Veritas (Jan 2017)
The dance of the mind: physique et métaphysique chez Gilles Deleuze et David Bohm = The dance of the mind: physics and metaphysics in Gilles Deleuze and David Bohm
Abstract
Over and above differences in terminology and cultural background, we try to show that the quantum physicist, David Bohm (Wilkes-Barre 1917 – London 1992), and poststructuralist philosopher, Gilles Deleuze (Paris 1925 – Paris 1995), shared a common aim in thought: to replace the classical (mechanistic) image of reality, which is still dominant in our time, with a metaphysics finally in agreement with the concepts and results of relativity, quantum mechanics and contemporary biology. For these two thinkers, the world of things that are well individuated in space and time, and ordered according to mechanical relations of cause and effect, are nothing but the momentary expression of an “undivided wholeness in flowing movement” that constitutes its true ontological ground. By means of this new metaphysics, the world of daily experience and classical science appears as the explicit manifestation or development of implicate order that undivided wholeness contains virtually in itself at deeper and deeper levels of envelopment and imbrication. The explicit world (of classical science and daily experience) is the result of a process of repetition, deceleration and temporal stabilization, triggered by the interaction of our measuring instruments – technical devices, sensory organs and motors, a priori forms and categories of the understanding – with moving wholeness, the thinking and observing subject of which represents a momentary and partial reflection rather than a solitary and autonomous fragment. By criticizing the classical image of the correspondence/adequation of being and thought, Bohm and Deleuze show that the thought seeking to grasp this wholeness in flowing movement inevitably interacts with it – by modifying, recreating and accomplishing it in one direction rather than another. Thought thus resembles a dance that tries to harmonize with the universal flux that generates and carries it away in a single movement with matter
