Deleuze and the Ambiguities of the French Reception of James
In three different and complementary ways, Deleuze misunderstood pragmatism. He misunderstood it firstly in that he assimilated pragmatism to pluralism. He missed it a second time since he borrowed the definition of pluralism from Bertrand Russell and not from William James. And he missed it a third time because his own version of pluralism does not stand up to the pragmatist method for making ideas clear. This article thus seeks to show, by way of historical argument (Part 1), textual exegesis (Part 2), and conceptual analysis (Parts 3 and 4), how Deleuze offered a pluralism without pragmatism, which leads him back to a philosophical outlook that the pragmatist philosophers he claimed to follow wanted to dismiss.
From his first book on Hume (1953) to his last article, “Immanence, a Life” (1995), Deleuze’s references to James were discreet but recurrent and significant. He belongs to a line of French thinkers who sought to shift pragmatism’s center of gravity from the theory of truth to the affirmation of pluralism, as though pragmatism were above all a metaphysics, before being a method for clarifying ideas and an epistemology.
The first in this line is Henri Bergson (1859–1941), a friend of William James. In the preface he wrote for the French translation of James’s Pragmatism, Bergson seeks to show that the criticisms leveled at pragmatism were guilty of a flawed reading: they did not see the close connection between the pragmatist theory of truth and the pluralist conception of reality. Rather, Bergson states that James’s theory of truth can only be understood by taking his metaphysics as a starting point (Bergson 2002, 267, 273; Bergson 2011, 1, 12). Indeed, for Bergson, pragmatism is opposed to the theory that truth is a copy of reality, firstly because this theory goes along with a monist ontology according to which the universe contains a logical structure that coordinates its elements within a perfectly coherent whole. To be said to know reality, the mind would thus have only to reproduce this logical structure passively like a mirror. Within truth, a necessary agreement or adequation would then exist between mind and reality since truth is already given in things, and the only function of mind is to release, to discover, and to extract it. In this view, because the universe is finite and static, truth is both already made and necessary. Pragmatism, on the other hand, is understood as a kind of pluralism, that is, as the critique of the idea that there is an order already given in the universe. According to Bergson, James affirms rather that reality is superabundant and not economically ordered, that it presents itself as a flux of particular experiences and not as the sum of clear-contoured things, and that it is open to a plurality of possibilities and not determined by necessity in its movement and its direction—in a word, that reality is largely multiple, unfinished, and chaotic. From this follows the constructivist thesis according to which it is up to the human mind to produce order actively, by inventing intellectual instruments that allow one to save experiences, to fix them into “things,” and to establish “laws” between them. The epistemological thesis that defines pragmatism, according to Bergson, ultimately derives from this; every truth is conceived as a human invention that is superadded to reality little by little, showing that order must be created and is not given because there is no adequation but rather a gap between the logic of humanity and that of nature. In short, because the universe is multiple and open, truth is a contingent conquest, ever susceptible to questioning.
This tendency to draw attention away from James’s pragmatism—which was quite contested in France at the time—and toward his pluralism culminates in the works of one of Bergson’s disciples, Jean Wahl (1888–1974), who in 1920 offered the first philosophical synthesis on the subject of pluralism in his The Pluralist Philosophies of England and America (Wahl 1925). The heart of the book is about James, in whose works Wahl was seeking, as he later explained, “behind the possibly irritating aspects of his pragmatism, the effort that was made to see reality in its state of flux and in its variety, and in that empirical unity which is perhaps ultimately more transcendental than transcendental unity, and also more complex” (quoted by M. Girel in his preface to Wahl [2004, 20]). The main interest of the book lies in the way in which Wahl shows the convergence of two versions of pluralism, one temporal and one spatial. The temporal version derives from Bergson: pluralism is the doctrine that affirms, against determinism, that novelty exists in time. Against the idea of a temporality in which everything is already given, James insists on change, chance, and an ever self-creating reality that is always incomplete. The spatial version of pluralism, however, is perhaps what makes Wahl’s reading original, and this is what would later have a strong influence on Deleuze. Against monism, pluralism is the affirmation that multiplicity exists: against the idea of totality that unites all the elements or parts of the universe in a single, great system, James insists upon the irreducible individuality of certain elements. The criterion of this irreducibility is to be found in the existence of exterior relations—a central problem for British and American philosophy at the time, in the debate around Hegelian idealism. That some relations are exterior means, for James, that some parts are only contingently attached to the rest of the universe: the idea of the “universe as a whole” of the monists is thus overturned a second time. The two versions of pluralism, temporal and spatial, join to form an image of the world that is irreducibly open and multiple, against the notion of a closed, whole universe: “Admit a time, and plurality will necessarily be its content. These two words designate two views of one and the same thing: the world, dispersed and parceled out, multiple in space and time, ever incomplete though ever in process of completion. The very center of pluralism is just where these two ideas meet in the idea of a world completing itself here and there” (Wahl 1925, 169).
Deleuze is of course Bergsonian, and always insisted on Bergson’s ideas of newness and creation, analytically linked with the idea of time. But he also openly declared that Jean Wahl had a strong influence upon the development of his thinking, calling him “the most important philosopher in France” (except for Sartre), for he “introduced us to an encounter with English and American thought” (Deleuze 2002, 57–58). The principle of external relations is indeed, in Deleuze’s eyes, the guarantee for preserving “the concrete richness of the sensible,” and “if one takes this exteriority of relations as a conducting wire or as a line, one sees a very strange world unfold, fragment by fragment: a Harlequin’s jacket or patchwork” (Deleuze 2002, 54–55). One could maintain that reading Wahl had been essential for Deleuze as he was formulating his thinking on difference, as mentions of James can be found even in the thesis outline that would ultimately become Difference and Repetition, mixed with other important influences of the time (notably Nietzsche), which he tried to combine: “Essential link of empiricism and pluralism: the taste for and game of diversity as opposed to the work of identification. Admirable description of diversity in James. […] Pure affirmation is a philosophy of difference (James and Nietzsche). The symbolism of Dionysus but also the jacket of Harlequin.”1
With Deleuze, the displacement of James’s pragmatism that was initiated by Bergson and continued by Wahl is carried to the extreme of complete substitution: the name of “pragmatism” no longer indicates a method or a theory of truth, but purely and simply the description of a pluralist universe:
“A contemporary of American transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau), Melville is already sketching out the traits of the pragmatism that will be its continuation. It is first of all the affirmation of a world in process [temporal version], an archipelago [spatial version]. Not even a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole [monism], but rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has a value in itself but also in relation to others: isolated and floating relations, islands and straits, immobile points and sinuous lines… not a uniform piece of clothing but a Harlequin’s coat, even white on white, an infinite patchwork with multiple joinings… These themes are to be found throughout Pragmatism, and notably among William James’s most beautiful pages” (Deleuze 1998, 86, 193n21).
In his two articles on Whitman and Melville, Deleuze thus seeks to characterize American pragmatism or pluralism as being predicated upon two main, complementary principles, with an anti-Hegelian bent. The first is a principle of difference: the pragmatist, says Deleuze, does not take the Whole as a starting point, but begins rather with a “given,” which is always plural, multiple, fragmentary, and heterogeneous. This principle answers the traditional ontological question as to what the ultimate components of reality are. It responds by stating that reality is ultimately made up of a plurality of elements that are ontologically independent from one another: one “part” does not depend for its existence or its nature on the existence and nature of another “part.” One cannot reduce one part to another (logical reduction) nor can one consider them only as multiple aspects of a more fundamental reality (dialectical unification). This is thus an ontological atomism. The second principle is a principle of relation, which governs the passage of the given to the constructed, in the creation of new, more complex entities: “But if it is true that the fragment is given everywhere, in the most spontaneous manner, we have seen that the whole, or an analogue of the whole, nonetheless has to be conquered and even invented” (Deleuze 1998, 58). In order for the construction of this whole not to be the negation of ontological pluralism, it is necessary that the multiplicity of parts not be integrated or unified in an undifferentiated totality, but rather that this totality exist only as the combination or the coordination of parts among themselves without losing their singularity. On this point, Deleuze comes back to the principle of external relations that Wahl had emphasized as being important for James’s pluralism: that various terms are linked in a purely external way means that the relations between them are not predetermined either by the nature of the parts that are the starting point, or by the nature of the whole they end up in. It is not necessary that B enter into relation R with A, nor that A enter into relation R’ with B; nor is it necessary that A and B enter into a relation at all to form the complex entity T. Thus linked merely externally, the parts are coordinated among themselves without being subordinated to one of them or to the whole that they form together. If all of given reality is atomistic (the principle of difference) and if all the relations between these atoms are external (the principle of relation), then the multiplicity inherent in reality as it is given is not negated or overcome when the elements of this multiplicity enter into relationship to form wholes: ontological pluralism is fully maintained. The wholes thus formed are not fixed and absolute, but variable and relative to the parts that compose them, to the degree that the combinations and recombinations of these parts are not predetermined. One may note that these two principles correspond to the two versions of pluralism: there is no reduction of diversity (that is, the multiplicity of parts in space: given reality is not whole, but dispersed); and there is no predetermination of the whole (the novelty of the future in relation to the present and the past: as the whole is not given, it must be made). These two principles can be seen working, according to Deleuze, in nature (bees and orchids), in the relation of humanity to nature (Ahab and Moby Dick), as well as within humanity (inventing democracy as the community of brothers or comrades where no individual is subordinated to any other, such as to a Father, or to the totality of a holistic society or a totalitarian state).
The principles of real difference and of external relation are in fact general principles in Deleuze’s thought, extending well beyond his study of American pragmatism and operating throughout all of his works. The same images of Harlequin’s multicolored jacket and a motley patchwork, both made of pieces of different-colored fabric or heterogeneous parts, are found again and again in Deleuze’s works. The first expansion, as we have seen, consists in witnessing these principles at work in American literature. But Deleuze goes on to find them discreetly in British writers and artists such as Lewis Carroll or Alfred Hitchcock (Deleuze 1989, 164; Deleuze 2006, 270–271). The second expansion is more significant and consists in passing from American pragmatism to British empiricism. Chronologically, Deleuze wrote on Hume before writing on pragmatism, but in reality, he attempted to find in Hume the pluralist description of the universe that he had found while reading Wahl as a student. In Empiricism and Subjectivity, Deleuze states that the central problem in Hume is the following: “how does the subject constitute itself within the given?” (Deleuze 1991, 110), and that the fundamental proposition that allows one to respond to this is that “relations are external to ideas” (Deleuze 1991, 105). The essential distinction necessary for understanding these statements is between atomism and associationism, bringing us back to the two principles of pluralism that correspond here to the two phases of the constitution of the subject in the given. The first principle in Hume that describes the primitive situation of the mind states that any idea that the mind can distinguish from another is different from the other, and can be separated from it by the imagination. According to this principle of difference, as long as the imagination can distinguish two different ideas within one idea, it can separate them, and so on, until the analysis arrives at the smallest distinguishable idea. The mind, at this point, is nothing but a collection of separate impressions and ideas that coexist and follow one another. What does imagination then do with such a collection? Its primitive, spontaneous activity consists in linking these ideas in a fanciful way; in fact, given that all simple ideas are separable, there is no necessary link between them, and the imagination can bring them together into any form it likes, without constraint, creating winged horses and fire-spitting dragons in the mind. However, it suffices to see that even in our most delirious dreams or our most uninhibited conversations, we can always observe a certain coherence, a certain thread running through our thoughts. This is why Hume postulated the existence of various principles, which guide the imagination by calming its delirium, restraining its free spontaneity, and putting a little order and method into the working of the mind. These principles have the effect of linking ideas in the mind in a regular way, and they are thus said to be principles of association: the mind no longer passes from one random idea to another, nor does it unite random ideas, but it passes from one idea to another one that resembles it, that is contiguous to it, or that is its effect or its cause. Thanks to these principles, the mind passes from fantasy (imagination in liberty) to understanding (ordered and disciplined imagination), that is, the subject is constituted in given reality without deriving from it entirely (according to the equation: the given + principles = the subject). Hume’s general project becomes incomprehensible, according to Deleuze, if one attempts to apply the usual definition of empiricism as a philosophy of the given or of experience. On the contrary, Deleuze defines Hume’s empiricism (and indeed all empiricism) by way of a dualism that corresponds to the two phases of the constitution of the subject whose various forms can be found in his commentary: mind and subject, given and constituted, fantasy and understanding, chaos and order, particular and general, nature and human nature, sensation and reflection, quantity and quality, collection and system, and, above all, term and relation. Foremost among these dualities (which are similar to those of Whitman and Melville: islands and straits, etc.) is that of atomism and associationism. The greatest misinterpretation, according to Deleuze, would be to confuse these two (Deleuze 1991, 118). These are indeed the two principles that we have been following in Deleuze’s thought, and the world of Hume strangely resembles the archipelagos of Melville and the America of Whitman (or vice versa): “the empiricist world can for the first time truly unfold in all its extension: a world of exteriority… a Harlequin world of colored patterns and non-totalizable fragments, where one communicates via external relations” (Deleuze 2004, 163). The two pragmatist principles of difference and relation, in Deleuze’s eyes, are nothing but prolongations of the two empiricist principles of atomism and associationism. And throughout his work, Deleuze remains faithful to this empiricism derived from Hume, identified with pragmatism, which is itself assimilated to pluralism.
This fact is visible in Deleuze’s third expansion, from this pluralist empiricism to philosophy in general, or at least to what philosophy should be. This is where the famous “great unity” of Lucretius-Spinoza-Nietzsche comes in, which is defined by the affirmation of these two principles of pluralism. In Epicurus’s and Lucretius’s naturalism, Deleuze effectively celebrates the beginning of “the real noble acts of philosophical pluralism” and the first act of overthrowing Platonism through the evocation of a “distributive,” “conjunctive” Nature, “Harlequin’s cloak,” far from any unifying principle such as Being, Unity, or Totality (Deleuze 1990, 267). This is because in these works one finds the principle of the heterogeneous multiplicity of elements, on one hand, and on the other, the principle of their nonpredestined encounters (the dualism of atoms and the clinamen). In a surprising way, he goes on to find an equivalent in Spinoza, a monist thinker par excellence, when he defends a pluralist conception of the attributes, which he says form an “irreducible multiplicity,” as “heterogeneous” elements that together make up a “motley” substance. This allows him to maintain the idea of a genealogy of substance itself along the same lines as the constitution of the subject in Hume (the attributes and the substance) (Deleuze 2004, 150). Above all, he states that it is impossible to understand the philosophy of Nietzsche (explicitly said to be analogous to that of James, in Deleuze’s thesis outline quoted above), if its essential pluralism is not taken into account: “pluralism (otherwise known as empiricism) is almost indistinguishable from philosophy itself. Pluralism is the properly philosophical way of thinking, the one invented by philosophy” (Deleuze 1983, 4). And indeed the two principles are to be found again in his reading of Nietzsche, through the distinction he insists upon between the irreducible multiplicity of forces, and their coming into relation through the will to power. Deleuze analyses Nietzsche as having made Epicurus’s atomism dynamic: in understanding the atom as a force, he returns to the principle that there is always an essential plurality of forces. The will to power is conceived to be a new clinamen or “differential element” by which a force relates to another force “by chance” (Deleuze 1983, 52–53), through variable combinations that form the different figures of the “active type” of the Master and the “reactive type” of the Slave.2 Other pairs derive from this founding duality of force and will, which are systematically brought out by Deleuze throughout his books on Nietzsche: action-reaction and affirmation-negation, meaning and value, and even aphorism and poetry (Deleuze 2001, 65, 74). Finally, Deleuze’s fourth and last expansion: from others’ concepts to the creation of one’s own concepts, such as non-totalizable “multiplicity,” “assemblage” of heterogeneous elements, the “rhizome” with lateral connections, and decentered “smooth space” (the patchwork quilt).
But the price paid for this identification of pragmatism with pluralism and of pluralism with empiricism is that of finding everywhere a certain dualism between terms and their relations. A critique is needed of the idea of pluralism that Deleuze claims to find in James, via Wahl. I will now turn to this task, first by criticizing Deleuze’s interpretation of pluralism precisely in the name of James’s pluralism, which Deleuze misunderstood. I will then critique this metaphysical pluralism in the name of pragmatism, which was forgotten and repressed in the French appropriation of James just discussed.
Already in his book on Hume, Deleuze invokes the principle of external relations in referring to both William James and Bertrand Russell: “Relations are external to their terms. When James calls himself a pluralist, he does not say, in principle, anything else. This is also the case when Russell calls himself a realist. We see in this statement the point common to all empiricism” (Deleuze 1991, 99). When he returns to Hume in later texts or courses, the name of James disappears and only the mention of Russell’s logic of relations remains, whose precursor is said to be Hume, through his associationism (Deleuze 2004, 163). Here Deleuze is again following Wahl, who had linked James and Russell in a similar statement (Wahl 1925, 252, 255). This link led Deleuze to unduly assimilate the two forms of pluralism so thoroughly that when he came to discuss pragmatism in the later texts on Whitman and Melville, in defining pluralism, he continued to use Russell’s version of it and not James’s.
Indeed, in Russell, Deleuze finds the link that leads him from affirming a radical dualism between terms and relations to affirming the externality of all relations. The axiom of external relations has several meanings for Russell, which should be considered briefly here.3 It is linked to analysis, understood as a method that allows a whole to be broken down into its simple elements, without the nature of these simple elements changing when they are taken in an isolated state nor when they are taken in the relations that make up the complex wholes. The analysis of language thus leads to the identification of absolutely simple propositions. Among these propositions, those of relationship (“this is to the left of that”) are not reducible to judgments of attributive form (where the subject is “this” and the predicate is “to the left of that”: S is P), as Aristotelian logic implied. Effectively, in such a proposition, there are three simple elements that exist independently of each other: there is “this” and “that,” which are in the relationship “to the left of” (the logical form of such a proposition would thus be written, xRy). This is indeed a form of pluralism: “this” exists and is that which it is, independently of “that”—and this is what the axiom of external relations means. The relation “to the left of” is not a predicate allowing “this,” “that,” or the complex entity that they form to be defined or even to be described: it designates a third entity. But these three components are not of the same nature, and the externality of the relations to their terms actually expresses a logical dualism: “this” and “that” are the particular values of the variables x and y, whereas the function “to be to the left of” is universal, in the sense that it can be applied to an indefinite number of particulars (my pen/my book; car A/car B, etc.). Related to the analytical method, to the logical analysis of language, and more precisely to the logic of relations, the axiom of external relations finds its ultimate meaning in a dualist ontology that posits two worlds, like the two elementary components of the proposition. These two worlds are, firstly, the world of perceptible particulars, which exist in space and time (those things that can be called “this”); and, secondly, the world of universals (qualities and relations), which are like platonic Ideas existing or rather “subsisting” outside of space and time and which cannot be known through perception (Russell nonetheless presupposes the possibility of a direct experience of universals). Only through direct experience of these different objects can one understand a simple proposition (and since such a direct experience is itself a simple relation between a subject and an object, it is external: hence Russell’s realism). This is the final interpretation that must be given to Russell’s axiom of external relations: if the relations are external to their terms, this is because they have a different nature from their terms—relations are universals that are only thinkable, and terms are particulars that are only perceptible. Russell affirms, without prior empirical examination, that all—absolutely all—relations are external to their terms, in an inversion of Leibniz’s position (that is, this is indeed an axiom for him) because this affirmation necessarily derives from the very nature of the relations that descend, like platonic Ideas, into the perceptible world in order to insert themselves between the terms, which are unbound and separated at their level. Russell’s pluralism is thus based on a dualism between particular and universal, argument and function, perceptible and intelligible, existence and subsistence, terms and relations.
And this is indeed why Deleuze thought he could make a collage out of Russell’s logic and his own version of Hume’s psychology. He made the three principles of association (the constitutive universal within human nature) the equivalent of Russell’s logical functions, and made simple ideas (the particularity within the mind) the equivalent of logical arguments—and if we follow him, we could almost summarize Hume’s thought in the following way: Rs(x, y), Cg(x, y), Cs(x, y)! This is why there are two principles in empiricism (or in pluralism or in pragmatism): one pertaining to terms (absolutely simple elements exist, that are independent from one another), and the other pertaining to relations (simple relations subsist, that are independent from their terms). Such a dualist conception explains why relations are understood to be entities that exist (or rather subsist), just like terms; and thus a third entity, beyond the two terms, must be recognized in the elementary furniture of the world—what Deleuze would go on to call the independent existence of the “and” and the “between,” or the “middle”: “Relations are in the middle, and exist as such” (Deleuze 2002, 55). But if this is indeed the case, then it is clear that the philosopher of difference did not see the difference between the pluralism of James and the realism of Russell.
The general context of James’s empiricism should in itself already call for prudence, since James was seeking to correct British empiricism in regards to its overly dualist and overly atomistic aspects. James’s radical empiricism should effectively be considered as a response to Kant and his followers, and as an effort to return to the old lines of British empiricism, simultaneously correcting them. Kantian philosophy is precisely dualist: it starts from an idea of perceptible given data inherited from the empiricists, by which is meant a multiplicity of separate and distinct sensations (atomism), and it seeks to show that this rhapsody of sensory data does not suffice to account for the cohesion and the coherence that understanding needs. To ensure this coherence, it thus presupposes the intervention of relations (the forms of sensible intuition and the syntheses of understanding) whose origins are not empirical since they cannot be given in experience, which is fundamentally bereft of such relations. A two-tiered world thus results: sensations are indeed given, like atomistic terms, but the relations that coordinate and unify these sensations (“to the left of,” “because of,” etc.) are produced by the subject. A long tradition then developed, up to the absolute idealism of T. H. Green (James’s primary target on this point), intending to reestablish rationalism upon the dualism of experiential terms and transcendental relations (cf. James 1977, 125–126). For James, radicalizing empiricism thus meant, above all, the idea that relations are just as much a part of experience, and that they are therefore just as particular and fugitive as their terms. As he had already discovered, regarding the perception of space in psychology, we move in a continuous way from the pen to the book, which is to its left, and the expression “to the left” designates only the intermediary and mediating space that allows us to pass, without spatial interruption, from this spatial object, which is the pen, to this other spatial object, which is the book: from the point of view of experience, terms and relations are on the same line or the same level. One can see how it is entirely misleading to define empiricism as Deleuze does, by the dualism of terms and relations, since James had sought to return to empiricism by refusing this very dualism, which rather defines a certain rationalism.
But what about the actual thesis of externality of relations in James, if it is not connected to a dualism of terms and relations? Indeed, James defines his pluralism by making reference to external relations: “Pragmatically interpreted, pluralism or the doctrine that it is many means only that the sundry parts of reality may be externally related” (James 1977, 145). It seems comprehensible, in reading this text, to link or even confuse James’s pluralism with that of Russell; however, they resemble each other only to the extent that the shark’s fin resembles that of the dolphin: through an external analogy, as it were, that can be explained by the fact that they have the same marine environment. Through this thesis on relations, James and Russell—and Deleuze—tried to combat the Hegelian monism that had penetrated Britain and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century—and France in the middle of the twentieth—and this common polemical environment is what prevented Deleuze from seeing the profound structural difference between the arguments of the two philosophers. James is an empiricist, and the very idea that one might posit an axiom concerning reality, as Russell did, is contrary to his philosophy, as it comes down to positing an a priori principle that governs experience independently of any empirical inquiry. One cannot know a priori that all relations are external to their terms: if Russell could posit such a principle, it was precisely because he had removed relations from sensible experience. James, on the other hand, settles for saying that some relations are external, which leads him also to recognizing the existence of internal as well as external relations. The very opposition between Russell’s thesis according to which all relations are external, and the thesis deriving from Leibniz or Hegel that all relations are internal, is a theoretical dilemma that seems typical of the dead-ends of abstract thinking. If we return to experience, the sterile opposition dissolves by itself because a whole variety of empirical relations are found, which range from the most external to the most internal: “The first duty of radical empiricism, taking given conjunctions at their face-value, is to class some of them as more intimate and some as more external. […] It is just because so many of the conjunctions of experience seem so external that a philosophy of pure experience must tend to pluralism in its ontology” (James 1976, 43–54). One can go even further and maintain that a given relation can be either internal or external depending on the circumstances. For example, the relation of resemblance between a model and its copy (in a portrait) is internal: if the copy did not resemble the model, one could not call it a copy. The resemblance is constitutive of its nature as a copy. On the other hand, if I pass a girl in the street who has a striking resemblance to the Mona Lisa, I can say that this relation is purely external (unless the girl willfully cultivates this resemblance and uses the painting as a model). Depending on the case, then, the resemblance can be internal or external, and only an empirical enquiry can determine the difference.
James’s position on external relations is thus anti-dogmatic and purely negative: pluralism is nothing but the opposite of absolute monism. For James, it suffices that a single element of experience can be recognized as independent from another and without necessary connection to it, for monism to be immediately refuted (cf. James 1975a, 78). And pluralism need not affirm anything positive about the “quantity” of separation that exists between the different parts of existence. There are thus two interpretations of the dilemma between monism and pluralism, depending on the point of view one takes. The monist interpretation of the dilemma places absolute monism in opposition to absolute pluralism: according to this view, either everything is unified in a closed totality or nothing is, and one has the choice between a universe seen as a coherent whole and a chaotic “multiverse.” On the contrary, the pluralist interpretation of the dilemma between monism and pluralism, between internal and external relations, emphasizes that there is no place for such “monomania” of multiplicity.
Thus when Deleuze states, following Russell, that all relations are external, and that in this thesis is to be found the definition of empiricism and the criterion of its identity with pluralism, he demonstrates precisely an anti-empiricist dogmatism that is opposite to James’s pluralism. Beyond this difference regarding the status of the thesis (as an a priori principle or the result of an empirical inquiry), Wahl’s collapsing of James into Russell, continued by Deleuze, took place by way of a conceptual confusion. “External” is not understood in the same way, in the two cases. In the traditional sense of the term, a relation is external to its terms if it is “accidental.” The differentiation between internal and external is in fact an application of the Aristotelian distinction between the essential and accidental properties of a substance, to the category of relation (cf. Rorty 1967, 125). Saying that a relation is internal, in this sense, only means that it is essential: the term would not be what it is if it were not in such a relation. An external relation is thus only a contingent relation: it could be removed without the nature of the terms being modified—such as in James’s example of the paper that is off the table and could be put on it without our ceasing to call them a paper and a table, and without our considering that we are no longer dealing with the same paper and the same table. James adopts this kind of moderate solution, as against the two extreme positions of total interiority and total exteriority of relations. “Exteriority” clearly has another meaning for certain partisans of total exteriority like Russell and Deleuze, whose pluralism ultimately rests upon a dualism of terms and relations. When Deleuze maintains that even the relations of ideas as Hume conceived them, which are nonetheless necessary relations (2 + 2 = 4), are external to their terms (Deleuze 1991, 66, 99), he is indeed using a different sense of the word. He means that the relation exists (or subsists) outside of the terms that it links, that is, that it is a third entity having an independent existence “beside” or “above” its terms. And when one grants such a separate existence to all relations in virtue of the irreducibility of their attributes, then one can indeed state that they are all external in this new sense of the word—but at the price of an infinite regress. If relations are external, in the sense that they have a separate existence, then supplementary relations are needed to link the first relations to their terms, and if these new relations also have the same kind of existence, then yet other relations will be needed, etc. On the contrary, one may avoid such a regress by refusing, as James does, the starting point in the atomism of terms that must subsequently be linked through the introduction of new entities from the outside. In any case, it is impossible to simply superimpose, as such, a pluralism founded upon the independent existence of relations, on top of a pluralism based in the recognition of the contingency of certain relations, but Deleuze constantly slid from one conception to the other.
In Hume’s empiricism and James’s pluralism, Deleuze sought to find the premises of his philosophy of difference. And in fact, he said as late as 1987 that he always felt that he was “an empiricist, that is, a pluralist” (Deleuze 2002, vii). However, when he tried to describe this empiricism more precisely, he qualified it as “transcendental,” which seems contradictory (Deleuze 2001, 25). When we examine the end point of this philosophy of difference supposedly inspired by empiricism and pluralism, we find an ontological dualism that is not unrelated to Russell’s duality of platonic relations and perceptible terms: “Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse. Difference is not phenomenon but the noumenon closest to the phenomenon” (Deleuze 1994, 222). The Difference that Deleuze speaks about is not an empirical difference that one can experience, between a book and a table. It is a principle of the production of experience, without which experience would not be what it is, that is, multiple. Vulgar empiricism (that of James, for instance) reduces and confuses Difference as a transcendental principle, and empirical diversity as what is given in experience. But it does not suffice just to describe the diversity encountered in experience that keeps the book and the table from forming a cohesive whole; it is necessary to do diversity justice through a principle that it could not itself provide the ground for, since the principle goes beyond it and produces it. The relation between transcendental Difference and empirical diversity is similar to the one presented in The Logic of Sense, between the event and the accident. What Deleuze calls “accident” is something empirical that happens—for example, an injury—that we describe through referring to its spatial and temporal situation (where and when did it take place?), indicating the people and objects involved (who and what?), and specifying the relations and actions linking them (who did what and how?): I cut myself yesterday with a knife as I was peeling potatoes in my kitchen. On the contrary, what Deleuze calls an “event” differs in nature from an accident, while still being “something in that which occurs” (Deleuze 1990, 149). The event of the cut is “within” the scene just described, without being identified with it, for this scene is only the empirical “actualization” of the pure event. The Cut preexists as an event before being “incarnated” in my body, in the form of a stupidly empirical booboo that I should take care of. Deleuze actually gives us no real means of understanding this difference between event and accident because one can never experience an event, since by definition all experiences are those of accidents (or, if you will, there is no possible experience of pure events, but only of actualized events).4 Deleuze maintains, following Blanchot, that this situation describes the illusion of suicide, which seeks to experience pure Death whereas only one’s empirical death will ever arrive. The same is true of Difference: we cannot experience pure Difference, since it is only ever given to us in the “incarnated” form of empirical diversity, in which it is immediately annulled.
Why should empirical diversity be produced by a principle that is anything else than an empirical cause? If a book and a table both exist, it is because both were produced and manufactured independently from one another, and one can retrace these empirical processes of production. But Deleuze is not satisfied with empirical diversity as it is given to him; he considers it necessary to appeal to a higher principle explaining its origin. In a gesture typical of the metaphysicians, he is not satisfied with climbing from empirical cause to empirical cause, but rather posits an ideal first principle, like Bergson who sought to show that the species not only descend from each other (an empirical relation of descent), but that they all “descend” from the same mysterious principle called Life, which becomes differentiated as it is actualized in the empirical world (a metaphysical relation of ideal genesis). In the famous Deleuzian pairs of concepts (virtual/actual, intensive/extensive, One/me-you-he, Depth/depth-width-length, Earth/territory, etc.), one constantly finds the same structure at work: two entities, one metaphysical and the other empirical, intimately linked but never merged, whose first term is the original principle of the other (in other words, they have a duality of essence but unity of existence). In an unpublished course on events, Deleuze uses an expression that, for once, is unequivocal: “in every event, as small or slight as it may be, there is something that overflows its carrying out, something that cannot be carried out […] as though there were a more, an extra.”5 Deleuze is not a thinker of the immanent plane of experience: in relation to the plane of experience (accidents, diversity), the metaphysical entity (the event, Difference) is transcendent; it “overflows.” Granted, it does not have separate existence like platonic Ideas since it only exists “within” the corresponding empirical entity, but it still exceeds all possible experience. Deleuzian immanence is precisely the name of a relation, the latest form taken by the relation between Ideas and the empirical world (noumena and phenomena) when the original Platonism, which was right to maintain the essential difference between the two but wrong to posit their separate existence, has not been overthrown, but only spread out or flattened.
What would James say about this demand for a metaphysical “extra”? He would of course have condemned it in the very name of his pragmatism. Pragmatism was for him, as it was for Peirce, first and foremost a method for making our ideas clear according to the following rule: the meaning of a concept is only made clear if one can describe the practical consequences that its use may produce, in terms taken from experience. But what about the concept of Difference? It makes no (practical) difference. Empirical diversity will remain what it is, whether we suppose that it is produced by pure Difference or not. This empirical diversity can only be modified through experience, and there is a real empirical inquiry to be undertaken in order to fully understand the causes of the variation in diversity (for example, the causes of the creation of new species, or the causes of the loss of biodiversity). But the concept of Difference is perfectly useless, as one cannot experience it nor can one act upon such an entity while seeking to affect empirical diversity (just try to conceive an experiment on Difference!) This is like Berkeley’s cherry: if a malicious spirit were to remove the substance of the cherry but continued to provide its perceptible qualities (redness, roundness, sweetness, etc.), nothing would change in our experience or our behavior toward the cherry, and so we can do without such a concept of “substance”; on the other hand, if certain perceptible qualities were to change (even if the malicious spirit kept its substance), this would make a real practical difference in our experience and our conduct (for example, we would hesitate to eat it). Suppose now that this malicious spirit removed the Cut as a pure event, but that I continued to have a finger that was cut and bleeding: nothing would have changed in my life; I would still run to the pharmacy yelling. Suppose on the contrary that this spirit decided to have some perverse fun by incarnating the pure Cut in an intact finger: what difference would it make? We can thus cut or rather entirely raze such an “extra” without losing anything essential.
It may be possible now to see how James’s pluralism was integrated into French philosophy to the detriment of his pragmatism, and how this dissociation favored misunderstandings about his pluralism. For this pragmatism embodied an empiricist attitude in philosophy whose main target was the very sort of metaphysical speculation that Deleuze, following Bergson and Wahl, was to develop under the name of pluralism or the philosophy of difference. The French reception of an empiricist and pragmatist pluralism is yet to happen.
Translated by Danielle Follett, thanks to the generous support of the Institut de Recherches Philosophiques de Lyon.
1 Thesis outline dating from the end of the 1950s, found by Guiseppe Bianco in the Jean Hyppolite archives and quoted in his unpublished lecture, “Philosophies of AND: What Happened between (Wahl and Deleuze)?” (2005), available at: www.diffusion.ens.fr/index.php?res=conf&idconf=685.
2 An explicit comparison between Epicurus and Nietzsche can be found in a course on Michel Foucault (on January 14, 1985), available at the National Library of France.
3 For further details, see Madelrieux (2006).
4 For further details on this critique, see Madelrieux (2008a).
5 Deleuze, lecture of June 3, 1980, available at the National Library of France (my emphasis).
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