§93. The Secret of Empiricism

Is it a surprise that a philosopher-friend of Nietzsche identifies with this sober, scientific, some would even say flat-footed philosophy? In Empiricism and

Empiricisms. Barry Allen, Oxford University Press (2021).

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197508930.001.0001.

Subjectivity, his early (1953) study of Hume, Deleuze says, “The classical def­inition of empiricism proposed by the Kantian tradition is this: empiricism is the theory according to which knowledge not only begins with experience but is derived from it.” The empiricism is theorematic, experience is ultimate evi­dence—such is Kant's caricature, which Deleuze finds “in no way satisfactory.” He says that knowledge “is not the most important thing for empiricism, but only the means to some practical activity.” The sting is drawn from Kant's refu­tation when empiricism is understood problematically rather than probatively, as an experimental instrument of enhanced practice rather than knowledge in its primitive form.³

Deleuze proposes as the “truly fundamental proposition” of empiricism “that relations are external to their terms.” That, he says, is “the point common to all empiricisms.” The thesis may seem outlandish; certainly it will not be found in our textbooks. But consider what external relations have to do with empir­icism more usually defined. When relations (including sameness and differ­ence) are external to terms, nothing can be known about things a priori, by reasoning from concepts alone. That undercuts the argument for innate ideas and eliminates a priori knowledge of nature, two textbook polemics of empir­icism. What makes relations external is precisely that they cannot be deduced from an adequate concept of their terms. To know what depends on what, we have to examine empirical relations, which requires investigation and cannot be concluded by reasoning alone.

Deleuze describes empiricism as “a vital protest against principles.” Principium is Latin for Aristotle's arche, which, developing Ionian usage, names that whence a thing has its origin and which in some way explains it. Empiricism is a protest against such principles; for instance, Hume: “'Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but like­wise in philosophy. When I am convinc'd of any principle, 'tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling con­cerning the superiority of their influence.” If relations are really external—if they are empirically real and logically external to their terms, as James pro­posed (§73)—then no principle governs what goes with what. No arche, no principium, only contingent connections that have to be discovered by the empirical probe of sensory affect. Again a profile of empiricism, now in its radical phase.⁵

What happens to concepts without principles is as Hume said—they be­come poetry. What is valuable about concepts is not their validity with ref­erence to a principle, but rather their creativity, their quality as interesting, beautiful, or illuminating, as evinced by what those who think with them accomplish. Concepts are creations, not copies, they are useful, not true, es­pecially not as truth has been understood in philosophy. A good concept is not nature's verisimilar, its value lying rather in breaking out new territory for thought and practice. “Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth,” say Deleuze and coauthor Felix Guattari. “Rather, it is cat­egories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure.” Every predication is an experiment; the relations it posits have to be tried and tested and cannot be deduced a priori.

Deleuze seems averse to acknowledge truth as a philosophical concept at all. Once the value of truth is in play we are captured. What can philosophers do when “the truth” is at stake? They can either dogmatically claim to have this truth, or negate somebody else's dogma, or be a skeptic and doubt all so- called truth—a grim selection of nihilistic alternatives. Deleuze was baffled by Foucault's interest in the idea of truth. In a letter in 1977 he asks Foucault, “Why [do you] feel the need to resuscitate the truth even if [you] make it into a new concept?” A colleague recounts how Deleuze “often spoke to me about that, saying, ‘Jacques, what do you think, Michel is completely nuts, what's this old idea about truth? He's taking us back to that old idea, veridiction! Oh, it can't be!'” The argument is not that truth is suspect or problematic, but merely that it is not interesting in philosophy any more. Deleuze liked Whitehead's remark, “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.”⁷

Radical empiricism as Deleuze develops it is a nostalgia-free adieu to truth, embracing instead “the most insane creation of concepts.” Again that may not sound like empiricism, but no less an empiricist than Francis Bacon said his favorite sort of experiment “is wholly irrational and, as it were, in­sane (furiosus). It takes place when you realize that you can try something not because you have been led to do so by reason or by some other exper­iment, but simply because the attempt has never been done before.” That is the insanity of the empirical concept, its awesome freedom. Deleuze writes, “Only an empiricist could say: concepts are indeed things, but things in their wild and free state.” He means liberated from decorum, domestication, nor­malcy, or respect for principle and category.

Science seeks empirical relations, what Mach called functions, that is, correlations or equations associating “interesting” (invariant) elements. Philosophy is about something else, which is breaking out new conceptual territory; its concepts “do not have an object but a territory.” Philosophy can be experimental, as Hume hoped, but the experiments will be extraordinary, as Nietzsche required. They will include experiments in experimentation and how far experiments go. “To think [as a philosopher] is to experiment, but experimentation is always that which is in the process of coming about— the new, the remarkable, and interesting that replace the appearance of truth and are more demanding than it is.”⁹

Deleuze's empiricism is that of a postmodern Hume for whom principles are unavailing, with affect in their place. “The genius of empiricism, which is so poorly understood, [is] the creation of concepts in the wild, speaking in the name of a coherence which is not their own... a coherence always on the way, in disequilibrium with itself.” The coherence that is not their own is coherence with the instruments and purposes of our action, a problem­atic coherence of the externally related. Empiricism is an emphatic “crea­tion of concepts” because concepts have to be created—no innate ideas. To describe this creation as “wild” (or “insane”) underscores the externality of the connections problematic thinking is at liberty to try. Experience is not a principle; it is the poverty of principles.¹⁰