From Philosophy to Spiritual Science – Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon on Gilles Deleuze and Rudolf Steiner

Introduction: From Philosophy to Spiritual Science

1.

In Riddles of Philosophy Rudolf Steiner writes that the future development of philosophy requires it to take a new step. The conception and experience of thinking, understood and practiced as a reflection and representation of the world, will have to give way to a radical transformation through which philosophy metamorphoses into a spiritual science. Such a development lies inherent in tendencies of the philosophical tradition itself, Steiner suggests, and “a pursuit of these innate tendencies leads the soul to the recognition of its own supersensible nature” (GA 18, 627). Steiner writes that

Such a spiritual science requires a radical transformation of the forces of cognition, and Steiner claims his own work to be based on a methodologically grounded transformation of thinking and perception, outlined in his philosophical-anthroposophical works. There is thus understood an inherent continuity between the philosophical-epistemological work and the form of a spiritual empiricism that Steiner claims Anthroposophy to be an expression of. Philosophical thinking, when developed according to the principles laid out in Steiner’s epistemology, is said to give way to an esoteric spiritual science. As Hartmut Traub writes, one “may even interpret this transformation from philosophy to esotericism as a metamorphosis of Steiner’s philosophy. However, the philosophical and intellectual basis of this transformation must not be abandoned or even thrown off: it is a constitutive-stabilizing factor in the new form”.¹

Steiner terms the ensuing new spiritual form of research ‘imaginative cognition’ and qualifies it as a direct perception and participation in the living forces constitutive of ordinary human consciousness.² These forces in turn are characterized as an ‘etheric life’ which expresses itself in all living phenomena, but is, in itself, a supersensible realm permeating all material-physical and psychological processes.³ In the book Cosmology, Religion and Philosophy Steiner claims ancient philosophy to have originated from an experience of this spiritual life, and expects philosophy in the future to regain a direct relation to it:

This leads to the question whether any such philosophical development can be perceived today and brought in relation to the fundamental ideas behind Steiner’s concept of a spiritual science.

The following article sets out to critically answer this question in the affirmative. It does so by taking the work of the philosopher and anthroposophist Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon as point of departure, and on this basis shows that Rudolf Steiner’s concept of a spiritual science can be related to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his co-author Félix Guattari.⁴ Thus, a kind of triangulation between Rudolf Steiner, Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon and Gilles Deleuze will form the conceptual basis for the present article. While Steiner’s s idea of a spiritual science is the underlying topic, the textual basis will be Ben-Aharon’s publications on the philosophy of Deleuze as it relates to Rudolf Steiner’s ideas about spiritual science, and central works of Deleuze and Guattari. Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon published an extensive treatment on the question of how a spiritual science can be created based on the works of Steiner in 1995 in The New Experience of the Supersensible. Since then, a number of publications that treat this topic has emerged from Ben-Aharon, and within the scene of anthroposophical literature, his works arguably stands out as the most rigorous and systematic treatment of this question, while at the same time making claims to a realization of spiritual cognition. In his review of Ben-Aharon’s book Cognitive Yoga, David Adams described it as “a most extraordinary book – probably the most extraordinary book that has been written within anthroposophy since the original work of Rudolf Steiner.”⁵ Others have voiced critical concerns about Ben-Aharon’s work, notably among them Andreas Neider and Franz Hofner in their review of The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century in Die Drei, claiming Ben-Aharon’s account of his spiritual cognition to be inadequate⁶ or based on a subjective projection.⁷ In Ben-Aharon’s work the conception of spiritual science developed by means of Steiner’s work has also been brought in connection to contemporary philosophy from the 20th Century, and this makes the basis for the present study. In the context of Steiner research, this study can be placed in relation to what Hartmut Traub and Marcelo da Veiga point to as a fundamental question, namely “the possibility of autonomous spiritual or supersensible cognition developed according to the specific principles postulated by Steiner.”⁸ The article approaches the question of such a possibility by means of a comparative reading of Ben-Aharon and Deleuze in order to bring to light converging lines of thought. By this means it also contributes to a contemporary contextualization of Steiner’s idea of a spiritual science.

After situating Deleuze in relation to esoteric and occult philosophy and tradition, Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon’s treatment of Deleuze’s philosophy will be outlined. This section will focus on the notion of a spiritual death-process behind the constitution of human consciousness, and how a spiritual science is depicted as dependent on a thinking that can attain this individuating process so as to be able to research the relation between empirical and supersensible consciousness. A discussion of central texts by Deleuze and Guattari follows which aims to show how Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and their notion of a ‘nomad’ or ‘minor’ science can be understood in relation to the idea of a spiritual science. The article ends by discussing how Ben-Aharon’s interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical apparatus can advance our understanding of this philosophy with regard to central problems of spiritual science.

Situating Deleuze in relation to Esoteric Philosophy and Steiner’s ‘Spiritual Science’

2.

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze has received widespread attention in the anglophone academic world, especially in the last twenty years, and the English commentary has grown exponentially. As part of this, the work to unearth Deleuze’s many unorthodox and previously less well-known sources and influences has led to his esoteric and occult leanings also being brought to light. While Deleuze’s thinking primarily engages the philosophical canon, his work also references and draws on a number of esoteric and occult thinkers and strands of thought. In the article ‘The Somnambulist and the Hermaphrodite: Deleuze and Johann de Montereggio and Occultism’ Christian Kerslake points out that Deleuze’s own concession to an “esoteric history of differential philosophy”⁹ has been overlooked in scholarship.

Kerslake writes that according to the historian and philosopher Sarane Alexandrian, the notion of a mathesis universalis that Malfatti and Wronski employ was used “to denote the conjugation of metaphysics and mathematics in a scientia Dei, or science of God” and that “Deleuze explicitly says that there is a mathesis universalis that corresponds to his theory of Ideas”.¹¹

In addition to Kerslake, who also published the book Deleuze and the Unconscious (2007a) which unearths a number of other esoteric and occult authors’ influence on Deleuze, Joshua Ramey has studied Deleuze’s philosophy in light of the western hermetic tradition in The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal (2012). While these studies show that Deleuze’s philosophy draws on several thinkers that belong to an esoteric strand of thought, there is in his writings no sign that he read or related to the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. On a textual basis, the closest may be Deleuze’s reference to D. H. Lawrence’s book Fantasia of the Unconscious (1923) in which an account of the anatomy of subtle etheric and astral bodies is given. In an essay called ‘To have Done with Judgement’, Deleuze writes that the body without organs – a name taken from the playwright Antoine Artaud – “is an affective, intensive, anarchist body that consists solely of poles, zones, thresholds, and gradients. It is traversed by a powerful, nonorganic vitality”.¹² He then continues to relate this body with Lawrence’s account who, Deleuze writes, “paints a picture of such a body, with the sun and moon as its poles, with its planes, its sections, and its plexuses”.¹³ Lawrence’s ideas are themselves in part derived from The Apocalypse Unsealed (1910) by James Pryse, who was an associate of the group of theosophists around Helena Blavatsky.

In the context of Steiner studies, Deleuze’s thinking has first been explored by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon. The main texts in which Ben-Aharon discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy is the essay ‘Spiritual Science and Contemporary Philosophy in Dialogue’ published in Spiritual Science in the 21st Century, and the book The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art. In ‘Spiritual Science and Contemporary Philosophy in Dialogue’ Ben-Aharon contextualizes Deleuze in relation to anthroposophical ideas more generally, while the treatment in The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art is a more systematic exposition. In this book, the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari is used to portray what Ben-Aharon describes as a “science of the event”.¹⁴

In addition to these explicit treatments of Deleuzian thought there are also implicit connections in Ben-Aharon’s work. In The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art, Ben-Aharon announced that in his forthcoming book Cognitive Yoga he will go more into detail of what is outlined as the science of the event.¹⁵ Ben-Aharon writes in this connection that what Deleuze and Guattari name a ‘body without organs’ is “one of the first virtual creations actualized through the virtual actualization” and that the “process of virtual actualization outside of the organic body will be described in detail in my book on Cognitive Yoga”.¹⁶ However, in Cognitive Yoga the term ‘body without organs’ is no longer used and has been exchanged with the anthroposophical expression ‘etheric body.’ This exchange thus implies a connection between Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a body without organs of non-organic intensive life, and the concept of an etheric formative body of living time. We can also note the similarity between the subtitle of Cognitive Yoga – Making Yourself a New Etheric Body and Individuality – and the chapter (or ‘plateau’ as it is called) ‘How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?’ in A Thousand Plateaus where Deleuze and Guattari treat this question. Thus, even though Cognitive Yoga has almost no reference to Deleuze and Guattari, and uses a different terminology, we can note that there remains a continuation between Ben-Aharon’s work with Deleuze and Guattari in The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art and the account of his own creation of a spiritual science in Cognitive Yoga based solely on the works of Rudolf Steiner.¹⁷

In addition to Ben-Aharon’s work, the scholars Frederick Amrine and Bo Dahlin has also connected Deleuze’s philosophy to Rudolf Steiner. In ‘The magic formula we all seek: Spinoza + Fichte = x’ Amrine writes that “Deleuze’s ‘plane of immanence’ must be what Rudolf Steiner termed in his own late work a realm of ‘living working’, as opposed to the realm of ‘finished work’”.¹⁸ In another context, Amrine has also brought Deleuze in relation to Goethean ideas of “an alternative scientific method in which an imaginative faculty previously restricted to aesthetics – anschauende Urteilskraft, or ‘intuitive judgment’ – is transformed into the rigorous instrument of an expanded science.” According to Amrine Deleuze is “aligning himself directly with this Goethean counterparadigm”.¹⁹ Bo Dahlin has discussed Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy in relation to Steiner in several texts, especially in connection to educational philosophy. In the article ‘Gloves of Ice or Free Hands?’ Dahlin argues that “some of Steiner’s ideas are compatible – or resonate in harmony – with the nonrepresentational epistemologies of Deleuze”.²⁰ Dahlin here focuses on the virtual nature of the concept in Deleuze’s philosophy, comparing it to Steiner’s epistemology on the one hand and its relevance for our understanding of education and the process of open-ended learning related especially to aesthetics on the other. Mentioned should also be made of Scott E. Hicks’ The Resurrection of Thinking (2018) which engages with Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida and Levinas in relation to Steiner’s thinking.

Ben-Aharon on Deleuze and the Encounter with ‘Living Death’

3.

In the lecture ‘Spiritual Science and Contemporary Philosophy in Dialogue’ Ben-Aharon gives a short overview of French philosophy in the 20^th Century, tracing its roots to the German thinkers Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger, before he arrives at the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, characterizing him as

In order to approach how this future role and task comes to expression, Ben-Aharon quotes Deleuze and Guattari saying that “The sole purpose of philosophy is to be worthy of the event” – a statement which, he says, can serve as “a symptomatic signpost in the evolution of philosophy”.²² In The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art Ben-Aharon repeats this quotation and writes that this statement

But what is the event to which philosophy’s sole aim is to become worthy of? In ‘Spiritual Science and Contemporary Philosophy in Dialogue’ Ben-Aharon characterize the event as the experience of living time, “the ever pulsating, breathing, vibrating movement of universal immanent life”.²⁴ A philosophy whose aim is to become worthy of the event thus aspires to think life in its immanent immediate flux, as a universal, intensive and nonorganic reality. To think life in this way ‘expresses a profound shift of the whole nature and practice of thinking’ because thinking attains and becomes itself this intensive life. Deleuze’s many central concepts – such as difference, intensity, virtuality, the plane of immanence, the body without organs, and the Event – can thus be understood in relation to this transformation of thinking and new conception of life.

When thinking is spiritualized, Ben-Aharon claims, one experiences the essence of life as immanent, universal reality.²⁵ The vitalist and panpsychist image of the world that Deleuze’s philosophy gives expression to then becomes more than a merely theoretical postulate.²⁶ One lives this immanent life according to Ben-Aharon, and in Deleuze’s texts, he writes, we find an authentic expression of this transformation and Umstülpung of thinking into intensive, cosmic life.²⁷ However, Ben-Aharon stresses that this intensive experience of life has

In order to show this aspect is present in Deleuze’s thinking Ben-Aharon connects the first ‘signpost’ with a longer quotation, taken from an earlier book, The Logic of Sense, published in 1969. From the chapter ‘Twenty-First Series of the Event’ Ben-Aharon compiles the following quotation as an expression of what it means that philosophy becomes worthy of the event:

This brings us to the central problem of how, from this vantage point, death is no longer a negation of life, but an immanent part of it, and how the relation between life and death itself undergoes a transmutation in the Event. In Deleuze’s words, at this moment “death turns against death” such that it is death itself that dies and reveals “the figure which the most singular life takes on in order to substitute itself for me”. This transmutation and transubstantiation is central to Ben-Aharon’s reading of Deleuze because it expresses the very threshold in which the forces of life and death can be studied in their immanent relationship. Thus, what is significant is not merely the association of thinking with an intensive, non-organic life, but the relation this has to the constitution of normal human consciousness. If what distinguishes mystical and visionary experiences from a spiritual science is whether the spiritual experience produced can be used also to research how these experiences relate to the normal, organically bound human consciousness, then a spiritual science needs to find a way to empirically charting this domain of the threshold. That requires the researcher to see and study how this intensive life conditions normal empirical thinking and the consciousness bound to the organic domain, and observe what happens in and on this threshold.

Thus, this quote is read by Ben-Aharon as exemplifying the central problem in the constitution of an imaginative cognition and spiritual science. When thinking is metamorphosed into etheric life, the dying of this life into the constitution of human consciousness and representational thinking can be perceived and studied. And as we will see, Steiner describes the problem of how ordinary human consciousness emerges from the suppression and ‘dying’ of a superconscious spiritual vitality to be at the heart of the creation of ‘imaginative cognition’ and spiritual science.

Steiner on Spiritual Science and the Living Death

4.

In Steiner’s book The Riddles of the Soul, (originally translated as The Case for Anthroposophy) Anthroposophy or spiritual science is outlined as a form of cognition capable of perceiving representational cognition and thinking – or human consciousness in general – as based upon a spiritual death-process. The content of consciousness, or ‘representations,’ are spiritual life and experiences that have been ‘benumbed’ and ‘devitalized’ so as to emerge as conscious representations:

Following this quote, all knowledge that comes about from sense-perception and normal thinking is based upon an unconscious death-process. This claim lies at the basis for Steiner’s anthropology and is all-pervasive in his thinking. In everything from the pedagogical and medical to epistemological and cosmological ideas, the three-fold human being with its polarity between thinking and will, corresponding to that between death and life, can be found.

This distinction between consciousness emerging from a death-process, and the metabolic and will process as being fully immersed in the spiritual life of the cosmos, is given a more general articulation in Steiner’s late Leading Thoughts where he characterizes this process philosophically as the emergence of non-being or ‘picture-being’ within ‘the ocean of being’:

Finally, one of the mantras for the esoteric lessons of the ‘Michael school’ that Steiner installed towards the end of his life encapsulates the above problem in the phrase “Because you lose the power of thinking / In time’s annihilating stream” (GA 270a, 153).³⁰ Thus, the deadened ideas of the soul that form the relation to an outer, sense-perceptible reality, are part of a stream of living time’s annihilation through which the living forces of thinking are lost. And in Steiner’s view, this constitution of human consciousness is the emergence of non-being withing the ocean of being.

This ontological dimension has deep implications for epistemology. Deadened representations constitute normal, every-day consciousness, and to engage with knowledge-processes, the living dimension must also be understood and experienced. To think not only has a logical dimension of content, thinking also has a vital dimension of movement and rhythm which has to do with a life-process and, ultimately, a moral-ethical dimension. If the truth of the first aspect depends on representational coherence and conceptual consistency, the second dynamic dimension cannot be fully determined by these parameters. As a process taking place in the world, the very production of thought must be evaluated and perceived alongside the conceptual and representational content. This would imply to need to find again the life that, as Steiner says, is ‘suppressed’ in the formation of a normal representation – or normal consciousness in general – and relate this spiritual life to the dying life of consciousness: “Just as the deadened ideas of the soul can be related to the sense world, so can the living ideas apprehended by spiritual organs be related to the spiritual world” (GA 21, 26).

In Riddles of the Soul Steiner writes that the new form of cognition that arises in this way can be termed ‘imaginative’ (Ibid., 27). Imaginative cognition constitutes the first stage of a spiritual science, and its development is based on a transformation of thinking into living forces in which a central issue is the experience and perception of the death-process constitutive of normal, representational consciousness. This belongs to the central problem of the creation of a spiritual science in Steiner’s view.

In several of Ben-Aharon’s books, this process discussed and described as the central issue with regard to Steiner’s idea of a spiritual science. In addition to the conceptual outline of this process, Ben-Aharon also portrays it from an experiential point of view. So, for example in Cognitive Yoga where Ben-Aharon writes about the experience of a living death in the following way:

As we saw above, Ben-Aharon also interprets Deleuze as giving expression to a similar experience, and he thus understands Deleuze’s thinking to push philosophy towards a spiritual science, exemplified by the quotation from the ‘Twenty-First Series of the Event’ in The Logic of Sense. In effect, Deleuze’s philosophy thus appears to confirm Steiner’s expectation that philosophy in the future would move towards a spiritual science. But to critically affirm this, we need to look more closely how the relation between life and death figures in Deleuze’s thought, and explore in some detail what conceptions Deleuze and Guattari have of the relation between philosophy and science.

Death Present in the Living as Individuating Factor in Deleuze’s Philosophy

5.

Ben-Aharon quotes from Logic of Sense as exemplification of a thought that has attained its own differential relation between life and death. But does this process figure in Deleuze’s philosophy in a systematic way? One could object that Ben-Aharon relies on a statement that can be interpreted metaphorically, as a literary trope or idea that should not be taken as the expression of a factual experience. One way to approach this question is to see to what degree the idea of a living death immanent to life figures in Deleuze’s philosophy more generally and systematically.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze portrays the theme of death from two different aspects or point of view. The first concerns the idea of “death present in the living” as individuating factor.³² The other is encapsulated in his claim that “there is an experience of death” connected to the creation of thinking in thought.³³

In a dense and complex section in the second chapter of Difference and Repetition Deleuze develops an account of individuation where he reinterprets a number of psychoanalytic concepts according to his own ontology. The central issues here is how he describes the formation of the ego and the thinking cogito as emerging from the birth of a (third) synthesis of time which is characterized as a pure and empty form of time. Eventually this pure and empty form of time is equated with a death present in the living:

The pure and empty form of time emerges in the third synthesis on the basis of which the ego and the cogito gradually establishes itself. As such, he presents the image of human individuation grounded upon a death present in the living. This death present in the living is an intensive death or a cancellation of the intensive differences that animate all temporal and living processes. From the virtual plane an intensive field of individuation, in which intensive difference relate to intensive difference, drives all individuating processes.

But within this field that produces the actual, human self-consciousness is individuated when the death present in the pure and empty form of time is folded upon itself. The human ego emerges when a form of time is abstracted from the sentient and living actualizing time, folded upon itself, and becomes narcissistic. This narcissistic ego, Deleuze writes, is “the phenomenon which corresponds to the empty form of time without filling it”.³⁵ Human individuation is grounded upon this living death-process because, as Deleuze writes, death “is inscribed in the I and the self, like the cancellation of difference in a system of explication, or the degradation which compensates for the processes of differenciation”.³⁶ The cogito, as the center of thinking self-consciousness, emerges by means of a ‘crucification’ of this intensive difference, or nonorganic life:

Deleuze thus presents an elaborate account of individuation that share a resemblance to Steiner’s explanation of how human consciousness emerges from a devitalization and suppression of life. Thinking and ordinary human consciousness is “a flower of continuous unconscious death”, to use an expression of Ben-Aharon,³⁸ because a dead time becomes the foundation for thinking: “It is the empty form of time … which causes thought to function – in other words, the entire machine of determination and the indeterminate”.³⁹

But if ordinary consciousness is a life is begotten from a spiritually living death process, then the opposite happens in the constitution of a transcendental empiricism, which Deleuze portrays in Difference and Repetition as the true act of creation which engenders “‘thinking’ in thought”.⁴⁰ Above we saw how Ben-Aharon reads the passage from Logic of Sense on the Event as expressing a transmutation of the living death process underlying the formation of ordinary thinking consciousness. When Deleuze writes that “death turns against death” and “loses itself in itself” and a “most singular life substitutes itself for me”,⁴¹ he gives expression to the very metamorphosis of thinking, from thought as acts of determination grounded upon the pure and empty form of time, to an experience of the creation of this empty form of time underlying thought. In the account in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze therefore writes that in the creation of thinking in thought, the thinker is “abstracting time from all content in order to separate out the pure form”.⁴² Because this is the very foundation for the ego and the cogito, the releases of the pure and empty dead form of time at the heart of the subject implies a radical metamorphosis of thinking and consciousness into intensive, differential life. And from this vantage point, the third synthesis of time is lived through, which is why Deleuze also writes that there “is an experience of death which corresponds to this third synthesis”.⁴³

The differential of life and death that constitutes human consciousness, and which is the experimental and experiential problem to be lived through in the creation of imaginative cognition can thus be found also in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. A death immanent to life, present in the living, is the central individuating factor, and this factor is experienced and individuated when transcendental empiricism becomes operative.

In Deleuze’s oeuvre he returns to this theme several places, and it constitutes a central topic not only in his account of the creation of a transcendental empiricism, but also in his ontology. Taking up ideas from Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson and Dun Scotus, Deleuze develops an ontology of being as becoming. This ontology of becoming is conceptualized as process taking place between a virtual plane of immanence, an intensive field of differentiation and individuation, and the actualized forms and differences. In this ontology Life is no longer tied to the living, to organic form, but is co-extensive with becoming itself. The virtual and intensive plane of immanence is a powerful non-organic Life implicated in all actualization and individuation. As a consequence, death can no longer be conceived of primarily as “an indivisible and decisive event”, as he writes in the book Foucault.⁴⁴ Before and beyond the death of the living being and individual person there is a more fundamental dimension of death “as being coextensive with life and as something made up of a multiplicity of partial and particular deaths”.⁴⁵ Similarly, in What is Philosophy? death “appears as a pure event whose variations are coextensive with life”.⁴⁶

In A Thousand Plateaus the theme occurs a number of times, and in the plateau ‘November 20, 1923: Postulates of Linguistics’ Deleuze and Guattari develop a semiotics of this vitalism in which language, or the enunciation of a statement, is treated as a ‘death-sentence’: “Language is not life; it gives life orders. Life does not speak; it listens and waits. Every order-word … carries a little death-sentence – a Judgement, as Kafka put it”.⁴⁷ Because this ‘dead’ virtuality of sense is everywhere inserted into becoming by means of language, in effect, “death is everywhere, as that ideal, uncrossable boundary separating bodies, their forms, and states, and as the condition, even initiatory, even symbolic, through which a subject must pass in order to change its form or state”.⁴⁸ However, to the death-sentence of beings who inhabit and master language there also belongs a counter-pole or opposite side. Language is not only the death of the order-word, ordering the world in representation, and exerting power, but also a freeing of thought through which death can become a line of flight. Therefore, the task is “not to eliminate death, but to reduce it or make it a variation itself”.⁴⁹

In connection with this polarity of language as a death-sentence and a line of flight – death as the expressed of the statement, and line of flight as the potentiality of becoming at the limit of language – Deleuze and Guattari write that this “is an appropriate place to bring up the opposition between minor sciences and major sciences”.⁵⁰ The problem of a death immanent to life in Deleuze and Guattari’s ontology, and how this differential limit between life and death figures in language and science, thinking and ‘experience’, thus brings us to the next section; namely how they portray philosophy as a ‘minor’ or ‘nomad’ science whose operation coincides with the creation of intensive concepts capable of retaining the intensive life of the Event.

Deleuze and Guattari’s Philosophy as ‘Nomad’ and ‘Minor’ Science

6.

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari differentiates philosophy from science and art and determine their respective activities and their mutual relationships. While philosophy is said to be the domain of the creation of concepts, and art the creation of sensations, science establishes “functions that are presented as propositions in discursive systems”.⁵¹ Concepts, functions and sensations are thus the three domains corresponding to the activities of philosophy, science and art.

These three activities are further distinguished by the fact that philosophical concepts are said to be intensive and virtual events, the sensations created by works of art ‘monuments’ that ‘incorporate’ the event, while functions presented in discursive systems relate to empirical relations, or states of affairs.⁵² Thus, a distinction is here made between science as an activity which creates functions, relating primarily to empirical states of affairs – presented in discursive systems and as such representational in nature – and philosophy (and art) whose object is the virtual and intensive state of the event, and whose form of thought is explicitly said to be non-representational and intensive.

Deleuze and Guattari explain philosophy and science’s difference in the relation to the infinite movement of the virtual. Whereas philosophy takes place within the virtual’s infinite movement, science relates to the material actualizations of the virtual, which proceeds by means of a “fantastic slowing down”:

Philosophy operates with thought at infinite speed, while science establishes functions that depend on the slowing down of intensive movement, an operation that corresponds to the very actualization of matter. Science thus establishes reference to the actual as well as the virtual as the transcendental plane of intensive forces conditioning the sensible or states of affairs, while philosophy makes thought travel on a plane of immanent movement. Science extracts its data from experiments, thereby creating scientific functions that capture the “pressure of the virtual” in actualization,⁵⁴ while philosophy, which depends no less on experimentation, “wants to know how to retain infinite speeds while gaining consistency, by giving the virtual a consistency specific to it”.⁵⁵

Thus, scientific thought depends on a plane of reference and discursivity, while philosophical thought is a creativity immanent to the infinite movement of the virtual. For philosophy, the question then becomes knowing how to retain infinite speed while gaining consistency in the creation of a new virtual. This element of philosophy as a spiritual practice of creativity thus makes a difference with regard to the virtual itself. The virtual infinite movement that conditions the sensible – intensity as “the being of the sensible”⁵⁶ in Difference and Repetition – Deleuze and Guattari also designate as chaos. Chaos, they write, “is a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence”.⁵⁷

The infinite potential of the chaotic virtual is distinguished from the virtual that has gained consistency. If science relates to a descending line from this chaotic virtual to states of affairs, creating scientific functions that express the pressure of the virtual in actualization, philosophy moves in the opposite direction, from states of affairs to the virtual plane of immanence, introducing novelty on this virtual plane itself:

Philosophy follows the ascending line of counter-actualization that goes from the empirical states of affairs to the virtual plane of immanence, creating a concept that gives consistency to infinite movement, thereby creating a new virtuality. The operation of philosophy is different from science in that it goes in the opposite direction, but as we will see, following Ben-Aharon it is itself a form of spiritual science of the event in that it develops the means to retain the event in its virtual state.

This becomes evident when we relate the distinction between philosophy and science in What is Philosophy? to the distinction between two forms of science developed in A Thousand Plateaus. In this book, Deleuze and Guattari writes that

In A Thousand Plateaus, the distinction between philosophy and science does not occur. But if we look at their determination of the two types of science, this distinction comes close to what in What is Philosophy? is distinguished as philosophical creation of concepts and scientific creation of functions. Both accounts operate with the same essential distinction between representation, reproduction and discursive system on the one hand, and immanent following and retaining of infinite movement on the other. In the science which reproduces, nature is approached as something external to the scientific operation in relation to which one finds constants and determines laws. The scientist is watching the flow from the bank. We can recognize here the basic element from the account of What is Philosophy? in which science gives reference to the virtual through the creation of functions. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari call this type of science the “royal science” of the state apparatus.⁶⁰

But there is also a scientific procedure which consists in ‘following’ in which the operation and experimentation cannot be undertaken independent of the observational capacities and forces of the scientist. As opposed to a scientific operation which is dependent on a fixed point of view, external to the phenomenon to be reproduced as knowledge, following requires the scientist to enter the flow. He or she must explore the material at hand in order to find the singular points at which the forces animating matter can be sensed and followed. A continuous variation of the variables depends on employing a sensible intuition that follows and senses intensive difference as a continuous productive force of expression, rather than extracting constants and deducing laws.

This science of following is therefore called a “nomad” or “ambulant” science.⁶¹ Corresponding to this distinction between the royal and nomad science of reproducing and following are two contrasting images of thought that Deleuze and Guattari characterize as ‘arborescent’ and ‘rhizomatic’:

Science which depends on reproduction is based on an image of thought that is fundamentally arborescent. Thought operates inductively or deductively, according to laws, and methodologies are supposed to secure the relation to truth. Behind this notion of science an image of thought is operating according to an arborescent, hierarchical model of logical relations. The unfolding of scientific truths grows from axiomatics and fundamental natural laws and principles. Beyond such fixed axioms, this scientific thought cannot go, and would have to grapple in the air and revert to speculative propositions. The ‘function’ can only represent the pressure of the virtual in the process of actualization.

Opposed to this arborescent image of thought, Deleuze and Guattari develop their famous rhizome, the rhizomatic image of thought. As the quote states, this is a thought that grapples with exterior forces. As the image of a rhizome implies, such thinking does not follow the logical categorization in which concepts are treated as representational content to be determined in a systematic relationship. Here, knowledge does not depend on subjective representation of external reality but consists in a much more active problem through which thought grapples with exterior forces into which it is inserted. In the formulation of What is Philosophy?; how to retain infinite speeds while gaining consistency? This change from thinking as representation and establishment of theorems and essences into a grappling with intensive forces exterior to the subjective act of thinking, requires a transformation: an intensification, differentiation, and spiritualization which makes thinking able to follow the movement of intensive forces, escaping the field of gravity which corresponds to the representational image of thought, and enter the virtual plane of immanence.

Corresponding to how philosophy and the creation of a concept gives consistency to the virtual, by retaining infinite movement, while science depends on a slowing down of movement, so in A Thousand Plateaus one scientific procedure is described as following “absolute movement,” while the other is concerned with “relative movement”.⁶³ For Deleuze and Guattari, movement is relative when the changing relation between bodies is determined relative to ‘a body’ considered as a unity or a ‘one’ and the space it moves through. Contrary to this, absolute movement, what they also call ‘speed’, “constitutes the absolute character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth space”.⁶⁴ In other words, this scientific procedure does not relate movement to pregiven unities but follows movement as the very constitution of a body considered as a multiplicity. This corresponds to the distinction between infinite movement of philosophy and the slowing down of movement in the formation of a scientific function in the account in What is Philosophy?. This is why the (transcendental) empiricism of the science of following does not remain external to the object of research, watching it from the bank and reproducing the phenomenon in functions, but follows the genetic and constitutive movement of nature as ‘becoming’:

When thinking reaches absolute or infinite movement, perception no longer takes place in the relation between a subject and an object, but follows the infinite movement constituting the absolute character of a body. In effect, perception is raised to a plane of immanence on which it takes place in the midst of things, as the very principle of composition.⁶⁶

The notion of a plane of immanence of absolute, or infinite, movement is also described by Deleuze and Guattari as a ‘smooth space.’ In the quote above a further qualification of the nature of this absolute movement of the plane of immanence is given when they write that it constitutes “the absolute character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth space in the manner of a vortex, with the possibility of springing up at any point”.⁶⁷ The absolute movement of smooth space or plane of immanence is here associated with the vortex. While Deleuze and Guattari relate this idea to Michel Serres’ book on Lucretius’ fluid model of physics and atomism, it is also apparent that they describe an experiential element of entering the intensive movement of smooth space: “one escapes the force of gravity to enter a field of celerity; when one ceases to contemplate the course of a laminar flow in a determinate direction, to be carried away by a vortical flow”.⁶⁸

This experiential element in their description of the nomad science is crucial in that it is precisely the metamorphosis of thinking itself that enables this type of science. Rather than operating with an exterior relation to what is reproduced – watching the flow from the banks – this is a scientific experimentation that depends on following the intensive forces behind actualized forms. It is thought raised to absolute movement, moving within the substance of being as intensive difference, released from the gravitational field of the physical world of actualities: “spiritual voyages effected without relative movement, but in intensity, in one place: these are part of nomadism”.⁶⁹

The distinction between philosophy and science in What is Philosophy? is thus comparable to the distinction between nomad and royal science in A Thousand Plateaus. These are like the science of the virtual and actual, even if both relate to the virtual-actual relation, one is concerned with the virtual in itself, the other with the actual and the pressure of the virtual within actualities. One extracts concepts that capture the event as becoming, the other sets up functions that determine relations between virtual potentiality and actuality.

According to Ben-Aharon this polarity between the virtual plane of immanence, what Deleuze and Guattari also call the ‘smooth space’, and the world of actualized subjects and objects, or ‘striated space’, can be related to the distinction Steiner makes between a physical space-time and an etheric “counter-space” (GA323, 274ff). In the same way that this difference between physical and etheric is expressed by different principles, such as gravity and levity, centric pressuring and peripheral suctional forces, and Euclidean and Projective geometries, Deleuze and Guattari enumerate similar properties to the striate and smooth space-times:

As opposed to striated, the smooth space is characterized by very different principles:

Similar to how Deleuze and Guattari set up the governing principles of striated space-time, the physical world of material objects and their forces is governed by gravity, centrically related forces and a Euclidian geometry of parallelism and finite measurements. On the other hand, the virtual and intensive smooth space or plane of immanence is characterized by Deleuze and Guattari as a field of celerity populated by vortical movements that escapes the field of gravity, corresponding to the etheric forces that work suctional from the cosmic periphery, creating a polarity of contraction and expansion in a field of levity. And as Deleuze and Guattari write, the qualitative opposition of these principles are not simply quantifiable, but conditions coextensive with the two different forms of science developed above.

Ben-Aharon on Deleuze and Guattari as a Spiritual Science of the Event

7.

From the above account we can now return to Ben-Aharon’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari and see how their philosophy can be understood as a spiritual science in which the central problem of creating an imaginative cognition can be observed. In The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art Ben-Aharon singles out three main operations of the science of the event, found also in Deleuze and Guattari. These are “‘de-actualization’ (also called counter-effectuation), ‘virtual actualization’ and ‘re-actualization’ (expression)”.⁷²

De-actualization is also described as “unhinging the thinking of the event from its bodily- and organic foundations” in Ben-Aharon’s account.⁷³ This operation can be understood as synonymous with the line that moves from states of affairs to the virtual in What is Philosophy?. In Difference and Repetition the process by means of which this takes place is described as breaking out of the given ‘dogmatic image of thought’ that operates on the basis of already constituted faculties in a ‘common sense’ and where ‘recognition’ serves as the implicit model for what it means to think.⁷⁴ In this model, a presupposed pre-existing subject carries out acts of thinking whose determination can be more or less adequate to the truth, and where conceptual determination implicitly relates to a pre-given self-identical ‘object’. But this whole model of thought is based on a mixture of elements (memories, sensations, acts of thinking, imaginations etc.), and this mixture denatures thinking and perception in their relation to the world. In Difference and Repetition Deleuze’s account of the process of de-actualization depends on the discovery of a difference at the heart of the cogito being fused with an intensive difference encountered in the sensible domain. This raises sensibility to its transcendent exercises Deleuze writes, and a ‘disjointed’ exercise of the faculties follows from it.⁷⁵ This is described as a fuse which unhinges the faculties from their common sense and mutual involvement in ‘recognition’, and returns them to the elements from which they originate, effectively metamorphosing the faculties into metaphysical organs of the intensive and virtual domain.⁷⁶ In this way, transcendental empiricism is established.

A similar process is described in Ben-Aharon’s books in many places. Using Steiner’s epistemological starting point of the directly given picture of the world in Truth and Science (SKA 2: WW, 31) as material for a meditative process, Ben-Aharon describes how a disjoining and unhinging of the faculties is made by means of “an actively produced non-relation between thinking and sense-perception”.⁷⁷ The goal of this practice

In practicing de-actualization, the formative force of actualization itself is released and become available “to operate in a free manner on the plane of virtual immanence and consistency and actualize the event of becoming in its pure virtual flowing stream”.⁷⁹ This leads to the next operation, which Ben-Aharon terms ‘virtual actualization’ and which he described as “navigating with its freed forces in the streams of non-organic, immanent cosmic life, and working creatively on this plane”.⁸⁰

If we look for the equivalent in Deleuze and Guattari, then to ‘navigate’ in this field of intensive forces is expressed as the task of ‘following’ and grapple with intensive forces that stand in a continuous changing and differential relationship. As a scientific operation this means to become with the event, on the plane of its composition. Thought and ‘experience’ are described as having reached absolute movement, and perception as taking place in the midst of things, as part of the absolute movement that composes them, as events.

On this plane of immanence one follows, navigates, and works creatively in order to effectuate virtual actualizations. Above we saw how Deleuze and Guattari also write that philosophy, by means of its operation, creates a new virtual, a virtual which “is no longer the chaotic virtual but rather virtuality that has become consistent, that has become an entity formed on a plane of immanence that sections the chaos”.⁸¹

But what is the reason behind this operation, what gives consistency to a new virtual entity formed on the plane of immanence? Following Ben-Aharon’s account, it is the forces released from de-actualization of representational consciousness that makes it possible to operate and work creatively on the plane of immanence. But if these actualizing forces of individuation and materialization are the forces of a living death immanent to the spiritual life of the universe, then this means that it is the forces of a living death that become free and available in de-actualization. This means that the basis for virtual actualization or the formation of a new virtual consistency is a virtual ‘alchemical’ transformation of the forces of life and death into a new compound. This would be consistent both with Deleuze’s ‘Twenty-first series of the Event’ in Logic of Sense and with the experience of death in the creation of thinking in Difference and Repetition. The emphasis in What is Philosophy? of a new virtual consistency being created, in which infinite movement is retained, add a different perspective. But read through the lens of Ben-Aharon’s work, one and the same theme of assimilating death into life can be seen.

In The New Experience of the Supersensible Ben-Aharon presents in detail this creative formation as a fusing and transformation of living death and dying life into a new etheric substance – or virtual compound. When ordinary, representational thinking and experience is de-actualized and turned into pure intensive forces, the relations that hold between past, present and future is changed. What is normally considered the present is mediated by the physical body’s organization of sensations and experiences. But in and as this presence, Ben-Aharon writes, a freezing and temporal preservation of past elements is effectuated, creating a frozen present as foundation for self-consciousness. Thus, what appears as a living present is in reality already past, or a ‘dead’ time. This dead past, preserved and disposed as the bodily mediated present consciousness, conceals the living future, Ben-Aharon writes. But when this representational consciousness, built from elements of past time, is de-actualized, the living future begins to press and intensify. Thinking leaves reflection and the representational and subjective interiority, and enters into an intensive relation to intensive forces. It changes from reflection to intuition. In this process, dead, past time, and living, future time is transformed into a living becoming that takes place and moves more and more within this intensive field of virtual individuation. And this is the basis for the creation of imaginative cognition:

Virtual actualization operates with the forces freed in and through de-actualization, when – using the expression from Deleuze and Guattari – “one escapes the force of gravity to enter a field of celerity; when one ceases to contemplate the course of a laminar flow in a determinate direction, to be carried away by a vortical flow”.⁸³ If this is the movement of de-actualization or counter-actualization from states of affairs to the virtual, then according to Ben-Aharon the creation of new virtual consistencies or ‘virtual actualizations’ requires learning “how to build in the life stream outside a permanent location or base, a ‘cocoon like’ virtual construction … shaped as a standing-flowing vortex in the external virtual world”.⁸⁴ In The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art the formation of this new virtual is described as the assimilation of the living death (the intensive force of actualization) within the field of forces in the following way:

The correspondence between the vortical shape of the absolute movement on the plane of immanence (or smooth space) in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, and this new virtual organ in Ben-Aharon’s description, is apparent and appears to be significant. The vortical movement that, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, carries one away when one enters smooth space-time, is in Ben-Aharon’s account described not only as part of the de-actualizing movement in which one escapes gravity and enters the field of celerity as a ‘spiritual voyage … in intensity’.⁸⁶ The central element is how this becomes the beginning of a new virtual actualization in which infinite movement is retained and given consistency as a ‘standing-flowing’ vortex of metamorphosis. This intensive vortex is depicted as the encounter between intensive life and death taking place unconsciously in any incarnation and actualization, but also as the heart of the process through which a new virtual is given consistency as a consciousness sustaining virtual actualization.

From the above outline of how Ben-Aharon reads Deleuze and Guattari’s science of the event a significant perspective emerges on what lies behind Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that philosophy creates a new virtual. Consistent with how the relation between life and death figures in Deleuze’s ontology, in his account of individuation, and in the creation of thinking in thought, a future synthesis is created from weaving of the forces of life and death into each other as a new virtual consistency. The immanent relation between the living force of death (hiding behind concepts such as striation, contraction, slowing down, freeze-frame, identity, organism) and life in its free intensive state (expressed in concepts such as smooth space-time, expansion, vortical movement, difference) can be consciously actualized as the creation of a new virtual body of life. With this in mind, we can read the following passage where Deleuze and Guattari define what they call ‘the Event’ in a new way:

The actual practice and formative result of creating new virtuals or etheric bodies is depicted in detail by Ben-Aharon. The notion of a body without organs so central in Deleuze and Guattari’s work is said to be

As announced in this passage, in Cognitive Yoga Ben-Aharon goes into the details of this process as it relates to the formation of new organs of intensive and virtual life, organs that Deleuze and Guattari also claim belong to this body without any physical extensive organs:

Thus, even if Cognitive Yoga has left the philosophical vocabulary and reference to Deleuze and Guattari, one can regard this book as a ‘manual’ for virtual actualization, and thus as a continuation and concretization of the science of the Event.

In Ben-Aharon’s outline of the science of the event what follows the processes of de-actualization and virtual actualization is “re-actualizing the event back in the world of ever better physical, social and cognitive forms, that become increasingly more transparent and expressive of the event”.⁹⁰ The central idea in re-actualization thus understood is not simply a new actualization following de-actualization, but that the process of actualization itself retains a ‘memory’ of the virtual, or is accompanied by its virtual double in an increasingly conscious way.

An obvious aspect of this is Deleuze’s understanding of ‘style’ in philosophy. In his philosophy language is not a means to convey information and conceptual clarification but constructed in order to turn thought back on itself, to push it to the limit, and to induce movement in thought and create affects. In this sense his philosophy is itself a grand re-actualization, bringing thought in proximity to the process of counter-actualization and ‘virtual actualization’.

In Ben-Aharon’s analysis this movement from the virtual to the actual as a conscious re-actualization is depicted as a working upon the body and its forces, showing how re-actualization is prepared and enacted and involves conscious work on the forces of the organic brain and body.⁹¹ The central aspect in this process is the creation of a virtual memory into time whereby the new material-physical actualizations of form carry a surplus of intensity such that consciousness does not exhaust itself in actuality and form, but remains in touch with the event behind physical formations.⁹²

Summary and Outlook

8.

Steiner expected the development of philosophy in the future to move towards a spiritual science. The present article has considered the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in light of Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon’s work and argued that the notions of a ‘nomad’ or ‘minor’ science in A Thousand Plateaus, ‘transcendental empiricism’ in Difference and Repetition, and the function and purpose of philosophy presented in What is Philosophy? can be read as concerned with the creation of what Steiner terms ‘imaginative cognition’, and which constitutes the beginning of a spiritual science. As part of this comparative reading, elements that have so far has received little attention in the literature on Deleuze and Guattari have been brought forth, namely the problem of an immanent relation between life and death in the creation of thinking, and how this relates to Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that philosophy’s sole aim is to be worthy of the Event understood as the creation of a new virtual. Based on Ben-Aharon’s spiritual scientific work and his reading of Deleuze and Guattari, this creation of a new virtual can be understood as coming about through an assimilation of death into life, fusing a ‘living death’ with a ‘dying life’ in and as the creation of new virtual-etheric bodies.

Having shown a number of converging lines of thought, a critical point raised by Ben-Aharon with regard to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy should also be outlined. This is connected to what Ben-Aharon presents as a deeper understanding of the metaphysical reality of the Event of transformation and transubstantiation. While this can only be indicated here, the central issue can be said to concern the true nature of the ‘I’ and the condition for its spiritual cognition and experience.

In Steiner’s concept of a spiritual science, the impersonal field of forces that figure as the object of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism or nomadic science belongs to what Steiner terms imaginative cognition. However, Steiner also develops further stages of a spiritual science which he terms ‘inspiration’ and ‘intuition’. In Die Stufen der höheren Erkenntnis Steiner writes about a challenge and danger that the experiences belonging to the imaginative cognition pose:

This can be directly related to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy in that, according to Ben-Aharon, Deleuze in his portrayal of the encounter and experience of living death does not reach beyond the imaginative field of impersonal virtual-etheric forces. Operating in this world of living forces, Deleuze was, according to Ben-Aharon, unable to fully fuse absolute life with absolute death such that the transformation and substitution of impersonal forces would reveal themselves as expressions and acts of the Being through which the human is given back her Higher Self. The following passage in which Ben-Aharon addresses this deeper issue may therefore end this study: