§98. Nomad Empiricism
“To make becoming itself a model, and no longer a secondary characteristic, a copy; in the Timaeus, Plato raised the possibility, but only in order to exclude it or conjure it away in the name of royal science.” Royal science refers to authorized knowledge of demonstrated theorems laid up in the archive of scientific truth.
This science isolates operations, which can be formalized, from intuitions, which resist operationalization and rely instead on qualities and affect. Royal science is science severed from sensuous intuitions, captured by formality, dedicated to laws and constants, things that never fluctuate, seeking the invariable in variations, the identical in differences, the universal amid change.42Deleuze and Guattari contrast this royal science with a nomadic science whose practitioners might be physicians, engineers, architects, masons, miners, metallurgists, or military strategists. Where royal science seeks to formalize, nomadic sciences “subordinate all their operations to the sensible conditions of intuition and construction.” Nomadic practitioners want to feel something, sense something, get their hands on the material, and follow the matter to a consummation, a problem solved, a work completed. Such knowledge is approximate (Aristotle called it “stochastic”), and depends on sensitivity, sensibility, and sensible evaluation. The only “matter” nomad sciences know is mixed in kind and laden with singularities (alloys, cements, gems, organisms, armies, terrains). They search not for what is always the same but what is singular and can be exploited in response to a problem.43
In Euclid's terms, nomadic science is problematic, discovering and solving problems, while royal science is theorematic, demonstrating theorems that have always been true. I have mentioned this distinction several times.
A historian of mathematics observes that the principal authors of classical geometry (Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius), as well as later commentators (Heron, Pappus, and Proclus) meticulously maintain this distinction, which in their terms is between the theoretikon and the porisikon. We should not think of ancient geometry as if the composition of books like Euclid's Elements was the geometer's ambition. Such books were for instruction, not to communicate advanced research. We should also bear in mind that Plato does not speak for the mathematicians, and his aspirations are not theirs. Ancient geometry is a tradition of problematic research, with the compilation of theorems ancillary to solving problems.44Theorems demonstrate the reality of something that exists independently of our knowledge. In his commentary on Euclid, Proclus says, “Theorems endeavor to grasp firmly and bind fast by demonstration the attributes and inherent properties belonging to the objects that are the subject matter.” Problems are different. The problem cannot be solved without a construction, and a willing mathematician is required to obtain a solution. Classic geometrical problems are the duplication of a cube (doubling the altar at Delos), trisecting an angle, and the quadrature of a circle (“squaring the circle”). Here is one from Euclid: “Given two unequal lines, to cut from the greater a line equal to the smaller” If two such lines are given, a straight equal to the smaller is not thereby cut from the greater. As this example shows, the essence of such problems is not difficulty, it is the “demand to do something not yet done or to discover something not yet known”45
Hence the advantage of problematic concepts and methods in fields that are breaking out new lines of inquiry, which seems to have impressed Deleuze. Problematic thinking is more consistently empirical, provoked by something surprising, unassimilable, and in response to which thinking is changed, learning from experience.
“The problematic is distinguished from the theorematic (or constructivism from the axiomatic) in that the theorem develops internal relationships from principle to consequence, while the problem introduces an event from the outside”; it puts “the unthought into thought.” By contrast, theorems are sterile, their statement already incorporating the full description of what has been discovered, and their demonstration having a place in the formal organization of results, but ancillary to discovery.46Where theorems belong to an impersonal order of laws and constants, problems are affects; we feel them before we understand anything. There is no problem until somebody feels one, and Deleuze and Guattari seem right to say that the capacity for that feeling—feeling that something is not as elegant, efficient, or technically sweet as it could be—is “inseparable from the metamorphoses, generations, and creation within science itself.” Nomadic sciences scramble distinctions that royal science formalizes and tries to enforce, as it normalizes what it can of nomad innovation. Without these gusts from the steppe, knowledge would asphyxiate in the desiccated formality of royal science.47
Paul Feyerabend made a comparable point when he distinguished what he calls theoretical and empirical traditions of science. While theoretical traditions replace intuitive and incompletely standardized procedures by abstract models with abstract concepts, and so far as possible allow only such concepts in their reasoning, empirical traditions doubt the usefulness of regimentation, and value reasoning instrumentally. Both traditions have their empiricisms, Quine for instance being an empiricist of theoretical science and Dewey one of empirical traditions. Feyerabend's example of an empirical (problematic) tradition is Hippocratic medicine. Another example is the Buddhist understanding of knowledge. Considering any “thing,” the enlightened want to know not what it is, but under what conditions it arises and ceases, which is the knowledge necessary to ensure that there is no clinging, hence no suffering.
Babylonian astronomy is also a problematic empiricism. This science began in the warrior-king's palace, not in the temples, and their systems are constructed on a profound empirical foundation (§20). Yet cuneiform astronomical tables express no interest in lawlike regularity or causal explanation. Their models are model calculations, procedural templates to apply, not a dynamic model constructed to satisfy the theorematic desire to see how the heavens go. Babylonian calculators produce the date of the solstice or eclipse, their science being a productive, problematic techne.48Nomadic sciences also lack a disinterestedness that royal sciences enjoy. '1 he knowledge of mine engineering would not continue in a pure form after all the mines close. Deleuze and Guattari say that the nomadic sciences are “hydraulic,” that is, sciences of flow and flux rather than solids stacked and transported, sciences that pursue not the identity of form but the consistency of intensities. They describe metallurgy as “the minor [i.e., nomadic] science in person.” Other materials flow, of course, but “it is as if metal and metallurgy imposed upon and raised to consciousness something that is only hidden or buried in other matters and operations.” Some materials seem to confirm the hylomorphic model. Wood, Greek hyle, naively seemed like the unformed matter par excellence, and its use tends to isolate the preparation of the material from the induction of form, as carpenters do not usually fell the timber. In metallurgy, however, these phases resist isolation. For instance quenching, an operation on the material, occurs after the form is induced, and unlike wood or stone, metal can be endlessly recycled, its art producing a continuous series of variations whose forms are understood to be inducted and provisional.49
Nomadic inquiry searches its material for singularities, qualitative differences, distinctions that technical masters know how to amplify and exploit.
These masters of material flows are themselves ambulant, given to itinerancy, which has been associated with empiricism ever since the Hippocratic Epidemics. Paracelsus, prince of Renaissance nomads, wrote, “Whoever wishes to explore nature must tread her books with his feet.” Adepts are enjoined to “sell your lands, burn up your books, buy yourself stout shoes, travel to the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the shores of the sea, and the deepest depressions of the earth.... Purchase coal, build furnaces, watch and operate the fire. In this way and no other will you arrive at knowledge of things and their properties.”50Nomadic empiricism makes an art of the sensuous experience royal science de-subjectifies by formalization. Nomads are empirical, even “mere empericks” (in royalist eyes). Their concern is with results, mere effectiveness, disdaining anything constant, like a universal law, as unavailing. Nomadic empiricisms take qualities for their problem and experiments for their method. The goal of nomadic inquiry ever since Hippocrates has been to control the forces of generation and corruption, ideally to generate or destroy any quality at will. These inquirers are not interested in body or matter save for its qualities and potencies. Except as an instrument to these ends, the universal is a matter of indifference.
Michel Serres composed an encomium to nomadic empiricism in his work The Five Senses (1985). He depicts such an empiricist as “a tailor, working locally, basting, thinking in extensions, from near vicinities to vicinal proximities, from singularity to singularity, from seed to layer, from well to bridge.” This empiricist is also a topologist, “having a sense for borders and threads, surfaces and reversals, never assuming that things and states of affairs are the same more than a step in any direction, a weaver of varieties, in detail.” The discoveries that experience enables are more enticing than the certainties promised in books.
“Language is closed on the language side, shut in on its qualities of exactness, precision, rigor; on the world side, on the other hand, it opens out. Inchoative and inexact, undecided but full of promise”51Deleuze and Guattari said Plato dismissed the thesis of original becoming in the name of royal science. If a notion so monstrous as aboriginal becoming were allowed, identity would not be given, individuality would remain obscure, and pure theory would be unavailing. Therefore identity must be first and difference derivative. That is the only scientific conclusion. Plato led the royalist adversaries of nomadic pluralism, egging idealists to “shatter and pulverize those bodies which their opponents wield” What the dusky empiricists allege for true reality is no more than “a sort of moving process of becoming” Nomadic finesse with the mutable is beneath the dignity of Plato's science. Those barbaric nomads “have intercourse with becoming by means of the body through sense” whereas Platonic royalists enjoy “intercourse with real being by means of the soul through reflection. And real being... is always in the same unchanging state, whereas becoming is variable”52
Antinomian rebellion against royalist pretensions to timeless truth has always come from empiricists, vexed by new problems, and exercising the rude prerogative of experience. Deleuze's philosophy is consistent with empiricist and especially radical-empiricist tradition in several respects. Like James and Bergson he aspires to a more consistently empirical empiricism, eschewing passive sensibility and the truth of the sensation. Thought and concepts begin (genetically, empirically) with a shock from outside, yet the very sensing is already affect, memory, and virtual action, and far from the passive reception of form. This leads Deleuze, as it led James, Bergson, and Dewey, to a problematic view of concepts, their value lying in what they can do, the action they organize or invent. Nothing a priori conditions the qualities or relations of events, experience being unconditioned by any necessity apart from life's natural necessity for action. Thought begins with material that is not meant to be thought, is not an ideal form already akin to thought, but whose aberrancy moves thought to exercise a power of invention.