The Non-Politics of "The Politics Of": Politics and Economy

THE NON-POLITICS OF "THE POLITICS OF":

Politics and Economy / The Manifest Image and the Scientific Image
__________________________________________

Introduction - Methodological Preliminaries, the Analytic-Continental Division Again, Science and Politics

Levi has been making some interesting comments about the connection between politics, analysis and critique, which devolved in a few responses from my part that might be worthy to integrate into a blog-post of its own. The main comment that triggered the responses was the following one

"It's interesting that discussions about the analytic/continental divide almost never mention politics. Almost nothing can be understood about continental thought and debates without understanding the political horizon upon which it unfolds. The same is not true of analytic thought. You could say analytic thought is dominated by an epistemological telos (truth), whereas continental thought is dominated by an ethico-political telos. These are very different codes or operative distinctions." 

My response proceeded as follows: first, I agree in that politics is much more pervasive in Continental discussions, even where some of its canonical figures didn't write all that much on politics (Heidegger; Bergson...). A similar argument can be said about science in Continental theory. Much of the self-proclaimed 'materialisms' are correlationist hybrids, including Marxist conceptions. Even materiality, when it is accepted in the name of a "materialism", is relativized to 'relations of production', or whatnot. I think the ubiquity of the political is in a sense a consequence of the hegemony of anti-realisms: the contextualization of every philosophical valence transforms ontological-epistemological questions to questions about the ways in which discourse organizes human practice.

This also illuminates why the analytic tradition, when committed to metaphysical and epistemological programs, did not think it necessary to pass through the socio-discursive grinder. Even instrumentalisms and (neo) pragmatism were for the most part restricted to methodological questions about a specific practice, rather than inflating the ubiquity of the political in every affirmative gesture. There's obvious exceptions to both rules.

I think, for my part, that the lesson to be learnt is twofold. For the Continentals, the concept of materiality needs to be dislodged from its residual humanism, as made visible when reducing it to 'relations of production'. The materiality of practice is still too anthropomorphically sealed. Any contemporary Marxism that seeks to be truly materialist cannot be encumbered by such a parochial notion. Any stringent concept of revolution to follow cannot continue to avow the heroic revolutionary elan, while keeping economy, techno-scientific insight subordinate to the classical dynamics of class struggle. This kind of weakness leads to thinkers like Badiou being able to claim for example that economy is just the State, and that politics is rather where subjective decision takes place. I think Land is right to mock this romantic exuberance.

For analytics, I think it's clear that the purported realism of their metaphysical positions came at a price of political naivete, which undermined their pretences. Brassier shows this in Nihil Unbound apropos the Churchlands for example, and I think Graham and others show a similar result in Ladyman and Ross, where appeals to the authority of science subordinate realism to pragmatism, and therefore end up becoming victims of a tacit political prescription behind their alleged normative neutrality.

The interplay of the normative and the causal, or the rational and the natural, is what is at stake here. The irony is that each side appears infected by a excess of unquestioned commitment, or dogma. When the analytic naturalist endows science the authority before the real as a matter of principle, the Continentals patronizingly wave the 'positivist!' card, and with due cause. But when the so-called Marxist materialist retorts with such gnomic formulations like "there is no outside of capitalism!", the analytic rightfully scorns what appears to reduce even what telescopes allow us to see to our practice, and take it as an idealist excess. It's clear that both are victim to a kind of methodological naivete: the analytic elides the rationalist obligation to adjudicate metaphysical claims to the in-itself, and the Continental elides the ontological and epistemological levels of description in correlationism (because even science is a human practice, it is said that science cannot know of the in-itself). Pragmatism and correlationism; two sides of the same anti-realist predicament. 

a) Hegel and Marx

I think a beginning for those of us involved in 'Continental theory' is to be uncompromisingly critical with the purported materialism of Marxist philosophy. The whole Marxist 'materialist' reversal of Hegel grossly insufficient. It wants to subvert the idealism latent in Hegel's dialectics in sight of a truly materialist conception of change.  To do so, Marx naively transplants dialectical categories proper to the Concept to the material. Thus, Marx frames nature ubiquitously and historically as governed by the principle of contradiction and the law of negation. So he wants to inject negativity into the Natural to make it a dynamic force of material production and to avoid tethering it to the narrow confines Conceptual, and so to an exercise in theoretical-reason for subjective consciousness; the materiality of practice is instead set then describe how qualitative forms emerge in matter, leading to the commodity-form as a mixture of 'pure' Nature (matter) and labor, and where the latter transforms the former into the 'inorganic support' or body of man. 

This view, mostly to be found in the early Marx (1844, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts), is still the most bluntly dialectical attempt to reconcile the becoming of the Concept with that of Matter, while not sacrificing their inextricability. But Marx's move doesn't quite work. Contradiction makes sense as a metaphysical principle to describe the dynamism of Nature if and only if one identifies logic and metaphysics, like Hegel did, because one can say that the principle of identity of indiscernibles leads to the conceptual equivalence of being and nothingness, and one can thus give blunt conceptual contradictions ontological content, from which the dialectical process takes off. One can equate conceptual indiscernibility with metaphysical identity through PII, because for idealism there is nothing in the order of being external to the identity issued by the rational Concept; the rational is what is actual. This makes sense for Hegel because you can begin with a pure abstract concept of being and have no predicative quality separate it from Nothing.

But when you want to begin from the multiplicity of Nature, before entwining with the Conceptual, it makes no sense to speak of negativity or contradiction. Marx is forced into saying ridiculous, proto-obscurantist things such as 'everything in nature has an opposite'. But what is the 'contradiction' or 'contrary' of a finger? Or of a planet? Or of a finger-part, for that matter? Marx wants the rationalist baby without the idealist bathwater, but instead ends up in methodological confusion, dislodging negativity from the Concept, where it is imbued and enveloped. Dialectical negativity cannot be transplanted into the material as an ontological motor without vitiating the rationalist coherence of the theory.

    In the end, the attempt to even say what Nature could be prior to the interplay of labor and matter becomes impossible, and the later Marx is much more bluntly descriptively empirical than 'philosophical' about Nature. The corollary of the incapacity, however, to dialectically disassociate the materiality of Nature from that of labor, the dyanmics of matter from that of production, is what allows Marxist orthodoxy to claim materialism means acknowledging that reality is determined by the dynamics of relations of production, rather than by blunt intellectual speculation. But in doing so it forgets its internal incapacity to theorize the mind-independent world of matter on which production is conditioned metaphysically. This is not going to change until the residual Hegelianism can be done away with and the theory given proper methodological footing. Otherwise, we get preposterously proto-correlationist or idealist claims like "there is no outside of capitalism!". No Marxism can survive the brutal reality of the contemporary without re-assessing its fundamental conceptual quandaries. It is clear the classical Hegelian dialectics won't do, and that negativity and contradiction/opposites are insufficient as metaphysical principles. The essential question remains: how to reconcile a rationalism with a materialism.

Of course, much Marxism has moved away and beyond the early conceptual frame that Marx inherited vis a vis Hegel (Althusser being maybe the most rigorous example). But much work still is left here; I don't think structuralism will do the trick just like that. But that is a discussion for another time.


b) Politics and Economy / Reason and Nature

Levi also mentioned, in a more recent comment:

"There are two very different types of political theory. On the one hand, there is the sort of political theory you find in thinkers like Marx, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari who hold that the most effective way to engage is by mapping the field of power, how it functions, its mechanisms so that people can engage better, more logistically, more strategically, more effectively. These theoristsgenerally say little about what is to be done. Their contribution is to uncover the problem.

There's another type of political theory that thinks what's important is declaring what you're against, establishing what a subject is, establishing that we have freedom or agency, and denouncing. This doesn't seem to contribute much as it seldom understands the concrete problems, how the field is organized, or how to engage. But it's fun, at least."

In response to this insightful passage, I mentioned the following points:

     I am generally suspicious of political theories that divorce diagnosis or critique from strategy. These are separate tasks, of course, but part of what probably reeks on both ends as ultimately impotent when thinking of a new possible societal organization is the saturation of descriptive-prescriptive discourse by insufficiently nuanced conceptual categories, following from an insufficient appreciation for the binding between politics and economics.

 This I find for instance in Foucault's strict historicist outlook, which is ultimately humanly sealed to the point of demoting the empirical reality of market economy. He has nothing to say about the concrete movement of economy, but plenty to say about agency, institutions, and power. I think there is some untapped 'structuralist' potential here, when dislodged from the residual humanism, however stringently Foucault's denouncing might have been against everything claiming itself to be 'human'.

I insist in that as long as theorists routinely disavow economics when doing political investigation they're repeating in a variation the nefarious move that post-Heideggerean phenomenologists-hemeneutic historicists did when routinely subordinating science to the subject, to the point of patronizing it as 'derivative abstractions' (even Habermas does this). All this to say: the patronizing of the intricacies of economy is the corollary of the correlationist reification of subjectivity, agency and "power". 

Now, does this mean that we must go the 'reductionist' route, and attempt to describe a political process in terms purely immanent to the material 'primacy processes'? Not quite. Recent Deleuzian-inspired accounts which follow this route face something of the opposite problem than the historicists, in that the category of agency becomes either impossible or extremely problematic, which leads into an equally impotent, and even more alienating, fetishizing of 'material process' (Nick Land anyone?). In the name of ontological univocity, and waging war against the logos of every representationalism and humanism (Deleuze included), thinkers like Land deflate the empirical-transcendental distinction to the point of effectively destroying the rational kernel in which political categories are articulated: decision, agency, obligation, all fall out the window.

These are normative categories, and as such operate within the space of reasons in which man conceives of itself through obligations and responsibilities. In destroying the autonomy of the normative, Landianism procures not just a pragmatic contradiction where all agency is dissolved, and at which point the only possible imperative is to 'intensify' the native process into which you're invariably embedded. But more fundamentally, one elides the capacity to adjudicate one's claims in rational terms, vitiating the theoretical status of one's enterprise, by destroying the logical basis of argumentation, thereby eliding the possibility of a real basis to adjudicate normative claims. It's your sci-fi counterpart to the classical romanticism of the historicists.

The resulting deficiency explains also what I take to be the brutal flaccidity of contemporary positive political visions. Without having the capacity to envision a new form of economical organization, political 'theory' is doomed to remain confined to vituperations against the State, the endless celebration of subjective and collective freedom, and the glorification of the moments of riot and demonstration. Not to demean the valence of the latter, of course. But it is clear that something like what Marx did, that is, to have a political vision sufficiently attentive to the intricacies of political economy to envelop the global scope, will need to get a grip into the concrete dynamics of the contemporary market. Without that, talk of 'relations of production' can never get off the academic conceptual commerce, which results in a placebo more than anything, encouraging the next parade of books with titles such as "The Politics of Lamentation". Romanticized historicist genealogies can do as fascinating history, and are absolutely necessary. This is not to simply identify politics with economy, but to insist that discontinuities in politics, global or local, cannot be excised from a dialectical interplay with the economic, insofar as the latter is the material support of collective organization and life. Critique of political economy is essential, and cannot be done away with.

So what is the alternative? Here I would timidly suggest that the necessary articulation between the normative and the natural is somewhat analogous to the articulation between the political and the economic. This would need some reconstructive surgery of course, but the idea, would be roughly along the following lines. We can't agree with Badiou in claiming that economy is something like the bare normality of the State, because this delivers the complex dynamics of market and the possibility of an economy to the 'fixity' of a structure, while reserving political action for the supplementary category of subjective decision, still beholden to romanticist voluntarism. It plainly divorces political subjectivation from its necessary intrication within the structural dynamics not only of a societal-state apparatus, but to a social-link determining the relations of material exchange, production and labor. Zizek criticizes the residual voluntaraism in Badiou thus as the Kantian supplement in the revolutionary's thought, somewhat justifiably. However, we must agree with Badiou and every apologist of the "free revolutionary subject", in that the economic stratum of abstract transactions and processes, or the Market, does not by itself produce wholesale structural changes, if by the latter we understand the sublation of its axiomatic efficiency.

One cannot fully dislodge the impersonal potency of market-forces from the interest of agents, and their complex social envelopment. Reducing individual and collective will to a facile moralistic Manichean distinction between the 'revolutionary elan' and the reactive capitalist 'greed', one fails to secure the proper integration of will into the pragmatics of political and economic decision, and how they make the latter not only axiomatically operational but structurally contingent. The twofold axis of rational subjective/collective decision/deliberation and the automatism of impersonal causal/axiomatic processes saturates the political and the economical in their mutual inextricability. Here, the function of critique of ideology overlaps with the making explicit of implicit norms which, inculcated by the State apparatus and the ruling class, articulate the logical nexus of the social space across a field of material inferences relaying concepts and practice,  organizing at the highest level the operational circuits of market dynamics. Ideological critique becomes of a piece with the exposing of implicit rules, challenging their normative valence. Economics here overlaps with the political, insofar as the mechanisms of deliberation proper to the latter can, once wrested from the blind efficacy of implicit norms through the use of logical and critical vocabulary, interrupt the axiomatic efficacy of the market by placing a burden of proof on the agencies that support it, and issues a challenge to its internal mechanics.

Political becoming cannot be counterposed to economic being. Being and becoming are native to economy through politics, once it is understood that the axiomatics of economy dynamize themselves by integrating decisional processes at the level of the normative. It is possible to understand discontinuities in economy without relapsing into haecceitism, while also avoiding glorifying the 'subjective revolutionary' elan at the expense of understanding the dynamics of local change. Thus, economics needs to be understood so as to explain how the dynamic processes of the market are  mobilized in interaction with the dynamics of agential processes proper to deliberation in  individuals, institutions, and so on (it is this intersection wherein certain concepts acquire concrete valence: share-value, risk analysis, probabilistic enveloping of financial speculation...). So what of politics then?

The possibility of structural change, in various degrees, or what I propose to call politics, concerns a possible way in which these two registers are entwined; it is not the emergence of subjectivity when the 'evental decision' disowns itself from all economic reality, breaking the latter's stasis. The Political Event cannot be dislodged from economy; we must be more Hegelian than Kantian here. Which means also, of course, more Marxist. By this I mean that in politics change is thought of in the articulation between the agential-institutional and the processual-causal at the pivotal joints, rather than in the sublation or elision of the economic in the name of the political.

But we must be more Badiouean or Sellarsian when accepting that the articulation between relations of production and the dynamics of class struggle cannot be construed in terms of a precarious concept of matter that introduces dialectical negation into it. The trick is to preserve the autonomy of political process with the natural efficacity of natural process in methodological terms, so as to avoid enveloping materiality with the conceptual (Idealism), but so as to avoid their indistinction (Land). Economy is dynamic in relating into its axiomatic aspect the agency of individuals and institutions, and subjectivity is structural in formally conditioning the dynamics of economy by virtue of being integrated into the latter's axiomatic process by the functional relaying of norms within the social space.

       The political natively related to economy is to be found at the moment not just when the former outstrips the regularity of the latter, but when it composes a dynamics of production sufficient to a set of needs, new possibilities and demands, and re-articulates the integral dynamism between the three in the form of labor and production dynamics. Demands cannot be understood outside the mediation of language and practice that informs the manifest image of man in the world, any more than it can be understood irrespective from the formal reality of value-form that inserts it into the field of commerce. But the incapacity to move outside the commodity-form which governs exchange value in capital dynamics is contingent on the present ubiquity of market-economy. Which means: any new articulation between the kernel of normativity and economics must depart from the contemporary situation. This is the only sense in which there being no outside of capitalism makes any sort of sense.

Thus, the question would be, how is it possible to have an organization of the formal reality of the economic and the materiality it supports, outside the form of the commodity? That is ultimately the task, but it cannot be resolved right away. How to have a conception of use-value adequate to the exigencies of our world outside the dynamism of generating surplus-value through the commodity form? What could such a conception of need or demand constitute, and under which practice?

Provisionally, we can muse: needs and demands are not fixed, but are partly empirically fixed by material constraints on the agents normatively articulating the social space (for example: food, health, housing...). This requires that the normative binding set the space of production-labor by developing an economic alternative to certain tasks (agriculture, medicine, construction...); or to propose the latter's axiomatization in an alternative model to market. Yet these spaces of economic reality cannot be reduced to wills that organize 'the greed of capitalist consumerism' any more than we can inflate collective action by deflating organization to 'Riot! No State!'. The latter is as powerless before Wall Street as it is when devising an effective means to organize labor so as to grow crops and distribute them across a population. We're still going to have to sink our teeth into the dynamics of market, and have the conceptual tools to devise new forms of articulation. If not, then 'bourgeois epistemology' flinging pebbles against the capitalist Iron Wall is all we have.

Negation, Affirmation, Death

                     NEGATION, AFFIRMATION, DEATH
                     - Deleuze, Badiou, Brassier -
          ___________________________________________________ 

 The philosophical discourses of the 19th and 20th Century modified radically the status of negation. It was in fact the work of Hegel that first elevated the negative act from its circumscription to a mere formalism proper to the logical exertion of the faculty of reason, to an ontological, structuring principle. In the case of Kant, this was provided by the schematic instantiation of contradiction in the famous antinomies of pure reason, with respect to sensible shattering caused by the sublimity of objects Kant called 'cosmological' (God, the Infinity of the Universe, the Soul...) Hegel contended instead that contradiction, and therefore negation, was not a merely regional possibility which obtained on the basis of an schematic individuation of objects. Rather, absolute negativity was to be found at the very heart of the dialectic's deductive necessity. Contradiction became thus not just formal, but essentially metaphysical or taken as the basic ontological structure.  So, Hegel was able to claim, against Kant,  that "antinomy is found not only in the four particular ob-jects taken from cosmology, but rather in all objects of all kinds, in all representations, concepts, and ideas.” (Hegel E L, Pg. 92)

        The philosopher who challenged the primacy of negation in its logico-metaphysical hypostatization with greatest fervor during the 19th Century was perhaps Nietzsche. Nietzsche allots dialectics and its pretentions towards truth to the uniformity of a philosophical discourse that thwarts the affirmative purchase of the Will, and founds in doing so a culture guided by resentment and weakness, finally the common denominator of Platonic philosophy and Christian religion. The philosophical chimera of truth, mobilized through the amputating agency of the negative, is nothing but the obverse of the thwarted will which denies existence through moral-categorical imperatives. This dissolution of the philosophical valence of truth, and therefore also of the epistemological force of representation, becomes also proper to the deconstructive pretensions of the post-phenomenological critique of consciousness initiated by Heidegger, but also of the historicist-hermeneutic line of Gadamer, the destitution of phallogocentism by Derrida, the pragmatism of Rorty, among others. Above all these notable descendants, the most salient inheritor of the Nietzschean avowal of affirmation, along its castigation of the negative, is maybe opened by the work of Gilles Deleuze in his astonishing crossbreeding of Bergson, Simondon, Spinoza and Nietzsche.

       In fact, Difference and Repetition, Deleuze's celebrated magnum opus, is crucially an attack on the philosophical primacy of negation, which following Foucault, he identifies as one of the four axes of representation which must be overcome. More specifically, Deleuze reduces negation to the relation of contrariness in the predicative form (A is not-B), so that even in Hegelian dialectics, the oscillation of dynamic becoming is finally subordinated to the identitarian regime of the Concept (Being remains conceptually indistinguishable from Nothing and thus passes over into it, this is the basic unity of becoming which develops into existence, etc). The apparent dynamism of the Concept in fact veils what can only be for Deleuze the spurious monotonous vacuity of hypostasized intellection. For Deleuze, radicalizing the Bergsonist critique, the philosophical task is precisely to destroy the identitarian regime of the Concept in favor of a thinking of pure Difference; to think of  a pure becoming which may attest to the immanent morphogenesis of matter without the transcendental constraints of representational thought. Yet this means, at the same time, to overthrow the metaphysical primacy of contradiction, which still operates under the aegis of the Concept. Instead of the purely extensive regime of well partitioned qualitative-quantitative determinations and magnitudes, Deleuze attempts to think of an ontological order of pure multiplicity governed by the principle of what he calls intensive individuation; unequalizable differences of differences, of which the specificity of the actual is merely derived and secondary. This will involve tracking the specification of matter from the virtual to the actual, as opposed to the merely extensive individuation of discrete parts and beings in actual representation.

         The theory of intensive individuation is thereby distributed across the three syntheses of time for Deleuze: the passive synthesis of habit in the present, the synthesis of the pure past or memory, and finally the third active synthesis of psychic individuation. And it is only in the latter that the cohort of the representational subject is finally split, and the 'larval selves' of the intensive field are prized free from subjectivist representation.  Deleuze associates this third moment, the definitive moment of individuation, with the purely affirmative act of thought whereby the tidy distinctions of the Concept are shattered, and pure difference qua affirmation asserts its primacy. There is a 'mystification' occasioned by the negative, counteracted by the immanentist theory of the intensive. Crucially, this also marks the point at which the bare organic death of the individual, the death of the organism deprived of life, is disavowed in favor of the properly intensive death of the subject; its splitting and dissemination across the virtual field of multiplicities. I quote Deleuze: "it is in quality and extensity that intensity is inverted and appears upside down, and its power of affirming difference is betrayed by the figures of quantitative and qualitative limitation, qualitative and quantitative opposition... The origin of the illusion which subjects difference to the false power of the negative must therefore be sought, not in the sensible world itself, but in that which acts in depth and is incarnated in the sensible world". This depth is constituted by, as we have surmised, the field of positive differential multiplicities, i.e. the Ideal domain which seals Deleuze's vitalist, but also panpsychist urge to escape the cohort of the transcendental philosophies of access. It does so folding thought back into the immanent field of material production, as its psychic medium of individuation. The primacy of contradiction is thus given up in favor of the primacy of the differential, whose formal model is that provided by the differential calculus.

       The work of Alain Badiou attempts to wrest Deleuze's materialist ontology of pure multiplicities from its last vestiges of empiricist-phenomenological content.  Founded only by the void of being, Badiou's set-theoretical ontology thinks the inconsistent multiple which is constructed on the basis of a transparent axiomatics; that of Zermelo-Fraenkel to be specific. Under this approach, the great fault of the Deleuzean project appears not in its dismantling of representation or in its destitution of the negative straightjacket. Its weakness lies in the incapacity to account for the indifferent genericity of the order of multiple being, as well as the radical disruption brought about by affirmative acts called Events. Change, along thought, is everywhere and nowhere for Deleuze; the pure differentials in becoming only actualize the virtual continuum locally, but the global virtual imbedding space wherein change happens belongs to the singular event, the eventum tantrum, which generates novelty from base repetition. This constituted the famous "body without organs" for Deleuze and Guattari, which, Badiou contends, surrenders the thought of the multiple to the aegis of the One. For Badiou, then, against the paradigm of multiplicity modeled on Riemannian manifolds and differential calculus, the Post-Cantorian set-theoretical paradigm of extensional multiplicities is to be favored. Through the extirpation of all semblance of intensional content, ontology is prized free of its last vestige of empirical transcendence, while the plurality of radical ruptures, of events, is accounted for in a theory of subjectivation and creative production. Set-theoretical ontology subtracts the multiple from any qualitative determination, and so from any vestige of positive content that would surreptitiously Idealize the material field, as is the case for Deleuze through the agency of a 'larval self' infusing matter with thought's distinctive purchase. Rather, Ideality now comes to be in the side of the truth-event, where the subject subtracts itself from the stasis of the ontological regime and the rule of the State's representational count. It signals where affirmation breaks the negative ontological dialectic, dividing "the history of the world in Two", and inaugurating a new Time.

         So, in a way, Badiou preserves the affirmationist vocation of Deleuze's thought. But rather than dispersing the affirmative act of thought within the continuity of the field of differential multiplicities in becoming, it tethers becoming to the evental act which disrupts the ontological order. Events are plural, and times are many. The status of the negative in Badiou's discourse is therefore twofold: on the one hand, the extensional regime of ontology and the objectual differentiation proper to phenomenology remains, within the materialist dialectic,  subordinated to the power of the negative. A set will be identical to another if and only if there does not exist an element of one which is not an element of another (axiom of extensionality). And any object whose intensity is equal to another in a particular situation is, for all 'intensive' purposes, identical to that object (the function of identity). Negation once again seems to pervade the metaphysical realm, while affirmation seems delegated to the immanent exception of the Evental act, which awakening the militant urgency of the subject, destroys the stable regime of differentiation which articulates the Laws of the World. Death, for its part, remains trivialized, a mere nullification of the intensity of a multiple in a given world reduced to its minimum intensity, meriting no reification to the status of ontological principle of individuation (as in Heidegger's account of being-towards-death, but also Deleuze's account of the intensive death of the self dispersed into the field of intensities). I quote Badiou:

      "When thinking of the event as the intensified and continuous result of becoming, Deleuze is an empiricist. And that, when he reabsorbs the event into the One of the unlimited Aion, of the Infinitive in which it subsists and insists, in the always there of the Virtual, he has a tendency to dogmatism. To break with empiricism is to think the event as the advent of what subtracts itself from all experience: the ontologically un-founded and the transcendentally discontinuous. To break with dogmatism is to remove the event from the ascendancy of the One. It is to subtract it from Life, in order to deliver it to the stars." (LOW, pg. 387)

      However, subtracting thought from the stability of the multiple and reserving it for the Truth Event, Badiou's thought in a sense is more 'exceptionalist' than Deleuze, it requires an even greater form of exception which this time resembles Kant more than Hegel. For Deleuze, thought  is everywhere, and the larval subjects which split the self virally infect the material realm all throughout. Deleuze Idealizes the material directly by wresting thought from the priority of the human to disseminate it across the material. Badiou's bare extensional multiple is, on the other hand, qualitatively empty, without any criterion for transcendental constitution, but also because of this irremediably static. The problem for him therefore becomes that of change; how to account for the disruption of the indifferent field of multiplicities, up to the generic form of truth which must be possible in order to differentiate novelties from reactionary simulacra. And it is there that he must reintroduce, not unlike Kant, the supplementary ethics of the evental act and of the intervention, of a kind of noumenal exception to the Laws of becoming.

       So, either affirmation takes purchase, local change is to be found everywhere and we transpose thought into the world, effectively idealizing it; or we subtract thought from the material to the point where its structure is indistinguishable from thought, and negativity asserts its rights to set the regime for ontological determinacy. But in the latter case, the event becomes the prerogative of the subjective act which 'ascends from the 'bare animality' of the world to the Eternity of the Idea; that is, to the productive domain of truths. Without the surreptitious dialectics of the event, the order of being glares forth in its apathy, and its monotony sheds along thought all becoming.

       It is at this juncture that the work of the Scottish philosopher Ray Brassier has attempted to radicalize the materialist urgency for disenchantment, while at the same time seeking to render the exceptionality of human thought inoperative. Both Deleuze and Badiou cannot but finally reintroduce the prerogative of the Ideal; either in the panpsychist process of being as becoming (Deleuze), or in the dialectics of change (Badiou). But although Brassier will celebrate the subtractive regime of extensional multiplicities advocated by Badiou, which prized being free of its transcendental burden and expulses any semblance of qualitative sense, he will have no truck with the dialectics of the event. No exception to the meaningless domain of the material limits or interrupts miraculously the disenchantment evinced by formal indifference of scientific factuality. It is through the latter that humanity comes to appear within the cosmological scope, as utterly trivialized. Brassier seeks to unearth a form of non-dialectical negativity, an unilateral index for the Real which is not occasioned by thought and so is not of thought, even if thought is of it. This means that the putative privilege of the temporal over the spatial so characteristic of empiricism, phenomenology and vitalism, must be overcome.  And along with them both Deleuze's castigation of the actual, as well as Badiou's evental discontinuities triggered by the subjective, become ripe for evisceration. In their place, Brassier favors the diachronicity of an ontologically univocal space-time where thought's dialectical structure shows its belonging to the Real, while the latter remains completely indifferent to thought. This is the roots of Brassier's 'speculative realist' option which, opposes the dominance of post-Kantian correlationism: the thesis that the world and thought, materiality and ideality, stand in a relation of mutual determination, and so that it is unthinkable to set them apart. Against the correlationist taint which always reifies the subjective, the sapient and the organic, Brassier unilateralizes the determination of thought by the material. In doing so, he argues that: "...speculative realism must uphold the autonomy of a space-time that is independent of the correlation of thinking and being, a space time whose incommensurability with the spans of human or even biological duration is no longer a function of chronological discrepancy but of a diachronicity rooted in the voiding of being-nothing." This entails, for Brassier, following the thought of Wilfrid Sellars', that although the real comprises univocally thoughts and things alike, being is never reducible to thought. Rather, while matter provides the conditional ontological support for the ontogenesis of thought, the latter is construed methodologically as belonging to the normative domain of the logical space of reasons. Matter, in its turn, is impervious to the inferential domain of rational normativity; even if it is only within the conceptual that the methodological separation of concept and object is enacted.

        As Badiou determined, the thought of being is dialectical and untethered from any kind of subjective conditions of access; but here we get not the dialectical Nothingness which, like in Hegel's objective Idealism, renders the dialectic of thought indistinct from the Real. The latter's non-dialectical being persists in its indifference to thought's normative purchase. And this way Brassier finds in the inscription of the human within the diachronicity of space-time already an index of its inevitable demise: not in the merely organic death of the individual, or the intensive splitting-of-self which destroys the representational subject. Rather, he finds it in the imminent knowledge of the truth of solar extinction inscribed in the natural-causal material domain which remains intractable to the temporal logic of organic sapience. The index of a death which will eradicate not just the local stupor of life, but the entirety of material existence itself down to its atomic substructure (one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now): assymptotia  leaves us with a cemetery of stellar corpses survived only by 'dark energy'. This darkened index for the Real death, which in Brassier's nihilist position, takes the Enlightenment to its ultimate consequences, is notably radically anti-phenomenological, since it can never be of the order of the chronological temporalization of first-person experience. But it is also radically anti-vitalist and anti-panpsychist, deflating thought's negative and affirmative power down to banal transience of those 'clever beasts', which Nietzsche had already announced, would soon perish without having "made a real difference". Solar extinction is precisely a knowledge which flattens thought into the material, and destroys the reification of meaning in its negative or affirmative capacity. It is the knowledge of a death that can never be experienced and which, being-irreducible to the possibility of apprehension within the continuum of temporal duration concomitant with thought, has in a sense happened already: "It is precisely the extinction of meaning that clears the way for the intelligibility of extinction. Senselessness and purposelessness are not merely privative,  they represent a gain in intelligibility... "

      Bearing the trace of the in-itself which has already destroyed it, the will to know becomes equal to the Real without thereby reinstating the duality of thought and matter and of their co-relation. Global extinction proceeds from an order of necessity utterly foreign to the free affirmation in the event; its Real conditions the thought that thinks it, not the other way around. Surrendering the torment of the death whose trace it bears, thought reveals also that its interests finally do not coincide with those of the living; and the vector of disenchantment opened by the Enlightenment should sedate the passion for subjective exceptionalism which peel off materialism by the lure of the discursive, the organic, the conceptual. Interestingly, this entails, for Brassier, a rehabilitation of the cog of representation against its post-Bergsonist and post-Heideggerean castigation, if only to espouse a revisionary naturalism where a methodological dualism grounds ontological univocity.

         I conclude with the following quote, from Brassier again, which announces what is perhaps the crucial philosophical predicament in these three thinkers: that is, to overcome a thought which, still encumbered in the Romantic desire to find itself at ease in the Universe, escapes the Real's vacuous, non-dialectical negativity, which, intractable to the vocabulary of the manifest image celebrating its clever beastliness, cares little for our moribund existence:

     "The problem consists in articulating the relation between the dialectical structure of conceptual discourse and the non-dialectical status of the real in such a way as to explain how real negativity fuels dialectics even as it prevents dialectics from incorporating its own negativity. Real negativity splits the logos from within, while from without it splits signification from reality. The goal is to understand how non-conceptual negativity determines dialectical negation while preventing negation in the concept from fusing with real negativity."

Deleuze's Spinoza

                       - SPINOZA'S DELEUZE -
                  Formal Distinction, Univocity and the Attributes

________________________________________________

INTRODUCTION

   In this paper I would like to consider some of the ramifications which follow for Spinoza’s so-called ‘ontological argument’, which advances the thesis of ontological univocity, i.e. that there is one being, and that being is said in one and the same sense. For this I follow some considerations set forth by Gilles Deleuze’s (1992) reading in Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. I begin by outlining how Deleuze historically situates Spinoza’s famous triadic distinction in the Ethics between substance, attributes and modes along the axes of three classical Cartesian distinctions: real, modal, and of reason. I then propose a tentative reconstruction for Spinoza’s argument for the thesis that ontological univocity is to be understood from the impossibility of real distinctions being numerical, and vice versa.

          I consider some difficulties which emerge for this position, given the Deleuzean consideration that attributes stand for formal distinctions, which are real and multiple qualitatively, but quantitatively singular. I show the motivations behind taking the alternative approach of making attributes mere distinctions of reason, and finally suggest why Deleuze’s reading encourages us to reject this option. I conclude that understanding attributions of essence as pertaining to formal distinctions rather than of reason is crucial in order to understand Spinoza’s perplexing idea about there being ‘degrees of reality’ in substance. Attributes can therefore me understood as adding to the reality of the same without dividing it.

I – Descartes Three Distinctions and Duns Scotus’ Formal Distinction

          Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza begins by situating the latter within the frame of a set of classical Cartesian aporias. These concern the distinction, already made explicit in Descartes, between substances and modes: the former referring to what “is in itself”, and the latter to what “is in something else”[1]. This seems readily continuous with Spinoza’s own definition at the outset of the Ethics which claims that substance is what exists and is conceived by itself, and modes are what exist and is conceived through something else (E, P1D3, P1D5). As Deleuze notes, Spinoza elsewhere explicitly associates his own distinction between substance-modes to Descartes’ own distinction when reshuffling the latter’s three kinds of distinctions: “We need to recall what Descartes has taught, viz. that there is nothing in nature but substances and their modes. From this a threefold distinction of things is deduced (1.60-62), viz. real, modal, and of reason.” (M, 353)

        Yet Spinoza will also underline later that modes cannot exist / not be conceived without substance, even if the two make up the ‘total of existence’ (E, P1P15). This means that the modes, which must exist in something else, do so in substance (God) and can only be conceived through substance (E, P1P23).  In turn, substance is known through the attributes which express its essence (E, P1DIV). Since existence pertains to the essence of substance, it clearly follows that the modes that exist in substance which they presuppose are also known through the attributes they imply (E; P1P23, P1P14). Or as Deleuze puts it: “If modes always presuppose a substance, and are sufficient to give knowledge of it, they do so through a primary attribute which they imply, and which constitutes the essence of the substance itself” (Deleuze 1992: Pg. 29) Whereas for Descartes the distinction between attributes and essences distinguishes between different substances, Spinoza will advocate the thesis of a single substance corresponding to all attributions of essence. We shall return to this crucial distinction below; but for now let us unpack how Descartes distinguishes through the tripartite distinction between substances, attributes and modes, three different kinds of distinction. We formulate these abstractly, in continuity with Deleuze’s presentation as follows (Ibid):

1)      Real distinction – For any x, x is really distinct from y if and only if x is ontologically different from y, i.e. if x and y are non-identical substances. The corresponding principle here is that of exclusion (between distinct substances).

2)      Modal distinction – For any x, x is a modal distinction of y, if and only if x ontologically implies y, while y does not ontologically imply x. That is, x is a mode of y just in case the existence of x implies the existence of y, but not the converse. The corresponding principle here is that of unilateral determination (between modes and substances).

3)      Distinctions of reason – For any x, x is a distinction of reason of y, if and only if y epistemologically implies x. That is, x is an attribute of y, if and only if y cannot be known except by way of x, i.e. if x is a (primary) attribute of y. The corresponding principle here is that of abstraction (between attributes and substances).

     As we shall see, Spinoza’s early ontological reorganization of the relation between substances, attributes and modes in the Ethics attempts precisely a corrective to how Descartes conceives and articulates these three kinds of distinction. We may just note provisionally that the thesis of ontological univocity must imply that for Spinoza knowledge of the attributes could only entail a singular substance, i.e. that the distinction of reason couldn’t ever suffice to be a real distinction in the Cartesian sense. 

           To show how this anticipated asymmetry in particular leads into a different ontological picture in Spinoza’s account, Deleuze proceeds to articulate briefly some of the central ‘ambiguities’ in Descartes view. First, with respect to the role that attributes come to play, both as qualifying, insofar as they discern the quality of the substance, and as diversifying, insofar as they distinguish varieties of modes in substances. Thus Descartes claims with respect to the attributes of thought and extension that they “…can be considered as constituting the natures of intelligent and bodily substance respectively”, but also that they “…can be taken as modes of a substance, that is insofar as one and the same mind can have many different thoughts; and one and the same body can be extended in many different ways.”[2] If there is more than one mind and one body, that is, if there exist more than one substance with the same attributes, and if modes are identified with attributes, then it plainly follows that different substances may share the same attributes and the same modes.

          In this way, while attributes in one sense specify or qualify the nature of the specific substances they apply to, in another sense they describe diverse modes which may obtain for different substances, i.e. bodies and mind bearing shapes and thoughts[3]. Different substances may thereby bear the same attribute by discerning appropriate modal essences, provided they are taken to be dependent on substance; different bodies may share the same shapes, and different minds the same thoughts. The conclusion Deleuze wishes to underline from this is finally that for Descartes “there exist substances sharing the same attribute. In other words, there are numerical distinctions that are at the same time real or substantial.” (Deleuze 1992: Pg. 30) The notion of numerical distinction is introduced here by Deleuze, but remains underexplained in the text. By way of clarification, let us expand our original ‘Cartesian set’ to include this latter variation:

4) Numerical Distinction – For any x, x is numerically distinct from y if and only if both x and y are conceptually identical occasions of z; that is, if both x and y are mere instances of the same concept. The corresponding principle here is diversification (between attributes-modes sharing the same concept).

       That numerical distinction can amount to real distinction entails thus that the diversification of modes-attributes as many instances of under the same concept index likewise many different substances to which these instances belong.  Let us for the moment obviate if this reconstruction is a good one, or whether the ‘major difficulties’ Deleuze attributes to Descartes’ system from these considerations actually obtain.

    The second important feature in the Cartesian set of distinctions for our purposes concerns real distinction alone. It must be possible to specify how one knows of real distinction, that is, how an ontological division between things can be epistemologically adequate to our conception of different things. In other words, how conception can amount to more than mere abstract ‘distinctions of reason’ between attributes of substances; but be capable of distinguishing really distinct substances as such. For this, Descartes, as well as Spinoza, will testify to the completeness of the Idea in real distinction: x is known to be ontologically different from y, if and only if, the Idea-concept of x excludes everything in content of the Idea-concept of y, and vice versa. Thus Spinoza claims, in continuity with Descartes, that “By substance, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself; in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.” (E, P1D3)

          This obviously already presents a problem for Descartes in conjunction to the earlier possibility that numerical distinctions may be real. This is the case since if more than one substance shares the same concept, but given that conceiving of real distinction requires conceptual exclusion, it becomes impossible for real distinction between such substances to be conceived without confusion. But let us leave this aside for the moment[4]. The second conclusion Deleuze draws is that “Real distinction brings with it a distinction of things… that is, a corresponding numerical distinction.” (Deleuze 1992; Pg. 31)

        Spinoza, says Deleuze, begins his enterprise in the Ethics around these two conclusions. First, he rejects the thesis that more than one substance could share the same attribute. In order to show this, Deleuze argues, Spinoza offers two distinct arguments. For the purposes of this paper it should suffice to briefly focus on the first, which involves a reduction ad absurdum, and finds its locus around the first eight propositions of part I of the Ethics. The reconstruction Deleuze offers is the following:

(1)   Two or more substances cannot share the same attribute for they would have to be distinguished by their modes, which is inconsistent with the thesis that the substance is self-distinct and thus that it precedes modes (E, P1P5).

(2)   Substance cannot have an external cause, since this entails it would have to share the same nature-attribute with its cause. (E, P1P6)

(3)   Thus there can be no numerical distinction in any substance, of whatever attribute; meaning that substance is infinite. (E, P1P7-P1P8)

  Now, Spinoza’s argument for (3) might seem baffling at first; concerning the nature of infinity in substance. Deleuze’s exposition does not clarify how infinity arrives in the third step, yet it remains crucial for the development of the argument below, as we shall see. The key to the argument, however, is given in the proof for Proposition 8, which we can attempt to reconstruct coarsely as providing the following argument:

A)    Existence follows from the essence of substance (P1P7).

B)    There can only be one substance per attribute [NSA principle] (P1P5).

C)    What exists finitely is limited by other finite existence (P1D2, P1P8)[5].

D)    But if another substance exists, then it must also exist by necessity (P1P7)

E)     Therefore, two substances cannot exist as finite, for then they would share the attribute of necessary existence by (A), and this contradicts (B).

F)     Therefore, substance must be infinite.

        In any case, Deleuze’s reconstruction shows finally that numerical distinctions cannot apply to real substances, since substance has unique attributes, and as infinite is necessarily unlimited by another of its kind, i.e. sharing the same essence. This already seems to argue for the uniqueness of substance; but Deleuze doesn’t seem to acknowledge that such an argument is implicit here; and claims instead that for Spinoza the uniqueness of substance is rather secured from Proposition 9 onwards. Numerical distinctions, for their part, are allotted to being proper to modes alone. But of course these have no properly ontological valence outside the modes, i.e. they are not real. So finally to make of real distinction a numerical distinction would be to confuse real distinctions with merely modal distinctions.

       For Deleuze, these considerations open up a crucial question concerning the attributes, and their qualifying role for substance. Since it has been admitted that modal distinctions are not real, then it follows that the diversifying role where attributes are tethered to modes is disavowed. Yet it remains it remains unsettled what the status of attributes becomes in what concerns their qualifying role; as specifying the nature or essence of the one substance. Are such qualifications real, or are they merely distinctions of reason which fall short of being real? On the one hand, Spinoza clearly seems to testify in favor of the reality of attributes, since they are “conceived to be really distinct”. (E, P1P10) But this division among the attributes cannot result in a division between real substances, since this would make real distinction modal or numerical, which we have seen is part of what Spinoza seeks to overcome against Descartes (Deleuze: Pg, 35) The question becomes thus how is it possible to reconcile Spinoza’s claim that a) there is only one substance for all the attributes (ontological univocity), with b) the reality of a diversity of attributes of that same substance which do not divide it.

      On the one hand, the uniqueness of substance follows from its indivisibility or its being-unlimited, since several infinite substances would violate the principle according to which an attribute cannot apply to one more substance (P1P5, P1P12-13). Additionally, since substance is absolutely infinite, all attributes must pertain to it. It follows from the hypothesis of there being two or more substances, that they would share necessary existence and therefore once again violate the NSA-principle (P1P13-14)[6]. It will follow that thus all attributes must be said of one and the same substance, or which amounts to the same, ontologically in one and the same sense. But then in what sense are we to understand the “reality” according to which the more attributes a substance has the more real it is? (P1P12, P1D4) Put differently, how can attributes amount ever to more than mere distinctions of reason, proper to ‘abstraction’?

        At this juncture, Deleuze proposes the argument that in spite of Spinoza’s disavowal of peripatetic distinctions, one must understand the status of attributes as being formal distinctions of substance[7]. For Deleuze this implies to narrow down the difference between a purely qualitative sense in which each attribute coins one essence respectively, and another sense in which all of these pertain to one and the same substance. Thus, even though Spinoza says that attributes are ways in which substance is conceived, this does not imply that there ought to be as many substances as attributes. As Deleuze puts it: “in positing as many substances as there are different attributes we make of real distinction a numerical distinction, confusing real distinction not only with numerical distinction, but with distinctions of reason as well.” (Deleuze 1992; Pg. 37) To unpack the notion of formal distinction let us propose the following formulation:

4)      Formal Distinction – For any x and for any y, x and y are formal distinctions of z, if and only if x and y qualify z completely independently without diversifying it, i.e. x and y are formal distinctions of z just in case x and y are said qualitatively distinctly of z but quantitatively univocally of z. The corresponding principle here is that of pure qualification (between attributes and a corresponding single substance of which these attributes are said).

      We should first note that this distinction is strong enough to preserve the intellect’s seizure of substance; even if in this case we are no longer dealing with mere abstractions through which substance might be known clearly and distinctly or not. The qualification of substance is not representational insofar as the attributes are said to follow from substance as the latter makes its essence transparently known. The subtlety here concerns the preservation of the criterion for real distinction, which involves the completeness of the Idea, wed to the claim that real distinctions may apply to one and the same substance. As a result, attributes would not jeopardize the thesis of ontological univocity advanced by Spinoza’s monistic ontology. Yet the argument apparently ‘bridges the gap’ between attributes and substance in a way that seems to rearticulate the status of distinctions of reason altogether, unyoking the latter from the diversification of modes and thus of numerical distinction. The argument Spinoza would follow under this reading can be roughly reconstructed as follows[8]:

1) There are infinite attributes, which function as ‘points of view’ on a substance (P1D4).

2) Because of the NSA principle, each attribute is a point of view on only one substance.

3) Numerical distinction is never real distinction; conversely, real distinction is never numerical distinction.

4) Thus, the real distinction between the infinite attributes is not a numerical distinction.

5) Thus, the substance which each attribute is a point of view on is necessarily the same substance. The attributes are qualitatively distinct, but quantitatively identical.

6) There is thus only one necessarily existing substance which has all attributes.

        This reading allows Spinoza to avoid two dangers which follow from reducing attributes to being mere ‘points of view’ or distinctions of reason, and which the intellect perceives or ‘abstracts’ from substance to know of it, but fall short of being real determinations of the same. First, this latter option might seem a palatable ‘subjectivist’ possibility, according to which substance has only one essence, but can be conceived in different ways by finite intellection. But as has been pointed out (notoriously by Gueroult (1992)) subjectivism runs into a problem when explaining the variety of attributes as mere abstractions. This can be gauged from the implication that attributive distinctions are on that account taken to be merely abstract conceptualizations on substance, in conjunction with the claim that even God qua infinite intellection thinks attributes. In a nutshell, since Spinoza claims that even the infinite intellect conceives of the plurivocity of attributes, it would follow that not even the infinite intellect understood itself correctly[9]. Thus either subjectivism is false or Spinoza is forced into contradiction[10]. 

        Against this reading, taking attributes as real but purely formal distinctions allows us to make sense of the claim according to which “The more reality or being a thing has the greater the number of its attributes.”  (P1P9). Taking attributes to as formal distinctions which are real, the points of view on substance constitute not just external viewpoints by finite intellection, but actually are ways in which singular substance comes to conceive of or express itself in a variety of forms. Thus, the manifold attributions are mere occasions of the infinite intellect coming to know itself in its qualitative plurivocity, while retaining its ontological univocity. On any account, one might object that it is still unclear why having more powers or attributes amounts to an increase in the reality of substance. Yet Deleuze’s reading as reconstructed has the additional virtue of not making reference to this notion; even if as we have been arguing it poses a way to render it compatible with the rest of Spinoza’s argument.

     Furthermore, this reading seems to sit well with Spinoza’s claim that God’s intellect must be fully actual and not merely potential, so that the attributes which express its essence would be mere potentialities which may or may not apply to his substance. Since the latter option would divide the intellection of attributes, it would thereby occasion a split in which the essences expressed in the attributes would be said to be merely ‘potencies’, contradicting the continuity between God’s intellect and his essence as fully actual. This point is clearly expressed by Spinoza in the second note to Proposition 23, which states that: “ Further, all the philosophers whom I have read admit that God's intellect is entirely actual, and not at all potential; as they also admit that God's intellect, and God's will, and God's essence are identical, it follows that, if God had had a different actual intellect and a different will, his essence would also have been different; and thus, as I concluded at first, if things had been brought into being by God in a different way from that which has obtained, God's intellect and--will, that is (as is admitted) his essence would perforce have been different, which is absurd.” (P1P23).

           If from this it follows that God cannot will to create those intellects which grasp his essence in any less perfect a manner than his own infinite intellection, since “…we can have no sound reason for persuading ourselves to believe that God did not wish to create all the things which were in his intellect, and to create them in the same perfection as he had understood them.” (Ibid) And since it is in the function of the finite intellect to conceive of the essential and infinite attributes or modalities of God and nothing else, it plainly follows such a comprehension is adequate to God’s essence (P1P11, P1P30).

        Second, this reading allows to dodge the problems that arise from an ‘objectivist’ reading according to which attributes express a variety of essence of the same substance, but which are distinct things in themselves[11]. Although this preserves the reality of distinct attributes, it seems at odds with univocity in the way of postulating these relatively independent essences which give distinct entities. Specifically, this reading seems at odds with Spinoza’s clear commitment to the thesis that it is of the nature of substance to conceive of itself by itself, without any of them having determined the other (P1P10). Therefore, if we made of the attributes multiply a variety of things and of substance a complex set of such things, we would have to admit of an internal division within substance, which runs against the clear statement according to which: “It is thus evident that, though two attributes are, in fact, conceived as distinct--that is, one without the help of the other-yet we cannot, therefore, conclude that they constitute two entities, or two different substances.” (Ibid) The real distinctions pertaining to the attribute must thus at once preserve the requirements of conceptual independence (real distinction) and ontological univocity (the distinction of reason). This strange hybrid structure assigned to substance is precisely that given by formal distinction, which isolates attributions of substance merely qualitatively. Ontological monism is left thereby unthreatened.

       A possible objection, raised by Jason Waller (2009), stipulates that it is problematic to identify the qualitative variety of attributes by way of different essential attributions, since this seems to require that each attribute be determined in terms of unique definitions which individuate essences[12]. According to Waller, this reading seems in friction with Spinoza’s account, according to which, following T. C Mark, “each attribute is not something that can be described or understood at all. … [T]he attributes are objects of perception.”[13] Thus, one might claim, Deleuze still subordinates the attributes to distinctions of reason by rendering them descriptively determinable, rather than ‘perceptually’, in order to qualify substance.

          However, separating attributes and essences from descriptive determinations seems problematic considering that the attributes must be conceived of as really distinct, that is without the help of one another. (P1P10). If we follow Deleuze in claiming that Spinoza here follows Descartes’ notion of real distinction, so that conceptual independence is necessary to individuate substance as causa sui through the attributes, then Waller’s objection seems difficult to endorse. If we add to this Spinoza’s claim that the essence of substance has no existence outside that of the attributes which express its infinite being, then dislodging attributes from possible clear and distinct conceptual expressions does not sit well either. In this regard, Deleuze concludes that “Attributes are Words in Spinoza, with expressive value: they are dynamic no longer attributed to varying substances, but attributing something to a unique substance.” (Deleuze: Pg 45).  This way, Deleuze can claim that attributes are forms common to both finite creatures and infinite substance; insofar as they forms of substance and modes univocally. This seems preferable to the alternative of attributes being abstracted from instances of modal, finite creatures, and transferred to God by analogy, since this again seems to downgrade attributes to the status of mere distinctions of reason (Ibid; Pg. 46-47).

          Having said this, even if God and creatures differ in essence and existence, the same forms are said of both, insofar as they constitute the essence of the former and imply the (finite) essence of the latter within themselves. This allows Deleuze to reconcile two claims which seem apparently at odds in Spinoza: a) that things which have nothing in common cannot be the cause of another (P1P3), and that if a thing is the cause of the essence and ground of another it must nevertheless differ both in the ground of its essence, and in that of its existence (P1P17). Or as Spinoza puts it: “Now the intellect of God is the cause of both the essence and the existence of our intellect; therefore the intellect of God in so far as it is conceived to constitute the divine essence, differs from our intellect both in respect to essence and in respect to existence, nor can it in anywise agree therewith save in name, as we said before. The reasoning would be identical, in the case of the will, as any one can easily see.” (P1P17N) The attributes are thus finally targeting the infinite forms of substance which are common to God, whose essence they conform, as well as modes-creatures, whose finite essence they imply. With these rejoinders in mind, we can sum up our brief and tentative overview of Deleuze’s reading by proposing the ‘Spinozist’ reworked criterion for real distinction as formal[14]:

S1)  Real/Formal distinction – For any x and for any y, x and y are formal-real distinctions of z, if and only if x and y qualify z completely independently without diversifying it, i.e. x and y are formal distinctions of z just in case x and y are said qualitatively and distinctly of z, but quantitatively univocally of z. The corresponding principle here is that of pure qualification (between attributes and a unique substance of which they are said).

             An additional set of problems might follow from Deleuze’s more provocative twofold characterization of formal distinction as implying that qualitatively “there is one substance per attribute” (Deleuze 1992: Pg, 32). We shall leave this issue undecided for the present paper, but note nevertheless that this seems to squarely reintroduce numerical distinction into real distinction. For how are we to understand that in a qualitative sense there is one substance per attribute if not as the claim that there exists in a sense a one-to-one correspondence between essence and attribute? From what we have considered thus far, it is clear Spinoza’s argument for univocity allows for no such ambiguity: the variety of essence attributed to substance must apply to it as instances of the same substance in all cases, and without ambiguity of sense. If not, this reading of Spinoza runs the risk of having smuggled a dubious duplicity of sense which threatens ontological univocity[15].

        Although these tentative approximations to Spinoza’s text are doubtlessly naïve and require a stronger consideration of alternatives, they at least flesh out some of the basic issues surrounding the status of attributes, and perhaps at some of the motivations guiding Deleuze’s ascription of reality to them under the unspoken aid of the ‘formal distinction’.

        Bibliography

• Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, translated by R.H.M Elwes, Digireads, 2008.
• Thomas C.  Mark, The Spinozistic Attributes, Philosophia 77.7, 1977.
• Jason Waller, Spinoza’s Attributes and the Intermediate Distinctions of Henry Ghent and Duns Scotus, Florida Philosophical Review, Volume IX, Issue 1, Summer 2009.
•  Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1988.
• Martial Gueroult, Spinoza, Vol. 1: Deiu Paris: Aubier, 1992.
• Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1984.
• Michael Della Rocca, Representation and the Mind Body Problem in Spinoza, New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
• Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, translated by Martin Joughin, Zone Books, Brooklyn, 1990 (fourth printing, 2005).
• Rene Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed C. Adam and P. Tannery, 11 vols, Paris 1897-1909.

---

[1] Descartes, Principles 1.48, 1.49

[2] Descartes, Principles, I.63-I.64

[3] Descartes, Principles, I.56

[4] A more pressing question becomes for Descartes how he can guarantee that conceiving of things as really distinct can target really distinct things; that is how thought can know the distinctions between substances it draws are in fact real. His answer in the Meditations will be that the non-deceptiveness of God guarantees this transitivity between the clear and distinct Ideas which make up our knowledge, and the real which furnishes the world. Thus to our conception of possible different substances there corresponds actual differences among substances. But since substance is by definition that which can exist by itself, and since I may think of the reality of a given substance isolated by a particular Idea in distinct occasions, these would have to correspond to real instances in every case. Spinoza, however, will have no truck with the thought that substance could designate possibility.

[5] We note in passing that Spinoza’ seems to shift slightly from Definition II, which claims that what is finite is what may be limited by something of the same nature, to Proposition 8 which claims that everything which exists as finite is necessarily limited by another finite existence.

[6] In this regard, I disagree with Deleuze’s claim that Spinoza’s argument presents a baffling split from the first eight propositions where the aim he claims is purportedly to show that there cannot exist more than one substance per attribute [NSA], and the latter which determines the uniqueness of substance as such.

[7] Deleuze explicitly tethers this notion of formal distinction to Duns Scotus; who, according to Deleuze, finds no problem in the thesis that one and the same substance may possess an infinity of attributes.

[8] I owe this possible reconstruction to Peter Wolfendale.

[9] Martial Gueroult, Spinoza, Vol. 1: Deiu (Paris: Aubier, 1992).

[10] As Jason Waller argues, this kind of problem seems also to extend to other reading’s such as Bennett’s where extension and thought are ‘really’ distinct but not really ‘fundamental’, even if they are perceived as such by finite intellection. This leaves Bennett open to the charge that the intellect ‘misperceives’ the nature of substance in the plurivocity of attributes. See Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1984), 64-65. For a critique of Bennett along these lines see Michael Della Rocca, Representation and the Mind Body Problem in Spinoza (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), 164. For Waller’s own reading, which overlaps in identifying attributes with Scotus’ formal distinction (albeit in a slightly different way than Deleuze), see Jason Waller, Spinoza’s Attributes and the Intermediate Distinctions of Henry Ghent and Duns Scotus, Florida Philosophical Review, Volume IX, Issue 1, Summer 2009. In it, Waller demotes formal distinction to an ambiguous status somewhere in-between real distinction and a distinction of reason (which he calls ‘conceptual distinction’). I believe this intermediary status is, however, problematic for reasons which must be left for another occasion.

[11] Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton

UP, 1988, 29-30

[12] Jason Waller, Spinoza’s Attributes and the Intermediate Distinctions of Henry Ghent and Duns Scotus, Florida Philosophical Review, Volume IX, Issue 1, Summer 2009, Pg. 97.

[13] Thomas C.  Mark,  The Spinozistic Attributes, Philosophia 77.7 (1977), Pg. 76.

[14] As Deleuze notes, this fundamental reworking of real distinction entails at the same time a reshuffling of the status of modal and distinctions of reason. The former become unyoked from the contingency of unilateral implication, since in the Spinozist monism everything is necessary. Thus we would have to propose something like a principle of ‘bilateral implication’ which wouldn’t compromise the methodological anteriority of substance, to run along Spinoza’s necessitarian argument. Or as Deleuze puts it “Everything is necessary, either from its essence or from its cause: necessity is the only affection of being” (Deleuze 1992; Pg 38).

        Similarly , given the power of finite intellect to discern the communitarian forms in the attributes, which are proper to both substance and modes, the mere ‘abstraction’ which articulates the Cartesian ‘distinction of reason’ falls off; instead wedding it to real distinction in a reworked conception of formal distinction.

[15] Something like this seems to have underwritten Descartes and Suarez in their rejection of the notion of formal distinction in Duns Scotus.