Absolutely. Here’s a comparative summary of how Gilbert Simondon, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze each understand individuation—a key philosophical concern they share, though approached through different metaphysical frameworks:
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1. Gilbert Simondon: Individuation as Ontogenesis
Key Idea:
Individuation is not the result of being but the process of becoming-being.
• Ontology of Becoming: Simondon rejects the classical form/matter schema (hylomorphism). The individual is not a substance but a phase in an ongoing process of individuation.
• Preindividual: Every individual emerges from a preindividual field of tensions and potentials—not yet resolved or structured.
• Metastability: Systems are not in equilibrium; they are metastable, primed for transformation.
• Transindividual: Individuation continues socially and relationally—subjectivity arises in co-individuation with others.
• Technics: Technical objects, like humans, also undergo individuation—he bridges ontogenesis with technogenesis.
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2. Alfred North Whitehead: Concrescence and Actual Occasions
Key Idea:
The universe is made of events, not things.
• Process Philosophy: All reality consists of “actual occasions”—discrete events that concresce (gather) prehensions (influences from past events) into a new becoming.
• Internal Relatedness: Each occasion is both an individual and a relation to all others—relational ontology par excellence.
• Creativity: The ultimate metaphysical principle; the power of the many to become one.
• Subject-Superject: Every entity is both subject (experiencing) and superject (completed outcome) in an interwoven world-process.
• God: For Whitehead, even the divine is part of the process—a lure for novel concrescences, not an external maker.
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3. Gilles Deleuze: Difference, Becoming, and the Virtual
Key Idea:
Individuation is driven by differential intensities unfolding in a field of virtuality.
• Ontology of Difference: Deleuze emphasizes difference-in-itself over identity—individuals emerge through processes of differentiation and actualization.
• Virtual and Actual: The virtual is not unreal—it is a real dimension of potentiality from which individuals are actualized through singular events.
• Multiplicity: Individuals are not stable substances but assemblages, composed of multiplicities and flows.
• Becoming: More fundamental than being—emphasizing transformation over form.
• Simondon’s Influence: Deleuze explicitly draws on Simondon’s preindividual and transindividual ideas in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense.
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Comparative Table
|
Conceptual Axis |
Simondon |
Whitehead |
Deleuze |
|
Core Concept |
Individuation |
Concrescence |
Differentiation and Becoming |
|
Metaphysical Ground |
Preindividual field |
Actual occasions |
Virtual multiplicities |
|
Relationality |
Transindividual as co-individuation |
Internal relations of events |
Assemblages and rhizomes |
|
Temporality |
Ontogenesis (time as individuation) |
Creative advance into novelty |
Non-linear becoming, time-images |
|
Technology/Subject |
Technogenesis and psychic individuation |
God and value as lures for process |
Subject as desiring-machine or becoming |
|
Form vs Process |
Process precedes form |
Form is crystallized process |
Forms are temporary expressions of flows |
|
Influence On |
Stiegler, Latour, Yuk Hui |
Eco-philosophy, theology, process thinkers |
Badiou, Guattari, new materialism |
In Summary
- Simondon gives us a structured ontology of emergence rooted in physical and psychic individuation.
- Whitehead offers a cosmological process philosophy in which the world is made of events, not substances.
- Deleuze radicalizes both into a philosophy of difference and becoming, emphasizing the creative power of the virtual.
Each offers a vision of individuation as the engine of reality, where what is arises from what becomes, and identity is always a momentary intensification in a larger field of relations.
Would you like an illustrated diagram comparing their metaphysical diagrams (e.g. Simondon’s cycle, Whitehead’s actual occasions, Deleuze’s virtual-actual topology)?
