Philosophy often has difficulty thinking through a mixture. It always has the suspicion that if it could ascend or descend just a little, the mixture would become an array of different elements; not a mixture at all, just a heterogenous dispersion (of different molecules in mere proximity, for example). The philosophic and the alchemical seem continually opposed. Even the idea of ‘mixture’ is a chimerical one: salt and water is not a mixture, it’s just salt-water, all nicely fused, but five kinds of gravel shaken together don’t constitute a mixture either, but just a bundle of different small stones. It seems in the concept of a mixture we need to have something that does not resolve itself into a unity, yet, in being called a mixture, doesn’t separate itself into a diversity either. A diverse unity, or unified diversity. One and many, the many in the one, without just being many ones.
This differs from notions like the crowd, or swarm, or pile. Thought is more or less comfortable here: a crowd can be a thing made of many things that make it up. We can hesitate over thinking whether a crowd is a thing, or whether to just reduce it to its elements. But notice a mixture is not reducible in this way: when we reduce it to its elements, it just becomes the dispersion of heterogenous elements in proximity. Does this mean that ‘mixtures’ are a kind of optical effect? Or do they refuse the idea of optics in the first place, as the latter pretends to provide us with a lens that refines the visible and filters out the noise? It might seem, then, that mixtures, in as far as they confront us with something irreducible to singular perspectives and, say, opinions, are tied to something that philosophy is eager to attain, all the while confronting it with its own impossibility, in as far as it cannot avoid sketching out ‘planes of consistencies’ populated by discrete elements. Such ambivalence might itself be attractive to ways of thinking that don’t shy away from paradox. After all, in eyeing that domain of non-optics, with its inarticulate fuzziness, philosophy might finally turn away from the harmonic ideas of perfect lenses and pure vision, which haunt so many of its conceptions of truth.
It would seem that the service that mixtures render us, sticking between our fingernails, would therefore not lie in inspiring our lofty thoughts, but on the contrary, in their gooeyness, to suspend our faculties and their discriminating capacities. At least in metaphor, we might extract some constructive principle out of that ―after all, isn’t it a mixture that holds bricks together? But the one house, doesn’t it once again subsume its components, re-establishing the preeminence of unity? Truly, it is not easy to keep the mixture from transmuting into a solution.