World in Deleuze’s reconstruction of the ontology of univocity

Abstract

Overcoming the tradition of metaphysics’ forgetting of the world and restoring the principal status of the world is the fundamental assertion of the movement of 20th century’s philosophical cosmology, and the ontology of univocity which is the centrepiece of Deleuze’s metaphysics of difference can be considered precisely as an important moment of this movement. Following the footsteps of Karl Lowith and Eugen Fink both of whom strive to surpass the traditional metaphysics in its medieval theological and modern subjectivist figures and think the World-Nature in a non-metaphysical manner, Deleuze has been well aware of the significance of Heraclitean original intuition of the world for the construction of ontology, that is to say, the ontology worthy of the name should be founded upon the World, be it cosmic or chaosmic, which is of a non-numerical unicity and of which both the divine and the human are only the modalities. Furthermore, he deepens this intuition through a reworking of Spinozism, especially the Spinozean theory of attributes as doubly infinite univocal forms and ultimately poses the Heraclito-Spinozean Nature-World as the common ontological condition of both the infinite and the finite and as the principle of individuation of all the intraworldy spatiotemporal beings. Hereby under the influence of the two German philosophers and through a deepening of their Heracliticism, Deleuze has established his own theory of World-Nature, i.e. ontology of univocity which has found its clearest and most profound expression in his creative interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of attributes.