Mixing it up!
Why have other principles?
This question rests of the double headed nature of vivacity. To be vivacious is at once to be vivid, and lively, full of promise, with one’s eyes sparkling. The mixing principles, perhaps might therefore be thought as the principles of such promise. Their role is to unwind the flashing eye of the sparkling mind. To follow one high road of the principle is to follow the cracks in ice of impressions, which radiated out, and speak of water below.
The vivacity of impressions, is the vivacity of the mental sprocket: The knowledge that so quietly a world can unravel from the ‘reality’ one cannot quite grasp in impressions.
However there is very clearly another path to follow. Vivacity, is also , as it relates to ideas alone, the elements which hooks up the largest number of complex ideas such that one can turn and turn again, and yet remain within the mind all the while.. This second take on vivacity, by itself, might be relatively unimportant, in that appear self sufficient and finished in itself, (unless that is it is driven by some vivacity or other). However this aspect of the vivacious comes into its own, as the lively mind attempt to a re-join to the passionate world. The Passion (in particular the direct passions of action) drive the mind onwards or backward, filling up the lively thought, and making then appear as if there were impressions. That is, as it those idea where themselves not merely vivacious in the first sense, but also vivacious in the second.
One needs of course profound care at this point about what is, and what is not being said. The key element to remember is that this process occurs without synthesis – as it merely involves the conjoining of a complex shifting idea with a set of passions:
From which it follows that for a complex idea to become as if it were an impression (all he while reaming such an idea), is not:
a)For it to become as an intensive reality. This would be less synthesis and more devouring!
b)Nor is it the simply produce, or (which is more or less the same) another principle, for this would be no special effect.
c)Nor yet can it be that it some how simply re-vivifies complex ideas, and thereby inspires them to link using the existing principles of the mind. In the three principles of mixing up complex ideas are the eventual ultimate product, and therefore not the spark in themselves to further idea.
The Only other option, if one takes Hume seriously at this point is that in conjoining with intensity, the complex, which becomes as an impressions gains a peculiarly liveliness all of its own. It lies in its own welter of vivacity, and will create principles by which that complex vivacity itself can be unwound, across a mind which necessarily includes (and yetis not utterly confined by) passions.
Or o put is slightly differently complex ideas need a new way to ‘do’ vivacity, an a new set of principles accompanying that way,. Only then can they involve the complex trap passions would otherwise set then., of either catching then within a single passions, or rendering them passions slaves, unable to devise new passions which engross and rework multiple passions, according to new rules.
Indeed no doubt, it is to avoid the first of these traps that Hume starts his characterization of passions with complex and indirect one (rather that the simple ones which are otherwise monotonously used).A complex idea and indirect passion, are thereby shown to be hooked up in at once a complimentary but also volatile coupling. Each has dimension to escape the other, if only things were a little different. And yet by itself this would still remain a trap. For only passions would be able to be complex, ideas would be the merely occasionly rebellious (and yet always strangely dutiful) handmaiden. The Vivacity of the complex ideas would be mere fodder for the passions, which built up their smug superiority from the much labouring mind. Moreover this smug superirority includes the delightful carp the simple ideas are not enough (echoed for Kant onwards). Passions, and their imperious intensities (those hard fists of being) start to lord over the workday ideas – with their all too promiscuous tendencies to wobble across the mind, and lack the rigour that the intense feels is its real right.
The second trap is harder to escape., as where can one find the empirical resources in the mind to understand how the complex impressions, based on the conjoining of passion-and complex idea, are themselves based? That is can ban a complex idea bleed as an impression does across the mind/ What could be its ‘simple’ ideas? And what is principles? Hume’s answer is only within morality is such a move comprehendable. The complex principle, are therefore automatically first and foremost moral ones.
But then what can such principles look like? How do they function- within this rubric of morality? What is it indeed in the morality that allows a new conjunction of complex impression and complex idea (one that includes now the passion within its enfolding).
Beyond these two questions, is another, mentioned above, about the question of vivacity and intensity. Hume makes this point the central plank of his argument against the imposition of reason to morality according to any schema (including those to come – here Kant and no doubt Deleuze pricked up their ears). Morality is essentially pitched, Hume suggests, in between external and internal world; and it on makes it turn on one rather the other then the entire edifice collapses. Thence it is not simply enough to be either vivacity or intense, but rather by conjoining the two in some new way one must breed a new, moral principle, capable of resonating in between the two. The role of such a principles being to giv e in the one throw the enfolded nature of intense passion, and the scampering nature of the vivacious, which so lightly trips from idea to idea.
Hume’s problem thereby becomes how one induce this conjunction within the mind in the first place. He suggests , famously enough, that one can and must start with self-interest, and therefore with the intense. The intense matter here, as direction passions will themselves be infinite in kind and kind. The power of the indirect passions of love and pride lies in being able to present in a single passions this complexity. Hence one must start form a position which is already comprehending a near infinity of subsidiary passions. Starting from the position of one own prides, and immediate loves, Hume suggests, one can envisage through sympathy the thoughts and loves of other more and more distance, until to can codify on the level of a society itself,. We will therefore call vice everything that hurts or ‘sympathetic person and call everything a virtue, which aid then. Once such a feeling is set up it will becomes as a principle of its own, and therefore applicable to situations beyond the generalized circumstance to produced it. Justice will thereby reach back into the love and even the pride that engendered it, and suggests humans behave quite otherwise.
Hence, the defining feature of justice lies in its emersion within the complexities of every thing else, at each and every point. Its inception lies within the modification of another passion. Moreover in this modification it is of course very importance to notice what the category of sympathy enables. The mind judging from the viewpoint of the sympathetic, understands all action, and all the feelings the produce (all their joys and pains) as if they were gathered up within the complex minds of others. The very complexity of indirect passions becomes as it were a principle for understanding the complexity of society. In effect, the feeling which defines humanity is itself born within human feelings, which were originally dong something rather different.
It immediately follows from this, that morality is born at level of the human. And yet, this humanity is of course highly problematic, as the human themselves (that is any and every feeling of identity) is itself not separated from the feelings of pride and love, which they inspire. Sympathy might then be linked to humanity, but only because humanity itself is being so generated within that feeling. So that, the giving of sympathy itself might be born with a single case of human passions (love universalized); and therefore be utterly caught up in the frame. And yet when that idea is given, it clearly springs up as a principle of its own, and thereby imposses a new direction upon thought, which now becomes inclined towards justice. Which is of course why Hume needs to argue that justice and injuscitce (and with them morality) need to be understood as something apart from either the action or even the motives to those action themselves, which morality itself judges. A father might neglect a child, , or fail to pay back some money which we owe for any number of separate reason (not all of them bad). And it is these motifs which morality looks one, and judges. That is, true to its origin in the indirect passions, justice does not seek to explain actions directly. On the contrary it comes in, only once those actions have been complete. Here it is possible to easily envisage justice reaching back from its point of inception in the domain of the sympathetic, back into the actions. In these actions it breeds praise or blame, and so excites feeling that were never simply there.
From this last point two further follow.
Firstly, thinking about what another human might be, at varying different layers or degrees of relation, is clearly one the most potent tools for thing at all. To think about one one loves, is to open the mind up to numerous possibilities and options to o with that loved one. But equally, to think the very different level of the collectively-sympathetic is also to think allow ones mind new ways to grasp at a problem, and new dimension to understand in it. The world becomes polyvocal populated is be very different degrees’ of humanity. Moreover this dimension becomes all he richer, when one recalls once again the profundity of the connection, for Hume between thinking identity and feelings. I Pride I feel myself to be. In love I feel some others to be. In sympathy I feel everyone in a society to also be (including myself).
Perhaps one might say here, that if pride gave the mind, in meditating upon on what it owned, a feeling of its own being and with it, its own individual consciousness ( the =x, creates the I think) the sympathetic bred within the mind a feeling of wider values, and thereby conveyed an idea of a more universal dimension to consciousness, of which my own identity was a mere subject. This last point then having two further dimensions of its own. On the one hand it is f course clear that as the roots of this consciousness are passive, and ultimately lie in action at quite a different level it has not value or resonance, beyond the mind that necessarily feels itself to be a part within it. There is certainly no universal mind therefore, but rather merely a feeling on the behalf of each mind that it is caught up within a society (and so other would judge, at the highest level like it does). On the other hand, each mind within itself, finds within sympathy clear counterfoil to pride (and self love) which motivate actions, with often disastrous results. Pride prevents a human being slipping from passion to passion, as long as it is caught up in the ownership of some property (mental or physical): To be and to own are given in one the same act, and last as long as each other. Sympathy by contrast almost sets up non ownership as its very principle. As one move from one property of the mind to another (one passion to another), one gradually finds within ones mind a dimension based of this very passage- that is based upon passions taken in the most generalized from imaginable, and thereby created, across the very flight of property, principle which can endure, and contain the mind. Humans are then contain by two facets of the world. Either they can be contained within their immediate desires to own and control the world they find themselves already within. Or else, they can use the complex feeling that the very notion of humanity generated within their mind to conceive of a form of conscious, which while impotent in almost all cases, all the same straddles the mind, within its judgements.
Secondly it is also clear enough that what it is to be a human is by no means fixed. On the contrary one only knows the human from the feeling of sympathy they provoke. Here of course humanity is apparently caught up in two tendencies (and yet each tendency clearly terminates at some point). In one direction there lies pride. In the bricks and mortar of the world the human grasps what is its, and generates a feeling to accompany that feeling of owning. A tendency, which runs through love, abruptly terminates, in a self and in pride. Bu running in the other direction through love, and different spheres of the loved, one apparently ends in sympathy. And yet there is a real problem of where this sympathy itself might terminate. The He very clearly wants to set one really very clear rules (nor should he). On the one hand it is clear where such a sympathy is not. there is no universal love of humans, n l cases. However this does not of course mean that is certain circumstances certain universal sympathize might not be possible . On the contrary certain action abhorrent or beneficial are likely to catch one up beyond any society, and tearing through time, breed a species of sympathy.
And yet, Hume councils one needs caution when faced with such apparent universals. On the one hand it would be a mistake to attempt to deduce from a half full of abhorrent truths a set of rules as if those rules were themselves cogent, self-evident and reasonable; when in fact they are based on very specific action and thoughts (often linked to certain circumstances). On the other there are very clear pitfalls in pitching such elements as really universal. Extra values, which relate more to the society suggesting these norms will invariably also lie within the self-evident truths. A further dimension that is of course utterly lost to the culture that drew up those truths in the first place.
That is, sympathy at any global level, given humanities finite natures and abilities is a clear non-starter. Moreover for Hume such a claim fails to grasp the very artificial nature of all sympathy. By which Hume of course means that sympathy is no lie, but merely a cultural artifice. Humans might come with the potentiality to be sympathetic, and yet what that sympathy is itself always carefully constructed within a society (or within a sequence of societies, where there exist elaborate rules and norms devised to articulate the sympathetic.
Humans from widely different place and with differing customs and habits, will not necessarily have any sympathy for each other (and will behave accordingly). And yet of course this does not mean that under no circumstance, no sympathy will happen. On the contrary, the very first encounter will being the ignite the sympathetic process, in which differing people stitch together a story of their relation with each other. Sympathy in such cases becomes caught up in time. A sympathy so painfully lacking in the present, emerges across the necessities of a relationship, that splice together shared and distant pasts, to in part determine a future course of action.
However given is very peculiar place within the mind, it is clearly a mistake to understand the principle of sympathy in terms of praxis. Or even active engagement. Its role. by contrast is to comment on or perhaps arrange the domain of the actively engaged, by pulling one undertandign of it is different drection It is not itself every simply actively engaged (althogh of course what it will be able to say does depend upon the feeling and complexities of the world in which it finds itself located). Sympathy is then less action and more complex story. Its roe is to take up, and interweave passions and complex ideas, binding them up, and articulating them within both a single a story, and yet also, within that story seeding the very possibility of others (that is the development of other sympathies) – both dimensions need understanding in turns.
Firstly, Each story order passion as it were a merely complex ideas. feelings, and people are run together, in combinations whose essence lies in their vivacity, rather than their intensity. A sinlge passion, a loathsome step mother or greed old man or vain lord, is hen unwound accross numerous sub descriptions, and plot lines. It is pulled out, for all to see, and share within. The more ‘complex’ the passion, the better, as the more facets that can be opened in the same basic story. If moves the emphasis or even the mood lightly of a story or a life, tragedy tumbles into comedy and back again., as the exact position of subtly nuances passions, produce slightly different version of the same story. In the hand of a story teller, sympathy becomes very volatile, and caught up in making differing version of itself. At the same time, the narrative is defined by the demands of complex ideas to hold the entire tale within a single representation (this story – not that one). Vivacity effectively becomes as if it were intense. It contains within it numerous other dimension, other stories (which are also part of this one) and yet, wraps up these other dimension within a single idea tale. To sympathise is to tell stories, of what others are and in the telling swap over the exact provenance of ideas and passion. Passion become external, arranged in a bewildering series of switches, and possible stories: while vivacity itself demands that this is the story that is written (all the while containing other stories).
In the hand of a story teller, the passion are effectively reduced to their smallest possible element (hence the larger the passion, the more it can be reduced), and in this least dimension behave different: No longer simply rolling up numerous other passions within a single feeling. But rather the passions themselves are pilled out one by one, as if external to each other, and their interconnections, and transmutation become able to be thought about (and judged). At the same time, the ’intense’ is given in the complex ideas, which demand a complex conjunction is given, in a single unity: a complexity which nonetheless holds much else.
Secondly, the action of the plot line is thereby driven by the complex ideas, which move the passions onwards. And yet as the passions remain just that passionate, there is no real reason why this moving has to be so. Here perhaps degree of sympathy matter. A story is written at a certain pitch of the sympathetic. On move then between passions, relatively easily, as f they were external to one another. If however the same passion is allowed to gain or loose intensity, the entire process is clearly transmuted, and the entire plot line can shift (sometimes rather abruptly). Each action is also genuinely a part in another quite distinct story, in which the same basic movement meant something really very different. Sympathy is thereby by no means simple. In itself it might always be pitched beyond any lived sphere of humanity, and yet in returning, and stitching together stories through that return, it always return to certain. The stores it tells, as they are related to a narrative, are then caught up in that level. The story one tells of the abduction of a much loved wife, in not quite the story one tells for a soildier forced from his loved ones to fought for another foolish pride; Which yet again is different from the tale one might tell of the unjustified misery left to the bereft at the end of the war. The first is a personal tragedy, the second a comedy, and the last social commentary.. But all are the Trojan war.
Hence as Deleuze so perceptively claimed, the game of repeating here is very complex., and clearly involve four quite different dimensions. On the one hand within a single narrative there are many other more of less formally contained. Narrative within may well exist within the same ‘sympathetic level’, and which the single story also gives homage to (as a passion contains also other feelings). Hence to read little Dorrit, with its tale of an old man and a dutiful daughter in the Marshalsea, is perahsp also to be located within Pickwick Papers, which has another portrait of the Mashalsea (and a picture in which old man and girl also, although in a different context feature). Or again to tell a story (or to add to a story) a refrain based on a three way repetition (Big bear, medium sized bear or little bear), is not just to repeat n the single story, but also open up into yet other tales. Each story is therefore made up of other stories (and each judgement is made up of intact motif). But then each story operates in taking up a single (or a number) of passions and by reworking them, expose their nature layer by layer. In Mr Dorrit, the fallen ‘gentlemen’ is revealed with heartless precision. One Passion, flips into another and yet another, and the character is t once funny, horrific and tragic. Each passion is thereby revealed o also already contain other passions, which are then repeated as if they were external to one another (and yet causaully linked). A veritable tapestry of differing passionate connections is thereby mapped out.
At the same time, each passion itself, if it axes in intensity (of wanes) risks disrupting the entire tale. Hence still in Little Dorrit, the entire story s infused with the mystery of Mrs Clennam, a mystery at once apparent, and ye unclear, This mystery 9tjat her apparent son is not her own) infuses the entre opening chapters of the book. And yet, the mystery, which Arthur felt so deeply, in utterly lost, to him at last by the end of the book. Amy ends up not telling him of it, and Mrs Cellamends up behaving pretty much as before. The critical point here is the moment when Mrs Clennam gets up (she had been bound to a wheel chair before) and walks off in search of Amy. She thereby reveals a different, far more intense (and actually more sympathetic for all its violence) character. Hat it was then for her to brood changes – and the central ‘wickedness’ she has done slipped away from being about Arthur (who as survived her) and becomes about disinheriting Amy….Her passion, when warmed up, not only became something else, but demanded a subtly different tale be reworked around her. The fian lrepetion, involves te vivacity itself, which was always so lightly tripping across all the others, reworking and rethinking what they might give.. vivacity, when the plot changes is what can then start agian, once the complex idea has fallen part. It immediately finds new element or dimensions for that structure to be or to become, reworking a new life in that run (and venally creating new complex structures)
Perhaps, having started the last paragraph in preaise of deleuz, one now also needs to add that where he really makes a mistake (or better looses interest) in Hume is actually where Hume become most interesting (a fact young Deleuze does allow at least. That is, it is the point at which sympathy (and the stories it breeds) prevent one from ever simply claiming that there is any simplistic repetition of the same. All sympathetic repetitions are always complex and diverse. They always repeat in an element of indirect passion (which contains so much more than the one set of feelings) , and are always highly nuance at to the sphere they are repeating within, and the strange connections that same sphere might be making on other aspects within the mind. Moreover stories, as they repeat are not simply taking up the mixed up dimensions, of the basic principles, and reblinding them. on the contrary in the very act of pitching themselves slapbang in the middle of thought, they demanding a different mixed up taken of vivacity and intensity. They demand that one in part be as the other (and yet never fully be): And thereby produce a complex fabric, where the complexity itself becomes the mental sprocket, opening the mind to numerous new thoughts, and new directions.
