Qi as intensity
(hundun, qi, form – virtual, intensive, actual)
Mapping of Chinese ideas on Deleuze’s ontology
1. Introduction
In order to describe human person, the Chinese and Western traditions have used different concepts and distinctions. While we are accustomed to a single binary (body-mind) or triple (body-mind-soul) distinction, in China several pairs or groups have been used (e.g. Jullien in his “Vital nourishment” has identified three binary distinctions, which all somehow correspond to the western body-mind duality, but only partially). From the several concepts used to describe human psychophysical constitution, I would like to pick out the notion of qi, which is the most famous of them in the West and has been largely investigated both in the Chinese tradition itself and also by Western scholars. I will not discuss all the different approaches taken, as it would both go beyond the time-frame and also beyond my capacities. I will pick up and develop only one idea: namely, to relate the concept of qi with the idea of intensities in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.
2. Deleuze
In his book, “Difference and repetition”, Deleuze tries to destroy the metaphysical tradition based on the notions of identity, similarity, analogy and oppositon, and he endeavors to build up a different ontology, based on the notion of difference, dissimilarity, disparity and ... . He lays this ontology out on three (or four) levels: virtuality, individualization, dramatization and actuality. Actually it is somewhat misleading to designate them as “levels”; perhaps it would be more justified to call them “phases” (phases of actualization and de-actualization).
1) virtuality is described – using terms borrowed from topology and mathematics – by “differential relations” and “singular points”. This is a level of mutual interpenetration (or “perplication”, as Deleuze also says) of its elements. The virtuality is interpenetrating, but – and this is very important – it is neither simple nor homogeneous.
A digression: This idea of virtual mulitplicity is crucial here (this idea was developed by Deleuze early in the 60-s, working on Bergson): he does not oppose “one” and “multiple” as the Greeks did (and who banned the multiplicity from the sphere of Ideas – or at least from the Idea, the idea of Good – because they must be simple and have no parts; Deleuze would argue that the problem is that they only had the idea of actual multiplicity, i.e. of mutual juxtaposition of elements and that they lacked the notion of virtual multiplicity, i.e. that of mutual interpenetration of elements.
Let’s return to Deleuze’s ontology.
2) Next there is the process of individualization and dramatisation. This is the sphere of intensities, where the initial interpenetration starts to be sorted out between different individuals (their different “fields of individuation”, with different zones of clarity and obscurity), but where the elements are not wholly juxtaposed yet, but are “implicated” in each other. This is not a mechanical process, because virtuality does not resemble actuality, and the different lines of individuation have to be created in a concrete, historical way – hence the notion of “dramatization”. For example, you are an embryo, you perform fabulous transformations which no adult form could endure, and even if we are guided by the blueprint of genetic material, nothing can be taken for granted in advance, but we have to live this dramatic process. Or when you develop a literary or philosophical idea: it is no mechanical work of writing down something pre-existent, but it has to be dramatically and often painfully created in its articulations.
3) Finally there is the final phase of actualization, the level of actuality, of actual forms and beings with their distinguishable qualities and extension. Here the elements juxtapose each other: in space (one part of an actualized body is situated next to another) and in time (one process takes place after another; they form an orderly temporal pattern).
Much could be said about these different levels (and Deleuze does explicit them quite in detail), but let us focus on the intermediate level or phase, that of intensities.
3. Zhuangzi
I would like to make a comparison between this deleuzian ontology and a fundamental Chinese cosmological idea. To illustrate the latter one, let us take a story of Zhuangzi (tr. by Watson, p. 123-4; Wade-Giles changed into Pinyin):
When Zhuangzi’s wife died, Hui Shi came to condole. As for Zhuangzi, he was squatting with his knees out, drumming on a pot and singing.
‘When you have lived with someone’, said Hui Shi, ‘and brought up children, and grown old together, to refuse to bewail her death would be bad enough, but to drum on a pot and sing – could there be anything more shameful?’
‘Not so. When she first died, do you suppose that I was able not to feel the loss? I peered back into her beginnings; there was a time before there was a life. Not only was there no life, there was a time before there was a shape. Not only was there no shape, there was a time before there was energy. Mingled together in the amorphous, something altered, and there was the energy; by alteration in the energy there was the shape, by alteration of the shape there was the life. Now once more altered she has gone over to death. This is to be companion with spring and autumn, summer and winter, in the procession of the four seasons. When someone was about to lie down and sleep in the greatest of mansions, I with my sobbing knew no better than to bewail her. The thought came to me that I was being uncomprehending towards destiny, so I stopped.’ (Zhuangzi, chapter 18)
莊子妻死，惠子弔之，莊子則方箕踞鼓盆而歌。惠子曰：“與人居長子，老身死，不哭亦足矣，又鼓盆而歌，不亦甚乎！”莊子曰：“不然。是其始死也，我獨何能無概然！察其始而本無生，非徒無生也，而本無形，非徒無形也，而本無氣。雜乎芒芴之間，變而有氣，氣變而有形，形變而有生，今又變而之死，是相與為春秋冬夏四時行也。人且偃然寢於巨室，而我噭噭然隨而哭之，自以為不通乎命，故止也。” (46/18/15-19)
What concerns us here is the development of the cosmological idea, expounded here, but I did not want to deprive you of the whole story and its dramatic context (and in Chinese philosophy, the context is very important).
What Graham translates with “amorphous”, is the Hundun (芒芴) or Chinese “chaos”. In the cosmogonic or genetic part of the story four phases are distinguished (in genetic order):
1) The original Hundun
2) Qi
3) forms
4) life
My idea here is that this kind of genesis can be interpreted in parallel with Deleuze:
1) Hundun as the original interpenetration of everything (a stadium before the distinction of “one, two, three and myriad things” of Laozi).
2) Qi as the phase of intensities, of individualization and dramatization. There are different accounts of qi as to its extension or differentiation. But at least it has already two aspects and is thus the stadium of “two” (yin qi and yangqi); some texts talk about six qi’s; and at the most it is as plural as the things, in the sense that to every individuated thing there corresponds a certain characteristic qi. But in any case it is clear that the qi is not yet the phase of the actualized, with the juxtaposition of elements: it is not possible to cut off a piece of qi (that is, the qi as it is in itself) in the way you can cut off a piece of wood from a stick, for instance.
3) Forms and Life as the level of actuality: the phase of distinguished and juxtaposed visible beings.
We can already see that the question, whether the qi is material or spiritual, is misplaced, because it does not fit in this kind of quasi-spatial dichotomy (i.e. in the conceptual space, where you have “the material” and outside of it “the spiritual”; “sensible” and “intelligible”; “this world” and “the other world” etc), but describes the temporal actualization (and afterwards in the story, re-virtualization) of beings.
4. Mutual benefit
What is the utility of this comparison? I believe that the benefit can be mutual. (1) On the one hand, Western thought has always been in pains to integrate the notion of qi, which seems to defy the Western notions and systems. Deleuze’s ontology is a very promising one in this sense, and although he conceived it already more than 40 years ago, it is still too little exploited. I think that his ontology can give us a framework to conceptualize some important Chinese notions like that of qi and to integrate them with the Western thought. It can thus be useful on the Chinese side, raising the prestige of Chinese philosophy, which even nowadays meets strong resistance in Western academic philosophical circles. (2) On the other hand it can give new life also to deleuzian philosophy, and not only in the sense that it can be used to make sense of Chinese ideas, as I just said, but also in the sense to somehow show the “reality” of the intensities (and accordingly also of the virtual) – not in the sense of a philosophical proof (the virtual needs no proof of reality, because it is the reality itself, one ontological aspect of the reality), but in the sense of rhetorical persuasion. Deleuze’s philosophy would find new practical extensions, because we must not forget that the concept of qi is also used in a more technical or concrete sense in different practical fields: e.g. the Traditional Chinese Medicine, calligraphy, poetry, methods of “vital nourishment” (e.g. qigong, wushu), etc. In China, the notion of qi has proved its practical utility for more than 2000 years, and perhaps in the Western soil it could find also new ingredients for growth.
My prediction or proposal is that the hope to “measure” the qi in the case of Chinese medicine or some qigong master, takes off from somewhat wrong presuppositions. If something can be measured in those experiments, then by definition it would not be the qi itself (the intensive), but its consequences (i.e. the actual, already actualized, more advanced stage of actualization). Because only the actual can be measured, because measurement is counting of spatially or temporarily juxtaposed elements; but by definition (according to my supposition here), these elements should not yet be juxtaposed in the phase of qi. It would be an illusion to search for some “mysterious” matter “behind” the ordinary one, which would be the qi. This works on the wrong presupposition of actuality (and its double, the potentiality or ideality in the aristotelian and platonic sense, which is simply a copy of actuality and similar to it (of course, in their ideological discourse, they turn it around and make the sensible and actual world a “copy” of the ideal).
In summary, I hope that this comparison would be useful for both Deleuze (and our Western thinking in general) and for China.