The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (135 page)

(b) Common Sense and Good Sense

The second and third paradigms form a pair. They are the paradigm of what Deleuze calls ‘common sense’ and the paradigm of what he calls ‘good sense’. By ‘common sense’ he means a faculty of thought which, by bringing other faculties, such as the various sensory faculties and the faculty of imagination, under a certain unity, allows for recognition both of the subject of thought and of the object of thought. By ‘good sense’ he means an
exercise of thought designed to organize the diversity of the given. (Error, in these terms, is ‘a kind of failure of good sense within the form of a common sense which remains integral and intact’ (p. 149).) Good sense is characteristically concerned with
progression
. It seeks, in the unruly diversity of the given, diachronic patterns, whereby things proceed from the remarkable to the unremarkable, from the less orderly to the more orderly, from the more differentiated to the less differentiated. Good sense requires common sense, because ‘it could not fix any beginning, end, or direction …, if it did not … [relate] the diverse to the form of a subject’s identity, or to the form of an object’s or a world’s permanence, which one assumes to be present from beginning to end’ (
Logic of Sense
, p. 78). But common sense likewise requires good sense, because there can be no recognizing either a subject of thought or an object of thought without the orderliness that good sense makes available.

As with the paradigm of representation, to say that these are casualties of Deleuze’s critique is not to say that he denies them a place in the operations of thought. What he denies them is a place in thought’s most fundamental operations. At the most fundamental level, the level of pure difference, there is something that eludes them both: the paradox inherent in pure events. Where the paradox inherent in pure events has events going in both directions at once, good sense acknowledges only what goes in one direction. Where the paradox inherent in pure events contests all identities, through its driving of eternal return, common sense searches for and fastens on the identity of thought’s subject and the identity of thought’s object. (See pp. 132–138 and 223–228; and
Logic of Sense
, 12th Series.)

(c) Clarity and Distinctness

The fourth paradigm is the Cartesian paradigm of clear and distinct perception. This is a paradigm in which every aspect of some given object of attention is itself an object of attention (Ch. 1, §3). This paradigm is not in the same sort of conflict with the execution of Deleuze’s project as the other three are. Rather it is, Deleuze avers, in conflict with itself. For the two elements in the Cartesian paradigm, so far from complementing or reinforcing each other, actually militate against each other. The more a thing’s several aspects can be said to be objects of attention, the less it can itself be said to be. Thus a computer image is an object of attention precisely insofar as its myriad component pixels are not: the image is clearly perceived precisely insofar as it is not distinctly perceived.
⁷⁶

It follows that this paradigm, unlike the other three, is one that Deleuze does not just exclude from the most fundamental level of thought: he rejects it altogether. In fact there is a paradigm of his own that he pits against it. In Deleuze’s paradigm thought operates precisely by converting obscurity (unclarity) into confusion (indistinctness) for the sake of greater clarity. It does this by taking the myriad distinctly perceived elements of some obscure multiplicity in the virtual and so actualizing them as to achieve a kind of unity in the actual that can be perceived as such – though only at the price that the many aspects of that unity meld into confusion. (See pp. 213–214, 252–254, and 280.)

(d) Four Assumptions

Central among the assumptions that constitute the dogmatic image of thought are the following four, in which the paradigm of representation is especially visible.

(1) The goal of thought is true representation.

(2) The anathema of thought is false representation.

(3) Thought is of such a nature that, with suitable ‘good will’ on the part of its subject, it tends to achieve its goal.
⁷⁷

(4) The problems addressed by thought are defined by their solutions, where these in turn are the truths that thought seeks. Equivalently, the problems addressed by thought take the form of questions and the solutions to those problems are the answers to those questions.
⁷⁸

Deleuze thinks that every one of these assumptions both can and must be challenged. It will be the main burden of the next section to show how and why.

The dogmatic image of thought has in Deleuze’s view been as pernicious as it has been prevalent. At the end of the chapter in
Difference and Repetition
devoted to it,
⁷⁹
he writes that its assumptions ‘crush thought,’
and that it ‘profoundly betrays what it means to think and alienates the two powers of difference and repetition’ (p. 167). Deleuze’s assault on the prioritization of identity over difference and his consequent attempt to show, in terms of pure difference, how things make sense are part of a much broader reorientation in philosophy.

6. The Nature of Problems, the Nature of Concepts, and the Nature of Philosophy; or, Metaphysics as the Creation of Concepts

Let us begin with assumptions (1) and (2). Deleuze acknowledges something far more precious to thought than truth. ‘The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the notion of truth,’ he says, ‘Not as substitutes for truth, but as a
measure
of the truth of what I’m saying’ (‘Philosophy’, p. 130, emphasis added). Relatedly, he thinks that a far worse fate can befall thought than to issue in falsehoods. It can issue in ‘nonsensical sentences, remarks without interest or importance, banalities mistaken for profundities, ordinary “points” confused with singular points, badly posed or distorted problems’ (p. 153). These, he says, are ‘all heavy with dangers, yet the fate of us all’ (ibid.).

Assumption (4) is vulnerable to the same considerations. On assumption (4) thought is primarily a matter of trying to answer questions, questions whose answers are antecedently identifiable propositions (‘What is the least number of colours that suffices to paint any given map, so that no two adjacent regions are painted the same colour?’ ‘How much weight can this bridge take?’). But in Deleuze’s view there is a much deeper and much more important level at which thought, insofar as it is concerned with questions at all, is as much a matter of trying to pose them as trying to answer them. At that level thought tries to orient itself in significant new ways, something it may do by providing the wherewithal to frame questions which have hitherto been unframeable and which, because of their array of associations and implications, raise all manner of further questions.
⁸⁰
This is a reflection of the fact that the most important and the most engaging problems addressed by thought do not themselves take the form of questions. They take the form of imperatives (‘Extend the line of investigation that led to the discovery of this mathematical function,’ ‘Connect the actions of human beings to climate change,’ ‘Make sense of this calamity’).
⁸¹
Moreover, where the solution to a problem on the dogmatic conception effectively kills the problem, a solution to a problem on Deleuze’s conception – we no longer have any licence to talk about ‘the’ solution to a problem – can serve rather to invigorate it.
(To extend a line of investigation is to present opportunities for further such extension; to connect events is to set them in a context that allows for further such connections; to make sense of a situation is to make something of it of which further sense can be made.) A problem on Deleuze’s conception can play a heuristic role, akin to the essentially inexhaustible heuristic role played by a Kantian regulative principle (Ch. 5, §7).
⁸²

There is a related difference between what Deleuze would say about problems and their solutions and what someone under the sway of the dogmatic image of thought would say. On Deleuze’s conception we may not even be in a position properly to formulate a problem until we have a solution to it. Take the familiar cake cutting problem: how to divide a cake fairly between two people. The equally familiar solution to this problem is that one person cuts and the other person chooses. So far, so straightforward – even on the dogmatic conception. But now suppose someone gives us the following instruction: ‘Generalize that to more than two people.’ This requires something of a different order. It requires us to think through what is achieved in the two-person case. And as we do so we shall soon see that there is a deep unclarity in the word ‘that’. What is to be generalized? Is it a question of one person’s being able to cut in such a way as to be immune to other people’s choices? Is it a question of no one’s ending up with a smaller portion than anyone else except by virtue of either cutting badly or choosing badly? What are the rules? There is no prospect of clarifying what is at stake here, nor therefore of formulating this problem well, except in tandem with actually working out some solution to it. Assumption (4) makes no provision for this sort of thing.
⁸³

Deleuze is working with a much broader notion of a problem than that which occurs in assumption (4) then. Elsewhere his notion appears broader still. For Deleuze, problems are objective features of the virtual. They present themselves as challenges: how to actualize the virtual in suitably creative ways. (Thus the challenge in the cake cutting case is to extend the virtual tendencies involved in our coming to see that two people can share a cake fairly by one cutting and the other choosing.) And they are solved to whatever extent the virtual
is
so actualized. Most of them are quite independent of human beings, certainly of the epistemic state of any particular human being (p. 280 and
Logic of Sense
, p. 54). A problem and its solution are as liable to involve plant mutations or geological shifts as they are to involve,
say, mathematical calculations or articulated programmes of research or the machinations of some wily politician. They may involve something’s ‘jumping’ over some obstacle by moving into a new state space, in the way described in §4 above. They may involve an obscure virtual multiplicity’s being actualized in a clear whole, in the way described in §5(c) above. The general form of a problem is not, ‘How do things stand here?’ but, ‘Proceed from here,’ where proceeding from here is understood in a such a way as to involve expressing anew the sense that is expressed here, playing out variations on these themes, tapping the virtual. The problematical, we now see, is deeply related to the ethical (see §4 above).
⁸⁴

It follows that problems and their solutions are not essentially propositional – though they may of course involve the production of propositions (cf. pp. 267–268). It does not follow that they are not essentially conceptual, at any rate not on the broad construal of a concept that Deleuze advocates. By a concept Deleuze means ‘[a set] of singularities that each extend into the neighbourhood of one of the other singularities,’ or ‘a set of singularities … [that lead] on from one another’ (‘Philosophy’, p. 146). A concept, on this construal, is an articulated area on what Deleuze calls ‘the plane of immanence’, that is the virtual plane on which all singularities and all other events, in their virtual aspect, are located (
What Is Philosophy?
,
Ch. 2
, passim; cf. ‘Philosophy’, p. 147). This means that anyone who traces connections between singularities is making use of a concept; and anyone who establishes such connections is creating a concept.
⁸⁵
Deleuze’s notion of a concept is therefore both importantly different from the notion standardly invoked by analytic philosophers and importantly similar to it. It is different inasmuch as, on the notion invoked by analytic philosophers, a concept is a universal corresponding to a region of the possible rather than a region of the virtual. It is similar inasmuch as, on either notion, the creation of concepts and the sustaining of concepts themselves constitute a kind of sense-making. More specifically, they constitute a sense-making which, while not itself propositional, serves, among other things, to make propositional sense-making possible.
⁸⁶
What is crucial in the present context is that,
on Deleuze’s notion,
⁸⁷
the creation and the sustaining of concepts are also a way of instigating, developing, formulating, assimilating, addressing, and solving problems.
⁸⁸

The solution of problems is, as we have seen, a response to life itself. It is a response to that which ‘forces’ thought. There is something accidental about it. ‘Do not count upon thought,’ Deleuze warns, ‘to ensure the relative necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think’ (p. 139). He then refers to ‘the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself’ (ibid.). Elsewhere, commenting specifically on the exercise of thought in philosophy, he
⁸⁹
writes:

The birth of philosophy required an
encounter
between the Greek milieu and the plane of immanence of thought…. [Philosophy] does have a principle, but it is a synthetic and contingent principle – an encounter, a conjunction…. Even in the concept, the principle depends upon a connection of components that could have been different, with different neighbourhoods. The principle of reason such as it appears in philosophy is a principle of contingent reason and is put like this: there is no good reason but contingent reason. (
What Is Philosophy?
, p. 93, emphasis in original; cf. ibid., pp. 41–42 and 82)