The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (134 page)

This notion of sense is related to, but importantly different from, various other notions of sense that we have encountered in this enquiry. In particular, while it bears on the relation between propositions and reality (as we are about to see), it is not the same as Frege’s notion of sense. Nor is it the same as the development of Frege’s notion of sense in the early Wittgenstein. I single out these two because it is especially instructive to contrast Deleuze’s notion with each of them.
⁶³

We have glimpsed how subjects and other entities are constituted along with their various features. In the 3rd Series of
Logic of Sense
Deleuze discusses how propositions stand in relation to what is constituted.
⁶⁴
Suppose, for example, that I see next-door’s cat in our garden. And suppose that I straightway tell you that next-door’s cat is in our garden. Then I utter a proposition which Deleuze would say:

•
denotes
a state of affairs that involves next-door, their cat, and our garden (hence denotes a state of affairs that involves suitably constituted individuals)

•
manifests
my belief about where next-door’s cat is (hence manifests the belief of a suitably constituted subject)

and

•
signifies
what else must be the case or may be the case if the proposition is true (hence signifies where the proposition is located in logical space as a result of the interrelations of suitably constituted features).

In the notion of denotation we hear echoes of Frege’s notion of
Bedeutung
. In the notion of signification we hear echoes of both Frege’s and the early Wittgenstein’s notions of sense. And in the notion of manifestation, or at least in notions that underpin the notion of manifestation, we hear echoes of both Frege’s and the early Wittgenstein’s notions of the grasp of sense. But Deleuze insists that, in addition to all of this, my proposition
expresses
what he calls sense. This is a matter of complex relations between pure events, in which much else is at stake beyond those three more familiar dimensions of my proposition. It has to do with what
difference
it makes whether my proposition is true. Thus part of the sense expressed is a heightened danger now connecting a change in feline aggression with a change in avine safety. Furthermore, my very uttering of the proposition, itself an occurrence like any other in which virtual tendencies are actualized, will have a bearing on the sense expressed. For instance, a heightened danger may now also connect a change in human aggression with a change in feline safety. In fact the sense is nothing apart from its expression (cf.
Logic of Sense
, pp. 21–22). In these and many other ways Deleuzian sense and Fregean or early-Wittgensteinian sense are very different from each other.

There are two striking differences that merit particular mention. First, a proposition and its negation can express the very same Deleuzian sense (e.g. p. 156 and
Logic of Sense
, p. 33).
⁶⁵
If I see next-door’s cat in our garden and I tell you that next-door’s cat is
not
in our garden, then I say something false, where in the original example I said something true; I lie, where in the original example I told it as I saw it; I leave open the possibility that there are no animals at all in our garden, where in the original example I foreclosed that possibility; but the same complex relations between pure events as were at stake in the original example, with their manifold implications for what matters to what else, can still be at stake here, expressed just as they were there. That is, it can make the same difference whether what I say is true as it did in the original example.

Second, Deleuze has a positive conception of nonsense whereby sense, so far from excluding nonsense, depends on it (e.g.
Logic of Sense
, 11th Series). Nonsense, as Deleuze conceives it, is a characteristic of the paradoxical element that inheres in events, that from which all sense ultimately arises. As far as language is concerned, this means that combinations of words that the early Wittgenstein in particular would have counted as straightforwardly lacking sense can for Deleuze be said to express sense of a special kind, enabling them to highlight just such nonsense. Examples are
‘Becoming pulls in both directions at once’ and ‘Alice does not grow without shrinking’ (see
Logic of Sense
, p. 1). Indeed Deleuze is prepared to say that even a word to which no conventional meaning has been assigned, such as Lewis Carroll’s ‘snark’ (Carroll (
1974
)), can be said to express sense, in this case by denoting the very sense that it expresses – a feature that words do not normally have, of course, and one that itself creates a distinctive movement in associated series of events whenever the word in question is used (
Logic of Sense
, pp. 66–67). Deleuze therefore has an extremely generous notion of sense, and correlatively of what it is for words to express sense, more reminiscent of Derrida’s generous notion of what it is for words to be put to effective use (Ch. 20, §6) than of either Frege’s notion or the early Wittgenstein’s notion of what it is for a proposition to have a sense.
⁶⁶
Relatedly, Deleuze recognizes all sorts of distinctions between the ways in which words express sense, and indeed the ways in which they highlight nonsense, to which nothing corresponds in either Frege or the early Wittgenstein. To be sure, the early Wittgenstein drew a distinction between two ways in which a combination of words could lack what
he
called sense, distinguishing between what he called nonsensicality, which attaches to a combination of words to which no meanings have been assigned, and what he called senselessness, which attaches to a proposition that is either necessarily true or necessarily false (Ch. 9, §3). Deleuze certainly has a distinction akin to that (
Logic of Sense
, p. 35). But he has plenty more besides. Part of the significance of this, in the context of our enquiry, is its bearing on the recurring idea, which surfaced most recently in §6 of the previous chapter but which is itself associated principally with the early Wittgenstein, that there may be a good story to tell about how a creative use of language might succeed in conveying what I have been calling a non-propositional understanding of things. For there might be a use of language expressing a Deleuzian sense of such a kind that whoever is suitably attuned to that sense will share the non-propositional understanding in question. Indeed that seems to me precisely the story that Deleuze himself must tell about his own use of language to highlight nonsense – as for instance when he says, ‘Becoming pulls in both directions at once.’ (I shall say a little more about this in the next section.)
⁶⁷

Finally in this section I want to allude very briefly to the ethical implications of these ideas, which Deleuze discusses in, among other places, the 20th to the 22nd Series of
Logic of Sense
, and which hark back especially to Spinoza.

We have encountered often enough in this enquiry the idea that representing how things are is not the only way of making sense of them. We first encountered the idea near the very beginning, in connection with Descartes, where I adverted to an alternative to representation, namely expression (Ch. 1, §6). I suggested that, on the assumption that things themselves make sense (the very assumption that it is Deleuze’s project to substantiate), sense can be made of things by participating in their sense-making, that is by expressing the sense that they themselves make. This is the notion of expression that Deleuze finds in Spinoza and Leibniz. And it is the notion that we have now seen him develop on his own account, in connection with propositions. But the connection with propositions is only one of many. Any actualization of the virtual serves as an expression both of the pure events involved and of the complex interplay between them wherein sense consists. We are, in a way, continually expressing sense. We are continually making sense of things.

For Spinoza, making sense of things was the stuff of ethics (Ch. 2, §3). Likewise for Deleuze. For Deleuze, just as for Spinoza, we come into our own, or ‘we become those that we are’,
⁶⁸
when we are the agents of our own sense-making, or in other words when we see the virtual tendencies that are being actualized in our lives, appropriate them, experiment with them, creatively extend them, trigger the intensities at work in them,
⁶⁹
release the sense expressed through them, and learn to surrender whatever cherished categories they may serve to destabilize (God, the self, the world of abiding values, the world of abiding physical objects
⁷⁰
). And it is in passing from the actual to the virtual, or in seeing the virtual in the actual – this is what Deleuze means by ‘counteractualization’ (
Logic of Sense
, pp. 150ff.) – that we achieve our most intense activity and display our greatest power. We attain to Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge.

Here, in summary, is Deleuze:

Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us. To grasp whatever happens as unjust and unwarranted … is, on the contrary, what renders our sores repugnant – veritable
ressentiment
⁷¹
…. What does it mean then to will the event? Is it to accept war, wounds, and death when they occur? It is highly probable that resignation is only one more figure of
ressentiment
…. We are faced with … a transmutation. ‘To my inclination for death,’ said Bousquet, ‘which was a failure of the will, I
will substitute a longing for death which would be the apotheosis of the will.’ From this inclination to this longing there is, in a certain respect, no change except a change of the will, a sort of leaping in place … of the whole body which exchanges its organic will for a spiritual will. It wills now not exactly what occurs, but something
in
that which occurs, something yet to come which would be consistent with what occurs, in accordance with the laws of an obscure, humorous conformity: the Event…. The splendour and magnificence of the event is sense. The event is not what occurs (an accident), it is rather inside what occurs, the purely expressed…. Nothing can be said, and no more has ever been said: to become worthy of what happens to us, and thus to will and release the event, to become the offspring of one’s own events, and thereby to be reborn, … and to break with one’s carnal birth. (
Logic of Sense
, pp. 149–150, emphasis in original)
^72
,
73

5. The Dogmatic Image of Thought

The ideas in the last two sections undoubtedly put a strain on some of our normal ways of thinking, and hence on some of our deepest self-conscious preconceptions about the nature of thought. Deleuze concedes this. In fact he proclaims it. He identifies a cluster of paradigms and assumptions concerning the nature of thought that have dominated the history of philosophy, groups them together under the label ‘the dogmatic image of thought’, and challenges them. In this section I shall consider four of the paradigms, then identify four of the most central of the assumptions.

(a) Representation

The first paradigm is that of representation. This is a paradigm in which thought is separate from its object, and is successful or unsuccessful to the extent that it does or does not suitably correspond to its object. As I intimated in the previous section, we first encountered this paradigm in Descartes, where we also first noted how expression serves as an alternative to it.

One of the principal ways in which Deleuze puts pressure on this paradigm is through his very prioritization of difference over identity. For representing how things are
eo ipso
involves operating at the level of constituted
identities. This is because the very idea of a correspondence between thought and its object is an idea of shared features between discrete entities. Or at any rate such is how Deleuze construes representation. At one point he refers to what he calls representation’s ‘dearest task’, which he characterizes as ‘[relating] difference to the identical’ (p. 235). He further insists that ‘difference is not and cannot be thought in itself, so long as it is subject to the requirements of representation’ (p. 262).

It by no means follows that there can be no such thing as representing how things are. What follows is that there can be no such thing as representing how things most fundamentally are, in their raw difference.
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The assault is not an assault on the very idea of representation. It is an assault on the idea that representation is a paradigm that reveals the ultimate character of reality.

These considerations about representation extend to linguistic sense-making more generally. For, as Bergson noted (Ch. 16, §4), the very articulation of propositions into subjects and predicates already bespeaks discrete entities and their features. Moreover, there is reason to think that such an articulation is not just a peculiarity of linguistic sense-making as we know it, but that it is of the very essence of linguistic sense-making; that simply making linguistic sense of things already involves identifying discrete entities and their features.
⁷⁵
To whatever extent this is true, it poses no more of a threat to the sheer idea of making linguistic sense of things than was posed above to the sheer idea of representation. The threat, as before, is only to the idea of making linguistic sense of things as they most fundamentally are. And even that does not preclude a more oblique use of language to achieve and to convey an understanding of things at the most fundamental level, the sort of thing to which I adverted in the previous section and the sort of thing which, I urged then and I urge again now, we need to acknowledge on Deleuze’s own pages.