How Do We Recognise Problems?

How Do We Recognise Problems?

Audrey Wasser

Miami University

Abstract This article approaches Gilles Deleuze’s notion of problems through a series of thinkers Deleuze draws on in developing this notion: Heidegger, Plato, Kant, Bergson and Nietzsche. Taking these thinkers as its guide, it sketches six broad characteristics that accompany an investment in problems, ultimately arguing that problems are attained through the activity of critique. It echoes Deleuze’s essay ‘How Do We Recognise Structuralism?’ by asking: for whom do problems exist? What does Deleuze recognise in those who recognise problems? And what do those who recognise problems make visible for us? Keywords: Deleuze, problem, critique, Heidegger, Plato, Kant, Bergson, Nietzsche I began this paper on Deleuze’s notion of the problem by casting about for a suitable title. ‘The Problem in Deleuze’ implied I would proceed with the analysis of a theme or concept that has a prominent place in Deleuze’s system, along the lines of, for example, ‘Virtue in Aristotle’. Or it suggested I would study a privileged method or device for writing, as, for example, ‘Metonymy in Proust’. But if problems are neither concepts nor methods – that is, if problems possess neither the clarity of concepts, nor the goal nor good will of a method – then, I saw, I would need a different line of approach. ‘The Problem with Deleuze’ was only a slightly more satisfying choice, because it implied that Deleuze was causing problems for somebody else – most likely me – in this scenario.

Deleuze Studies 11.1 (2017): 48–67 DOI: 10.3366/dls.2017.0251 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/dls

How Do We Recognise Problems?

49

Ultimately, I thought I would do better to follow the lead of Deleuze’s 1967 essay on structuralism and pose the question, how do we recognise problems? If problems have an ideal status, if ‘problems are ideas’, as Deleuze makes clear in the third and fourth chapters of Difference and Repetition, then they are not recognisable in the way that objects of sense experience are. Moreover, if problems furnish the very conditions for the use of our mental faculties (Deleuze 1994: 146), as Deleuze claims, determining the exercise of those faculties as well as the particular and local communication that emerges among them, then they are not recognisable, for the operation of recognition already presupposes the unity of a thinking subject and a pre-established harmony of the faculties (133). In other words, recognition is unable to draw back the curtains of its own stage to consider the possibility that in problems might lie the very ‘genesis of the act of thinking’ as such (158). Still echoing Deleuze’s essay on structuralism, then, we might do better to ask: for whom do problems exist? What does Deleuze recognise in those who recognise problems? And what do these thinkers themselves recognise, or make visible for us? For what they recognise might otherwise be invisible and imperceptible, except for the use that they make of it (Deleuze 2004a: 171). Taking a series of these thinkers as our guide, then – Heidegger, Plato, Kant, Bergson and Nietzsche – I will sketch out six broad characteristics that accompany an investment in problems. This itinerary is meant to be suggestive rather than exhaustive; and perhaps to the disappointment of some I will leave out those twentieth-century French figures Deleuze also draws on explicitly to develop his notion of problems, namely Albert Lautman, Gaston Bachelard and Gilbert Simondon.1 But as Lautman and Simondon, at least, have been the object of increasing critical attention,2 I wanted to take a longer view, to see how Deleuze’s investment in these near-contemporaries has already been prepared for by his interrogations of the history of philosophy.

I. Problems Are an Object of Affirmation Throughout his work, Deleuze is fond of repeating that it is in the articulation of a question or problem, rather than in its solution, that we can locate the ‘sense of truth and falsehood’. In this way, ‘a solution always has the truth it deserves according to the problem to which it is a response’ (Deleuze 1994: 158–9).3 Beyond the dualism of questions and answers, truth and falsehood, then, Deleuze affirms the priority of a third register, that of problem-formation, a domain in which truth and falsity first acquire meaning and orientation. Let us say that our

50 Audrey Wasser first criterion for recognising problems involves the affirmation of a problematic register. The affirmation I have in mind here entails the elevation of problems to a positive and objective status. Deleuze argues that problems are determined neither subjectively nor privatively, so that they would mark an insufficiency in knowledge, but that problems belong to thought as transformative moments in the act of learning, and to objects as a positive and shared dimension of those objects (Deleuze 1994: 63–4). In this way, problems possess a certain ontological reality. Deleuze will go so far as to refer to the ‘being of the problematic, the being of problem and question’ (63–4); and the thinker he credits most with granting an ontological priority to problems is Heidegger. In a long footnote on Heidegger in Difference and Repetition – one that, incidentally, interrupts a discussion of problems and dialectic in Plato, a discussion I will comment on in a moment – Deleuze observes the links Heidegger forges between problems, being and ontological difference. At this point in his discussion, turning to Heidegger allows Deleuze to underscore his own notion that problems have a particular modality, one that corresponds neither to being nor to non-being. Heidegger’s ‘Ontological Difference’, or the difference between beings and Being, Deleuze writes, ‘corresponds to questioning. It is the being of questions, which become problems’ (Deleuze 1994: 64–5). Without identifying problems with Being as such, Heidegger affirms problems’ ontological priority, and he connects them, broadly speaking, to a differential element. For both Heidegger and Deleuze, questions and problems are a mode of being of difference.4 Even if we do not yet know what problems consist of, we can observe that the act of positing the reality of problems – a reality irreducible either to being or to non-being – is a decisive gesture. It is a gesture of affirmation, and a demand for a different kind of thinking. In this spirit, Being and Time begins with the well-known call to ‘raise anew the question of the meaning of being’. Raising this question, or rather retrieving the question we have covered over and forgotten, we first need to be ‘perplexed’ by being, Heidegger maintains (Heidegger 1996: xix), and to rediscover being’s obscurity behind its everyday appeal to self-evidence (2–3). Being and Time begins, in other words, by calling being a problem. And not only does Heidegger insist on the priority of the problem, but he does so as a polemical gesture, as a way of disrupting given ways of speaking about and understanding being. For ‘the first philosophical step in understanding the problem of being’, he argues, ‘consists in avoiding the mython tina diegeisthai, in not “telling a story”’ (5).

How Do We Recognise Problems?

51

II. Problems Disrupt Common Sense What are the stories we tell about being? The epigraph to Being and Time is taken from Plato’s Sophist, from a moment when the Visitor from Elea, the principal figure in the dialogue, is reflecting on the meaning of the term ‘being’. He remarks: ‘For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression “being”. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed’ (Plato 1993: 244a, qtd in Heidegger 1996: 5). In perplexing, problems disrupt our worn-out stories. These lines point to an antagonism between problems and common sense, and suggest that the notion of story or myth – and of traversing the myth – marks the threshold to Heidegger’s own work. Perhaps the kind of problems we are after are likewise attained by a disruptive movement of traversing and uncovering. We might say that problems are ‘paradoxical’ in the literal sense of running contrary to common sense or doxa (Bell 2006: 13). In Plato’s Sophist we find an elaboration of the opposition of problem to doxa, one in which problems are linked to the dialectic, and to the dialectic’s function of discriminating between knowledge and false belief. I would like to turn to Plato here, for in Plato we can see how an affirmation of problems demands a concomitant struggle not only against false belief but also against false problems. Most importantly, we will discover in Plato the conditions that transmit this struggle to the modern era. Plato’s dialectic, Deleuze suggests, ‘proceed[s] by “problems”, by means of which one attains the pure grounding principle’ (Deleuze 1994: 63).5 Despite the fact that Deleuze treats problems as a species of Ideas later in Difference and Repetition, in this passage, he suggests an affinity between problems and what Plato calls ‘aporia’: perplexities or obstacles in the dialectical path (from ! + "ó#o$, meaning passage or way). The term ‘problem’, like ‘aporia’, comes from the Greek, from "#ó%&'(!)-, "#ó%&'(!, a question put forward for discussion, but literally meaning ‘a thing thrown or put forward’ (from "#o- + %&'(!, to throw). Problems are literally ‘in the way’ of the path of discourse. For Plato, attaining a grounding principle is linked inextricably to dialectical refutation, and to refutation’s hygienic function: by showing a person ‘how his opinions conflict with one another’, refutation aims to rid him of ‘the belief in [his] own wisdom’, to ‘remove the opinions that interfere with learning’, and thereby to ‘cleanse his soul’ (Plato 1993: 230d). Refutation reveals the emptiness of discourse, intervening when a person ‘thinks he’s saying something though he’s saying nothing’

52 Audrey Wasser (230b). Such an intervention is also a ground-clearing, meant to restore the immediacy of the Idea that is present but covered over by a way of speaking.6 In Plato, in short, the disruptive function of problems is tied to an activity of grounding. If Socratic refutation is concerned with the hygiene of the soul, the Sophist dialogue likewise wrestles with the question of how to ‘cleanse’ philosophy of sophistry and false statement. In so doing, it also draws our attention to the conditions that demand such cleansing. The Sophist is concerned both with what it means to go wrong in thought, and with how we identify the signs of having gone wrong. The dialogue examines the relationship between language, falsity and being. ‘What do you want to signify when you say being?’ asks the Visitor from Elea (Plato 1993: 244a); and, as we saw above, he notes that what was once self-evident – the meaning of ‘being’ – has now become an obstacle. Thus he proposes: We have to reexamine things that have seemed completely clear to us till now. Maybe we are in some ways confused about them, and our mistaken belief that we understand them well might make us reach agreement too quickly . . . Parmenides’ way of talking to us has been rather easygoing . . . so does the way of talking that everyone uses who has ever urged us to specify just how many beings there are and what they’re like . . . They each appear . . . to tell us a myth, as if we were children. (Plato 1993: 242b–c)

The Visitor suggests, in other words, that, like children, he and Theaetetus have agreed too quickly and too easily to a way of talking. To refuse the stories one is told, however, turns out to require not dispensing with a wrong way of thinking, but rather uncovering what is opaque or unclear within what one thought was clear, and what one mistakenly thought one understood. The sophists, in response to the charge that they produce false statements, reply that in fact there are no such things. Invoking Parmenides’ exclusion of non-being from language and thought, they maintain that it is ‘impossible to say, speak or think that which is not’ (Plato 1993: 238c). False statements, in this view, are impossible. Their assumption is that since the object of a false statement does not exist, the false statement itself cannot be made: non-being is ‘unthinkable . . . unsayable, and inexpressible in speech’ (238c). The sophists’ discourse thus appears as a kind of smooth surface of unverifiable statements. The Visitor responds to this argument with a rather complicated machinery intending to show that false statements are indeed possible. A discussion of being and difference takes up the bulk of the dialogue,

How Do We Recognise Problems?

53

yet, oddly enough, this discussion does not address the puzzling question of sophistry, the ostensible focus of the dialogue – that is, it does not address the question of how to distinguish true statements from false, being from seeming. Instead, the Visitor ends up showing not only that false statements and beliefs are possible, but that they actually exist. And he shows how they exist. His response entails a discussion of predication: false statements, he demonstrates, do not name non-existent objects but construct faulty combinations of names and verbs, or subjects and predicates, as, for example, in the statement ‘Theaetetus flies’ (Plato 1993: 262a–263a). By combining existing elements, false statements are ‘a sort of production’, the Visitor maintains, a ‘production’ in the sense of something coming to be that previously was not (265b). Earlier in the dialogue, the Visitor does attempt to distinguish between two kinds of imitation: between the good imitation that produces likeness, and the bad imitation that fabricates appearances, or simulacra (Plato 1993: 235d; Livingston 2012: 108). While ‘likeness-making’ reproduces the ratio of things as they are, he argues, ‘appearance-making’ entails imitations that only appear to be likenesses but actually employ faulty ratios. We may very well wonder: what exactly do these simulacra imitate? After all, there are no existing combinations of forms of which they are copies. We thus end up being able to make sense of simulacra only by understanding them as inventions in their own right, as the production of what Plato calls ‘originals’ (Plato 1993: 266a; Rosen 1983: 298). The Sophist, in short, reveals a rather vertiginous situation in which neither thought nor language requires the support of objects outside itself (cf. Russell 1967: 49). If Socratic refutation disrupts common sense, then Sophistry remains its too-proximate shadow, an ungrounded disruption or a pure ungrounding, where simulacra are produced without measure and circulated without restriction; where problems no longer clear the way for truth.

III. Immanence Is the Condition of Problems While the Sophist’s explicit aim may have been to distinguish philosophy from sophistry, true statement from appearance-making, one of its results – whether intended by Plato or not – is the discovery of language as a realm of pure appearance: language as a medium of unfettered simulacra. In Deleuze’s view: the end of the Sophist . . . contains the most extraordinary adventure of Platonism: as a consequence of searching in the direction of the simulacrum

54 Audrey Wasser and of leaning over its abyss, Plato discovers, in the flash of an instant, that the simulacrum is not simply a false copy, but that it places in question the very notions of copy and model. (Deleuze 1990b: 256)

That is, though Plato’s entire philosophy appears to be aimed at rooting out sophistry and false imitation, in showing these imposters to be worthy opponents by bringing them in to the domain of being, and by proving that false statements exist, Plato points toward a world in which there are no longer models against which to judge copies at all – a world in which the sophist becomes indistinguishable from Socrates. It is in this sense that Plato himself can be said to ‘be the first to overturn Platonism, or at least to show the direction such an overturning should take’ (Deleuze 1994: 68).7 What Plato reveals in Deleuze’s deconstructive reading – for I think we can call it that – is, in short, our third criterion for recognising problems: immanence is the condition of problems. Problems are affirmed as productive in their own right only once we dispense with a transcendent model of truth and liberate simulacra from the superiority of a ground against which they would be judged. That is, problems become creative when they no longer refer to higher truths or preexisting solutions. The liberation of simulacra does not entail a triumph of the false statement over the true Idea, but the discovery of their indistinction, and the demand for new forms of articulation. When Deleuze, following Nietzsche, defines the task of modern philosophy as ‘overturning Platonism’ (Deleuze 1994: 59), he affirms this indistinction as the condition of thought in modernity. With the loss of the Forms against which appearances can be measured and judged, simulacra assert their own rights, the rights of the production of appearances. In so doing, they leave the question of how they should be evaluated to another time. It is as if the ‘ground [rises] to the surface without ceasing to be ground’ (Deleuze 1994: 28) – that is, without ceasing to demand that appearances be evaluated and claims adjudicated. The immanence of appearances calls for a new criterion for evaluating philosophical truth.

IV. Problems Are Intrinsically Determined Not until Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the production of appearances taken up as an explicit philosophical theme. Kant radically reinvents the notion of phenomena, as Deleuze acknowledges in his 1978 lectures, so that ‘there is no longer the essence behind the

How Do We Recognise Problems?

55

appearance, there is the sense or non-sense of what appears . . . for the disjunctive couple appearance/essence, Kant will substitute the conjunctive couple what appears/conditions of appearance’ (Deleuze 1978; translation modified).8 That is, ruling out the essences of things in themselves as legitimate objects of knowledge, Kant relates the appearance of things to the very structure of our cognition. In so doing, he reorients philosophical inquiry from questions of essence to those of the conditions of representation, and to the site of these conditions, to the transcendental subject (Deleuze 1978). With this reorientation comes a new conception of truth and falsity. For the seventeenth-century rationalists who preceded Kant, truth lay within the purview of reason, and illusion lay beyond it. Spinoza, for example, characterised reason as true in itself, and error as a privation of knowledge (Spinoza 1985: IIP33). And Descartes paradigmatically submitted sensory evidence to doubt, retaining only what ‘occurs in the clear perceptions of the intellect and nowhere else’ (Descartes 1984: 104). Illusion, in other words, was privative or otherwise external to reason; its principle was sought in the human body, the passions, or the nature of the imagination. Against this negativity and externality of illusion, Kant’s great contribution, Deleuze proposes, is a conception of illusion as positive and intrinsic to the nature of thought itself. ‘Pure thought falls into an illusion that is internal to it’: thus Kant discovers the necessity of an illusion that does not mark the incursions of the passions on thought but the very ‘influence of thought on thought’ (Deleuze 1956–7). Linking Kantian critique to an evaluation of false problems, Deleuze makes it clear that a recognition of such problems is at work in Kant’s discovery of transcendental illusion. ‘More than anyone’, Deleuze writes, ‘Kant wanted to apply the test of truth and falsehood to problems and questions: he even defined Critique in these terms’ (Deleuze 1994: 161). Indeed, as early as his 1956–7 lecture course ‘What is Grounding?’ (a lecture course to which the present article is much indebted), Deleuze cites transcendental illusion as the paradigmatic case of false problems. What Kant describes is a kind of error produced neither by a misapprehension of sense data nor by logical mistakes, which might be avoided if one paid better attention to logical rules (Kant 1999: A296/B353). Rather, transcendental illusion consists in a misuse of ideas of reason, ideas that are in themselves ‘natural and unavoidable’ (A298/B354). Rupturing with rationalism on this point entirely – that is, on the point that illusion is natural and necessary – Kant bestows on illusion a positive dimension. Illusion becomes the object of critique and

56 Audrey Wasser hence ‘transcendental’ when we discover that ‘it is reason that engenders the illusion into which it falls . . . This illusion belongs to reason’s nature’ (Deleuze 1956–7).9 Thus, in place of a notion of truth and falsity as characterising thought’s relation to objects external to it, Kant substitutes a notion of true and false problem-formation, which pertains to the proper usage of ideas. Here we find our fourth criterion: because problems refer to the very functioning of thought, their truth or falsity is determined intrinsically, as a question of legitimate or illegitimate use, rather than extrinsically, according to the relation between idea and object. Let us look more closely at Kant’s characterisation of transcendental illusion. He finds that such illusion lies in ‘the taking of a subjective condition of thinking for the cognition of an object’ (Kant 1999: A396). To expose this error for what it is, Kant demonstrates that concepts such as God, the world, or the self are unknowable in their content and at the same time necessary to the proper functioning of reason. They are necessary conditions of thought, and of our knowledge of experience. Kant grants these ideas a regulative rather than constitutive use: one of ‘directing the understanding to a certain goal . . . which . . . serves to obtain for these concepts the greatest unity alongside the greatest extension’ (A644/B672). Ideas of reason organise cognitive activity, in other words; and ‘insofar as this organization is not itself given in experience, we thus say that it is a problem, that it has a problematic status’ (Bryant 2008: 162). ‘Kant never ceased to remind us that Ideas are essentially “problematic”’, writes Deleuze in the fourth chapter of Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994: 168), where he makes it clear that he draws on a Kantian notion of transcendental ideas for his own theory of problems. He continues: In what sense, then, does Kantian reason, in so far as it is the faculty of Ideas, pose or constitute problems? The fact is that it alone is capable of drawing together the procedures of the understanding with regard to a set of objects . . . The understanding alone would obtain answers or results here and there, but these would never constitute a ‘solution’. For every solution presupposes a problem – in other words, the constitution of a unitary and systematic field which orientates and subsumes the researches or investigations in such a manner that the answers, in turn, form precisely cases of solution. (Deleuze 1994: 168)

Problems are idea-structures that regulate the use of the faculties: they orient the faculties and serve as a horizon for their use, designating

How Do We Recognise Problems?

57

the totality of conditions that make possible the cognition of an object. Because nothing in experience can correspond to such ideas, and because they cannot even be ‘projected in an image’, these ideas remain, as Kant says, ‘problems without any solutions’ (Kant 1999: A328/B384). Where Kant calls ideas ‘regulative’, in fact, Deleuze goes so far as to suggest he means nothing more than ‘problematic’. But a simple substitution of ‘regulative’ with ‘problematic’ should give us pause. For Deleuze, problems are regulative in the sense that they organise the activity of the faculties and establish the parameters of their making sense. Yet the faculties themselves are ‘problematised’, in Deleuze’s reading, insofar as they discover their distinctive vocations only by encountering problems. Problems mark the disjunctive limits of the faculties and in so doing bring each ‘face to face with its own element’ (Deleuze 1994: 141).10 The notion of problems as transcendental ideas brings us to our next question. If problems govern the use of the faculties, how can a problem ever be said to be ‘false’? That is, how do we reconcile the intrinsic conditioning power of problems ‘with a norm of the true?’ (Deleuze 1990a: 16).

V. False Problems Express the Character of a Thought Though Deleuze links false problems to Kant’s notion of transcendental illusion, the term was actually coined by Henri Bergson in 1911, in a now well-known lecture on ‘Philosophical Intuition’ (During 2000: 39; Bergson 2002: 78). In fact, it is not surprising that Deleuze uses the term ‘false problems’ in a discussion of Kant in 1956, just after completing two short essays on Bergson the same year that focus on this concept. Deleuze seems to be looking for what is already Bergsonian in Kant, and perhaps for what is Kantian in Bergson. The early essays on Bergson, as well as Deleuze’s Bergsonism book (1966) examine the major concepts in Bergson’s philosophy – duration, memory and élan vital – through the lens of the method of ‘intuition’ (Deleuze 1990a: 13). As Bergson presents it, intuition is a means of recovering precision in philosophy, not only by determining philosophy’s proper objects, but also by dispelling false problems. Bergson draws attention, first of all, to the way problems are posed. ‘Stating the problem is not simply uncovering’, he argues, ‘it is inventing . . . Already in mathematics, and still more in metaphysics, the effort of invention consists most often in raising the problem, in creating the terms in which it will be stated’ (Bergson 2002: 51). Against a model of philosophy as jigsaw puzzle, in which problems are simply given by

58 Audrey Wasser language or society and their elements need only be rearranged to form solutions (52), Bergson directs his attention to the philosophical work of problem-formation. Problems are not the shadows of solutions, but must be invented as their solutions are invented. And the invention of a problem should be undertaken with care, for the problem will serve as a laboratory for its solution. Or in Deleuze’s words, ‘the problem always has the solution it deserves, in terms of the way in which it is stated . . . the conditions under which it is determined as a problem, and . . . the means and terms at our disposal for stating it’ (Deleuze 1990a: 16). Rather boldly, Bergson announces: ‘I believe that the great metaphysical problems are in general badly stated, that they frequently resolve themselves of their own accord when correctly stated’ (Bergson 2002: 95). He gives only two examples of false problems, captured by the respective questions: why is there something rather than nothing? And, why is there order rather than disorder? (96–7). We might well be wondering why these questions express false problems. These questions make us as dizzy as if we were peering over an abyss, and they seem impossible to solve. In fact, in Bergson’s view, they should never have been posed. Take the first question, which arises, as Bergson argues, ‘only if one posits a nothingness which supposedly precedes being. “One says: there could be nothing”, and then is astonished that there should be something’ (97). What Bergson reveals is that the question relies on a series of presuppositions: it supposes that non-being is a viable alternative to being, that non-being is opposed to being, and that non-being can be supplanted by being’s arrival. To clarify Bergson’s language, the question does not really posit anything at all; it proceeds from a state of already having posited a good deal of what is supposed to be up for investigation, namely, what Bergson calls ‘the articulations of the real’ (50). Regardless of whether we are sympathetic to Bergson’s ontological claims, we can observe the nature of Bergson’s objection. A false problem is much more than a poorly phrased question. It is a retrograde movement of thought, in that it ushers in decisions about what is supposed to be up for debate. It is a masked proposition, in that it covers over these decisions with the appearance of a question. And it is a restrictive construct, in that it limits possible responses to those which have agreed in advance to the terms of the question. A critique of false problems, then, goes hand in hand with the creation of real ones. In Deleuze’s eyes, ‘Bergson’s great virtue is to have attempted an intrinsic determination of the false in the expression “false problem”’ (Deleuze 1990a: 17). If we understand this expression to refer to

How Do We Recognise Problems?

59

illegitimate problem-formation, then we see that a false problem is a kind of badly analysed composite: it is a question resting on a postulate, and receiving its determination from the very act of repressing this postulate (cf. Deleuze 1956–7). So what, exactly, does the false problem repress? Bergson argues that the question, why is there something rather than nothing? arises from terms that are drawn from everyday language use, and thus from the habits of common sense which serve the interests of the social organism (Bergson 2002: 50). Thus, for example, “‘Nothing” is a term . . . which can only have meaning in the sphere proper to man’ according to ‘ways of thinking we use in practical life’ that are ‘particularly essential to our industry’ (97). Specifically, ‘nothing’ designates ‘the absence of what we are seeking, we desire, expect’ (97), indicating a ‘psychological motive’ or affect, such as we find in the absence of what interests us (Deleuze 1990a: 17). Elsewhere, Bergson writes: we must never forget the utilitarian character of our mental functions, which are essentially turned toward action. . . . habits formed in action find their way up to the sphere of speculation, where they create fictitious problems, and . . . metaphysics must begin by dispersing this artificial obscurity. (Bergson 1991: 16)

Metaphysics – or real problem-formation, in other words – must cut to the heart of badly analysed composites. At the same time, false problems create these composites because they express organisations of thought that stem from our practical lives, and from the vested interests of those lives. What these false problems have the capacity to reveal, then, when they are grasped as such – and insofar as, in their immanence, they necessarily refer to their own formation – is the very nature of their formation and thus the character of the thought that made them. Our fifth criterion is that false problems express the nature and character of a thought. Interestingly enough, we can find a version of this same insight already present in Plato’s Sophist. At the end of the dialogue, and after a metaphysical discussion of Being and Non-being, the discussants return to the theme of sophistry. The Visitor proposes to differentiate between two kinds of speaker: the first sort, he maintains, is a ‘sincere imitator’ who is ‘foolish and thinks he knows the things he only has beliefs about’; while the other sort is an ‘insincere’ imitator who ‘has been around a lot of discussions, and so by temperament he’s suspicious and fearful that he doesn’t know the things that he pretends in front of others to know’ (Plato 1993: 268). While most critics argue that this dialogue

60 Audrey Wasser leaves us with no real criteria for distinguishing between good and bad imitation, between likeness-making and appearance-making,11 the Visitor’s remarks here suggest a different possibility: they suggest criteria for distinguishing between kinds of speaker and thus between kinds of bad imitation. The Visitor seems to be proposing that sophistry appears under the sign of certain affects – affects he calls ‘fear’, ‘suspicion’ and ‘insincerity’. It is not hard to imagine that these affects function as signs that accompany a discourse and make visible some aspect of the speaker’s character. To echo Bergson on this point, the false problems of the sophist have the positive capacity to indicate the ‘psychological motive’ of their speaker. With this notion of false problems as expressive of character, we find ourselves on the cusp of a Nietzschean concern with perspectivism, with a typology of will, and with an evaluation of problems that moves beyond the domain of epistemology into one of ethics. Nietzsche asks ‘which one?’ and ‘who wants the truth?’ because a problem – true or false – is ultimately the sign of a form of life – of an ethos. An immanent determination of problems asks the philosopher to become ‘a symptomatologist, a typologist, and a genealogist’ (Deleuze 1983: 75).

VI. Problems Are the Object of Critique Deleuze writes that Nietzsche’s ‘method’ is derived from the form of Nietzsche’s preferred question, one that cuts against the grain of a metaphysical mode of inquiry. ‘Metaphysics formulated the question of essence in the form “what is . . . ?”’ – the paradigmatic question of Plato and Socrates (Deleuze 1983: 75). ‘What is . . . ?’ installs the hierarchy of essence over appearances. Against this hierarchy, Nietzsche poses a question of perspective: ‘who?’ or ‘which one?’ Instead of ‘What is tragedy?’ Nietzsche asks, ‘Who are Apollo and Dionysus?’ Instead of ‘What is the truth?’ he asks, ‘Who want the truth?’; and instead of ‘What is morality?’ he asks ‘For whom is it good or evil?’ Facts become interpretations; judgements become signs of life leading the philosopher to distinguish ‘ages, peoples, degrees of rank among individuals’ (Nietzsche 1998: 3). In his early sketches for The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche set forth a task for his philosophy: ‘My philosophy an inverted Platonism: the farther removed from true being, the purer, the finer, the better it is. Living in semblance as goal’ (qtd in Smith 2006: 90). With an affirmation of simulacra or pure semblance, Nietzsche affirms the production of appearances untethered from essences, and the production of meaning

How Do We Recognise Problems?

61

disjoined from a superior order of truth that would ground it. The fulfilment of Nietzsche’s task, a true ‘overturning of Platonism’, in Deleuze’s view, would ‘[swallow] up or [destroy] every ground which would function as an instance responsible for the difference between the original and the derived, between things and simulacra’ (Deleuze 1994: 67). At the same time, we have seen that the destruction of the ground creates an urgent need for new forms of evaluation. With Kant, these forms become intrinsic to knowledge: appearances are measured against conditions of representation that belong to the transcendental subject. The scope of cognition is determined by reason, which adjudicates knowledge claims, serving as ‘the highest tribunal of all the rights and claims of speculation’ (Kant 1999: A669/B697, qtd in Deleuze 1984: 22). We might say that forms of evaluation remain generic to cognition as such; they constitute a kind of ‘common sense’ so that the transcendental subject is a generic subject without particular interests except for the proper functioning of the faculties.12 It is not until Bergson and Nietzsche that we get a sense of problems as created rather than given, and hence as expressive of particular forms of life. In Nietzsche in particular, problems are linked to the vested interests of individual perspectives. Sceptical of a notion of ‘disinterested contemplation’ and above all of the ‘pure reason’ of Kantian philosophy, Nietzsche urges, in a well-known passage in the Genealogy of Morality: Let us guard ourselves better from now on . . . against the dangerous old conceptual fabrication that posited a pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge; let us guard ourselves against the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge in itself’ . . . There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival ‘knowing’. (Nietzsche 1998: III.12)

In Nietzsche’s hands, appearances are referred to the perspectives in which things appear: perspective serves as an immanent form of evaluation. But what, exactly, evaluates? A ‘perspectival seeing’ must entail more than the multiplication of that neutral perspective Nietzsche derides. Perspectives must be interested: at stake here, I would maintain, are lived perspectives or ‘incarnate will’, as Nietzsche calls them (Nietzsche 1998: III.12), forms that bear out an evaluation of what appears in the drama of a particular life, turning life as such into a differential field of forces or wills.13 Life itself becomes evaluative. And phenomena become signs of will, so that ‘any given concept, feeling or belief will be treated as symptoms of a will that wills something’

62 Audrey Wasser (Deleuze 1983: 78). Here we truly see the transformation of epistemology into ethics. The question ‘who?’ or ‘which one?’, then, indicates a mode of evaluation in which the incarnate will becomes an evaluative form: concepts and problems, feelings and beliefs, are evaluated by the forms of life that dramatise them and bear them out. Nietzsche is the only thinker we have addressed whom Deleuze does not explicitly link to a treatment of problems, though it is worth noting that Nietzsche himself uses the term at crucial moments, notably when he takes credit for discovering the problem of morality. In Daybreak, for example: As long as the world has existed no authority has yet been willing to let itself become the object of criticism; and to criticise morality itself, to regard morality as a problem, as problematic: what? Has that not been – is that not – immoral? (Nietzsche 1997: 3, qtd in François 2008: 234)14

We can see in these lines that a radical critique of morality will entail the construction of morality as problem. Likewise, discovering the will to truth, Nietzsche writes: And here again I touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends . . . what meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem? (Nietzsche 1998: III.27, qtd in Deleuze 1983: 99)

A critique of the value of truth, in other words, will be carried out by means of the construction of truth as problem. It may be surprising that Deleuze wants to link Nietzsche’s method (which he ultimately calls a method of ‘dramatisation’) to the form of the question ‘who?’ or ‘which one?’ rather than to Nietzsche’s perspectivism or even his genealogy. But underscoring the form of the question in this way allows Deleuze to mark Nietzsche’s project as one of critique. And juxtaposing Nietzsche’s question with Socrates’ reveals this critique as one that cuts through Platonism in order to redistribute its articulations of the real. The critical question is one that cuts through language, doxa or myth – through the authority of concepts that are given to us – to reach the problem that lies beneath these concepts. For Heidegger, Kant, Bergson and Nietzsche – even for Plato – critique is bound up with the discovery of false problems, of badly formed questions that hide presuppositions. The badly formed question is the limpid reflection of its response; it is ‘traced from givable, probable or possible responses . . . the neutralised double of a supposedly pre-existent proposition

How Do We Recognise Problems?

63

which may or must serve as response’ (Deleuze 1994: 156). The critical question, by contrast, returns to the obscurity of the problem, because it is in the determination of this problem that the sense and value of the real will be produced. What Nietzsche demonstrates perhaps better than anyone is the degree to which the gesture of critical uncovering is identical to the movement of creation, for the critical question cuts through one organisation of sense and meaning in order to articulate another. Properly speaking, in immanence there is no longer a ground ‘beneath’ what appears, and nothing remains to be ‘uncovered’. There is only the evaluation of what appears, an evaluation that refers to problems which are themselves embedded in existing fields of relations and which draw on existing presuppositions, habits and forms of life. This is why Deleuze does not elaborate a free-standing theory of problems – and why my own isolation of the topic is somewhat artificial – but he connects problems, on the one hand, to processes of individuation and their accompanying spatio-temporal dynamisms; and on the other hand, to sense encounters that bear problems within them and forcibly disrupt habits of living. Problems are always incarnated, in other words, and serve both as the subjects of processes of individuation and as the objects of sense encounters.15 They are likewise attained by a double movement in which the act of critique is indistinguishable from the act of creation. Critique and creation are united in the construction of problems, problems which in turn determine the sense and value of the forms – both ideal and lived – that serve as their solutions. In his chapter on ‘The Image of Thought’ in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze takes issue with a long-standing belief, one that can be traced back to Aristotle, that ‘problems are given ready-made, and that they disappear in the responses or the solution’ (Deleuze 1994: 158). I hope I have shown how a view of problems as ready-made neutralises the activity of thought in problem-formation. Moreover, it masks the degree to which problems are determined within alreadyexisting fields of relations. Leaving philosophers ‘content to define the truth or falsity of a problem by the possibility or impossibility of its being solved’ (Deleuze 1990a: 17), an impoverished view of problems turns the activity of thinking into a neutral game of question and answer, producing in philosophy a ‘strange leap on the spot or vicious circle’ (Deleuze 1994: 161). At the same time, what Plato calls ‘dialectic’, what Bergson calls ‘intuition’, what Nietzsche calls ‘perspective’ and what Kant calls ‘critique’ – and in fact, perhaps all of these are just different names for

64 Audrey Wasser ‘critique’ – all of these activities aim to do more than simply dispel the illusions of metaphysics. All of them aim to grasp false problems for what they are in order to expose the nature of the thought that produced them. And all of them aim to discriminate between false problems and real ones in a gesture that reveals the inseparability of critique from creation in a philosophy of immanence. For when no superior vantage can lay claim to truth, every act of discrimination entails the creation of a point of view; and every evaluation finds its meaning and its motive in the construction of a problem.

Notes 1. For Deleuze’s discussion of Lautman on problems, see Deleuze 2004b: 107; 1994: 163–4, 178–9, 324, n.9. For his treatment of Simondon’s notion of problems, see especially Deleuze 2004c: 88; 1994: 246. For a brief but important citation of Bachelard, see Deleuze 1994: 320, n.9. 2. On Deleuze’s relation to Simondon, for example, see Toscano 2006: chs 5–6, as well as recent issues of Parrhesia 7 (2009) and Pli 24 (2012). Chapter 4 of my book The Work of Difference also considers this relationship (Wasser 2016). On Deleuze’s relation to Lautman, see DeLanda 2002: ch. 1; Duffy 2013: ch. 4; Peden 2014: 221–51. 3. See also Deleuze 1956–7; 1983: 104; 1990a: 16; 2004a: 182; Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 16, 81. 4. For more on Deleuze’s relation to Heidegger, see Beistegui 2004; Bell 2006: ch. 4; Peden 2014: chs 6–7. 5. Deleuze likely has in mind Book 7 of the Republic, one of Plato’s most explicit discussions of the dialectical method, where Socrates asserts: ‘Dialectic is the only inquiry that travels this road, doing away with hypotheses and proceeding to the first principle itself’ (Plato 1992: 533d). 6. Deleuze makes this argument in ‘Qu’est-ce que fonder?’, connecting Socratic refutation to anamnesis: ‘It’s not discourse that Socrates refuses but the fact that discourse comes from particular people’, Deleuze claims. ‘He wants logos to be the expression of the real as such. The relation is no longer between souls but between the soul and the Idea. This is what Socrates calls recollection. The idea is presented as already there’ (Deleuze 1956–7; my translation). [Ce n’est pas le discours lui-même que Socrate refuse mais que le discours ne soit plus celui des personnes . . . Il veut que le logos soit l’expression du réel comme tel. Le rapport n’est plus entre les âmes mais entre l’âme et l’idée. C’est ce que Socrate appelle la réminiscence. C’est que l’idée se présente comme déjà là.] 7. Gregory Flaxman describes this reading of Plato against Platonism – this characteristically deconstructive move – especially well: ‘Deleuze insists that the task of reversing Platonism must be sought in Plato himself . . . Deleuze enacts his critique by virtue of a kind of writing and thinking that becomes Platonic so that Platonism itself becomes something else’ (Flaxman 2012: 117; see also 348, n.1) 8. ‘Au couple disjonctif apparence/essence, Kant va substituer le couple conjonctif ce qui apparaît – conditions de l’apparition . . . Il n’y a plus l’essence derrière l’apparence, il y a le sens ou le non sens de ce qui apparaît.’

How Do We Recognise Problems?

65

9. Because Kant asserts that transcendental ideas are not illusions in themselves, but become so due to their illegitimate or ‘extravagant’ use by the faculty of judgement (Kant 1999: A643/B671), it can be argued that Kant continues to share with rationalism a belief in the fundamentally ‘good nature’ of reason. My thanks to the anonymous reader at Deleuze Studies for drawing my attention to this point. And indeed, Deleuze characterises Kant’s treatment of reason in this way in Kant’s Critical Philosophy and Difference and Repetition. However, if we follow Deleuze’s description of the ‘good nature’ of thought as referring to thought’s natural affinity with the true, then we must remark that, if ideas of reason, for Kant, are not in themselves errors, neither are they in themselves true. The question of a legitimate or illegitimate use of ideas points to the fact that the true is not intrinsically determined, as it was with Spinoza, for example. It also shows that it belongs to the ‘nature’ of reason, for Kant, to ‘[confuse] its interests and [allow] its various domains to encroach upon one another’ (Deleuze 1994: 137). For more on the question of the nature of reason and its legitimate or illegitimate use, see Deleuze 1984: 25–7. 10. I am grateful to John Protevi for helping me refine this insight. 11. See Rosen, for example: ‘Either we grasp the original directly, in which case images are superfluous and there are no false statements. Or we do not grasp the original directly, but only via images, in which case there is no evident criterion for distinguishing between accurate and inaccurate copies, other than images themselves’ (Rosen 1983: 292). 12. Again, see Deleuze 1984 on the interests of reason and common sense; see also Deleuze 1994: 131–48. 13. In Deleuze’s terms, Nietzsche’s will to power is not a ‘wanting or seeking power’ but the differential element in which forces ‘directly confront one another’ (Deleuze 1983: xi). Forms of life dramatise differences of will (78–9). For more on the relation between Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivism’ and his immanent ethics, especially for the argument that ‘perspectives’ refer not to individual people but to the drives, which are themselves multiple, see Smith 2011. 14. François draws out the fact that both Nietzsche and Bergson understand the task of philosophy to be the task of creating problems. For both, François argues, this treatment of problems is made possible by the rejection of a transcendent standpoint of truth and by a seizing of knowledge as immanent to reality itself (François 2008: 230–9). 15. Hence, drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s work for a theory individuation, Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition that ‘individuation emerges like the act of solving a problem’ (Deleuze 1994: 246). For more on Deleuze’s notion of the encounter, and especially on the inseparability of its logical and physiological registers, see my article ‘A Relentless Spinozism: Deleuze’s Encounter with Beckett’ (Wasser 2012).

References Beistegui, Miguel de (2004) Truth and Genesis: Philosophy and Differential Ontology, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Bell, Jeffrey (2006) Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Difference, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bergson, Henri (1991) Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, New York: Zone Books. Bergson, Henri (2002) The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle Andison, New York: Citadel Press.

66 Audrey Wasser Bryant, Levi R. (2008) Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. DeLanda, Manuel (2002) Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, New York: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles (1956–7) ‘Qu’est-ce que fonder? Cours hypokhâgne, Lycée Louis le Grand 1956–1957’, available at < http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle =218&groupe=Conf%E9rences&langue=1 > (last accessed 26 May 2014). Deleuze, Gilles (1978) ‘Kant – 14/03/1978’, trans. Melissa McMahon, available at < http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=66&groupe=Kant&langue=2 > (last accessed 26 May 2014). Deleuze, Gilles (1983) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1984) Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1990a) Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, Gilles (1990b) The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles (2004a) ‘How Do We Recognise Structuralism?’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina, London: Semiotext(e) and MIT Press, pp. 170–92. Deleuze, Gilles (2004b) ‘The Method of Dramatisation’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina, London: Semiotext(e) and MIT Press, pp. 94–116. Deleuze, Gilles (2004c) ‘On Gilbert Simondon’, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina, London: Semiotext(e) and MIT Press, pp. 86–9. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari (1994) What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Descartes, René (1984) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Duffy, Simon (2013) Deleuze and the History of Mathematics, New York: Bloomsbury. During, Elie (2000) ‘Fantômes de problèmes’, Magazine littéraire, dossier ‘Bergson’, 386, pp. 39–42. Flaxman, Gregory (2012) Powers of the False Volume 1: Gilles Deleuze and the Fabulation of Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. François, Arnaud (2008) Bergson, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche: Volonté et réalité, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Heidegger, Martin (1996) Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Kant, Immanuel (1999) Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Livingston, Paul M. (2012) The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism, New York: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich W. (1997) Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

How Do We Recognise Problems?

67

Nietzsche, Friedrich W. (1998) On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Peden, Knox (2014) Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Plato (1992) Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Plato (1993) Sophist, trans. Nicholas P. White, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Rosen, Stanley (1983) Plato’s Sophist: The Drama of Original and Image, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Russell, Bertrand (1967) A History of Western Philosophy, New York: Simon and Schuster. Smith, Daniel W. (2006) ‘The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism’, Continental Philosophy Review, 38, pp. 89–123. Smith, Daniel W. (2011) ‘Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Towards an Immanent Theory of Ethics’, in Nathan Jun and Daniel W. Smith (eds), Deleuze and Ethics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 123–41. Spinoza, Benedict de (1985) Ethics, in Collected Works, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Toscano, Alberto (2006) The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze, New York: Palgrave. Wasser, Audrey (2012) ‘A Relentless Spinozism: Deleuze’s Encounter with Beckett’, SubStance, 41:1, pp. 124–36. Wasser, Audrey (2016) The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form, New York: Fordham University Press.