Gary,

You might to take a look at Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy by Michael Hardt. Hardt reconstructs Deleuze's intellectual development in terms of a series of tranpositions: from Bergsonian ontology to Nietzschean ethics (as you mentioned) and from Nietzschean ethics to Spinozist politics. This latter step is very important, because it prevents Deleuze from becoming trapped in Nietzsche's aristocratic republicanism.

Unfortunately, Hardt doesn't mention Hume's influence on Nietzsche, although Deleuze's first book was on Hume. In many plsaces Deleuze identifies himself with a "minor tradtion" that runs from Lucretius, to Spinoza, Hume, and Nietzsche.

Carl
Giovanni concurs with you. She says that:

"Hardt's thesis is that Deleuze gets his ontological framework from Bergson, which he then enriches ethically via his encounter with Nietzsche. Finally, Hardt views Deleuze's interest in Spinoza as the attempt to translate a still purely metaphysical set of positions, drawn from Bergson and Nietzsche, into politically meaningful action."

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.

John,
you write:

"I'm not sure what you're aiming at with the dual track between Deleuze and Adorno."

Neither am I to be honest.

On my understanding both are attempting to overthrow idealism ( any philosophy that affirms an identity between subject and object and thereby assigns constitutive priority to the epistemic subject?) to make way for materialism. My understanding is that it is difficult to think as a materialist as opposed to laying claim to that label.

Often, where this label is most vehemently and immediately claimed, we find a particularly unreflective kind of metaphysics powerfully at work--in my experience the mechanism and atomism of a dogmatic scientific reductionism that is based on classical physics. This dogmatic materialism is taken as an ontological given and denies the way that it is a philosophical construct. As Hegel forcefully pointed out, we are effectively invited to have faith in some framework/ontology for data which is sheerly given.

Adorno in Negative Dialectics tries to formulate a "philosophical materialism" that is historical and critical but not dogmatic.

What sort of materialism is that,given that Adorno holds that praxis not longer serves as an adequate basis for challenging (philosophical) theory?

I get as far as Adorno's "materialism being motivated by undeniable human suffering.

Does it overlap with the process materialism of Deleuze? Does it highlight the differences about bodies rather than consciousness, in the attempt to breaking through the deception of constitutive subjectivity?

What is the critical potential of that materialism.