Problematic Ideas

The first principle of philosophy is that Universals explain nothing but must themselves be explained.

Deleuze and Guattari – What is Philosophy (p. 7)

This brief quote from the introduction to What is Philosophy? encapsulates an important theme that runs throughout not only Deleuze and Guattari’s collaborative works, but also Deleuze’s own works. This should perhaps be obvious if, as the quote makes clear, it is a first principle of philosophy that Universals do not explain but need to be explained. How are we to explain and account for Universals? Are we to offer a nominalist account, bringing into play the writings of David Lewis, among others, to fine tune the argument? We certainly could, and I do touch upon these types of arguments in An Inquiry into Analytic-Continental Metaphysics (forthcoming), where I compare and contrast Lewis’s and D.M. Armstrong’s approaches to understanding, or explaining, the nature of universals. Rather than rehearse those arguments here, however, I want to return to Deleuze, and in particular to two sources of an explanation of universals that Deleuze draws from–namely, Plato and Hume. These two sources come together, I argue, in the concept of problematic Ideas, and it is here where universals come to be explained; or it is to problematic Ideas that we are to turn in acting upon the first principle of philosophy.

Let us begin with Plato. It may seem strange to begin with Plato, for does he not begin with Universals, calling upon Universals, or Ideas, to explain why things are the way they are? A painting is beautiful, for example, because it participates in the nature or Form/Idea of beauty. On a cursory reading of Plato, this appears to be how Ideas are understood, but as the problem of accounting for the relationship between Ideas and that which shares in these Ideas, a problem that first emerges in the Parmenides (see 132a6-b2), one can see an effort in Plato’s later dialogues to address these problems. This effort is exemplified in the Philebus (discussed here) where Socrates remarks that ‘the wise men of the present day make the one and the many too quickly or two slowly, in haphazard fashion…they disregard all that lies between them’ (17a). If Plato takes this caution seriously, then it would seem clear that he would not think of Ideas as the one distinct and separate from the many that share or participate in this one. He would want to develop an understanding of Ideas that is most concerned with “all that lies between them.” This is the direction that Deleuze pushes a Platonic theory of Ideas. Ideas are thus neither a determinate one or many, but they are what accounts for and explains the relation between a determinate one and many, or they account for and explain universals as conventionally understood.

It is at this point where we can bring in Hume, a more predictable ally in our attempt to explain universals rather than presuppose them. In his Treatise (1.1.7 Of abstract ideas) Hume expands upon Bishop Berkeley’s arguments and claims that universals, or “general ideas are nothing but particular ones” (1.1.7.1). As Hume continues, since all our ideas are merely copies of impressions, “Abstract ideas are therefore in themselves individual, however they may become general in their representation” (1.1.7.6), and this is done by bringing together all the “possible degrees of quantity and quality” associated with the possible individuals one may have in mind when thinking, for instance, of a dog. But as Hume recognizes, this is all done “in such an imperfect manner as may serve the purposes of life…” (1.1.7.7). In other words, since we cannot, as individuals with finite minds, comprehend the infinite possibilities associated with any abstract idea (we cannot hold in our mind all possible dogs for instance), we construct an imperfect image that is suitable for the “purposes of life,” or we find that we can successfully apply the abstract idea to the dogs we encounter in our daily lives.

We can now return to the sense in which problematic Ideas are between the one and the many, or how they draw from both Plato and Hume. As I develop the notion, problematic Ideas, as Ideas, are not to be confused with the determinate entities they make possible, whether a determinate universal and abstract idea, “dog,” or the many determinate individuals to which the predicate, “…is a dog,” correctly applies. At the same time problematic Ideas are problematic for what is constructed, following and extending Hume, is a problem that allows for the possibility of a solution, or the possibility that in any given circumstance you apply the abstract idea to a particular individual. Understood in this way, problematic Ideas both explain universals, and the determinate relations that arise between the one and the many (or so I argue in my forthcoming book), and they explain the transformation and undermining of determinate universals—that is, universals as determinate and identifiable—as they become problematized and make way for new solutions, for new abstract ideas and universals. This move to problematic Ideas, therefore, is part of my effort to follow through on the first principle of philosophy.