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January 19, 2006
As we know, the early Deleuze was sympathetic to Bergson's notion of the élan vital---Deleuze accepts this model of creative evolution as part of developing a metaphysics (for contemporary biological science?) The élan vital introduces an explosive force internal to the process of evolution (an internal difference?) .
I guess that what we have here is a biophilosophical model of the idea that development involves dynamical processes. It is an old (Hegelian) idea that seems to have been recovered. Only we have "internal difference" instead of contradiction as the dynamo, with Deleuze arguing that it is the subsumption of difference to negation which is the major mistake of the dialectical tradition.
In the Conclusion to his What is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze addresses the issue of vitalism. He says:
Vitalism has always had two possible interpretations: that of an Idea that acts, but is not---that acts therefore only from the point of view of an external cerebral knowledge (from Kant to Claude Bernard); or that of a force that is but does not act--that is therefore a pure internal Awareness (from Leibniz to Ruyer). If the second interpretation appears to us to be imperative it is because the contradiction that preserves is always in a state of detachment in relation to action or even to movement and appears as a pure contemplation without knowledge. This can be seen even in the cerebral domain par excellence of apprenticeship or the formation of habits: although everything seems to take place by active connections and progressive integrations, from one test to another, the tests or cases, the occurrences, must as Hume showed, be contracted in a contemplating "imagination" while remaining distinct in relation to actions and to knowledge. (p.215)
I'm not sure what to make of that. It's left me non-plussed. I thought that Deleuze was more materialist than this, more Nietzschean than Humean, and more inclined to think in terms of a field of conflicting forces. I also presumed that he was more inclined to vitalism as "goal directed activity of organic life", rather than the romantic "mysterious vital force" and understood the former in terms of complexity theory's understanding of self-organizing material systems.
Maybe I miss what is meant by Idea --it sounds very Kantian and transcendental. Maybe it has to do with Deleuze's conception of philosophy as a problem solving activity that involves solutions to particular problems and and the act of thinking in the constitution of problems. This is beginning to sound like Hegel.
Hence vitalism is a problem that requires a solution involving the creation of concepts to make sense of 'vitalist life-forces, movementor flux, vigour, immediacy, connectedness, metamorphosis or change, and 'becoming' ie., the way we are immersed in country in the sense that bodies and landscape flow back and forth into one another.Vitalism has been recoded as flux and uncertainty and heterogeneity.It is a concept that refers to multiplicities subject to mutation and constant becomings.
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Nothing to do with Deleuze, whom I haven't read, but a thought that might jibe with the "experience" being perhaps indicated in the quote, by way of Edelman's and Tononi's physiological theory of the brain. Consciousness, they educe, resides primarily in the "thalamocortical system", the cerebral cortex in its connections with the thalamus. However, there is not one set of neuronal groups that is either necessary or sufficient for the generation of consciousness, which they take to be a neuronal processs rather than a strictly deterministically physical effect. Instead, widely distributed neuronal groups are mutually connected with each other through rapid re-entrant connections, without any given neuronal group at any given time necessarily participating and without there being any coordinating "homoculus" or superordinate center of decision. On the other hand, input or outputs to the consciousness "system", whether perceptual, proprioceptive, motor or positional, are initially processed neuronally elsewhere and nonconsciously, such that they may or may not enter into consciousness. But consciousness itself, always integrated and differentiating, continuous, yet always changing, is a self-generating process with its own endogenous "energy", such that, for purposes of abstraction, it could be regarded as an independent "closed" system. When one falls into a deep non-REM sleep, it shuts down and neurons fire and pause synchronously throughout most of the brain; when one wakes up, consciousness "reboots" itself. The upshot is that inputs and outputs to consciousness enter into it only indirectly; that is, only if, when they enter into or exit the consciousness "system" through various "portals", their effects are widely and rapidly distributed throughout the neuronal groups forming the "functional cluster" of the "dynamic core" through re-entrant connections, do they form part of what is "synthesized" as conscious experience. Not exactly a philosophical point, but it does seem to rhyme with what is expressed in that otherwise perplexing citation.