2
Between Realism and Anti-realism
I want to begin situating Deleuze’s thought relative to realism and anti-realism by addressing two questions Deleuze received after he gave his “Method of Dramatization” talk to the Société française de Philosophie on 28 January, 1967. The first is from Ferdinand Alquié, who expressed the following concern upon hearing Deleuze use examples from science and psychology to make philosophical points:
I understand that Mr. Deleuze criticizes philosophy for making the Idea a conception that is not adaptable, as he would like, to scientific, psychological, and historical problems. But I think that alongside these problems there remain classical philosophical problems, namely problems having to do with essence. In any event, I don't believe, as Deleuze does, that the great philosophers have never posed such questions.[1]
Coming from the man who was overseeing Deleuze’s work on Spinoza at the time, this criticism got Deleuze’s attention. The second question is from Alexis Philonenko, a Kant and Fichte scholar, who sought clarification of Deleuze’s argument concerning the relationship between the representational and the subrepresentational. Philonenko compared these arguments to Maïmon’s, noting that the differential elements for Maïmon compare to Deleuze’s subrepresentational elements, and the representational compares to the integration of these differentials. A consequence of this approach for Philonenko is skepticism, for we are without a criterion whereby we can discern ‘what we produce and what the object produces...[and] what is produced logically and what is not…’ This leads to his question:
So this is what I want to know: what part does illusion (or the illusory) have in the movement of differential elements?[2]
Before addressing Deleuze’s response to these two questions I want to set forth how these questions give rise to issues concerning realism. We will then be better able to place Deleuze’s thought into the constellation of debates that surround realism, anti-realism, and speculative realism.
Alquié’s concern with Deleuze’s talk was that the distinctiveness of philosophy was being supplanted by science. Is philosophy merely a midwife for the sciences? For Deleuze the answer is clearly no. When asked whether the topological model Deleuze and Guattari put forth in the conclusion to A Thousand Plateaus is ‘transposable into mathematics [and] biology,’ Deleuze says, ‘it is the other way around,’ and to clarify this point he adds: ‘I feel that I am Bergsonian – when Bergson says that modern science has not found its metaphysics, the metaphysics it needs. It is that metaphysics that interests me.’[3] This metaphysics should not, Deleuze stresses, be ‘in the style of Kant,’ but rather ‘in the style of Whitehead.’[4] What this style involves will be discussed below, but it is important first to appreciate the fact that Deleuze is interested in the metaphysics modern science needs, rather than the science philosophy needs.
With this turn to metaphysics we also return to the choice that has come to characterize much of post-Kantian philosophy—one can follow Humean empiricism and its positivist and nominalist variants or one can follow Kantian critique and its idealist and rationalist variants, but one cannot follow both. Alexis Philonenko’s question regarding illusion comes from the Kantian perspective. For Kant there is the transcendental illusion whereby one extends the concepts of the pure understanding to form judgments regarding things that are beyond the limits of possible experience (e.g., the existence of God, the claim that the world must have a beginning in time, etc.). The point of Kant’s critical project is to determine the limits that draw the line between legitimate and illusory claims to know what is real and what is not. But even with this project in hand, Kant admits that the transcendental illusion ‘does not cease even after it has been detected and its invalidity clearly revealed by transcendental criticism.’ (A297) The mind naturally and inevitably slips into illusion. On Philonenko’s reading of Maïmon, we cannot even be certain about the line we draw between legitimate and illusory judgments since it is uncertain whether the integration of differentials from which our judgments arise are the products of our own making or a real consequence of a real object. Similarly for Hume, when we are led through the association of ideas and habit to impute causality and necessity to objective relationships, or to infer a substantial self that accompanies our thoughts and perceptions, Hume too would leave us with no way to differentiate between reality and illusion other than the strength and vivacity of the beliefs themselves, which is certainly no guarantee. As Deleuze says of Hume, ‘From the point of view of philosophy, the mind is no longer anything but delirium and madness. There is no complete system, synthesis, or cosmology that is not imaginary.’[5] Deleuze’s response to Philonenko’s question may thus seem surprising, but it is unambiguous—for him there is no place for illusion with respect to the subrepresentational field – this field is ‘perfectly determinable’ as Deleuze puts it – and ‘the illusion only comes afterward, from the direction of constituted extension and the qualities that fill out these extensions.’[6] For Deleuze, therefore, the real is to be associated with processes that constitute the givenness of objects rather than with the constituted, identifiable objects and categories themselves. It is for this reason that Deleuze identifies the style of metaphysics he is interested in with Whitehead instead of Kant; rather than base an understanding of reality upon identifiable categories and forms of judgment, Deleuze argues that our scientific, representational understanding of reality presupposes subrepresentational processes that are not to be confused or identified with that which is identifiable as a result of these processes.
In the choice between Kant and Hume, therefore, it appears Deleuze’s choice is clear—Hume. But where does this leave Deleuze relative to realism, and metaphysics in particular? At first it might seem that Deleuze should be placed solidly within the anti-realist camp. After all, if what can be said of reality may, in the end, be illusory, and if much like Hume Deleuze is willing to say that ‘there is no complete system, synthesis, or cosmology that is not imaginary,’ then it would seem to be difficult to place Deleuze within the realist camp. But is he an anti-realist?
To answer this question I will sketch out the difference between realism and anti-realism by turning to Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism, which ultimately is a radical critique, as Meillasoux puts it, of any ‘contemporary opponent of any realism.’[7] Put briefly, correlationism is the position which holds that we cannot know reality as it is in-itself but only as it is for-us, as a correlate of consciousness, language, culture, conceptual scheme, etc. Meillassoux notes that Fichte’s Principles of Scientific Knowledge is the ‘chef d’oeuvre of such a correlationism’ in that it shows how any attempt to posit a reality as independent of any positing is still a reality that is posited as such. Correlationism, however, is not committed to a subject-object dualism but more importantly rejects any attempt to hypostatize a reality that would be an autonomous and independent reality. This is why Meillassoux will understand correlationism not as ‘an anti-realism but [as] an anti-absolutism,’ for it is invoked ‘to curb every hypostatization, every substantialization of an object of knowledge which would turn the latter into a being existing in and of itself.’[8] Whether these autonomous beings are Ideas or objects, correlationism, for our purposes, is anti-realist in that it holds that any reality in-itself is always from the start an in-itself correlated with something else.
Let us turn now to more traditional understandings of anti-realism—namely, those of the analytic tradition. The term itself was first used by Michael Dummett to characterize those positions that argue that reality is what is necessary in order to state meaningful, true sentences. Dummett will refer to this as semantic realism, and others will call it deflationary realism, but it is clear that it is a form of correlationism or anti-realism in that the real is real only insofar as it is necessary to the utterance of meaningful, true sentences – or, as Quine famously put it, “To be assumed as an entity is, purely and simply, to be reckoned as the value of a variable. In terms of categories of traditional grammar, this amounts roughly to saying that to be is to be in the range of reference of a pronoun.”[9] Donald Davidson will later criticize Quine for continuing to adhere to what he refers to as the third dogma of empiricism, by which Davidson means the continuing adherence to the scheme-content dualism whereby a pure content (‘sensory firings’ in Quine’s case) is forged and translated by a conceptual scheme into the content of our knowledge of reality. In rejecting the third dogma Davidson may appear to be a realist – he does, after all, claim to uphold a form of monism which asserts that there is nothing but objects and events – and yet when he argues for the reality of these objects and events his argument in the end is that they (especially events) are real only because we could not utter the meaningful sentences we do without them. And finally, though we could go on, in David Lewis’ modal realism, a realism that goes well beyond common sense naïve realism in that Lewis accepts the reality of possible worlds, Lewis argues for the reality of these possible worlds by showing that they are necessary if our everyday counterfactual claims are to be meaningful and true. In all these cases and in others we could list, the real is real only by virtue of the necessary role it plays in some other process (namely, a linguistic and semantic process), and thus correlationism and anti-realism are alive and well within the analytic tradition.
To move beyond correlationism, Meillassoux draws support from an important ontological claim that he derives from it, even though he admits that correlationism ‘is not an ontology, strictly speaking.’ Meillassoux argues that ‘[a]ccording to the correlationist, if I remove myself from the world, I can’t know the residue. But this reasoning supposes that we have access to an absolute possibility: the possibility that the in-itself could be different from the for-us. And this absolute possibility is grounded in turn on the absolute facticity of the correlation.’[10] In other words, following from the epistemological claim that one cannot ‘know the residue’ of what would be independent of what is for-us, Meillassoux draws the ontological conclusion that the world could be other than it is for-us, which entails, in turn, the possibility of a world without correlation, a world without givnness. From here it is a simple step to the undermining of correlationism since if the real, X, can only be known as a posited X, then it follows from the ontological conclusion concerning the facticity of the correlation itself that there is the possibility of an X that is not posited, a world without givenness for-us.
One of the challenges that attends Meillassoux’s conclusion, and one that is central to what has been called speculative realism (but which has not been ignored within the analytic tradition as well), is to account, in a noncircular manner, for the facticity of thought itself—especially the normative patterns of thought—and hence for the relationship between thought and the structure of reality from which thought emerges. It would lead us too far astray to begin to detail these debates, but it should be noted that the Meillassoux’s own concerns regarding realism and the facticity of thought are widely shared and are being addressed from a number of different perspectives.
To begin to return this discussion back to the relationship between philosophy and science—and clearly science has a lot to say about the origins of thought—we will be aided by discussing necessary laws. We can begin with David Lewis’s Humean understanding of necessity, what he calls Humean Supervenience. On Lewis’s reading of Hume, any claims we make regarding the world that we take to be true, including claims concerning necessary laws, supervene upon a given distribution of particular facts. There cannot be a change in this distribution without a change in the claims or truths that supervene upon them. Given the laws of probability, the chance a single throw of the dice will give me a six are one in six. Three or four sixes may show up in a row, but given a large enough number of throws the number of times I throw a six approaches one in six. These laws of probability therefore supervene upon a given distribution of particular facts (rolls of the dice) in the world up to and including time1. If there is a non-zero chance, however, that after time1 sixes come up every time then that would effect the chance distribution at W at time1—it would be something higher than one in six, but this contradicts Humean supervenience. Lewis refers to this as an undermining future. In his analysis of Hume, however, Meillassoux argues that what makes Hume’s understanding of necessity possible is that there be a totality relative to which the particular facts are compared, and hence upon which the necessary laws supervene. It is the totality of throws at time1 combined with the throws after time1 that gives rise to undermining futures. Following Badiou and Cantor, however, Meillassoux argues for the not-All that cannot be totalized and which therefore undermines the necessary laws that would supervene upon a given totality. The notion of an undermining future would not even arise on this reading. This is not to say that there are no particular facts or regularities between facts. Within a large set of observations the odds of sixes appearing may be one in six, or there may be countless other regularities, but the ‘laws’ that supervene upon these regularities are, Meillassoux argues, ‘contingent. They are not necessary. As Hume said, we are unable to demonstrate any such necessity.’[11]