Deleuze and Pragmatism

I. Pragmatism and Deleuze: Four Possible Approaches

What are the relations between pragmatism, particularly the philosophy of John Dewey, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze? Are there important ways in which the philosophies of these two writers are similar? Are there important ways in which they are different? Do claims of similarity or difference illuminate the work of Dewey and his account of philosophy as criticism always rooted in particular selective interests? Do they illuminate the work of Deleuze and his conception of philosophy as concept creation always marked by the creator’s signature? Do these kinds of comparisons produce something else entirely, something other than illumination of Dewey and Deleuze? Is it true, perhaps surprisingly true, in light of differences of time, place, and tradition, that Deleuze is a pragmatist, a philosopher of growth and democracy, perhaps even a Deweyan pragmatist or instrumentalist or empirical naturalist? Is Dewey’s work a philosophy of difference, rhizomic, a philosophy at the surface or a philosophy of surfaces rather than heights and depths? And, when Dewey calls for a recovery and reconstruction of philosophy, is this a Deleuzian deterritorialization or, perhaps, a reterritorialization, or something else entirely?

In raising these questions, my starting point is pragmatic in two key ways. First, I understand truth pragmatically and instrumentally: it is a matter of consequences, results, last things, the satisfaction of purposes, and experienced warrant. This means that I take the question, “Is it true that Deleuze is a pragmatist?” to be the question, “Is there some use in characterizing Deleuze as a pragmatist?” Because all authors and all philosophies are similar to all other authors and all other philosophies in some ways, and also different from all other authors and all other philosophies in some other ways, whether or not we choose to call or consider Deleuze a pragmatist depends on our purposes and what those purposes lead us to emphasize. So, for pragmatists to ask whether or not Deleuze is a pragmatist is to ask, for pragmatists, whether understanding Deleuze this way is useful or makes any practical value or has any “cash value.” It is important to be clear about purposes.

Second, I understand efforts at, and acts of, knowing pragmatically and instrumentally: They are perspectival, plural, and partial, and they are interested or selective. This claim is central to pragmatism. In his chapter on “The Stream of Thought” in his Principles of Psychology, William James observed that all consciousness “is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.” He added: “Accentuation and Emphasis are present in every perception we have. We find it quite impossible to disperse our attention impartially over a number of impressions.… We actually ignore most of the things before us” (1981 [1890], 273). John Dewey stressed this same point in a slightly different context, asserting that selective emphasis or choice is inevitable and unavoidable in all thought, and he drew out its implications for philosophical method: “Deception comes only when the presence and operation of choice is concealed, disguised, denied” (1981 [1925], 34). If one makes the case that Deleuze is a pragmatist, or if by contrast one makes the case that he is not, what is one ignoring? What investment is one protecting? What interests have paid one’s retainer? It is important to be clear about the selectivity of attention—the selectivity of what is noticed and what is not—that issues from some purposes rather than others and that satisfies some interests rather than others while at the same time also leading to some additional purposes rather than others.

So, in asking if Deleuze is a pragmatist or Deweyan or in simply comparing pragmatism to the writings of Deleuze, what features of pragmatism merit focus? To what features of pragmatism should attention be directed? There are, of course, lots and lots of ways to answer this question.

First, some analyses of Deleuze and pragmatism would involve a focus on treatments of the history of philosophy and past philosophers. For example, one could compare James’s account of “Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism” (1977 [1909], 101–124), an account central to James’s own pluralism and his rejection of the traditional problem of the many and the one, to Deleuze’s analysis of “Bergsonism” and his claims that Bergson “exposes the traditional theme of the one and the multiple as a false problem” and “intends to give multiplicities the metaphysics which their scientific treatment demands of them” (1991 [1966], 117). Or, as another example of this sort, one could argue for similarities or differences between Dewey’s treatment of canonical modern European thinkers from his early “The Pantheism of Spinoza” (1969 [1882]), “Kant and Philosophic Method” (1969 [1884]), and Leibniz’s New Essays: Concerning the Human Understanding (1969 [1888]) to his later sustained analyses of the subjectivism of modern philosophy in chapter after chapter of Experience and Nature, and Deleuze’s treatment of the same group of thinkers in his books on Spinoza (1988 [1970]; 1992 [1968]), Leibniz (1993 [1988]), Hume (1991 [1953]), and Kant (1984 [1963]). Or one could ask whether Hegel left a “permanent deposit” in Deleuze’s thinking as Dewey claimed was the case with his own philosophy long after he had drifted away from his earlier Hegelianism (1984 [1930a], 154). Or one could simply assess the extent to which Deleuze would agree with James’s claim that progress in philosophy consists in going around Kant rather than through him (1978 [1898], 138–139).

A second way to compare pragmatism and Deleuze would be to highlight shared or contested central doctrines and major theses. Proceeding in this way likely would appeal to persons who are sure there must be a class of necessary and sufficient propositions that one must believe to be a pragmatist and that there must also be a class of necessary and sufficient propositions that one must believe to be a Deleuzian—and that comparing pragmatism and Deleuze is just a relatively simple matter of determining how much overlap there is between these two classes of propositions. In this context, for example, one could compare Peirce’s influential tripartite account of signs (1998 [1894], 4–10; 1998 [1903], 160–178) to Deleuze’s analysis of the types of signs, “The Literary Machine” production (and not just interpretation) of signs, and the pluralism in the system of signs in his Proust and Signs (2000 [1964]).1 Or, as another example, one could compare James’s radical empiricism and its nonsubjective and nonobjective world of pure experience and experienced relations (1976 [1904], 21–44) without any “trans-empirical connective support” (1975 [1909], 7) to Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism” and its pure immanence, a field of “pure immediate consciousness with neither object nor self,” all transcendence “constituted solely in the flow of immanent consciousness that belongs to this plane,” a transcendence that is “always a product of immanence” (2001 [1995], 25, 26, 31). Or to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s claim near the end of A Thousand Plateaus that “[i]t is not enough, however, to replace the opposition between the One and the multiple with a distinction between types of multiplicities. For the distinction between the two types does not preclude their immanence to each other, each ‘issuing’ from the other after its fashion” (1987 [1980], 506).

A third way to think about the relation between pragmatism and Deleuze’s philosophy would be to concentrate on particular themes and special topics. For example, in his later work, Dewey focused on topics such as experience and nature, knowledge and inquiry, democracy and the public, and the aesthetic and religious dimensions of human lives. Accordingly, one might ask about the relation between Dewey’s experience and nature and Deleuze’s difference and repetition, between Dewey’s logic as the theory of inquiry and Deleuze’s logic of sense, between Dewey’s public and its problems and Deleuze’s and Guattari’s analysis of capitalism and schizophrenia, between Dewey’s concept of culture and Deleuze’s notions of assemblages and machines. Or, as another example, one could compare just exactly what both Dewey and Deleuze mean by “genetic method” in philosophy, a method that both philosophers endorse and employ.² Of course, this same focus could be undertaken from a negative rather than positive perspective by focusing on the extent to which pragmatists and Deleuze together reject large philosophical themes that include traditional correspondence theories of truth, foundationalism in epistemology, representationalism in philosophy of language, transcendentalism and monism in ontology, psychoanalysis in psychology, and impartiality in philosophical method. These all would be daunting, difficult undertakings due to difference in philosophical lineages, modes of expression, and cultural situations. Moreover, the goal of any such undertakings would not seek a conclusion that the pragmatists and Deleuze hold the same views; rather, they would explore the extent to which the pragmatists and Deleuze hold both similar and different views, the extent to which they express similarly different lives.

Finally, a fourth way to compare pragmatism and Deleuze would not attend principally to their accounts of figures in the history of philosophy, or to their assertions of their own views—what Deleuze called philosophy (as distinct from the history of philosophy) or speaking/expressing/imbuing life “in one’s own name” (1994 [1968], xv). Nor would this way of comparing pragmatism and Deleuze attend to broad themes and topics and philosophy’s treasured “isms.” Instead, it would compare the pragmatists—or a pragmatist, say, Dewey—to Deleuze on the basis of temperament and vision. Proceeding this way surely would not appeal to persons who conceive of philosophy as something independent of time and place and feelings—as something independent of actual persons. In his Pragmatism, William James identified pragmatism in just this way. After explaining how pragmatism was a method for settling otherwise interminable metaphysical debates and also a theory of truth (that results from applying the pragmatic method to the notion of truth), James claimed that pragmatism is a “temperament” or an “attitude” or a “more or less dumb sense of what life honestly means” to a person or a personal “feeling” of the “total push and pressure of the cosmos” (1975 [1907], 31, 11–15, 9, 24).3

James repeated these claims throughout his writings, perhaps nowhere more eloquently than in the opening pages of A Pluralistic Universe (1977 [1909]) in which he described a person’s philosophy as a kind of trust and loyalty to one’s own experience and as an expression of one’s personal vision and intimate character (10, 14). Different philosophies, James observed, are different “modes of feeling the whole push, and seeing the whole drift of life, forced on one by one’s total character and experience, and on the whole preferred—there is no other truthful word—as one’s best working attitude” (1977 [1909], 14–15). On this view, different philosophies are the expressions of different temperaments, expressions of different preferences, expressions of different working attitudes, expressions of different persons in different times and places and with different selective attentions and interests. James identified the temperament of pragmatism as one of “looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessity; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (1975 [1907], 32). It is a temperament attuned to experience and to life as lived rather than life as abstracted, represented, discursified.

Accordingly, if one is to compare in a genuinely pragmatic way the philosophy of pragmatism with the philosophy of Deleuze, one must compare their temperaments, their attitudes, their working preferences, their visions. What is the temperament of Deleuze’s philosophy? What is the temperament of his life, of life, of “A LIFE, and nothing else” (Deleuze 2001 [1995], 27), of absolute immanence in Deleuze’s thought? Is it useful to call this temperament pragmatic?

II. Dewey and Deleuze on the Nature of Philosophy

This issue of temperament, attitude, and vision must be made more concrete and specific. To do that, in thinking about Deleuze and pragmatism I will focus in the first place on one main question: What is philosophy (and by what image of thought or method, if any, does it operate)? Rather than pick, or cherry pick, a few issues or problems, I will focus on the nature of philosophy itself as understood by Deleuze and by pragmatism. And in comparing Deleuze and the pragmatists, in constructing a Deleuze-pragmatism assemblage, in reading Deleuze and the pragmatists with and against each other and themselves, I will focus in the second place on just one central pragmatist: John Dewey. In the context of considering Deleuze and pragmatism, Dewey appears a hard case. It is far easier, for example, to see Deleuze’s apparent parallels with, connections to, and uses made of Peirce’s theory of signs and phenomenology and James’s radical empiricism, streams of consciousness, and his insistence on overcoming the problem of the many and the one. However, is Deleuze’s thought in any important sense Deweyan? Finally, I will concentrate on only a couple of texts—particularly Dewey’s Experience and Nature and Deleuze’s and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?—intending them together simply as a case study (although one that points, of course, to other texts).

Do Deleuze and Dewey have similar views about the nature of philosophy and what it is one does as one philosophizes? The answer to this question may appear to require a delicate but sustained conversation, a kind of translation from the language of difference, schizo-analysis, minor literature, the plane of immanence, conceptual personae, and geophilosophy back and forth to the language of experience and empirical method, qualitative immediacy and relational instrumentality, inquiry, public philosophy, and democracy as a way of life. How is it possible to stage such a conversation without requiring at least one of the participants to speak the other’s language, to become pragmatic or to become Deleuzian, to become the other? Or, is the goal of such a conversation not the ability to translate with familiarity one to the other, but rather increasingly to find one less familiar with one’s self? Or is it both of these things in a “double becoming” of deterritorialization and reterritorialization: “The Autochthon can hardly be distinguished from the stranger because the stranger becomes Autochthonous in the country of the other who is not, at the same time that the Autochthon becomes stranger to himself, his class, his nation, and his language: we speak the same language, and yet I do not understand you” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994 [1991], 110).

Do Deleuze and Dewey have similar views about the nature of philosophy and what it is one does as one philosophizes? At first glance, as the quotations that open this chapter make clear, it seems they have quite different views. In both the 1929 preface and the final chapter of Experience and Nature, Dewey clearly set forth a view that philosophy is criticism, that it is criticism of criticism. In apparent difference, in What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari assert that philosophy is concept creation. Criticism and concept creation: what’s the difference, or perhaps more to the point, what, if anything, is shared by these two characterizations of philosophy? Dewey observed, “Of all affairs, communication is the most wonderful,” and he concluded a discussion of communication and meaning with a call to action that is at once a celebration: “When the instrumental and final functions of communication live together in experience, there exists an intelligence which is the method and reward of the common life, and a society worthy to command affection, admiration, and loyalty” (1981 [1925], 132, 160). In seeming contrast, Deleuze and Guattari, eschewing a “cogito of communication,” asserted, “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it” (1994 [1991], 108). It is impossible to imagine John Dewey asserting that we have too much communication.

And yet… it surely is possible to imagine him claiming that we have too much communication of particular sorts, too much undemocratic communication, too much communication on behalf of privately appropriated ends and powerful elites, too much communication not warranted by inquiry, too much communication that is not educative, too much communication that does not contribute to the realization of today’s ideals in tomorrow’s world. And because of this, possible agreement appears, or, at least, a different kind of difference, appears, as Deleuze and Guattari continue directly, “We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present. The creation of concepts in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist” (1994 [1991], 108). Here surely it is possible to imagine Dewey—Dewey who wrote in 1939 as fascism and Nazism gained strength in Europe that “creative democracy” is a yet-unrealized ideal and “a task before us” for the future (1988 [1939], 224–230)—agreeing that we need more effective resistance to parts of the present; and that we need more effective ideals and more imaginative action on their behalf.

And yet… it may seem that this point vanishes almost as quickly as Deleuze and Guattari, asserting that “a becoming by its nature… always eludes a majority,” continue directly once more: “It is not populist writers but the most aristocratic who lay claim to this future. This people and earth will not be found in our democracies. Democracies are majorities, but a democracy is by its nature that which always eludes majority.… It is not always easy to be Heideggerian… Heidegger lost his way along the paths of the reterritorialization because they are paths without directive signs or barriers” (1994 [1991], 108–109). Geopolitics: this seems so, well, French: the identification of democracy with the present neo-liberal state, the blanket claim that (no) populist writers lay claim to becoming-futures, and the implicit suggestion that paths without certain futures are thus paths without directive signs at present. Perhaps this is why Deleuze, in “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature,” wrote that the English and Americans, unlike the French, begin again not from some supposed point of origin but from and through the middle: “One begins again through the middle. The French think in terms of trees too much.… Trees are the opposite of grass. Not only does grass grow in the middle of things, but it grows itself through the middle.… We have grass in the head, not a tree: what thinking signifies is what the brain is, a ‘particular nervous system’ of grass” (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987 [1977], 39). Grass in the head—like Walt Whitman, not an aristocrat but a poet of becoming-democracy, and a hiker able to see and make a path even without a preordained destination. “Resist much,” Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass (1855).

And yet once more, contra Heidegger and Kant, Deleuze and Guattari write that philosophy summons forth not a pure race “but rather an oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race,” that the philosopher writes “for the illiterate.” “But what does ‘for’ mean? It is not ‘for their benefit,’ or yet, ‘in their place.’ It is ‘before.’ It is a question of becoming.… [The thinker] becomes Indian and never stops becoming so—perhaps so that the Indian who is himself Indian becomes something else…” (1994 [1991], 109). Deleuze and Guattari call this double becoming both the relationship that constitutes philosophy and nonphilosophy and also the process in which philosophy becomes nonphilosophy “so that nonphilosophy becomes the earth and people of philosophy.” Parts of this transaction seem one-sided and, as such, would trouble Deweyan pragmatists. Why think the philosopher or philosophy itself male? Why think the Indian is not a philosopher, and why identify the Indian with nonphilosophy? And why think philosophy enables the Indian to become, to become something else, as though philosophy is an institution of charitable effort, a charitable visitor who, unlike John Dewey, has never read and learned from Jane Addams.4 Nonetheless, it may be possible to approach pragmatism here, to view Deleuze’s understanding of becoming in a pragmatic angle of vision. As William Carlos Williams (1953 [1925]) observed in an essay on Daniel Boone in his In the American Grain, published the same year as Dewey’s Experience and Nature, the problem of a new world is not the problem of finding new ground for an old world: “There must be a new wedding.… Not for himself surely to be an Indian, though they eagerly sought to adopt him into their tribes, but the reverse: to be himself in a new world, Indianlike” (136–137).

Dewey, like Deleuze, sought a “liberation of thought from those images which imprison it” (Deleuze, 1994 [1968], xvii), including—importantly—old images of liberation itself. He wrote for a new world and sought to hasten its arrival, forging connections between old and new: “We cannot lay hold of the new, we cannot even keep it before our minds, much less understand it, save by the use of ideas and knowledge we already possess. But just because the new is new it is not a mere repetition of something already had and mastered. The old takes on new color and meaning in being employed to grasp and interpret the new” (Dewey 1981 [1925], 3). But the forging of a philosophical new world is not reconciliation of old and new. It is a transformation of the old—Dewey calls it a “winnowing fan,” a destruction of chaff once treasured and cherished. It is not, he says, “an insurance device or mechanical antiseptic.” Similarly, the forging of a philosophical new world is not merely or exclusively a matter of interpretation. It is also creation, re-creation, reconstruction, resignification (and, for Dewey, every deterritorialization is at once a reterritorialization). Dewey claims that his empirical naturalism can inspire “the mind with new courage and vitality to create new ideals and values in the face of the perplexities of a new world,” a world marked by both “the standpoint and conclusions of modern science” (Dewey 1981 [1925], 4). “Experiment, never interpret,” Deleuze writes. Yes, but is there experimentation without or independent of interpretation? Dewey would wonder. For Dewey, it is not possible to “kill interpretation,” although it is possible to kill particular interpretations. Experiments “exceed our capacities to foresee,” Deleuze observes (Deleuze and Parnet 1987 [1977], 48–49). Yes, there is no certain or complete foresight (although there may be substantial foresight), Dewey would add. Our efforts to think and to live carry no guarantees of success. It is life that exceeds our capacity to foresee and, for Dewey, experimentation is action aimed at enlarging that (always incomplete) capacity in order to better (always imperfectly) secure our ideals. Calling philosophy “a generalized theory of criticism,” Dewey put it this way: “Its ultimate value for life-experience is that it continuously provides instruments for the criticism of those values—whether of beliefs, institutions, actions or products—that are found in all aspects of experience” (Dewey 1981 [1925], 9).

In Experience and Nature, particularly in its first and last chapters, Dewey developed this view of philosophy and its goals and method. Beginning with the warning that his “empiricism” or “naturalism” is radically different from traditional empiricism and traditional naturalism, Dewey claims that empirical method in philosophy is like empirical method in the natural sciences: it is public and social; it insists on the continuity of experience and nature—experience is both of and in nature; it understands experience in a holistic, “double-barreled,” both “how” and “what” way, rejecting equally materialistic and subjectivist varieties of reductionist, “single-barreled” views of experience; and, it is both genealogical and instrumental, always referring the results of its reflection back to the experience that occasioned it, the reflection thus becoming a means of control and enlarged use. Two things happen here: a) empirical method’s testing establishes new truths—i.e., acts of verifying created new verities (and for empirical method there is no truth independent of this process of testing claims by and in experience; and b) this testing not only creates new truths, but it also creates or transforms or renders more meaningful the experience that gave rise to inquiry (employing empirical method) in the first place. Empirical method’s testing of its results thus has both an instrumental and a consummatory dimension.

As such, this method is strikingly different from other, nonempirical methods of philosophy and their three-part failure: a lack of verification (and a lack of verities that are the products of verification processes) that renders other methods noninstrumental; a lack of meaning enlargement that renders other methods nonconsummatory; and abstraction and artificiality, evidenced in gaps between the problems of philosophy and the problems of actual life—leading to the irrelevance of philosophy from life and, more important from a practical perspective, lives separated from intelligent direction.

Because nonempirical methods do not begin with the primacy of experience, they are occupied with problems not only artificial but interminable—problems of trying to put back together in reality what they have separated in thought—mind and body, self and others, subject and object, thought and feeling, fact and value, inner and outer, God and mankind, experience and nature, being and becoming, immanence and transcendence, and identity and difference. By contrast, empirical method in philosophy refuses to treat distinctions made by thought as dualisms antecedent to and independent of thought, and it operates with a natural, social, semiotic account of mind as the state of things in which qualitative feelings are not just had but, rather, mean and signify objective differences (Dewey 1981 [1925], 198).5 Thus, empirical method does not ask about the primacy—the reality, the truth, the goodness, the beauty—of things distinguished. It does not say, for example, that mind is more essential than body or that difference is more primary than identity. Rather, it investigates the origins or effects or consequences or interests or functions or uses of making some particular distinction in some particular context. It explores, for example, for what purpose and with what results difference has been subordinated to identity in particular philosophies or liberated from identity in other philosophies, or for what purpose and with what results someone sets forth an alternative to thought under an image of the same and similar, or in the service of what interests and against what other interests one distinguishes three ages of the concept as the encyclopedia, pedagogy, and commercial professional training (see Deleuze 1994 [1968], 167; Deleuze and Guattari 1994 [1991], 12). As a result, Dewey states strongly that “the first and perhaps the greatest difference made in philosophy by adoption respectively of empirical or non-empirical method is, thus, the difference made in what is selected as original material” (Dewey 1981 [1925], 20).

Empirical method also refuses to identify the objects of knowledge with objects that are ultimately, or most, real. It thus refuses ontological primacy and privilege to objects of knowledge over objects of other kinds of experience. “The dark and the twilight abound,” Dewey notes, here echoing a strain developed in The Quest for Certainty. “The isolation of traits characteristic of objects known, and then defined as the sole ultimate realities, accounts for the denial to nature of the characters with make things lovable and contemptible, beautiful and ugly, adorable and awful” (Dewey 1981 [1925], 28). Nonempirical method presupposes and sustains “intellectualism”; empirical method does not—instead identifying intellectualism as one of the great vices of philosophy. Treating objects of knowledge as real, independent of the act of knowing, and treating all experience as knowing are, Dewey claims, intimately connected. Both are examples of unacknowledged selective emphasis. Dewey is quick to point out that selective emphasis is “the heart-beat of mental life” and that there is no thinking without it. But selection does not render that which is not selected unreal or less real; it only designates some things as perhaps more useful than others for certain purposes at hand. Nonempirical method, Dewey claims, ignores this reference to purpose and covers up its workings. It exhibits a “cataleptic rigidity” in its attachment to whatever aspects of experience it has become most interested, and Dewey proceeds to give several examples of the fallacy of selective emphasis, drawn from the history of philosophy (Dewey 1981 [1925], 30–31). What, then, is the fallacy of selective emphasis? It is the invalid inference from the fact that some things are more relevant or useful for a particular purpose to the conclusion that these things are more real (or more true or more good or more beautiful) antecedent to, and independent of, that purpose. From this perspective, any philosopher who does not recognize and in some way stress this point stands in considerable distance from Dewey.

It is of course crucial to stress that Dewey believes that empirical method engages in selective emphasis. The contrast here is between one method that denies and covers up selection and another that acknowledges it honestly. Empirical method states “when and where and why the act of selection took place” because this choice is itself an aspect of experience, an “empirical event.” It is, as Dewey says elsewhere, genetic—noting and avowing choice (as “an experiment to be tried, not an automatic safety device”). This method, Dewey concludes, is “a kind of intellectual disrobing” or “cultivated naiveté” through “the discipline of severe thought,” even if one cannot quite become totally or permanently naked (Dewey 1981 [1925], 34, 35, 40).

Dewey is upfront about his selective interests and his particular view of philosophy. He writes that he is striving to give an account of the generic features of existence in a manner consistent with the methods and results of contemporary science. This account makes possible his view of philosophy as criticism and his account of criticism as discriminating judgment, critical appraisal, of values. Philosophy, Dewey writes:

is and can be nothing but this critical operation and function become aware of itself and its implications, pursued deliberately and systematically. It starts from actual situations of belief, conduct and appreciative perception which are characterized by immediate qualities of good and bad, and from the modes of critical judgment current at any given time in all the regions of value.… These values, criticisms, and critical methods, it subjects to further criticism as comprehensive and consistent as possible. The function is to regulate the further appreciation of goods and bads…” (Dewey 1981 [1925], 302)

Dewey does not claim that his view of philosophy is true. Instead, he claims that it is a reasonable hypothesis that “waits to be tried” and therefore it is a matter of faith: “Because intelligence is critical method applied to goods of belief, appreciation and conduct, so as to construct freer and more secure goods, turning assent and assertion into free communication of shareable meanings, turning feeling into ordered and liberal sense, turning reaction into response, it is the reasonable object of our deepest faith and loyalty, the stay and support of all reasonable hopes.” This faith is not in the least secure or utopian, as Dewey quickly adds: “What the method of intelligence, thoughtful valuation, will accomplish, if once it be tried, is for the result of the trial to determine. Since it is relative to the intersection in existence of hazard and rule, of contingency and order, faith in a wholesale and final triumph is fantastic” (Dewey 1981 [1925], 325, 326).

If philosophy, or philosophy that employs empirical method, or intelligent philosophy, is self-aware criticism, criticism that subjects values and critical methods themselves to further criticism, how does it do this? How does it establish “freer and more secure goods”? How does it turn assent and assertion into “free communication”? And how does it affect freer goods and communication in the face of powerful interests, institutions, practices, and traditions that work against this greater freedom, that do not operate by methods of intelligence, that do not treasure or cherish “winnowing fans” or similar machines aimed at turning their goods into chaff and operating often without the assent and assistance of persons whose values and meanings are significantly constrained? Dewey understood the need to address these social and political questions and he understood the nondemocratic and noneducative forces and concentrations of power toward which these questions point. At the end of his famous 1917 essay, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” he wrote about the “deification of power”:

“all peoples at all times have been narrowly realistic in practice but have then employed idealization to cover up in sentiment and theory their brutalities. But never, perhaps, has the tendency been so dangerous and so tempting as with ourselves. Faith in the power of intelligence to imagine a future that is the projection of the desirable in the present, and to invent the instrumentalities of its realization, is our salvation. And it is a faith that must be nurtured and made articulate: surely a sufficiently large task for our philosophy” (Dewey 1980 [1917], 48).

Faith in the power of intelligence is first faith in the power of imagination, faith in the power to create ideals—possibilities yet unrealized, different becomings. Pragmatism, Peirce observed, is the logic of abduction—the logic of hypothesis creation.

Here in the link between imagination and creation, the Deweyan notion of philosophy as criticism is perhaps most obviously close to the Deleuzian notion of philosophy as concept creation (Deleuze and Guattari 1994 [1991], 5). (Even here, in many respects what is close is also distant. When Deleuze and Guattari write that “every creation is singular” and that “the first principle of philosophy is that Universals explain nothing but must themselves be explained” (1994 [1991], 7), Deweyans are likely to protest that it is not singularities but rather only objects—events transformed by meanings and language—that explain anything at all.) And here, in the link between notions of philosophy and political commitments, the Deweyan opposition of criticism to the “business mind” (1984 [1930b], 41–143)6 and his linkage of criticism to education and a democratic way of life is perhaps most obviously close to the Deleuzian opposition of philosophical concept creation to “marketing,” “sales promotion,” and commercial professionalism and the linkage of concept creation to a pedagogy of the concept (Deleuze and Guattari 1994 [1991], 10, 12).⁷

1 See also the extensive use of Peirce’s semiotics and phenomenology throughout Deleuze’s Cinema 1 (1986 [1983]) and in chapter 2 of Cinema 2 (1989 [1985], 30–34).

2 Dewey (1976 [1902]) identified his experimental method as a kind of “genetic method,” by which he meant that “it is concerned with the manner or process by which anything comes into experienced existence” (4–5).

5 When nature, or some bit of it, is organized such that language occurs, mind emerges and sentience is taken up into a system of signs. Here Dewey could agree with Deleuze’s claim that “events make language possible,” although Dewey’s focus is the claim that language makes objects—turns events into objects with meaning—transforms events. See Deleuze (1990 [1969], 181).

References

Deleuze, Gilles. 1984 [1963]. Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 [1983]. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988 [1970]. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Light Books.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1989 [1985]. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1990 [1969]. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1991 [1953]. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature. Translated by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1991 [1966]. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books.

7
Pragmatism and Difference

I. Pragmatism and Deleuze: Four Possible Approaches

II. Dewey and Deleuze on the Nature of Philosophy

Conclusion

Notes

References

7Pragmatism and Difference

I. Pragmatism and Deleuze: Four Possible Approaches

II. Dewey and Deleuze on the Nature of Philosophy

Conclusion

Notes

References

7
Pragmatism and Difference