Jonathan Bennett and Gilles Deleuze on events

 Since Jonathan Bennett recently died, I've returned to his excellent book, Events and their Names. Hence these little thoughts. 

Jonathan Bennett’s Events and their Names is, like Gilles Deleuze’s Logique du Sens, an inquiry into the status of events and our ways of talking about them. However, the two philosophers take very different routes to the theorization of the event.

Deleuze, going back to the Stoic rejection of Platonism – the first reversal of Platonism in a series going up through the twentieth century – writes of the event as an extra-being – an opacity at the heart of becoming. Deleuze relies, for his sense of Stoic logic, on the work of the French scholar Emile Brehier, who reconstructed it, taking Stoicism out of its category as a purely practical philosophy.

This is Deleuze:

Why is every event fall within types such as plague, war, the wound, death ? Is this just a way of saying that there are more unhappy than happy events? No, since it is a questiion of a double structure in every event. In all events, there is a present moment of effectuation, that of the event incarnating itself in a state of things, an individual, a person, that which is designated when one says: here, the moment has come; and the future and past of the event are judged only as functions of that definitive present, of the point of view of that which incarnates it. But there is another part of the future and past of the event taken in itself that eludes any present, because it is free of the limitations of a state of things, being impersonal and pre-individual, neuter, neither general nor particular, eventum tantum… or rather which has no other present than that of the mobile instant that represents it, always doubled in the past-future, forming what must be called the counter-effectuation.”

 

This is certainly a different vocabulary than Bennett’s. Philosophers dramatize with their examples: Deleuze’s examples are derived, partly, from the Stoics, and partly from Deleuze’s elevated sense of the historical importance of the person. However, one can easily link certain elements – counter-effectuation to counter-factuals – to see connections in the total discourse on events.

 

Bennett’s book has a deflationary purpose: to reduce our logical anxieties about events by showing that events are really not basic kinds of things.

 

“One conclusion of this book will be that our event concept is adapted to the giving of rather small and indeterminate gobbets of information. That unfits it for bearing weight in disciplined theories such as those of semantics, ethics, "action theory", and philosophy of mind, in which philosophers have tried to put it to work; and the failures of those attempts (some of which will be examined later) can be traced to their putting onto our event concept a load it cannot carry.”

 

In order to make this argument, Bennett defines events in terms of a supervenience of on objects and facts:

 

“In shorthand, I shall say that events are supervenient entities, meaning that all the truths about them are logically entailed by and explained or made true by truths that do not involve the event concept. Similarly, all the truths about universities come from truths about people and buildings and equipment; all the truths about ecological niches come from truths about plants and animals and weather and terrain.”

 

Bennett is staking out a claim, here, that is absolutely opposed to all forms of process philosophy. His great opponent is those who read the supervenience relationship inversely. Bennett alludes to the work of Donald Williams.

 

“It is a view about items that Leibniz called "individual accidents" and

Williams called "tropes".  A trope is a case or instance of a property: My

house is a concrete particular that has whiteness and other properties;

whiteness is an abstract universal that is possessed by my house and other particulars; and the whiteness of my house is a trope, an abstract

particular. It is unlike my house in that all there is to it is whiteness, and it is unlike whiteness in that it pertains only to my house. Now, Williams has maintained that at the deepest metaphysical level my house and the universal whiteness are both collections of tropes, with different principles of colligation. What makes it the case that my house is white is just the fact that the whiteness of my house belongs to both collections.

 

According to this metaphysical scheme, substances and properties are

supervenient on tropes. To that can be added the plausible thesis that

events are tropes and that indeed the concept of a trope differs from the

concept of an event only in being slightly more general or abstract. The

result is a position implying that substances and properties are supervenient on tropes (including events), rather than vice versa.”

 

We are running into exactly the reversal of Platonism that Deleuze sees in the Stoics. Bennett’s reading of the supervenience relation can’t actually be put in terms of the classic Platonic divide between being and becoming, given that his substances and properties are not, exactly, Platonic ideas. He cleverly takes Williams suggestion about troping and uses it to return us to the universe of substances and properties, upon which events – or as he calls them (rather tiresomely) event sortals, meaning event types like dying, sighing and that host of things that the English gerund is so good at nominalizing.

 

My own opinion here is that the world-game suggested by making events basic and the world-game suggested by making events epiphenomenal are both true – by which I mean both can be made to operate consistently in their games. To a degree – both games have tensions, if not hidden contradictions. Which is how both games can be played against each other – in fact, I’d contend that the construction of these world-games can’t get off the ground without them playing against each other.

 

The glory and the problem of Deleuze’s book is that its exemplary events are sometimes too highfalutin to make them connect to the common. The problem with books in the analytic vein, such as Bennett’s, is that sometimes the arguments from the common seem arguable. Here is Bennett arguing with Davidson about the meaning of that old favorite, the Writer of Waverly.

First Davidson:

 

“Substances owe their special importance in the enterprise of

identification to the fact that they survive through time. But the

idea of survival is inseparable from the idea of surviving certain

sorts of change--of position, size, shape, colour, and so forth. As

we might expect, events often play an essential role in identifying

a substance. Thus if we track down the author of Waverley or the

father of Annette, it is by identifying an event, of writing, or of

fathering. Neither the category of substance nor the category of

change is conceivable apart from the other.”

 

Second Bennett:

 

“Not so. We can track down the author of Waverley by locating the person

who wrote Waverley; we don't have to think of him as the person who was the subject or agent or author or participant in a writing of Waverley. So we have no need to introduce the concept of a particular event.”

 

Try as I may make the person who “wrote Waverly” somehow separate from the person who was the participant in a “writing of Waverly” – notice that Waverly is not picked out here by a definitive article, but by an indefinite one, as though there was a multiplication of Waverlys in possible worlds, which I don’t think Bennett really believes – is simply to make a point that Deleuze makes about the double structure of the event – the difference between the present and its viewpoint and the eluded present of the viewpoint of the counter-effectual – the counterfactual past and future. I can not imagine nabbing the person who wrote Waverly and not claiming he was the person who participated in, or simply wrote, Waverly.

 

Perhaps in the garden of forking paths, in the Borgesian World-Game. Perhaps.