'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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reworking Bergson
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February 10, 2006
This review of the work of Keith Ansell-Pearson by Daniel W. Smith is interesting in the light of my concerns for vitalism, Bergson and Deleuze. Smith says:
The contemporary reception of Deleuze's own Bergsonism in turn has tended to be linked with two interrelated areas of contemporary scientific research. The first is complexity theory (theories of self-organization, dynamic systems theory, etc.), which deals with irreversible time sequences in physics and elsewhere. Writers such as Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers have seen Bergson's dynamic philosophy of change as a precursor to developments in "chaos" theory. The second is evolutionary biology, which deals with the question of "the time of life" (to use Ansell-Pearson’s subtitle), that is, the fact that Life itself entails a continual creation of unpredictable novelty (genetic differentiation).
I do recall reading Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman (1997) but I have not read Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (1999). So I do not know the way that it attempts to interpret Deleuze's reworking of Bergson to think past the human condition to various forms of organic and non-organic life; or its interpretation of the way that Deleuze rehabilitates the category of the elan vital as internal difference.
Smith adds that:
Bergson wrote Creative Evolution long before [the modern synthesis in biology, which accounts for the production of the new in evolutionary terms]occurred, but with his notion of the élan vital, he was striving for a philosophical conceptualization of the new that could be derived from the phenomenon of “Life” itself. Earlier, in Time and Free Will, Bergson had attempted to do the same with the concept of durée. Ansell-Pearson marshals these Bergsonian concepts in an effort to rethink this primacy of the future, extracting the concept of the elan vital from its matrix of "vitalism” (at least as understood as a mysterious "life-force"; Deleuze preferred to maintain the concept of vitalism in a renewed form), and extracting the concept of duree from its matrix of psychologism.
The conception of the new that is rejected by Bergson is that of is modal logic, which Bergson argued, "sees in a new form or quality only a rearrangement of the old and nothing absolutely new" just as mathematics tends to reduce complexity to calculability.This is because we tend to think that a possibility logically "pre-exists" its reality, and that certain possibilities are excluded once one of them is realized. Deleuze argues that difference and divergence are needed to adequately think the new. Hence a metaphysics of the virtual.
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Umm... see below.