Vitalism originally emerged in the eighteenth to nineteenth century in the field of science with the transition from a matter-based to an energy-based model of physics, that is, from Newtonian dynamics to thermodynamics (Hayles 1984); but nowadays it rather designates a school of the theories which focus on the ―ontology of difference‖
(Lash 2006), counterposed to the (post-) Cartesian ontology of presence and identity. It prioritizes the process of a subject‘s becoming rather than its state of being, while focusing on the subject‘s connection with the world of flux. Vitalism absorbs new discourses from sciences, while finds its philosophical roots far and wide, from Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, Simondon, to Deleuze and Guattari. Vitalism is a theoretical practice which recovers the neglected and repressed Other in the most radical way: it not only undoes the nagging binaries, for instance, that of mind/body or
sense/reason; but also blurs the very distinction between human and machine (and animal). Vitalism concerns a materialistic way of becoming, of connecting with, of being in the presence of the world of flux, multiplicity. Multiplicity is not the sum of those diversities, but is contained in the ―and,‖ the line of flight that things come to pass, becomings evolve, and revolutions take shape. For an expression of his appreciation of becomings, Deleuze prefers verbs to nouns, particularly in the infinitive form:
―Infinitives express becomings or events that transcend mood and tense‖ (1995: 35).
Although Freud is well known to have undermined the notion of consciousness by theorizing the unconscious, Hume (2008: 18-29) had suggested, more than a century earlier, that the mind is a complex ―society‖ rather than an organizing consciousness. He believes that an identity is always a work of fiction. He reckons reason must be
considered in the context of custom, convention, and habit. For him reason always holds
the potential for being unreasonable, therefore, it is not possible to separate madness from delirium within the mind. He has paved the way for vitalist thinkers. But Hume is not the first thinker who conceived of human mind otherwise than the Cartesians. A hundred years earlier than this Hume‘s conception, Spinoza proposed a philosophy of the body. It is very interesting to see Spinoza, who is almost contemporaneous with Descartes, has advanced furthest the theory of the body and affect.
Spinoza (2005: 70; 113) sees that neither the body nor the mind holds primacy one over the other, nor is there a real relation of causality between the two. The
underlying premise of such a philosophy of the body is that we do not know what a body can do, and, in the same way, we do not know what a mind can do. It is a matter of showing that the body surpasses the knowledge that we have of it, and thought likewise surpasses the consciousness that we have of it. Spinoza believes that there are forces of thought which may not be immediately apparent to consciousness and consciousness is a sort of waking dream, since our mind and body are simply the effects of encounters with other bodies. For him consciousness can register the effect of an encounter between bodies, but knows nothing of the cause. He maintains that mind and body are autonomous but they nonetheless proceed or develop in parallel. Any one of the two can determine the other, and therefore, does not in any way resolve the question of the relation between body and mind. The question of the mind‘s power to think, the body‘s power to act, and the notion of the correspondence between them is always open and indefinite, because an affect straddles this relationship insofar as it indicates at once the current state of the mind and the body.
Spinoza, like his contemporary Leibniz, views the world as a set of
innumerable instances of a single prime matter, which he variously calls ―substance,‖
―nature,‖ or ―God.‖ The substance, or prime matter, is manifested in ―attributes,‖ which have at any given time ―modes‖ or states of transformation or non-transformation. The quality of the modes, that is, possible transformation of a given state of an attribute, is what Spinoza calls ―affects,‖ which include, but are not limited to, human emotion. It is in this particular mode of affects that Spinoza finds the roots of an ethical understanding that works with human modalities and relations, rather than autonomous human subject.
Affect in this sense is more than mere feeling or emotion; affect is a differential in force accommodated by the mode of a body at a given moment—what a body is capable of.
The important thing is not feeling or being able to feel; nor is it sympathy or empathy.
What matters is the indistinguishability between feeling and self, and the way that both
feeling and self are constituted through and by modes of individuation. Therefore, a body can never be universal; it is highly contingent. The question of what a body can do thus opens onto the question of the ways in which the body is articulated and
materialized, and at the same time, articulating and materializing.
Spinoza defines a body by two sets of concepts that express its dynamic capacity of affect: one, kinetic and dynamic; the other, longitude and latitude (Deleuze 1992b: 625-26). The kinetic proposition tells us that a body is defined by relations of motion and rest, of speed and slowness between particles. A body is not defined by a form or functions but by a complex relation between differential velocities; therefore, one slips in among things and connects with something else by movements and speed.
The dynamic proposition concerning bodies refers to the capacity for affecting and being affected. For Spinoza bodies and minds are not substances or subjects, but modes, which means a complex relation of speed and slowness in the body and in thought, and it is also a capacity for affecting and being affected, pertaining to the body or to thought.
To develop further this notion of a body as a dynamic and complex relationality, Spinoza goes on to elaborate another set of concepts; longitude and latitude. He calls longitude of a body the ―set of relations‖ of speed and slowness, of motion and rest, between particles, that is, ―unformed elements.‖ Latitude means the ―set of affects‖ that occupy a body at each moment, that is, the intensive states of an ―anonymous force.‖
The longitudes and the latitudes together constitute the plane of immanence or consistency, which is always variable and is constantly being altered, composed and recomposed, by individuals and collectivities. For Spinoza the plane, which means, roughly, a conceptual-affective continuum, of immanence or consistency is a ―plan,‖ not in the sense of a mental design, a project, or a program; it is an intersection, a diagram which implies a mode of living, a way of life.
Spinoza‘s ethics therefore has nothing to do with a morality: he conceives it as an ethology, which is first of all the study of the relations of speed and slowness, of the capacities for affecting and being affected that characterize each thing (Deleuze 1988c:
17-29; 1992b: 627). Ethology is about knowing whether relations (and which ones) can compound directly to form a new, more ―extensive‖ relation, or whether capacities can compound directly to constitute a more ―intensive‖ capacity or power. Hence what matters for a body, which means a subject for Spinoza, is no longer an idea, capture, or utilization, but complex and dynamic affective relationalities. In this way Spinozist ethics replaces Kantian morality, which always refers existence to transcendent values
(Deleuze 1988c: 23). Contrast to Kantian morality (1983), Spinozist ―ethics without morality,‖ as Deleuze calls it, is an immanent practice and in this practice bodies are
―relations‖ of composition or decomposition. It is clear that bodies are connected to matter, but instead of discrete ―things,‖ they are found to be articulated through the dynamics of affect and being affected. Bodies are modalities, that is, relations of states of change. No universal laws or overarching guidelines exist for action. Spinozist ethics, an ethology, is therefore a ―typology of immanent modes of existence,‖ a practice of
―non-subjective affects‖ (Deleuze 1988c: 27); it is a pragmatic, bottom-up perspective.
It is, more than anyone else, Deleuze who has been re-reading, citing, and appropriating Spinoza extensively to form his seminal works on machinic subjectivity.
But Deleuze also finds Leibniz and Nietzsche important, as their foundational
concepts—―fold‖ and ―monad‖ from the former; ―will to power‖ from the latter—can be seen as opening a path to the philosophy of becoming and vitalism, undermining traditional humanism as well as Cartesianism. The idea of the fold expresses a conception of matter which is multiple and continuous. It is the triumph of the wave over the particle. According to Leibniz, the fold is found everywhere as a feature of matter in the world: but, as no two things are ever folded in the same way, it is not
―universal‖; it is in continuous variation and unfolding only serves to open up another fold, as matter is not ―granular‖ but is made up of ever-smaller folds (Deleuze 1993:
158). This concept of the fold enables Leibniz to introduce ―perspectivism‖ into philosophy; by perspectivism he does not mean that truth is relative to a subject, as in relativism, but rather constitutes a ―truth of the relative‖ (Deleuze 1993: 130). As for the substance of matter, Leibniz thinks that it is made up of an infinite number of ―monads,‖
which is not a material element, and consequently has no parts. It means that a monad does not occupy a specific space but is rather a modulation in time. A monad is completely closed, with no doors or windows; hence each monad both contains the entire world within it and creates a unique perspective on the world by illuminating a small part of it. With his conception of the monad and fold, Leibniz can be seen as one of the forerunners of vitalist thinking. Being and matter are never stable; they are always caught in a process of variation, which means, becoming. His thought of matter as being continuous and endlessly folded expresses a concept of movement, on top of undermining distinctions between organic and inorganic matter, interior and exterior, and, body and soul.
It can be said that this conception of the substance of matter as a modulation,
not as an identity, has been threaded into Nietzsche‘s philosophy of ―will to power‖
(2000; 2004) in which the ideas of flux, movement, and creation occupy critical positions. With Nietzsche the Cartesian principle of unitary identity and the notion of self has become a ―grammatical fiction.‖ He argues that truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms, and thus things that we accept as self-evident truths are often simply ―congealed‖ metaphors. For example, the use of
language is always a matter of convention; language offers us a shifting sign system rather than a fixed system of transcendent meaning. He thus suggests what he calls the
―decodifying process,‖ which means continuous ―drifting‖ or ―deterritorialization‖ and experiment (Allison 1977). As a part of the intellectual move away from ―three Hs‖—
Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, Deleuze, along with Derrida and Foucault, carries this Nietzsche‘s work forward: while Derrida questions hierarchical oppositions between speech and writing, and, presence and absence; both Foucault and Deleuze engage in projects that reformulate traditional binary oppositions between given alternatives in terms of a pluralistic continuum, in which choices are always local and relative rather than global and absolute (Schrift 1996: 326-39). In this way Deleuze elaborates upon Nietzsche‘s concept of the ―will to power‖ as a qualitative difference between forces rather than a quantitative difference between powers, so that we can concentrate on relations and difference rather than on individuals, selves and substances.
While Nietzsche‘s ―will to power‖ can be taken as qualitative difference between forces, Bergson provides an onto-genetical dimension for the forces with his seminal conception of élan vital. Bergson (1998) claims that a real theory of knowledge is inseparable from what he calls a theory of life, and rejects Darwinian idea of
evolution arguing that life possesses an inherent creative impulse (élan vital), which creates new forms as life seeks to impose itself on matter. Bergson thereby elaborates a thoroughly materialist account of perception: for him the brain does not create
representations of that which is perceived, but rather responds to the movement of
matter; consciousness subtracts something from the world, rather than adding something.
What he proposes is a new metaphysics, a world in which things provide their own
―luminosity,‖ just as the paintings of Cezanne and Van Gogh show a world in which the landscape itself ―sees‖ (Deleuze 1994: 169). And, as for the way of capturing the
―luminosity‖ of the world, Bergson presents the method of ―intuition‖ which he defines as a ―laborious and even painful effort to remount the natural slope of the work of thought‖ (1988: 55). According to Deleuze‘s interpretation (1988a: 13), intuition is, in
contrast to the ordinary use of the word, ―neither a feeling or an inspiration, nor a disorderly sympathy, but a fully developed method, one of the most fully developed methods in philosophy.‖ In other words, the intuitive method is an approach which demonstrates sufficient flexibility to deal with a world of multiplicities which are in flux.
It works against the tendency towards artificial closure which ignores the irreducible pluralism and heterogeneity. Bergson (1988: 25; 35) describes it as a method for inventing a ―liquid‖ perception, for locating the eye which resides ―within things,‖ a world of flux and mobility, accepting no final definition or meaning. It is precisely because there cannot be a difference in kind, but only a difference in degree between the faculty of the brain and the function of the core, between the perception of matter and matter itself.
While the conception of intuition offers ―method,‖ the theses on movement and duration designate ―process‖ in Bergson‘s philosophy of becoming (1988: 2-29).
Bergson writes that ―the past coexists with the present that it has been; the past is preserved in itself, as past in general (non-chronological); at each moment time splits itself into present and past, present that passes and past which is preserved‖ (1988: 5).
He illustrates precisely how our subjectivity is formed in this liquid, continuous and processual time. His notion of duration is a process of becoming itself; he sees that mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates, rolling upon itself. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. Consciousness cannot go through the same state twice because our personality is built up each instant with its accumulated experience, which changes without ceasing. By changing, it prevents any state from ever repeating it in its very depth. That is why Bergson sees our duration—
the process of becoming—as irreversible. Our personality shoots, grows and ripens without ceasing. Each of its moments is something new added to what was before. With regard to the moments of our life, each of them is a kind of creation. The elements for this creation have no real and separate existence; they are manifold mental views of an indivisible process. And for that reason there is a radical contingency in progress, an incommensurability between what goes before and what follows. It is clear that mechanism, which regards only the aspect of similarity or repetition, cannot deal with this process.
What is important in Bergson‘s theory is not a solid nucleus, but an indistinct fringe that fades off onto darkness. He points out that mechanism and finalism forget
that the nucleus has been formed out of the rest by condensation, and that the whole must be used, in order to grasp the inner movement of life. Indeed, if the fringe exists, however delicate and indistinct, it should have more importance for philosophy than the bright nucleus it surrounds (1988: 45-48). In everyday life, Bergson (1998: 224-26) writes, the ―vital principle‖ manages the fringe, ever repairing faults, correcting effects of neglect or absentmindedness, and putting things back in place, while causing
experience to repeat itself and enabling our mind to generalize. It is different from the physical order, which simply makes the same combination of causes give the same combined effect. Though Bergson‘s philosophy of becoming presupposes an organism as an open system, closure is not against this process of ―creative evolution‖ but one of its conditions of possibility.
Bergson‘s philosophy of process has paved the way for Canguilhem who adapts the ―vital principle‖ to explain the on-going evolution of machinic constructions.
The basic proposition of Canguilhem‘s ―organology‖ is that machines reveal their theories ―in concreto‖ and should be understood by virtue of ―biological‖ principles.
Canguilhem (1992: 44-69) argues that technology is more than a secondary result of scientific activity; therefore he drops the vocabularies of classical mechanics, physics and chemistry, in favor of the vocabulary of biology. He also makes use of the concepts of linguistics and communication theory, such as code, information, instruction,
message, meaning, and program, because those are the new language that biology has acquired. His organology reflects the revolutionary findings in the molecular biology of the 1950s and early 1960s, by which the definition of life as organization has given a way to a new conception—information. The traditional Cartesian relationship between the machine and the organism involves mechanical explanation of bodily movement—
machines are for ―goal-directed‖ activities, and, accordingly, human body is a moving machine, a set of axioms, a geometric system for rational reconstruction. Canguilhem reverses this relationship with his conception of ―substitutability of function and
polyvalence of organs.‖ It means to acknowledge machines as having a greater range of activity, less bound by purposiveness and more open to potentialities, that is,
improvisation and process.
Having absorbed this idea, Simondon (1992: 296-319) rejects fixed entities, naming his own theory of subject formation ―onto-genesis‖ because it is to designate the
―development‖ of the being, or its becoming. For Simondon, becoming is not a framework in which the being exists, nor something that happens to it following a
succession of events; it is one of the dimensions of the being, a mode of resolving an initial incompatibility that was rife with potentials. Simondon‘s word for a being‘s becoming is ―individuation,‖ and, in order to grasp firmly the nature of individuation, he urges us to understand that the being is not a substance, matter, nor a form, but a tautly extended and supersaturated system, which exists at a higher level than the unit itself, as a ―meta-stable equilibrium.‖ Hence the full being, the preindividual being is a being that is more than a unit. Unity or identity is useless notion in helping us discover the actual progress of individuation. It is only one of the being‘s stages, which comes after the process of individuation. Individuation is always ―amplified,‖ which means that it cannot be reduced to a mere functionality. The process of individuation is thus not akin to a manufacturing process, in which case it would not be a process involving
succession of events; it is one of the dimensions of the being, a mode of resolving an initial incompatibility that was rife with potentials. Simondon‘s word for a being‘s becoming is ―individuation,‖ and, in order to grasp firmly the nature of individuation, he urges us to understand that the being is not a substance, matter, nor a form, but a tautly extended and supersaturated system, which exists at a higher level than the unit itself, as a ―meta-stable equilibrium.‖ Hence the full being, the preindividual being is a being that is more than a unit. Unity or identity is useless notion in helping us discover the actual progress of individuation. It is only one of the being‘s stages, which comes after the process of individuation. Individuation is always ―amplified,‖ which means that it cannot be reduced to a mere functionality. The process of individuation is thus not akin to a manufacturing process, in which case it would not be a process involving