Nietzsche famously critiqued Christianity for its Platonic notion of some imaginary heaven where values or transcendental forms existed. It devalues the material world he said. Well, regardless of the historical falsity of his narrative, it is a large aspect of modern Christianity. We hear in Orthodox Christianity that this “two story universe” is a result of Protestant secularism - read HERE
Nevertheless, it is a looming problem. To solve it, many theologians are turning to…. Deleuze !
Basically, this amounts to an “enfolded transcendence”
Transcendence, not as another intelligible world or immaterial substance that inheres in matter, but rather a *structure* of creation that points to a Creator.
So that meaning is the being of all that has been created.
As Deleuze says, “We are dealing with two cities, a celestial Jerusalem and an earthly one, but with the rooftops and foundations of a same city, and the two floors of a same house.”
The two levels of body and soul are distinguished but inseparable, related by a fold: “The great equation, the world thus has two levels, two moments, or two halves, one by which it is enveloped or folded in the monads, and the other, set or creased in matter.
No power above and beyond nature, rather what is already there enfolded at the root, here is the zone of immanence where transcendence plays itself out, unfolding itself in a way that is staged by the Creator.
Hence the entire cosmos is liturgical, all of creation as a plane that is ordered to praise.
For the whole story, what follows is complex, but here you go....
First, from James KA Smith :
“What we find in Leibniz and Deleuze are the resources for countering a Platonic and modern disenchantment of the world via the reenchantment of nature, emphasizing the creational character of reality by an affirmation of the integrity of immanence. The integrity of creation is seen as a third way between autonomy and occasionalism.”
“The common ground of these two projects is their rejection of a Platonic dualism or “scale of being” that devalues the being of materiality in the name of intelligibility or seeks to escape this “plane of immanence” to ascend to an unencumbered transcendence.”
“What Deleuze sees Leibniz doing is overturning Platonism—while at the same time rejecting nominalism—by means of subverting dualism ”
“For Deleuze, this subversion of Platonic dualism is seen in the persistent motif of folding in Leibniz’s corpus. Rather than a break or a line of separation, the fold (le pli) indicates a duality without disjunction, a difference within a unitary structure.Thus, Deleuze likens Leibniz’s philosophy to a Baroque architecture—particularly a Baroque chapel—“where a crushing light comes from openings invisible to their very inhabitants.”
What characterizes the Baroque building is a distinction of two floors that are nevertheless inseparable and, to a degree, indistinguishable. “For Leibniz, the two floors are and will remain inseparable; they are really distinct and yet inseparable by dint of a presence of the upper in the lower. The upper floor is folded over the lower floor” in the way that the Baroque chapel separates the upper sacristy from the common areas only by the draping folds of a canvas.
Keeping in mind the ontological stakes in this metaphor, Deleuze asks in conclusion, “Is it not in this zone, in this depth or this material fabric between two levels, that the upper is folded over the lower, such that we can no longer tell where one ends and the“and the other begins, or where the sensible ends and the intelligible begins?”
Ok. I know that is….pretty abstract, you can see some diagrams of this HERE with the following commentary :
Baroque House • • • • Clearly the two levels are connected (this being why continuity rises up into the soul). There are souls down below, sensitive, animal; and there even exists a lower level in the souls. The pleats of matter surround and envelop them. When we learn that souls cannot be furnished with windows opening onto the outside, we must first, at the very least, include souls upstairs, reasonable ones, who have ascended to the other level ('elevation'). It is the upper floor that has no windows.
It is a dark room or chamber decorated only with a stretched canvas 'diversified by folds, ' as if it were a living dermis. Placed on the opaque canvas, these folds, cords, or springs represent an innate form of knowledge, but when solicited by matter they move into action. Matter triggers 'vibrations or oscillations' at the lower extremity of the cords, through the intermediary of 'some little openings' that exist on the lower level. Leibniz constructs a great Baroque montage that moves between the lower floor, pierced with windows, and the upper floor, blind and closed, but on the other hand resonating as if it were a musical salon translating the visible movements below into sounds above. (The Fold)
Indogenous vs. exogenous • The lower level or floor is thus also composed of organic matter. An organism is defined by endogenous folds, while inorganic matter has exogenous folds that are always determined from without or by the surrounding environment. Thus, in the case of living beings, an inner • formative fold is transformed through evolution, with the organism's development. Whence the necessity of a preformation.
Deleuze uses Leibniz’s theory on the Baroque (the folded subject) to help explain the position of the individual: the subject is perspectival, it is its point of view and represents a particular moment. Deleuze explains how the Baroque differentiates two forms of folding: material and soul that exist on the two levels of Baroque architecture - matter on the lower, and soul on the upper - where each floor is labyrinthine, extending to infinity.
However, these two floors are connected, and Deleuze suggests this connection is formed by another fold , thus there exists a means of communication. On the surface of a fold there is the means whereby a point can develop producing a singularity (when discussing Leibniz, Deleuze uses ‘singularity’ to describe the perception of movement). This is a point of inflection (the place on the curve where the tangent crosses it), what Deleuze describes as an “elastic point”.
These inflections are potentially innumerable and become available perspectival positions. This folding, created by inflection, creates an “envelope of inherence” and Deleuze explains that this inclusiveness simultaneously creates the fold at the moment the fold forms this inherence .
Thus, we have the process of aggregation in the folding: the folding creating the force of inclusion, but at the same time this incorporation is forming a fold around that which has been gathered up. Deleuze explains what this means for the soul described by Leibniz (what occurs on the upper floor): this windowless floor, covered with drapery, is inclusive to the point where the process of enveloping is so encompassing that a soul is formed . This is not a place, exactly, nor entirely a point of view, but “what occupies point of view, …a soul, a subject”. In this process of inclusion, which concurrently forms the fold, it becomes apparent how an inside can be formed from an outside: the windowless floor, defining the soul for Leibniz, creates an intact subject, a soul attached to a body (matter).
We can now begin to see how our sense of self-hood, which appears to be inside us, actually comes from the outside and is formed in a little pocket we conveniently call our ‘self’. The normally polarised inside and outside become connected in the model of the fold, therefore contradictory terms become reconcilable: truth/lie, us/them, and so on. The outside, therefore, is found on the inside, the other is in myself, and the answer to the unthinkable paradox of what truth is, is in thought itself.
The fold, whilst forming an envelope which situates the subject at that point of view, in its act of folding over also enables that subject to see itself. The subject can be self-reflective (and reflexive), can see its place in the world and has agency in terms of moving their perspective (by simply moving along the fold).
Allright, James KA Smith continues:
“As suggested above, the test case for any such ontology is the microcosm of the human person. Deleuze contends that in Leibniz there is a communication between “the pleats of matter and the folds in the soul.”
The two levels of body and soul are distinguished but inseparable, related by a fold: “The great equation, the world thus has two levels, two moments, or two halves, one by which it is enveloped or folded in the monads, and the other, set or creased in matter.”
In this sense, the early modern question of the union of body and soul is approached by Leibniz in terms that are decidedly un-Cartesian and hence un-Platonic: “There exists only one and the same world, conveyed on the one hand by the souls that actualize it and, on the other, by the bodies that realize it; this world does not itself exist outside of its expressants.
"We are dealing with two cities, a celestial Jerusalem and an earthly one, but with the rooftops and foundations of a same city, and the two floors of a same house.”
“But for Leibniz, this appurtenance is characteristic not only of the human person but of matter in general, both organic and inorganic. “The unit of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold.”
“He argues that there is (and must be) an active, creative force inherent in things. Thus, what distinguishes his theory from Boyle’s is that, for Boyle, the “divine law” that governs nature is external to nature rather than inherent to the structures of nature ”
“In fact, for Leibniz, the immaterial aspect of the monad is identified with force, and this force “is itself an inherent law imprinted by divine decree” on materiality. In this sense, what is compressed or folded into the monad is simply order that inheres in matter. The temporal structure of materiality permits the unfolding of this original order folded into the organism.
As Deleuze comments, “The first fly contains the seeds of all flies to come, each being called in its turn to unfold its own parts at the right time.”
This is because the ordering command is compressed or folded into materiality from the beginning, granting a certain independence and integrity. Thus again, undoing Platonism, Leibniz concludes that “souls never leave behind their whole body” (Nature and Grace);”
“there are also no souls which are completely detached from matter, and no spirits without bodies. Only God is completely removed from matter” (Monadology,.”
“Leibniz’s affirmation of materiality in his ontology stems from early reflections on the incarnation, so there is a sense in which the creation is a collection of hypostatic unions.
Therefore, not only is the plane of immanence imprinted with a divine order from the beginning, but it is only in this materiality that the original fold of the command can be unfolded; matter, or the body, is the theater of unfolding ad infinitum.”
“Leibniz constantly emphasizes the reflective or expressive activity of the universe in general and the (rational) monad in particular. A monad “is representative in its nature,” and it is “the body by means of which the universe is represented in the soul” (Monadology).
Each individual is a “living mirror” of the universe, which as a whole is a mirror of the Creator. Therefore, the key to understanding Leibniz’s theory of expression or reflection—a key that Deleuze misses—is the notion of the imago Dei, transferred now to the universe as a whole.”
“The multiplication of beings, then, is a multiplication of mirrors, which, “in turn, multiplies the reflections of the Creator. ”
“the affirmation of immanence as the integrity of creation. In this way, transcendence is affirmed in immanence, or what we might describe as “enfolded transcendence” as a creational given.In other words, this ontology emphasizes the referential structure of creational immanence—that “meaning is the being of all that has been created”.
The question of transcendence, then, is not a matter of an immaterial “substance” inhering in matter but rather a structure of “referring and expressing” that points to an origin. The only way in which this can avoid becoming a Platonic, or even an iconic, dualism is if we understand “meaning” in a phenomenological sense of intention that is not substantial.”
“ Thus, the zone of immanence is invested with transcendence, not as a kind of container for an ethereal substance but rather as a structure of phenomenological reference to an origin that is not itself subject to temporal conditions (or even “being”).
Therefore, the affirmation of the integrity of creation (or the goodness of materiality) contains within itself an affirmation of transcendence, not as another intelligible world (hence, we agree with Deleuze’s critique of Platonism) but rather as that which inheres in the structure of creation insofar as it points to a Creator. In this way, Deleuze’s and Leibniz’s emphasis on “expression” in the plane of immanence is a fruitful point of contact for conceptualizing the referential structure of creation without canceling the affirmation of immanence.”
The enfolding is an original enclosing that grants a relative autonomy to the created order that now unfolds itself, disclosing the folds in the “root.”
The affirmation of the integrity of materiality entails a rich account, in both Leibniz and Deleuze, of the “interlacements” within the zone of immanence that occasion the unfolding of that which was enfolded at the origin”
“There is no pristine, immediate access behind the scenes; rather, the invisible is seen in the visible, such that seeing the visible is to see more than the visible. This zone of immanence is where transcendence plays itself out, unfolding itself in a way that is staged by the Creator.”
David Bentley Hart, in “The Beauty of the Infinite” attempts to tie in Deleuze’s idea with St Gregory of Nyssa :
“All creation declares God's glory, and so should be understood not simply according to a logic of substances, but first as a free and flowing succession of semeia, within which "substances" are constituted as the relative stability of the "notes" or "moments" that the whole discourse (the Logos) calls forth; being, as a kind of cogent rhetoric, is the aesthetic surface of shared implications and complications whose very needless excess expresses the nature of divine love. Rather than a strong distinction between sign and substance, then, one should perhaps speak of "substantial signs" or of "semeiotic substances." Perhaps one can read Gregory in something like (and against) the way Deleuze reads Leibniz.
In Deleuze's The Fold, the monadology of Leibniz is transformed into a "nomadology": the accord of every series in a preestablished harmony is recast as the divergence of every series into (in a phrase borrowed from Pierre Boulez) a "polyphony of polyphonies"; and the implication of all things in the monad's unique perspective becomes the folding and unfolding continuity in disjunction of surfaces, and the truth (or truths) of infinitely many perspectives.
Deleuze, being a thinker of what he calls the "neo-Baroque" - the atonal, the sublime“the atonal, the sublime - has really no use for Leibniz's ontological “harmonics"; but for Christian thought the infinite and form can and must be thought together, not in the interest of some banal cosmic optimism, but because the measure of difference is primordially peace, a music whose periods, intervals, refrains, and variants can together (even when incorporating dissonances) hymn God's glory.
Embracing neither the austere moral calculus of Leibniz's determinism nor certainly Deleuze's adolescent fascination with sheer divergence and aleatory digression, one can yet conceive of an infinite, "ontological" music that eminently contains all transitions and intervals together, in which any series may digress without ever passing beyond reconciliation, beyond the reach of musical mediations that might restore it to the measures of that original peace that allows it to move at all (this is, of course, to speak eschatologically).”
“ Here again one must invoke the ontological difference, and with it the difference between the infinite music of the Trinity and the finite harmonies and discords of our fallen song. A "baroque" Gregory, so to speak, is one whose understanding of the divine image as perfected only in ceaseless motion completes an understanding of creation as a continuous unfolding (akolouthia, to use Gregory's word) of a marvelous "fabric" expressive of God's transcendent abundance. In the case of Gregory, for whom the soul (somewhat like Leibniz's monad) can in a sense mirror the whole of being's display, it becomes possible to see the image not as simply the naked eidetic correspondence of eikon and archetype, but as dynamic correspondence by way of likeness and difference, or likeness as difference.
Here one has dispensed with any concept of a malign ontological interval between eikon and simulacrum, as the mystery of the image is not simply its inner approximation to an invariable anonymous essence, but its "superficial" arrangement of the signs it comprehends.
The soul is an image of God in its traversal of all the semeia of being, within an infinite that always bestows itself in concrete instances of beauty, kabod, and so is an image by "reflecting" the whole infinite series in itself: inflecting the infinite and being inflected by it and all its interdependent positionings, by being always in motion, impelled by love, finding its proximity to God only in the endless music of this deferral.
This is the soul's steadfastness in the good, “changelessly beautiful amid change, drinking in an inexhaustible beauty.
Only in Christ, of course, has this ordering of the finite toward the infinite perfectly occurred; only here is the true image of God and the true form of the creature entirely given; but the Holy Spirit is able always to bring all natures into conformity with that love, to reconcile them to the infinite according to the salvation Christ has wrought, and to fashion in them anew the beauty for which they were created.”
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