Spinoza’s double Bind.
1)The heart of Spinoza’s theory of perception lies in a double move.
a)On the one hand perception is what it is because in perceiving the body itself is different. To perceive is to live in a way body that is different. The scope of this difference is of course enormous. He same log that allows be to perceive the world, allow that world to make me utterly other than I was. Spinoza is aware of this fat. Hence the changes in ones essence or better in the way ones power is deployed which follow on from perception. To perceive us ten to be as different in oneself, as one understands difference in others or as Spinoza puts it – the more one knows things, the more one knows God.
b)At the same time, but in another register, spiniza allows for the idea that objective truth does not see the world quite like this. I grasps in its perceptions (which is of itself a prime power albeit one of knowing) the realities of the world. It does not see the change, but has an idea of the changer. Or better it has an idea of he changer as the occur within ones own body, and yet as that change is attributed to another (the mind has awareness of others and itself in affections).
That is at the heart of the theory lies the idea that one is changes, and made another in perception, even as one is grasping at another in thinking. The point of adequate ideas is to align these otherwise rather different realities.
2)Spinoza here makes a fascination alternative open to thinking the self.
a)The self will make its pitch as that which exists between body and mind. A Self, which is ultimately rooted in being a lump of meat , or being a spiritual individuality to mirror the bodily one (is was were Aristotle starts from after all), claims to have direct axes to the very different forms of individuality at stake in the Spinoza formula. It grasps as a one, a unity, the continuity of a perceiver in perceiving (that is a continuity in perceiving another, as another), and the ability to be changes through perception (it is the self that claims to be what leans). The two changes are caught up in the same prism of identity.
b)The exact formula here is of course rather tricky, as the relative merits of each case are allowed for rather different.
i)In the Kant equation priority is given to ‘objective’ continuence (the I think). This changes element captures in a single throw both perception, and the mazework of the empirical self. Perception and change are therefore pivoted at the same point.
ii) In Hegel the two are given in the dialectic. Hegel will follow Kant is assuming that perception will be the key (as indeed Spinoza does himself),: A self only is through it relation to other therefore. But where for Kant this relationship can be caught up in the prism of the I think, Hegel argues in effect it needs to be caught up in action. In acting, in history, in praxis, action gives itself or better re-invents itself within logic of perceptions relation to another. The Self that is able to grasp at another, is directly expressible in the changes another creates within the self: the Diaectic’s core.
iii) Schopenhaur in contrast pulls the to utterly apart. The rules of seeing and the rules of being are uttery distinct….
c)as a rule Spinoza wants to allow far more complexity here, than any of the subsequent thinkers seem able or willing to allow. This complexity is given in two points.
i)on the one hand Spinoza wants to make a concession to the self. He allows (to a degree) its first point. The initial truth of the mind lies in objective (as opposed to formal) thought). It knows it has a body. And yet then Spinoza rains of the selfish thinkers parade, by allow that this perception of the body is already caught up with everything else. The starting point of thought is therefore the perception of an individuality (as Kant know) but that individuality is only given as it is already caught up in a changing world. What is ‘mine’ is then an objective (as opposed to formal) perception, of another – which is only given to me as the individuality with allows me to grasps ht thought is itself caught up n everything else…
ii) On the other hand – Spinoza will encase that thought within at attribute of itself. Merely to grasp that idea is therefore also to be changed – it is active. One might grasp at another in perception, but on is also altered (become ones own another) in the process. This another of oneself is not dialectic, as it is never in gear with consciousness. On the contrary consciousness float above it, treating it, as the idea of the mind treats the body. If grasps that action then in the perception of oneself – or better as the perception of oneself. In acting I might become my own another, and yet that another gives me at the same time my awareness that I am at all!
d)Spinoza wants a great deal of complexity, and additional reality where others want only the ego. This approach allows him to make 2 additional distinctions.
i)The conceptions of the self are never simply right (Kant) or wrong (Schopenhaur). The self is no an error or a godsend but a second order grasping on behalf of objective ideas of a formal reality which includes itself within it (and hence is necessarily self consciousness). Such an idea is therefore å) necessarily includes own thought.∫) explains the continuity of that thought, a continuity which is attributed to something else ç) allows for conscious always to contain truth one cannot form adequate idea without it but also to not itself be true. Different elements, different dimension different textures of consciousness emerge.
ii) Adequate ideas clearly take on the position of the self, but include anothering oneself and others within them. As adequate ideas of formed a self consciously alters its own awareness, and does so in grasping another, within is also altering itself in a way complementary to the over series of ideas themselves. Adequate ideas are therefore an alternative to the dialectic – blasting as they do any opposition of self and the world, even as that self is given (that is conscious of itself) within the world.
3)There are very deep reasons why it proves impossible to hollow out Spinoza’s very perceptive account of the world.
a) The starting point here probably lies with the conception of the self or soul or mind. Spinoza’s conception here is of Byzantine complexity = a complexity which at every turn complexifies what has in thought appeared so very easy – the notion of a sol or spirit to claim the world. I was far more conducesive t western thought on doubt to develop the notion of the soul to allow it to be as complex as Spinoza’s notion of essence.
b) but it becomes immediately clear to the fist great thinker of this move, Leibniz, that one cannot simply assert the soil against the heavy guns of Spinoza. on the contrary one needs o find an agency powerful to contain the galaxy of difference Spinoza has blasted open, and an agent who is capable on inhabiting this world for difference. Leibniz great formula is that one needs to think of a self or monad, which contains within itself (albeit at different rhythms) all its actions and its perceptions. A self must be therefore already contain its own actions. The problem then is hat the self cannot simply contain such action as itself. A medium needs therefore to be concocted in which these actions can be given. Leibniz gives that medium as time. It is in and through temporal experience, in having a certain history that a monad is sealed in from all the rest, in this it contains what it is: it has itself.
c) the problem of course is that this ‘itself’ was too strong for any other taste than Leibniz,: more particularly a cretinous reading of Leibniz would invariably assert that Leibniz errs here as the monad of itself never confronts the world, and is never caught up in the other. Seen from the Spinozain point of view this criticism is just. But the self ,which does not really make this move either, has no right to such a move. Hat makes this reading so very bad is that it confuses to rather distinct argument which are clearly present in Leibniz.
i)the Monad of itself is ultimately a moral assertion. The existence of the Monad, and its ability to encompass time, is what allows God to choose between the worlds. Monad contains its own universe therefore, because itself existence (rather than the existence of another parallel monad) gave God the pretense to make this universe.
ii) But this is to say the monad does not confront difference all the time. On the contrary The Monad in itself, in making a decision, it really does confront what it not – and doe so at the most profound of level. Adam choosing to sin Now is put against not just Adams who do not sin at all, but also all those Adams who sin tommorow or a second before or a second after the moment he sin’s at. Time itself become disturbingly proactive, and bothersome. Guatari is surely right to suggests that Lebiniz uses morality to ground this chaos of time in something else.
d)Conventional account of Leibniz coming from the position of the self are so cretinous because the argue as if Leibniz account of perception somehow represented a retreat from reality, and into a self. Or better Liebniz is the whipping boy for that problem of action in the conceptino of the self. The self wants to claim action for its won, and claim it immediately. It therefore has a problem with the fact that perception will as it acts within the body alter what that body is (and what it can do). Leibniz simply accepts that fact, an then breeds in the monad something which was capable of surviving this difference, and explaining even that . The more normal move for the apostles of the self (and the only possible one for materialist one), is to somehow has the self active at the point of creation, at the point it ought to be being made different. The I Think is therefore pitched at the point of consciousness (and Kant, who knows his Leibniz does this deliberately, it is not for nothing he uses the Leibniz second order phenomena of apercerception). In perceiving therefore for such thinkers, one must allow for the fact that perception must have an element of self creation, - and be self creating, and acting on the level of the body. One cannot therefore simply allow that in another place there is a monad which contains what occur within the body…
4)However the effect of the last point is to allow for what Spinoza taught. Is to allow for the fact that there must be a point of action within perception, a point tied to consciousness and the reworking of what one is. The difference being of course that where post Leibnzian thinkers confuses this move with time, which remains the only medium capable of holding the self,
a)Spinoza never felt the need to make such a move. Moreover Spinoza is of course very happy with a self which even as it is self conscious can change all the time. There is nothing fixed in a Spinoza moment of self consciousness therefore – not even what that consciousness is and what it can achieve.
b)The cost of this move is high, at least to modern ears. Spinoza cannot move on to develop a theory of time, which makes his holding down on identity possible (or at least expresses it). In many account spinoza appears to waft around making distinction between time and duration, which appears not to hold, and creating a moving picture of what time might be.
c) It is however possible o see other Spinoza’s here. In the theory of affects Spinoza present rather a complex set of relations between tenses:
i) To feel joy is therefore to be being changes into the future. One echoes onto a future in changing an does so directly.
ii)This joy is the caught up in a feeling of love, which tied the move to the future down to a loved object – to a thing of the present.
iii)This love object itself becomes the focus of hopes which link it to pasts and futures.
d)These shift is, when one remembers that in changing in affects the essence really is caught up in differing from what it was – that is in having more or less power, as the body itself alters its nature (while still remain a hole – that is still being able to communicate its motion, according to the definition of the individual), really do matter. Spinoza is therefore starting to map out a very complex theory of time which allows different tenses to connunicate within one another- and therefore understand different sense consciousness which in its own way is present across all these links) can be thought.
e) However it certainly needs to be allowed that Spinoza is not utterly consistent here. The problem of time is a problem which he confront very early )Zeno’s paradox in Metaphysical thoughts), and develops in great detail. He time at the time of ep12 (the Meyer letter) is not necessarily consistent with his latter viewpoint therefore.
f)However running through these problems is that deep problem of what time looks like from within creation. Right at the end of Ethics,he directly considers this idea, by talking of actual existence which an be determined by duration and defined by time. Duration therefore is the actual being in the world (a being which ultimately is rooted in god’s being, and had nothing to do with individual essences ). Time is that being as it is in my being – as I determine it as I have a body: in being the body I am able to fix future and past times in relation to the present, (and in relation to each other). In having a body one ties down a duration of owes it in a tense.
g) Spinoza with all the resources of substance attribute, essence and the idea of god at his disposal can then nuance out myriad complexities here. As I exist, in existence these tense are as real as I am: their reality an my reality are given together. And yet, if one relates them to substance itself (or rather immediately to the duration hat flows from it), then this reality is merely provision, merely an expression within duration of duration. And yet if one then turns to one an essence itself exists within creation, then once again everything is changes. The tenses linked to joy are real, in that one is really knowing more reality as one becomes joyful (and echoing a joy God has in his own existence, in his own complexities).: sadness and the changes of sadness are unreal, and their duration false.
The complexities of the last point are worth more than one life times of consistent study. However, what matters here is that Spinoza runs a theory of tense up as the theory which will allow the mind to navigate what it means to percieve a time from within history itself: That is what it genuinely means to be within time even as one has a being within duration. That is to jump philosophers: What I means therefore to be within the set of things in themselves which have some notional existence , even if it is beyond us (or amongst the hidden springs of nature, or God’s mind, or Will or whatever).
5)The compleixites o time within time, comes at two levels. The firs is relatively easy to solve while the second far harder.
a)i) It is perhaps this last move that, as Kant knew very well, so difficult in the standard account of the self. Something has to be supposes which at one very deep level institutes that which exists apparently only on the shallowness of levels. That is the empirical self requires a foundation otherwise – in the transcendental self. Time is founded in an act which parallels, what time is in the mind (or rather abstracts a-posteri that which must be for the mind to be at all).
ii)The problem of course with this approach and with all the attendent nonsense which goes with it is that it is effectively hadly a solution at all. I merely comes down to saying that one perceives but means of a mans, and that is it.
iii)A variation might then (as Heidegger by and large does) to make the historical itself- the progress of tie, itself the driving force. The I think relates one to a time beyond the body- the tie of world history within which being is given.
iv)And yet there is a welter of difference between any historical act of being and real history. One might think one is innocently setting oneself up as the leader of thinking, when one is actually being a stooge to national socialism…
b)The alternative problem is perhaps even more severe. Time is not simply synomous with duration (which is why Spinoza makes the distinction). Duration that is the tyranny of continuity, of being the same bloody thing, even as one differs (or event through these differences). Time might create then an utter world of difference ( I am not a child, although I contain that child) – an yet that difference is soldered into blind, bland succession. And yet time (as Leibniz and Spinoza knew so well) much imply rather a different relations with difference.
i)For Spinoza as mentioned above time implies a freedom from within perception to re-pull or even re-feel – the passage of some affect. The past or the future time, is therefore a time which is not just felt, t can always be felt differently. More than that as the future creates a present, and that present is caught up in other times, it must always be so felt. Time is therefore not simply aping continuity. It is allowing that duration to be – or better have existence within the mind (and therefore according to that essence). Time therefore within exisence actively creates what a duration is (even though that creation is caught up in world history itself).
ii) The link is therefore very indirect – in Spinoza – and the mind allowed a freedom to pull into other times. Spinoza thereby (ironically) allows himself to escape simple fatalism. One needs care here Spinoza of the level of the infinite is of course utterly fatalistic (and moreover relies on that fatalism to tie objective and formal thoughts of finite objects together within the infinite mind (this takes up the final fifth or so of the firs book of ethics). And yet on the level of the mind as it occurs within God directly, and therefore is acting to make its world directly (and therefore is free) fatalism – if understood as pure pre determinism is avoided. The mind is always within its own limits, to remake itself(according to the carefully worked out connection with the world itself).: that is it is free to rework the sense that it I causes and causes in the world.
iii)Once again without Spinoza’s elaborate mechanisms for nuancing out difference here, then time which rivets being into a single existence, while also offering up the possibility that one might always be different, is caught up in that Heideggerian trap of the fatal. It is too easy to suppose that actually (or virtually) everything is already their, already caught in the medium of time, awaiting release.
vi) Heidegger therefore shows this very clearly in that he argues that death is enough to rivet choice and flow together. As I die I must choose (and ultimately the failure to choose is itself an act) – which is all very well- but fails to make the very simple distinction which is surely at the heart of time itself. Namely that time imposes not just a finite order of being, but also a singularity in existence, which is logically separate from that finitude. I could after all imagine a world in which everyone had a finite existence, but in that existence a very great number of versions of themselves existed and communicate with one another. Tie is not therefore merely a space of duraation, thought essentially in also implies that within that space one is caught up in one span, and that if one had a different actual existence, what one was would be different. – and one cannot (if one is really thinking the nature of time essentially) simply suppose the one is synomus with the other.
v) An alternative might want all those options extra within the world (as virtual), and yet still suppose that is virtuality was directly compatible with the flow of duration (something Heidegger in allowing for the importance of death, which at least steps beyond the world does not). To exist would be to change, and there would be in that change always other changes that could have been made (or that were made) as other element split off, to form different durations. To exist for a certain time together, and then to part so the same time could mean radically different things, would thereby become the articulated in terms of the flow of times : the being together and then being different, which characterized this movement.
v) Both such attempts will therefore be characterized by the attempt to allow for the difference between different times within the domain of flowing time: To make that choice almost the produce of the flow. And yet this move is surely wrong headed. The flow, is after all what we experience in time as it is given to us. It is our time: the time we are in. If one is really attempting to think the medium in which that existence ids itself being fashioned, then one cannot simply (aka Kant_ slip this extra dimension of ourselves within the process). This continuity, this flow is the product of time, and not its master. It would therefore be better to take this fact on the chin, and build a theory which starts at the other end, with the conflicting world of choice (which is were time starts giving us – were we confront our own being different), and then derive whatever duration one can from what follows.
6)The alternative model was first outline of course by Leibniz. This is exactly the problem if God before time, who has a welter of Adam’s to choose between, and the possibility of creating a single world. This move can be understood in two ways: As given by leibnniz or Deleuze.
a)i) This choice for Leibniz is a complex one.A single world is for him necessary due to the nature of lived/perceived bodily existence – which he takes as implying such a continuity (in the De Bosse letters he develops why this is so, and how it effects morality). The world is therefore as it is material is singular. The problem is why.
ii) The answer to this problem is ultimately a moral one. The only reason why God would choose one world is because one was better than all the others, and so must be. Morality is therefore the solution to otherwise myriad possible existence.
iii)This is then the importance of the monad. The Monad is the perfect citizen. I is able to inhabit the world of choice – that is the world of difference, and yet in that inhabitance give God a pretext for choosing one world (this Adam not that), rather than all the rest.
b)The alternative model keeps in mind that Bergsonian jargon based distinction between virtual and actual, making it sing with rather a different note.
i)The Virtual is the domain within which myriad choices, myriad difference await, while the actual is the world of duration which splits of in tumbling into actual being from that world.
ii) Each reality will contain actual elements, and virtual elements- it will always be able to recreate what it is – even as it is: It will always be aware of differences breaking in.
iv)the actual is therefore real, and follows the path of duration even as it is caught up be other moves, and pens on no lived (non atcual) realities within which the events it follows could also be inscribed.
c)The advantage of Deleuze is hat it avoid the move to the Godhead as the ultimate chooser, and allows that power to the choasmosis of monads; even though it does so by flirting with Bergsonian terminology. The advantage for Leibniz of his own view point is that it allows him to demonstrate why there is only one stream of the actual, a demonstration that he understands itself to be as an important element within time as anything else….Spinoza is no doubt he is out of this exchange altogether.
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