§96. Empirical Difference
Writing of identity and difference, Aristotle said, “That which is different is different from some particular thing in some particular respect, so there must be something identical whereby they differ.” This is a classic statement of the thesis that identity is original, and difference (and all other relations) derived and secondary.
First come beings, identical with themselves. They are what they are, themselves by themselves, auto kath auto, as Plato put it. Then come relations and differences, corollaries of primitive identity. This original identity is consistent with the priority of unity and the principium individuationis—to be is to be one. This oneness, this individuality, is first and essential; differences and other relations derive from the self-identity of these original units. In Difference and Repetition (1968) Deleuze works out an alternative account, according to which difference is original, positive, preindividual, and aboriginally multiple. This difference is older than identity, older than individuality, older than actual history, a virtual pre-individuality from which empirical individuals emerge.23Deleuze draws on the argument of Gilbert Simondon, Lindividu et sa genese physico-biologique (1964), a book he had reviewed enthusiastically. “The new concepts established by Simondon seem to me extremely important; their wealth and originality are striking, when they’re not outright inspiring.” The problem Simondon poses begins with Aristotle’s hylomor- phism, the idea that natural substances are a composite of matter (hyle) and form (morphe). An individual horse is one individual substance because it is one specific form materialized in one parcel of matter. Simondon complained that the theory overlooks a problem. What is this “materializing” of form? It sounds like a process, so how does it go?24
Aristotle never considered the question.
He takes individuals, their identity and individuation, for granted and asks what in them is truly individual. His answer is, being that— that form in that matter. Individuals are given, natural unities. There are categories—an individual substance, an individual place, an individual color, and so on—but to be is to be one something, an individual, which makes a genesis of individuality unthinkable, since nothing non-individual exists with which to commence generation. Simondon’s question about this cryptic process was partially anticipated by embryology, which goes back to Hippocrates and Democritus, but its perspective did not much penetrate metaphysics or its assumptions.25Empirically, we never see the actualization Aristotle postulates as fundamental to nature. We have no experience of inert, amorphous matter, which in experience is always some differentiated material, the result of an earlier formation, and is therefore actual and individuated. No finished form exists in nature, nor in the mind, only always an operative sequence, a history of form transformed; the fully individuated individual is no more than a limit. Not only is a being never fully individual. “In order to exist it needs to continue to individualize itself, solving the problems posed by its own surrounding milieu.”26
Every individual is individualized by an ontogenesis. How does an individual become one? “Unity and identity,” Simondon writes, “only apply to one of the phases of being, posterior to the operation of individuation; these notions cannot help us discover the principle of individuation; they do not apply to ontogenesis understood in the fullest sense, that is to say, the becoming of being.” Or the becoming of the individuated, Aristotle’s materialized form. There must be something pre-individual, something not yet one, not yet form, not yet clear and distinct, not yet actual, yet not nothing, and disposing of some energy capable of setting the pre-individual into action.27
We should envision levels of individuation, rising from molecules to crystals, proteins, organisms, and collectivities.
But what about the limiting case of nothing yet individual? To materialize primordial individuals we have only singularities, fluctuations of virtual tendency, like vacuum fluctuations in quantum physics. As Deleuze observes in his review, “Singular without being individual: that is the state of the pre-individual being. It is difference, disparity”—that is, original difference, in advance of identity. Simondon concludes that individuation is a “relative resolution,” not the absolute it was for Aristotle, Ockham, and Hume. It is relative to virtual, obscure and distinct pre-individual antecedents; and since individuation generates not simply an individual but a milieu, its effects are relative to an evolved ecology. For every individual that emerges there is a milieu and this milieu is a reserve of becoming from which individuals draw out their being. Such individuals can be only by becoming, which makes become “a verb with a consistency all its own.”28This thesis on the pre-individual genesis of the individual has an implication for relations, which do not spring up between terms that are already individuals. Simondon says “a relation must be understood as a... manner of being, and not a simple relation between two terms.” A relation is a mode of becoming, a way in which individuals become what they are and endure their identity. “That which we generally consider to be a relation, because of the mistaken hypothesis of the substantialization of individual reality [i.e., hylomorphism], is in fact a dimension... through which the individual becomes.” The individuality of the individuated does not precede relations (as terms do under nominalism), but comes about through the genetic, historical materialization of relations. Connection, continuity, and interpenetration lead the way, and relata consolidate as products of rational reflection and imaginary spatialization in their wake.29
Bergson had already argued that terms and relations are distinguished only by abstraction.
Considered in real time, “the only immediate datum of experience” is “a continual flow from which we simultaneously derive both terms and relations and which is, over and above all that, fluidity.” Relation is prior to terms because becoming related changes terms from anything they might have been prior to the relation. While the relation is not a thing itself apart from the relata, it is more than the relata conceived in isolation, which are merely abstractions. Real relations are endured, and extend through time.30Individuated individuals are outcomes of events that cannot be individuated or identified with anything actual. Actuality is individuality, the outcome of individuation, an embryonic genesis whose process evades actual form. Being, reality, cannot be limited to actuality or individual existence, a conclusion against nominalism that Peirce and Bergson already drew. What is not actual though nevertheless real, and real despite not being individual, are virtual pre-individual tendencies. They are originally many and different, obscure yet distinct. Deleuze calls them Ideas, quasi-causes, and haecceities. Writing of himself in the third person, he says, “Haecceitas is a term frequently used in the school of Duns Scotus in order to designate the individuation of beings. Deleuze uses it in a more special sense: in the sense of an individuation which is not that of an object, nor of a person, but rather of an event (wind, river, day, or even hour of the day). Deleuze's thesis is that all individuation is of this type.”31
He associates these singularities or haecceities with infinitive verbs: “to run,” “to fruit,” “to heat.” These express qualifications of events, qualifications of becoming, and thus qualifications of being, the residues (local invariants) that punctuate passage. Suppose an event occurs. It has an antecedent cause, that cause has a cause, and so on. That is the actual order of actual causes. But what makes the event a flood, a storm, an eclipse, a battle? Where does this qualification of the event come from? Not from the cause.
Whether a horse trots or gallops is not a function of physiological causes acting from the past. Deleuze describes this qualification of events as a “static process” and a “genesis without dynamism.” That means no actual force operates dynamically on actual elements to induce this qualification. How becoming is qualified—not caused, which is for physics, but qualified—is not a mechanical effect, being instead an affect, an intensity or quality of perception. Events always have their cause, or we may suppose they do. But how events are qualified does not have a cause in the same way. Actual occurrence is causally determined, but the qualification of the event depends on memory, on the past, on experience, and its affect.32Kant made a good point against mental atomism. One cannot have mental atoms and leave all the relations imaginary. Any mental atom must have duration; we have no awareness at an instant. But if the sensation or simple idea has duration, it is already a synthesis, bound from end to end by relations, which makes this atom as imaginary as relations were supposed to be. Kant assumes that a refutation of mental atomism is a refutation of empiricism. But mental atomism and psychological nominalism entered empiricism in the wake of Ockham rather than by continuity with its ancient and medical traditions, and like James and Dewey, Deleuze separates them again.
His idea is to conceive qualities and their perception in terms of what Kant called intensive magnitudes, but to interpret these magnitudes in terms of Bergson's virtual existence. There is no positive primitive simple in this philosophical psychology, the perceived being a difference among multitudes. This is transcendental empiricism again, Deleuze's radical empiricism. The sensible given and the giving of this given are entirely immanent, not an inscrutable stimulation from beyond experience.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, in a section on the Anticipations of Perception, Kant argues that sensation always has an intensive quantity or degree.
The actual quality and empirical genesis of a sensation are conditioned by a whole manifold of different possible sensations, an intensive manifold, “from the pure intuition = 0 onwards up to a certain quantity of the sensation.” He says that “we must ascribe intensive quantity, that is, a degree of influence on sense to all objects of perception, in so far as this perception contains sensation.” These intensive magnitudes (e.g., heat, brightness) belong to the category Bergson calls qualitative multiplicity (the phenomena of duration are his major example). They are infinitely heterogeneous and unmeasurable because uncountable, being not an extensive sum of mutually external units but rather a continuous, interpenetrating series of qualitative differences tending negatively to zero. Being continuously divisible, they involve ever-smaller moments that are not successively synthesized. All those differences of heat and brightness, all differences of any actual magnitude, are real, but without actual existence. They are virtual, though not virtual units, not virtual individuals, but virtual differences, differences of intensive magnitude. Deleuze's thesis is that virtual intensive difference is the transcendental principle of empirical qualities, the immanent condition of their actuality. “Intensity—difference of intensity—is the sufficient reason of all phenomena, the condition of that which appears.”33The unnoticed and inexplicitly given can still be effective and produce an effect, in this case an affect, which grows imperceptibly into awareness. Every sensation, every sensory quality, so in effect all phenomena, are intensive magnitudes and qualitative multiplicities. The genesis of sensory consciousness is not from atoms and laws of association, but from intensity rising to awareness from unconscious perceptions. With allusion to Leibniz, Deleuze refers to the “minute, obscure, confused perceptions that make up our macroperceptions, or conscious, clear, and distinct apperceptions.” These bring together an infinite sum of minute perceptions “that destabilize the preceding macroperception while preparing the following one.... The tiny perceptions are as much the passage from one perception to another as they are components of each perception”; in other words, they interpenetrate.34
These insensible perceptions are intensive virtual differences, and the pre-individual virtual of which empirical, phenomenal, qualified actuality is an expression. The actuality of qualities is the difference of qualities in relation to a virtual magnitude or multiplicity, or what Deleuze calls an Idea. Difference of color, say, is an Idea, a virtual multiplicity, and as virtual these differences tend to become all they can be. This virtual tending to qualitative actuality gives Deleuze's Ideas, as manifolds of pre-individual singularity, their reality (power), without requiring the actual full existence with which Plato endowed his Ideas.
The virtual is not static. Like a quantum vacuum, it surges with tendency, multiple tendencies competing for actuality. Virtual entities are tendencies, and tend with some puissance. As phases in events that have not finished happening they have an inherent tending, a tendency to actualize or materialize. To tend is to press along a line that has a limit, at which point the tendency will have become all that it can be. Co-virtual elements cannot always actually coexist. Since tendencies tend, and not all of them can be simultaneously actual, there is selection. This is what Nietzsche meant when he said that the world is will to power. Nothing can become what it is without subordination. That is as true of a molecule or cell as an organism or a polity. One tendency adjusts and adapts to others in a milieu that resists closure.
Embryologist Karl von Baer epitomized embryogenesis. “When we observe the program of the formation [of the embryo], what first of all leaps at the eye is that there is gradually taking place a transition from something homogeneous and general to something heterogeneous and special.” Of course the embryonic mass is far from homogeneous; it merely looks that way to unaided perception. It is a field charged with potency, and is almost nowhere actually homogeneous. “Genesis,” Deleuze writes, “takes place in time not between one actual term however small and another actual term, but between the virtual and its actualization.” Individuation is a movement not from the more to the less general, but from virtual pre-individual haecceities, qualitative differences of intensive magnitude, to an actual individual; from a vitality without organs to organisms and their members.35
An egg is a paradox. It is an organic, living individual, yet it has no speciesform and no organs, being intermediate between the virtual pre-individual and the individuated, materialized, actual individual with species identity and organs. The ontogenesis is not mechanical, not an intricate mechanism of actual parts like a clock, nor the concretion of contiguities bit by bit. Epigenetic torsion and folding would destroy such an assemblage. We should think of epigenesis as a phenomenon of duration, like a melody, with the immanent finality of a task, open to disturbance and calling forth improvisation. The process is for Deleuze exemplary. We are to generalize the embryological model, not just to the evolution of species, but to nature, natura naturans, the becoming of beings. “The entire world is an egg.” Nothing ever completely abandons an embryonic condition. “We are never fixed at a moment or in a given state but always fixed by an Idea as though in the glimmer of a look, always fixed in a movement that is under way.” Everything we are is becoming everything it can be. We are just along for the ride.36
Overcoming original identity is a boon to a more consistent empiricism because all experience arises from relational features of milieus, where the tenor of experience is difference and relation, not the same and self-identical. Nominalism banishes difference and relation to an intentional, mental, fic- tive order, against which Deleuze advances “transcendental” empiricism, James's radical empiricism, especially in its pluralist phase. Multiplicity, difference, and relational interpenetration are the matrix of individual genesis.