On the Nature of Concepts

Abstract

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy, famously, as an activity that consists in forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts.1 But this definition of philosophy implies a rather singular analytic of (to borrow Kant's phrase). Deleuze's of as it were, differs significantly from previous notions of concept. One of problems it poses - which is problem I would like to address today - lies in fact that concepts, from a Deleuzian perspective, have no identity but only a becoming. This poses a particular problem in dealing with status of Deleuze's own concepts. In his preface to Italian translation of Logique du sens, for example, Deleuze himself briefly charts out of concept of intensity within his own work.2 (1) In Difference and Repetition, he says, concept of intensity was primarily related to dimension of depth. (2) In Logic of Sense, everything changes: concept of intensity is retained, but it is now related primarily to dimension of surface: same concept, but different components. (3) In AntiOedipus, concept enters yet another that is related to neither depth nor surface: rising and falling intensities are now events that take place on a body without organs.3 (4) One might add a fourth to Deleuze's list: in What is Philosophy? concept of intensity is used to describe status of components of concepts, which are determined as intensive rather than extensive (which is one way in which Deleuze distances himself from, say, Frege, for whom concepts are extensional). In other words, concept of intensity does stay same even within Deleuze's own work; it undergoes internal mutations. The same is true of Deleuze's other concepts as well. The concept of affect, for example, first arises in Deleuze's work on Spinoza, where it designates passage from one intensity to another in a finite mode, which is experienced as a joy or a sadness; in A Thousand Plateaus and What Is Philosophy? however, affect is no longer the passage from one lived state to another, but has assumed an autonomous status - along with percepts - as a that takes place between two multiplicities.4 To this, one must add fact that Deleuze's concepts - like intensity or affect - themselves have a long becoming in history of philosophy, which Deleuze relies on and appropriates, and into which Deleuze's own work on concept is inserted. The concept of multiplicity, for instance, is first formulated mathematically by Bernard Riemann (and beyond that, is linked to Kant's concept of manifold); both Bergson and Husserl pick up on Riemann's work, in different ways; and Deleuze first writes about concept with regards to Bergson's distinction between two types of multiplicity - continuous and discrete. But here, too, concept again gets modified within Deleuze's own work. The types of reductions that he analyses - only from continuous to discrete, but from problematic to axiomatic, intensive to extensive, nonmetric to metric, nondenumerable to denumerable, rhizomatic to arborescent, smooth to striated, and so on - while interrelated, are identical, and each would have to be analyzed on its own account. Indeed, on this score, one of great texts in history of philosophy is Kant's opening to Transcendental Dialectic, where he explains why he is going to appropriate Plato's concept of Idea rather that coining his own term, since Plato was dealing with a problematic similar to one Kant wants to deal with, although Plato had not sufficiently determined his concept.5 Deleuze does exact same thing when, in Difference and Repetition, he in turn takes up Kant's theory of Idea and modifies it in his own manner, claiming that Kant had pushed to limit 'immanent' ambitions of his theory of Ideas. …