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Experience the Body.
a)The Idea was really Spinoza’s it was he how inaugurated the basic thought that the body was never mine. It belonged then to God as he balanced of many things in single objective idea. The Body was not mine, but what was mine was the experience it gives.
b) Or even more telling, hat was mine what was time was the way the body allowed me to control the way it had been effect. In hat control I was born. In that control I had a body.
c) This control then included the body itself as a part of that control. My name for the body was the name for that control.
d)Here one needs to a degree to be nice about Bergson. Bergson refound this idea to a degree. Arguing that he body, and its affects were what asserts delay between an action and a reaction.
e)It was then it delay hat led him o pose time as a real extra dimension to the body. The Body in time was not the body beyond time.
f)This move then allowed Deleuze (but also I guess Bergson) to use the body in the update of Kant. It was not the self what was internal to a time as it was empirical, and the self of consciousness that was external or creative of time, but rather the body that allowed the empirical self to flourish in the delay. The delay itself, being duration was the mystery beyond me, a mystery that the body could only partake within, without ever mastering.
g) Well possibly. But for Spinoza with delay, with its implication for time, was not the only or even the key issue. The body is rather an access which allows or orchestrates itself in parts. The delay is therefore necessary as it allows the body to be made up of very many things: these very many things allow the body to reshape its own nature.
h) In the Spinoza repertoire the physical substrate for this diversity is given in the infinite immediate mode of motion and rest (the gate of the future). As the body is then made of many things, it has the right to rework its future.
i) Moreover in being many as a body, the body of sensation and the body as it is in the idea of God, are one an the same, or at leas run to a degree akin to one another. The Being many therefore allows me a real point of axes on what I am, and what I could be.
j)however Spinoza does not then need to conclude that within this combination and recombination there need be one and one time (the gate of the future of the infinite mode). On the contrary on a deep level at least three tense cold be involved.
k)The future as the gate into diversity, the past as the mirror of cause (the infinite intellect is free in the causal universe), and the present ads the founding block of the individual (the individual is that which can allow a movement to be present for itself ).
l)The future is then that which is a priori to the idea of God (objective), that which this idea will fix: that is it is the acting causing cause of nature. The constituent elements, which compose in a remain hidden from perception.
m) The Cause is that which is in the intellect (in perception) but after the action has happened. That is it Is the action non only in the effect. It is therefore locked in the past of the action.
n)The Individual (the present) is defined as the point of breakage. Technically it is not in any of the participating parts of the or elements of itself. I is therefore not in the shifting relations o motions in which it is composed, or the bodies which are giving those relations. It is not in reality as such. But its idea is in God in the shifting world of many things, each of which are being balanced o and reckoned of one against the other. Te present then has no physical substrata as such, and yet has an idea which reflects and refracted a very real presence.
o)It is then this kind of problematic presence within this flux, within this shifting series of element, as they are a physical individual, that is as they give something a middle in this change, and middle for this way of changing (and therefore was they have an essence within God), which appears to be as perception.
p)By perception is the registering in terms of a physic, that is in an attribute, in being in the middle to this hubbub of changing elements. The Body as such, as physical reality has no real live beyond this hubbub of change, even if it has an idea beyond those links.
q)This last element restricts and defines the nature of essence and its body. The Body the one level really does not exist apart from the essence. It is not something separate. On the contrary as it is physical, as it has a reality it is in the essence, and this essence expresses the physical reality of shifting elements, that is of affections.; that is of perceptions. the body as it is physical reality is synonymous with perception and affection therefore.
r) However as the price paid for this affection, the body has a reality of its own as a thing apart from these affection it gives. It as it is composed in and through very many ideas, suggests links other than those of the simple perception in creates or allows.
s)Or better, the body which exists as an idea in the very many parts, before the essence expressed that idea in actual physical reality (the before is a technical or conceptual one). It follows that there will be idea open in God which explore the body not as alive experience within my live, but as it is in itself.
t)Moreover these ideas clearly have ramification for the body and what it can do in the world in which it actively is. From which it follows that there really ought to be within essence ideas to restich the body, and make it think the elements not formally of reality, or rather not of perceived reality and yet which relate to it as a body (ht is to its idea in God across very many elements).
u) Here Spinoza stops. Or better he wants to understand this exploration in terms of common notions and sympathy, that s in terms of the extra elements it gives the world He wants it therefore to be a genuine movement beyond what one is, and therefore does not explore it in terms of a principle. He does not give it a principle of its own, or at least does not formally.
v)The difference however thus far with Bergson is palpable. Bergson loves his soul far far too much to be a Spinozain. At Bergson’s base is therefore the idea that the diversity of extension is merely the lowest form of duration. Everything then lies together held within the whole of an endless duration. A and my body are untied, or better where we differ I as a superior slice in duration win out. I am the same (but greater) that my body. It might therefore of me with my durings, that is with my delay, bit is just an aid.
w)The whole of the soul is therefore save from the horror of matter, that is the horror of dividing into nothings and nobodies.
x)At the same time Bersgson looses sight of the key difference Spinoza s at least aware of between those principles which relate to perception direction, and those that are caught up in the body. That is duration even my duration is distinct in types, or better has polyvocal elements within it. Different echoes to be within.
y)It is this move which Hume then runs with. Hume takes up principles, and creates three distinct families. There are principles of experience (contiguity), principles of the body (resemblance) and principles of the passions (myself as I am in a body). These principles then operate of different rhythms and breed endless complex interchanging and links. It is between these links that the world is formed for me.
z)Deleuze knowing Hume well in a sense develops the Spinoza vision. Resemblance, taken as the affinity of the perceptions I have through the idea that allows a body to be what made the body itself, peculiarly need not be of my body at all. That is the ideas which I have which reassemble will resemble always across other bodies, and open links with them. M perceptions need not locate me in my own body therefore, as they are caught upon the mists of resembling. They might allow me always to be elsewhere.
aa) Moreover as this relation to the elsewhere relates to the manner in which bodies conform with one another, in building an individual, - that is the very many that are making that individual, they are really free. They might hook into anything in the universe where a conformity s to be found, at some level. The rub then lies in the nature of that level. That is in the defining of it as a level. The Universe through the body is basted open
bb)this is of course far too much for the ever cautious Hume. Is true it would give rather to much truth and not enough reality to perceptions. The perception itself would be the truism, and not the reality of vivacity. It is far better Hume would argue to be cautious. The idea we now, as lodestar of our being ids our own body. Better stick to that, and explore ways it creates an overspill in perceiving, and not go gallivanting around the universe of the mind!
cc)Even more importantly Hume would add, this argument is only possible if one first forgets the difference between passion and affect. Now Affects for Hume are real, and yet come in two specie. There are those affects I share with all of humanity (according to the laws of Spinozian sympathy), and there is the vivacity of reality itself, and yet between the two lies all the tepid welter of passions. It might ell be possible to tred paths between those passions., and established affects amongst them. That is establish point of accord, and yet those accords or on junction will be temporary volatile, and problematic.
dd) One cannot therefore immediate and all at once jump into the world of the affect. Things really really might not be that simple. Between me and the way I become with others, might lie a welter o difference, and the affect of the colour red might be utterly complex to define or refine, without some sort of frame.
ee) It is o wonder then that Deleuze actually goes back to Hume (or a least cites him once again) when he comes to realize that affects need frames as artworks. There cannot stand alone in the light image of cinema 1.
ff)However Hume would still argue that his careful distinct between passion which are before us all, and root us back tour body as our reality in the most brutal of manner, and affects ought to be more honoured that Deleuze can.
gg)Here Deleuze’s own Bergsonian suprastructure operates to occlude what he can do. He wants the difference hat matter to be univocal, and temporal. That is the repeat of time that which set everything awrong, and makes all tunes dance differently, is the tune Deleuze wants to sing
hh)As part of that Suprastructure Bergson commits Deleuze to loose sight of the independence of vivacity, which does not ft in the Bergson take on time (though is key to the Spinoza one of the body) . Deleuze then has t win back over many years hard study the write to make the distinct between perception and affection, which at last in what s philosophy become affect and percept. This distinction can however only be dawn as somehow outside (deleuzian) philosophy.
ii)The point here is that Deleuze takes he Bergson soul-greed on, and wants a unity to early one. This unity will then allow a unity for the universe which precludes the detour of the body, a unity neither Spinoza or Hume could or would want to allow.
jj)Indeed both thinkers would go further. Taking up another part of Kant, they might suggests that then entire point f the three types of physical temporality identified in Spinoza at the start of this piece, is that they allow time in the body to be different. even more so, they might both add, when one images the difference injected into reality in the squirting of oneself into it through the passions.
kk) The passions give us a reality, and yet in giving that reality they overspill what is actively there, and force one to think about difference tenses in which that reality genuinely is.
ll) Spinoza develops this into an entire metaphysic of tense. Affects relate to tenses, and create our feeling of them. this feeling is for us, and therefore for God really real. It is not then relation another time. It is what is in the sense hat this is how he are being made. it is an account of what we are.
mm) These tenses are then linked together is ways examined in other essays round here.
nn)However the point here is that these relations (double tense) are not only genuine, in the sense that they have a real ontological reality of their own, but also do not need a duration, that is a fundamental underpinning.
oo) Or perhaps beet that fundamental underpinning is treble. At is base one might have what immediate follows from God, but which is never thought (the immediate mode), or the perception in the idea of god as complete (the shifting world or causes), of the present which can never be gathered in a simple reality.
pp) Indeed it is the last one that is the perhaps the most important, as it opens out a difference between the body as it is present in god, and as it is in the essence.
qq) In god, in the idea of God that is, as it actually exists it relates to a shifting construction of something present. But within the body itself, which picks up the very many elements the idea of the present is given it will not feel like that. What is simple in the idea of it (if not single) will be in its existence complex, and open out numerous extra links between that currently is before it, and what is not.
rr) Perhaps these links might be though in two rather different ways. One might have the ontological links which seek to find a way in which I am to insert myself as a thing within the remains of perception I find myself.
ss) That is these elements in creating feelings give themselves as real, and therefore need to insert themselves into the world the see. The elements that are allowed in the body (the passions) demand a world to be real within. This reality is then composed in the perceptions, and the way they enwrap in a certain glamour a series of not necessarily present perceptions. My Being is therefore given in the way I take up and enrich while unifying the elements of another, the elements from elsewhere.
tt)The other possibility is I arrange my entire being around composing myself within relation to reality. I therefoe gear up my passions to recive and allow reality to be. I see myself in position to my perception, as the plate in which they are engraved. My reality is therefore to take up the others, and respond.
uu)In this second case given that the world of reality changes, where I am in relation to that change will be sense. It ill compose myself in the past or of the future as it was revealed. In unify across a series of change as their hidden unity in a tense. The world then tumbles into this tense.
vv)To reconcile these two is no easy matter. Deleuze who is aware of the division, wants to run with the ontological division, but ensure the union of the two occurs in the third repetition, where reality breaks in, and changes everything (forcing one to be of the past, as it founds the future).
ww)Hume is suspicion about any quick resolution, and really suggests that the two should be kept apart. Morality is therefore one thing, and understanding another, and cheap solutions in religion or philosophy should be distrusted. Or perahs better, solution thee might well be between the two, but one cannot assume that. Rather (like god the blind vegetable come force come…) they need to be carefully thought through and explored.
xx)Spinoza is more gentle. There might be many accord between the assertion of existence and the world of perceiving. There might be. he thinks there are number counted. But hat means one needs to proceed with so very much caution, to make sure that one has found the more appropriate for one situation…
yy)His point is that one needs not to break or forget being a body with its organs in the process. The organs might well not be me at all, and might indeed merely be my perception, but that does not mean that those organs as they are in God in many ideas are not helping me, and are most capable of reforming a me in numerous ways, ways that might be either ontological or phenomological at the same time. It ill then matter how I treat these ways, and here there will be no rule beyond what reason and sympathy (rooted as they are on common notions) can give.
zz)Running across all these thinkers remains however the same basic claim. The body is not a thing. It is not really a machine. It is gather the facet house of perception, and the kaleidoscope of living. It is what imprisons experiences in cells of memory, and then what allows those cells another type of freedom. All that then differs is what and where that freedom is thought to be…