A conversation has been developing on an earlier post on Bergson Deleuze, and becoming around Alfred North Whitehead with John C Halasz making all the running. The comments are too good to be buried away, and as I know very little about the metaphysics of the new physics, I've reposted John's comments here to bring Whitehead into the conversation on becoming/process philosophy that is beginning to take shape.
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O.K. Back from a brief vacation and having read through the Borradori, I thought I'd take another crack at the Whitehead thing, though I'm not sure what you're aiming at with the dual track between Deleuze and Adorno.
"Whitehead works with an event-atomism based on the ontological priority of discrete events or their components."- That seems to be some sort of criticism, but I don't think it's quite accurate. To be sure, events are arrived at as the outcome of analysis: processes consist of variously interlinked events. But, as stated earlier, Whitehead was working from relativity and early quantum theory,- (the fully fledged quantum mechanics was only beginning to be developed exactly when he was writing and it is not known how much he knew or understood of it). And the point about quanta is that, though they are discrete, there is basically no such thing as a quantum, since quanta can only be understood in terms of their relations to each other: the concept is intrinsically a relational one. (In addition, relativity interrelates time and space into space-time "systems", which are effectively functions of the unfolding of events, yielding a concept of physical time, in contrast to Newtonian mechanics, which, while desubstantializing the understanding of matter into mass, displaced substantialism onto abstracted space and time as an absolute container of material events, while, the famous E=MC>2 replaced the Newtonian abstraction of force from matter.
In other words, in addition to its superior problem-solving/explanatory power, the new physics was also more rationally intergrated, in the sense of explicating its components in relation to each other.) The "actual entities", or, in temporalized form, "actual occasions",- the simplest form of an enduring entity being a recurrent series of actual occasions-, are quanta generalized into a model for all existents, at whatever level of size or complexity, in place of the traditional "atoms", partaking thereby of a certain, so to speak, moderate holism. Further, if processes are "reduced" to "discrete events or their components" as a result of analysis, that does not mean that such events are thereby inert and "external", but rather events are always, in the terms of the analysis and its jargon, "percipient".
The notion of "ontological priority", as well, is a bit out-of-place here, for Whitehead is not exactly doing ontology. His "metaphysics" is a natural cosmology, or, in other words, a kind of philosophy of nature. And it is not, nor does it claim to be, a complete, systematic, totalizing account of the world, in the manner of the pretensions of classical philosophy. It does not deal directly with the socio-historical world, nor with language, meaning, or communication, nor with freedom and ethics. But the main thrust of the work is to provide an account, half heuristic, half speculative, of a pluralistic and open universe and how it could "hang together", its possible cohesion or coherence, without relying on the traditional "logocentric" conception of "unity", as with the positivists' notion of a "unified science", surely a hangover from traditional metaphysics. Such an account leaves room for, but does not determine, other concerns.
Perhaps a way into this issue is to ask whether or not Whitehead is an empiricist of sorts, though the answer to the question is not really important. Though he participated in the development of formal symbolic logic, together with Russell attempting to provide a logical foundation for mathematics, which project he does not seem to have gone back on, inspite of Goedel having put paid to it, when he set about to do philosophy, he put such logic aside, as useless for his purposes. The contrast with Russell, who continued the main line of British empiricism, in terms of what might be called the standard analysis, logical atomism, couldn't be more stark. Whitehead starts from "experience"- he cites a particular passage from Locke as the clearest description he knows of- and then proceeds via analysis well beyond the bounds of direct experience, all the while presumably relying nonetheless on an appeal to what he "captures" of experience, both in the sense of self-experience and external experience, as his legitimating ground, but the analysis is a non-standard one, and is aimed precisely against logical atomism and the forms of explanation that rely on it. (He implicitly equally rejects the rather static account of a holistic absolute in the Oxford Idealists, though that's a bit removed from Hegel's original conception and intention.)
The key point here is that, though Whitehead proceeds entirely by way of analysis, it is not directed toward some "ultimate" bits, reduction to atomic simples, any more than to some sort of unmitigated holism,- (a potential link with Marx' rather murky critique of Hegel is perhaps to be found here). And the highly generalized analytic approach also contrasts with the reliance on any architecture of categorial stipulations traditionally associated with ontology. (The contrast with Nicolai Hartmann's revisionist ontology, which, according to sketches I've read of it, is also concerned with capturing the levels of reality, but relies on categorical stipulations, I think favors Whitehead's much more supple approach.)
On the other hand, when I was reading "Process and Reality", I was puzzled by what its epistemological implications were supposed to be, given its overall heuristic intent. I think the answer is that there are none, since, rather than doing epistemology, asking and seeking to answer the question of how our intelligence grasps, secures, and justifies its knowledge of the external world, Whitehead has simply flipped the question over, attempting to answer the question of how an intelligible world can emerge from a purely physical one and how it continues to interact with it. Not only does that offer an alternative route to at once explaining, justifying, and criticizing the rationality of science, while signally de-transcendentalizing the problematic, but it, oddly enough, perhaps could link Whitehead's effort to that of his opposite number, via Russell, Wittgenstein, who also sought to de-transcententalize philosophy as part of his critical dissolution of epistemology. (Adorno's peculiar position should be noted here: the transcendental is false and illusory, but it is a "necessary" illusion that will persist so long as the structures of "exchange society" that generate it would persist).
The point of an anti-reductionist realism could perhaps be expressed in quasi-Wittgensteinian terms thusly: any explanation must conserve the identity of its phenomena, else it's not clear what the explanation is an explanation of. Perhaps Whitehead's way is to suggest how phenomena can conserve their "identity" without relying on unchanging and exclusive "essences".
Finally, with respect to Whitehead, I want to return to that bothersome business of "God" talk. I sought earlier to make plain that the primary thrust of Whitehead concerned the elaboration of a critical, non-reductive realism, (though, to be sure, realism is not all of what one would want),- and that Whitehead's notion of "God" is not a sudden re-spiritualization of the whole shebang. Whenever one encounters talk about "God" the only thing one can reasonably do is to ask what, if anything, the name (of the unnamable) specifies, and what does it (or is it said to) do, that is, what is the function of the name/concept. Whitehead states his overall ambition as to do for passing-away what Aristotle did for coming-into-being. (There is an echo of Spinoza there.) Partly, that is an expression, within the context of an urbane progressivism, of a mildly tragic view of life: the frank recognition that successfully integrative orders do not always, or even usually, obtain.
But the main point seems to be an invocation of "cosmic" memory, beyond that attached to particular beings, that is, the way in which the persistence of the past contributes to further, novel evolution. Regardless of whether that is supposed to have a consolatory function (or denies loss), it does allow for an account of the interaction between "internal" and "external" relations, in terms of the phase transitions of overall processes. So it's not clear that "Whitehead holds that there can be no continuity of becoming", since without demarcation, rooted in finitude, there can be no registration of becoming, for which "continuity" could be meaningfully claimed.
I should go to bed now, so I'll leave off. But perhaps I'll get back to deliver some criticism of Bergson/Deleuze, work and time permitting. Particularly, I would question whether temporality could really be construed in terms of duration/continuity/extended presence, or rather whether the experience/concept of the "thing" doesn't precisely rely on articulation.
What happens when the ethical concepts of our ethical life have decayed, emptied out and become illusory? How do we live in the public world?
Hobbes gives us an answer. Once our ethical concepts are disenchanted we have civilization as self-preservation. Moral categories are replaced by natural desires and aversions, whilst the virtues that once mediated the relations between persons are replaced by relations of power.
We recoil from this nakedness of violent self-interest in the public world and we seek to attain our humanity in our private life: in love, relationships, marriage, community etc. So says Adorno. In Minima Moralia he adds:
Where civilization as self-preservation does not force on him civilization as humanity, he gives free reign to his fury against the latter, and refutes his own ideology of home, family and community. para 116, 'Just hear, how bad he was', pp.182)
"..detects in the formless fanmilarity and slackness a mere pretext for violence, a show of being nice in order to be nasty, to our hearts desire. It subjects the intimate sphere to critical scrutiny because intimacies estrange, violate the imponderably delicate aura of the other which is his condition as subject. Only by the recognition of distance in our neighbour is strangeness alleviated: accepted into consciousness."
Treating others as ends in themselves becomes an instrument for furthering individual self-interest--as a piece of property to be used. We conform to the ethical convention of looking into their human eyes and recognizing them as human whilst we are treating them as a means, as a tool to be used and discarded.
This happens constantly in the social practices of family life and personal relationships and this 'badness' poisons our valued relationships with others. It leads to a lot of bitterness,resentment and anger. The moral substance of human beings is disappearing.
This post picks up on this one and, more importantly, this one. It is concerned with the way the French 'poststructuralist' philosophers moved away from the French Hegelian tradition.
The post works off this text. This dissertation says that:
The roots of post-structuralism and its unifying basis lie in a general opposition not to the philosophical tradition tout court but specifically to the Hegelian tradition. For the generation of Continental thinkers that came to maturity in the 60s, Hegel was the figure of order and authority that served as the focus of antagonism ... Any account of Continental post-structuralism must take this framework of generalized Hegelianism as its point of departure.
In his early work, Deleuze pursues a philosophical critique of the dialectic principally through his interpretations of Bergson and Nietzsche. Negri's work complements this project on a political plane by reading Marx and Lenin to develop an adequate political critique of Hegelianism. In these works Deleuze and Negri do not engage Hegelianism in order to salvage its worthwhile elements; they do not propose their critiques as the extraction of "the rational kernel from the mystical shell." They strive instead toward a total critique and rejection of Hegelianism so as to attain a real autonomy, a theoretical separation from the entire Hegelian problematic.
The dissertation goes on to highlight a paradox that I've also noticed:
Since they (Deleuze and Negri)are so firmly embedded in their cultural contexts, this attempted deracination from the Hegelian terrain is not immediately successful. They not only pose their projects in terms of the typical Hegelian problems -- the determination of being, the unity of the One and theMultiple, the dialectical development of historical forces -- they also do so in the traditional language of Hegelianism. Paradoxically, Deleuze and Negri appear very Hegelian in their efforts to establish Hegel as a negative foundation for their thought.
This post on Deleuze's 'Nietzsche and Philosophy' picks up from this one in early July. It is a very historical text, as it was the first book in France to systematically defend and explicate Nietzsche's work, which was still suspected of fascism, even after the second World War.
This text is seen as a classic one in the way that Continental post-structuralism has problematized the foundations of philosophical and political thought. This way of interpreting poststructuralism as a theoretical rupture holds that this inaugurates a post-Philosophical culture where philosophical claims and political judgements admit no justification and rest on no foundation. This 'postmodern' interpretation incorporates post-structuralism into a series of Anglo-American debates between modernists and postmodernists.
Now I'm more interested in the way Deleuze interprets Nietzsche to gain a way out of the philosophical cage that imprisons him through questioning the most general presuppositions of philosophy,
From Nietzsche, Deleuze adopts the desire to create new concepts that challenge conventional ideas about origins and representations and about the distinction between "mental" and "material" phenomena, concepts that attempt to create a critique of reason that is not reactive and negative, but rather affirms or "produces" something other; a philosophy based around the flux of existence.
In the Preface to 'Nietzsche and Philosophy' Deleuze says that Nietzsche's philosophy is organized along two great axes.
The first is concerned with forces and forms of general semeiology. It gives rise to the conception of the philosopher as a physician, active and reactive forces, the reactive forces of ressentiment and bad conscience, and the constitution of the subject as a man-slave. On this axis Nietzsche understands life as a contest between "active" (life affirming) and "reactive" (life denying) forces.
The second axis is concerned with power and forms an ethics and an ontology that gives rise to the will to power, eternal return and affirmation.
Deleuze says that it is important to remove the distorted interpretations assocated with man-slave (a being dominated by a master); the will to power (as a will that desires and seeks power); and eternal return (as the return of the same) since these misinterpretations turns Nietzsche into a nihilist, a fascist or a prophet.
Deleuze reads Nietzsche as opposing nihilism with transmutation, the affirmation of power by the Overman, and does with an interpretative and evaluative philosophy aligned with the arts.
I have little disagreement with this sketch in the Preface. It is a Nietzsche that I would also defend.
What I find most interesting about Deleuze is that he is trying to create an image of thought as affirmative and productive, rather than an image of thought as negative and analytical: one which will lead to alternative, non-dialectical, non-hierarchial, "a-conceptual concepts".
If the moral conventions of ethical life have decayed and been blightened by the free market, with only fragments remaining, then we are going to find it difficult to 'breathe' in the old language. The old moral language of modernity (utilitarianism and Kantianism) is saturated with the conditions by which western culture was able to produce the great art and thought, and then to produce death camps with the efficiency of a factory.
Tis something that is difficult to hold onto in these conservative times.
One can understand why Adorno said that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz was itself barbaric. I presume Adorno would say the same about ethical philosophy. Ours indeed is a destitute time. We live in the void.
What we can say is that ethical philsophy could still be written, only not as we had known it. Philosophy would have to change in order to rebuild the tainted home of ethical life in which live and find our nourishment. What is required is a new language, a new philosophy; one that would be a way of turning us toward that which is absent in our everyday world; an ethical life that has some meaning and substance, and is able to offer us some guidance in how we should live.
Bernstein's account of Adorno's thesis of 'wrong life cannot be lived rightly' in his Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics has similarities with Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the disintegration of a moral language in modernity. Both argue that affirmative ethical life has disintegrated: our human moral conventions---agreements in ways of living and talking---have been undermined, decayed, corrupted, blighted and destroyed. This is the process of nihilism.
In para 18, 'Refugee for the Homeless', in Minima Moralia Adorno gives an account of the effects of nihilism on the ethical understanding of dwelling. He says:
Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. The traditional residences we grew up in have grown intolerable: each trait of comfort in them is paid for with a betrayal of knowledge, each vestige of shelter with a musty pact of family intersts. The functional modern habitations designed from a tabula rasa, are living-cases manufactured by experts for philistines, or factory sites that have strayed into the consumption sphere, devoid of all relation to the occupant; in them even the nostalgia for independent existence, defunct in any case, is sent packing ... Anyone seeking refuge in a genuine, but purchased, period-style house, embalms himself alive. (p.38)
As the common understanding of what it is to dwell at home has become defiled and nothing has replaced it, so we become aware of the fragility of nomos, the slippage and corruption of our moral language and the disintegration of a moral community. Betrayal, deceit and violation take root, and they become the norm in personal relationships.
Reflection on this fosters an ethical awareness.
What, then is Adorno's response? He says:
The best mode of conduct, in face of all this, still seems an uncommitted, suspended one: to lead a private life, as far as the social order and one's needs will tolerate nothing else, but not to attach weight to it as something still socially substantial and individually appropriate. 'It is even part of my good fortune not to be a home owner', Nietzsche already wrote in The Gay Science. Today we should have to add: it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home.
In his Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics R.M. Bernstein says that Adorno's reflections in Minima Moralia are a taking the pulse of moral possibilities and hence the rationality potential latent in them. This is the philosopher as physician diagnosing the sickness of our civilization.
Bernstein says:
Adorno's detection of aporia in these spheres [of romance, love, marriage] is hence precise: these practices do not provide a path to right living, rather they prohibit what they promise, and do so in a way that suppresses the moment of prohibition, thereby substituting moral illusion for moral truth.
Is this not a description of the process of nihilism described by Nietzsche as a diagnosis of the ethical failure of modernity? Our present practices in ethical life lack rational coherence and ethical meaningfulness. They have an indequacey in regulating, orientating and giving meaning to everyday life.
My understanding is that in the type of process philosophy developed by Bergson, "duration" and with it a form of continuum is fundamental. Bergson's "duration" is the continuum of becoming itself. This stands in contrast with Whitehead's concept of becoming. This is not continuous, as Whitehead holds that there can be no continuity of becoming. So Whitehead works with an event-atomism based on the ontological priority of discrete events or their components.
The influence of Bergson on poststructuralism has been pretty much ignored. Despite Deleuze's early years having been dedicated to a series of monographic studies in the history of philosophy (Bergson, Nietzsche, Spinoza) very few Deleuze scholars have tried to examine the interrelation and interdependence between the different philosophers Deleuze wrote about individually.
This is what Giovanna Borradori tries to do in terms of process philosophy that transforms the ontology of being into an ontology of becoming. The attraction of Bergson lies in both his undermining the stability of fixed objects and states, and his affirmation of movement and change of the material universe.
She says:
In the transition from Bergson to Nietzsche, Deleuze's interest shifts from the ontological realm to the social-historical perspective. This shift is evident in the massive change in terminology that his encounter with Nietzsche brings about. Tendencies become forces, and eventually powers, not in the codified sense of pouvoir, but in the unstructured and vitalistic pressure of a puissance. The purely differential conceptual pair external-internal translates into the antagonism between reactive and active. And finally, the ontological category of virtuality, which for Bergson means the world as affected by duration, is reborn as the selective principle of affirmation whose law is the eternal return.
In his Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics R.M. Bernstein says that from the perspective of intimacy (and its voice of care) the fragmentation of modernist morality into Kantian (good willing) and utilitarian (good ends) strands is a function of the distortions incurred by mass society; and that some reconstructed conception of virtue ethics matches our deepest intuitions, and ethical reality itself when the distortions are removed.
I'm very partial to that account. It expresses what I've felt, and struggled with, in my personal life; it makes sense of my recoil from both kinds of rule-bound moralities; and it reinforces my return to a virtue ethics concerned with character and a flourishing human life well lived. So I have read Adorno's Minima Moralia in terms of a virtue ethics.
Bernstein states his thesis this way:
It does not seem implausible to suggest that Kantian and utilitariarian morality are moralities for hard times, moralities for a world in which neighbours have become strangers and the coordinating mechnaisms for social reproduction are impersonal ones like the market, rather than intersubjective discursive practices ... Kantian morality answering the need for guidance in personal interactions between strangers, and utilitarianism the need for policies applicable to the institutions that coordinate the public actions of such individuals? Might not the oft-noted difficulties of with Kantian morality and utilitarianism derive from the fact that, at bottom, they are remedial moralities, moralities standing in under adverse conditions for morality proper?(pp.47-8)
That is why Adorno makes his stand in the sanctuary/enclave/refuge of private life and seeks models of an undeformed moral life, even this is beyond reach and we are not able to form an image of such an ethical life. But we can take the pulse of rationality (right living) within the relationships of personal life.
This looks interesting. On reflection I've mentioned the article here, where I questioned the misreading of Hegel's conception of becoming as organic self-development through time. The misreading of Hegel is standard form in 20th century French philosophy--just as it is in Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Giovanna Borradori goes along with this misreading.
I'm only noting Giovanna Borradori's, 'The Temporalization of Difference: Reflections on Deleuze's Interpretation of Bergson' here,
as I have to catch a plane to Adelaide in an hour or so. I'll address it tomorrow at home, if ADSL-2 has been connected whilst I've been away in Canberra setting up an office. Surely ten days is long enough for that?
Update: 19 August
No ADSL. The wireless modem is still being configured by Internode. And it has taken me most of the afternoon to get dial-up as an emergency stopgap. I'm not very happy about the length of time the changeover to ADSL-2 is taking to be set up.
Back to Bergson. Giovanna says:
For Bergson, tendencies, or types of temporality, cover both phenomenological and ontological functions in the following way: the phenomenological function regards the workings of memory and perception, while the ontological function derives from Bergson's vitalistic reading of the concept of evolution .... Both functions, though distinct, have a common ground in what is perhaps Bergson's firmest commitment: the commitment to the metaphysical asymmetry between time and space.
"While space is, metaphysically speaking, homogeneous extension, time is, because of its passing character, irreducibly heterogeneous" is Giovanna's take. I reckon I will give that a miss. I have the flu this afternoon and that paragraph is just too hard to think through.
What interests me is this paragraph:
This ontological reach of tendencies is embedded in Bergson's critique of the concept of evolution. As commonly interpreted, Darwinian evolution is a process by which the individuals less fit to survive the challenges of the environment are genetically weeded out. The question regarding how the natural selection of the fittest translates into significant permanent change----a question answered, long after Darwin, by modern genetics---does not address, for Bergson, the crucial point: what kind of force is evolution? His answer is: a creative and productive power (élan vital), a power that, while not embodying a teleological end, stands in ontological contrast with the resistance of matter.
Despite being a philosospher of process species remained fixed for Hegel. Whilst Hegel's philosophy is based on the notions of historical progress, of evolutionary development, he only sees He it clearly when it comes to people, society and history. He misses it in the organic (biological) world. This is a serious flaw Hegel's philosophy as it means that it is in human-centered and anthropocentric.
In concluding this essay Giovanna Borradori says:
In my reading, then, Deleuze's understanding of Nietzschean affirmation is the channel through which Bergson silently infiltrated poststructuralism. For the young Deleuze, Bergson represents the promise of a conceptual model able to account for all tensions escaping formal analysis. The possibility of twisting the "representationalism" regulating the structuralist framework depends, very broadly, on this promise.
Poststructuralist thought inherits from Heidegger the notion that Western ontology is bound to a representationalist mode of thinking that attributes to concepts the function of re-presenting, or re-producing, a primitive presence, origin, or meaning. Bergson's emphasis on duration, and his connection between difference and duration, offers Deleuze a dynamic model based on heterogeneity and movement rather than simultaneity and juxtaposition. In "Bergson's Conception of Difference," Deleuze unfolds Bergson's potential as a critic of representationalism, reconcilable with Nietzsche and as an alternative to Heidegger. Since 1956 it is Bergson who has provided Deleuze with the tools to render difference irreducible. This is why I see the Bergsonian temporalization of difference as a major moment of coalescence of poststructuralism, assumed as pensée de la difference.
Giovanna Borradori says that:
Bergson views evolution anti-mechanistically, as a process of constant change and development, determined by the acting upon each other of two ontologically distinct tendencies.
Is that not close to Hegel?
Update: 17 August
I have take the advice of Carl Sachs to connect Bergson with Nietzsche. Below is paragraph 109--Let us be on our guard-- from Nietzsche's The Gay Science.
Let us be on our guard against thinking that the world is a living being. Where could it extend itself? What could it nourish itself with? How could it grow and increase? We know tolerably well what the organic is; and we are to reinterpret the emphatically derivative, tardy, rare and accidental, which we only perceive on the crust of the earth, into the essential, universal and eternal, as those do who call the universe an organism? That disgusts me. Let us now be on our guard against believing that the universe is a machine; it is assuredly not constructed with a view to one end; we invest it with far too high an honor with the word "machine."Let us be on our guard against supposing that anything so methodical as the cyclic motions of our neighboring stars obtains generally and throughout the universe; indeed a glance at the Milky Way induces doubt as to whether there are not many cruder and more contradictory motions there, and even stars with continuous, rectilinearly gravitating orbits, and the like. The astral arrangement in which we live is an exception; this arrangement, and the relatively long durability which is determined by it, has again made possible the exception of exceptions, the formation of organic life. The general character of the world, on the other hand, is to all eternity chaos; not by the absence of necessity, but in the sense of the absence of order, structure, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic humanities are called. Judged by our reason, the unlucky casts are far oftenest the rule, the exceptions are not the secret purpose; and the whole musical box repeats eternally its air, which can never be called a melody - and finally the very expression, "unlucky cast" is already an anthropomorphizing which involves blame. But how could we presume to blame or praise the universe? Let us be on our guard against ascribing to it heartlessness and unreason, or their opposites; it is neither perfect, nor beautiful, nor noble; nor does it seek to be anything of the kind, it does not at all attempt to imitate man! It is altogether unaffected by our aesthetic and moral judgments! Neither has it any self-preservative instinct, nor instinct at all; it also knows no law. Let us be on our guard against saying that there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one who commands, no one who obeys, no one who transgresses. When you know that there is no design, you know also that there is no chance: for it is only where there is a world of design that the word "chance" has a meaning. Let us be on our guard against saying that death is contrary to life. The living being is only a species of dead being, and if a very rare species. Let us be on our guard against thinking that the world eternally creates the new. There are no eternally enduring substances; matter is just another such error as the God of the Eleatics. But when shall we be at an end with our foresight and precaution? When will all these shadows of God cease to obscure us? When shall we have nature entirely undeified? When shall we be permitted to naturalize ourselves by means of the pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?
Postings have been few as I've just been only able to connect to the internet on a borrowed computer as the household is still being connected up with ADSL-2 by Internode.
This essay by Giovanna Borradori states that the young French poststructuralists were impatient with the centrality of negation within the dialectical branch of the rationalist lineage codified by Hegel. The reason why Hegel is of primary concern to Deleuze is that, throughout the 1950s, French philosophy was dominated by two distinct articulations of the Hegelian framework: on the one hand, Jean-Paul Sartre and Henri Lefebvre's dialectical materialism, and on the other, the existentialist readings of Hegel's early work by Alexandre Kojeve and Jean Hyppolite.
Giovanna Borradori states that:
Dialectics, Deleuze writes, proceeds systematically by negation ... properties and entities are individuated by contrast to what they are not rather than for what they are ... When Deleuze accuses dialectics of entertaining an external relationship with things, he is blaming it, using its own vocabulary, for not having reached its original Hegelian objective: overcoming the "one-sidedness" characteristic of any specific philosophical approach Hegelianism "unnecessarily" translates difference into negation; by so doing, it endorses what I shall call, glossing Deleuze, an inauthentic conception of difference. By contrast, Bergson offers an authentic conception of difference because his interpretation makes difference, instead of negation, a primitive.
What would be an example of internal or authentic difference? Certainly not the difference between two objects conceived as self-contained substances, say a cat and a mat. In fact, this is precisely the inauthentic interpretation of difference that Bergson's metaphysics is supposed to help us overcome. The section of Bergson's metaphysics that Deleuze finds crucially helpful for the sake of overcoming inauthentic difference concerns how temporality affects the notion of substance. In order to get to authentic difference, so Deleuze's argument goes, we need to bracket the notion of substance as we have inherited it from the Greek tradition. This phenomenological reduction will reveal that thinking in terms of substance forces us to assume that entities are only located "in" time, while, instead, entities become "through" time too. From the standpoint of their being substances, entities are thus "in" time, whereas from the standpoint of their becoming "through" time they are something else. What are they? "Phases of becoming" is Deleuze's answer.
Hegel does represent the full bloodied return to becoming and process in modernity initially suggested by Kant in his Critique of Taste. Does not the Aristotlean-Hegelian organic metaphysical tradition put process into substance, as part of its rupture with the atomism and mechanism of modernity presupposed by a mathematical physics?
Is not Hegel concerned with development of substance through time so that they become something else, yet remain the same being? It is not obvious to me that thinking in terms of substance forces us to assume that entities are only located "in" time, instead of entities becoming "through" time.
It is not clear why we should dump self-developing entities in various relationships in favour of the process as beoming. Ecology makes sense of the former not the latter. So why should we bracket a Hegelian understanding of a self-developing substance?
I'm going to be without a computer and online access once again. So this is going to have to be a quick post.
Bernstein in his Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics talks about the systematic dislocation of moral intentions (Kant) from consequences (utilitarianism) in ethical theory, with virtue ethics opposed to both.
What does that mean in terms of a philosophical diagnosis of a damaged ethical life? The consequence of the systematic dislocation of self from society says Bernstein. Hence the emphasis on the sphere of intimacy as a refuge that offers possibilities for an ethical life. It is here that we feel that ethics is more than emotings or obedience to impersonal rules.
I've finally been able to gain access to a laptop and internet access long enough to make a post. Even though I have been lugging my books around with me, I have been finding it difficult to post when on the road without owning a laptop. Until now.
In Minima Moralia, Adorno shows how the smallest changes in everyday behavior stands in relation to the most catastrophic events of the twentieth century. J.M. Bernstein, in his Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, says that Adorno is attempting to:
"...reveal the ethical complexion of the practices of individual existenced as.....spheres of practice that posses ethical significance and salience open to ethical judgement of the precise moral intentions and willings through which we consiously put ourselves into them ... Because of the conditioning of the practices composing private existenced by productive relations in their widest significance, our intentions and actions must systematically backfire."
"Adorno seeks to show how the pattern of deformation these practices suffer; their systematic forms of misfiring, points o a general derangement of modern ethical life; the fatal antagonism or failure of coherent articulation of universal and particular. To say that there is a fatal antagonism between universal and particular is to claim that the anonymous rule systems that are meant to provide the conditions of possibility for individual existence,to be the mediums through which individuals are able to attain self-realization, have in fact become obstacles."
I don't know that much about Henri Bergson. I understood him as a dead philosophical figure who opposed science in the name of metaphysics. Then I came across this review and this passage caught my eye:
From the time of Descartes, philosophy has been forced to cast a critical eye on science. Once it became obvious that science and the empirical method delivers superior knowledge of the material world, philosophy had to stake out its territory over and against science's expansive and increasingly imperial claims. Descartes' dualism was an early and influential response to the problem, but as Gary Gutting writes in French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, "one of the most persistently attractive has been the claim that philosophy can and should root itself in an experience with an immediacy or concreteness that escapes the abstractions required for successful empirical science". This was of course Bergson's path. While science could provide us with utterly convincing snapshots of reality, and utterly practical analyses of isolate phenomena, it could teach us nothing about continuity and duration---nothing, that is, about the essential nature of lived experience. And while modern science has progressed far beyond classical atomic theory, it nevertheless continues to understand the world in terms of the discrete. Such emphasis on the discrete and the isolate continues to inform our understanding of virtually all phenomena and their transformations, up to and including mental phenomena."
"Bergson was perhaps the greatest philosopher of time in the Western tradition (though he is still marginalized within it), and his insistence that science knows only time without change, or rather, time as space, was fundamental to his entire philosophical project. But why does science spatialize time? Why does it reject that the continuity of lived time has any relevance for its own methods and procedures? For Bergson, it is because the scientific pursuit is based on the principle of mechanism. From the scientific perspective the universe is a machine whose operations can be defined, quantified, and predicted. Thus science provides human beings a degree of control over the material world that pre-scientific societies could only dream of. However, for Bergson this doesn't change the fact that the universe is not a mechanism, and that time is not space."
Modernity partnered with capitalism and technology and the bible is a heady Promethean brew is it not? It gives us shop until you drop and the rules to live our private life by.
What more could you want?
Something to ease the ache of emptiness and unfulfillment inside me.
Work harder and longer is the response.
What we are confronted with is a pragmatic public discourse that offers an image of the good life and unambiguous ethical criteria for everyday living. Here the evangelical, Christian right-wing combination of the almighty dollar and the Holy Bible that is proving to be very attractive to many people.
Maybe it is not just a case of modernity being a process of disenchantment, as held by Max Weber and the Frankfurt School. The implications of modernity’s drive to secularize everything and everyone in its path was through a enlightening process of demystifying. Weber designated the modernity's process of demystifying modernity's 'disenchantment'. Nature and society became 'calculable' and commodified for human use.
This disenchantment narrative, some say, leads to a sense of overwhelming sense of negativity. It could be argued that the framework of Marx's political economy (and commodity fetishism?) simply does not take into account the subjective satisfactions and fugitive wonders of consumer society---those small pleasures of consumer society that we secretly enjoy and are a place of enchantment in modern life.
Jane Bennett in The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (2001) says that enchantment combines two distinct sensations or moments:
"...on one hand, 'a pleasurable feeling of being charmed [by an] as yet unprocessed experience', as well as, on the other, 'a more unheimlic....feeling of being torn out of one's default sensory---psychic---intellectual disposition'. 'The overall effect of enchantment is a mood of fullness, plenitude or liveliness, a sense of having had one's nerves or circulation or concentration powers tuned up and recharged---a shot in the arm, a fleeting return to childlike excitement about life."
How does this affirmation of enhantment arising from the canny wonders of the everyday lead to a better ethical life in a damaged world?
Have we not entered the complex world of pleasure and power in commodity culture? Is not the advertising/publicity industry a massive professional apparatus principally dedicated to both the shaping of individual conduct and the colonization of public discourse?
Let us grant that the small pleasures of consumer society do furnish us with a daily surplus of energy and humour that can go a long way. But to what extent do these fleeting moments of enchantment supersede the critique of the injustices of capitalist society? How do they connect with a damaged ethical life? Not all ethical impulses derive from the positive feelings associated with enchantment and wonder.
If the major institutions of liberal democracies have become increasingly shaped and rationalised by the reproduction of capital through the process of the market, then these institutions are no longer available as spheres of ethical practices.
Is that not what is happening to our universities? The liberal university of yesteryear is becoming a corporation ruled by a business ethos of cash flows, profits and takeovers in the marketplace.
What has happened is that the ethical practices that belonged to, and were a part of, civil society have increasingly retreated into private existence; into a world that is remote from, but not untouched by, the processes of capital reproduction.
Hence we live a damaged life. Ethical life is deformed, stunted and distorted:
To assert that our ethical life is damaged is to claim that that for us the good life is longer possible, and hence that now all philosophy can do is to survey the damage, to read the ruins of ethical life as a negative expresson of what has been lost and/or what we intend and hope for.
Update: 3 August
I have some doubts about Adorno's line of argument. Has ethical practice in our ethical life decayed to the point where all that is left is reflection on individual experience?
Is there not a problem in concentrating on the individual when modernity places the individual at the centre of its mode of life? I don't see that this reliance on individual experience is unavoidable, the only option, or all that is left.
Are there not fragments of ethical practice in civil society?--eg., a skin specialist helping with cancer because they are concerned with helping people to live healthier lives rather than just doing it for the cash. Civil society is not reduced to the cash logic of the marketplace.