Reading WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? (8): concepts all the way down

From the beginning of WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? we are within the domain of the concept. « Old age » must be read as conceptual old age, the Idiot is a conceptual idiot, etc. This idea means that we are not in the domain of naive empiricism, and that « to speak concretely » is not the same as to speak empirically. Philosophy is concepts all the way down.

Here we come to a point of divergence between the perspective of this blog and Deleuze and Guattari’s doctrine of the concept. This blog is devoted to examining recent French philosophy (and associated Anglophone Continental Philosophy) as constituting a set of competing metaphysical research programmes, i.e. as an ensemble of heuristic projects (rather than completed systems) containing both testable and non-testable (speculative and empirical) components in various proportions.

Deleuze and Guattari say explicitly

« The concept belongs to philosophy and only to philosophy ».

This leads them to a simple principle of demarcation. They demarcate philosophy from science by denying the role of concepts in science, assigning concepts to philosophy and « functions » (equations) to science.

This clear and simple demarcation is a form of empiricist illusion, based on the denial of conceptual incommensurability within the sciences.

For example, some physicists and philosophers at first saw no difference between the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction and Einsteinian relativity, as the corresponding equations were the same, as were the predicted empirically observable values of mass, distance, and time. However, the concepts of the two theories are different, e.g. Newtonian mass as a simple property and Einsteinian mass as a relational quantity.

Deleuze and Guattari at this (demarcationist) stage of their argument (which as we have seen is strongly relativised in the conclusion of the book) resort to what we could call a conceptual uniqueness hypothesis.

This would seem to confirm François Laruelle’s reading of their book as expounding a form of  standard philosophy, i.e as falling under the principle of sufficiency. However, Laruelle oddly enough does not take into account the end of the book, he treats it as by Deleuze alone, and he converts what is essentially a hypothesis with a highly constrained domain of application (explicitly discussed and analysed in the book) into a principle.

When all this has been said in defence of one of  the book’s core hypotheses, one cannot deny that there is a form of philosophical sufficiency that is heavily foregrounded. If we do not see how the conclusion’s hypotheses concerning non-philosophy are actually at work throughout the book, we shall be led to give primacy to the demarcations (and thus validate the judgement of philosophical sufficiency) and to see the final invocation of non-philosophy as the incoherent inclusion of a « backdoor » exception.

This impression of a « sufficiency » or a tautology of the concept is reinforced by Deleuze and Guattari’s affirmation that concepts are self-positing and self-referential.

Testability is one of my meta-criteria in reading, as I consider that the text is constantly setting up criteria, so that one can seek to assess whether, and to what extent, it actually satisfies its own criteria and also assess the value of these criteria themselves.

These questions (What are the criteria?, Are they satisfied,? To what degree?, and What’s so great about these particular criteria?) can help us to read more closely but they also permit more degrees of freedom than an « empiricist » idea of reading. If we can read the text as a heuristic process then we can invent new thought and new hypotheses in close relation to it, playing off concepts against criteria, and tautology against testability, as part of what Deleuze and Guattari call an « »athleticism » of the concept.

Note: I am indebted to a conversation with Ethan Nope for helping me to clarify my ideas here.