A Critique of Being as Identity

Gilles Deleuze (1925-95) exposed a major assumption underlying the West’s inquiry into Being: it had emphasized identity at the cost of difference. In the philosophy of identity regarding Being, an essence or substance is proposed as Being, and that essence or substance remains identical within all beings and over time. This essence is defined in terms of itself rather than of something else, i.e., it has self-identity. For example, God is by definition self-caused, unchanging and eternal. 

Deleuze argued that Western philosophers had made a fundamental mistake. Wherever distinctiveness, uniqueness or variation in beings were present, they were considered less real and therefore less desirable. Identity had been upheld over difference in considering Being. For example, God’s creation was considered as fallen and less divine than God. 

Deleuze showed that this way of thinking had been present throughout the history of Western philosophy, starting with most pre-Socratic philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, but with the exception of Heraclitus and a few others. It continued with the Neoplatonist and medieval thinkers, and it wasn’t until pre-modern philosophers like Spinoza, Hegel and Nietzsche that the study of Being broke away from identity.

Among modern thinkers, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) initiated the crucial break from Being seen as identity when he argued that Being was a process comprising a series of events that held sway over Dasein. But it was Deleuze who emphasized that differentiation was the way to understand the nature of beings. This process of active differentiation, and the infinite repetition of the differentiation process, was responsible for the sensed existence of all beings.  This process can be seen as a Becoming of Being. 

Deleuze interpreted Duns Scotus’ principle of univocity, which insisted that God and Nature were on the same footing, to mean that all beings were of the same origin, which explains his famous quote: “A single voice raises the clamor of being.”  In Deleuze’s philosophy, the sameness demanded by univocity was that individual beings were formed (“individuated”) in the mind by the same process of differentiation, but did not have the same essence. Being was therefore this process of differentiation that unites all beings.

Deleuze argued that we sense diverse phenomena through differences in intensity called singularities. Each of our faculties of remembering, thinking, imagining, feeling and sensing contribute their own discordant singularities to this field of sense-making. Unlike Aristotle’s substance (ousia) which comprised identities, our field of sense-making ultimately comprises differences.

For Deleuze, the critical element of this sense-making process is an Idea. This was not the identity of Plato that corresponded to a perfect form but a pure mix of singularities from different faculties (or multiplicity) that does not presuppose any form of identity. Ideas can be thought of as ineffable, transcendental content that is yet within our sense-making process.

In contrast to Kant, Deleuze argued that Ideas create virtual meaning that is actualized by the physical processes of sense-making. In effect, Ideas can be thought of as potential that is waiting to be realized. Deleuze labeled his approach “transcendental empiricism,” transcendental because of the virtual nature of Ideas and empirical because of their actualization through the physical senses.