In The Logic of Sense [LS], Gilles Deleuze embarks on a unique kind of metaphysical project: to articulate a program for working philosophically within the realm of sense. I choose these words deliberately. The project is a metaphysical one, and sense is a realm. Sense has a real metaphysical status, but in the course of the text these descriptors-real, metaphysical-come to have a new meaning. If sense is metaphysical, that must be understood in the context of Stoic metaphysics, which have not, heretofore, set the tone for metaphysical thinking. The articulation of a metaphysics of sense is Deleuze's Stoic project. To be sure, he relies on the exemplary poetry of Lewis Carroll in arriving at his destination, and the presence of Artaud, Simondon, Lacan, Klein, and others cannot be ignored. But the logic of sense is above all Deleuze's great Stoic moment, or so I shall contend. And so it is the aim of the present essay to present the Logic of Sense as a figurai study of Stoic metaphysics.1 Indeed, the Stoic presence in that text is almost as ubiquitous as that of Carroll, and it is quite incredible that Deleuze's singular, momentous contribution to the field of contemporary Stoic studies has remained obscure. The present essay will have succeeded, then, if it demonstrates the Logic of Sense's rather important contribution to Stoic studies, and if, in turn, it demonstrates the importance of Stoic metaphysics to the Deleuzian project. I would like to begin with some brief remarks on historiography. As is well known, the Aristotelian syllogistic dominated all philosophical thinking on logic for thousands of years. During this time, some Stoic fragments on logic were always available, but they were almost entirely ignored or misunderstood. Indeed, the details of Stoic logic look bizarre and sometimes even trite; they were known to contemplate the truth-value of such conditional statements as "if it is day, then it is night," and "if it is day, then it is day."2 And so through the early twnethieth century, classicists and philosophers tended to dismiss the Stoic achievement in logic. The eminent German classicist Carl Prantl wrote in his 1855 history of logic, "it must have been a frightfully decadent and corrupted age that could designate so hollow a head as Chrysippus as its greatest logician."3 But the situation turned around drastically when, in the late 1920s, the Polish logician Jan Lukasiewicz noticed that the Stoics had actually been working on a sophisticated version of propositional logic, which went even further than the categorical predications that constituted the Aristotelian syllogistic. Following Lukasiewicz's discovery, two important monographs were published in English-one by Benson Mates (1953) and one by Kneal and Kneal (1962)-which set the standard for our contemporary understanding of Stoic logic. But this renaissance of Stoic logic just happened to coincide with the age of Frege, Russell, and Carnap, whose influence is all too palpable in the otherwise helpful publications I just mentioned. For example, the Stoics had a theory of sense, which they referred to with the term lekta-that which is sayable.4 They thought that propositions were meaningful (corporeal) utterances that signified some other (incorporeal) thing: the sense of the proposition. As Sextus Empiricus reports: The Stoics defended the first opinion, saying that three things are linked together, "the signified" [to s'mainomenon], "the signifier," and "the name-bearer." The signifier is an utterance, for instance "Dion"; the signified is the actual thing [pragma] revealed by an utterance, and which we apprehend as it subsists in accordance with our thought, whereas it is not understood by those whose language is different, although they hear the utterance; the name-bearer is the external object, for instance Dion himself. Of these, two are bodies-the utterance and the name-bearer; but one is incorporeal-the thing signified and sayable, which is true or false. …
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Mar 28, 2024
Haiping Wang Xiaojun Zhang 
Open Access