Thought-Factory.net Philosophical Conversations Public Opinion philosophy.com Junk for code
PortElliot2.jpg
'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'
RECENT ENTRIES
SEARCH
ARCHIVES
Weblog Links
Library
Fields
Philosophers
Writers
Connections
Magazines
E-Resources
Academics
Other
www.thought-factory.net
'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'

multiplicities « Previous | |Next »
January 26, 2007

Manuel DeLanda's in his Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy seeks to present the process-based realist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to an audience of analytical philosophers of science and scientists with an interest in philosophical questions. DeLanda reconstructs Deleuze's ontology in scientific terms.

As we have seen in this book DeLanda juxtaposed essence to multipliciity. Multiplicity belongs to the many without having a one, and so it replaces the talk of identity of a material objects in terms of essences and natural kinds. It offers a different way of modelling complex dynamic processes. He says:

While essences are traditionally regarded as possessing a clear and distinct nature ....the singularities which define a multiplicty are by design obscure and distinct: the singularites come in sets, and these sets are both given all at once but are structured in such a way that they progressively specifiy the nature of a multiplicity as they unfold following recurrent sequences. (p.16)

The account is a mathematical one and is illustrated through differential geometry. So the language is groups (a set of entities) and symmetry (a property marked by the degree fo symmetry amongst entities).

Delanda says:

Classifying geometrical objects by their degrees of symmetry represents a sharp departure from traditional classificiation of geometical figures by their essence. While in the latter approach we look for a set properties common to all cubes, or to all spheres, groups do not classify the figures on the basis of their static properties but in terms of how these figures are affected (or not affected) by active transformations, that is, figures are classified by their response to events that occur to them. Another way of putting this is that even though in this new approach we are still classifying entities by a property (their degree of symmetry), this property is never an intrinsic property of the entity beign classified but always a property relative to a specific transformation (or group of transformations).

DeLanda shows that when we replace essence with multiplicity, we replace a hierarchical ontology of genera, species, and individual organisms (lacking causal connections), with a flat ontology that treats all spatial structures as individuals created through specific causal processes.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:49 PM | | Comments (4)
Comments

Comments

How is this different from what is already worked out in Whitehead, who was himself, after all, a geometer?

John,
you know more about Whitehead than I do. Delanda does not even mention Whitehead. Nor Hegel in developing an ontology of processes in terms of tendencies in processes. It is all directed at Plato and the Forms from what I can see.

I struggle to understand it----I can see how it makes a break with Aristotle and substance, essence and natural kinds etc.

But I am no geometer or mathematician so it is painful step by step for me to grasp this way of understanding process---the progressive differentiation in which one singularity, or set of singularities, may undergo symmetry-breaking transition and be converted into another.

So what? Isn't this the fertilized egg becoming a developing organism? A qualitative change?

Hell, DeLanda even talks about multiplicities as concrete universals--a term straight out of Hegel.

I'm not sure, but I'd guess that the talk of "differential geometry" refers to topology, where the graphing of convergent functions shows various shapes to be continous transformations of the same space, "homeomorphic", such that a donut and a coffee cup are really the "same". At any rate, talk of topology has been standard for all that French "Theory" since Lacan.

More generally, the possibility of "reducing" emergent properties and capacities, "qualities", to formal structures and their transformations is an old dream of causal explanation. In the case of a blastocyst differentiating/developing into an embryo that becomes a full-fledged separate organism, specific gene-regulation cycles regulating growth and differentiation of tissues can be diagrammed using Boolean algebra, as if such formalized decisions were actually instantiated in the genome. Yes, that's "quantity becoming quality", but as an actual material process, not a conceptual transition. (I'd guess that Hegel himself was influenced in his formulation by the establishment of chemistry by Lavosier not too much earlier, wherein "mechanical" explanations in terms of material particles where made finally tractable to understanding the structural properties and reactivities of chemical combinations).

Whitehead, though, already addressed and resolved the issue between nominalism and realism over the ingredience of concepts in things and the temporal becoming and transformation of "essences" in his analysis of nature as process. The difference is probably that Whitehead still resorts to a "Platonic" vocabulary of "eternal objects", i.e. the formal or structural properties of things/processes that are "conceptually prehended" by the processual concretion of monadic "actual occasions", and "God", who is "there" because of the basic "cosmological" problem of natural order that Whitehead has set himself and whose assigned function is to presort "eternal objects" for their potential suitability for "conceptual ingression" in actual occasions and to harmonize ex post the consequences of such ingressions. Also "God" seems to be functioning as a notional "guarantee" that there is still a possibility of cohesive "objective truth", inspite of the infinite relativity of monadic perspectives. But "God" is not the object of an idealistic contemplation, but a function of a "critical realism" about the actual components and relations of internested monadic processes. So "God" is really a question of the limitations of the becoming of mutually conditioning processes within the "economy" of an overall "cosmological" context.

I think the issue here concerns understanding how "concepts" become and transform themselves within and as real processes, without reverting to any sort of "naive" realism. That's different from the metaphysical idealism of Hegel's conceptual-reflective dialectics, rooted in a concern for the epistemic "justification" of the given order of the world, with its theological residues and overtones. It points rather in the direction of what Marx may have meant, but never adequately clarified, by "materialist" dialectics.

John
you are right about the topology stuff. DeLanda refers to topology and

Poincare's topological studies and the ontological differences that may be posited between the recurrent features of state space and the trajectories these features determine.

This is held to be the key to to the idea of a Deleuzian multiplicity.

I have no idea of what a state space trajectory is. But DeLanda does say in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy that Deleuze moves away from topological thinking, in which individuation is achieved through the creation of classificiations and of formal criteria for membership in those classifications.

However, he goes on to say talk in terms of Platonic essences and Aristotles natural states which woudl be achived if there were not interfering forces. Aristotle is not an essentialist (! , he 's non-essentialist) but is completely topological, as he is concerned with defining the criteria which group individuals into species and species into genera.

 
Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

Name:
Email Address:
URL:
Remember personal info?
Comments: (you may use HTML tags for style)