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January 22, 2006
Once again I've been having connectivity problems.
Deleuze's vitalism, or philosophy of life, has its roots in Bergson's metaphysics; or rather it is based on a critical engagement with evolutionary thinking that is rooted in Deleuze's rehabilitation of Henri Bergson's 1907 Creative Evolution and its conception of the élan vital.
On Deleuze's interpretation Bergson's ' élan vital ' introduces an explosive force internal to the process of evolution is internal difference. So differentiation as a process of actualization. Bergson is critical of natural selection, the core principle of Darwinism, which explains evolution in terms of an external principle of differentiation. Bergson's creative evolution furnishes an alternate understanding of differentiation: in which evolution follows an internal principle of differentation that explains genetic change .Life expresses itself as the play of a virtual creative evolution involving divergent lines of actualization.
Bergson's organic metaphysics or vitalism reworks Aristotle to hold that objects are composites, mixtures of a number of tendencies. Giovanna Borradori spells this out. She says that Bergson holds that things:
"... are not self-contained substances, independent of time and becoming, but "phases" of becoming itself. In other words, a thing is not the effect of a cause but the expression of a "tendency." A tendency is a phase of becoming. Is there a correspondence between a thing and a tendency? Not a one-to-one correspondence because things are composites (des mixtes) of at least two tendencies. A tendency can express itself only insofar as it is acted upon by another tendency and, therefore, tendencies never come isolated from one another but always in pairs."
According to Borradori Deleuze argues that Bergson encourages us to address not the presence of characters, but the tendency they have to develop them.
She says:
"When we describe a thing we usually group together set of properties. This is a mistake. We should focus on the emerging properties, or rather the tendency that a thing has to develop some properties or characters. It is these which differ in kind; their expressions, that is, the things and their properties, differ only in degree or intensity... Internal difference does not describe difference among things, but difference among the very tendencies that the individual thing brings to a certain degree of expression."
Hence the idea of internal difference :eparating out the tendencies means to intuit that at the bottom there is just difference and not identity. What Bergson showed, on Deleuze's interpretation is that internal difference does not need to get to contradiction, alterity or negation, because these three notions are either less deep than internal difference itself. Bergson's vitalism holds that things as composites of tendencies, qualitatively vary in time.
What Deleuze then does is rework Bergson's conception of objects. If for Bergson things were composites, mixtures of a number of tendencies, then in Deleuze's Nietzsche book they are expression of forces .Forces are antagonistic to each other, come in differentiated pairs, like tendencies, and form a multiplicity which is an irreducible plurality.
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