3. Time and the Virtual: The Intensive Difference
4.4 Affirming Difference-in-Itself: Lucretius, Nietzsche and Deleuze
The aesthetic is the sphere of the affect: an “aliquid”325 world of liminalities, membranes, interfaces, exchanges, passings and becomings. Affectivity immerses objects in a network of relations.
Everything consists of powers to affect and be affected. In an immanent philosophy that is the only hierarchy. For Deleuze the aesthetic experience – or apperception in the Kantian sense – is the site of the genesis of our representations. As the first part of the study at hand has hopefully established, for Deleuze the path of going from the given to the conditions of experience leads to Kant, especially via a thorough detour of Critique of Judgment. It is here, says Deleuze, that the Kantian legacy is ultimately formed: namely in the notion that the aesthetic experience opens up a possibility to think of experience in general without conditions, that is, to address the issue of real experience instead of possible experience. The aesthetic resides outside legislation. It cannot be judged on the basis of the conceptual.
And, upon discovering this, Kant throws the whole issue of normativity into question. The aesthetic is radically singular. One can make aesthetic judgments only on a case-by-case basis, as the aesthetic phenomena appear as under categories which are born alongside the phenomena.
This is why Deleuze nominates Kant as the first “modern”
philosopher of apparitions instead of appearances, and it happens on
324 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 262.
325 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 23.
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the grounds of the aesthetic. The existence of the simulacra is aesthetic, not moral (that is, hierarchical in the Platonic sense). The sense of a phenomenon is relational, experiential and event-like, and these characteristics are evident in the Kantian account of the aesthetic: an aesthetic experience is an encounter between the object and the observer.
LUCRETIUS AND THE ORIGINAL DIVERSITY
Here, in considering the simulacra as the union of heterogeneous series, Deleuze evokes the names of Epicurus and Lucretius, whose
“naturalism” he advocates as the kind of philosophical pluralism necessary to counter the Platonistic representationalist tradition within philosophy. In the second part of his text “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy”, Deleuze gives a brief exposition of some basic tenets of his own empiricism by referring to Lucretius’ poem De rerum natura.326 Lucretius, though widely regarded as “merely” advocating an earlier Epicureanism, is praised by Henri Bergson and George Santayana for developing some originally less-than-coherent ideas of Democritus and Epicurus into an impressively intuitive system of philosophical materialism.327 For Deleuze, Lucretius is a figure worth praising for his commitment to naturalism, contrary to the mythic or supernatural framework of pre-philosophical thinking. Lucretius’
naturalism makes him a philosophical antidote to Platonism’s recourse to transcendent foundations for beings. The lesson of Lucretius is, in short, that diversity is essential to the products of Nature. When looking around ourselves, we find manifest diversity in the world.
Lucretius states:
Turn your attention now to a meadow in which there are grazing beasts of various kinds, wooly sheep and brave
war horses and, not at all far from them, horned cattle, all of them munching the same grass and drinking the same water from the flowing brook, under the same
326 Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. David R. Slavitt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
327 See Henri Bergson, “The Originality of Lucretius as a Philosopher” in The Philosophy of Poetry: The Genius of Lucretius, ed. and trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), pp. 65–83; George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1910), pp. 19–72.
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azure sky. Each of them lives its life in its own
shape and nature, following the pattern of its parents.
So various is the life the same nourishment fosters in the same field and in the brook and pond as well.
So too are the parts diverse of which each creature is made–
bones, sinews, organs, guts, the different
results that have come about from the same beginnings.328
An altogether harder lesson to learn is to think of the diverse as diverse, without subsuming it to some kind of unity, oneness or wholeness. At this point it must be evident that this has been Deleuze’s aim throughout his own œuvre, especially explicit in Difference and Repetition. In Lucretius’ conception of Nature we can observe three tendencies and, correspondingly, three principles. They can be schematised as follows:
NATURAL DIVERSITY PRINCIPLE
Diversity of worlds 1. Diversity of species Specificity
2. Diversity of individuals
within species Individuality 3. Diversity of parts within
individuals Heterogeneity
Contrary to Plato or Aristotle, for whom diversity is a degeneration of a previous unity, Lucretius’ naturalism starts from the fact that everything that exists appears as diverse: “none of the things that appear before our eyes is made / of only one kind of element, but rather of different seeds / that have been commingled”.329 The principles of specificity, individuality and heterogeneity imply a world that is composed of a diversity of “worlds”, as beings interact with each other, compose or are composed of each other. Every individual is distinct from every other and ultimately irreducible to abstract generality. Lucretius illustrates this by a moving example: a mother cow searches in vain for her calf, which has been taken away to be sacrificed to the gods. Even though calves might all look the same to
328 Lucretius, De rerum natura, 2.562–573.
329 Lucretius, De rerum natura, 2.501–503.
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us, she would recognise her own offspring from among any number of them.330
Likewise, no grain of sand or speck of dust is indiscernible, given sharp enough powers of observation. This corresponds with Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz, where an observer has a clear and distinct point of view to a part of the world that is, in totality, unclear and indistinct. Yet, the observer is still affected by the whole of the world. Likewise, one can note a parallel with von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt, which denotes the life world of each animal subject, shaped by the particular subject’s powers of observation and action. Umwelt forms the clear and distinct zone of observation for every particular entity; the outside of this habitual milieu is obscure, as it lies outside the formal capacity of the individual. Still, the entity is from the beginning caught in a web in inter-milieu relations which can affect the individual and in which the individual can act as a pre-individual intensity to some other milieu and individual-in-formation.
Accordingly, when thinking about a grain of sand we can shift the perspective and the scale of observation. Instead of a singular granule of sand we can speak about its components – molecules, atoms and sub-atomic parts. Or we can consider a sandy beach, composed of millions of grains of sand. Wherever we turn, we come to see that distinctness and heterogeneity occur. Accordingly, states Deleuze, nature must be thought of as the principle of the diverse and its production. However, one must be careful here not to fathom the principle of production as producing a totality or a Whole. Deleuze sums up the Epicurean thesis: “Nature as the production of the diverse can only be an infinite sum, that is, a sum which does not totalize its own elements”.331
The principle of diversity cannot, in itself, form a Whole, or Being. The notion of wholeness is the idea to resist and Deleuze considers Lucretius as having been able to hold his ground against the inherent will-to-foundation in philosophical thought. To totalise the diversity of Nature under such a concept as the One is to subsume everything under One’s judgment, the judgment of God. What one does in declaring “To Have Done With the Judgment of God!”332 is to
330 Lucretius, De rerum natura, 2.355–365.
331 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 267.
332 As Antonin Artaud’s radiophonic play from 1947 is titled: Pour en Finir avec le Jugement de dieu. This is a catchphrase later adopted by Deleuze and Guattari.
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refuse a “final” aim of everything, a total unity, telos, or Absolute.
Instead, what is noted and affirmed is the diversity and difference inherent in nature. The Platonic hierarchy must be overturned since it implies that nature is fundamentally an imperfect manifestation of some higher – that is, transcendent – principle. There is nothing that would gather the plurality of everything that exists under one totality:
nature is not collective. Rather, nature is distributive. It distributes various elements into relations with each other, yet without forming a total sum. From this follows that nature is not attributive. Instead of expressing itself as attributing a quality to extension, “A is B”, nature is conjunctive. Beings connect, oppose and support other beings: “This and that … Nature is Harlequin’s cloak”.333
Nature as this ramshackle construction, making itself up as it goes along, is what is truly affirmed and what affirms itself. In contrast, what is artificial and frail is the One. It is merely an abstraction, considered arbitrarily in isolation from the network of beings. The tendency to take recourse in a totality provided by a mythic foundation is a characteristic Deleuze noted in Plato.
Lucretius, in turn, is a critic of that which makes man’s soul anxious.
Unhappiness is caused by the “false infinites” that thinking produces:
“To the origins of language, the discovery of fire, and the first metals royalty, wealth, and property are added, which are mythical in their principle; to the conventions of law and justice, the belief in gods; to the use of bronze and iron, the development of war; to the inventions of art and industry, luxury and frenzy”.334 Happiness is, then, produced by the understanding of the diverse as diverse, without adding a mythical, transcendent dimension in order to account for it.
APPEARANCES AND THE THREAT OF NIHILISM
One may easily note similarities with Lucretius and Nietzsche’s project of critiquing those tendencies in Western though which enslave man under a belief of something higher than the apparent world. As Deleuze states, Lucretius and Nietzsche are united in their critique of myth and the transcendent: “From Lucretius to Nietzsche, the same end is pursued and attained. Naturalism makes of thought and sensibility an affirmation. It directs its attack against the prestige
333 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 267.
334 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 278.
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of the negative; it deprives the negative of all its power; it refuses to the spirit of the negative the right to speak in the name of philosophy”.335 Instead of elevating the transcendent as the hidden principle and secret of this apparent world, both Lucretius and Nietzsche seek to affirm appearance as appearance. To be more exact, the term “appearance” already leads us to posit a difference between that which appears and that onto which this appearance is founded.
Hence Deleuze’s adoption of the term simulacrum. As there can be no hierarchy in a system of thought “tainted” by the idea of a groundless image, thinking reaches the “power of the false”
(pseudos).336 The sophist obscures and obfuscates the Platonic hierarchy of claimants and leads us to a point where there can be no distinction between true claimants and false pretenders.
In his text “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable”
Nietzsche sketches a “history of an error”, meaning the history of the notion of a true, transcendent reality. The history of the transcendent is presented as six stages, all of which illustrate a case of relating the true world with the illusory one, the one “we” inhabit. The first three stages are, in succession, Platonism, Christianity and Kantianism and the status of true being is ascribed to the Ideas, God and the noumenal world, respectively. The true world in the first Platonic version is attainable by the wise man. Then, in Christian thought, the true being is postponed: it is promised in the future for the one who believes and repents. Moving ahead, Kantian thought takes a leap further and establishes truth as forever unattainable, but still providing a kind of consolation and imperative for mortals. According to the solar model of truth, we proceed from the light of the Ideas into the Northern fog of Königsberg, with “the old sun” seen only through mist, pale and elusive.337
The latter three stages present a movement further away from the thought of a true world and towards Nietzsche’s own thinking.338
335 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 279.
336 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 96.
337 Friedrich Nietzsche, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable” in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (London: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 485.
338 Scholars have disputed the extent of the latter three stages as representing Nietzsche’s own thinking. John T. Wilcox is the most inclusive; he states that all three stages contain elements of Nietzsche’s work as it proceeds. See Wilcox, Truth and Value in Nietzsche: A Study of His Metaethics and Epistemology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), p. 123. Others, such as Heidegger, see the beginnings of Nietzsche’s philosophy in stage five, but full-fledged
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The fourth stage lays the foundation for the acceptance of the fact that we cannot attain nor know the true world. From this follows a question: how can something that is unknown radiate an influence on us? The fifth stage is the one where the idea of a true world becomes the so-called “true” world when we recognise that the idea of truth has become superfluous. The last and sixth stage does away with the thought of a true world altogether. Nietzsche states: “The true world – we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one”.339 We find the simulacrum-effect at work: once we deny the primacy of the model, we end up denying the secondary status of the copy as well. Therefore, the dichotomy between the two is abolished.
In the light of the Deleuzean story of overturning Platonism, this stage means its completion, “twilight of the idols”.
What is notable is that the very idea of overturning is found within the thinking of Plato himself. As Walter Pater comments, the
“disintegrating Heraclitean fire” takes hold of men’s customs and concepts once the figure of the sophist is introduced.340 Thus, even though Plato wanted to suppress the dangerous notion of the simulacrum, he had formulated the thought already and made possible the ungrounding of the hierarchy of knowledge and truth. Against the dichotomy of essences and appearances, with its establishing of re-presentations as the repetition of the same, it is possible to posit simulacra or apparitions as the repetition of difference. Simulacra are no longer “false” in the sense of being opposed to truth, as, following Nietzsche, the notion of a true world must be done away with altogether. A true world of models and copies would be ruled by the self-identity of the highest principle, organising the world of appearances according to the resemblance between phenomena and this superior principle. The “false” Nietzschean world is, by contrast, subject to constant reinvention of itself as the repetition of difference.
This is how Deleuze reads Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return. It is not to be thought of as the eternal return of the same, but of the perpetual production and distribution of differences. This denotes
Nietzschean thought only in the last, sixth stage. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes One and Two, ed. and trans. David F. Krell (New York: Harper, 1991), p. 239.
339 Nietzsche, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable”, p. 486.
340 Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism (London: McMillan, 1902), p. 107.
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world as synthesis, a becoming. Yes, an eternal return, but as the return of difference, of continual variation or creation.341
Nietzsche’s thought of the eternal return is mainly posed against the danger of nihilism inherent in the abolishment of the transcendental foundation of thought and knowledge.342 If we accept the claim that nothing is true we run into the risk of short-circuiting thinking altogether. The claim “nothing is true” in effect breaks down thought because even this claim cannot then be held as truth. Here the correlation between truth and belief disappears. Nihilism is defined by Nietzsche in his notes as follows: “A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist”.343 An intellectual stance like this cannot grant any meaning to the world anymore. This state is described by Nietzsche as the “great nausea” of nihilism.344 The devaluation of the values on which man has previously based his measure of the worth of the world evokes this feeling of sickness.
Yet, this nausea is not the final word on the matter. As Nietzsche delineates in his six-stage “history of error” mentioned above, the phase of nihilism shall be overcome. From the aporia of
“nothing is true” must be fashioned an unconditional affirmation of the world as it is. This happens via the idea of the eternal return. This means that man has to present himself the question of the possibility of accepting an eternal or perpetual recurrence of all events.345 This is the challenge separating passive nihilists from the active ones who are able to affirm life, for there are two kinds of nihilism: passive, which denotes the decline of the power to affirm, and active, which in turn stands for the increasing of the power of the spirit.346 The active
341 See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 46.
342 A more recent commentator of Nietzsche, Bernard Reginster, shares with Deleuze the emphasis on the crisis of nihilism in Western thought and the centrality of the problematic of the overcoming of this crisis in Nietzsche’s writings. See Reginster, The Affirmation of Life:
Nietzsche on the Overcoming of Nihilism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
343 Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, ed. Walter Kauffmann, trans. Walter Kauffmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 585A, p. 318.
344 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Horace B. Samuel (Mineola: Dover Publications, 2003), II, 24, p. 66.
345 This idea is presented in Niezsche’s famous aphorism “The Greatest Weight” in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), §341, p. 273.
346 Nietzsche, Will to Power, 22, p. 17.
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nihilist is able to rise to the challenge of the eternal return and will it unconditionally.
NIETZSCHE’S AFFIRMATION OF THE APPARENT
Affirming the thought of eternal return or eternal recurrence means affirming existence as it is, without meaning or final aim. As Deleuze emphasises in his reading of Nietzsche, eternal return does not concern the notion that everything will return in a manner that is exactly the same as it has been, and that this will happen time and time again. Rather, “the eternal return is linked, not to a repetition of the same, but on the contrary, to a transmutation”.347 What recurs is not the same but rather the “meaningless” variation; the world is a becoming, constantly re-arranging itself. “Nothing is true” is here affirmed by turning transience and contingency into absolute values.
Affirming the thought of eternal return or eternal recurrence means affirming existence as it is, without meaning or final aim. As Deleuze emphasises in his reading of Nietzsche, eternal return does not concern the notion that everything will return in a manner that is exactly the same as it has been, and that this will happen time and time again. Rather, “the eternal return is linked, not to a repetition of the same, but on the contrary, to a transmutation”.347 What recurs is not the same but rather the “meaningless” variation; the world is a becoming, constantly re-arranging itself. “Nothing is true” is here affirmed by turning transience and contingency into absolute values.