Gilbert Simondon’s Metaphysics of Individuation

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Contents

Introduction. 1

Individuation. 2

Living Individuals. 3

System as Individual 4

Information. 5

Development 6

Ethics. 10

Introduction

Gilbert Simondon’s aim in his 1958 PhD thesis entitled Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information is to overcome the dominant metaphysics of his time, substantialism and hylomorphism. Both attempt to explain reality by starting from the individual to infer a principle of how the individual came to be. While this may seem reasonable, Simondon points out that it presupposes that “the individual qua constituted individual is the interesting reality, i.e. the reality to be explained,” privileging the individual as the primary being of ontology while disregarding the environment or “milieu” in which the individual arose from. In this essay, I will draw from both the introduction and the conclusion of his book to explain his metaphysics of individuation.

Simondon thinks that those who start with the individual as the basis of their ontology will fail to consider how the individual came about to begin with, its ontogenesis which is its origin and development to become what it is. Such an ontology also assumes that there exists some overarching principle of individuation or arche in Greek which we can then discover. Simondon thinks this not only gets things backwards, its assumed starting point of the individual does not go back far enough.

In a substantialist metaphysics such as atomism, atoms are considered the most fundamental units of which there can be no further origin to investigate. The arche then is the eternal and indivisible atoms which are the building blocks for all else, atoms being the true individuals. In hylomorphism which was proposed by Aristotle, matter and form combine to give an individual, or in equation form, matter + form = individual. The arche must then be in either the form or the matter, with the operation of creating the individual, the plus in my equation, “not supposed to be capable of supplying the principle itself but only of putting it to work.”

Simondon thinks that both ontologies have “a dark zone that conceals the operation of individuation.” This operation is in need of explanation. In hylomorphism, it is the plus that needs explanation and should not be simply passed over or taken for granted. In substantialism, it is how the atoms came about to begin with. How did their individuation take place? What is their arche?

Individuation

Whatever the arche is, Simondon believes it precedes the individual. He considers “the operation of individuation as primordial, on the basis of which the individual comes to exist and whose unfolding regimes and modalities the individual reflects in its characteristics.” He calls the basis of this primordial operation the pre-individual, a system which potential energy is not exhausted even after it forms or “individuates” the individual since not all the “potentials” have been actualised. What is actualised through the process of individuation in the pre-individual is the individual but after that process, there remains a remainder of the pre-individual.

Simondon draws on the science of his time to support and inspire his theories. In addition to chemistry, thermodynamics, evolutionary theory and the social sciences, he draws on quantum mechanics. While he does not directly mention virtual particles manifesting in a vacuum, his primordial pre-individual system with its potential energy, incompatibilities and tensions can translate to fluctuating quantum fields interacting to give rise to excitations of quanta at particular points in space. These packets of energy have wave-particle characteristics which can be considered as individuation.

Moreover, what comes out of the individuation is not just the individual but the “individual-milieu coupling.” The individual is not all that exists and is not its own cause. The pre-individual system contains potentials and incompatibilities that give rise to tensions and extremes. When these tensions are resolved, it results in individuation. Simondon therefore thinks that the ready-made completed being posited in substantialism and hylomorphism is mistaken. Instead, a being becomes what it is.

However, this becoming, this individuation, is not a one-and-done step but comprises phases of individuation. To become requires a capacity of the being to “phase-shift with respect to itself, to resolve itself by phase-shifting.” Becoming is the way the incompatibilities in the system resolve to give rise to the phases of each being. One potential among the many potentials become actualised in each individuation.

Borrowing from thermodynamics, these phases are characterised by energy “exchanges between structure and operation” leading to intermediate equilibria. But if each phase results in equilibrium, why would there be a next phase? This is because these equilibria are not stable but “metastable.” For a particular set of conditions, an individual may exist in equilibrium with them but should these conditions change, the individual may no longer be in equilibrium and will have to change to get to a new equilibrium with the new conditions.

Simondon analogises the primordial system to a supersaturated solution which holds potentials of ontocrystallising one particular crystal or another. Which particular crystal manifests depends on the varying microphysical conditions at that time and space. The microphysical condition is ultimately what is happening on the quantum level, where the waves or packets of energy traversing fields, at the limit, causes a crystal to manifest or individuate out of the solution. Form and matter are not sufficient to cause individuation since individuation requires also energy, so all three must “preexist in the system.” They then need a relation to mediate between them in order for the crystal to manifest out of the milieu of the solution.

Living Individuals

Simondon presents the individuation of non-living things as taking place in an “instantaneous, quantum, abrupt, and definitive way,” separating out of the milieu to take its place as an individual distinct from the milieu though still interacting with it to constitute a new system. Living things have a similar beginning but their individuations continue and “amplify” after their initial individuation. This continuing individuation is what distinguishes the living from the non-living.

While a crystal continues to grow, this growth takes place on its surface which is its limit at any given moment. By contrast, the living being has an interiority where an “internal resonance” of internal communication maintains its metastability. The living individual continues individuating, resolving the problems of its existence by adapting, “modifying its relation to the milieu” which machines are also capable of doing, but also by “modifying itself, by inventing new internal structures, and by completely introducing itself into the axiomatic of vital problems.” This ongoing individuations are not taking place only at its surface but from within it. The living individual mediates within itself what is happening to it in relation to its milieu but importantly also what is happening internally. Because the potentials of the pre-individual are not exhausted by the initial individuation, it “is a source of future metastable states from whence new individuations will be able to emerge.”

System as Individual

Relations are taking place within the individual as inner resonance but also exteriorly. The individual thus becomes a subject in relation to the system, this subject being part of the problem which it needs to intervene in in order to resolve. It is an element in the world which acts in the world. The living individual’s “successive individuations […] engage more pre-individual reality and incorporate it in the relation to the milieu,” writes Simondon. It develops affectivity and perception which is “integrated in emotion and in science,” opening up new dimensions for its being. The continuing individuations within the living individual manifest as psyche. Psyche emerges because the individual contains within itself potentials and incompatibilities that need resolution. However, it cannot resolve all its problems within itself and hence has to surpass itself to become part of the world, forming a new system of world and subject. The world in that way is also individuating through the individuation of its elements, its elements of individuals becoming group individuals through their pre-individual realities which connect to form a collective individual like a society.

This collective individual and the solo individuals have a reciprocal relationship, forming what Simondon calls the transindividual to “account for the systematic unity of interior (psychical) individuation and exterior (collective) individuation,” creating a “psycho-social world of the transindividual.” This transindividual itself further individuates and has its own problematics and metastability. It is these problematics that require a continual becoming of the being in order to mediate a resolution of them. The problematic which arises from the potentials and incompatibilities gives rise to a “conflictual situation” which resolves in a new “axiomatic that incorporates and unifies all the elements of this situation into a system that contains the individual.” It hence goes from “metastability to metastability.”

Individuation can thus be considered to take place on different levels such as “the physical, the vital and the psycho-social,” which have as their basis “matter, life, mind and society” respectively. Instead of focusing on the terms or subjects in a relation which is the way of substantialism, Simondon thinks we should focus on the relation itself, which should be considered as being. Relations are dimensions of individuation which the individual negotiates in its becoming.

He sees the individuation process as a transduction, where the principle of individuation does not come from outside but from within. The tensions of the pre-individual system is resolved within the system to form structures of individuation, the way crystals form in a supersaturated solution from within the chemistry of the solution. The tensions within the system “phase-shifts and develops dimensions according to which it will be structured” over time.

Information

Information surfaces from the disparity between things. Simondon writes:

[Information] is the tension between two disparate reals, it is the signification that will emerge when an operation of individuation will discover the dimension according to which two disparate reals can become a system [,…] that through which the non-resolved system’s incompatibility becomes an organisational dimension in the resolution. […] information is the formula of individuation, a formula that cannot exist before this individuation.

Information is not just data or signals but the “signification” or meaning of beings. Simondon believes that the notion of form in hylomorphism must be replaced instead with information. This information is not given, not pre-defined like the form. “Information is never a single term but the signification that emerges from a disparation,” he adds.

Simondon conceives of individuation as an “operation of communication,” a communication of information where “the individual is not the only reality […] but merely a phase [,…] the seed of a totality,” leading from the pre-individual to individual living beings to the collective. From the originating charge of the pre-individual, the individual is “initially inserted by being on the same level as all the other beings that make up this world. Individuation does not exhaust the potentials in the pre-individual. Hence, an individual is an actualisation of a particular potential but also contains the unexpended potential in the pre-individual, leading not to a completed essential individual but one that is in a phase that has a “reserve of becoming,” such that it can then lead to a successive phase. Besides, each individual does not have to develop the same way since the various potentials lead to different outcomes.

A being while in one phase “harbours several phases of being,” not just the current manifested phase. These other phases while potential and latent are real and are also a part of the individual since their possibility can change that being. The successive phases of a being need not be a continuation of an “entelechy,” a fixed essence which can only unfold but can be totally different, say a person who is a junior engineer and decide later to be a philosopher instead of a senior engineer. “Ontological monism must be replaced with a pluralism of phases, since the being incorporates, instead of a single form given in advance, successive informations that are a certain number of reciprocal structures and functions,” writes Simondon of what he terms the “polyphasic being.”

A fixed and absolute being can have no relation to others since the others do not affect or change its being. Instead, the information sent and received, and reciprocity when interacting with others allows other phases to become actualised. Instead of the Aristotelian hylomorphic nomenclature of genera and species where specific differences in forms are what differentiates between species, Simondon thinks that the notion of form needs to be relational, where information is “the relational signification of a disparation.”

Differences may cause separation but also may be the basis of relations between things. Disparation arises between things but can also be within a being. A being is often considered to be one that has an identity and a unity but Simondon thinks that this view is “impoverished” since we exceed this identity and unity due to our potentials which is exemplified in our polyphasic being. “Identity is replaced with internal resonance,” which can lead to signification and amplification that launches a new phase of our being.

Simondon thinks of such actualisation of potentials as transductive, where potential energy is diverted to one path or another and not down a serial development where one stage leads necessarily to the next towards some pre-defined teleology or as a result of its origin. His image of this “transductive order” is a spectrum resembling a bell curve where the centre is the maxima which is grasped as “qualitative or intensive being” though the being also spreads out on both sides of this maxima towards its extremes, which while less intense nonetheless exist and remain a possible manifestation.

Development

Yet why do individuals arise at all, be they non-living or living things? Simondon writes:

Physical individuation is the condition of vital individuation without ever being its cause, since the vital intervenes as an amplifying deceleration of physical individuation; physical individuation is the resolution of a first problem underway, and vital individuation is inserted into it after the emergence of a new problematic; there is a pre-physical problematic and a pre-vital problematic; physical individuation and vital individuation are modes of resolution; they are not absolute points of departure.

The emergence of physical objects aims to solve one problem which creates the conditions for the emergence of a new problem which may then lead to the emergence of living things as a way to solve this new problem. Here, Simondon is suggesting that nature evolves in response to problems. Through the resource of potentials in the pre-individual, individuals result. Since the pre-individual is not exhausted in its formation of individuals, further individuation can occur in the nascent individual which now serves as the “milieu of [further] individuation.” What is gained by the individual in its individuation is extracted from the milieu. “Individuation takes place in a quantum manner through abrupt leaps, each plateau of individuation being capable of once again relating itself to the following as a pre-individual state of being,” he adds. Each phase becomes the base, a pre-individual by which the next phase takes off from.

The individual in the here and now is merely a “provisional solution, a phase of becoming that will lead to new operations” powered by the leftover potential energy of the pre-individual, which are the extremes of the bell curve. The incompatibility of these extremes leads to “tensions and potentials,” the source of the new problematic which then requires and hence tends towards resolution.

Perhaps a clearer way to understand the difference between the individual and being is that an individual is what a thing is presently, just the maxima overshadowing the extremes in the here and now, while the being contains its history, its current individual and its possible futures. The individual is hence a “moment of the being.” This however is not a Hegelian dialectical movement but a transductive one, where the resolution of tensions is not a synthesis, not an aufhebung retaining the best parts of the previous stages but an amplification of a particular potential selected not purely on the basis of the rational but with a degree of indeterminacy. Simondon adds:

Becoming is a perpetuated and renewed resolution, an amplifying, incorporating resolution that proceeds via crises, such that its sense is in each of its phases, not at its origin or its end alone. […] the being must also be grasped temporally, in its present at the moment in which it is, and not reconstituted based on the abstraction of its two parts [of origin and end or of birth and death.] […] The being’s present is its problematic in the process of resolution. The individuated being is not substance but the being called into question.

The individual questions its current state of being and seeks answers. It problematizes its own being which it resolves through the phases it becomes over time, where new structures and functions develop in order to release the tension of its potentials. The being is not just what it finally is at the end, “it is the being that becomes the being of the phases.” In each moment, the being is. The phases it passes through are its phases. The individual is continually individuating: “to individuate and to become is a single mode of existing.”

Simondon explains that the vital domain is “a support of structures and functions that depend on non-living characteristics that expand them in their initial phase and amplify them but are not reduced to them,” what we today call emergence. He writes:

After the emergence of the vital, the physical is an impoverished, uncharged real, a residue of the complete process from which life has emerged by separating. […] life and non-living matter in a certain sense can be treated as two speeds of the evolution of the real.

The vital is not something that follows from the physical but also comes from the pre-individual through “more precise and more complex conditions of initial tension and metastability,” these different conditions leading to a different type of being.

The difficulty of all substantialist metaphyics such as creationism, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s monads or Benedictus de Spinoza’s pantheism is that the beings in them are “resolved in advance [,…] incapable of being opposed to itself […and] not charged with potential.” Simondon’s vision is that a being

is not one, it is capable of expansion starting from itself; the being does not subsist relative to itself; it is constrained, tensed, superposed on itself, and not one. The being is not reduced to what it is; it is accumulated in itself, potentialised. It exists as being and also as energy; the being is both structure and energy; structure itself is not merely structure, since several orders of dimension are superposed; each structure corresponds to a certain energetic state that can appear in future transformations and belongs to the being’s metastability.

A stable state achieved in a metastability is “but a borderline case. […] only stable within certain limits and in a single order of magnitude, without any interactions with other orders of magnitude; it conceals potentials that when unleashed can produce an abrupt alteration that leads to a new, equally metastable structuration.” Being and becoming are reconciled by considering that states are “metastable manners of being, plateaus of stability leaping from structure to structure” when destabilised by dynamic interactions with others and with oneself. He adds:

Becoming is no longer the continuity of an alteration but the linking of metastable states through the unleashing of potential energy whose play and existence are part of the regime of causality that constitutes these states. […] The structure-energy ensemble is what can be called being.

The potentiality within the system is why Simondon insists that a being exceeds unity since there are many possible becomings of a being, effectively making many different beings possible though only one among them will become actualised. Since the one result comes from a pre-individual milieu with potential energy, we cannot deduce or induce from the currently existing beings how the pre-individual is by going backwards through a causal chain since that only traces the one developmental path which is actualised among the many which had the potential but was not actualised. This is why Simondon calls for a transduction, where the potential energy in the pre-individual could materialise in one form or another.

Simondon’s theory of the pre-individual borrows from “the domains of physics, biology, and technology,” in particular quantum mechanics where a physical individual like a photon is a particle but also a wave, where exchanges of energy in fluctuating fields can give rise to energy and particles, which he terms allagmatics. When an individual appears, it is in relation to the system of the milieu. It is relative and not substantial since the relation to the system is critical to its existence and it does not stand alone as a thing independent of the milieu from which it emerged. Substantialism is focused on the particle form of the being while ignoring its wave or energy form. The particle form of the photon is analagous to the individual — the particle is not the entirety of the photon’s being and neither is the individual the “entirety of the being” but only an aspect of it since there remains the leftover potential energy of the pre-individual within the being which can transform the being in relation to the milieu.

The individual “appears as a modification of the being upon which the […being’s] problematic becomes enriched: it is the appearance of information with the being’s system.” This information has meaning and this meaning must be able to be received. This information both informs and is also being informed. It is reflexive, conditioning the being through internal resonance, which leads to the further individuation of the individual. It is this information that “establishes the transductivity of successive individuations, arranging them into series, insofar as it traverses them by carrying what can be taken back up from one individuation to the next.”

This information is both interior and exterior, interior to the system of the milieu and exterior to the individuals. It mediates between them by constituting the internal resonance of the system which provides inputs to the solutions leading to the individuations of individuals as well as system. There is a mutual dependence and reciprocity between the two levels.

Ethics

Since metaphysics informs ethics, Simondon proposes that ethical values are the values that are preserved when a system goes from metastable to metastable individuation. He writes: “Everything is relative, except the very formula of this relativity, a formula according to which a system of norms can be converted into another system of norms.” In order to develop an ethics, a system must know that it is itself relative and metastable and hence incorporate this information into its conditions of equilibrium. He explains:

The tendency toward eternity then becomes the awareness of the relative, which is no longer a will to halt becoming or to make an origin absolute and to grant a normative privilege to a structure [as a substantialist ethics does], but the knowledge of the metastability of norms, the awareness of the meaning of transfer that the individual qua individual has.

Thus it is not that each society in each epoch cannot have norms but that these norms are understood not to be eternal and absolute. The quest for ethical norms needs to be on-going since contemporary life changes and hence demands novel and different responses for each epoch. “A veritable ethics would be one that accounted for contemporary life,” he adds. Contrary to expectations of universality and permanence, norms, values and moralities that are changeable and changing are not a contradiction but to be expected since the individual is provisional and metastable. “There is a historicity of the emergence of values, just as there is a historicity of the constitution of norms,” notes Simondon. Ethics is thus context dependent and not an absolute given. “Ethics is the meaning of individuation, the meaning of the synergy of successive individuations,” he adds.

Ethics is needed because “it is the meaning according to which the interiority of an act has a meaning in exteriority.” The act of an individual has an effect on the whole because it is integrated into a “network of acts,” a web and not a causal chain. An act that has no further effect even on its own actor is non-moral but one that gives rise to a “resonance of acts,” that expands from the initial act and finds completion in other acts, has meaning and information. Simondon writes:

Ethics is that through which the subject remains subject, refusing to become an absolute individual, a closed domain of reality, or a detached singularity; it is that through which the subject remains in an ever-charged internal and external problematic, i.e. in a real present, living on the central zone of being, not wanting to become form or matter. Ethics expresses the meaning of perpetuated individuation, the stability of becoming, which is that of the being as pre-individuated, individuating, and tending towards the continuous that reconstructs in an organised form of communication a reality as vast as the pre-individual system. Across the individual — understood as the amplificative transfer emerging from nature — societies become a World.

The relationality of individuals demands an ethics since the acts of individuals impinge upon other individuals. It is through ethics that the individual moves beyond its own concerns towards a collective and then to a collective of collectives which forms the entire system, which is the world.