Digressions&Impressions

Popper, Schmitt, and Friend & Foe

It cannot, of course, be denied that human individuals are, like all other things in our world, in very many respects very unequal. Nor can it be doubted that this inequality is of great importance and even in many respects highly desirable.12 (The fear that the development of mass production and collectivization may react upon men by destroying their inequality or individuality is one of the nightmares13 of our times.) But all this simply has no bearing upon the question whether or not we should decide to treat men, especially in political issues, as equals, or as much like equals as is possible; that is to say, as possessing equal rights, and equal claims to equal treatment; and it has no bearing upon the question whether we ought to construct political institutions accordingly. ‘Equality before the law’ is not a fact but a political demand based upon a moral decision; and it is quite independent of the theory—which is probably false—that ‘all men are born equal’. Now I do not intend to say that the adoption of this humanitarian attitude of impartiality is a direct consequence of a decision in favour of rationalism. But a tendency towards impartiality is closely related to rationalism, and can hardly be excluded from the rationalist creed. Again, I do not intend to say that an irrationalist could not consistently adopt an equalitarian or impartial attitude; and even if he could not do so consistently, he is not bound to be consistent. But I do wish to stress the fact that the irrationalist attitude can hardly avoid becoming entangled with the attitude that is opposed to equalitarianism. This fact is connected with its emphasis upon emotions and passions; for we cannot feel the same emotions towards everybody. Emotionally, we all divide men into those who are near to us, and those who are far from us. The division of mankind into friend and foe is a most obvious emotional division; and this division is even recognized in the Christian commandment, ‘Love thy enemies!’ Even the best Christian who really lives up to this commandment (there are not many, as is shown by the attitude of the average good Christian towards ‘materialists’ and ‘atheists’), even he cannot feel equal love for all men. We cannot really love ‘in the abstract’; we can love only those whom we know. Thus the appeal even to our best emotions, love and compassion, can only tend to divide mankind into different categories. And this will be more true if the appeal is made to lesser emotions and passions. Our ‘natural’ reaction will be to divide mankind into friend and foe; into those who belong to our tribe, to our emotional community, and those who stand outside it; into believers and unbelievers; into compatriots and aliens; into class comrades and class enemies; and into leaders and led.---Karl Popper The Open Society and its Enemies (one volume edition), 439-440 (emphasis in original)

Yesterday Jerry Gaus (1952-2020), who was the greatest theorist of the open society in our life-time, died. This post is an imperfect homage to his memory. 

Nearly every word in the passage quoted above is a response to Schmitt's Concept of the Political (perhaps mediated by Strauss' commentary). This is easy to miss because in a rare moment of self-command, Popper does not name the target nor attaches a lengthy discursive footnote.* My present interest is to discuss the significance of this, rather than to offer complete proof of the claims in the first sentence of the present paragraph. The quoted passage occurs in chapter 24 of The Open Society. And it helps clarify Popper's decision to call the critics and alternatives to liberalism/Open Society -- which he describes and criticizes with a mixture of polemics and admiration -- 'enemies.' 

In the Concept of the Political, Schmitt claims (recall) that "there is a specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.'" In German it is 'feind' which can be translated as 'enemy' and as 'foe.' There is some debate among readers of Schmitt, no doubt encouraged by writings by Schmitt after the war, that there is an important distinction between enemy and foe in Schmitt. But such a distinction is unavailable to Popper in 1943. 

In the quoted passage, Popper twice echoes Schmitt's distinction between friend and foe, and he treats the genesis of the distinction in our emotions ("the division of mankind into friend and foe is a most obvious emotional division.")  That he has Schmitt in mind is clear from the second use of 'friend and foe' which marks those recognized to "belong to our tribe" (compatriots) and not to those outside of it, or as Schmitt would put it, "the other, the stranger."

For Popper the embraces of the Schmittian distinction facilitates the emotional rejection of what Popper calls equalitarianism. Because from the vantage point of our emotions, our differences are highly salient. As Schmitt puts it, "emotionally the enemy is easily treated as being evil and ugly," (emphasis added).

That Popper is shadowing even trolling Schmitt is obvious from his next move -- which one can only describe as chutzpah -- in which he points out that the distinction is recognized by the Christian commandment. Schmitt by contrast had insisted that the Christian love in the commandment is not reserved for the "political enemy."+ 

It is important for Schmitt to make his distinction compatible with Christianity because for Schmitt his rejection of liberal universalism, ultimately rests on his submission to a providential (Christian) faith opposed to the liberal's "anthropological profession of faith."** Strikingly, and as a good Kantian, Popper grants Schmitt the claim that at bottom the choice, for or against liberalism, rests on a species of faith (this is crucial to Strauss' interpretation of Schmitt and Strauss subsequent  historiography).

As Popper puts it, "the choice with which we are confronted is between a faith in reason and in human individuals and a faith in the mystical faculties of man by which he is united to a collective." (450) The second option is the Schmittian outlook. The former option, the "right kind of faith" is Popper's liberalism, which "frankly admits its origin in an irrational decision." (437; emphasis added.) That Popper thinks that there is a faith in individuals as an alternative to a faith in the collective begs the question against Schmitt's insistence that always, a "collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity," (which begs the question, too). 

I do not mean to claim that for Popper, the choice between himself and Schmittian is reducible to such an existential Kierkegaardian leap (while rejecting any belief in providence). He also thinks the consequence of the Schmittian choice is that it "must lead to an appeal to violence and brutal force as the ultimate arbiter in any dispute." (440)*** That is to say, Popper claims (and here he echoes Strauss again) that Schmitt returns us to a kind of state of nature not worth having. 

Now, the significance of all of this is that it allows us to raise the question how the open society should treat its enemies? In fact, I already noted that Popper thinks a kind of defensive violence, even tyrannicide, is permitted (recall), even obliged, in order and only in order to restore democracy. But the more challenging question is, how should the open society treat its enemies before they have succeeded in overthrowing it? And part of Popper's answer is: make sure you can (conceptually) recognize that there are enemies. What follows from this recognition I explore before long. 

On Starting a (Philosophy) Blog

About three or four times a year I get asked for advice on how to start a philosophy blog. (My first thought is always, haven't they heard blogs died?) So, this post is meant for those who wish to start such a blog or who like, so to speak, a peak behind the curtains.  I have organized my notes along some topical headers, but obviously they interact with each other. (Also, this post on the nature and risks of being a public philosopher provides important background.)

• Audience

The only good reason to start a blog is because you wish an audience for your ideas and have a desire to see them discussed. (Sometimes you are nudged into it because some grant agency or department chair wants to see more outreach.) Journal articles are controlled by others (and in philosophy have insanely low acceptance rates), have very restrictive form, length, and content requirements, and even when you get through all the gate-keepers have limited audience size. Newspaper editorial pages have huge audience, but have very restrictive word and style limits. Even so, the first thing to reflect on is who are you, or do you imagine, writing for? You can pitch the blog to your academic peers in your area of specialization, your students, the profession at large, or the academy, or an even wider public.  That is, your intended audience will constrain not just the topics you will discuss as well the the manner in which you do so. Of course, they can become moving targets and change, but to develop a blog you need to have an intended audience in mind (even if only philosophers of the future.)

Every audience presupposes different background knowledge and are more or less forgiving of different kinds of (specialized) writing styles. I admire Bleeding Heart Libertarians because while they write for a non-academic, rather politicized (and large!) audience, they simultaneously are interesting and accessible to academics who do not share their shared background commitments. But I also admire Brian Weatherson, when he was still blogging actively; Brian's blog was generally rather technical and he did not compromise on this. But he writes clean, lively prose and made you see the point of the apparatus while you were sitting in on a seminar he was virtually having with his peers and graduate students.

The bad news is most blogs, even well written and designed ones, have small audience size. That is sometimes a matter of  bad luck [just as you publish a neat post on modality, a film clip of Timothy Williamson is shared on youtube, etc.] or bad marketing (you need to use social media, link to other blogs, that is, become a node in a lot of discussions), or an unwillingness to talk about sex scandals or share professional gossip. The main problem with most blogs is that they lack voice or what I call persona.

• Persona

The hardest problem is to figure out what persona you will project in order to connect with your audience given the ideas you want to discuss. I tend to suggest that you need to project and magnify a part of you that inspires a response in one's would be audience. (Of course, if you are Kierkegaard you can develop many different kinds of such personae.) For those of us, who are self-conscious teachers, we do something similar with our class room persona, which we use as a means to facilitate learning, to provoke reflection, or generate discussion. I know quite a few shy people, who qua blogger present a persona they would like to be in other parts of their life.

Now, it  is significant that if your blog takes off, this blog-persona has consequences how people will interpret and see you. So, you have to be willing to live with such consequences, even unintended consequences sometimes due to selective attention to only few utterances or posts. It surprised me, for example, albeit  it was an entirely foreseeable consequence, that I have come to be understood by some readers as a shrill social justice warrior (despite my skeptical sensibility).

• Form and Content

Most philosophy blogs are brief reads (250 words) or short reads (800-1200 words). It's not as if long reads (over 1500 words) are impossible, but life is short and few people are eager to pay attention to you for extended periods of time. Personally, I would love to see more use of graphics and video-moving content in philosophy blogs. While the best blogs  -- through the use of hyperlinks -- create an oeuvre, a system, a privileged set of conversation partners, or a pathway into different ways of thinking, by nature blogs are (recall here and here) ephemera. 

Some content restrictions and style structures follow from the blog provider you use. You should really research different kind of blog providers--not just their fee structures, but also their permissible templates, the capacity of the templates to do what you want to do with the blog, and the explicit restrictions of speech they impose. Some blog providers give you a discount but then plaster advertising on your otherwise clean house look.  This is a big decision because once you go with a particular provider you kind of lock yourself in, and when you switch you may have trouble to carry the archive of your past blogs with you. 

Academics are disciplined into forms of cautious and pedantic writing that are tedious to read. Like all non-disciplinary  writing any given individual blog post needs a hook--the first few sentences are key. On average, a blog needs to state its point or conclusion in the first paragraph. Luckily analytical philosophers are trained to state their thesis in the first sentence, and glorify polemics, so  the transition to blogging is not so difficult, provided -- and here our training pulls in the other direction -- one is not a perfectionist of a certain sort.  That is to say, analytic philosophers impose on ourselves a demand of disambiguation against any kind of uncharitable misreading. That makes for a great satirical blog post, but destroy whatever conatus (in the Spinozist, not the Hobbesian or Cartesian sense) a blog post may have. 

That is to say, most good blogs have in addition to a provider who delivers a range of container templates, they (the blogs) also have an implicit and regular template in which the content is articulated. The simplest one is three-fold: (i) hook [thesis/point]; (ii) argument/evidence; (iii) polemical restatement of the thesis. (For others, recall here and here.) Of course, over time one learns to play with different structures to present one's point.

• Frequency

The most important point about frequency is that it needs to be fairly regular--certainly while you are developing your blog and audience. The audience should want to expect one, even if they can't receive a new piece when they wish. But once a blog is established that's compatible with extended downtime. Schwitzgebel's The Splintered Mind and Helen de Cruz, who divides her blogging activities among different sites, allow quite a bit of down-time in between posts. But their pieces are received with great interest. 

Few academics have the time to do a daily post and it is really unnecessary to draw a regular audience. In fact, it may reduce one's audience because people really don't want to spend that much time with you (we academics are not that fascinating to others). The other, more frequent problem is that many blogs start with a gush of activity (often drawing on ideas and posts that motivated setting up the blog in the first place), and after a few weeks or months they run out of steam and die down. Some people really don't have a lot to say and become aware of this in a timely fashion. My only suggestion is to think about blogging as producing a series, some of these are open-ended and some a circumscribed.  Of course, it's okay if blogs die. 

• Comments Policy

One of the most important decisions that you'll make, which will influence your audience size, audience engagement, and your health is your comments policy. If you allow automatic (un-moderated) anonymous commenting you will probably have  larger, even loyal readership and more comments than otherwise would be possible. You will also allow your  blog ro be hijacked by, and in a certain sense you will be responsible for providing a platform for, some of the worst and unsavory ideas out there.  If you want to produce the end of times, go for it.

That leaves either moderated commenting of anonymous comments or moderated comments of owned comments. The former is extremely time-consuming, the latter reduces the number of comments significantly. If you want to be a forum for discussions you probably need to allow anonymous commenting because so many people worry about reputational costs of their comments, have legitimate concerns about being targeted by some lunatic or anonymous website, or concerns about employability or tenure-ability. Either way, write a good comments policy, so you can re-direct the aggrieved to it. 

• Time management

I hinted at the significance of time management. It is very easy to have one's blogging become all-consuming. Drafting a piece and moderating comments, not to mention an obsessive eye on readership numbers and flows, can be a time-sink. Obviously this is more true of very high profile blogs, and the odds of your blog becoming high profile are -- time and attention are  scarce goods -- low. Even so, it's good to set some rules for yourself about when you post and when you check comments (etc.). If you care about audience size you'll also learn when are good times to post a piece. Timing really matters.

Group blogs can be very time consuming because they require quite a bit of coordination behind the scenes. But they do allow taking quiet breaks from blogging without much disruption to the blog.

• Professional Risk

You have to think hard about this. Lots of peers think blogging is not serious and not philosophy. Almost certainly your blogging will not meet exacting professional standards of, say, an Analysis article. Alternatively, when you do get an audience, you run the risk that they know your blogging work better than your scholarly work.

A lot of people use their blogs to promote the scholarly views they have developed in print. That's a dissemination model of blogging. That's relatively low risk because you have already done the hard work and understand (presumably) the scholarly landscape. Of course, if you cut scholarly corners you are giving more visibility to your would-be-enemies/critics to hunt you down.

Alternatively you can use a blog to develop or discover a position. However, if you use a blog to develop new ideas or new interests, you run the risk of looking like an amateur or worse. 

Okay, this is just over 1800 words, so I have gone on too long. But maybe you found it helpful.

 

Major League Philosophers and an Adjunct

The three weirdest things that major league philosophy professors do when talking to those of us playing in the minors (MiLP, consisting of all of triple, double, class, etc. etc. etc. A departments)-

1. Refer to colleagues and/or their major league graduate school teachers by first name, as if we automatically know who they are talking about (i.e. “Oh yeah, I remember how Charles used to get really cranky whenever people crossed him about the deontic/alethic distinction.” Huh? Charles who? Parsons? Hartshorne? Bukowsi? Some Charles whose last name I don’t even recognize?).
2. Less common, but common enough to be a reliable trope, automatically assume that you have read their work (“Don’t forget that I already covered that one in “Pretense’s Pretense.” What? Pretense what? What’s this “pretense theory” you keep mentioning?).
3. Expect you to get worked up that that one or more of their papers is not cited or discussed in places where it should be (say an anthology dedicated to some problem doesn’t even mention them). Everyone in the minor leagues who has published enough is used to this happening to them.

The only sense I can make of all three of these is that major league philosophy is a very small community, at least compared to all of the MilP programs. If you are among the very small group of academics who belong to departments with a non-trivial speaker series and travel budget (and working plumbing in your building for that matter) you have a much better idea of who everyone else in such departments are and what they are working on. As a result you are right to expect everyone else in that small group to know what’s going on with you.--Cogburn "When Major League Philosophers talk to the rest of us." @Philpercs.com

When I arrived in grad school in the mid 90s, I turned out to be the fifth 'Eric' (Brown, Wiland, Brandon) or 'Erik' (Curiel); in addition, there were still fresh enough memories of an 'Erich' (Reck). So, we were simply identified by our last names, especially when talking to each other. Luckily none of us had last names that also doubled as a common first name (e.g., Stanley, Taylor, Hunter, etc.), so further confusion was avoided. Last names were also good enough for our local heroes -- one was either in the Wittgenstein-Anscombe or (the much smaller) Carnap-camp. Because there was a kind of happy indifference to Kripke at Chicago, I reflected little on the fact that names had metaphysical import, but if I had thought about it at the time I would have been suspicious of the very idea of self-identity and certainly not consider it trivial.

The joke of Cogburn's post is that he has been more widely and more regularly read than most living philosophers. Defying all the old status rules of the profession, he has better name recognition within the profession than (say) your average NYU grad. For a while I would be often asked what he is really like. After all, I spent nearly three years in intense, daily contact with Cogburn. But, while I have very fine-grained (and surely false) theories on the subject, I always deflect the question because I have never met the man in person to this day; he is the only one of the old NewApps crew that falls in the unmet category, which proves his point: most of the others I met on my or their work-related travel, funded by generous taxpayers and endowments.

Even after we went our separate ways, I have stayed compulsively addicted to Cogburn's blogging because he is mostly unpredictable (his recent turn to T.S. Eliot excepted), often profound, and distinctly unwilling to activate the tiresome and endlessly repeated Memes about the profession that circulate elsewhere.

Philosophy is an unusual profession in that our status hierarchy conforms, in very large part, to the objects of our knowledge, that is, the scribblings and occasional bons mots of other philosophers. Yes, other professions and arts also have status hierarchies in which folk emulate and keep track of each other; and, of course, in academic disciplines they are also supposed to cite each other. But the naked truth is that even when -- let's stipulate -- it is meaningful, much of professional philosophy has no outside referent; when it does, it is constructed or imagined by those very same philosophers or other academics--this is true even of much work in the philosophy of special sciences and applied ethics. This means a good chunk of philosophy just is about philosophy or the way the world is imagined by philosophers. This has an obvious corollary: while officially we keep arguments, moves, and distinctions distinct from identity, we have made it when our names have become a short-hand for them (cf. 'to Quine'; Platonic; etc.).

If we really believed what we say, 'our arguments stand or fall regardless of the speaker's authority,' then why has there not been a proliferation of anonymous or group pseudonyms in our best philosophical writings (since, say, Kierkegaard)?* The rare exceptions tend to involve motivated hoaxes and political concerns. (Impossible you say? Mathematics had Bourbaki.) Professional philosophy is best compared to a credit economy with currency controls; there are a lot of inflated reputations, but the bubbles tend to last rarely for more than a decade.

In his post, Cogburn, suggests that there is an escape from  this credit economy. But as he recognizes, you can't really write about about the path toward freedom and still be convincing. Amusingly enough Cogburn's post went viral and was shared by professional philosophers on Facebook who, well, play in the majors.

I never got sophisticated about engaging with Kripke. When I was still historicist, I used to think that rigid designation is a metaphysics apt for a society that embraces the one-drop-rule. After I rejected historicism, I was relieved to discover Lewis, embraced counterpart theory, and decided to keep worlds fairly small.

Dailynous has directed me to the obituary of Dave Heller, who with a master’s degree in American literature ended up teaching (ahh) philosophy; since his death, his life has been turned into a symbol of  the plight of adjuncts in our oligarchic universities that represent our oligarchic times--a noble cause. He also seems to be an exemplar of somebody who lived a true philosophical life and, thereby, experienced the kind of freedom Cogburn describes. (That's not intended as an argument for ongoing exploitation of adjuncts.) Google directed me to snippets of his life (as a salesclerk at the Magus bookstore in Seattle); I was thrilled to learn that his shtick involved him asking, “Are you re-reading anything?” No text stays the same, after all.+

 

Poetic Philosophers; (or on Harman on Aristotle and Fodor)

By far the greatest thing is the use of metaphor. That alone cannot be learnt; it is the token of genius [εὐφυΐας]. For the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances.--Aristotle, Poetics 1459a (translated by W.H. Fyfe.)

 Warum ich so weise bin.
 Warum ich so klug bin.
 Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe.--F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

I was reflecting on Graham Harman's and Jon Cogburn's responses to my earlier post on Harman, when I caught another point by Harman:

There is a reason why Aristotle calls metaphor the greatest gift of genius, the one that cannot be taught. He doesn’t say “being able to eliminate fuzziness and speak in clear propositional terms is the greatest gift of genius,” because it isn’t. Fuzziness and lack of precision are relatively minor intellectual problems in comparison with premature or hasty literalization of the world. (Editorial comment: analytic philosophy, for all its achievements, still doesn’t grasp this point, and that’s why it does not produce many impressive writers even though it produces industrial-scale numbers of clear ones. Jerry Fodor once called himself and his friends better writers than Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, which just proves how much the point is being missed.)--Graham Harman.

I understand the temptation felt by Harman (and W.H. Fyfe) to translate Aristotle's εὐφυΐας as 'genius;' context makes clear that Aristotle is trying to convey the idea that being good at coining metaphors is a skill that cannot be taught, but somehow a natural talent, that is, it exhibits having fine natural dispositions. One reason to resist the (Romantic sounding) use of 'genius' here is that only a few pages before (1455a), Aristotle had written [διὸ εὐφυοῦς ἡ ποιητική ἐστιν ἢ μανικοῦ:] that is why poetry needs either a naturally well disposed nature or being a manic, and here the inspired ‘manic’ [μανικοῦ] evokes our genius. For somebody with a good disposition may still need a lot of endurance or practice to get good at the skill.

One might think that Harman is just wrong to channel Aristotle on metaphor and apply it to philosophers because, in this context of the Poetics,  Aristotle is discussing tragedy, not philosophy. But, as it happens Aristotle is generalizing about a skill. In fact, the ability to see sameness within difference is, indeed, also a philosophical one.* So, one way to read Aristotle is to suggest that to be a very good philosopher means to have an important skill in common with a very good poet.

As an aside, in context of his post, Harman is engaging with B.P. Morton (a blogger at the new group blog, Philpercs), and it's not quite clear to me what prompts Harman's aside about analytical philosophers and the bon mot put-down Fodor (who, like many not quite great analytical philosophers is a great, entertaining polemicist, but whose stock has been plummeting since his ill-advised, anti-Darwin book not to mention ordinary developments in cognitive psychology).

Perhaps it's because of my analytical training that my first quiet thought in response to Harman’s ‘’ analytic philosophy…does not produce many impressive writers even though it produces industrial-scale numbers of clear ones,” was it's better to produce industrial-scale numbers of clear writers than to produce considerable number of bad poets.+ But I caught myself, because I know that in our time, re-activating  the polemic between analytic and continental philosophy prevents genuine thought. By now we ought to judge these philosophical traditions not by the many, but either by the best or by the potentially enduring contributions they produced (about which some other time more).

Yet, analytical philosophy does not weed out truly great writers: Russell (who won the 1950 Nobel in Literature), Quine, Iris Murdoch, Dennett (go re-read Elbow Room), and Jody Azzouni are all excellent examples.** Even Fodor has quite a few memorable lines when he is not being a polemicist. (I leave aside her the good polemical writing at which we analytical philosophers excel.) This is not to deny that the joy one can find in reading them is different in character from the joy, if it is joy, one experiences in reading Nietzsche or Kierkegaard.

Even if one agrees, as I am inclined to do, that "Fuzziness and lack of precision are relatively minor intellectual problems in comparison with premature or hasty literalization of the world," it does not follow (even if I, upon considerable reflection, agree that the 'literalization of the world' should not be undertaken in haste—it took me a while to understand this phrase) that we should praise or promote fuzziness and lack of precision for their own sakes (although I note that one can deploy fuzziness in precise and skillful ways).

Anyway, I close with this observation (which echoes Benardete on Quinean poetics): while clarity is a core virtue in the self-understanding of analytical philosophers (recall this), the dirty secret of our poetic genius is that we have an enduring love for well-chosen metaphors: for example, content (as in mental content); grounding (as in metaphysical grounding); stance (as in the intentional stance), and, more controversially, analysis (as in analysis is the method of analytic philosophy), etc. That is, like all great philosophical movements, analytic philosophy, too, combines clarity and poetry.

 

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.)