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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'

Deleuze:a non-essentialist vitalism? « Previous | |Next »
March 19, 2006

How and in what sense can Bergson's "vitalism" be taken seriously given the developments in modern molecular biology? It's a good question for a contemporary "bio-philosophy" or philosophy of life is it not? Or for an interpretration of Deleuze's vitalist metaphysics, since Deleuze endorses Bergson’s ‘vitalism’, or the universal presence of dynamic forces in all living, and evolving, entities, including the human?

We know that Deleuze's vitalist philosophy belongs to a tradition of non-mechanistic, non-teleological, and non-reductionist thought about evolution running from Bergson to Gilbert Simonden through Jacob Von Uexkull and Raymond Ruyer. Deleuze's Difference and Repetitionis the most biological and ontological of his works, and is the text that constitutes the core of the Deleuzian metaphysics.

John Proteti argues in The Geophilosophies of Deleuze and Guattari, that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus constitutes a “geophilosophy,” a neo-materialism, which, in linking the philosophical materialisms of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud with contemporary science, avoids the traditional bogeys of materialism: determinism and vitalism. He says:

In this way transcendental geophilosophy can provide a consistent materialism without mechanistic reductionism or vitalist essentialism. We must first avoid attributing selfordering to the rule-bound interaction of elementary components of actual physical systems (mechanism). In Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence on maintaining a strict distinction between virtual singularities and the actual system, we see that the virtual is a way of talking about the emergent properties of systems, which are not reducible to the aggregated results of simple behaviors of elementary particles, but must be discussed in their own terms. On the other hand, Deleuze and Guattari avoid vitalism by avoiding any attribution of an essence to organic life; by insisting on the phenomenon of "non-organic life," that is, the appearance of phenomena of selforganization and novelty in physical, chemical, and geological processes, they disabuse us of any lingering humanist illusions and insert human affairs squarely in nature, parts of a creative "Earth." In other words, Deleuze and Guattari exorcize the ghost in the machine, but in so doing leave us with a different notion of machine, that of a concrete assemblage of heterogenous elements set to work by the potentials of selfordering and novelty inherent in the virtual singularities, the attractors and bifurcators, of the actual system.

It is in Difference and Repetition that Deleuze details the main characteristic of the virtual as self-differentiating, or “difference in itself.”

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 04:28 PM | | Comments (1)
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You should read G.Canguilhems book Le normal et le pathologique, its a major reference for deleuzian vitalism.