“PROP. VII. The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.” -Baruch Spinoza (2013-09-01). Ethics (Kindle Locations 664-665). Heraklion Press. Kindle Edition.
This, of course, reads like representation. So it seems kind of strange that Deleuze would have taken to Spinoza like he did. But this is easily attributable to same thing any student of philosophy (or intellectual inquiry in general (has to do when approaching a more established practitioner: steal what they can use.
That said, I think I might have found a couple of quotes that point towards the univocity of Being that Claire Colebrook connects between Deleuze and Spinoza in her Routledge Guide to Deleuze. But I’m finding it in a weird roundabout way:
“This truth seems to have been dimly recognized by those Jews who maintained that God, God’s intellect, and the things understood by God are identical. For instance, a circle existing in nature, and the idea of a circle existing, which is also in God, are one and the same thing displayed through different attributes.” –Ibid (different page
Given that, in terms of substance, mind and body are just two sides of the same thing, what we find ourselves approaching here is something similar to Berkley’s Idealism in which he argues that given that everything exists in the perception of it, the only thing that could be keeping our individual perceptions of the world consistent with other individual perceptions is our sharing in the mind of God. Spinoza then goes on to say:
“PROP. VIII. The ideas of particular things, or of modes, that do not exist, must be comprehended in the infinite idea of God, in the same way as the formal essences of particular things or modes are contained in the attributes of God.”
What I’m getting at here is the univocity of Being comes out of the fact that reality for us can only come out of how it registers in the mind. Therefore, its very existence is not so much conditional on existing in the mind as its participation in a vast exchange of energy between minds and their objects. And the univocity of Being makes perfect sense since, logically, a thing either is or isn’t. Because of this, it makes little sense to talk about (as Rorty points out (ontological status since, once again, a thing either exists or it doesn’t. Being, unlike everything else in reality, is a is or is not situation.
Think, for instance, of a unicorn. Now while all evidence points to the probability that unicorns don’t exist, we still have to admit that the concept of one does and that the concept has as much being as a real one standing before our very eyes. The idea, in conclusion, is to recognize that our perceptions of and interactions with the world , our emotional responses, our passions (in short: our subjective experiences, have the same ontological status (Being (as the rock that stubs your toe: the so-called objective.
And we might consider here the implications this would have for Deleuze and Guatarri’s model of desiring production as well as Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism.