Deleuze as (proto-Carnapian) Philosophical Historian of Philosophy

Our only teachers are those who tell us “do with me,” and are able to emit signs to be develop in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce. (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (hereafter DR), 26).

Difference and Repitition, 26DR 26)

Duns Scotus, Spinoza, and Nietzsche are three moments in the “history of the philosophical elaboration of the univocity of being.” (DR 48) This history is progressive: Spinoza “marks  a considerable progress.” And Nietzsche becomes world-historical (he offers “a Copernican revolution” (DR 50)) by opening the “possibility of difference having its own concept,” that is “eternal return” not of the “Identical,” but rather “returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes,”  (DR 50; it matters to Deleuze that what returns are the ‘extreme’ or ‘excessive’ forms). The history of progressive conceptual development is not just a “theoretical” exercise, but delivers a “practical” criterion in Nietzsche.

As the epigraph to the post suggests, for Deleuze the history of philosophy is an occasion to encounter exemplary thinkers that both invite their readers to think with their thoughts as well as demand from their very best readers a development that does not mindlessly repeat the original, but in the development introduce variance. This creative act of the historian of philosophy, this repetition and difference, which Deleuze calls the method of dramatization is, thus, a way to conceptualize the doing of the history of philosophy as a means toward progress in philosophy. Deleuze attributes the origin of the method to “Kierkegaard and Nietzsche,” who “invent an incredible theatre within philosophy, thereby founding simultaneously this theatre of the future and a new philosophy.” (DR 9) So, Nietzsche plays a double role of the founder of a method and a contributor to a key development in which it is deployed. (That double role is -- witness Kierkegaard -- apparently not necessary.)

Undoubtedly much is confusing about this. But it's clear that the task of a progressive historian of philosophy is not just to understand the past and give it a stable representation, but rather to creatively re-write the historical text. In the preface, Deleuze had already hinted at such a procedure by quoting a Borges story approvingly: “The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer…” (DR xx)* It would, thus, be a category error for a professional historian of philosophy to say to a philosophical historian of philosophy that somehow the philosophical historian’s writings “are not true.” But the philosophical historian can say to the professional historian that truth overlooks some presuppositions including its own ground.

 

To put the point differently, we can certainly represent the past according to Deleuze; while this, professional history of philosophy can deliver historical truth (and, see my colleague Mogens Laerke how to do this), we will certainly miss something of significance if we only aim at truth (what Deleuze calls movement or difference, etc.). We only become philosophical historians if in our representations we do something further with the past: repetition with change. Not just any change, but by way of the “most insane creation of concepts ever seen or heard” (DR xix; this creative conceptual development is the “secret” of the right sort of “empiricism”). That is, to say, philosophical history of philosophy becomes movement or art, which is now – not unlike Carnap’s Nietzschean perspective – understood as outside the stipulated or regimented language of representation.**  This art is as Plato already recognized, a domain outside the rational.  

As Socrates asks, where is the fourth? Presumably, then, the answer is that Deleuze is inscribing himself as a fourth moment in the “history of the philosophical elaboration of the univocity of being.”  He is doing philosophical history of philosophy. (Here I leave aside to what degree Deleuze’s great works on Spinoza and Hume (and his more troublesome one on Leibniz) are professional history of philosophy or philosophical history of philosophy. )

So far so good. But now we need to ask, does Deleuze think that the previous history of philosophy is necessary for the coming to be of his philosophy, or could have Menard written his text with its (not quite infinite) richness by not repeating (one is tempted to say, plagiarizing) an older text? Could a Deleuze or another achieve what is needed by simply by creating the right concepts. From Deleuze’s perspective there is a sense in which from Parmenides onward (all the way to Heidegger), the elaboration of the univocity of being was in play (DR 44).   

So, one might imagine that a ninth century Deleuze could have thought his way through Dons Scotus, Spinoza, and Nietzsche without their actual precedent. This counterfactual is not as far-fetched as it might seem because Deleuze indicates that Plato had, in fact, almost thought his way to a Deleuzian perspective with eternal return and all that and had as it were missed its true mark (in which difference is “the supreme goal of dialectic” (DR 81) by insisting on the primacy of the original over the copy (DR 80). This is why it is no surprise that for Deleuze it is desirable and inevitable that his philosophy “should conserve many Platonic characteristics.” (DR 71)***

Even so, Deleuze suggests that his own philosophy is made possible by two prior developments: one is to be found in a kind of common philosophical error (by Hegel in his treatment of infinitely large and  contradiction and Leibniz in his treatment of the infinitely small limit) and the other outside philosophy in art (DR 82). Rather than detailing the shared error of Hegel and Leibniz here, I just point out that their common error gives rise to a new form of cognition: orgiastic (as opposed to organic) representation. Orgiastic representations are akin to (Cartesian-style) confused ideas: so they do not represent the true. But unlike confused ideas, where the representation is as it were blurry, in orgiastic representation distinct, but jumbled content is affirmed. (Deleuze is Spinozistic in that ideas are always affirmations.) And, it turns out, orgiastic representations are a special (that is, fruitful) alternative to the true.  Second, it is the development of modern art that teaches philosophy to abandon representation (as an ideal (DR 82)); to give up being scientific (not by being anti-scientific or against science),

So, Deleuze recognizes that while in one sense his philosophy is timeless in another sense it is historically conditioned by requiring two earlier conceptual developments: one of which is the required need to develop the proper sort of concept to deal with a special kind of philosophical mistake and the other is to allow philosophy to stop aiming at the classical idea of truth. That is to say, Deleuze rejects (i) the pop-Heideggerian idea that we must go back to a pre-Socratic original (or an authentic Dasein); (ii) he also rejects the pop Foucault-ian idea that all is contingent or the mere play of (will to) power. Rather he insists that there are social-conceptual necessitation relations that are conditioned by the creative interplay of perhaps contingent conceptual circumstances and conceptual legislation.

Obviously, the above does not entail a uniqueness claim: that there is only one way to be a philosophical historian of philosophy. For it rests on controversial claims about the true nature of philosophy. But given that we live in an age in which science remains a permanent displacing alternative to philosophy, Deleuze’s approach is a distinctive somewhat mad, but living option.

 

*In fact, for Deleuze it’s not only that ‘A=B, but not quite,’ but even ‘A=A, but not quite.’ This trick he can only pull off by giving up (recall and here) what Tarski calls the classical idea of truth (or in Deleuze’s terminology  the ideal of representation).

**In fact, we can understand Deleuze as attempting to offer a framework in which both internal questions and external questions are understood by a common principle—a principle that, in turn, (a) both can be tamed in a rigorous language of representation as well as (b) escape us and becomes un-representing art. (Of course, Deleuze’s conception of (a-b) as contributions to distinct forms of aesthetic is not quite Carnapian.) But we should not ignore Deleuze’s and Carnap’s shared interest in Nietzsche and Frege (and their shared desire to avoid the mistakes of Heidegger).

***One tantalizing point left hanging in Deleuze’s treatment is to what degree Plato’s generative treatment of myth  anticipates the methodological innovation attributed to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

Comments

[Mathieu Marion]

Just read your post. I have only read Deleuze on other philosophers (Kant, Nietzsche), but not DR. Is there any sense that he had read authors in the hermeneutic or the historicist tradition? He would probably have gained from doing this.

[J. Edward Hackett]

I like Mathieu's question. When Eric speaks about Deleuze's introduction of "variance," one could say there is an underlying element of Gadamer's pre-judgments' productive power to foster understanding. As Gadamer insisted, the productive emphasis of our prejudice as contrary to Enlightenment do help us. In another way, however, Deleuze's idea of philosophy as the "creation of concepts" seems anti-thetical to the hermeneutic tradition in one way. The hermeneutic philosopher is often constituted more by the historicity of a tradition than described as someone introducing a creative element into interpretation.

[Jeff Bell]

Nice post Eric! I like the Carnap connection with respect to the internal and external questions and your first footnote. As an internal question, to ask about whether numbers exist is ultimately a tautology if one has already accepted the language of mathematics. We thus have the reduction of an internal question to a=a. The external question, however, depends upon how fruitful mathematics is in clarify and explaining the phenomena this language represents; or we have a=b. Building on what you say, Deleuze's concept of difference challenges the primacy of both questions by arguing for the derivative nature of identity (a=a) and representational theories of truth (a=b) that presuppose it. If so, I agree, but my question is how "proto-Carnapian" Deleuze is since Carnap still seems to be committed to a representational theory. External questions are practical questions best answered by determining how well they represent their subjects.

[Eric Schliesser]

I am no Deleuze expert and sometimes his allusions can be fairly terse/cryptic. But while historicism (in the Hegel-Marx sense) is certainly a genuine concern, it does seem that the Hermeneutic tradition (Dilthey, Gadamer, etc.) is absent from his focus. If that is right, I think Edward Hackett's remarks can explain why.

[Eric Schliesser]

Yes, Jeff, Deleuze's concept of difference is (again to borrow Carnap's terminology) a meta-framework for both internal and external questions. Obviously, this makes one wonder if there is a further 'external' question--with infinite regress looming, or if difference is really a sufficient reason (as Deleuze sometimes intimates).
I guess I assume that Deleuze is not against representational theory as far as it goes--it should just recognize its limitations.

[Mathieu Marion]

By "historicist" tradition I did not mean the "Hegel-Marx" sense, but what is known as the "historical school" (historische Schule) of Droysen, Dilthey, Meineke, etc. I bet it is also absent. I agree that, at first, the emphasis on creativity in interpretation appears antithetical to the hermeneutic tradition, but it is actually one of the main planks of Gadamer's own take on hermeneutics (see, e.g., Truth & Method, p. 296: "understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well"), I mean this is basic Gadamer. At all events, that should not serve as an excuse for one's or Deleuze's ignorance. These authors (to which one might include Collingwood, who also believed that understanding is open-ended) discuss and dissect at length these issues and I don't see what good there might be in not reading them. I was raised in a French-speaking milieu much in tune with Paris, in the late 1970s - early 1980s, and know it quite well (less Deleuze, I must say, although I forgot to mention I also read his book on Empirisme et subjectivité). I have been ever since amazed, given the emphasis on history of philosophy in France, how little they - and their readers - actually knew. Ditto with, from what I gather here, "repetition and difference" vs "identity in difference" in the British Neo-Hegelians.

[Aaron Alvarez]

I liked the post but I can't help but think that the type of history Deleuze is talking about is not the type of history often conceptualized in contemporary philosophy. It is a history that seems more contemporary and closer to the New History School. Not as against the agent current state of affairs as a genealogy but something meant to delimit the creation of the agent. I would claim Deleuze's introduction of variance is an attempt to break away from the Gadamarian concept of tradition itself and from the Hisroriche Schule . Deleuze and Carnap both seem to find some way to to place possibility within limitations although the issue for both and where they diverge is what is ontologically primary. Whereas Carnap finds founding moment, Deleuze finds a breakage. I think this becomes clear in works like Deleuze's Time Image where the continuity of perception is held to appearance and in Deleuze's work on geometry and topology.

[Mathieu Marion]

Aaron, you write: "I would claim Deleuze's introduction of variance is an attempt to break away from the Gadamarian concept of tradition itself and from the Historiche Schule". This is just tangential, but I think hardly any one really knew about Gadamer until he first went to Paris in 1981 and sparred with Derrida (the latter's Éperons is a good example of this, as one finds in it harsh criticisms of "herméneutique" that betray lack of knowledge of Gadamer, there are no references whatsoever - it seemed more important at the time to quote the Larousse on "étron" - and the little one gathers is banal and resembles more the views of Schleiermacher or Dilthey). As I said, I doubt Deleuze knew of Gadamer at the time of writing DR (I might be wrong, I make no claim to expertise whatsoever). But you are certainly right that, by contrast, Deleuze's idea seems to be that interpretation should not be constrained by what has been brought about by the tradition. I do not really see exactly what this amounts to, as I assume that Deleuze did not want to claim one could grapple with the text independently of any interpretative context, but if one has to figure out what the tradition was up to first but then, according to the view, the problem recurs.