Essays on Deleuze

by Daniel Smith

  The audacity of Spinoza's “heresy” was to have rejected both these orthodox approaches—the negative and the positive, the apophatic and kataphatic—and to have set against them the heterodox doctrine of the univocity of the divine attributes. For Spinoza, we know only two of God's infinite attributes (thought and extension), and these attributes are common forms predicable univocally of both God and his creatures. Though formally distinct, the attributes are ontologically univocal. To say that the attributes are univocal means, for example, that it is in the same form that bodies imply extension and that extension is an attribute of the divine substance (the position of immanence). If Spinoza radically rejects the notions of eminence, equivocity, and even analogy, it is because they imply that God possesses these perfections in a form different from that implied in his creatures, a “higher” form (the position of transcendence). Spinoza's genius lies in his having provided a profound explanation for his rejection of these orthodox positions: the problem they were attempting to solve, he says, was an altogether false one, for two reasons.

  On the one hand, as Spinoza argues in the Short Treatise, theologians had tended to confuse God's attributes with his propria (properties). Following Aristotle, Spinoza defines a proprium as that which belongs to a thing, but can never explain what it is. The attributes that have traditionally been ascribed to God are not attributes, Spinoza explains, but mere propria. They reveal nothing of the divine essence. The Short Treatise distinguishes three types of propria of God: the first type are modalities of the divine essence that must be affirmed of all God's attributes (cause of itself, infinite, perfect, immutable, eternal, necessary …), or of a specific attribute (omniscience is affirmed of thought; omnipresence is affirmed of extension); the second type are those that qualify God in reference to his products or creations (cause of all things, predestination, providence); the third type, finally, do not even belong to God, but designate extrinsic determinations that merely indicate the way we imagine God, failing to comprehend his true nature (justice, charity, compassion). The basic error of theology is that it confuses God's essence with these propria, and this confusion pervades the entire language of eminences, negations, and analogies. When propria are given a substantial value that they do not have, the divine substance is given an inexpressible nature that it does not have either. And this error, in turn, has compromised the whole of philosophy. Even Descartes was content to define God as infinite perfection, though perfection and infinity are not attributes but merely modalities of the divine essence (propria of the first type).12

  On the other hand, Spinoza offers a genetic account of this theological error in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Why was the nature of God denatured in this way? Because, Spinoza explains, his predecessors lacked a proper historico-critical method for interpreting Scripture. They simply presumed that God had revealed his nature in Scripture. But in fact, the aim of Scripture is to give us models of life, to make us obey, and to ground our obedience through its warnings, commandments, and rules. “Revealed theology” concerns itself exclusively with propria of the third type, which appeal to our imaginations to make us serve a God of whose nature we remain ignorant. As for God's true attributes (thought and extension), they are made known through the light of Nature, not revelation. The nature of God is made manifest in the order of Nature, not in the teachings of the Bible. Spinoza likes to remind us that the prophets were men with vivid imaginations but weak understandings; Adam, Abraham, and Moses were not only ignorant of the true divine attributes, but also of most of the propria of the first and second type.13 According to Harry Wolfson, the Tractatus overturned a long hermeneutical tradition that had been inaugurated centuries earlier by Philo; after Spinoza, Scripture could and would no longer be treated as a properly philosophical authority.14

  The univocity of the attributes thus entails the absolute immanence of God and Nature, Deus sive natura, stripping God of any transcendence (it matters little whether this is understood as pantheism or atheism). What Deleuze finds in Spinoza, prior to Hume's and Kant's critiques of theology, or even Nietzsche's “death of God,” is a quiet and confident philosophy of immanence. One can already sense Deleuze maneuvering between Scylla and Charybdis; univocity is as opposed to the negative eminence of the Neo-Platonists as to the positive analogies of the Thomists, each of which have their modern counterparts.

  2. The Univocity of Cause. The second figure of univocity Deleuze finds in Spinoza is the univocity of cause; God is cause of all things in the same sense that he is cause of himself. Broadly speaking, medieval philosophy distinguished between three types of causes: a transitive cause, an emanative cause, and an immanent cause. A transitive cause is a cause that leaves itself in order to produce, and what it produces (its effect) is outside of itself. Christianity held to the idea of a real distinction between God and the world. If God created the world, and the world is exterior to God, then God must come out of himself in order to create the world; it therefore needed to see God as a purely transitive cause (creationism). An emanative cause, by contrast, is a cause whose effect is exterior to it, but which none the less remains within itself in order to produce its effect. The sun, for example, remains within itself in order to produce, but what it produces (light) comes out of it. Such metaphors of luminosity are frequent in Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists, who pushed an emanative conception of cause to its furthest point. An immanent cause, finally, is a cause that not only remains within itself in order to produce, but one whose produced effect also remains within it. This is the conception of causality developed by Spinoza.

  Here again, Christian theology adopted a syncretic solution: Is God a transitive cause, an emanative cause, or an immanent cause?15 Orthodoxy insisted that God is a transitive cause, transcendent to the world (creation ex nihilo). How, then, does God create the world? He would have to have a model or idea of the world in his understanding, and he would create the world, in conformity with this model, through a free act of the divine will. But this would imply a fully immanent causality; the model or idea must remain in God's understanding, and God must remain in himself in order to contemplate it. To reconcile these two movements, one requires the idea of an emanative causality between the model of the world in God's understanding and the real world produced in conformity with this model. Medieval thinkers consequently had to combine the three types of causality in varying permutations. The idea of an immanent causality, Deleuze suggests, functioned as a kind of internal theoretical limit for philosophers and theologians up to the Renaissance (Nicholas of Cusa, Erigena, Petrarch, Bruno, Eckhart, the Rhine mystics)—a limit, however, that was always repulsed, out of a concern to avoid pantheism, through the doctrines of creation (by a transcendent being above his creatures) and emanation (from a transcendent One beyond Being). In a sense, the immanent cause was always present in philosophy, but Spinoza was the first thinker who was willing (and able) to take the concept of causality to its immanent limit, and to free it from all subordination to other processes of causality.

  What are the consequences of an immanent causality? In an emanative causality, the One is the cause or “radical origin” of Being, but the cause (the One) remains beyond its effect (Being). The One does not come out of itself to produce Being, because if it came out of itself it would become Two. This is the sense of Plotinus’ notion of the gift: Being is a gift or donation of the One, but the One necessarily remains beyond Being, it “is not.” Ontologically, the universe is in this way rendered hierarchical; beings have more or less reality depending on their distance from or proximity to the One as the transcendent first principle (the “great chain of Being”). Morally, it allows Being to be judged because there is an authority higher than Being itself (the “system of judgment”). The One is thus inseparable from a negative theology or a method of analogy, which are required to maintain this eminence of the cause. We must not be led astray by the prefix “uni-” in the term “univocity”; a univocal ontology is by definition irreconcilable
with a philosophy of the One, which necessarily entails an equivocal concept of Being.16 Heidegger seems to have remained tied to a certain conception of eminence in his famous lecture on “Time and Being,” where he developed the theme of the es gibt: that is, the “gift” (Gabe) of time and Being by the It.17 Jacques Derrida, in his later works, has moved toward a philosophy of transcendence, influenced by Levinas and linked to the theme of a negative theology.18

  Deleuze has followed a very different path. In Spinoza's immanent causality, not only does the cause remain in itself, but also its effect remains “immanate” within it, rather than emanating from it. The effect (mode) remains in its cause no less than the cause remains in itself (substance). Hence Deleuze's fondness for the “expressionistic” Renaissance notions of complicare and explicare, which he adopts for his own purposes in Difference and Repetition; all things are present to God (or Nature), who complicates them, and God is present to all things, which explicate and implicate him.

  Immanence of the image in the mirror, immanence of the tree in the seed—these two ideas are the basis for any expressionist philosophy. Even in Pseudo-Dionysus, the rigor of the hierarchies leaves open a virtual place for zones of equality, univocity, and anarchy. (TRM 262–3)

  In Spinoza, similarly, natura naturans (substance and cause) and natura naturata (mode and effect) are interconnected through a mutual immanence; the cause remains in itself in order to produce, and the effect or product remains in the cause (SPP 92). In an immanent ontology, Being necessarily becomes univocal; not only is Being equal in itself, but it is also equally and immediately present in all beings, without mediation or intermediary. There is no distant cause or first cause, no final cause, no “chain of Being,” no hierarchy, but rather a kind of anarchy of beings within Being (the One is no longer an arche or first principle). “The rock, the lily, the beast, the human equally sing the glory of God in a kind of crowned anarchy.”19 By extracting immanent causality from the other processes of causality, Spinoza flattened everything on to an absolutely infinite substance that possesses all attributes and comprehends all things as its modes; God is in the world, and the world is in God. (This, indeed, was the fatal accusation of every heresy: the accusation of immanence, the confusion of God with his creatures.) In Deleuze's language, Spinoza projected Being on to a fixed plane of immanence, within which all things move in a process of continuous variation, with no finality, no purpose, no pre-established harmony, but only “the necessary concatenation of the various effects of an immanent cause” (EPS 233).

  3. The Univocity of Modality (Necessity). Necessity is the third figure of univocity—the univocity of modality, after the univocity of the attributes and the univocity of cause.20 The univocity of modality states that everything that is necessary, either through itself or through its cause. Far from negating the concept of freedom, the univocity of modality profoundly rejuvenates the concept of freedom by separating it entirely from the concept of the will, with regard both to substance and to modes (God and his creatures).

  On the one hand (with regard to substance), those who ascribe an intellect (or an understanding) and a will to God's essence wrongly conceive of God according to anthropomorphic predicates that imagine God as a kind of prince or legislator (propria of the third type). Consider Leibniz's fantastic revision of the traditional notion of creation. God, he says, has an infinite understanding. The term “understanding” must here be taken equivocally—it does not have a single sense—since God's infinite understanding is not the same as the finite understanding of humans (the analogy of Being). Before he creates the world, there an infinite set of “possibilities” (possible worlds) in God's understanding, all of which have a certain weight depending on their degree of perfection. They all have a tendency to pass into existence, yet not all of them can do so, because they form incompatible (or incompossible) combinations. Only that set of possibles that has the greatest quantity of perfection will pass into existence, and it is precisely God's will that chooses the “best” of all possible worlds, in accordance with a calculus that chooses the most perfect combination (the Best).

  Against Leibniz, Spinoza will hold that it is absurd to ascribe either an understanding or a will to God's essence; these are the two great errors that distort both the notion of necessity and the notion of freedom.21 For when God is conceived as having a will to choose (or to create ex nihilo), in the image of a prince or tyrant, or as having an understanding containing models or possibilities, in the image of a legislator, his supposed freedom is tied to physical contingency (will) or logical possibility (intellect). As a result, we attribute inconstancy to God's power, since his will could have created something else, or else a certain powerlessness, since his power is limited by conceived models of possibility. If God could have produced a different order of Nature—that is, if he had conceived and willed something else concerning Nature, then both his intellect and will—that is to say, his essence or his nature—would have had to be different, and God would be other than what he is, which is absurd. Similarly, if we maintain that God does all things for the sake of the Good or the principle of the “Best,” we place something outside of God, which does not depend on God, as a model to which he is subject or a goal toward which he aims, which is equally absurd.22 In both cases, we grant existence to abstractions, such as Nothingness, in the case of creation ex nihilo; or the Good and the Best, in the case of legislative freedom.23

  For Spinoza, God is free not because he wills in accordance with possibilities or models conceived in his understanding (from this viewpoint, the modal logic of possible worlds is simply theology for logicians). Rather, God is free because he necessarily acts and produces in accordance with his own nature (and not out of a capricious “freedom of the will”) and because his understanding necessarily comprehends his own nature (and not because he conceives possibilities or models). If necessity is the only modality of all that is, it is because the only cause that can be called free is one that exists through the necessity of its nature alone, and is determined by itself to act. Thus God, who is constituted by an infinity of attributes, is the cause of all things in the same sense that he is the cause himself. And God is free because all his actions and productions (or creations) follow necessarily from his essence alone, without his conceiving possibilities or contingencies. Intellect and will are simply modes of the divine nature. The divine intellect (or infinite understanding) is simply a mode through which God comprehends nothing but his own essence and what follows from it; and his will is only a mode according to which all consequences follow from his essence or from that which he comprehends. As Deleuze puts it, “one is never free through one's will or through that on which it patterns itself [via the intellect], but through one's essence and through that which follows from it.”24

  On the other hand (with regard to modes), Spinoza once again gives a genetic account of the origin of the categories of possibility and contingency. If humans are born into “bondage” (the title of Part Four of the Ethics), it is because they are determined by causes outside themselves. By its very nature, human consciousness registers effects, but it knows nothing about their causes. The order of causes is an order of composition and decomposition of relations, which infinitely affects all of Nature. When my body “encounters” another body (or my mind encounters another mind), the two bodies sometimes enter into a composition that forms a more powerful whole (as when food nourishes me), while at other times one body decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts (as when poison makes me ill). But as conscious beings, we only ever apprehend the effects of these compositions and decomposition; we experience joy when a body encounters ours and enters into composition with it, and sadness when, on the contrary, a body threatens our own coherence. In other words, we only take in “what happens” to our body or mind, and our consciousness is simply the continual awareness of this passage from a lesser to a greater perfection (joy), or from a greater to a lesser (sadness). Consciousness thus has
only an informational value, but the information it provides is necessarily confused and distorted; the human condition condemns us to have only inadequate ideas, effects separated from their real causes (knowledge of the first kind).

  Consciousness is thus constituted by a triple illusion. Since it only takes in effects and is ignorant of causes, consciousness satisfies its ignorance by reversing the order of things, mistaking effects for causes (the cosmological illusion of final causes or ends). Moreover, it can believe itself to be a first cause, attributing to its will an imaginary power over the body—even though it does not even know what a body “can do” in terms of the causes that actually move it to act (the psychological illusion of freedom). Finally, in domains where it can no longer imagine itself to be a first cause or the organizer of ends, it imagines a provident God who himself operates by means of final causes (understanding) or free decrees (will), organizing everything in accordance with means–end relations in order to prepare for humans a world commensurate with his glory and his punishments (the theological illusion).25 The categories of possibility and contingency are also illusions—but they are illusions that follow from the organization of the finite mode. For a mode's essence does not determine its existence; thus, if we consider the essence of a mode, its existence is neither posited nor excluded, and we apprehend the mode as contingent. And if we regard the extrinsic cases that make the mode exist, we still do not know if these causes will determine the mode, and we apprehend the mode as merely possible.26 Contingency and possibility, in other words, are merely expressions of our ignorance. For Deleuze, Spinoza's critique has two culminating points: nothing is possible in nature (the essence of non-existing modes are not models or possibilities in a divine legislative intellect); and there is nothing contingent in Nature (existences are not produced through the action of a divine will which, like a prince, could have chosen different laws, or a different world) (SPP 94).