The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (136 page)

This is the kernel of Deleuze’s assault on assumption (3). He rejects the idea that thought can be suitably
directed
to achieve whatever basic aims its subject may have. That is to ignore the thousand natural shocks that thought is heir to.

These references to philosophical thinking provide us with a good cue to turn to Deleuze’s account of philosophy itself. Much of what we have heard him say about thinking in general can be straightforwardly applied to philosophical thinking in particular. Here is a pertinent quotation:

Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure…. [And] this cannot be known before being constructed. We will not say of many books of philosophy that they are false, for that is to say nothing, but rather that they lack importance or interest, precisely because they do not create any concept. (
What Is Philosophy?
, pp. 82–83; cf.
Hume
, p. 106, emphasis in original)

This quotation provides the telling clue as to how Deleuze conceives philosophy. Philosophy, for Deleuze, ‘
is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts
’ (
What Is Philosophy?
, p. 2, emphasis added; cf. ‘Philosophy’, p. 136). Not just any concepts, mind; certainly not if it is to be truly worthwhile. Its concepts must disturb, challenge, provoke. They must be anachronisms of a sort. ‘Philosophy,’ Deleuze writes, ‘… is always against its time, critique of the present world. The philosopher creates concepts that are neither eternal nor historical but untimely…. And in the untimely there are truths that are more durable than all historical or eternal truths put together: truths of times to come’ (
Nietzsche
, p. 100; cf.
Difference and Repetition
, p. xxi). In a similar vein he continues the preceding quotation set as an extract as follows:

Concepts must have irregular contours moulded on their living material. What is naturally uninteresting? Flimsy concepts, … or, on the other hand, concepts that are too regular, petrified, and reduced to a framework. In this respect, the most universal concepts, those presented as eternal forms or values, are the most skeletal and least interesting. Nothing positive is done, nothing at all, … when we are content to brandish ready-made old concepts like skeletons intended to intimidate any creation, without seeing that the ancient philosophers from whom we borrow them were already doing what we would like to prevent modern philosophers from doing: they were creating their concepts. (
What Is Philosophy?
, p. 83)

The philosopher, on Deleuze’s conception, provides new ways of making sense of things then. Those new ways of making sense of things need not be ways of making sense of new things. The aim is not to see new sights. It is to see sights anew. P.M.S. Hacker proposes that the chief insight of Wittgenstein’s later work is that ‘philosophy contributes not to human knowledge, but to human understanding’ (Hacker (
1996
), p. 110). There is a sense in which, for Deleuze, philosophy contributes neither to human knowledge
nor
to human understanding, but rather to human
⁹⁰
thinking
, which may very well promote both knowledge and understanding but which may equally well disrupt them and force them out of both their complacence and their complaisance.
⁹¹

Philosophy, on this conception, is certainly an attempt to make sense of things, on a suitably non-propositional, virtual-centred construal of making sense of things. It follows that Deleuze’s account of philosophy can be readily adapted to an account of metaphysics, on my definition of
metaphysics: metaphysics is simply that part of philosophy in which the concepts created are of the most general kind.

There may now appear to be an anomaly
vis-à-vis
Spinoza however. For it now appears that Deleuze is presenting us with a vision of metaphysics as pursuit of Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge. Certainly, there seems to be a strong hint of Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge, and of the inexpressibility that I have argued attaches to it, in passages such as the following:

Thought as such produces something
interesting
when it accedes to the infinite movement that frees it from truth as supposed paradigm and reconquers an immanent power of creation. But to do this it would be necessary to return to the interior of scientific states of affairs … in order to penetrate into … the sphere of the virtual, a sphere that is only actualized in them…. But it is the sphere of the virtual … that logic can only
show
, according to a famous phrase,
⁹²
without ever being able to grasp it in propositions. (
What Is Philosophy?
, p. 140, emphasis in original; cf. ibid., p. 160)

Why do I speak of an anomaly? Because in
Chapter 2
, §6, I argued that metaphysics, for Spinoza himself, with whom we might expect Deleuze to be in broad agreement on this issue, is a pursuit, not of knowledge of the third kind, but of knowledge of the second kind.

In fact, however, Deleuze no more presents us with a vision of metaphysics as a pursuit of knowledge of the third kind than Spinoza did. Knowledge of the third kind is by definition particular. Metaphysics is by definition general. What Deleuze presents us with is something which, in one critical respect, is just the same as what Spinoza presented us with: a vision of metaphysics as
conducive
to knowledge of the third kind, a vision of metaphysics as in the service of ethics, and thus itself an integral part of the good life. Deleuze nevertheless goes beyond Spinoza in his account of
how
metaphysics conduces to knowledge of the third kind. What Deleuze adds to the Spinozist vision is the idea of metaphysics as the creation of
concepts.
⁹³

7. Three Answers

Deleuze supplies clear answers to the three questions that I posed in §6 of the Introduction. A synoptically useful way of bringing this chapter to a close will be to say briefly what they are.

(a) The Transcendence Question

Deleuze denies that there is scope, in metaphysics, for making sense of what is transcendent: it is not for nothing that the plane on which concepts are constructed is called ‘the plane of immanence’ (see the previous section). Indeed Deleuze denies that there is scope
anywhere
for making sense of what is transcendent. He denies that there is anything transcendent.

This is a consequence of his empiricism. He describes his empiricism as both ‘a superior empiricism’ (p. 57) and ‘a radical empiricism’ (
What Is Philosophy?
, p. 47). It is an empiricism in which nothing is taken for granted save what is given, and according to which nothing is given, at the most fundamental level, save differences: not discrete entities, not their features, not even the subject (see §4(d)).
⁹⁴

Deleuze also frequently describes his empiricism as ‘transcendental empiricism’ (e.g. p. 144). Here there is a deliberate echo of Kant. At first blush this is surprising. Does not Deleuze exclude from his position the very elements that would invite such a Kantian label: a pre-given subject, for instance, or a radical separation between experience and its conditions? Well, he certainly excludes those two elements. But he retains a dependence of experience on its conditions (§4(e)). And he makes capital out of the interplay between our various mental faculties, just as Kant did (cf. Ch. 5, §4, and Ch. 7, §8).
⁹⁵
This is arguably enough to make the label apposite. At any rate it seems to be as much as Deleuze wants to evoke with the label (see pp. 135ff.).

A version of the concern that arises with respect to this label arises anyway. If Deleuze denies that there is anything transcendent, then with what right does he continue to talk of the immanent? Surely, the immanent is to be understood precisely in contrast to the transcendent, as that which is in some sense immanent
to
something else, such as the subject. Ought not Deleuze to follow Hegel’s lead and repudiate the very distinction between the immanent and the transcendent? Surely, he could achieve all he wants
to achieve with his talk of the immanent by resting with the idea that being is univocal.

Several points can be made here. First, it is not obvious that rejection of the transcendent need occasion rejection of the very distinction between the immanent and the transcendent. Must someone who denies that there is anything unknowable, for instance, reject the very distinction between the knowable and the unknowable? There are in any case obvious historical reasons for continuing to talk of immanence, not least its theological connotations. (Deleuze’s rejection of the transcendent is very much of a piece with Nietzsche’s rejection of the transcendent, which found celebrated expression in Nietzsche’s claim that God is dead (Ch. 15, §5): when God was still alive, what is now reckoned to be all there is was immanent to Him.) Deleuze helpfully discusses these issues in ‘Example 3’ of
What Is Philosophy?
(pp. 44–49). He rebukes Plato and his followers for casting the immanent as that which is immanent to the One; he rebukes Descartes, Kant, and Husserl for casting the immanent as that which is immanent to the subject;
⁹⁶
and he applauds Spinoza, whom he sees as being followed in this respect by Bergson, for casting the immanent as that which is immanent only to itself.
⁹⁷

A final question for this sub-section: in urging that we can make sense only of what is immanent, is Deleuze vulnerable to the Limit Argument (Ch. 5, §8)? No – precisely because he rejects the transcendent. His project is not to draw a
limit
to what we can make sense of, not in the sense of ‘limit’ in which a limit is a limitation separating one terrain from another (cf. Ch. 9, §4).

(b) The Creativity Question

Deleuze believes that metaphysics is a creative exercise; he could scarcely make his position on that any plainer. Indeed he follows Bergson in seeing it as a creative exercise of the purest kind (Ch. 16, §§3 and 6). At one point he goes as far as to say that ‘to think is to create –
there is no other creation
’ (p. 147, emphasis added). True, he has an extremely broad conception of thought (cf. pp. 252–253). Even so, the implications for metaphysics, in which thought is taken to a kind of pinnacle of what it can do, are clear.

Whether or not we accede to Deleuze’s views about metaphysics, we cannot deny the creativity of his own practice, nor the richness of what he creates. Consider, for instance, the list of notions that he himself invents
(event, sense, …) as well as his appropriation and extension of other philosophers’ ideas (eternal return, the univocity of being, …). Here as elsewhere, his practice, in this case his contributions to metaphysics, can be seen as a striking endorsement of his theory, in this case his stance in
meta-metaphysics.

(c) The Novelty Question

Deleuze likewise believes that there is scope for (radical) innovation in metaphysics: this too is a point on which he leaves no room for doubt. Not only that; he thinks the metaphysician had
better
innovate. And he thinks the metaphysician had better not stop innovating. Once the new is established, it needs to be replaced by a new new.
⁹⁸

Part of the rationale for such innovation, as we saw in the previous section, is to upset traditional ways of making sense of things, which are in danger, as they stagnate, of ceasing to be ways of making sense of things at all. A certain bemusement, if only transitional bemusement, is thus to be expected when metaphysicians get to work. In fact it is to be applauded. This is both profoundly non-conservative and profoundly un-Wittgensteinian.
⁹⁹

In §6(b) of the Introduction I quoted P.M.S. Hacker’s appeal to ‘concepts and categories that we could not abandon without ceasing to be human’ (Hacker (
2001b
), p. 368). Part of Hacker’s reason for making this appeal is to defend a Wittgensteinian conservatism. But Deleuze might well accede to the idea of concepts and categories that we could not abandon without ceasing to be human and draw an entirely different conclusion. There are real practical questions about what our humanity consists in, about how beholden to it we should be, and about who, come to any of that, ‘we’ are.
¹⁰⁰
When Deleuze urges that we should aspire, in metaphysics, to make sense of things in ways that are radically new, let us not forget the variety of ways in which our making sense of things (i.e. the
making
of
sense
of
things
by
us
– all four components are pertinent) can be radically new.

1
This is a reference back to the opening sentence of
Ch. 5
.

2
Deleuze’s death in 1995 was by suicide. Having become debilitated by various pulmonary ailments he threw himself from his apartment window. In a subsequent internet discussion thread Greg J. Seigworth commented, ‘I’m betting his eyes were open the whole way.’ This chapter may go some way towards explaining the significance of Seigworth’s comment.

3
The books were
Difference and Repetition
and
Logic of Sense
.