This is the fourth in a series of extracts from my forthcoming book on Deleuze (to be published in the same P&R ‘Great Thinkers’ series as the Derrida and Foucault volumes). In this extract I discuss six important points to take into account if we want to understand how Deleuze thinks about truth. To see all the excerpts released so far, please click here.
We have already seen that, for Deleuze, the dogmatic image of thought is inextricably bound up with a particular set of political ideas, born out of Plato’s political problem of distinguishing between the true philosopher and the false sophist, and with the aim of preserving the order and stability of the state. Plato creates in his ontology a perfect reflection of his politics: he gives himself the ontology that his politics requires. His philosophy, then, is not guided and shaped by a pure will to truth but by pragmatic political ends.
Deleuze identifies this gambit of engineering an ontology to fit a pre-ordained politics not only in Plato. Aristotle projects the ideal of the privileged adult male citizen onto the natural and onto the divine, and then justifies the privilege of the adult male citizen in terms of nature and the divine.[1] Kant is named by Deleuze as the quintessential philosopher of the state par excellence, who “turns the philosopher into the judge” (WiP 72) to mirror the function of the state judiciary. Kant derives his idea of the transcendental, judging subject from the legislative state, and then justifies the state in terms of the subject. His philosophy is a reflection of the juridical system his philosophy supports, “tracing its doctrine of faculties onto the organs of state power” (ATP 376). Following a similar pattern, Deleuze and Guattari see monotheism as lending itself to despotic, imperialist states (WiP 43).
Figure A.22: The arborescent organization of the imperialist state.
How does Deleuze know his view is true?
This, for Deleuze and Guattari, is the pattern of all philosophical systems: not a disinterested search for truth but a complicity of ontology and politics all the way down. They see their own position as no different: they give themselves an ontology that will facilitate their ethical and political aims. It is worth pausing a moment, before we press on to discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s ethics and politics, to reflect on a question that will have been raised, I suspect, in the minds of many readers of this book: “how does Deleuze know that what he is saying is true?” It is a question that exercises theologian John Milbank in Theology and Social Theory. “If Being remains in itself unknowable, always absent and concealed,” asks Milbank, “then how do we justify the characterization of Being as univocity?”[2] We cannot, he concludes, pointing to what he sees as “the element of sheer preference” in Deleuze’s fundamental ontology.[3] These questions are easy to pose, but not quite as easy to answer as Milbank assumes, unless we betray Deleuze, the question, or both. I propose to make five observations with the intention of showing why this question prevents us from understanding what Deleuze is trying to do.
The first observation to make is that the question “is it true?” belongs in the dogmatic image of thought. It is the question par excellence to distinguish between the icon and the simulacrum, and we have already seen how Deleuze suspects such a question of political motivations. It is out of an addiction to the dogmatic image of thought that one privileges what Deleuze, after Nietzsche, calls the “will to truth” (See, for example, NaP 94-6).
Secondly, by Deleuze’s lights asking of any philosophical system “is it true?” is problematic, because each system brings its own criteria for what counts as a valid answer to that question. Judged empirically, empiricism seems the “truest” of all systems. In terms of its power of a priori reasoning, idealism looks the “truest”. The criteria of truth are part of the system, not something outside all systems by which they can each impartially be judged. In Difference and Repetition (187) Deleuze expresses this in terms of conic sections. Imagine taking a cone, standing it on its base and slicing it in two with a knife at an angle of forty-five degrees. Now throw away the top half of the cone. The forty-five degree surface of the cone base is a conic section. Slicing at different angles and heights will yield with different conic sections. Each conic section is complete in itself, yet not the whole story of the cone, just as each philosophical system is self-consistent and yet not an exhaustive account of the world.[4]
The third reason why the question of truth is problematic for Deleuze is that it turns us away from the world, to abstract and unchanging concepts that betray the flux and becoming of reality. Whatever we might try to say about the world will always fall short of its complex becoming. Fourthly, Deleuze’s interest in the question of truth is not primarily in answering it, but in questioning what motivates it. Deleuze follows Nietzsche in interrogating the reason why we pursue the “will to truth”: whose interests does it serve? Who stands to gain from enforcing a strict definition of “truth”? Do those interests suppress becoming and difference, or encourage them?
Fifthly, asking of any philosophy whether it is true misunderstands what philosophy itself is. Deleuze and Guattari reply to the eponymous question of What is Philosophy? with a straight and succinct answer: philosophy is “the discipline that involves creating concepts” (WIP 5), in other words creating ideas that help us to see and live in the world in new ways, like Plato’s creation of the forms (WIP 6) or Kant’s transcendental, legislating subject. Note that philosophy creates concepts for Deleuze, rather than discovering them. To discover ready-made concepts in the world would be the modus operandi of the representation and recognition at the heart of the dogmatic image of thought, but in a philosophy of immanent becoming the imperative is to be inventive and to proliferate difference. It is also important to recognize that, for Deleuze, concepts are always responses to problems (such as the problem of distinguishing the sophist from the philosopher in Plato), not foundations in their own right. So the question to ask of a concept is not “is it true?” but “to what problem is it a response?”, and the criterion by which such concepts are to be judged is not whether they are true or not, but what they allow us to see and how they allow us to act.
Sixthly, the criterion of truth is replaced in Deleuze’s thinking by two other measures: interest and usefulness. Let us take interest first: “Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure.” (WIP 82). As for usefulness, in the course of an interview with Michel Foucault Deleuze insists that “[a] theory is exactly like a box of tools […] It must be useful. It must function”.[5] The toolbox metaphor is an instructive one. We do not mount our tools on the walls of our houses to gaze at them admiringly, nor do we simply write books that describe our tools in loving detail. Tools are to be used on particular, local projects; they prove themselves when they help us to get a job done. Similarly, theories are not there to admire or wax lyrical about, but to perform certain, specific and local tasks in the world, after which they can be laid aside and other tools chosen to address other projects and tasks. Interest and usefulness are not as unusual criteria as it first may appear. Why has Plato’s philosophy had such an enduring hold on the Western imagination? Because it is true? No-one has been able to show conclusively that it is. But it has certainly drawn the interest of generations of philosophers, and generated libraries of commentary and critique. And it has certainly proven itself useful in providing explanations of everything from language to the origin of our knowledge and the possibility of grouping individual things in the world in meaningful categories. Philosophers do not know whether Plato’s system is true, but they have found it exceedingly interesting and useful.
Seventhly, concepts are interesting and useful for Deleuze in direct proportion to their promotion of the dynamic becoming of life itself: “‘There are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the intensification of life” (WiP 74). The litmus test is not whether a philosophical concept corresponds to some pre-given reality, but the style of life to which it leads: does it intensify the becoming and difference of life, or stifle it? For the dogmatic image of thought, thinking is about recognizing and representing reality; for Deleuze and Nietzsche thinking is about “discovering, inventing, new possibilities of life” (NaP 101). In fact, this concern trumps the question of truthfulness, such that Nietzsche can famously write of the God of divine providence that he “is so absurd that we would have to get rid of him even if he did exist”.[6]
Eighthly and finally, Deleuze displaces the question of truth and falsity away from propositions (this is a true image; that is a false simulacrum) and makes them qualify the problems that condition them (the problem of the ‘true image’ is a false problem). We have the (empirical) truths we deserve as a function of the problems we have been able to pose, and the means and terms we create for posing them.
[1] This point is made by John Protevi in “The Organism and the Judgment of God”, in Bryden (ed.), Deleuze and Religion 31.
[2] John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) 306.
[3] Milbank, Theology and Social Theory 308.
[4] Henry Somers-Hall, “Introduction”, in The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze 7.
[5] Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power” in Donald F. Bouchard (ed.), Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977) 208.
[6] Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (eds.), Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) §53, p. 52.
