Passive and Active Thinking
On universals and particulars, thinking and creativity
Living beings are infinite in their variety, in their potential; life goes on and on, and even death cannot put an end to life because there is also birth, new life coming into being. In this sentence we have the particular and the universal: on the one hand, particular living things which are as various and different from each other as can be; on the other hand, the universal “life” as it applies to all of these particulars and as something inextinguishable, because though one instance of living being might vanish, there will always be more life to take its place. One side emphasises the fact that all life is precious and valuable in its own right; the other that “life goes on” and that thinking on a cosmic scale puts everything into perspective.
Jean Hyppolite, in his analysis of G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, made much of the fact that Hegel wanted to “think through” the “being of life.” Hegel wanted to show how the particular and universal aspects of what we see when we examine life come together to make up the concept of “life.” It is tempting to put too much weight on one side or the other: perhaps life seems such a “multiplicity,” such a mass of conflicting and contrasting processes, that there can be no over-arching concept of life, or perhaps “life” is viewed in a religious way, as denoting “universal life, world soul” and so becomes an abstract concept that cannot do justice to the intricacies and particularities of any singular instance of living being, the upshot of religious thinking being so often to minimise the contingent happenings of life in favour of focusing the mind on something bigger.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari stand against Hyppolite’s Hegelian notion of “multiplicity.” What Hyppolite is really talking about here is “the multiple,” in other words a concept of many-ness ready-made to be opposed to the concept of “the One.” By standing so readily in opposition to it, the multiple can quickly and easily be dialectically reconciled with the world soul, as just another aspect of this totality. Yes, things have their particularity, but they are always already part of the One. Everything can be tied together neatly. This is how Hegel “thinks through” the concept of life: by reconciling both sides of the concept so that nothing is left out, nothing escapes, no loose threads. You can examine every particularity of a living being without losing sight of its part in the world soul; you can dwell on the religious notion of the infinite soul of the world without having contempt for the everyday particulars of life.
The problem, for Deleuze and Guattari, is that this is all too “abstract.” By which I think they mean: nothing changes when you think this way; you accept everything just the way it is. And worse than this, though you sought to hold both universal and particular in mind, in fact abstraction causes you to lose sight of the particular, since not very much need be known about particulars in order for you to be satisfied in the conclusion that “All is One.” Big picture thinking often misses the details.
Deleuze and Guattari contrast the concept of the multiple with their own notion of multiplicity: a true multiplicity consists of particulars that do not divide without changing in nature; nothing can be separated from its context without altering its quality. It is in fact impossible to examine a particular living being in abstraction while holding it in place in some great pre-established cosmic order. The challenge of thinking becomes: how to think through a multiplicity? And because thinking means altering what is thought about as you think about it, if you are really thinking you will notice that things start to change; you know you are really thinking when things happen as a result. In other words: real thinking is creative.
A thinker has a choice to make, between passivity and action. Remember the famous quotation from Karl Marx, that “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” By separating universal and particular, and only bringing them together in an abstract unity, Hegelian thinking leaves the world exactly as it is, whereas Deleuze and Guattari, in developing the concept of multiplicity, are attempting to come up with a way of thinking that is “pragmatic and precarious,” that acknowledges that thinking means creation of something new, and so which might respond to the present moment in a way that brings about real action and change.
(I’ve been reading Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman’s translation of Jean Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Brian Massumi’s translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, and Cyril Smith’s translation of Karl Marx’s Theses On Feuerbach.)