Thinking the Impossible by Gutting Gary;

Author:Gutting, Gary; [Gutting, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199674671
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2014-09-02T10:11:03+00:00

Why be a Nietzschean?

While Derrida is, of course, a “more complicated” case, Deleuze and Foucault appeal to Nietzsche to support their opposition to Hegel. But what precisely is the problem with Hegel? Their objections are both philosophical and cultural (or ethical). Philosophically, they reject Hegelian “totalization”, his claim to provide a comprehensive meaning for history, based on an account that purports to be the final (absolute) truth about reality. Culturally or ethically, they oppose institutions and practices (to a good approximation, the values of conventional, bourgeois society) that they think Hegel’s philosophy supports. Since Hegel offers elaborate cases (especially in his Phenomenology and Logic) for his position, we might expect Foucault and Deleuze to offer detailed specific objections to these arguments. We find, however, hardly any trace of such an approach. They begin with the assumption that the Hegelian system must be rejected, and set out, along lines Foucault found suggested by Hyppolite, to develop alternatives (ontological or methodological) to them. Nor do they offer any critique (Marxist or otherwise) of bourgeois society; they merely register their obvious disdain and outrage at its deficiencies. It might well be that, in both instances, they regard the cases against what they oppose to have been conclusively made by other philosophers and social critics. (Deleuze, however, seems to regard explicit criticism as the sort of “reactive” movement he wants to replace with pure affirmation.) No matter, they come to their intellectual project with firm anti-Hegelian convictions that function as starting-points, not claims they need to establish.

I do not intend this point as a criticism. All philosophies are developed on the basis of pre-philosophical convictions of one sort or another. Philosophical inquiry often consists in the critical examination of these convictions (at least by testing their mutual consistency) and in development (refinement, extension, application) of them. Properly carried out, this process can provide important indirect support for the initial convictions by answering possible objections and showing the intellectual fruitfulness of the convictions. Philosophical inquiry becomes not a presuppositionless derivation of its conclusions but a persuasive elaboration of its presuppositions.18

In the case of Deleuze, the elaboration will not be of the simple denial of Hegelian ontology but of Deleuze’s positive alternative ontology, his philosophy of difference understood as creative affirmation rather than negation. Although we cannot even touch its surface here, Deleuze’s elaboration over the course of his career was impressive. He began by showing how elements of his ontological view could be developed from the work of a wide variety of philosophers: Hume, Spinoza, Bergson, Nietzsche. Then he showed, in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, how his approach could fruitfully transform our understanding of classical philosophical problems such as the plurality of being (one-many), causality, and the nature of representation, of sensation, of thought, etc. In other works, he demonstrated the power of his position to illuminate art, literature, psychology, economics, and politics. This sort of elaboration does not prove that the viewpoint is true (or otherwise to be preferred over

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