable that analogy falls into an unresolvable difficulty: it must essentially relate being to particular existents, but at the same time it cannot say what constitutes their individuality. For it retains in the particular only that which conforms to the general (matter and form), and seeks the principle of individuation in this or that element of the fully constituted individuals.

By contrast, Univocal Being and Individuating Difference completely change this picture.  Instead of seeing two copies of squirrel form and observing that their commonality is "analogous instantiation of squirrel form", we're going to say that the two squirrels have in common their difference.  The individuating difference that actually produced two squirrels in this case.  What these things have in common, insofar as they exist, is that they were articulated as individuals. They were constructed. And, in fact, they're never really done being articulated as individuals.  They have in common this continuing process of articulation.  They have only their difference-ing, their differentiating, their differing, in common.  The process by which they become distinct from everything else.  

By contrast, when we say that univocal being is related immediately and essentially to individuating factors, we certainly do not mean by the latter individuals constituted in experience, but that which acts in them as a transcendental principle: as a plastic, anarchic and nomadic principle, contemporaneous with the process of individuation, no less capable of dissolving and destroying individuals than of constituting them temporarily; intrinsic modalities of being, passing from one 'individual' to another, circulating and communicating underneath matters and forms. The individuating is not the simple individual.

This may make it sound like there's no real squirrel at all.  As if the fixed, fully individuated squirrel we see is just some sort of illusion and all that's really there is some eddy in a very slowly flowing fluid.  And ... well ... that's basically right.  There is no eternal squirrel form in nature.  But the illusion is not the actual squirrel, it's the idea of the pre-existing squirrel form.  If there's an illusion here, it's our theory of squirreldom, not the reality of appearances (and even that can't be an illusion because, of course, all the ideas in our head are part of nature as well).  This is the perspective of univocal being and individuating difference -- a world without fixed forms and identities.  The concepts are meant to describe a world which is in continual flux, and where difference isn't something that happens between fixed forms that magically fell out of the sky, but is the act of differing that produces (or destroys) actual individuals.  

This should clearly start to remind us of the discussion of embryogenesis.  The world of univocal being is a world where all the forms are specified step-by-step, by the gradual breaking of symmetries in a chemical soup that differentiates a space as it develops.  Individuating difference is differentiation, and univocal being is the egg.  And because I happened upon this squirrel analogy, I think we can even get a glimpse of the way the same metaphor can be scaled up to address evolution.  Since there's no fixed "squirrel form", any individual squirrel actually implies a whole population of squirrels, from which this particular squirrel has been articulated or individuated as distinct.  There's never one wolf.

The Univocity of Being 2: Distribution and Hierarchy

Every time Deleuze wants to talk about an open space, he will reach for the image of the nomad.  Thinking about nomads is great because it forces us to counteract our now deeply seated prejudice that settling down to a sedentary life on a fixed piece of property as subjects of some state is the natural, inevitable, best and really only way to live.  Even at this early stage of his philosophy, he's clearly making a political and historical point.  Nobody seems to refer to nomads as "subjects".  Their movement is a way to be in the world that clearly locates them in space.  But the space isn't conceived as a closed state totality from the start, and they occupy it in a way that does not make the ground "theirs", that is, does not convert it into "property".  As James Scott confirmed, subject, property, sedentarism, and agriculture all go together, and the nomads are having none of it.

The main thrust of the nomad image in D&R is metaphysical though.  Deleuze is just using the nomad's version of political anarchy to help us see the way we have carried the same state sponsored concepts into the very depths of our metaphysics.  Just think about the loaded terms "subject" and "property".  Is it coincidence that we think of the building blocks of the universe as substantial subjects, each with various properties, each farming its little metaphysical plot of wheat?  So much for philosophy starting from some mythical land of self-evident a priori principles!

I wrote some before about how thinking about embryology can help us understand how an open space and a nomadic distribution works, and those comments are worth revisiting.  Looking at this again now in the context of univocity though, I might shift the emphasis onto a sentence that I didn't quote last time: 

It is an errant and even 'delirious' distribution, in which things are deployed across the entire extensity of a univocal and undistributed Being. It is not a matter of being which is distributed according to the requirements of representation, but of all things being divided up within being in the univocity of simple presence (the One - All).

One of the biggest, but also weirdest, aspects of Univocal Being is that it does not work the way you expect a totality to work.  If you think of it simply as a restatement of the idea that "everything is one", you miss the point -- univocal is not the same thing as unitary.  On the one hand, it's not a closed whole which would be divisible into parts.  In fact, he says univocal being is actually undistributed.  On the other hand, we can't think of it in terms of mystical union either, because this would imply that the distinctions we see are actually illusory, which is to say that they don't exist in the same way as the undistinguished whole.  This is the point of the reference to Parmenides on pg. 36.  There is not a "path of timeless truth" and a "path of changing appearance and opinion" -- the whole idea of univocity is that appearance exists in the same sense as reality so that there's only one way to exist.  So you end up with a non-whole not-dividing itself into parts, and have to make sense of the idea that somehow the parts are the whole.  The whole structure kinda reminds me of something out of one of Cantor's infinite sets.  Or the description of the ground in the first section of this chapter.

This idea that the parts are the whole, or at least equal to the whole occurs again in the discussion of hierarchy. 

There is a hierarchy which measures beings according to their limits, and according to their degree of proximity or distance from a principle.  But there is also a hierarchy which considers things and beings from the point of view of power: it is not a question of considering absolute degrees of power, but only of knowing whether a being eventually 'leaps over' or transcends its limits in going to the limit of what it can do, whatever its degree.

The words 'everything is equal' may therefore resound joyfully, on condition that they are said of that which is not equal in this equal, univocal Being: equal being is immediately present in everything, without mediation or intermediary, even though things reside unequally in this equal being. There, however, where they are borne by hubris, all things are in absolute proximity, and whether they are large or small, inferior or superior, none of them participates more or less in being, nor receives it by analogy. Univocity of being thus also signifies equality of being. Univocal Being is at one and the same time nomadic distribution and crowned anarchy

I'm still struggling to fully the understand the concept of power.  We're obviously talking about some sort of "absolute power" here, not a relative comparison of the power of two distinct forms.  It seems to me that the limit in question can really only be defined after the fact.  You only know what the limit was once you cross it and transform into something else, similar to the way a phase transition works as ice turns into water.  Univocal Being isn't a pre-given totality, and the forms that populate it can't be defined in advance either.   In fact, since Being is univocal, the whole and the parts (wrong terms of course) that come to populate it exist in exactly the same way.  Which I think means we have to conceive of both of them as continually expanding and transforming, though these transformations have to be conceived as themselves discontinuities that create "leaps" and "lines".  Does this mean that we can also only define Being by looking in the rearview mirror?  I'm tempted to link this to the concept of time, but it seems pretty tenuous.  And in the other direction, when we say that something "deploys all its power" are we saying that it's effectively "becoming equal to Being"?  This seems similar to the dissolving of identity one might might associate with buddhism, where the interconnection with the rest of the world has become so intense, that there's no definition of "you" left that doesn't include everything.  But again, I feel like I'm veering into something very abstract and of dubious value here.  

The Univocity of Being 1: Expressive Being

I've been working on this Univocity section (35-42) for a while now and a straightforward translation continues to elude me, so I think we'll just have to wade in at random and see how it goes.  The concept of Univocity is a tough one because of how abstract and metaphysical it sounds.  Beyond even that though, Univocity exhibits a particularly gnarly form of ontological feedback that makes it especially tough.  In other contexts, Deleuze will discuss this concept as the question of immanence (as opposed to transcendence) and describe it as "the very vertigo of philosophy".  To succinctly state the problem: the idea of immanence really bakes your noodle because if everything comes from within, then so does your theory that everything comes from within.  In other words, your thought about things is another thing; there's no way to represent the world without adding to it.  If that recursive structure sounds like it's going to be as navel-gazingly simple as thinking about thinking ad infinitum, try watching some video feedback.

Anyhow, so, I think the first thing to notice about the concept of Univocity, at least as presented in this context, is that it is not Equivocity.  It is explicitly opposed to construing the unity of Being as analogy, which was how Aristotle understood it in the last section.  

The unity of analogy rested on some capacity for third party judgement -- a subject who could judge that two concepts were linked by analogy even though they "really" had nothing to do with one another (in fact, had so little connection that at first we weren't even able to call them "different " but simply "other").  I think my understanding of this point would improve a lot if I read more Kant.  But let's pass over the idea of judgement for now, because anyways Deleuze is about to replace it with a different idea, that of the expressive proposition.  According to Deleuze an expressive proposition has three parts: 1) a thing or mode or designator that does some pointing, 2) something designated or pointed at by those pointers, which, in the reverse directions is expressing itself through the pointers, and 3) the sense or meaning that is expressed by the proposition as a whole.  It's not completely clear to me why Deleuze chooses to introduce propositions and expressions here, other than the connection to Spinoza, who we'll see also believed in Univocity and considered everything an expression of God.  Maybe it also has something to do with the way that this concept of expression forms a circle where the designators point at the designated while the designated expresses itself through the designators, which would seem to obviate the need for a third party judgement.  

Or maybe, to return to our starting point, the whole idea is just to set up the contrast with analogy.  With propositions, we get a model of how different things could designate something in common in the same way, as opposed to analogous but different ways.

What is important is that we can conceive of several formally distinct senses which none the less refer to being as if to a single designated entity, ontologically one. It is true that such a point of view is not sufficient to prevent us from considering these senses as analogues and this unity of being as an analogy. We must add that being, this common designated, in so far as it expresses itself, is said in turn in a single and same sense of all the numerically distinct designators and expressors. In the ontological proposition, not only is that which is designated ontologically the same for qualitatively distinct senses, but also the sense is ontologically the same for individuating modes, for numerically distinct designators or expressors: the ontological proposition involves a circulation of this kind (expression as a whole).

 There's something really odd going on in this quote.  We've become accustomed to thinking of Being as a sort of ontological substance.  So the idea that many designators point to the same substance probably isn't too surprising to us.  This would be another version of the idea that there is one underlying principle behind reality, one type of "stuff" from which it is built (whether you think this is mathematical forms or Absolute Spirit or electrons depends on what age you were born into).  Everything we see is really just a manifestation of this stuff, which is the only stuff that really, ontologically, IS.  Other stuff is just illusion and mere appearance, not real reality.  But in the quote above, we're told that "the sense is ontologically the same" for the appearances that indicated this underlying reality.  "Sense" doesn't seem like an ontological substance though.  It seems like the reality of "sense" would be in the process by which a designated expresses itself through designators that in turn designate it.  Sorry for the mouthful there, but I'm trying to draw the circle I mentioned before that I think he means by the circulation of "expression as a whole".  That a process can be said to be, that it could be an "ontological thing" (see how our everyday language is biased?), is already a pretty strange idea in a Western metaphysics that worships stasis and despises motion.  

But in fact this quote gets even weirder when you realize that this whole discussion started with the name of Duns Scotus.  Now, I don't know spit about medieval theology, but I have gathered that for Scotus, the major point of the univocity of Being was to counteract Aquinas' idea that we only know God through analogy.  When I say that my dog is good and that my neighbor is good I mean to use "good" in the same sense.  But, for Aquinas, when I then say that God is good, I don't mean that in the exact same sense that I meant with my dog or neighbor, I mean it in a merely analogous sense.  Scotus was explicitly denying this and claiming that if we're going to genuinely know God at all, the qualities we attribute to him have to be in the same sense as we attribute them to everything else.  

In effect, the essential in univocity is not that Being is said in a single and same sense, but that it is said, in a single and same sense, of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities. Being is the same for all these modalities, but these modalities are not the same. It is 'equal' for all, but they themselves are not equal. It is said of all in a single sense, but they themselves do not have the same sense.

If we translate this reference to Scotus to our current context, I think we end up with three distinct senses of "being" that the doctrine of Univocity is claiming are all the same.  First, there's the "Being of Being", as it were.  Surely Being is, right?  This is familiar ontological substance sense we employ when we say talk about the unity of what "really exists" (God, electrons, whatever).  Second, there's the "Being of beings".  Normally, we think that these mere appearances are just there to point at the underlying Being, and aren't "really real" durable substances in and of themselves.  Following Duns and Deleuze though, we're now claiming that beings are in the exact same sense that Being is.  I exist and my dog exists and god exists, and while we are all different, in so far as we exist, we all exist in the same way.  Appearance now becomes as real as reality.  Third, I think there's an implication here that the sense itself in which Being is said of everything is an ontological "thing" of its own -- as if there were also a "Being of sense", which could only be a sort of process of the circulation of expression where Being expresses itself through beings that designate it.  And of course, this final sense of Being is the same sense as the first two.  Or perhaps it's better to say that this final ontological sense is the most fundamental one that gives meaning to the first two, which would lead you to a formula like: Being is process, the process of the expression of Being.

To me though this is all getting a bit too academic.  I don't really love the term Being in the first place.  If you want to talk about God, talk about God.  Being seems a thin veneer.  And either way, they are both so abstract that it's hard to be sure you're actually saying anything and not just tossing word salad.  I think I learned something here, but the final formula seems a bit like something a geriatric Heidegger would be saying to his golf buddy.