what kind of panpsyhcist is deleuze?
DESCRIPTION
What Kind of Panpsyhcist is Deleuze?TRANSCRIPT
Student No. 07975043
What Is the Thought That Makes Difference?
Thought is one of the central and most important concepts of Difference and
Repetition. Yet Deleuze makes reference to thought in such a variety of
polysemous contexts that the question presents itself to us of what role
thought plays in Deleuze's philosophy. At least two important strands of
thought run through Difference and Repetition. The first seeks to expose an
image of thought which has a unitary identity, a harmonious will and a common
sense in all those who possess it. Exemplary of this image of thought are the
Cartesian cogito and the Kantian transcendental subject. What Deleuze wishes
to bring to our attention however, is the form of such common sense – a form
that though it professes scepticism or transcendental rigour retains an identity.
In the place of any identity of thought Deleuze pursues a thought of difference,
a thought that “'makes' difference” (Deleuze, 1994: 29). This thought of
difference is the second strand in Difference and Repetition and its relation to
the first is a question of genetic conditions. Deleuze's transcendental
empiricism, in contrast to Kant's transcendental idealism, is a process without
end which attaches to every phenomena, even the given of thought. The
thought of difference for Deleuze then is twofold. It is philosophical thought for
which difference is an object; though by object we mean aim or patient of
study, since it is a concept which indexes the constant necessity of change.
Difference as the constant necessity of change is the metaphysical motor at
the heart of Deleuze's project and it is constant change that is the other
thought of difference – thought which is itself the process of differenciation.
Page 1 of 23
Student No. 07975043
Deleuze signals the importance of thought for the whole of Difference and
Repetition when he says that “thought is that moment in which determination
makes itself one, by virtue of maintaining a unilateral and precise relation to
the indeterminate. Thought 'makes' difference” (Deleuze, 1994: 29). Yet, so
early in the work, this dense quote provides little to help us understand in what
context thought operates. Concepts at the heart of Deleuze's project appear
here that we must explicate before their significance appears more clearly to
us. Immediately however, two possibilities present themselves as ways in
which we might understand “thought”. The first is that we understand thought
not as limited to any being, human or otherwise. Thought is instead a power, in
a broader metaphysical sense, intimately connected with difference and the
process of differenciation. Contrary to this though, an image of thought
presents itself which is limited to the cognitive capacities of the human, or
finite rational, consciousness. In the manner of Kant's transcendental subject
thought is granted some privileged access to difference. Here it is the cognitive
exercise of our faculties which provide the a priori foundations from which to
begin, and which subsequently determine, our philosophical investigation.
Deleuze's transcendental empiricism shares with Kant's transcendental
idealism a concern to reveal the conditions for the possibility of some given.
Deleuze's is, however, an attempt to radicalise and invert Kantianism,
subjecting not only the structure of experience to this operation but the
structure of every thing. The extent to which Deleuze is successful in his
radicalisation of Kant depends upon the extent to which he is justified in
making every thing a structure of experience. In other words, what is the
Page 2 of 23
Student No. 07975043
thought that makes difference?
Deleuze is explicit in his endorsement of panpsychism: “Every body, every
thing, thinks and is a thought to the extent that, reduced to its intensive
reasons, it expresses an Idea the actualisation of which it determines”
(Deleuze, 1994: 254). The difficulty of unpacking Deleuze's panpsychist
thought is in part due to the non-linear presentation of Difference and
Repetition and its refusal to settle on a singular definition of thought. There are
good reasons for this, not least the critique of representation and identity which
are rehearsed throughout the work. Difference, repetition and thought are
successively subjected to the same process of enquiring after their conditions;
these concepts are critiqued and undermined as stable identities. This method
seems hardly to be made explicit at all in Difference and Repetition, but it is
demonstrated again and again. The transcendental of Deleuze's transcendental
empiricism is an unending questioning after the conditions for the possibility of
every conditioned identity. That this process of questioning which Deleuze
adopts as his philosophical method is the same as that which he works through
in his idealist metaphysics puts our question of panpsychism into context. The
eternal posing of problems in the virtual relations of Ideas produce
differentiations in those relations. The way in which these problems are also
worked out in differenciations in the actual mirrors that transcendental process
which Deleuze has adopted. The question “what are the conditions for the
possibility of this conditioned identity” is posed by the philosopher, but the
form of a question or problem to which a particular identity is the temporary
Page 3 of 23
Student No. 07975043
solution is also the form of Deleuze's virtual/actual process metaphysics. The
thought which asks the question in philosophical enterprise is the same
thought which operates in the actualisation of every conditioned identity.
Whether Deleuze is warranted in this expansive use of thought is the question
at which this project is aimed.
The Image of Thought
What thought Deleuze is not referring to in either philosophical questioning or
metaphysical actualisation is made clear in his critique of representational and
identitarian philosophy. The image of thought Deleuze calls the “ur-Doxa”
(1994: 134) because in identifying a common unitary identity for thinking
philosophers such as Descartes and Kant appeal to a common sense for which
they can give no conditions. Despite their sceptical or transcendental
intentions what philosophies adopting the image of thought critique are only
elements of thought and not the form of thought itself. By appeal to what is
supposed to be self-evident – the “I think” for example – the image of thought
introduces an identity which cannot be regarded as a fact. According to
Deleuze, the faculty which serves to make identity primary is recognition.
Recognition is a power to proclaim identity by reference to similitude, and
serves as the provider of a correspondence theory of truth by connecting
thought and thing in a relationship of resemblance. For Kant the transcendental
conditions of experience are the categories. Yet no conditions are ever given for
the categories themselves. Where the structure of experience in our perception
of particulars is subjected to a transcendental aesthetic, the procedure by
Page 4 of 23
Student No. 07975043
which such conditions are recognized exempts itself from further critique.
Experience therefore, the unity of the transcendental subject itself, remains an
identity. This is the basis for Deleuze's attack on representation and his
adventure into the conditions of difference in itself. Deleuze attacks Aristotle as
guilty of taking empirical or generic difference for metaphysical difference. But
such difference, according to Deleuze, is merely specific difference – the
difference between this or that thing. The real foundation for specific difference
is recognition. We can say that these things differ on condition of first
identifying what these things are. Just as Aristotle makes identity according to
categories the basis of generic difference, so Kant makes the transcendental
categories the basis for phenomenal difference. But Kant's categories are
themselves identities the conditions of which undergo no further critical
process as to the conditions of their possibility. They are fixed identities, brute
facts of consciousness which are distinguished by the specific difference
between them. Deleuze's work against a common sense shows that he cannot
be satisfied by the Kantian faculties. “[It is] not qualitative opposition within the
sensible, but an element which is in itself difference, and creates at once both
the quality in the sensible and the transcendent exercise within sensibility”
(Deleuze, 1994: 144). The phenomenological operation of recognition by which
Kant identifies the conditions of thought can give no account of the conditions
of these conditions; in the categories and the faculties of experience we reach
fixed identities. Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, however, is concerned to
show the conditions of even those categories and faculties which cannot think
their own conditions. The identity of any image of thought is the result of a
Page 5 of 23
Student No. 07975043
process which precedes that thought's power to order or recognize. This is why
Deleuze seeks difference in itself in place of mere qualitative opposition.
The procedure by which Deleuze submits every identity to enquiry after its
conditions undermines any stable identity of a thinking subject and it is from
here that he expands thought beyond any finite rational being. If it is thought,
in the finite rational sense, which makes difference and difference is the prime
metaphysical motor then we accept that every question of being makes sense
only in a correlative epistemology privileging human access. This is precisely
the opposite of Deleuze's intention. Deleuze's principle of univocity, that “Being
is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of
which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself” (1994: 36), makes explicit
the universal metaphysical significance of difference in itself. The thought
which makes difference therefore cannot be the thought of any unified identity.
In some sense the thought which makes difference must be operative in
differenciation, the processes of actualisation which condition every
conditioned phenomena. This is what is meant when Deleuze says that every
thing “thinks and is a thought to the extent that, reduced to its intensive
reasons, it expresses an Idea the actualisation of which it determines” (1994:
254). However, to what extent Deleuze is justified in this depends on the
method of transcendental empiricism and the structure of virtual/actual
relations discovered through this method. Deleuze's attempt to invert
Kantianism by his more radical transcendental procedure is not enough by
itself to guard against the accusation that the structure of thought in
Page 6 of 23
Student No. 07975043
philosophical questioning is illegitimately extended into metaphysical process.
If it is thought that does metaphysical work through differenciation then we
must enquire into the nature of this process and the place of thought in it.
Page 7 of 23
Student No. 07975043
Biology, Panpsychism and Time
In Larval Subjects, Autonomous Systems and E. Coli Chemotaxis John Protevi
argues that Deleuze's thought is a “biological panpsychism” (2007: 29) and
that “cognition is fundamentally biological, that it is founded in organic life”
(2007: 29). Protevi's argument is based on a reading of Deleuze's larval
subjectivity that is exclusively biological. Larval subjectivity is a moment in
Deleuze's philosophy of time that describes the syntheses of past, present and
future. The syntheses of time occur in the differentiation of the virtual and
determine a time of differenciation. That this moment is a “subject” signals
again the parallels operative in Deleuze's work between first person thinking
and metaphysical process. Furthermore, the examples from biology that
demonstrate Deleuze's syntheses – in habit, memory and creativity or
evolution – raise the question of the biological function of time and thought in
contrast to a univocal temporality. It is from the synthesis of time through
subjectivity that Deleuze begins his critique of representational theories of time
and launch his own differential philosophy of time.
Deleuze begins the discussion of his philosophy of time with a reference to
Hume, but also an allusion to Leibniz and a sign of the panpsychism which
Deleuze will come to develop. “Repetition changes nothing in the object
repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it”
(Deleuze, 1994: 70). This is Hume's problem according to Deleuze. It is a
problem which in Hume led to sceptical empiricism and turned Kant towards
transcendental idealism, but which Deleuze will radicalise through his
Page 8 of 23
Student No. 07975043
transcendental empiricism. The discontinuity of phenomena is not a problem
which must be overcome by anchoring succession in either habit or
transcendental categories, but is a moment in the differenciation of the actual
through temporal synthesis. Leibniz's mens momentenea brings together
matter, time and memory such that "every body is a momentary mind and
consequently without consciousness, sense, memory" (Leibniz quoted in
Beeley, 2004: 61). The temporal structure of differenciation for Deleuze is
intimately connected to sense and memory and it is through his approach to
these questions that he will attempt to escape the problematic inherited from
Hume and Kant of discontinuity and succession. The conditions for successive
appearance are for Deleuze, just as they are for Kant, temporal. However, the
succession of phenomena which Hume and Kant anchor in the rational subject
Deleuze makes a process of larval subjectivity. The larval subject is a not
comparable to any identity of consciousness or cogito - Deleuze's arguments
against common sense make this clear. Instead, the larval subject might be
compared with Whitehead's “subject-superject” because for both Whitehead
and Deleuze the subject is not a being with any a priori structure, it is the
process and the product of an actualisation. The first moment in that process
for Deleuze is a contraction of elements of the past in expectation of the future.
There can be no absolute inertia in Deleuze; no thing ever stays what it is,
because for a thing to be what it is it must be created. No creation is eternal
and each new moment is instead a repetition, a new creation in which the
same returns through temporal difference. Thus when Deleuze says that
repetition “changes nothing in the object repeated” (1994: 70) this is both
Page 9 of 23
Student No. 07975043
Hume's problem and Deleuze's processual solution. No object can be repeated
itself, instead the Idea which is its conditioning ground may be contracted and
repeated again, but always differently.
The possibility of a return of the same, which is the possibility of any
appearance of stable identity, is based on a contraction of elements of the past
– a memory of what was in expectation of what can be again. This contraction
is the basis of habit, which is repetition and expectation of the same. Deleuze
seeks here to show what Hume could not: the conditions of habit. In Hume
habit is the faculty which grounds expectation of succession but no explanation
is given for the ability of habit to operate serially, that is successively. Habit for
Deleuze is dependent on temporal synthesis, not vice versa. Equally critical is
that we understand habit not as a faculty of the empirical subject as in Hume,
but as a habit of the material itself. This is what is meant when Deleuze says
that repetition “does change something in the mind which contemplates it”
(1994: 70). It is not, as it is in Kant and Hume, that a finite intellect synthesises
successive phenomena, but rather that the larval subject operates as the
universal mind in which Ideas undergo differentiation, a process which in turn
differenciates temporally.
The second synthesis of time is the contraction not only of elements of the
past, but of the whole of the past in the present. This synthesis makes possible
a past wider than the perished moment; it makes possible a return of that
which is not present and is a deeper memory for being. The third and final
Page 10 of 23
Student No. 07975043
synthesis introduces novelty and individuation. The eternal return of difference
is the repetition not of what has been but repetition of difference, the bringing
into the present of a future which is always different. Together the three
syntheses of time form a crucial moment in Deleuze's process philosophy. In
the current context however we are interested primarily in the first synthesis
and Deleuze's pyscho-biological examples of the passive synthesis of habit.
Deleuze is explicitly organicist, biological and psychical in his examples of the
first synthesis. The contraction of past elements provides the ground for a
habitual repetition most easily seen in living bodies. The systole and diastole of
the heart provides the clearest example with the caveat that this living habit –
while it is exemplified in a material, biological system – is possible only on
condition of the contraction of a past that cannot be actual or material – since
it is past – and therefore the physio-biological phenomena is conditioned by a
spiritual process. “A soul must be attributed to the heart, to the muscles,
nerves and cells, but a contemplative soul whose entire function is to contract
a habit” (Deleuze, 1994: 74). This spiritual process of contraction can be
related to the organisation and function of biological unities in the Aristotlean
sense. Protevi links this spiritual element, the psukhē of living organisation, to
contemporary autopoetic theory, which includes Evan Thompson and which
Protevi calls the “mind in life school” (2011: 31). Protevi's approach explicates
Deleuze's philosophy of difference in reference to an organic philosophy in
which the dynamic genesis of living things is a material and cognitive or sense-
making process. Insofar as this biological focus explicates the evolution of
Page 11 of 23
Student No. 07975043
living entities in this way it accurately describes Deleuze's work. However, the
problem with an approach that limits itself to the field of biological-
panpsychism is that it limits the work of temporal synthesis and differenciation
to the biological realm and forgoes any description of a broader empirical
realm. First, such work cannot really be called panpsychist because psyche is
not a universal process, but is confined to a limited realm of biological
organisation. This then raises questions of the origin of biological organisation
if the potential to contract habit in temporal synthesis is not universally
distributed. Consequently, claims for the univocity of Being become
problematic. If what Being is said of differs and that difference is made by
thought, then thought limited to a particular realm gives us the peculiar
situation in which the non-biological is not, or in some sense lacks true Being.
Indeed, such a limited biological thought, although realist about living
organisation, echoes Kant's critical strictures by limiting activity to the living
subject. Such biological-panpsychism therefore risks the very serious
accusations that it is either straightforwardly anti-realist, or at the very least
handicapped in its ability to speak about a world beyond living thought. If
Deleuze's repeated references to biological genesis, whether of eggs or eyes,
are understood in a way which limits true Being to the biological, it is left with
no recourse when it comes to thinking the origin of life from non-life. Just as for
Kant, such an origin is unthinkable. What the non-living is, in fact, remains
extraordinarily problematic. Given the focus of biological genesis in Difference
and Repetition and the intimate relation between living habit and temporal
synthesis we may rightly ask if these problems affect Deleuze.
Page 12 of 23
Student No. 07975043
Vitalism
Rather than panpsychist, a more proper term for the power particular to living
things might be vitalism. Ray Brassier attacks Deleuze as a vitalist with the
understanding that: “by 'vitalism' we mean the claim that physical and
chemical principles cannot explain biological functions and processes”
(Brassier, 2007: 168). Brassier's basis for the claim that Deleuze is a vitalist is
twofold. The first is the preponderance of biological examples in Difference and
Repetition. The second criticises as illegitimate Deleuze's universalising of
thought based the first person experience of intensive difference. In regards to
the first, while references to biology abound in Difference and Repetition the
problems associated with either biological-panpsychism or vitalism, however
serious, cannot be attributed to Deleuze merely on the basis of his scientific
background. That Deleuze was less familiar with the physical sciences than he
was with the biological sciences says very little about the philosophical merit of
his work. Brassier's second argument however, holds more weight. Indeed,
Brassier's criticism follows the same lines as that subjective element of
Deleuze's thought that we have been mapping. The thought that we have
called panpsychist Brassier criticises as vitalist, accusing Deleuze of remaining
within an idealist framework which is incapable of thinking a world outside
experience. Far from radicalising Kant's transcendental work, Deleuze is left
“equivocating between transcendental and absolute idealism” (Brassier, 2007:
190).
Page 13 of 23
Student No. 07975043
The space of thought in which vitalism finds itself can be made clear by an
another definition, this time proposed by Canguilhem. Canguilhem's definition
of vitalism is given in the context of a discussion about how we situate
ourselves with regard to nature – as alien to it or part of it.
A scientist who feels filial, sympathetic sentiments toward nature will not
regard natural phenomena as strange and alien; rather, he will find in
them life, soul and meaning. Such a man is basically a vitalist.
(Canguilhem, 1994: 288)
The problem which Brassier attributes to Deleuze, Canguilhem highlights here.
Whatever our feelings towards nature, and much of Deleuze's work rests on the
aesthetic intuition of signs of intensive difference, there is no guarantee that
nature either reciprocates, or indeed feels at all. We may extend filial and
sympathetic feelings, but if we attribute the same feelings to nature it may
simply be that what we find is our own way of looking. Much of Brassier's
criticism rests on the sufficiency of Deleuze's work to the variety of inorganic,
material and seemingly senseless processes of nature found in contemporary
physical science – death and entropy are Brassier's preferred examples. To
deny that natural phenomena such as these can be strange and alien may be
to to project into nature, rather then find in it, our own image of life, soul and
meaning. This criticism, when put to Deleuze, condemns transcendental
empiricism for mistaking the form of our feelings of intensive difference for the
the form of all actualisation. This form of all actualisation, which is Deleuze's
larval subject, Brassier argues can only be understood as biological, memorial
and psychically individuating. The syntheses of time are vital powers of living
Page 14 of 23
Student No. 07975043
beings, not universal principles. Furthermore, the moment of the eternal return
in which novelty and individuation occur “is as yet the prerogative of homo
sapiens” (Brassier, 2007: 201). “Ultimately, it is the thinker – the philosopher-
artist – who is the 'universal individual'” (Brassier, 2007: 185).
The Soul of Matter
Kant calls the theory of living matter hylozoism and argues, on account of his
own commitment to the inertial (and therefore lifeless) identity of matter, that
“we certainly have no a priori insight into whether such matter is possible. But
this means our explanation can only move in a circle” (Kant, Ak.I 394, 1987:
276). The form of our experience for Kant recognises phenomena only so long
as they conform to the categories of experience. Since the categories
determine matter as extended only and lacking inherent power, the intuition of
life or thought within matter is a non-object to us. Certainly the form of certain
living things suggests a force of purposive organisation, but this aesthetic
intuition cannot properly speaking be an object of our understanding. To say
the matter lives or has a vital inherent force is to fabulate from within the
imagination, and such a story has purchase only insofar as we recognise
phenomena that match our imagination. We say nothing true about the world,
and much more about our feverish imaginations. Yet Kant's comment that the
thought of living matter moves “in a circle” is illuminating of the difference
between he and Deleuze. Thought not grounded in an a priori is unthinkable for
Kant, whereas for Deleuze the ungroundedness of every phenomena is the
inevitable result of thinking difference in itself. With the image of thought
Page 15 of 23
Student No. 07975043
undermined by Deleuze's ceaseless questioning after the conditions of every
conditioned entity, the identity of every thing – including matter – becomes a
contingent moment in an ongoing process of differenciation. The expansion of
transcendental critique to even the thinker of the transcendental abandons any
apodictic certainty to a chaotic becoming where natural production trumps the
necessary identity of any thing. The question remains however, of in what
sense Deleuze is entitled to proclaim the universal significance of the thought
of difference and whether such thought can be considered as realism.
In seeking to paint Deleuze as a vitalist incapable of realism about the non-
living Brassier damns him for relegating matter to a dream of mind (2007:
201). While Brassier, like Kant, finds such a suggestion incomprehensible,
Deleuze has a positive role for the dream of matter. The first passive synthesis
of time is a:
bare repetition [which] must be understood as the external envelope of
the clothed: that is, the repetition of successive instants must be
understood as the most relaxed of the coexistent levels, matter as a
dream or as mind's most relaxed past. (Deleuze, 1994: 84)
The differenciation of matter is the enveloping of differentiated Ideas.
Difference is clothed in its actualisation and matter is the most relaxed of the
contractions of succession. Just as Leibniz's matter is a “momentary mind […]
without consciousness, sense, [or] memory" (quoted in Beeley, 2004: 61)
Deleuze's matter is produced in mind, but mind that has not yet contracted the
complexity of a past or the possibility of novelty. It is not “only the sleep of
Page 16 of 23
Student No. 07975043
reason which gives rise to monsters: it is also the vigil, the insomnia of
thought” (Deleuze, 1994: 29). Thought dreams in the sense that it is sleepless,
always repeating, incapable of ever being the same. In what sense is matter
also a dream of mind?
If Deleuze has achieved nothing else in his critique of the image of thought, we
must at least grant that the ungrounding process of transcendental empiricism
has banished any possibility of a stable, individuated subject of experience.
What then gives rise to this impression that “I think”? This identity or
recognition, if we are to interrogate its conditions seriously, must itself be
conditioned and therefore the product of some sub-representational process.
This is the meaning of difference in itself. Phenomenal appearance, at least as
it is encountered in our subjective experience, cannot be grounded in any a
priori. It must therefore always be the product of a process which is never the
same, but always different. This process is exemplified in the syntheses of
time: the succession of appearances and their constant change are given to us
in an experience of intensive difference. We cannot experience difference in
itself; in agreement with Kant, on this at least, experience is of phenomena not
process. Where Deleuze departs from Kant is in granting to aesthetic
experience relevance to the presentation of the phenomenal. Kant's aesthetic
Ideas retain an “as if” status. Deleuze, on the other hand, is a realist about
Ideas. An Idea is not an object or an identity, but a differential relation the
expression of which conditions an actualisation. It is because actual
appearances cannot be taken as given that they must be products of a
Page 17 of 23
Student No. 07975043
conditioning process. Ideas express relations which are conditioned and
actualised in thought.
A process of first person experience conditioned by forces which are not
available to that experience except mediately is neither dogmatically anti-
Kantian, nor opposed to contemporary science. But Deleuze's claim is much
broader than this. The experience conditioned by forces not immediately
available to that experience is not only a first person process. If first person
thought is a process conditioned by Ideas in the virtual, and if we are realists
about the origin of life and consciousness from the non-living unconscious, then
the generative process of differenciation is a universal process. That temporal
synthesis is a necessary moment of differenciation is a result of the necessity
of all identity being conditioned, which is to say that all identity is a product of
difference repeated. Yet unlike Kant, whose transcendental aesthetic fixes the
form of time only in the common sense identity of the transcendental subject,
the subject of Deleuze's temporal synthesis is universal not finite. The larval
subject is not a finite or particular subject, it is the universal form of an ongoing
process of difference: “the subjective, or duration, is the virtual“ (Deleuze,
1988: 42 emphasis in the original). Time takes a form the subject of which
Deleuze maps through syntheses of past, present and future. Each synthesis
contracts the potential to express again Ideas for which there is no original.
Insofar as differenciation expresses Ideas it is a process of thought. Thought “is
that moment in which determination makes itself one, by virtue of maintaining
a unilateral and precise relation to the indeterminate. Thought 'makes'
Page 18 of 23
Student No. 07975043
difference” (Deleuze, 1994: 29). Ideas determine actualisations which are made
one, which is to say they appear as particular. The unilateral relation is the
process whereby differentiation of the virtual works itself out through
actualisation. If the process of our first person experience is a momentary
product of this actualisation, and if we are realists about the common origin of
all natural phenomena – whether psychic or material – then we risk
incoherence if we deny to material phenomena the same active process in its
production as that which we grant first person experience. Every body, every
thing, is a conditioned product and the thought of difference operates in its
actualisation. No distinction can be made between biological, chemical or
physical processes. The phenomena even of the basest element is the product
of as momentary mind. Even “[m]etallurgy is the consciousness or thought of
the matter-flow, and metal the correlate of this consciousness” (Deleuze &
Guittari, 1997: 411).
Conclusion
That the thought which makes difference cannot in any way be a common
sense image of experience is clear in Deleuze's work. While it is true that first
person experience of intensive difference serves as the point of departure for
our thinking of the mind of matter, this experience is neither unified nor
identical. Encounters with difference force us to think in the way that they
present signs to us of the Ideas enveloped in appearance. But relations of
difference are operative as much in chemistry and physics as they are in
biology and psychology. Thought makes difference in the sense that the
Page 19 of 23
Student No. 07975043
process from differentiation to differenciation is real but not yet actual.
Deleuze's thought is not absolute idealism because thought is only this process
of differenciation. The differentiation of the virtual remains what is not thought.
This unthought is not quite noumenal, because there always remains the
potential that virtual Ideas may be enveloped in actualisation, thereby
becoming the subjects of the mind of time; but the determinate relations of
Ideas are inexhaustible. Behind every thought made actual, the potential of the
virtual works unconsciously. Deleuze's thought is neither rigidly biological, nor
vitalist and and it is not opposed to physical science. While Deleuze is critical
of any method which makes a law from conditioned states of affairs, this simply
means that behind every phenomena – whether psychic or material – is the
product a process of thought, unilaterally related to virtual difference. The only
law possible for Deleuze is “crowned anarchy” (1994: 37), an ungrounded
process of continual productivity. If any thinker is alarmed by Deleuze's
description of the spiritual process of matter they need only remember that the
best current physics is not atomism, but describes instead a process of the
production of matter. That this physical process itself cannot be material,
because the material is its product, is the meaning of Deleuze's panpsychist
thought. That the physical is not opposed to thought, and Ideas are not
excluded from the material, must be accepted by any realist about naturalist
metaphysics.
Page 20 of 23
Student No. 07975043
Bibliography
Brassier, Ray (2007) Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and
Exitinction. Palgrave
Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Beeley, Philip (2004) A Philosophical Apprenticeship: Leibniz's
Correspondence with
the Secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg in
Leibniz
and his Correspondents, ed. Paul Lodge. Cambridge
University
Press, Cambridge, pp47-73.
Canguilhem, (1994) Knowledge and the Living, in A Vital
Rationalist, ed. Francois
George Delaporte. Zone Books, New York, pp287-
320.
Deleuze, Gilles (1988) Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara
Habberjam.
Zone Books, New York.
(1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton.
Columbia
University Press, New York.
(2006) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson.
Continuum
International Publishing, London.
Page 21 of 23
Student No. 07975043
Deleuze, Gilles & (1997) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi.
University of
Guittari, Felix. Minnesota Press, Minnesota.
Kant, Immanuel (1987) Critique of Judgement, trans. Werner S. Pluhar.
Cambridge,
Hackett Publishing Company.
Leibniz, G. W. (2001) A New Physical Hypothesis, trans. R.T.W. Arthur.
Online:
http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~rarthur/trans/Leib.TMA
.pdf [accessed 27/04/13].
Protevi, John (2011) Larval Subjects, Autonomous Systems and
E. Coli Chemotaxis
in Deleuze and the Body, eds. Laura Guillaume and Joe
Hughes. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, p29-52.
Shaviro, Steven (2009) Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and
Aesthetics.
MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachussets.
(2010) Panpsychism And/Or Eliminativism. Online:
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1012 [Accessed
31/03/13]
Williams, James (2003) Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: A
Critical
Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh University Press,
Page 22 of 23
Student No. 07975043
Edinburgh.
Whitehead, A.N. (1985) Process and Reality. Free Press, New York.
Page 23 of 23