Episode 110 - Intensity
Transcript
Ellie: 0:14
Hello and welcome to Overthink.
David: 0:17
The podcast that gives you an intellectual adrenaline rush.
Ellie: 0:21
I'm Ellie Anderson.
David: 0:22
And I'm David Peña Guzman. Ellie, I went skydiving recently.
Ellie: 0:28
So intense!
David: 0:31
Yeah, it was for my 10th year anniversary. My partner surprised me, which was shocking because he's afraid of heights.
Ellie: 0:37
Few things scare me more than the idea of skydiving. They just had a skydiving episode recently on The Bachelorette and my palms are sweating literally just even remembering the scene from The Bachelorette in which they went skydiving. So I can't imagine actually skydiving. What was that like?
David: 0:52
I mean, it was intensity in itself, I would say. Blood pressure rising, adrenaline rushing, feeling of danger to the max because you're literally jumping out of a plane at 9, 000 feet. And these are all feelings that are really hard to quantify, right? You feel them swelling up inside you, but how do you talk about how afraid you were or how much vertigo do you have?
Ellie: 1:21
Oh my god. All I know is just even thinking about it there's the palm sweating, but then there's also just like a swelling of the chest. And I'm somebody who literally blacked out on an amusement park ride in Copenhagen. It was just like literally one of those rides that just goes up into the air and comes back down. So truly, how did you do this? Were you terrified?
David: 1:41
I was terrified, because, I was trying to project a little bit of courage with the instructors because I did it obviously in tandem with somebody attached to the back of me. But when they made me put my legs out of the moving airplane, and I really just felt them dangling in the air, I just felt my stomach collapse into itself. At that point you can't really back out, especially because my partner had already jumped, so I couldn't leave him literally hanging in the air. And yeah, I jumped with my tandem partner and the fall itself was just this feeling that my body has never had, right? Because my body has not been in those positions at that speed at any point in my existence. Yeah, so definitely very intense.
Ellie: 2:33
Dude, now not only are my palms sweating and my chest is swelling up, I'm getting slightly nauseous. I feel like I would just throw up if I did this, which is even worse because I'm actually afraid of throwing up, so I'm afraid of heights and afraid of throwing up. Skydiving just sounds like the worst of all possible scenarios for me.
David: 2:49
This is not for you, and I don't have a problem with the throwing up part, but I will say that I was nauseous for an entire day following the three minute skydiving jump. And they said that's normal because your stomach really gets twisted inside out. And so for the next day, I just lay down and watched TV hoping for the nausea to go away.
Ellie: 3:13
Okay, somebody needs a Zofran prescription, that's what saves me. But wow, okay, so really seeking this adrenaline rush had a lot of effects. It had a price.
David: 3:25
it had a price and the price was a set of feelings that, now to link it to philosophy, point to a kind of change inside of us, like these rising feelings, these surges of emotion or sentiment that have been a very thorny problem throughout the history of philosophy. And it's a problem that was first tackled by Aristotle of all people.
Ellie: 3:51
A man who did not know about skydiving, but who had things to say about intensity all the same. So set the scene for us, because we're going to talk in this episode about why we love calling people or experiences intense. And in fact, skydiving is one of the examples that one of the philosophers will talk about from more recent times, Tristan Garcia has written about. But in the meantime, it's good to do our due diligence with Aristotle. So yeah, tell us a little bit about how Aristotle is conceiving of intensity.
David: 4:19
Yeah, so let me parachute us into his understanding of intensity because Aristotle in his writings is of course trying to understand nature. And part of nature is change. So there are many places in his corpus where he tries to figure out the metaphysics of change. And in one of these books called The Categories, he says that some things change either by augmenting or decreasing. things can get bigger, they can grow, or they can multiply. But then there is this other kind of change that is of an entirely different order, and for which he didn't really have a word. And so he just calls it, somewhat confusingly, the change of the more or less. So it's a kind of change where things can change more or less in relation to a particular trait without that change being the same as augmentation or decrease.
Ellie: 5:16
I find this distinction so strange though, because what's the difference between augmenting versus decreasing and more versus less, right? It seems to me like more identifies augmentation and less identifies decrease.
David: 5:34
yeah, no, so fair question. And again, it's a problem of language and he himself struggled to explain it a little bit in the categories. But the basic idea is that when you're dealing with augmentation and its opposite, which is decrease, you're dealing with something that is quantitatively measured, right? It's about size, it's about proportion, and it's about magnitude. Whereas the other change that he calls more or less, you're dealing with something that is fundamentally intensive. And so just to give an example, he talks about an object growing paler and paler with time. So imagine that you leave like a painting outside in the sun and it gets paler, over the months. He says, there is less of the intensity of the colors in the paint, but we wouldn't say that it's an augmentation or a decrease because we're not dealing with there being more paint or more canvas. It's the same object, it's just the intensity of the colors have changed.
Ellie: 6:39
But wouldn't we say there's less saturation?
David: 6:42
There is less redness, he would say, or less blue,
Ellie: 6:46
but why wouldn't that be quantitative or measurable?
David: 6:49
Because it's the same amount of surface that is still painted. It's just the intensity of the color that has changed. for him, the more and the less applies really to things that change in this intensive way.
Ellie: 7:02
Would we say it applies to qualities?
David: 7:06
Yes, it does apply to qualities, but it depends on which qualities we're talking about. But one of the philosophers that I read in preparation for this, whose name is Mary Beth Mader, who is an expert on the concept of intensity, argues that in Aristotle, there are three sorts of things that change in this more or less. those are, certainly, affectations of the body, so things like heat, sweetness, things having to do with perception, like color. A second one is virtue, right? Like a person can be more or less just And then the last category to which this would apply are the emotions, right? Like you can be more or less happy. You can love somebody more or less. But we wouldn't quite say that augmentation and decrease are the right categories for that.
Ellie: 8:00
I have to say, just my questions are coming from the place of really struggling with this concept. I feel like it's practically impossible for me not to think about this in terms of quantitative measuring, which I am very loathe to admit as somebody who does not think that all things are reducible to quantity and measuring.
David: 8:18
Yeah, no, and this is a really tricky problem. And I think our hat at the very least has to go off to Aristotle for recognizing the autonomy of this kind of change that, again, he calls the more or the less. And his observation that it has nothing to do with measurement and size. And that observation on Aristotle's part began a centuries long debate about what this change is and how we should conceptualize it.
Ellie: 8:50
Today, we're talking about intensity.
David: 8:54
What does it mean to call somebody or something intense?
Ellie: 8:58
Why do Bergson and Deleuze consider intensity a key concept for understanding consciousness?
David: 9:05
Can the concept of intensity help us resist the tyranny of measurement and capitalism?
Ellie: 9:14
We love to call people intense, and the contemporary French philosopher Tristan Garcia's book The Life Intense is subtitled, I think very interestingly on this point, A Modern Obsession, indicating that Garcia thinks our society is obsessed with intensity.
David: 9:31
Yeah, you've been pitching this episode for a while, in part because you've been wanting to talk about this book that you read, and now I've read it too for this episode, and the basic idea behind it, which he gets at in all sorts of interesting ways that we're going to discuss in this episode, is that intensity really has become an ideal in our contemporary age. It is something not just that we do, but that we believe we have to be at all times.
Ellie: 10:02
And at first glance, I think we talk about intense not only in positive ways as this ideal that we want to strive towards, but actually I would also say in negative and maybe even sometimes neutral ways. So if I say, whoa, that person's intense. That's not necessarily a good thing.
David: 10:20
it depends on who's saying it, right? Because calling somebody intense would be a compliment if it's coming from, say, my Burner friends who love to go to Burning Man, but it might be a dig coming from my more normie friends who pride themselves on their taste in mid century Scandinavian furniture. Not the same audience.
Ellie: 10:40
Not you making a Burning Man reference, I was planning to mention it somewhere in this episode. I've never been, although I'm interested in going, but I do feel it has a reputation for being one of the most intense experiences on offer in modern American society.
David: 10:59
I mean, I've been, and I have no interest in going again, so I'm the inverse of you.
Ellie: 11:04
Look at you. You're the more intense host today, skydiving and Burning Man.
David: 11:07
Oh yeah, I'm just like flipping my hair over here in my normie office on campus. but I think they would say that those experiences at Burning Man are intense in a fundamentally good way. But the thing about intensity is that it doesn't always need to be good, right? You can have an intense experience that is, at bottom, dangerous, being chased by a bear, almost getting hit by a car. I think, my experience of skydiving would fall on this end of the spectrum for sure.
Ellie: 11:40
Although you chose that my friend, whereas the person getting chased by a bear presumably did not.
David: 11:44
I don't know, did you choose the bear over the man, Ellie?
Ellie: 11:45
I love the resurgence of that discourse.
David: 11:54
But my point is that most people wouldn't quite choose those dangerous experiences of intensity.
Ellie: 12:01
Yeah, And I think also, we can be in intense experiences that are dangerous and negative, right? Like things that we don't want and we can be really afraid of those experiences. And I also think that we can be afraid even of intense experiences that aren't dangerous. Like intense experiences, part of what it means for them to be intense is that they take you out of your comfort zone. And that can be scary, right? even if oh, this is an"objectively" safe situation. Maybe we're talking about an immersive play that you attend. The intensity of that can be scary and maybe not something that people are really inclined to want to do.
David: 12:41
Yeah, no, I think you're right. And, I just joked about my skydiving experience being intense in that dangerous way. But the reality is that I did a lot of research and so did my partner to find a really safe skydiving agency. And so we did it not because we thought it was dangerous, but because we thought it would take us out of our comfort zone. And there was a certain pleasure in the intensity of that deviation.
Ellie: 13:04
This episode is sponsored by David's Skydiving Agency.
David: 13:12
So far we've been talking about intense experiences, but I think it's important to go back to the Garcia book because there he focuses on intense people rather than experiences. And he thinks that being intense, like an intense person, is what has become a moral ideal in our society. We are all encouraged to become what he calls intense subjects. And to be an intense subject for him really means, and this is a quote from the book, a heroic subject capable of enduring a world of differences, variations, and changes. fluctuations, bursts of energy, and power plays. And this figure of the intense subject has to be courageous in the face of all the vicissitudes of modern life. You have to be comfortable with changes in identity, in circumstances, and in external conditions.
Ellie: 14:09
that extent, it reminds me of the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's idea that life under late capitalism is what he calls liquid life or constantly fluctuating and dynamic. And Bauman's view has been quite influential, I would say, in recent years. I think I maybe read his work around the same time as I read Garcia, pre-pandemic. And the intense subject, I think if we're going to put that notion of liquid life together with Garcia, the intense subject is the subject that can weather the complexities of late capitalism, globalization, and I would also add the age of technology.
David: 14:45
No, that's right. shall we get into the three characters that he talks about?
Ellie: 14:50
Yeah, you know I love a dramatis personae, and that's what happens in this Garcia book. He focuses on three intense subjects in particular. The libertine was the first one, then we got the romantic, and finally the rocker teenager.
David: 15:07
Totally unexpected character in a philosophy book.
Ellie: 15:10
It's so obsessed. that's one of the things that's fun about this book is it's just so unabashedly contemporary. And each of these three characters corresponds to a different time period. And keep in mind, Garcia is also French, so these characters are très français. The Libertine, to begin with, comes from the 17th and 18th centuries. And, you have figures like the Marquis de Sade here. I might also add dangerous liaisons. And the Libertine is a person who wants to live life on the edge through sensual pleasure that is often mixed with pain. So in Sade you have sadomasochism and whatnot. And then, after the Libertine, we get the Romantic, which starts in the late 18th century and continues through the 19th century. That's like the age of romanticism. The Romantic gets their intensity not from sadomasochistic pleasure, but rather from their connection to nature. And Garcia says, especially the Sturm und Drang of dramatic storms. So think Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting of a man in a suit looking out over a windswept landscape of dramatic mountains. that's the Romantic figure of intensity. And then, in the mid 20th century, along comes the third intense subject, the rocker teenager.
David: 16:32
Yeah, whom Garcia also colorfully describes as the electric adolescent. I just imagine an adolescent discharging electricity through every limb. and I'm also obsessed with the fact that he says at one point in the book, I have another quote here."The adolescent is first of all a hormonal being powered by desire, rage, and frustration. And what is rock if not the electrification of hormones?"
Ellie: 17:02
It's so horny. Oh my god. It's, iconique.
David: 17:08
It's shocking.
Ellie: 17:11
And Garcia says that this rocker teenager with the electric guitar and the hormones coursing through his body is a symbol of the fast life and a desire to feel disturbed, like energies are coursing through you.
David: 17:27
I have a question for you that I had when I was reading the book, especially in connection to the electrification of hormones with the rocker teenager, because he associates this teenager, of course, with the rise of electric rock and the electric guitar, which happened beginning in the middle of the 20th century, second half of the 20th century, really. Do we think that the rocker teenager remains the dominant model of intensity for us now in the 21st century? Or is there now another figure that is going to come in to supplant the teenager?
Ellie: 18:00
Maybe the raver?
David: 18:02
Or the circuit queen?
Ellie: 18:06
Okay, this could be my Los Angeles talking, but the person who goes to a bunch of breathwork workshops?
David: 18:13
Yeah, they definitely would see themselves as intense, although this would be a much more spiritual intensity.
Ellie: 18:19
I don't know they is, I have been to multiple breathwork workshops myself. Very intense.
David: 18:25
Yeah, but it's a different kind of intensity, right? Like the other ones are like the libertine is a hedonistic intensity having to do with bodies and pleasures. The romantic one is an intensity that is tapping into the forces of nature. The rocker teenager is somebody who throws themselves into a music that envelops them. I think the breath working L. A. influencer or meditator actually would break the pattern in that they would be turning inward in search for an inner intensity.
Ellie: 18:56
I love every part of your analysis except that the two options you gave were L. A. Influencer or meditator, as those are the only two options and also that they are mutually exclusive. Okay. But no, I really like that, this idea of this turning in, because it seems like the breathwork person would be most akin to the Romantic, of these previous figures. But that, yeah, instead of turning out to the weather outside these storms, it's like actually cultivating a storm within.
David: 19:29
And actually that is what the Romantic also does, right? They look for the force of outer nature in their own inner nature. That's like the essence of Romanticism. So maybe it would be just the return of the Romantic in the 21st century context. But I want to say something about these three characters, because in The Life Intense, Garcia says that all of these are different iterations of the same broad subject position, which he calls the electric person. So they all embody this ideal type in different ways. And this is a kind of figure that emerged in the late 17th, really 18th century in Europe, and that embodies intensity in their way of being in the world. And the reason that he calls this person electric. has to do with his interpretation of the history of the concept of intensity since Aristotle and then the role that the discovery of electricity in particular in the 18th century played in that history. So we mentioned that Aristotle is the first one to really tackle the problem of intensity. He draws our attention to the fact that it is different than quantitative change.
Ellie: 20:45
And he never used, we didn't say this before, but he never used the word intensity, right? Like we should note that.
David: 20:51
No, the word intensity first appears in the medieval period, and what happens is that because a lot of philosophers inherited this problem of, how are things changing when they're not changing in a quantifiable way, what ended up happening over the course of the next 1, 000 years after Aristotle, is that most philosophers, and you really see this in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period, ended up responding to the problem of intensity by turning intensity into extension. So they basically started quantifying everything that was a candidate for intensity because it was easier to deal with in that way.
Ellie: 21:31
Like me because I end up thinking that any intensity is actually extension, as I mentioned at the beginning.
David: 21:36
Yeah, exactly. you're an early modern/medieval, thinker, Ellie. You are an unelectric person, according to Garcia.
Ellie: 21:44
I'm even pre-Libertine.
David: 21:46
Yeah. And so this process of, let's say, the extensification of intensity culminated in the scientific revolution in the 17th century, where basically science took intensity entirely out of the natural world. Nothing is intense. Everything is just matter and motion. And so it's almost as if science drove this stake through the problem of intensity by denying the reality of intensive changes. Then comes the discovery of electricity, and it's almost as if intensity just detonated a bomb in the middle of European culture by saying, no, intensity is real, and I, electricity, am the highest expression of it, and you cannot deny my reality. And so Garcia argues that electricity came to be experienced by Europeans in the 18th century as intensity par excellence. It's something that is real, you cannot see it, but it shocks you, it electrifies you, it galvanizes you.
Ellie: 22:50
This is such an interesting history, although I do have a lot of questions about, can't we measure electricity? And in that case, can't it be put in terms of the quantitative? But again, it's so funny with this episode because I feel like I'm just coming up against my own challenges understanding the concept of intensity, or maybe imagining it, let's say. But I think maybe that difficulty that I have personally, we can come back to a little bit later in the discussion. when we talk about Bergson, because I want to talk a little bit here while we're on Garcia about the ethical ideal of intensity that he discusses. Because Garcia doesn't only say that we have a moral ideal of the intense person, which we've been discussing, he also says that we have an ethical ideal of living intensely. That is, we're all tasked with seeking out intense experiences in our lives in addition to being intense people. And Garcia has an interesting way of distinguishing morals from ethics here, he says that morals have to do with values and ideas, whereas ethics is contentless. It has to do with ways and manners of doing things. So we've been talking about the values of those intense figures, but let's say a little bit about the ways and manners of living intensely, this ethical ideal.
David: 24:06
So you might wonder, what sorts of manners of doing things are intense? Garcia says that intensity is the opposite of lukewarm and that the highest expression or archetype of the lukewarm personality is the bourgeois person. So living intensely really means rejecting bourgeois ways of life and values and seeking other ways of inhabiting the world. But this ultimately means rejecting identification in general. To live intensely really means constantly running away from anything that might define you.
Ellie: 24:44
Yeah, and at this point, I think we can start to see Garcia's critique of intensity as an ethical ideal emerge. I wonder what you make of his point here, David, because I don't necessarily find it easy to see whether Garcia is critical of the ideal of intensity in the sense of just showing how it emerged or offering a kind of genealogy or account of it, or whether he's critical of it in the sense of being against it.
David: 25:13
Yeah, so I would say that he's not against it in the sense of asking us not to live intensely or not to seek intense experiences, but rather that he's critical in the sense that he is giving us a genealogy about how it came to be, but also critical in the sense that he believes It's ultimately unstable and unsustainable. You cannot be in a moment or in a feeling of intensity forever. At some point, that rise of intensity has to give way to a reset back to a baseline, by definition.
Ellie: 25:48
You've got to dismantle the city at Burning Man. You can't live there forever.
David: 25:52
Yeah, correct. And so there is something about experiences of intensity that makes them fundamentally ephemeral and that even if you were to maintain them at their peak, they would actually lose their sense of appeal or their attractiveness to you. And he gives the example of music, right? If you listen to music that is constantly surprising you, and it keeps you in that feeling of intensity, Oh, this music is really exciting and unpredictable. At some point, you just start experiencing the change itself as constant. And so it becomes lukewarm. It becomes lackluster. So he's critical in the sense that there's a kind of tragedy to his account where every intensity becomes lukewarm. And that's what happens to electricity. Even, you said, can't we measure it? And he says, yeah, eventually we domesticated electricity as well.
Ellie: 26:50
And so as an ideal, intensity is self defeating because it just leads us to this treadmill or hamster wheel of seeking more and more intense experiences because we're not getting the same high that we got before. I mentioned that I really struggle with the concept of intensity because I am liable to think about it in terms of extension or measurability, which is literally the opposite of what you're supposed to do with intensity. And this was part of my reason for wanting to do this episode. I really wanted to talk about the Garcia book, but I was also begging you to do this episode because I wanted an excuse to talk about Bergson and Deleuze on this topic. And listeners might remember from our self knowledge episode back in 2022 that you, David, got me interested in wanting to read Bergson more seriously. In fact, I'm excited to report I have been doing just that this year.
David: 27:59
Woot woot!
Ellie: 28:00
Yes, so let's get it. Bergson was writing in the early 20th century and for him, intensity is central for understanding consciousness. And I'm obsessed with thinking through this right now, in part because I feel like I can't wrap my head around it. So David, let's get into it.
David: 28:17
yeah, let's do it. So one of Bergson's key points is that in our scientifically minded society, we too often think about things like consciousness, free will, the experience of time, and basically anything else related to our psychic life as humans, in terms of space and measurement. So we're all Ellie Andersonians in this regard, we reduce intensity to extension. And for instance, with time, Bergson says that we treat time as if it were a series of moments arranged on a line. At one point in one of his writings, he says, as if time were a pearl necklace. And we also think about consciousness more generally as a stream of mental activity that is filled with contents that are individuated, that are separable from one another. But these ways of thinking really are just metaphors. And unfortunately, they are metaphors that if we take them too seriously, we end up misunderstanding the things that they are supposed to illuminate, like time and consciousness in this case. And so when we do this, we are putting consciousness in terms of extension and thinking about it in largely geometric terms, as lines extended in space.
Ellie: 29:45
And this is such a profound insight to me, because it's so true that we tend to put time in terms of space constantly, whether it's through a pearl necklace, chronological timeline, metaphor of a stream, and also that we then tend to think about consciousness in similarly extensive terms. And a desire to overcome these common misconceptions leads Bergson to the concept of intensity. Because he thinks that intensity is the alternative to these misunderstandings. So first things first, Bergson identifies two different aspects of intensity. First, there's the intensity that refers to the estimated magnitude of something from the outside on us. So this happens when we have sensations, like you're skydiving, David, and you're like, Oh my God, I am 9, 000 feet up in the air hurtling through space. There's a very large estimated magnitude of that experience on your consciousness. And so you feel like it's a particularly intense experience. So this kind of intensity, this first kind, happens when we have sensations, whether you're skydiving or just like chilling on your couch, then you have like;less of an intense experience, right? It also happens when we're engaged in muscular effort, something is requiring more or less effort, and when we pay attention, more or less effort involved, right? And this seems to me to be the usual way that we discuss intensity. But Bergson also wants to address a second kind of intensity. This is the intensity of the multiplicity that goes on within our consciousness. Specifically, we use intensity in this way in referring to what he calls the larger or smaller number of simple psychic phenomena which we conjecture to be involved in the fundamental state. Okay, so we need some examples here in to make this larger or smaller number of simple psychic phenomena evident. One is deep seated psychic states like hope, joy, and passion. Another is aesthetic feelings. And a third is moral feelings. He thinks that these kinds of experiences, feelings, and psychic states have a qualitative multiplicity, which is not extensive but related to intensity. And David, this is where I need you to jump in because the idea that it's a larger or smaller number of simple psychic phenomena is exactly what trips me up. It's the same as the Aristotle problem!
David: 32:17
Yeah. The more or less?
Ellie: 32:18
Yeah, it seems like more or less larger or smaller is still referring to extension, magnitude, number. But Bergson is saying, no, this is not quantitative, it's a qualitative multiplicity. You know Bergson better than I do. So what do you make of this?
David: 32:35
one way to think about it is that both of them are trying to recognize that there is diversity and difference, but a kind of diversity in difference that is not the same as numerical, identifiable difference. So for Bergson, the multiplicity of our internal states is a really unique and special kind of multiplicity, right? It's different from, let's say, the multiplicity of material objects in objective space. So when we see material objects, we can very easily separate one object from the others. We can individuate them based on their spatial temporal coordinates, right? there is this cup here, there is a table there. But in consciousness, the multiplicity is not of the same order and it doesn't work the same way. So our mental images, our feelings, you mentioned like hope, joy, passion, things like that, they are different from one another, and we can tell when we are in one state rather than the other, but it's not as if we can clearly carve them out at their joints, because in order to do that, you would have to assume that they are extended in space in order to really draw a line between them.
Ellie: 33:50
Yeah, but I think the relevant analogy there wouldn't be carving out the difference between joy, passion, and hope, but saying what components are involved in each of those individual experiences. what is joy comprised of? And having more and less joy.
David: 34:05
Yeah, so I think it would be both. It would be that each of those feelings has a multiplicity within it of sensations, affectations and stimuli.
Ellie: 34:14
That's what Bergson's referring to in the passage I discussed.
David: 34:17
But in general, he also believes that multiplicity also explains the relationship between different mental states that are different, but that kind of blend into one another in very subtle ways where, sometimes you're angry and your anger subsides. And at some point, you become happy, but you cannot say, Oh, here is the moment where one became the other. And so the point here is that the multiplicity of psychic states is not countable. It is not numerical, unless we translate it into the language of space and geometry. That is to say that we can only count conscious states if we symbolically represent them as material entities that happen to live inside our mind, but on their own, they really permeate each other completely and they are not external to one another.
Ellie: 35:12
And there, folks, is your critique of both Inside Out and Inside Out 2. Because what happens when we think about these emotions, located in the head too, I have so many thoughts. I feel like I maybe mentioned this before, but I have a lot of problems with how Inside Out and Inside Out 2 represent the mind. Yeah, but the point is that they symbolically represent different emotions as different characters. But that's precisely what Bergson is saying is the wrong way to conceptualize things, right? And you can see here that for Bergson, the concept of extension is just not applicable to consciousness. if I want to catalog my conscious states, like how I'm feeling sad at the same time as I'm imagining moving away from home, and that feeling of sadness has these different kind of component parts, All those things happening are not lived as separate, but rather as permeating one another. They're not lived as distinct in space, but as endured in time, or what Bergson calls pure duration. And so conceptualizing them and separating them out is just at a remove from consciousness. It's not necessarily a bad thing that we symbolically represent these things as separate, but we have to recognize that's not actually how they're lived in consciousness.
David: 36:32
Yeah, you're right that it's not necessarily bad. In fact, he says it's very practical and if you're concerned about action and pragmatic concerns, then yeah, you should extensify these intensive qualities. But it does lead to a misrepresentation or a misunderstanding of our inner reality. And that's why Bergson is In my view, one of the most powerful critics of the psychophysics movement of the 19th century. Psychophysics was this movement in psychology that started in the 1860s, founded by a German psychologist and physicist by the name of Gustav Theodor Fechner, who believed that you can just take the tools and the methods of physics and literally apply them to psychic phenomena. for instance, if you want to understand the experience of tickling, just to use that kind of mundane, everyday example, Fechner would say, first you look at the physical stimuli that give rise to the sensation. So somebody running their fingers on your back or something like that. And then you apply physical methods to that. So how much pressure are the fingers exerting on the skin and what surface of the skin is actually engaged in this movement. You measure those quantitatively and then voila, you have a measure of your tickling feeling. And so what psychophysics does is it conflates the two kinds of intensity that you mentioned earlier, Ellie. The intensity of an external magnitude, like the stimulus, with the intensity of the actual lived feeling of the thing itself. And so Bergson says that this is something that we need to resist because it ultimately collapses the intensity of inner life into the extension of outer space.
Ellie: 38:34
Yeah, I'd be so curious to hear what contemporary physicists and those who are working at the intersection of neuroscience and physics would have to say about this because it seems to me, at first glance that maybe there would be something still relevant in Bergson's critique of psychophysics for contemporary attempts to translate consciousness into the language of physics, but that is indeed beyond my pay grade. So let's think about how Bergson wants to provide as an alternative to this quantitative way of thinking about consciousness what he calls qualitative multiplicity. And again, it's hard to describe this, especially because any time I hear multiplicity, I think about numbers and counting. But qualitative multiplicity pertains not to extension, numbers, counting, measurability, etc., but to intensity. And intense states can be deeper or more shallow, but not measurably more or less. But again, David, I feel like I need you to help us here because this is where I feel like I'm still inclined to think about intensity as measurable. So do you think he really succeeds at getting away from this idea of the quantitative? Do you think we can really have a concept of multiplicity that is Qualitative.
David: 39:57
So I do, and I think Bergson thinks we find it if we just introspectively turn within.
Ellie: 40:04
That's probably not going to be satisfying to the physicists.
David: 40:07
Oh yeah, no, for sure. No, no, this is a critique of science for sure. And it's a defense of the autonomy of metaphysics. And I do think we find this notion of qualitative multiplicity in our everyday understanding of our experience of our own body and of our own emotions. If we just try to peel away everything that we have been taught about how to talk about them. So for example, if I ask you, Ellie, how many emotions did you have yesterday? It's an incoherent question because emotions, they're not photographs that flash in front of us that we can count and differentiate. Rather, they are a qualitative multiplicity. I felt a lot of things yesterday and their multiplicity was in my feeling rather than out in the world. And so I do think that It correlates with commonsensical understandings of those things that Aristotle talked about as subject to the more or less, right? virtue, emotions, and also affectations of the body. When I get burned by a cigarette, that experience can be, as you said, Ellie, deeper or more shallow, but it's not the sort of thing that I can subject to a quantitative measurement on a scale, which is why, when we go to the doctor, it's so famously difficult to answer the question, on a scale of 1 to 10, how bad was, like, whatever, giving birth, as opposed to breaking two legs.
Ellie: 41:42
No, that, that's a good point and maybe I've just been too brainwashed by growing up in a culture that encourages us from a very young age to put those things in terms of numbers and the fact that in my own personal life I really enjoy taxonomizing different emotions and experiences.
David: 41:59
Oh my god, you, if you had been a filmmaker, you would have been the maker of Inside Out.
Ellie: 42:04
No, David, I take umbrage with that statement. That is not, that wouldn't be me. It would more be like I would be probably like really into stream of consciousness, avant garde filmmaking. Some of my favorite, authors are Proust and Knausgaard, both of whom are really obsessed with just getting into the nitty gritty of our consciousness. But then again, they're totally not at all writing about this in quantitative terms. And in fact, Deleuze, a philosopher very interested in Bergson's notion of intensity, we'll talk about that in just a few minutes, is also very interested in Proust and wrote a lot about Proust too, thinking that Bergson and Proust are very much in the same vein in their conception of consciousness.
David: 42:49
Yeah, and in order to convey the details of this other conception of consciousness that is not quantitative, all of these thinkers, Bergson included, have to figure out how to work with a language that is fundamentally spatializing in order to capture something that is not spatial. And that's why in Bergson's works, we find a lot of images and metaphors of liquids, of flow, of spectra, of melodies where, what comes before influences what comes after. Because all these images allow him to capture this sense of interpenetration, this qualitative multiplicity that is not spatial contiguity. So there's a lot of linguistic invention that you see in the writing because one of the obstacles is language.
Ellie: 43:44
Absolutely. And this is so hard because the subject predicate form of language, I would say, encourages us to put things in spatial terms. Maybe even not just the subject predicate form, maybe it's language in general.
David: 44:25
Bergson's theory of intensity has had a renaissance in recent decades thanks to the work of Gilles Deleuze, who has been deeply inspired by Bergson's work and used the concept of intensity a lot in his own writings. And Deleuze has been not only a hot philosopher in recent decades among philosophers, but also among political and critical theorists, especially those who defend the theory of the movement known as Accelerationism.
Ellie: 44:54
Yeah, we've got a lot of Deleuze fanboys these days. before you tell us about accelerationism and this appropriation of Deleuze's philosophy, I want to talk a little bit about his own theory of intensity. And I'll focus on Difference and Repetition, which is a book of Deleuze's that I am definitely a fanboy for. I really, think this book is amazing. Although, as we've talked about in previous episodes, I also have a lot of disagreements with Deleuze. I appreciate the project, even if I disagree with some of the details. We just talked about him in detail in our organisms episode if you haven't listened to that yet. Okay, so Deleuze seems inspired by Bergson's claims about intensity and qualitative multiplicity because Deleuze is really interested in understanding difference. And he wants to understand difference in a way that goes beyond our symbolic representations of it. So in the same way that Bergson talks about how we misunderstand consciousness and time when we symbolically represent them and then treat that symbolic representation as accurate truth, Deleuze thinks that we misunderstand difference when we put it into this kind of spatial or symbolic thinking because we usually think about difference as the difference between two different things that we perceive imagistically in the world, right? We understand the difference between two mugs by saying one is bigger than the other, one is more red than another, or more offensive than another.
David: 46:20
Those offensive mugs.
Ellie: 46:23
Sometimes they have some real hot takes on those mugs. But this common sense way of thinking about things only scratches the surface for Deleuze. He wants to think pure difference, difference on its own terms, without imagistic or symbolic representations of difference, without appeal to different things that we can sense in the world. And he thinks that the concept of intensity can help us here. He actually goes so far as to say that intensity is difference and that intensity is pure difference in itself. It plays a big role in his metaphysics, then, because it also provides a way of understanding change as a process of becoming. And that's something that we've been talking about a lot throughout the episode, this idea, beginning with Aristotle, that there is a form of change that is different from the augmentation or decrease, but is instead, in Deleuze's terms, a process of becoming. When we become something, we change. We don't stay the same, of course. But this change doesn't happen by virtue of discrete moments in time, right? It's not as though you go from being like 35 years old in a day to being 35 years old in two days. There are all of these moments in between, and even those moments we can't think about just in discrete. moments as well, right? This reminds me of the Paradox episode where we really get into this. And so Deleuze thinks that intensity is helpful in figuring becoming and change because it's neither divisible nor indivisible.
David: 47:52
Yeah, and the non divisible or indivisible I think is a great way to really get our head around this notion of intensity as difference, because if you think about something like temperature, of course we experience temperature as correlated with something that is objective, right? Like the movement of mercury in a mercury thermometer, right? That's a purely, quantitative, mathematically measurable thing, but our feeling of the change of temperature is something else altogether. for example, could we say that 80 degrees Fahrenheit is twice 40 degree weather? Is it twice? I don't know. It doesn't Like, even, especially when you're thinking about the ridiculousness that is the Fahrenheit scale that doesn't make any sense, is zero the absence of temperature? And if so, what happens to the negative numbers? So here you start to see how, even if we can use numbers to understand certain phenomena, again, there is that distortion that happens through symbolization.
Ellie: 49:02
And that example of temperature, one that Deleuze uses, is still, referring to something that we do understand scientifically, but it already shows that intensity is like important in figuring the natural world and our relation to it. But it's all the more so when we're thinking about individuation. For Deleuze, any thought comes about by means of an intensity and any'who' is an intensity. Intensity drives individuation. And so even though Deleuze is less interested in consciousness, that term, than Bergson is, he's still using this insight from Bergson's theory of consciousness and thinking about it in terms of what makes something what it is as opposed to something else. What drives individuation? And the answer to that is intensity.
David: 49:51
Yes, you're jumping into the nitty gritty of Deleuzian metaphysics here, Ellie, which I really like, because we do find all these images of intensification, speeding up, acceleration in Deleuze's work, especially his later works, which were co-authored with Félix Guattari. And in their co-authored work, they use images, for example, of deterritorialization. They talk about forces and flows of desire that make it clear that they see intensity as doing really important philosophical work around actualization, individuation, and becoming. Now, one concern is that Intensity is not inherently progressive or revolutionary or emancipatory. I take intensity to be quite neutral and believe that it can lead itself to left wing or right wing appropriations. In fact, this is what has happened to Deleuze's own philosophy of intensity. One of the ways in which this philosophy has been used in recent years is, again, with the rise of this movement known as Accelerationism. Now, the term Accelerationism is very recent. It was coined only in 2010 by Benjamin Noys.
Ellie: 51:16
I knew it was contemporary, but I didn't know it was that recent.
David: 51:18
Yeah, I know, it's super recent, and it came out in Noys' book from 2010, The Persistence of the Negative. Now, later that term, accelerationism, was popularized by a number of other political theorists who started turning to it as a way of advancing the idea that rather than trying to slow down capitalism or making it come to a halt, which has been the leftist strategy for a very long time.
Ellie: 51:48
Yeah, when you say making it come to a halt, like that often means like revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.
David: 51:54
yeah. But instead of fighting against it from the outside, we actually should try to intensify it. We should accelerate capitalism. So the core idea behind accelerationism is that all those processes that maintain capitalism, like free trade, deregulation, capitalist accumulation, runoff technological innovation should be expanded. They should be strengthened in order to push capitalism to the limit and thereby bring about sweeping cultural, social, and political change.
Ellie: 52:31
And specifically bring about capitalism's demise. The idea of accelerationism is the only way to overcome capitalism is by making it run through its phases as quickly as possible so it exhausts itself.
David: 52:44
Yeah, that's correct. You push it up against its own internal limit and hope that it collapses from its own internal movement that it can't sustain.
Ellie: 52:54
Yeah, which, and I know you're in the middle of explaining accelerationism, so I don't want to belabor this point, but that idea comes from Marx because Marx's philosophy of history, following Hegel, whom he's inspired by, in many respects on this, revolves around the idea that a given formation of society, culture, economics, etc. has internal contradictions that once they are pushed to a certain limit will become so contradictory that the system itself will fall apart.
David: 53:23
Yeah, it will tip it over. Yes.
Ellie: 53:25
so I'm not saying Marx was an accelerationist, obviously that would be anachronistic, but like I'm saying that this core idea that we need to run through the faces of capitalism in order to overcome capitalism, that is rooted in Marx's teleology of history.
David: 53:38
Yeah, so these Accelerationist theorists take this notion of intensity from Deleuze and then they borrow also this language from Marx to argue that we should put the pedal to the metal when it comes to capitalism to bring about its collapse.
Ellie: 53:53
I love that symbolic representation of the unrepresentable intensity.
David: 53:58
but the point that I'm getting at here with my claim about the ambiguity of intensity is that so far we've been talking about left wing. accelerationism, which is associated with people like Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, among others. But the really bizarre thing about Deleuze's philosophy of intensity and acceleration is that it has also inspired a very far-right-wing version of the same argument. Yeah, the spokesperson for this really creepy movement is a man by the name of Nick Land, who is a conservative, racist, reactionary, you name it, writer, who inspired by Deleuze, argues that we should accelerate capitalism, not so much to overcome it, actually to liberate capitalism from any human imposed limits. So he has this dream for capitalism to become almost like a self oiling machine that runs on its own and that transcends any human community until it brings about the singularity. And it's a very, different political project, but the point is that it's equally rooted in this philosophy of intensity and intensification, It's just that it's put to work toward the aim of this unsettling techno utopian right wing fantasy where there is nothing left but capitalism all the way down. And, there are actually many versions of right wing Accelerationism, including really fucked up racial visions of Accelerationism where these alt right characters call for things like racial assassinations in order to speed up racial conflict, in order to eventually bring about a white ethnostate worldwide.
Ellie: 56:02
Ooh. Okay. Yeah. I feel like when I hear acceleration as I'm referred to, it's just often in like slightly disdainful tones, but like it's taken as a serious position, but as a position that most people, I know. don't buy. And I think certainly that's even just like the left wing accelerationism, let alone the right wing accelerationism. I actually didn't know that it was like as white supremacist as all of this.
David: 56:29
it's unabashedly, genocidal, and for me, philosophically speaking, one of the really unexpected things about this right wing movement is that they also explicitly trace their project to a combination of Deleuze plus Marx.
Ellie: 56:46
And I don't think that the concept of intensity itself is, to blame here. Of course, we never say that concept is to blame for anything that's a misnomer. But I would say, what you're pointing to, David, is the way that intensity can be used for different political projects. And I think that just, for me, leaves me with questions about, is it that intensity? is a useful concept for politics, but also needs to be bolstered and in dialogue with other concepts? Or is it the case that intensity is actually not a particularly useful concept for politics? And I don't know the answer to that, in part because I'm still working through how useful I think intensity is for other things, like understanding consciousness outside of a techno scientific paradigm. But I think what this definitely shows us, at least, is that the concept of intensity is so open to interpretation that it has a lot of potential, rich potential.
David: 57:54
Yeah, intense potential.
Ellie: 57:55
Yeah, for understanding human life, whether it's like the rocker teenager or these left and right wing versions of accelerationism.
David: 58:05
Yeah, so, is it useful? In the words of Aristotle: more or less.
Ellie: 58:12
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