The dogmatic image of thought

In many respects, Deleuze’s constant engagement in his earlier writings with the question of the nature of thought is a prolegomenon to the distinctive practice of philosophy developed in collaboration with Guattari. Throughout his work from Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983) and Proust and Signs (1972), through Difference and Repetition (1994) to What Is Philosophy? (1994), Deleuze returns to the criticism of the ‘images’ of thought that have held sway in philosophy. All too often, he argues, these images have served to set limits to philosophy’s own capacity for thought. By contrast, he finds in the works of philosophers such as Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, Bergson and Nietzsche the outlines of a critical and untimely form of thought that breaks with these prevailing images.³ It is from the perspective of the approach to thought shared by these philosophers that he undertakes the analysis and critique of conservative and conformist images of the nature of thinking, along with the characterisation of an alternative form of thinking which would be ‘opposed to the traditional image which philosophy has projected or erected in thought’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987:16).

By the ‘image’ of thought, Deleuze means more than just a representation of thought but ‘something deeper that’s always taken for granted, a system of coordinates, dynamics, orientations: what it means to think and to ‘‘orient oneself in thought”’ (Deleuze 1995b:148). The image of thought is a pre-philosophical series of presuppositions which structures both the understanding of thinking and the character of the conceptual production which ensues on that basis. It is an image of this kind which allows Descartes to suppose at the outset of his Meditations ‘that everybody knows and is presumed to know what it means to think’ (Deleuze 1994:131). In Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983) and Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze argues that philosophical reflection upon the nature of thought has been dominated by a series of presuppositions which together make up a single ‘dogmatic’ image of thought. These presuppositions recur throughout the history of philosophy in variant forms, empiricist as well as rationalist. Together they form an image of thought which is all the more effective because it remains largely implicit.

The essential theses of this image of thought derive from the idea that thought is a natural capacity with an inbuilt affinity with the true. Thought naturally seeks truth, ‘it loves and wills truth “by right”’ (Deleuze 1983:95; 1994:131). On this basis, thought is supposed to be naturally sound and the process of true judgement automatic in the sense that it results from the normal operation of the faculties. Conversely, error must be the

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effect of forces external to thought and hostile to its normal operation: ‘the inflation of the concept of error in philosophy shows the persistence of the dogmatic image of thought’ (Deleuze 1983:105). Thought has many misadventures, Deleuze points out, including the effects of madness and malevolence, yet the dogmatic image tends to reduce all these to the single form of error understood as misrecognition or failure of the will. He argues that the analysis of thought should instead take seriously the fact of stupidity: unlike truth or falsity, stupidity comes in many forms and degrees. Whereas the dogmatic image supports the view that thought needs a method, an artifice which enables the thinker to ward off error (Deleuze 1983:103), Deleuze defends a conception of thought as an involuntary activity which is always the effect of outside forces and elements: ‘something in the world forces us to think’ (Deleuze 1994:139). From this perspective, there is no place for the idea that thought must be under the control of a good will and no basis for a conception of method.

In Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze argues that the dogmatic image of thought which dominates the history of philosophy takes its model from acts of recognition: ‘whether one considers Plato’s Theaetetus, Descartes’ Meditations or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, this model remains sovereign and defines the orientation of the philosophical analysis of what it means to think’ (Deleuze 1994:134).⁴ Implicit in this model is the conflation of thought with knowledge and the supposition that knowledge is ultimately a form of recognition. Recognition is defined by the harmonious exercise of the different faculties upon an object which is supposed to be the same throughout its different representations (sensory, memorial, intellectual, etc). The model of recognition therefore implies an underlying agreement among the faculties which is typically grounded in the unity of the thinking subject: ‘For Kant as for Descartes, it is the identity of the Self in the “I think” which grounds the harmony of all the faculties and their agreement on the form of a supposed Same object’ (Deleuze 1994:133; cf. 1963:135).⁵

Deleuze objects that recognition offers a timid conception of thought which draws its exemplars from among the most banal acts of everyday thinking: ‘this is a table, this is an apple…good morning Theaetetus… who can believe that the destiny of thought is at stake in these acts…?’ (Deleuze 1994:135). In opposition to this model, he argues that it is not the reassuring familiarity of the known which should provide us with the paradigm of thinking, but those hesitant gestures which accompany our encounters with the unknown. Examples that point to an alternative model of thought may be found in Plato, when he draws attention to the responses of the subject of contradictory perceptions which ‘provoke thought to reconsideration’, or in Heidegger, when he points to the situation of someone learning to swim.⁶ Apprenticeship or learning may be contrasted with recognition at every point: it is an involuntary activity

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which need not involve the application of a method. Apprenticeship is not the natural exercise of a faculty but something to which we are driven by necessity or puzzlement, in any case by the perception of a problem. The antithesis of thought in this case is not error but the failure adequately to perceive a problem or the inadequate specification of the dimensions of a problem which confronts us—in other words, stupidity.

The dogmatic image of thought assumes that the primary task of thinking is knowledge, where this is understood in terms of solutions to particular puzzles or problems which can be expressed in prepositional form. As a result, this image privileges the prepositional form of thought and the relation of designation or reference as the locus of truth. By contrast, apprenticeship is an activity in which progress cannot be measured solely by reference to propositions since it requires familiarity with a given material or milieu. We acquire such familiarity when we acquire the capacity to discern and to pose problems correctly. Deleuze argues that it is from acts of apprenticeship or learning that we ought to derive the transcendental conditions of thought (Deleuze 1994:166). His objection to the recognition model is therefore normative. He does not deny that recognition occurs or that the faculties may be employed in this manner. Rather, he wants to retain the name of thinking for a different activity which takes place when the mind is provoked by an encounter with the unknown or the unfamiliar. The process of thinking must be brought into being by forces external to the thinker: ‘To think is to create—there is no other creation—but to create is first of all to engender “thinking” in thought’ (Deleuze 1994:147).

Deleuze’s second objection to the dogmatic image is that it tells us nothing about the conditions that give rise to thought: ‘We are never referred to the real forces that form thought, thought itself is never related to the real forces that it presupposes as thought’ (Deleuze 1983:103–4). By contrast, he argues for a ‘genetic’ conception of thought, the purpose of which is to give an account of the real conditions which give rise to thought and which determine the form it assumes. By real conditions, he means the transcendental field or field of immanence in terms of which the different forms of thought must be understood. Different philosophers propose different accounts of the nature of this field. Thus, in Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983), Deleuze takes the will to power as the basis for a ‘genetic and differential’ genealogical analysis of thought, on the grounds that, for Nietzsche, it is the different varieties of will to power that give rise to thought. In these terms, thought may be either affirmative or negative in relation to life, active or reactive in its modality of realising will to power. This principle sustains Nietzsche’s questioning of the will to truth in Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche 1973) and in On the Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche 1994) when he asks: What is the value of truth? or What it is in us which really wants truth? Understood in this manner, the

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‘element’ of thought is no longer truth and falsity but ‘the noble and the base, the high and the low, depending on the nature of the forces that take hold of thought itself (Deleuze 1983:104).

By contrast, in Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze’s shift from the recognition model of thought to ‘a point of view of effective genesis’ (Deleuze 1994:162) proceeds by way of an account of problems as the transcendental ground of thinking. The importance attached to the invention of problems in philosophy is a recurrent theme in Deleuze’s philosophy which may be traced back to his essay on Bergson (Deleuze 1956). He endorses Bergson’s view that ‘true freedom’ and therefore the highest power of thought lies in the capacity to discover or constitute new problems, thereby rejecting the pedagogic conception of thinking as the solving of problems given to us by others or by ‘society’ (Deleuze 1988a: 15). Similarly, in Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze argues that thought must be understood as the exploration of problems thrown up by history, social life or the development of particular sciences, and in its highest form as the expression or actualisation of transcendental problems. Deleuze’s conception of transcendental problems is modelled upon Kant’s account of transcendental Ideas. In this respect, Descombes is right to suggest that in his metaphysics of difference Deleuze is above all a postKantian (Descombes 1980:152). For Kant, the Idea of nature may be regarded as a problem in the sense that it is the undetermined object of empirical knowledge and the embodiment of the ideal of a complete conceptual determination of that object. As such, it regulates the practice of scientific inquiry.

For Deleuze, Kant’s account of the transcendental ground of reason provides the basis for a novel understanding of the nature and function of problems. In opposition to the traditional view, which defines problems in terms of the possibility of finding solutions, and which sees truth as essentially prepositional and prior to problems, he argues that problems must be regarded as the source of all truths: ‘problems are the differential elements in thought, the genetic elements in the true’ (Deleuze 1994:162).⁷ Problems here are understood as the specific objects of thought and, as such, accessible only to thought in its transcendental operation. These objects of pure thought can only be empirically discerned by means of their particular conceptually determined forms: in relation to ordinary empirical thought they remain unthinkable. They are paradoxical objects in the sense that they are at once that which cannot be thought and that which can only be thought. Deleuze’s conception of transcendental problems as the genetic elements of thought implies a twofold genesis: a logical genesis of truths in the form of solutions to particular problems and a transcendental genesis of the act of thinking in the discovery or constitution of Ideas or problems. Both geneses are implicated in the activity which Deleuze takes as his model for thought: ‘The exploration of Ideas and the elevation of each faculty to its transcendent exercise amounts to the same thing. These are two aspects of an essential apprenticeship or process of learning’ (Deleuze 1994:164).

Deleuze is by no means the only philosopher to suggest that thought is essentially a problem-solving activity. In political philosophy it is hardly controversial to claim that philosophical theories of the nature and foundations of government, or the principles of a just society, arise in response to real problems. Thus, as we saw above, Rawls’s concept of political liberalism (Rawls 1993) was designed to solve the problem of defining a stable and just society in which there are divergent and incompatible views of the good. However, there are not only different kinds of problems in philosophy but also different stances which philosophy can take in relation to its problems. Although the aims of political liberalism differ substantially in a number of ways from Kant’s defence of reasonable faith, there is a sense in which both seek an apologetic solution to their respective problems. Rawls follows Kant in seeking a solution to his problem based upon practical rather than theoretical reason, and adds that an adequate solution will be subject to the test of ‘reflective equilibrium’: that is, it will be found when the principles of justice which flow from the principles of construction accord with the widely held convictions of free citizens of a stable and just society. As he describes the procedure, ‘we begin from shared fundamental values implicit in the public political culture in the hope of developing from them a political conception that can gain free and reasoned agreement in judgement’ (Rawls 1993:100–1). To the extent that the goal of reflective equilibrium implies a form of recognition of the fundamental values presupposed at the outset, this approach to the problem remains bound to the dogmatic image of thought.

By contrast, Deleuze’s principal reason for claiming that the classical image of thought is a profound betrayal of what it means to think is that it sustains a complacent conception of thought which is incapable of criticising established values. Kant is his prime example of a thinker who proposed an all-encompassing critique but who in the end settled for compromise. His version of critique proved incapable of questioning the value of knowledge, faith or morality: ‘There has never been a more conciliatory or respectful total critique’ (Deleuze 1983:89). The reason is that the value of knowledge, morality and beauty is presupposed by the manner in which Kant understands the different systems of collaboration among the faculties. Deleuze points out that there are as many kinds of common sense as there are natural interests of reason (Deleuze 1963:118; 1994:136–7). Knowledge, morality and beauty are thus presupposed by the terms of Kantian critique. Claims to knowledge, moral judgement or aesthetic value may be called into question, but not knowledge, morality or aesthetic value themselves.

Deleuze contrasts Kant’s critique with Nietzsche’s genealogy, arguing that Nietzsche sought the radicalisation and extension of Kantian critique. Nietzsche’s objection was that Kant did not pursue critique to the point at which it would become a true critique of values: ‘we need a critique of moral values: the value of these values themselves must first be called into question’ (Nietzsche 1994: Pref. 6). It follows that the nature of critique itself must be transformed, for if Nietzsche’s critique were to be undertaken in the manner of Kant’s, on the basis of some unchallenged set of fundamental values, then it would be vulnerable to the same objection. That is why Nietzsche’s genealogy is an immanent critique, in which there is no external standard by which to evaluate but only the will to power as a principle of internal genesis, both of values and of thought: ‘only the will to power as genetic and genealogical principle, as legislative principle, is capable of realising internal critique’ (Deleuze 1983:91). Deleuze attributes to Nietzsche an ideal of thought which could equally be considered the goal of his own philosophy, namely a ‘thought that would affirm life instead of a knowledge that is opposed to life…Thinking would then mean discovering, inventing new possibilities of life’ (Deleuze 1983:101).

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 740