Pantha Rei: Becoming[,] from Heraclitus to Deleuze

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The philosophy of Heraclitus of Ephesus is one of the most present in contemporary philosophy, partly due to the influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy and the weight it acquired again in the work of Deleuze, a French philosopher, born in 1925, dying in 1995, when he jumped through a window of his apartment. Heraclitus, however, Greek, died of hidropsy (Pedraza, 2009). Neither of them had a dignifying ending . Deleuze would died by suicide after living a lifetime with the ravages left by tuberculosis and smoking.

Both have themes in common, mediated by Nietzsche with certainty, but that, in contemporary times, acquire new relevance, with incredibly chaotic processes of deterritorialization that, paradoxically, consist of a stagnation of the production of the human (culture, evolution social, inability to keep old promises of modernism and modernity, and hyperposition of a clearly different future, as one of the biggest reasons for organization and human activity from the common imaginary) when all meaning is exhausted or every sign is disconnected from its signifier and meaning , and the last two among themselves, with the typical anthropocentric differentiation, about the living in the first approximation. and in the difference of the living from the non-living (vitalist), as second approximation, with a production of production and desire that, ultimately, end up generating a schizophrenic movement, impermanence and continuous change in our materiality, especially relative to our relationship with the means of producing reality or of producing some meaning that can be stabilized by some homeostatic process (Deleuze & Guattari, 1985) that allows some sense of stability in the very production of the world, with a non-existent representation, or an already existing and stagnant one (Fisher, 2014).

Therefore, you cannot simply turn your face from the philosopher who initiated the genealogy of one of the most important philosophers-nodes¹, in contemporary times, in which becoming is a concept not seen with attention or seen integrated into sections of his thought (of Deleuze) in which it is difficult to disintegrate it (deterritorialize it) into its pieces … like the schizophrenic himself (Deleuze and Guattari, 1985).

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The philosophy of Heraclitus is highly characterized by change. It is not his, however, the expression πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei, everything flows) but of Cilicia Simplicio (Peters, 178p). The phrase, or aphorism, that is most recognized is that of: ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμβαίνουσιν, ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ, which can be translated as On those who enter the same rivers, ever different waters flow. This is how the constant change is what endures itself for Heraclitus, an instantaneous permanence and an eternal change. Panta rhei.

This is an important concept when it comes to contrasting it with Deleuze’s philosophy, since the idea of becoming originates with Heraclitus, then it is developed by Nietzsche, and more importantly by Deleuze (Parr, 2005, 25p)

by stubbornly wondering how the future could begin and why it is not over yet, the ancient philosophers are false tragic, who invoke the hybris, the crime, the punishment. Except for Heraclitus, they are not placed in the presence of the thought of pure becoming, nor on the occasion of this thought. (Deleuze, 2002b)

that is, Deleuze recognizes the genealogy of the concepts that were inherited to him. And it even mimics concepts that Heraclitus uses in a very general way ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω (Hodos ano kato, The ascending-descending path) to his analysis, along with Guattari, under other names (deterritorialization, territorialization [and the auxiliary reterritorialization]): From one to another there is only one becoming that is the becoming of reality (Deleuze y Guattari, 1985).

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In this becoming there are two directions. In Heraclitus, it is identified as an ascending process and another in the opposite direction: descending, which, in effect, is a dyad: a duality resolved, surmountable, and collapsible duality only at the end of time. However, they are directions of only one lane, one succeeded in activity and as central driver after the other; the principle of causality is respected in the thought of Heraclitus, and thus (not as in a conclusive process but with the process itself in existence, and in it) all transformed things cease to be and are at the same time, that is to say becoming now has dimensionality, or multiplicity (Parr, 181p). Heraclitus uses fire as an engine, or arche, and says that all things equivalent or replaceable by it (DK22B90).

Deleuze would not call them ascending or descending path but rather deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and indeed it makes them equivalent in stating that “Deterritorialization and reterritorialization intersect in the double becoming.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1997). For Deleuze (and Guattari) there is an emphasis on it, primarily, as social, economic, political and transcendental processes, rather than materialistic per se. And yet, Deleuze does not neglect the materialist analysis of Marx’s history, and will use these forces, that intersect the same body and, which produce production and desire, as the arche of the socio-political and socio-economic reality they analyze (Guattari and him). The fire rises. It is worth recalling that Deleuze uses the concept of deterritorialization as a process that feeds back itself, in which there is no reterritorialization process and simply there is a decoding and a positive trend towards the limits of capital, which are schizophrenia, and then in the sense in which it occurs a spontaneous reterritorialization; the first is described in A Thousand Plateaus and the last case in Anti Oedipus, however, the parallels are held.

The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows in order to extract surplus value from them, the more its ancillary apparatuses, such as government bureaucracies and the forces of law and order, do their utmost to reterritorialize, absorbing in the process a larger and larger share of surplus value. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1985)

That last quotation establishes a clear case of a dyad, similar to that formed by the ascending and descending path of Heraclitus. Suddenly one is tempted to use manichaeism as a body in which such a comparison is possible, or as a renormalization of one philosophy into the other, by saying that the ascending processes are processes of [re]territorialization and the descending ones to those of deterritorialization.

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Heraclitus speaks of two types of forces, or interaction, between them. They can find themselves in a constant war between various forces, tearing down and building reality itself, and that everything is a becoming through such a war and, given a state, apparently, homeostatic (δίκη), with all these forces in struggle, harmony is achieved, although in movement: Εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ τὸν πόλεμον ἐόντα ξυνὸν καὶ δίκην ἔριν, καὶ γινόμενα πάντα κατ’ ἔριν καὶ χρεών (DK22B80, It is necessary to know that war is common and right is strife and that all things happen by strife and necessity).

Deleuze would rescue later the idea when he talked about the body of discord and fights when he asked, What is the body?

We do not define it by saying that it is a field of forces, a nutrient medium fought over by a plurality of forces. For in fact there is no “medium”, no field of forces or battle. There is no quantity of reality, all reality is already quantity of force. There are nothing but quantities of force in mutual “relations of tension” (VP II 373/WP 635). Every force is related to others and it either obeys or commands. What defines a body is this relation between dominant and dominated forces. Every relationship of forces constitutes a body — whether it is chemical, biological, social or political. Any two forces, being unequal, constitute a body as soon as they enter into a relationship. This is why the body is always the fruit of chance, in the Nietzschean sense, and appears as the most “astonishing” thing, much more astonishing, in fact, than consciousness and spirit.

These forces can be active or reactive. The former can be transformed into the latter by being separated from the latter, as if a decapitated head grows torso, legs and arms. Only reactive forces become potentiality: the body can be but does not end up being, it is a becoming suspended; similar to the connotation of the term deterritorialization in Anti Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus; in Anti Oedipus it is a decoding of flows, signs and anything that can be consumed and in A Thousand Plateaus it consists of the new or the edge of an assembly (Parr 18p, 2005).

Without war and strife there would be no body. It is necessary to understand that the difference in quantity between forces is the very essence of the force and its relationship with other forces. A similarity between the physical forces, and what Deleuze speaks of, would be precisely the following: given an equality of magnitude (and opposite direction), the forces are reactive forces waiting for an assembly with an active force that functions as a will that ends up giving to the object and to the totality (the forces are not isolated from the totality) the character of repetition and not the product of a law (Deleuze, 2002a).

Heraclitus is very present in Deleuze’s analysis of active and reactive forces, in one way or another, hidden among the metaphors and reinterpretations made by Deleuze of Nietzsche, of his own philosophy and the philosophy of Heraclitus himself. Everything is a struggle and an eternal return that is reaffirmed in the becoming of being, and in the conjunction of these forces on the battlefield that are the forces themselves. Heraclitus comes to synthesize it as Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre (DK22B1).

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In the end Deleuze seems to have direct influences of Bergson, Spinoza and Nietzsche to develop most of his work, which Guattari would complement, however, Deleuze returns to the beginning, to Heraclitus, and spares no recognition: “Heraclitus is the one for whom life is radically innocent and just.[…] Heraclitus denied the duality of worlds, “he denied being itself”. Moreover he made an affirmation of becoming.” (Deleuze, 2002b) From him he would recognize and take as his own the multiplicity itself, and with it he understands, the eternal return, the being itself which is becoming.

Heraclitus had taken a deep look, he had seen no chastisement of multiplicity, no expiation of becoming, no culpability of existence. He saw no negativity in becoming, he saw precisely the opposite: the double affirmation of becoming and of the being of becoming — in short the justification of being. Heraclitus is obscure because he leads us to the threshold of the obscure: what is the being of becoming? What is the being inseparable from that which is becoming? Return is the being of that which becomes . Return is the being of becoming itself, the being which is affirmed in becoming. The eternal return as law of becoming, as justice and as being. (Deleuze, 2002b)

He does not even flinch at the Platonic attack on the philosophy of Heraclitus in Cratylus. The duality of Plato’s world-universe is irrelevant and has extended a creative nihilism (which he weirdly rejects) as an asynchronous extension to Stirner’s ideas, where the old spooks are left behind along with their arborescence. To the unique and the nothing creative of Stirner, he ends up displacing them in favor of the Nietzsche’s Overman: “The overman lies close to my heart, he is my paramount and sole concern — and not man: not the nearest, not the nearest, not the poorest, not the most suffering, not the best” (Z IV “Of the Higher Man”, 3, p. 297 — the allusion to Stirner is obvious)” (Deleuze, 2002b) and becoming itself. He no longer needs the duality of a world to solve a conflict generated in the fact that what changes does not correspond to a fixed idea (Stirner, 2017) in the world of ideas. Being is becoming, becoming is what constitutes the being itself, that is incomplete because we think of time as an incomplete dimension (as opposed to spatial dimensions that are understood as infinite and complete).

Becoming, but from where, what and since when? Well, out of nowhere, just as the vacuum boils into virtual particles². Becoming and being come from a nothingness that creates the becoming because the nothingness is the becoming itself as well, a nothingness that can only say what it is not. In Deleuze’s words:

We have to reflect for a long time to understand what it means to make an affirmation of becoming. In the first place it is doubtless to say that there is only becoming. No doubt it is also to affirm becoming. But we also affirm the being of becoming, we say that becoming affirms being or that being is affirmed in becoming.[…]

Multiplicity is the inseparable manifestation, essential transformation and constant symptom of unity. Multiplicity is the affirmation of unity; becoming is the affirmation of being. The affirmation of becoming is itself being, the affirmation of multiplicity is itself one. Multiple affirmation is the way in which the one affirms itself. “The one is the many, unity is multiplicity.” (Deleuze, 2002b)

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And so, Deleuze ends up creating the rhizome: “The one is the many, unity is multiplicity.” The becoming from Heraclitus to Deleuze, of course, is incomplete under the usual perspectives on what time consists of. Only when the time is complete, or if it is taken and thought as complete, all the paths will cease to be and will become the world of forms and ideas, including the one from Eris towards Heraclitus, and in discretized flow, Deleuze being one of the most recent eternal returns-nodes in their becoming.

Footnotes

1. Thinking that the relations between philosophers can be seen as a graph. This vision still retains some Hegelian arborescence, however, it is one of the closest maps to the rhizome itself (Deleuze and Guattari, 1978).
2. Virtual particles are particles that sprout in matter-antimatter pairs from the vacuum itself, and are usually annihilated when they meet their peer, returning all their energy extracted from the vacuum to vacuum Thanks to this it is that Stephen Hawking could sustain that the black holes “radiate”, that is to say they are not so “black”, and the truth, I find no greater sign that Heraclitus, Stirner, Nietzsche or Deleuze weren’t wrong, assuming a modernist and positivist stance on philosophy itself, on the eternal return, creative nothingness and becoming.

References

Deleuze, F., G. y Guattari. 1985. El Anti-Edipo: capitalismo y esquizofrenia. Paidós.

Deleuze, G. 2002a. Diferencia y repetición. Biblioteca de Filosofía. Amorrortu.

_________. 2002b. Nietzsche y la filosofía. Anagrama.

Deleuze, G., y F. Guattari. 1978. Rizoma: introducción. Premia Editora.

Deleuze, G., F. Guattari y T. Kauf. 1997. ¿Qué es la Filosofía?. Argumentos (Anagrama).

Fisher, M. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. John Hunt Publishing.

Manlove, Timothy. 1698. Praeparatio evangelica, or, A plain and practical discourse concerning the soul’s preparation for a blessed eternity [microform] : being the substance of several sermons preach’d at Leeds / by Timothy Manlove. Printed for Nevill Simmons …, / sold by George Coniers London.

Pajares, A.B. 2008. Fragmentos presocráticos de Tales a Demócrito. Bibioteca temática. Clásicos de Grecia y Roma. Alianza Editorial.

Parr, A. 2005. The Deleuze Dictionary. Edinburgh University Press.

Pedraza, F.R. 2009. Historia de la filosofía, 2 Bachillerato: materia común : [Tesela]. Oxford Educación.

Peters, F.E. 1967. Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon. NYU Press.

Stirner, M. 2017. The Unique and Its Property. Underworld Amusements.