Review of James Williams, Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time

Philosophy

College of Arts and Letters Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2013.09.01 Everything James Williams Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide Published: September 02, 2013 James Williams, Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time: A Critical Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh University Press, 2011, 205pp., $32.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780748638543. Reviewed by Daniel W. Smith, Purdue University James Williams has emerged as one of the most important and accomplished readers of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. After writing two early books on Lyotard (1998 and 2000; see also Crome and Williams 2006), Williams published, in rather quick succession, critical introductions to two of Deleuze's most important works, Difference and Repetition (2003) and Logic of Sense (2008). Between these two books, he published Encounters and Influences, which explored, in a series of extended essays, the relation of Deleuze's philosophy to thinkers such as Bachelard, Whitehead, Kant, Levinas, and Antonio Negri, as well as issues raised by analytic philosophers such as David Lewis (on the concepts of the possible and the virtual) and Graham Harman (on the status of problems) (2005a). Williams has also published a study of poststructuralism (2005b) and coedited a collection of papers exploring the relations between the analytic and continental traditions (Reynolds et al. 2010). The result has been an impressive body of work that is marked by not only by Williams' own interpretive acumen in both the continental and analytic traditions, but also by his own original philosophical voice. In his most recent work, Williams tackles one of the most difficult, yet central aspects of Deleuze's thought: his philosophy of time. In a sense, the book is an expansion of the fourth chapter of the book on Difference and Repetition (the chapter on "Repetition"), which dealt with the same material in a much more condensed form. Even cursory readers of Deleuze will no doubt be familiar with the broad outlines of his approach to the philosophy of time. From antiquity through the seventeenth-century, time had been subordinate to movement: time, as Aristotle said, was the measure or "number" of movement (Physics 219b2). Since the plurality of movements implied a plurality of times, ancient philosophers sought something immobile or invariant outside of movement (or at least a most perfect movement) that could function as a metric by which all other movements could be measured. In the Timaeus, Plato found a measure for the extensive movement of the cosmos in the celestial schema of the stars, with its cardinal points, while Plotinus incorporated the intensive movement of the soul into the movement of the One, with its emanative processes of procession and conversion. In both cases, time was subordinated to eternity as to an "originary time": in Plato's apt formula, time was "the moving image of eternity" (Timaeus, 37d). The discovery of this eternal invariant was the discovery of the true: the form of the true was that which was universal and necessary, in all places and in all times. Yet both these domains -the cosmos and the soul -remained haunted by a descent into fundamental aberrations that threatened this invariant: unpredictable meteorological movements (the "sublunar") or the restless desires of the soul (the Fall). The Galilean revolution revealed that, despite appearances, the celestial sphere was not eternal -even stars and galaxies come-into-being and pass-away (4). Indeed, one could say that the descent into temporality is what unites the otherwise diverse disciplines of contemporary science. The question of time not only haunts relativity and quantum physics, but also astrophysics, geology, chemistry, molecular biology, and paleontology, each of which has perfected procedures for dating the age of their objects. The Universe and its particles, the Earth and its life, species, humans, microbes -each has been dated, and their evolution gathered together into a kind of "chronopedia," to borrow a term from Michel Serres (2003, 335), that has replaced the old encyclopedia. The "laws" of nature may provide the necessary and invariant rules of the game, but the moves of the game themselves are contingent, aleatory, constantly bifurcating. To use Stephen Jay Gould's well-known image, if we rewound and replayed the tape, it would produce a different story, a different game, different times. The sciences themselves, in other words, have put ancient Cronos back on the throne. It was Kant who provided the first full philosophical expression of this mutation in modern thought. The relation of time to movement was inverted, and originary time was replaced by "ordinary time": time ceased to be the measure of movement; rather, it is movement that takes place in time. In Kant, time became the "pure and empty form" (82) of everything that moves and changes -not an eternal form, but precisely the form of what is not eternal. Time was thereby rendered autonomous and independent, liberated from cosmology and psychology, as well as the eternal. Kant's argument that the Self, the World, and God are all transcendent illusions is derived directly from this new status of time. Before Kant, time had largely been defined by succession, space by coexistence, and eternity by permanence; in Kant, by contrast, succession, simultaneity, and permanence are all shown to be modes or relations of time. The result of this other Copernican revolution would be a fundamental change in the relationship of philosophy to temporality, which would take as its object the new rather than the eternal. The production of the new would be the correlate of ordinary time in the same way that the discovery of the true was the correlate of originary time with the ancients. For Deleuze, as a result, the aim of philosophy would no longer be to discover pre-existent truths outside of time, but to create non-preexisting concepts within time. Although it is true that modernity, no less than antiquity, has remained preoccupied with creating metrics for space and time (GPS, clocks, time zones, time tables, etc.), such metrics, even if they are grounded in natural rhythms and periodicities, remain conventions, artifices. The nature of time can no longer be confused with its measure. The underlying "metaphysics" of time has profoundly changed, and it is this metaphysics that constitutes the object of Deleuze's philosophy. "Bergson says that science has not found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it needs," Deleuze once wrote, "It is this metaphysics that interests me" (Villani 1999, 130). The immense accomplishment of Williams' book is to have isolated the fundamental components of the metaphysics of time developed in Deleuze's works, and to have subjected them to a rigorous analysis. His introduction (chapter one) sets the stage by laying out the two basic concepts in Deleuze's theory of time. The first is the concept of a manifold (or multiplicity), which Deleuze derives from Riemann, but to which he ascribes a purely philosophical status (3). In effect, multiplicity replaces the old metaphysical concept of substance. Just as Riemann created a non-Euclidean concept of space as an n-dimensional manifold with no pre-given metric, Deleuze formulates a non-chronological concept of time as an n-dimensional and non-metrical manifold defined by "a formal network of processes" (3) that are "interacting with one another" (9). As the pure form of change, this manifold is characterized by its infinite variability, or chaos: "Chaos is characterized less by the absence of determinations than by the infinite speed with which they take shape and vanish" (Deleuze and Guattari 1996, 42). These evanescent determinations are not the "parts" of time but, more properly speaking, its singularities, and time is less a flow than a combinatory of these singular elements. The second concept is that of synthesis; the modalities of time, in turn, are the result of the synthesis of these elements: "out of a chaos of unrelated particulars, paths are selected" (30, emphasis in original). Here too, as Williams shows (30), Deleuze appropriates the Kantian concept of synthesis by modifying its status: in Kant, syntheses are activities undertaken by the mind or the subject, whereas in Deleuze, by contrast, they are passive processes that are constitutive of both minds and subjects -and indeed, of objects as well (32). Summarizing his thesis, Williams writes: "Every determinate thing is a combination of singularities, forming a multiplicity that is changing in multiple ways according to the syntheses of time" (187n10). The heart of the book, however, lies in its central chapters (two through five), where Williams expands on the concept of synthesis, and presents detailed analysis of the three fundamental types of temporal syntheses proposed by Deleuze: habit (present), memory (past), and the new (future). We can only provide a few hints here of the richness of Williams' analyses of the three syntheses. First Synthesis (Habit). Kant restricted synthesis to the activity of the subject, since knowledge depends on the synthesis of our sensations or intuitions in concepts or schemata. Yet the possibility of even receiving sensations (receptivity) depends on the passive syntheses of the body, and every organism is itself a synthesis of water, nitrogen, carbon, chlorites, and sulfites, and so on (38). These are not active synthesis that we undertake, but rather passive syntheses that we are, that we can at best "contemplate" (giving this ancient notion a contemporary sense) (27). If Deleuze, following Hume, considers these organic syntheses to be contracted habits, it is because they are all temporal: each contraction constitutes a living present of the body (as well as a mens momentanea), in which the future appears as need and the past as genetic heredity. In this sense, the body is an integral of a plurality of temporal retentions and expectations. Chronobiology, for instance, has shown that our bodies are composed of dozens of biological "clocks" or rhythms -cardiac, digestive, nervous, molecular -which are not always commensurable, and which can easily be upset (e.g., by jetlag). Fatigue and exhaustion, in turn, mark the slackening of these temporal syntheses. Moreover, if we speak of mental fatigue as much as metal fatigue (47), it is because what is true of the organic is no less true of the inert, as Williams discusses in a wonderful passage entitled "Of Pebbles and Their Habits": "Each pebble contemplates the sea and the tides, the currents and the storms, the mass of sister pebbles, flotsam and broken shells" (38). Second Synthesis (Memory). This manifold of synthesized and contracted presents, with their variable rhythms, find their condition, in turn, in what Bergson called the pure past. Although we tend to think that the present "is" and the past "is not" or "is no longer," the opposite is in fact the case. No matter how small it may be, it is the passing instant that "is not" (since whenever we try to grasp it, it has passed on and been replaced by the succeeding instant), whereas the past itself is preserved (it "is" the case that I wrote this review). In his classic text Matter and Memory, Bergson, on the basis of similar reflections, deduced the necessity of the pure past (or pure memory) as the ontological condition of time, without which the present would never pass (55). The contemporary revival of interest in Bergson is due in no small part to Deleuze, and Williams brilliantly highlights two aspects of his appropriation of Bergson. First, the concept of the pure past is the result of a properly transcendental deduction (59ff.). Second, this deduction does not attempt to establish a foundation (in the usual sense), but is instead grounded in a set of paradoxes (63, 68): the paradox of contemporaneity (the contemporaneity of the past with the present that it was), the paradox of coexistence (the coexistence of all the past in relation with the new present in relation to which it is now past), and the paradox of pre-existence (the pure element of the past pre-exists the passing present) (63). One of the most original aspects of Williams' book is his analysis of the role that paradox plays in Deleuze's philosophy as "the passion of thought," as what can only be thought. "Deleuze has placed a productive and genetic paradox where once there were philosophical foundations" (83; cf. 52-3, 63, 163, 173n1). Third Synthesis (the New). Williams devotes two chapters (chapters four and five) to the third and most complex synthesis, which concerns the conditions for the production of the new (the future). But is it not paradoxical to search for the conditions of the new, since the conditioned (the new) would be determined by its conditions, and thus would not be truly new, like an effect that is already contained in its cause? The answer is yes, and this is why all the "categories" of Deleuze's ontology (difference, singularities, divergence, multiplicity) are differential categories: they have no self-identity, but are constituted internally by difference. Thus, when they are actualized, they are differentiated, that is, they produce the new. This is also the reason Deleuze proposed replacing the possible-real couple with the virtual-actual relation: whereas the real resembles the possible, and the actual differs from the virtual. Time, for Deleuze, does not move from one actual term to another, but from the virtual to the actual (from the virtual manifold to its actualized syntheses) (73). Williams is at his best when, particularly in "Time and the Eternal Return" (chapter five), he explains why Deleuze approaches all these syntheses through the rubric of repetition. (In Difference and Repetition, the chapter on time is entitled "Repetition for Itself"). In his book Repetition, Kierkegaard had attempted to make repetition a category of the future rather than the mere recurrence of an x in the past. Hume had already shown that repeated series such as AB, AB, AB . . . themselves produce something new, namely an expectation or habit (when A appears, we now habitually expect B) (3). Similarly, when in 1789 the French revolutionaries were determined to restore the past and live their lives as "resuscitated Romans," this act of repetition produced something new, the French Revolution. The past (as condition) and the present (as agent) are here transformed into dimensions of the future (the creation of the new) (97): repetition as metamorphosis. In his fifth chapter, Williams adroitly shows why these reformulations of the concept of repetition reached their culmination in Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return, which Deleuze interprets, not as an endless recurrence of the same, but as the repetition and production of difference (115). There are, to be sure, many other treasures to be found in Williams' book, including discussions of destiny and freedom (68ff), Proust's importance for a theory of time (77f), and an intriguing section on "The Do's and Don'ts of Time Travel (7ff): Deleuze's philosophy does not allow for time travel as it is popularly conceived, for instance in science fiction . . . . according to Deleuze's account, we are travelling back and forward in time all the time with no need for special machines or for odd physical properties such as wormholes." (8) But the core of Williams' analysis lies in his clear explication of a metaphysics of time as nonmetrical manifold of coexisting syntheses (140), as well his elucidation of the complex philosophical methodology Deleuze utilizes to construct it (a methodology that combines empirical observations and transcendental deductions within a broad speculative framework [31, 46-7, 68]). "The point of an interpretation," Williams writes toward the end of his book, "is to explain and perhaps enhance, to connect and differentiate, to exemplify and add voices, to chime with and offer counterpoint, to develop and to unpick, to analyze and give reasons, to criticize and, with luck, to expand" (153). One indeed finds all this, and more, in all of William' works. Though he follows Deleuze's text closely, he goes far beyond it, posing questions and raising issues in his own distinctive voice. And although Deleuze appeals to numerous figures from the history of philosophy, Williams insists that a narrow focus on exegesis risks "blunting originality and falling into stultifying question about fidelity" (12-13). He is generous with his footnotes, which are deliberately intended to give readers access to interpretations different than his own (2). If there is a less-than-hidden agenda in the book, it appears in the opening pages, where Williams admits that he ultimately tends to read Deleuze as a process philosopher of time in a Whiteheadean mode (2; cf 135). Although Whitehead fades into the background, the term "process" does not, even though Deleuze himself did not thematize the concept. Indeed, the word appears on almost every page of Williams' book, and effectively becomes the key to all the other concepts: a manifold is "a formal network of processes" (3), "syntheses are processes" (113), "the pure past is a process" (77), "pure becoming is a process" (140), and "time itself is process" (3). Deleuze admitted his affinities with Whitehead, but it would be helpful to know the ways in which Williams' rather sweeping use of the concept is intended to provide a link between the two thinkers. Most of the book focuses on the theory of time presented in Deleuze's 1968 Difference and Repetition, but the final two chapters (chapters six and seven) examine the slightly different theories of time presented in Logic of Sense (1969) and The Time-Image (1985). Williams reconciles his analysis with the first, but -somewhat surprisingly -he warns that the second adds little to, and perhaps even takes away from, the earlier elaboration of Deleuze's philosophy of time. Given its appeal to images and to Bergson's philosophy, The Time-Image threatens to collapse the plurality of times back into a unity (161-2) (despite the fact that the seminars Deleuze gave while writing The Time-Image provide a wealth of new material on the philosophy of time; see the "La Voix de Gilles Deleuze" website at the University of Paris 8). Though Williams clearly lays out the reasons for his hesitations (see esp. 192n1), a final question is left lingering at the end of the book: if concepts are no longer eternal but are themselves subject to the manifold of time (philosophy as the creation of concepts), would not the concept of time itself be subject to its own becoming and metamorphoses? Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time is an impressive achievement, both as an interpretation of Deleuze and as an original contribution to the philosophy of time. Its presentation of time as an irreducible manifold of synthetic processes stands as a needed antidote to textbooks that often tend to reduce the philosophy of time to the oppositions of McTaggert's A-series versus B-series, or tensed versus untensed language, or even presentism versus eternalism. References Crome, Keith, and Williams, James, eds. 2006. The Lyotard Reader and Guide. New York: Columbia. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 1996 [Original French ed. 1991] What is Philosophy? Translated by Graham Burchill and Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990 [Original French ed., 1969]. Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale; edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York Columbia University Press. Reynolds, Jack; Chase, James; Williams, James; and Mares, Edwin, eds. 2010. Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides. London: Continuum. Serres, Michel, 2003. L'Incandescent. Paris: Le Pommier. Williams, James. 1998. Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy. London: Polity Press. Williams, James. 2000. Lyotard and the Political. London and New York: Routledge. Williams, James. 2003. Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Williams, James. 2005a. Encounters and Influences: The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze. Durham: Clinamen Press. Williams, James. 2005b. Understanding Poststructuralism. Durham: Acumen Publishing. Williams, James. 2008. Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Villani, Arnaud. 1999. La guêpe et l'orchidée: Essai sur Gilles Deleuze. Paris: Éditions Belin. Copyright © 2019 ISSN: 1538 1617 College of Arts and Letters Accessibility Information Notre Dame, IN


Philosophy

SPINOZA'S ETHICS: FREEDOM AND DETERMINISM by Alfredo Lucero-Montaño 1. What remains alive of a philosopher's thought are the realities that concern him, the problems that he addresses, as well as the questions that he poses. The breath and depth of a philosopher's thought is what continues to excite and incite today. However, his answers are limited to his time and circumstances, and these are subject to the historical evolution of thought, yet his principal commitments are based on the problems and questions with which he is concerned. And this is what resounds of a philosopher's thought, which we can theoretically and practically adopt and adapt. Spinoza is immersed in a time of reforms, and he is a revolutionary and a reformer himself. The reforming trend in modern philosophy is expressed in an eminent way by Descartes' philosophy. Descartes, the great restorer of science and metaphysics, had left unfinished the task of a new foundation of ethics. Spinoza was thus faced with this enterprise. But he couldn't carry it out without the conviction of the importance of the ethical problems or that ethics is involved in a fundamental aspect of existence: the moral destiny of man. Spinoza's Ethics[1] is based on a theory of man or, more precisely, on an ontology of man. Ethics is, for him, ontology. He does not approach the problems of morality - the nature of good and evil, why and wherefore of human life - if it is not on the basis of a conception of man's being-in-itself, to wit, that the moral existence of man can only be explained by its own condition. For Spinoza, to work up an ethics is not to elaborate an external theory of morality, but to go deep into the intrinsic, radical, and essential constitution of the human condition: It is impossible for a man not to be part of Nature and not to undergo changes other than those which can be understood solely through his own nature and of which he is the adequate cause (E4p4).[2] Spinoza's commitment is essential for his search of mankind's reason. His ethics is an attempt to give reason to the human facts that usually are not susceptible to a rational explanation, and are condemned to pure irrationality. Particularly the moral facts - what Spinoza abridges as "the emotions and actions of men" - have been considered as a realm of Alfredo Lucero-Montaño: Spinoza's Ethics: Freedom and Determinism 2 existence that eludes any understanding. So the essence of our existence was conceived as an unreachable and unexplainable twilight zone, in which science and reason cannot have access. Man can explain everything, know everything and dominate everything, but himself. His own actions, the essential of his being, were marginalized, were put outside of his reach. Thus the specifically human would be a universe determined by a power external to man and alienated from his understanding. Despite modern rationalism's dubious commitment to rationalize the whole of existence, it seems certain that Spinoza's project to make intelligible the moral world, and give it an immanent basis, is a project that grants his thought a permanent significance.[3] 2. The fundamental aim of Spinoza's Ethics is to naturalize and rationalize human life, in opposition to the philosophical tradition that looked at the realm of "the emotions and actions of men" as something extra-natura or anti-natura, alien or opposite, to a rational understanding. In this sense, Spinoza writes in a notable passage: Most of those who have written about the emotions (affectibus) and human conduct seem to be dealing not with natural phenomena that follow the common laws of Nature but with phenomena outside Nature. They appear to go so far to conceive man in Nature as a kingdom within a kingdom... They will doubtless find it surprising that I should attempt to treat of faults and follies of mankind in the geometric manner, and that I should propose to bring logical reasoning to bear on what they proclaim is opposed to reason, and is vain, absurd and horrifying...I shall [therefore] consider human actions and appetites just as if it were an investigation into lines, planes, or bodies (E3pref). Spinoza does not only think, in accordance with his time, that nature is written in numbers and it has in itself a casual and mathematical rationality, but that everything can be "demonstrated in geometrical order," including ethics itself. For Spinoza, and likewise modern rationalism, nature losses its demonic character, and acquires even a divine status: In his pantheistic conception, "God is one," there is only one substance, an absolutely infinite being, consisting of infinite attributes of which only thought (spirituality) and extension (spatiality, corporeity) are known by man. God is not just thought, as Descartes believed, but also extension as the Spinozist heretical theology states. This means that Alfredo Lucero-Montaño: Spinoza's Ethics: Freedom and Determinism 3 the divine is in the physical nature as it is in thought itself. Furthermore, nature is divine itself. Everything is God, and God is everything. If extension and thought have been unified in this basic premise, if monism tries to resolve, in an essential unity, the dualism between spirit and matter, infinite and finite, absolute and relative, eternity and temporality, we must understand that man, with all his affects, cannot constitute a sui generis reality outside of nature. If God itself is not extra-natura, even less can man be: He does not constitute "a kingdom within a kingdom." But Spinoza's naturalism takes with itself - together with the possibility of dealing with the human affects as if they were "lines, planes, or bodies" - the possibility that freedom could be questioned: Men are deceived in thinking themselves free (E2p35schol). In the mind there is no absolute, or free, will. The mind is determined to this or that volition by a cause, which is likewise determined by another cause, and this again by another, and so ad infinitum (E2p48). Here freedom seems to have no place in an absolute and necessary order, or when Spinoza writes: "that all things in Nature proceed from an eternal necessity and with supreme perfection" (E1app). Certainly there is no freedom, if we understand by it the power of doing an action without cause or reason, if we conceived free action as the human possibility to act independently of determining causes. That would be freedom conceived as self-determination, as causa sui, for instance, as in Kant or Sartre. Here we must point out that Sartre's idea of freedom certainly takes place as the exact counterpart of the Spinozist notion: freedom is an absolute indetermination, a "complete and unconditioned" freedom - anti-natural, unjustifiable and absurd. Sartre's existentialism not only asserts the irreducibility of human condition, but it precisely assumes the extra-natura character, opposed to reason, of the "vain, absurd and horrifying" absolute freedom. And far away from the Spinozist notion, Kant's idea of freedom is outside of nature, outside of natural causality, and nevertheless it is rational (and it is a nonnatural "cause"), because it belongs to the order of practical reason. Alfredo Lucero-Montaño: Spinoza's Ethics: Freedom and Determinism 4 On the other hand, in Spinoza's rationalism takes place the most strict identity between "cause," "reason" and "nature," in which cause is the same thing as reason, reason is the same thing as cause, and cause is the same thing as a necessary causality or determinism: "From a given determinate cause there necessarily follows an effect" (E1ax3). In other words, this determinism means that the same causes produce the same effects through a chain of uniform, determined and necessary items. It consequently makes freedom incompatible with rationality, and with nature and its causal realm. Now we can clearly understand that to assert, as Spinoza does, the rational and natural condition of human life implies the questioning of freedom. Can we really explain what man is within a strict monist and deterministic philosophy? Can we talk about ethics in a universe ruled by necessary causal laws? Is it not a contradictio in terminis to speak about a "deterministic" ethics? How can we explain within a perfect order the universal presence of human imperfection, like man's irrationality, destructiveness and evil? Can it be an ethics "demonstrated in geometrical order"? Could Spinoza really achieve his project of a strictly deterministic ethics that eliminated all sense of freedom? Spinoza's Ethics precisely oscillates between these alternatives: if there is ethics, there is no absolute determinism, or vice versa. If the former, then the determination is reduced, and it is not anymore incompatible with freedom; the causality ceases to be absolutely necessary (implied in a consequent determinism). If the latter, the emphasis put on a strict determinism - as a guarantee of rational perfection and absolute truth - ethics becomes impossible; it disappears in a straightforward manner to the consolidation of determinism. These two possibilities seem to be present at the same time in Spinoza's ethics, creating tensions and contradictions within his system. Nevertheless, there is an ethics, and this means that there is a mode of determinism combined with freedom. The Spinozist ethics, explicitly or implicitly, establishes several meanings of freedom. Alfredo Lucero-Montaño: Spinoza's Ethics: Freedom and Determinism 5 3. Certainly, Spinoza writes of "good" and "bad" affects: pleasure, love, devotion, hope, confidence, etc., are good affects; pain, hatred, mockery, fear, despair, are bad affects. For Spinoza, affects are rationales as much as they express man's belonging to nature, that is, his inclusion in an universal causal order by which he is necessarily affected. However, the affects can favor or not favor man's being: I shall understand by pleasure 'the passive transition of the mind to a state of greater perfection,' and by pain 'the passive transition of the mind to state of less perfection' (E3p11schol). However, what is fundamental in Spinoza's gaze is that man has an originating tendency, a kind of elan vital, an effort or essential impulse to persist in his own being: The conatus with which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing itself (E2p7). Desire is the very essence of man; that is, the conatus whereby man endeavors to persist in his own being (E4p18dem). In contrast with those that might see in the human condition some originating tendency to destruction or death, like Freud who asserts that "the aim of all life is death" or Heidegger who understands human existence (Dasein) as a "being-toward-death," Spinoza holds that death is external or extrinsic: "No thing can be destroyed except by an external cause" (E3p4). For Spinoza, the good affects are those that favor the originating conatus of life, toward its expansion and perfection, that is, to joy and happiness. The bad affects, on the contrary, disturb the being's impetus: Pleasure is an emotion whereby the...[man's] power of activity is increased or assisted. Pain, on the other hand, is an emotion whereby the...[man's] power of activity is diminished or checked. Therefore pleasure in itself is good...[and pain is in itself bad] (E4p41dem). I shall mean by 'good' that which we certainly know to be the means for our approaching nearer to the model of human nature that we set before ourselves, and by 'bad' that which we certainly know prevents us from reproducing the said model (E4pref). Here it is necessary to notice that the existence alone of the "bad" affects could be a sign of a break in the supposed human perfection;[4] if not, how can we really understand Alfredo Lucero-Montaño: Spinoza's Ethics: Freedom and Determinism 6 melancholy, grief, fear, hatred, death, in a realm where everything "endeavors to persist in its own being," and in a realm that is subject to the most necessary and divine rationality? The fact alone of the existence of a difference, or contrast, between good and bad affects is a proof - grounded on freedom - of the ethical condition of man. For a strictly deterministic system there is no place for qualitative distinctions: everything is indifferent, apathetic, neutral, because everything is precisely necessary. The difference between good and bad affects implies the negation of the perfect causal order, or it reveals the existence of an imperfection, and therefore the possible character of determination. The diversity implies then the different alternatives of possible, unlike and opposite, causal links: some favorable to man's essential nature and others opposite to it, some of life and others of death. It seems that we live in a world determined by a kind of necessity-in-the-circumstances (relative necessity), and not one of absolute necessity: what is, but could not be; what is this way, but could be in another way. And this notion of necessity-in-the-circumstances is related to freedom. On the other hand, the difference does not only exist, according to Spinoza, between good and bad affects, but between emotions in general and actions; between the passive life which is affected by the exterior,[5] and the active life which, on the contrary, is a cause itself, and not only an effect. The "power of activity" that moves human nature "by reason of its essence or by reason of its cause," and produces its own motion - from inside to outside, and not from outside to inside - means nothing else but the fulfillment of the conatus itself: Besides the pleasure and desire that are passive emotions, there are other emotions of pleasure and desire that are related to us in so far as we are active (E3p58). Since reason demands nothing contrary to nature, it therefore demands that every man should love himself, should seek his own advantage (I mean his real advantage), should aim at whatever really leads a man towards greater perfection, and, to sum it all up, that each man, as far as in him lies, should endeavor to preserve his own being (E4p18schol). For that reason, melancholy, hatred, sadness (passive affects), are not actions (active affects), and for the same reason, the actions agree with the good affects: So no emotions of pain can be related to the mind in so far as it is active, but only emotions of pleasure and desire (E3p59dem). Alfredo Lucero-Montaño: Spinoza's Ethics: Freedom and Determinism 7 Certainly, the difference between passive and active affects, between passivity and activity, shows the "human weakness in the ethical struggle,"[6] or in Spinoza's words, it shows the essential difference between bondage and freedom: We shall readily see the difference between the man who is guided only by emotion and belief and the man who is guided by reason. The former, whether he will or not, performs actions of which he is completely ignorant. The latter does no one's will but his own, and does only what he knows to be of greatest importance in life, which he therefore desires above all. So I call the former a slave and the latter a free man (E4p66schol). A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death (E4p67). For Spinoza, real freedom would not consist hence in acting gratuitously, without cause nor reason, but on the contrary to act according with the necessary nature of man: To act from reason is nothing else but to do what follows from the necessity of our own nature considered solely in itself (E4p59dem). It is in the nature of reason to regard things as necessary, [to wit, as they are in themselves] (E2p44cor2dem). In other words, for Spinoza, freedom means to obey the determined conatus which man "endeavors to persist in its own being," acting in agreement with "the clear and distinct ideas" which show the universal rationality, and in conformity with the necessary and eternal truths of nature. Thus freedom would be nothing but the fulfillment of the own necessity of being: The conatus to preserve itself is nothing but the essence of a thing, which... is conceived as having a force to persist in existing and to do those things that necessarily follow from its given nature. But the essence of reason is nothing other than our mind in so far as it clearly and distinctly understands (E4p26dem). In this sense, we might say that the change between the passive life and the "free" and active life is nothing but the change of one bondage to another one: to leave acting from external causes (passive affects) and to subject oneself to internal determinations (active affects) which are absolutely more determining. Then freedom would be just the outcome of a fixed, determined and immutable nature, an absolute, necessary nature, and not a possibility itself. Spinoza does not admit that "free" action can fall on our own nature and transform it, that is, freedom cannot be creative and produce true changes; therefore it could not explain the ethical condition of man. Alfredo Lucero-Montaño: Spinoza's Ethics: Freedom and Determinism 8 However, in another sense, we cannot think that "active" life and "passive" life are indifferent, nor that the change of one to another does not, in some way, imply freedom. It, explicitly or implicitly, shows the condition of the ethical activity (man's active understanding of himself), even though it is conceived in a limited way and it fulfills in conformity with a supposed nature, or a necessary essence. We could even say that the paradox is double: for it not only expresses that freedom consists in necessity, but that necessity involves, at the same time, freedom; man's necessary nature (his rational conatus to persist in his own being) is not absolutely necessary: it does not inevitably come to fulfilment in a spontaneous and automatic manner, as a natural instinct. On the contrary, it is a free acquisition, possible and contingent, borne in the effective man's activity, through which could it take place or not. Certainly, the conatus is just "conatus" in the sense as "tendency", possibility or potentiality, "endeavor," struggle and conquest of freedom. It properly is not a force, or a spontaneous impetus, which takes place with natural and universal facility. Spinoza seems to acknowledge this when he writes: "If men were born free, they would form no conception of good and evil so long as they were free" (E4p68). Actually, for man, the conatus is a potency, a "desire", an "endeavor," which requires human "work", to wit, requires art (activity) and artifice (virtue); it is a cultural outcome and not a natural one; it is moral and free, not spontaneous nor absolutely determined. However, for Spinoza, the real active and free life is something very difficult to reach: If the road I have pointed out as leading to this goal seems very difficult, yet it can be found. Indeed, what is so rarely discovered is bound to be hard. For if salvation were ready to hand and could be discovered without great toil, how could it be that it is almost universally neglected? All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare (E5p42schol). Beyond this explicit acknowledgment, freedom is present in the Spinozist system showing, in many ways, the inconsistency of determinism. Man can and must ruled over his passive affects; he must arise above the vital determinism and produce an active and rational life: Therefore the more we endeavor to live by the guidance of reason, the more we endeavor to be independent of hope, to free ourselves from fear, and to command fortune as far as we can, and to direct our actions by the sure counsel of reason (E4p47schol). Alfredo Lucero-Montaño: Spinoza's Ethics: Freedom and Determinism 9 All the Spinozist actions ("conatus," "desire," "virtue", "power") do not mean anything else but freedom - the human power to influence over the causal chains, and thus transform human nature. It is true that freedom is not absolute or uncaused, and neither anti-natura nor extra-natura, but it also means that man's nature is not a closed, immutable, causal realm. That is why we have history, culture and ethics. 4. Beyond the effort of Spinoza's thought to apprehend the real, beyond his rationalistic commitment, the facts themselves, with their qualitative diversity and "motion and rest," overflow the Spinozist system. In effect, the fluidity of human activity exceeds the rigid and limited margins of Spinoza's determinist scheme within which he tries to rationalize ethics. It is only possible in an unnecessary, changing, imperfect order, to wit, in a human not divine order. Ethics is only possible as the world recovers its human dimension: imperfect and perfectible, essentially qualitative, always subject to siege by irrationality and nothingness, always open and in gestation. In a geometrical order there is no ethics: there are no passive and active affects, there is no difference, there is neither conflict nor struggle, neither life nor possibility. Certainly, there is no ethics in pure indetermination, nonsense and vacuousness. The human world is an ethical world because within it there is also causality, rationality, differentiation, sense and "conatus to preserve the nature of the thing itself." Spinoza's actuality is not due to his determinist rationalism, but to his endeavor to seek the logos of the human affects, and to understand the paradox of freedom intrinsically, but not contradictorily, related to determination. It is not due to his monism or pantheism, but to his recovery of human nature and its own affects. Nor is it due to his univocal optimism, but to his advocate for vital values. In sum, it is in his effort to conciliate the passions and actions, that is, the natural and moral horizons of human life. On the most extreme antithesis of Hobbes' statement: homo hominis lupus, we can find the Spinozist deification of nature and man himself. But opposite to Spinoza's implicit homo hominis deus, contemporary ethics stands on the fruitful hope that neither lupus nor deus, but homo hominis homo.[7] In this sense, Spinoza is a fundamental contribution to an ethics based on the human condition itself. Alfredo Lucero-Montaño: Spinoza's Ethics: Freedom and Determinism 10 Finally, there is no ethics without freedom. Even in Spinoza's deterministic conception there is an "ethics" in the broad sense. Because an indifferent and apathetic universe (consequent of an absolute determinism) is not a "human world", therefore, freedom is present. Freedom means the capacity of "option," "value" judgment and "decision," because there are, one way or another, open alternatives and possibilities. The ethical reality is the work of man's "endeavor". Footnotes 1. Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991). 2. References to Spinoza are given by the internal form, for example, 'E' stands for Ethica (followed by the number of the part), and so the following terms: p(roposition), dem(onstration), schol(ilum), ax(iom), app(endix), cor(ollary), pref(ace), etc. 3. Henceforth I heavily draw on Juliana González, "El Proyecto de una Ética Determinista: Spinoza," in Ética y Libertad (México: UNAM, 1989), 97-110. 4. Just a simple a question: Is not perfection inhuman? 5. For Spinoza, man as part of Nature could be assailed by external causes, and the passions resulting from them (E4ax, E4p5). 6. See Herman De Dijn, "Spinoza's Ethics: From the Sorrows of Reason to Freedom and Beyond," in La Ética de Spinoza. Fundamentos y significado, Actas del Congreso Internacional: Almagro, 24-26 de octubre, 1990 (Ciudad Real: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 1992), 495. 7. See Fernando Savater, Invitación a la Ética (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1982), 38. Alfredo Lucero-Montaño (Tijuana, México) holds a master's degree in philosophy from San Diego State University (San Diego) and a bachelors in philosophy from Universidad Iberoamericana (México City).


Transcending the Disciplinary Boundaries

Philosophy

Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 2, 2009 www.cosmosandhistory.org 1 INTRODUCTION: TRANSCENDING THE DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIES Arran Gare This edition begins with a tribute to Brian Goodwin. Brian was not only an original member of the editorial board of Cosmos & History, but was the patron of the Joseph Needham Centre for Complex Processes Research from within which this journal was conceived. His work and life symbolizes all that the journal stands for. The central question that Brian was concerned with throughout his life was: What is life? It seems appropriate therefore to retrospectively dedicate last year's two volume special edition on this question to him. However, I believe that this edition of Cosmos & History would also meet with his approval. If there is a theme uniting the papers in this edition it is the problematic state of existing disciplines and the fruitfulness of transcending disciplinary boundaries, something that was of increasing concern to Brian. The first paper by Carlos Frade examines and attempts to explain the parlous state of sociology, contrasting what now passes for sociology with its promise as a free form of enquiry proclaimed by Max Weber and C. Wright Mills. Frade is concerned to work out how sociology could be revived, but in order to do this he attempts to explain not only its failure to live up to its promise, but also its complicity in the debasement of universities. Free enquiry has been undermined by the way universities have functioned and the internal dynamics of disciplines, which have tended to sideline and silence those who have resisted specialization and the trivialization of research, defended provocative theses or questioned the state of their discipline. However, sociology has also been undermined by the lack of the virtues required to sustain a free form of enquiry. The revival of sociology and of the university will require, as Frade put it, 'love', 'insight' and 'courage'. While in this paper Frade focuses on sociology, his analysis is relevant to the way free enquiry is being stultified in all disciplines. The second paper by Adam Scarfe is firstly an historical study of the origin and influence of the notion of the 'Baldwin effect' in evolutionary biology, but it is much ARRAN GARE 2 more than this. It is an attempt to synthesise Baldwin's insight with Alfred North Whitehead's metaphysics to develop a process-relational evolutionary cosmology. This is itself a courageous work, combining history of science, theoretical biology, natural philosophy and metaphysics. Being over 25000 words long it is the kind of paper, academically rigorous yet written for a broad audience, that tends to be regarded as too short for a book and too long for a journal article, yet this is exactly the length required for the project Scarfe has attempted. Another ambitious paper crossing a number of disciplinary boundaries is 'Complexity, Sustainability, Justice, and Meaning' by Horacio Velasco. Focussing initially on how the conflict between the directional chronological time of history and the reversible dynamical time of classical physics has been resolved by the invalidation of the dynamical sense of time by non-linear dynamics, Velasco then shows how non-linear dynamics has been complemented by symbol mediated language. Engaging with limitations of economic theory and ethics in dealing with ecological constraints he then attempts to show how indefinitely evolving complexity, sustainability, justice and meaning are indissolubly bound with chronological time. Glenn McLaren also crosses disciplines to engage with science, natural philosophy, metaphysics and ethics in a study of climate change. Taking Alfred North Whitehead's Science and the Modern World as a starting point, McLaren argues that existence is essentially vibratory. Conceiving nature in this way shows promise as the basis for all the natural sciences, McLaren argues. However, if nature is essentially vibratory, we should not be trying to eliminate vibrations. Using defective attitudes to health to illuminate defective attitudes to climate change, McLaren calls for a new kind of ethics of participation. The notion of time is investigated from a very different perspective from the preceding writers by Frederic Will in 'Temporal Foundations in the Construction of History.' In this paper Will offers two essays on time which converge on a description of cognition as subject-centred. The first essay on 'Multiple Nows' argues that the present and the past are generated in infinitely diverse combinations whenever a new 'now' establishes a past for itself, while 'History of a House' asks what is the 'historicity' or that object, and suggests that the answer is 'nothing'. The historicity is ascribed to it by the historian/perceiver who is standing before the house, Will argues. The following two papers reveal the fruitfulness of Peircian semiotics as a transdiscipline. Steve Mackey uses semiotics to reveal the parallels between the ideas of John Dewey and Jürgen Habermas, two thinkers who are seldom considered together. Inna Semetsky's uses Gauss' interpretation of complex numbers to explicate Peirce's notion of abduction as an aspect of the production and interpretation of signs. Each paper illustrates how Peircian semiotics, which is a relatively new and vigorous field of research, is enabling scholars to make connections and offer insights that would have been precluded by older disciplines. COSMOS AND HISTORY 3 One of the peculiar features of the divide between the sciences and the humanities, with the humanities having been severely reduced in status in recent years, is that there has been recourse to evaluative terms taken from the natural sciences and applied to people's psychological states. The most important of these are 'health' and 'illness'. Seamus MacSuibhne questions this tendency, examining the promotion of 'solstalgia' as a new mental illness. Jacques Derrida achieved a cult status in the humanities in 1990s, a status shared with Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. This status has been inherited by Slavoj Žižek. While having common sources of inspiration, there are huge differences between these thinkers. Alzo David-West analyses a late interview with Derrida on 'Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides' and reveals Derrida to be 'unremarkable, expounding an ambiguous and eclectic pre-Marxist prophetism.' Terry Lovat and Inna Semetsky argue that Deleuze's philosophical method and unorthodox ontology facilitates a naturalistic interpretation of the functioning of mysticism, while Daniel Hourigan finds Žižek to be a fruitful starting point to examine the 'mythologization of technology.' Hourigan at the same time provides an analysis of Žižek's philosophy of what in the past might have been called 'the human condition.' In 'Philosophical Anthropology, Ethics and Political Philosophy in an Age of Impending Catastrophe' Arran Gare argues that if we are to provide the ethics and political philosophy required to reorient people to address the global ecological crisis, then it is necessary to reintegrate philosophy with the quest to understand the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos. It is necessary to revive philosophical anthropology to oppose the Hobbesian view of humans that has dominated modernity. What is required, Gare argues, is a reinterpretation of Hegel's philosophical anthropology, ethics and politics taking into account Schelling's critique of his Idealism, a reinterpretation of Marx's work based on this reinterpretation of Hegel, and then a reinterpretation and development of such humanism through recent developments of hierarchy theory and biosemiotics. In 'Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Modern Cosmology' Jorge Horvath argues that contemporary cosmology is in the throes of a major reorientation in thought in its effort to account for a major anomaly in existing scientific theories. The anomaly, and the deep change in the conceptual framework required to overcome this anomaly, qualify as a textbook Kuhnian paradigm shift, Horvath argues. He then goes on to identify some of the actual elements 'in the works' of contemporary science associated with this revolution in thought. The edition concludes with a review by Arun Sladanha of Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, placing this work in the context of recent discussions of the relationship between science, philosophy and the humanities. ARRAN GARE 4 It was hoped that our special edition on the question 'What is Life?' would also come out as a book. Unfortunately, despite our efforts, we have not been able to find a publisher. Those we have contacted have pointed out that although the papers are outstanding, they are available free online. Under these circumstances publication in book form is not a good commercial proposition. This has meant that it has not been possible to make corrections that we intended to make. The most important of these pertain to acknowledgement. The tables in Floyd Merrell's paper 'Life Before Matter, Possible Signification Before Tangible Signs: Towards a Mediating View' drew on the work of Steven M. Rosen, notably Table 1 and associated analysis which was adapted from Table 3.1 of Topologies of the Flesh, A Multidimensional Exploration of the Lifeworld (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006, p.75) and Table 5.1 of The Self-Evolving Cosmos, (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2008). This was not acknowledged. The editors of Cosmos and History (and Floyd Merrell) apologize for the omission of this acknowledgement. Philosophy and Cultural Inquiry, Swinburne University