Nội dung

4 The Overturning of Pl atonism You have to present concepts in philosophy as though you were writing a good detective novel: they must have a zone of pres­ ence, resolve a local situation, be in contact with the "dramas," and bring a certain cruelty with them. They must exhibit a cer­ tain coherence but get if from somewhere else. GILLES DELEUZE, - Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974), 141 Despite the fact that Deleuze does not explicitly write as an esoteri­ cist, his maj or works nevertheless proceed in a rather gnomic mode of philosophical discourse, a discourse inspired by the paradoxical, the problematic, and the uncanny. In this way, Deleuze's texts enact what they often claim: genuine thought unfolds through a discourse that runs counter to prevailing images of rationality, enlightenment, and truth. Philosophical discourse, for Deleuze, does not emerge with­ out provocation, elicitation, and a certain forcing. Thought for him is a kind of passion, an excess manifest as creation as much as critique. Thought is a critique of cliche and habitual forms of thought, and a cre­ ation of modes of life, even evoking an entirely transformed sensibility (NP, 101). The Overturning of Platonism 113 The Image of Thought For Deleuze it was Plato who discovered, but also restricted, the true nature of philosophy as spiritual ordeal. Socrates leads his interlocutors into the dizzying perplexity of a seemingly interminable dialectic. But there is an implicit presumption in Plato's dialogues that in any genu­ ine act of thought, however arduous, productivity can be guaranteed in advance by the inherent connection between the good and the true: a truly good will to thought will always move us closer to the truth, and unworthy suitors to the hand of the good and true will be sifted, like chaff from wheat. The deep connection in Plato's mind between philosophical inquiry and moral purification bequeathed to Western philosophy what Deleuze calls, in Difference and Repetition, an implicit "image of thought." This image determines the philosopher as, above all, a person of good will, inherently possessed of a "good will to truth." But from Plato to Hegel, Deleuze contends, the good will of philosophy functions ultimately in the service of established values and of the state. The will of philoso­ phy, with its quest for truth, is to establish (or reestablish) identity, order, and continuity against the forces of difference, chaos, and dis­ continuity. However subversive Platonism might have been to its Greek milieu, under the auspices of the Platonic image, thinking in the West became a conservative affair: a will to buttress the mind and the status quo against c hallenges to order, discipline, and control. Despite modern philosophy's critical ambition, the conservative ten­ dencies in the Platonic image of thought are repeated in the idea of a cogitatio natura universalis (natural universal reason) Descartes as ­ serted was common to all humanity. For Deleuze, the persuasive force of Descartes's grounding of being in the subject, cogito ergo sum, is less radical than it may appear to be, since it depends on the implicit pre­ supposition that it is in the nature of thought itself, in its innate nature, to seek the truth with a good nature and a good will. Deleuze points out that the coherence of an idea of naturally donated "good sense" de­ pends not on an explicit philosophical j ustification, but on the implicit idea that "everyone knows" what it means to think (DR, 129). A think­ ing thing cannot want to be deceived: any deceiver must be external to thought, outside the circuit of consciousness. Self-consciousness is 114 Chapter Four presumed by nature to be constituted by a desire to avoid deception, betrayal, violence to itself. But this distinction of the subject from its potential vicissitudes, in Deleuze 's view, is inimical to thought. In Dif­ ference and Repetition, he asserts just the contrary: Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing pre­ supposes philosophy: everything begins with misosophy. Do not count on thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to rise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a pas­ sion to think. The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are one and the same: the destruction of the image of thought which pre­ supposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself. (DR, 139) Under the auspices of the image of thought, what remains unasked are the truly critical questions: Why the need for order? Who requires continuity? When and under what conditions is truth to be preferred to illusion? For Deleuze, the postulates of common sense legislate that the productions of thought must be inherently recognizable, even if the object of thought is difficult, paradoxical, or even unthinkable. It is the image of thought that prevents philosophy from completing the project of Platonism, since under this aegis thought can never truly break with opinion (doxa). Wedded to a representational model of concepts, phi­ losophy continues to fashion its ideas according to the implicit parame­ ters of common sense. Beyond the postulates of the image of thought lies a great risk, a confrontation with allies other than those of good and common sense in the quest of truth.! Such a "thought beyond the image of thought" would, Deleuze asserts, "find its difference or its true beginning, not in an agreement with the pre-philosophical Image but in a rigorous struggle against this Image, which it would denounce as non­ philosophical. As a result, it would discover its authentic repetition in a thought without Image, even at the cost of the greatest destructions and demoralizations, and a philosophical obstinacy with no ally but paradox, one which would have to renounce both the form of repre ­ sentation and the element of common sense" (DR, 132). Across numer­ ous traditions, paradox is one of the classic literary modes of spiritual ordeal, always aimed at unsettling the mind and enabling it to appre­ hend levels of interconnection, relationality, and interdependence that The O ve rturning of Platonism 115 are not rationally accessible? It is within such an "overturned Platon­ ism" that we again discern the lineaments of the hermetic Deleuze, a Deleuze whose philosophy is geared as much to spiritual transforma­ tion as to conceptual creation. Platonic Ordeal Despite Plato's moralism, Deleuze argues that it is nevertheless within the Platonic corpus that a subversive and profound notion of thought lies in wait. Even though, following Nietzsche, Deleuze asserts that "the task of modern philosophy has been defined: to overturn Platonism," he insists that much should be retained from Plato: "That this overturning should conserve many Platonic characteristics is not only inevitable but desirable" (DR, 59). What is it that Deleuze - the hermetic Deleuze, that is - would have us retain? In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze observes that Plato's confidence in the ordeal of the dialectic is grounded in a mythical conception of the dialectic as an odyssey, a return to lost origins. That is to say, the difficulties of dialectical ordeal recapitulate a cosmic process of metem­ psychosis: the procession and return of souls to their true autochthony in the invisible, changeless realm of the idea. Plato presents Socratic dialectic as a kind of exercise, a training that is productive for thought despite the failure of the participants to produce satisfactory definitions or complete concepts. Going beyond what Plato might have averred, Deleuze asserts that the failed or incomplete nature of dialectic is in fact necessary. Plato himself would have admitted that since the immu­ table and eternal ideas cannot be discursively represented, they must form the object of some kind of access other than what ordinary lin­ guistic and conceptual expression allows, and it is for just such intuition that dialectic prepares. But the questions remains open: if not by discursive mediation, by what power are the ideas apprehended? Some kind of mediation is nec­ essary. But how is it to be construed? Deleuze writes, "With Plato, the issue is still in doubt: mediation has not yet found its ready-made move­ ment. The Idea is not yet the concept of an object which submits the world to the requirements of representation, but rather a brute pres­ ence which can be invoked in the world only in function of that which is not 'representable' in things. The Idea has therefore not yet chosen to 116 Chapter Four relate difference to the identity of a concept in general: it has not given up hope of finding a pure concept of difference in itself" (DR, 59).3 In what sense is Plato's theory of ideas linked to the development of a pure concept of "difference in itself"? On this issue, Deleuze contrasts Plato with Aristotle. For Aristotle, individuals are particular combina­ tions of matter and form. Individuals differ insofar as they manifest dif­ ferently actualized potentials. Individuals (primary substances) are the substances they are in relation to a discernable essence (substance in a secondary sense) whose potential they more or less actualize. Concep­ tual activity, for Aristotle, is the mind's ability to abstract form from matter. All knowledge, as knowledge of form, is an abstraction from a series, and is in this sense a generalization. A concept of justice, for example, is developed from reflections on how the potentials of justice have been more or less actualized in various individuals. Species of justice, or beauty, as much as of trees or horses, can likewise be deter­ mined based on abstraction from individuals.4 For Aristotle, what makes a thing knowable, whether this is a natural or an artificial kind, is that it can be classified into species and genera that are prior, at least in the order of knowledge, to individual differ­ ences. (It is somewhat unclear in Aristotle in what sense primary sub­ stances, such as individual horses, are dependent upon secondary sub­ stances, such as species essence of horseness.) Indeed, Aristotle claims there is no science of the singular, and by implication no science of difference, as such. That is to say, intelligible differences, for Aristotle, are always differences known by and through comparisons of sameness or similarity. But comprehensible differences are, as Deleuze puts it, always relatively large differences, ones that can be clearly perceived or represented, and that can delineate individuals, genera, and species. This means that ultimately difference has no concept of its own, in Aristotle's thought. Difference is meaningful only within a process of comparison, such as in the construction of an analogy by which it is judged that a horse is both like and unlike a mule. For Aristotle, a differ­ ence that cannot be articulated by comparison between two identities is essentially meaningless, and may as well be considered, like prime matter, as inconsequential for thought. In Plato, however, difference is not conceived of in terms of com­ parison or opposition. Difference, in Plato, seems to be approached "in itself," and this is part of what inspires Deleuze. Socrates's search for The Overturning of Platonism 117 definitions (of love, j ustice, excellence, and so on) is a search for the presence of a stable form within a shifting world of appearances, for true being in the realm of becoming. But the definition of a form is not a generality discovered through processes of abstraction from empirical aggregates or collections of experience. In the Statesman, for example, Socrates is not looking for the list of attributes that will distinguish the set of all authentic rulers from those who lack such attributes, but seeking to apply a test whose result will make the difference between a leader and a charlatan.s As Deleuze puts it, this is because each indi­ vidual relates to its archetype (an idea) as a copy to its model. What matters, for Plato, are not external affinities between various copies, but internal relations between copies and ideal models. Plato seeks to distinguish, Deleuze argues, authentic from inauthentic copies, and above all to eliminate simulacra, those particularly malicious appear­ ances that are neither originals nor imitations, neither models nor copies.6 "It is clear that Plato distinguishes, and even opposes, models and copies only in order to obtain a selective criterion with which to separate copies and simulacra, the former founded upon their relation to the model while the latter are disqualified because they fail both the test of the copy and the requirements of the model. While there is indeed appearance, it is rather a matter of distinguishing the splen­ did, well-grounded Apollonian appearances from the other, insinuative, malign and maleficent appearances which respect the ground no more than the grounded" (DR , 265). As Deleuze puts it, the "brute presence" of the idea is a kind of trial that singles out a "line of authentic descent" from within an indifferent mixture, a materiality that has no specifi­ able relation to form, but that persists as a kind of inchoate medium, an "indefinite representing multiplicity" (DR , 60). Unlike in Aristotle, in Plato identity is not realized as a reciprocal relation between mater and form, potentiality and actuality. If anything, in Plato materiality must be eliminated, or at least refined, in order for a distinct individual manifestation to be distinguished from its simulacra. It is as if matter constitutes a set of inchoate elements to be sifted: "The search for gold provides the model for this division" (DR, 60). For Plato, the faculty that recognizes the forms - the basis of all identity, both semantically and ontologically - is not a faculty that represents, but one that intuits a movement of descent. As Deleuze puts it, "Difference is not between species, between two determinations of a genus, but entirely on one 118 Chapter Four side, within the chosen line of descent: there are no longer contraries within a single genus, but pure and impure, good and bad, authentic and inauthentic, in a mixture which gives rise to a large species. Pure difference, the pure concept of difference, not the concept in general, in the genus and species" (DR, 60). Deleuze suggests that when Socrates attempts to distinguish the true leader from the charlatan in the States­ man, or true erotic ecstasy from delirium in the Phaedrus, there is no question of attempting to establish species and genera. For Plato it is a matter, rather, of divining a singularity, a "dialectic of the immediate" that divides the true from the false claimant, the worthy suitor from the impostor. Deleuze characterizes this as a "question not of identifying but authenticating" (DR, 60). That is to say, Plato's proj ect is not to or­ ganize being into species and genera, but to divide the world of appear­ ances into true and false imitations, images that are genuine inheritors of the idea, on the one hand, and on the other hand images that are impostors, simulacra. As Deleuze puts it, "This problem of distinguish­ ing between things and their simulacra within a pseudo-genus or a large species presides over [Plato's] classification of the arts and sciences. It is a question of making the difference, thus of operating in the depths of the immediate, of a dialectic of the immediate. It is a dangerous trial without thread and without net, for according to the ancient customs of myth and epic, false claimants must die" (DR, 60). Plato distinguishes the false claimants from the true by referring their claims to what Deleuze calls a "mythical" ground: participation. The claim to participation is not simply the claim to be identified as a mem­ ber of a class or token of a type. It is a claim to have passed a test or to have a basis for one's claim. The difference between the j ust and the unjust, pretenders to j ustice and authentic stewards of j ustice, is not a difference between any two, but an internal and constitutive difference. It is the difference an "immediate fact" of participation makes. Unlike the Aristotelian development of form in matter, the participation of be­ coming in being is not the development of a material substrate. It is the selection of an icon from within a prodigious field of idols, false images. The interplay of epistemic and ontological registers here is deliberate, and is why Deleuze can claim that Platonic dialectic, as much as the Platonic cosmology, is in the last instance, a moral vision. That a false suitor such as the unscrupulous Meno contradicts himself when asked to define excellence means not that he has not yet found the answer to The Overturning of Platonism 119 the question "What is excellence? " but that he is not (yet) the kind of person who could understand the question. Meno contradicts himself in laying claim to virtue - not because he lacks the ability to correctly define a genera, a generic category, but because he illegitimately claims to participate in the idea of excellence. Socrates's question is not simply what is excellence, but are you excellent? What is important about this picture for Deleuze 's own theory of ideas is that, as Plato presents him, Socrates does not show himself to be a worthy suitor of the ideas because he produces definitions, but because he understands the nature of the problems - the tests, the ordeals ­ demanded by a life defined by the hypothesis of the ideas. The problem is that knowledge is not a matter of generalization but of participation, and participation, at the level of dialectic, is a movement of purification begun in self-examination. In the Apology, when Socrates learns that the Delphic oracle has declared him the wisest of the Athenians, he re ­ sponds with a life lived in the attempt to refute the oracle . This attempt is an ordeal by means of which Socrates attempts to determine his own worth, the coherence of his own beliefs. Socrates lives his life through a question: What is it to be wise? The irony of Socrates's life is that his own answer is embedded in the structure of his life lived as a question, a life that demonstrates that to be consc ious of ignorance is wisdom. Problematic Ideas What can be preserved in Platonism, for Deleuze, is the notion that philosophy is a specific form of education, an apprenticeship activated by the discovery of that which is truly different: the idea. In Plato, the ideas (or forms) do not appear in a perceptible diversity, but constitute a supreme and nonsensible power of iteration. But as Deleuze points out, because the forms do not appear directly in the empirical, they introduce a regime of obscure signs into the sensible world, traces of the ideal in the real. These traces can only be perceived as problematic, as moments where the continuum of time and circumstance is at odds with itself. The idea is never given in a complete pleroma, and can only be grasped as sign. When determining, for example, who counts as a sophist, as opposed to a philosopher, or what counts as a merely "acquisitive" as opposed to a "productive" art, or even what counts as a winged as opposed to 120 Chapter Four nonwinged animal, Plato does not present individuating differences in terms of generalizable criteria. Plato's divisions thus "lack sufficient reason," as Aristotle claimed (DR, 59).7 A capricious or itinerant form of differentiation that "j umps from one singularity to another" is pre­ cisely what is so curious and compelling for Deleuze about the Platonic method of thought (DR, 59). In Plato, "the Idea is not yet the concept of an obj ect which submits the world to the requirements of representa­ tion, but rather of a brute presence which can be invoked in the world only in function of that which is not 'representable' in things" (DR, 59). Thus, in Platonic dialectics the relation between an idea and a partici­ pant or icone of that idea is in some sense occult, inexplicable. The idea institutes a relation that cannot be represented, yet is there. The rela­ tion between the ideal and the real, in Plato, constitutes an enigmatic presence of sense. Deleuze's thought is a kind of spiritual exercise. It is not accidental that Socrates refers to himself as a midwife, claimed to have learned about the forms from a sorceress, and was constantly accused of be­ witching or spell-binding his interlocutors. According to Plato, it was the accusation of religious innovation that led to Socrates's execution. This accusation must have been linked, in part, to the challenging re­ distribution of sense and sensibility that would have been inspired by the hypothesis of the forms: this belief would have led one to live one's life differently, in view of different realities, as Socrates's young ad­ mirers often remark. There is already in Socrates a sense that to appre­ hend ideas is to be changed and transformed. It is this transformative dimension of ideas that inspires Deleuze's own conception of thought. Socrates's capriciousness, his lack of systematic exposition, demon­ strates that, in a certain way, he does not subordinate difference to rep­ resentable divergence, or to what will amount in later philosophy to subordination of difference to the powers of the One, the analogous, the similar, and the negative -ways difference fails to be thought "in itself," but is conceived in relation to something else (DR , 59). Faced with a host of "suitors" or "claimants" to the right to define and thus to participate, Socrates "tests" to see if the claim holds. But this test is an enigma, a problem posed to the claimant: Do you know the nature of the question to which you are giving an answer, the essence of the problem to which you are giving a solution? False claimants contra­ dict themselves.performatively, because their character is not fit for the The Overturning of Platonism 121 truth of the idea in which they claim to participate . Deleuze argues that even if Plato ultimately believes that philosophical inquiry returns us to a state in which what is problematic in embodied existence is fully re ­ solved, restored to the idea, the dialectic is nevertheless always tinged with irony, and "irony consists in treating things and beings as so many responses to hidden questions, so many cases for problems yet to be re­ solved" (DR, 62, 63). Even if the Platonic philosopher is assured of the ultimately unproblematic nature of the ideas to which he or she belongs by right, the idea is a source of irony, never a means of identifying but a way of pro blemati zing, a manner of posing questions.B Since being is other than becoming, and discourse is within be­ coming, discourse is always less than full speech about being. The philosopher's questions never lead directly to truth, but only to other questions. But for this inconclusive dimension can be read as a posi­ tive aspect of learning, since learning the difference between the ideal and the actual worlds is an initiation into the significance of signs. In Platonic terms, in learning difference one learns how to distinguish be ­ tween two kinds of images or appearances: true icons and false imita­ tions. As Deleuze puts it, "Neither the problem nor the question is a sub­ jective determination marking a moment of insufficiency in knowledge. Problematic structure is part of objects themselves, allowing them to be grasped as signs, just as the questioning or problematizing instance is a part of knowledge allowing its positivity and its specificity to be grasped in an act of learning. More profoundly still, Being (what Plato calls the Idea) 'corresponds' to the essence of the problem or the ques­ tion as such" (DR, 64) . To call Platonic "Being" the essence of a problem or question is a kind of doublespeak on Deleuze's part. It is here that Deleuze begins to interpolate his own views with Plato's. For Deleuze, questions or problems, "problematic structure," is a transcendental dimension, in the sense that the true forces and elements involved in any material, social, or historical configuration must be understood in terms of ideal problems whose complete contours are not fully given. Such dynam­ ics, for Deleuze, should be considered ideal because they can, under a variety of conditions, account for why any actual configuration be ­ comes unstable or enters into unpredicted relations and unforeseen modes of communication with other entities. In fact, for Deleuze, such a multiplicity of sense is virtually present at every moment, even if our