Monism = Pluralism

PLURALISM = MONISM

– From A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari

Jeffrey Bell’s blog entry about William James’ radical empiricism reveals relations between Hjelmslev’s Net and Linear Logic. To begin with, Hume was concerned with disjunctive relations (of expression) to the exclusion of conjunctive relations (of content). In addition, James sought the solution to the problem that consciousness (here content) has between the “one and the many”, one consciousness in relation to many consciousnesses. Unable to resolve this problem, James did not realize that conjunction can come in two modes, an additive one and a multiplicative one, a substance and a form.

The substance of content (here consciousness, agency, …) is constituted incrementally from choices between actions, either thoughts (thoughts-as-action) or actual actions (actions-as-action). This is additive AND. The form of content (essence, existence) is assembled by the ordering of those choices, a multiple choice of choices. This is multiplicative AND. These are the powers of AND.

However, Hume’s disjunction (expression) also comes in two flavors: additive and multiplicative (substance and form). It also has a problem with the “one and the many”. The substance of expression is either identity or generation (accident, substance). This is additive OR. The form of expression doesn’t seem like much in Linear Logic, but it is the very form of the logic, invertible with the connective tissue of the calculus (the comma). This is multiplicative OR. These are the powers of OR.

Content and expression are dual to each other, as conjunction is logically dual to disjunction. Is content the “subjective” and expression the “objective”? Is substance the “one” and form the “many”? Each is dual to the other, not distinguishable except by perspective. Perhaps these double duals are like a Mobius Strip, which only has one side, weaving in and out and forming a unity out of multiplicity.

Note that the elements of the double dual shown here are taken from the Protreptikos page “Monism and Pluralism”. The fourfold is made up of different “compositions in being”, each in two parts. There are many echoes to other double duals in these compositions, such as potency/actuality (existence) and substance/form.

References:

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari / A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia

http://schizosoph.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/monism-pluralism/