What Is Philosophy?

The idiot will reappear in another age, in a different context that is still Christian, but Russian now. In becoming a Slav, the idiot is still the singular individual or private thinker, but with a different singularity. It is Chestov who finds in Dostoyevski the power of a new opposition between private thinker and public teacher.2 The old idiot wanted indubitable truths at which he could arrive by himself: in the meantime he would doubt everything, even that 3 + 2 = 5; he would doubt every truth of Nature. The new idiot has no wish for indubitable truths; he will never be “resigned” to the fact that 3 + 2 = 5 and wills the absurd—this is not the same image of thought. The old idiot wanted truth, but the new idiot wants to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought—in other words, to create. The old idiot wanted to be accountable only to reason, but the new idiot, closer to Job than to Socrates, wants account to be taken of “every victim of History”—these are not the same concepts. The new idiot will never accept the truths of History. The old idiot wanted, by himself, to account for what was or was not comprehensible, what was or was not rational, what was lost or saved; but the new idiot wants the lost, the incomprehensible, and the absurd to be restored to him. This is most certainly not the same persona; a mutation has taken place. And yet a slender thread links the two idiots, as if the first had to lose reason so that the second rediscovers what the other, in winning it, had lost in advance: Descartes goes mad in Russia?

The conceptual persona is not the philosopher’s representative but, rather, the reverse: the philosopher is only the envelope of his principal conceptual persona and of all the other personae who are the intercessors [intercesseurs], the real subjects of his philosophy. Conceptual personae are the philosopher’s “heteronyms,” and the philosopher’s name is the simple pseudonym of his personae. I am no longer myself but thought’s aptitude for finding itself and spreading across a plane that passes through me at several places. The philosopher is the idiosyncrasy of his conceptual personae. The destiny of the philosopher is to become his conceptual persona or personae, at the same time that these personae themselves become something other than what they are historically, mythologically, or commonly (the Socrates of Plato, the Dionysus of Nietzsche, the Idiot of Nicholas of Cusa). The conceptual persona is the becoming or the subject of a philosophy, on a par with the philosopher, so that Nicholas of Cusa, or even Descartes, should have signed themselves “the Idiot,” just as Nietzsche signed himself “the Antichrist” or “Dionysus crucified.” In everyday life speech-acts refer back to psychosocial types who actually attest to a subjacent third person: “I decree mobilization as President of the Republic,” “I speak to you as father,” and so on. In the same way, the philosophical shifter is a speech-act in the third person where it is always a conceptual persona who says “I”: “I think as Idiot,” “I will as Zarathustra,” “I dance as Dionysus,” “I claim as Lover.” Even Bergsonian duration has need of a runner. In philosophical enunciations we do not do something by saying it but produce movement by thinking it, through the intermediary of a conceptual persona. Conceptual personae are also the true agents of enunciation. “Who is ‘I’?” It is always a third person.

The difference between conceptual personae and aesthetic figures consists first of all in this: the former are the powers of concepts, and the latter are the powers of affects and percepts. The former take effect on a plane of immanence that is an image of Thought-Being (noumenon), and the latter take effect on a plane of composition as image of a Universe (phenomenon). The great aesthetic figures of thought and the novel but also of painting, sculpture, and music produce affects that surpass ordinary affections and perceptions, just as concepts go beyond everyday opinions. Melville said that a novel includes an infinite number of interesting characters but just one original Figure like the single sun of a constellation of a universe, like the beginning of things, or like the beam of light that draws a hidden universe out of the shadow: hence Captain Ahab, or Bartleby.3 Kleist’s universe is shot through with affects that traverse it like arrows or that suddenly freeze the universe in which the figures of Homburg or Penthesilea loom. Figures have nothing to do with resemblance or rhetoric but are the condition under which the arts produce affects of stone and metal, of strings and wind, of line and color, on a plane of composition of a universe. Art and philosophy crosscut the chaos and confront it, but it is not the same sectional plane; it is not populated in the same way. In the one there is the constellation of a universe or affects and percepts; and in the other, constitutions of immanence or concepts. Art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and percepts.

This does not mean that the two entities do not often pass into each other in a becoming that sweeps them both up in an intensity which co-determines them. With Kierkegaard, the theatrical and musical figure of Don Juan becomes a conceptual persona, and the Zarathustra persona is already a great musical and theatrical figure. It is as if, between them, not only alliances but also branchings and substitutions take place. In contemporary thought, Michel Guérin is one of those who has made the most profound discovery of the existence of conceptual personae at the heart of philosophy. But he defines them within a “logodrama” or a “figurology” that puts affect into thought.4 This means that the concept as such can be concept of the affect, just as the affect can be affect of the concept. The plane of composition of art and the plane of immanence of philosophy can slip into each other to the degree that parts of one may be occupied by entities of the other. In fact, in each case the plane and that which occupies it are like two relatively distinct and heterogeneous parts. A thinker may therefore decisively modify what thinking means, draw up a new image of thought, and institute a new plane of immanence. But, instead of creating new concepts that occupy it, they populate it with other instances, with other poetic, novelistic, or even pictorial or musical entities. The opposite is also true. Igitur is just such a case of a conceptual persona transported onto a plane of composition, an aesthetic figure carried onto a plane of immanence: his proper name is a conjunction. These thinkers are “half” philosophers but also much more than philosophers. But they are not sages. There is such force in those unhinged works of Hölderlin, Kleist, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Kafka, Michaux, Pessoa, Artaud, and many English and American novelists, from Melville to Lawrence or Miller, in which the reader discovers admiringly that they have written the novel of Spinozism. To be sure, they do not produce a synthesis of art and philosophy. They branch out and do not stop branching out. They are hybrid geniuses who neither erase nor cover over differences in kind but, on the contrary, use all the resources of their “athleticism” to install themselves within this very difference, like acrobats torn apart in a perpetual show of strength.

There is all the more reason for saying that conceptual personae (and also aesthetic figures) are irreducible to psychosocial types, even if here again there are constant penetrations. Simmel, and then Goff-man, have probed far into the enclaves or margins of a society the study of these types, which often seem to be unstable: the stranger, the exile, the migrant, the transient, the native, the homecomer.5 This is not through a taste for the anecdote. It seems to us that a social field comprises structures and functions, but this does not tell us very much directly about particular movements that affect the Socius. We already know the importance in animals of those activities that consist in forming territories, in abandoning or leaving them, and even in re-creating territory on something of a different nature (ethologists say that an animal’s partner or friend is the “equivalent of a home” or that the family is a “mobile territory”). All the more so for the hominid: from its act of birth, it deterritorializes its front paw, wrests it from the earth to turn it into a hand, and reterritorializes it on branches and tools. A stick is, in turn, a deterritorialized branch. We need to see how everyone, at every age, in the smallest things as in the greatest challenges, seeks a territory, tolerates or carries out deterritorializations, and is reterritorialized on almost anything—memory, fetish, or dream. Refrains express these powerful dynamisms: my cabin in Canada … farewell, I am leaving … yes, it’s me; I had to come back. We cannot even say what comes first, and perhaps every territory presupposes a prior deterritorialization, or everything happens at the same time. Social fields are inextricable knots in which the three movements are mixed up so that, in order to disentangle them, we have to diagnose real types or personae. The merchant buys in a territory, deterritorializes products into commodities, and is reterritorialized on commercial circuits. In capitalism, capital or property is deterritorialized, ceases to be landed, and is reterritorialized on the means of production; whereas labor becomes “abstract” labor, reterritorialized in wages: this is why Marx not only speaks of capital and labor but feels the need to draw up some true psychosocial types, both antipathetic and sympathetic: the capitalist, the proletarian. If we are looking for the originality of the Greek world we must ask what sort of territory is instituted by the Greeks, how they deterritorialize themselves, on what they are reterritorialized—and, in order to do this, to pick out specifically Greek types (the Friend, for example?). It is not always easy to decide which, at a given moment in a given society, are the good types: thus, the freed slave as type of deterritorialization in the Chinese Chou empire, the figure of the Exiled, of which the sinologist Tokei has given us a detailed portrait. We believe that psychosocial types have this meaning: to make perceptible, in the most insignificant or most important circumstances, the formation of territories, the vectors of deterritorialization, and the process of reterritorialization.

But are there not also territories and deterritorializations that are not only physical and mental but spiritual—not only relative but absolute in a sense yet to be determined? What is the Fatherland or Homeland invoked by the thinker, by the philosopher or artist? Philosophy is inseparable from a Homeland to which the a priori, the innate, or the memory equally attest. But why is this fatherland unknown, lost, or forgotten, turning the thinker into an Exile? What will restore an equivalent of territory, valid as a home? What will be philosophical refrains? What is thought’s relationship with the earth? Socrates the Athenian, who does not like to travel, is guided by Parmenides of Elea when he is young, who is replaced by the Stranger when he is old, as if Platonism needed at least two conceptual personae.6 What sort of stranger is there within the philosopher, with his look of returning from the land of the dead? The role of conceptual personae is to show thought’s territories, its absolute deterritorializations and reterritorializations. Conceptual personae are thinkers, solely thinkers, and their personalized features are closely linked to the diagrammatic features of thought and the intensive features of concepts. A particular conceptual persona, who perhaps did not exist before us, thinks in us. For example, if we say that a conceptual persona stammers, it is no longer a type who stammers in a particular language but a thinker who makes the whole of language stammer: the interesting question then is “What is this thought that can only stammer?” Or again, if we say that a conceptual persona is the Friend, or that he is the Judge or the Legislator, we are no longer concerned with private, public, or legal status but with that which belongs by right to thought and only to thought. Stammerer, friend, or judge do not lose their concrete existence but, on the contrary, take on a new one as thought’s internal conditions for its real exercise with this or that conceptual persona. This is not two friends who engage in thought; rather, it is thought itself that requires the thinker to be a friend so that thought is divided up within itself and can be exercised. It is thought itself which requires this division of thought between friends. These are no longer empirical, psychological, and social determinations, still less abstractions, but intercessors, crystals, or seeds of thought.

Even if the word absolute turns out to be exact, we must not think that deterritorializations and reterritorializations of thought transcend psychosocial ones, any more than they are reducible to them, or to an abstraction or ideological expression of them. Rather, there is a conjunction, a system of referrals or perpetual relays. The features of conceptual personae have relationships with the epoch or historical milieu in which they appear that only psychosocial types enable us to assess. But, conversely, the physical and mental movements of psychosocial types, their pathological symptoms, their relational attitudes, their existential modes, and their legal status, become susceptible to a determination purely of thinking and of thought that wrests them from both the historical state of affairs of a society and the lived experience of individuals, in order to turn them into the features of conceptual personae, or thought-events on the plane laid out by thought or under the concepts it creates. Conceptual personae and psychosocial types refer to each other and combine without ever merging.

There are relational features: “the Friend,” but a friend who has a relationship with his friend only through the thing loved, which brings rivalry. The “Claimant” and the “Rival” quarrel over the thing or concept, but the concept needs a dormant, unconscious perceptible body, the “Boy” who is added to the conceptual personae. Are we not already on another plane, for love is like the violence that compels thinking—”Socrates the lover”—whereas friendship asks only for a little goodwill? And how could a “Fiancée” be denied her place in the role of conceptual persona, although it may mean rushing to her destruction, but not without the philosopher himself “becoming” woman? As Kierkegaard asks (or Kleist, or Proust): is not a woman more worthwhile than the friend who knows one well? And what happens if the woman herself becomes philosopher? Or a “Couple” who would be internal to thought and make “Socrates the husband” the conceptual persona? Unless we are led back to the “Friend,” but after an ordeal that is too powerful, an inexpressible catastrophe, and so in yet another new sense, in a mutual distress, a mutual weariness that forms a new right of thought (Socrates becomes Jewish). Not two friends who communicate and recall the past together but, on the contrary, who suffer an amnesia or aphasia capable of splitting thought, of dividing it in itself. Personae proliferate and branch off, jostle one another and replace each other.7

There are dynamic features: if moving forward, climbing, and descending are dynamisms of conceptual personae, then leaping like Kierkegaard, dancing like Nietzsche, and diving like Melville are others for philosophical athletes irreducible to one another. And if today our sports are completely changing, if the old energy-producing activities are giving way to exercises that, on the contrary, insert themselves on existing energetic networks, this is not just a change in the type but yet other dynamic features that enter a thought that “slides” with new substances of being, with wave or snow, and turn the thinker into a sort of surfer as conceptual persona: we renounce then the energetic value of the sporting type in order to pick out the pure dynamic difference expressed in a new conceptual persona.

There are juridical features insofar as thought constantly lays claim to what belongs to it by right and, from the time of the pre-Socratics, has confronted Justice. But is this the power of the Claimant, or even of the Plaintiff, as philosophy extracts it from the tragic Greek tribunal? And will not philosophers be banned for a long time from being Judges, being at most doctors enrolled in God’s justice, so long as they are not themselves the accused? When Leibniz turns the philosopher into the Lawyer of a god who is threatened on all sides, is this a new conceptual persona? Or the strange persona of Investigator advanced by the empiricists? It is Kant who finally turns the philosopher into the Judge at the same time that reason becomes a tribunal; but is this the legislative power of a determining judge, or the judicial power, the jurisprudence, of a reflecting judge? These are two quite different conceptual personae. Or else thought reverses everything—judges, lawyers, plaintiffs, accusers, and accused—like Alice on a plane of immanence where Justice equals Innocence, and where the Innocent becomes the conceptual persona who no longer has to justify herself, a sort of child-player against whom we can no longer do anything, a Spinoza who leaves no illusion of transcendence remaining. Should not judge and innocent merge into each other, that is to say, should not beings be judged from within—not at all in the name of the Law or of Values or even by virtue of their conscience but by the purely immanent criteria of their existence (“at all events, beyond Good and Evil does not mean beyond good and bad”)?

And there are existential features: Nietzsche said that philosophy invents modes of existence or possibilities of life. That is why a few vital anecdotes are sufficient to produce a portrait of a philosophy, like the one Diogenes Laertius knew how to produce by writing the philosophers’ bedside book or golden legend—Empedocles and his volcano, Diogenes and his barrel. It will be argued that most philosophers’ lives are very bourgeois: but is not Kant’s stocking-suspender a vital anecdote appropriate to the system of Reason? 8 And Spinoza’s liking for battles between spiders is due to the fact that in a pure fashion they reproduce relationships of modes in the system of the Ethics as higher ethology. These anecdotes do not refer simply to social or even psychological types of philosopher (Empedocles the prince, Diogenes the slave) but show rather the conceptual personae who inhabit them. Possibilities of life or modes of existence can be invented only on a plane of immanence that develops the power of conceptual personae. The face and body of philosophers shelter these personae who often give them a strange appearance, especially in the glance, as if someone else was looking through their eyes. Vital anecdotes recount a conceptual persona’s relationship with animals, plants, or rocks, a relationship according to which philosophers themselves become something unexpected and take on a tragic and comic dimension that they could not have by themselves. It is through our personae that we philosophers become always something else and are reborn as public garden or zoo.

EXAMPLE 6

Even illusions of transcendence are useful to us and provide vital anecdotes—for when we take pride in encountering the transcendent within immanence, all we do is recharge the plane of immanence with immanence itself: Kierkegaard leaps outside the plane, but what is “restored” to him in this suspension, this halted movement, is the fiancée or the lost son, it is existence on the plane of immanence.9 Kierkegaard does not hesitate to say so: a little “resignation” will be enough for what belongs to transcendence, but immanence must also be restored. Pascal wagers on the transcendent existence of God, but the stake, that on which one bets, is the immanent existence of the one who believes that God exists. Only that existence is able to cover the plane of immanence, to achieve infinite movement, and to produce and reproduce intensities; whereas the existence of the one who does not believe that God exists falls into the negative. It might even be said here, as François Jullien says of Chinese thought, that transcendence is relative and represents no more than an “absolutization of immanence.”¹⁰ There is not the slightest reason for thinking that modes of existence need transcendent values by which they could be compared, selected, and judged relative to one another. On the contrary, there are only immanent criteria. A possibility of life is evaluated through itself in the movements it lays out and the intensities it creates on a plane of immanence: what is not laid out or created is rejected. A mode of existence is good or bad, noble or vulgar, complete or empty, independently of Good and Evil or any transcendent value: there are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the intensification of life. Pascal and Kierkegaard, who were familiar with infinite movements, and who extracted from the Old Testament new conceptual personae able to stand up to Socrates, were well aware of this. Kierkegaard’s “knight of the faith,” he who makes the leap, or Pascal’s gambler, he who throws the dice, are men of a transcendence or a faith. But they constantly recharge immanence: they are philosophers or, rather, intercessors, conceptual personae who stand in for these two philosophers and who are concerned no longer with the transcendent existence of God but only with the infinite immanent possibilities brought by the one who believes that God exists.

The problem would change if it were another plane of immanence. It is not that the person who does not believe God exists would gain the upper hand, since he would still belong to the old plane as negative movement. But, on the new plane, it is possible that the problem now concerns the one who believes in the world, and not even in the existence of the world but in its possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence, closer to animals and rocks. It may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. This is the empiricist conversion (we have so many reasons not to believe in the human world; we have lost the world, worse than a fiancée or a god). The problem has indeed changed.

The conceptual persona and the plane of immanence presuppose each other. Sometimes the persona seems to precede the plane, sometimes to come after it—that is, it appears twice; it intervenes twice. On the one hand, it plunges into the chaos from which it extracts the determinations with which it produces the diagrammatic features of a plane of immanence: it is as if it seizes a handful of dice from chance-chaos so as to throw them on a table. On the other hand, the persona establishes a correspondence between each throw of the dice and the intensive features of a concept that will occupy this or that region of the table, as if the table were split according to the combinations. Thus, the conceptual persona with its personalized features intervenes between chaos and the diagrammatic features of the plane of immanence and also between the plane and the intensive features of the concepts that happen to populate it: Igitur. Conceptual personae constitute points of view according to which planes of immanence are distinguished from one another or brought together, but they also constitute the conditions under which each plane finds itself filled with concepts of the same group. Every thought is a Fiat, expressing a throw of the dice: constructivism. But this is a very complex game, because throwing involves infinite movements that are reversible and folded within each other so that the consequences can only be produced at infinite speed by creating finite forms corresponding to the intensive ordinates of these movements: every concept is a combination that did not exist before. Concepts are not deduced from the plane. The conceptual persona is needed to create concepts on the plane, just as the plane itself needs to be laid out. But these two operations do not merge in the persona, which itself appears as a distinct operator.

Philosophy presents three elements, each of which fits with the other two but must be considered for itself: the prephilosophical plane it must lay out (immanence), the persona or personae it must invent and bring to life (insistence), and the philosophical concepts it must create (consistency). Laying out, inventing, and creating constitute the philosophical trinity—diagrammatic, personalistic, and intensive features. Concepts are grouped according to whether they resonate or throw out mobile bridges, covering the same plane of immanence that connects them to one another. There are families of planes according to whether the infinite movements of thought fold within one another and compose variations of curvature or, on the contrary, select non-composable varieties. There are types of persona according to the possibilities of even their hostile encounters on the same plane and in a group. But it is often difficult to determine if it is the same group, the same type, or the same family. A whole “taste” is needed here.

Since none of these elements are deduced from the others, there must be coadaptation of the three. The philosophical faculty of coadaptation, which also regulates the creation of concepts, is called taste. If the laying-out of the plane is called Reason, the invention of personae Imagination, and the creation of concepts Understanding, then taste appears as the triple faculty of the still-undetermined concept, of the persona still in limbo, and of the still-transparent plane. That is why it is necessary to create, invent, and lay out, while taste is like the rule of correspondence of the three instances that are different in kind. It is certainly not a faculty of measuring. No measure will be found in those infinite movements that make up the plane of immanence, in those accelerated lines without contour, and those inclines and curves; or in those always excessive and sometimes antipathetic personae; or in those concepts with irregular forms, strident intensities, and colors that are so bright and barbarous that they can inspire a kind of “disgust” (especially in repulsive concepts). Nevertheless, what appears as philosophical taste in every case is love of the well-made concept, “well-made” meaning not a moderation of the concept but a sort of stimulation, a sort of modulation in which conceptual activity has no limit in itself but only in the other two limitless activities. If ready-made concepts already existed they would have to abide by limits. But even the “prephilosophical” plane is only so called because it is laid out as presupposed and not because it preexists without being laid out. The three activities are strictly simultaneous and have only incommensurable relationships. The creation of concepts has no other limit than the plane they happen to populate; but the plane itself is limitless, and its layout only conforms to the concepts to be created that it must connect up, or to the personae to be invented that it must maintain. It is as in painting: there is a taste according to which even monsters and dwarves must be well made, which does not mean insipid but that their irregular contours are in keeping with a skin texture or with a background of the earth as germinal substance with which they seem to fit. There is a taste for colors that, in great painters, does not result in restraint in the creation of colors but, on the contrary, drives them to the point where colors encounter their figures made of contours, and their plane made of flats, curves, and arabesques. Van Gogh takes yellow to the limitless only by inventing the man-sunflower and by laying out the plane of infinite little commas. The taste for colors shows at once the respect with which they must be approached, the long wait that must be passed through, but also the limitless creation that makes them exist. The same goes for the taste for concepts: the philosopher does not approach the undetermined concept except with fear and respect, and he hesitates for a long time before setting forth; but he can determine a concept only through a measureless creation whose only rule is a plane of immanence that he lays out and whose only compass are the strange personae to which it gives life. Philosophical taste neither replaces creation nor restrains it. On the contrary, the creation of concepts calls for a taste that modulates it. The free creation of determined concepts needs a taste for the undetermined concept. Taste is this power, this being-potential of the concept: it is certainly not for “rational or reasonable” reasons that a particular concept is created or a particular component chosen. Nietzsche sensed this relationship of the creation of concepts with a specifically philosophical taste, and if the philosopher is he who creates concepts, it is thanks to a faculty of taste that is like an instinctive, almost animal sapere—a Fiat or a Fatum that gives each philosopher the right of access to certain problems, like an imprint on his name or an affinity from which his works flow.11

A concept lacks meaning to the extent that it is not connected to other concepts and is not linked to a problem that it resolves or helps to resolve. But it is important to distinguish philosophical from scientific problems. Little is gained by saying that philosophy asks “questions,” because question is merely a word for problems that are irreducible to those of science. Since concepts are not propositional, they cannot refer to problems concerning the extensional conditions of propositions assimilable to those of science. If, all the same, we continue to translate the philosophical concept into propositions, this can only be in the form of more-or-less plausible opinions without scientific value. But in this way we encounter a difficulty that the Greeks had already come up against. This is the third characteristic by which philosophy is thought of as something Greek: the Greek city puts forward the friend or rival as social relation, and it lays out a plane of immanence—but it also makes free opinion (doxa) prevail. Philosophy must therefore extract from opinions a “knowledge” that transforms them but that is also distinct from science. The philosophical problem thus consists in finding, in each case, the instance that is able to gauge a truth value of opposable opinions, either by selecting some as more wise than others or by fixing their respective share of the truth. Such was always the meaning of what is called dialectic and that reduces philosophy to interminable discussion.12 This can be seen in Plato, where universals of contemplation are supposed to gauge the respective value of rival opinions so as to raise them to the level of knowledge. It is true that there are still contradictions in Plato, in the so-called aporetic dialogues, which forced Aristotle to direct the dialectical investigation of problems toward universals of communication (the topics). In Kant, again, the problem will consist in the selection or distribution of opposed opinions, but thanks to universals of reflection, until Hegel has the idea of making use of the contradiction between rival opinions to extract from them suprascientific propositions able to move, contemplate, reflect, and communicate in themselves and within the absolute (the speculative proposition wherein opinions become moments of the concept). But, beneath the highest ambitions of the dialectic, and irrespective of the genius of the great dialecticians, we fall back into the most abject conditions that Nietzsche diagnosed as the art of the pleb or bad taste in philosophy: a reduction of the concept to propositions like simple opinions; false perceptions and bad feelings (illusions of transcendence or of universals) engulfing the plane of immanence; the model of a form of knowledge that constitutes only a supposedly higher opinion, Urdoxa; a replacement of conceptual personae by teachers or leaders of schools. The dialectic claims to discover a specifically philosophical discursiveness, but it can only do this by linking opinions together. It has indeed gone beyond opinion toward knowledge, but opinion breaks through and continues to break through. Even with the resources of an Urdoxa, philosophy remains a doxography. It is always the same melancholy that raises disputed Questions and Quodlibets from the Middle Ages where one learns what each doctor thought without knowing why he thought it (the Event), and that one finds again in many histories of philosophy in which solutions are reviewed without ever determining what the problem is (substance in Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz), since the problem is only copied from the propositions that serve as its answer.

If philosophy is paradoxical by nature, this is not because it sides with the least plausible opinion or because it maintains contradictory opinions but rather because it uses sentences of a standard language to express something that does not belong to the order of opinion or even of the proposition. The concept is indeed a solution, but the problem to which it corresponds lies in its intensional conditions of consistency and not, as in science, in the conditions of reference of extensional propositions. If the concept is a solution, the conditions of the philosophical problem are found on the plane of immanence presupposed by the concept (to what infinite movement does it refer in the image of thought?), and the unknowns of the problem are found in the conceptual personae that it calls up (what persona, exactly?). A concept like knowledge has meaning only in relation to an image of thought to which it refers and to a conceptual persona that it needs; a different image and a different persona call for other concepts (belief, for example, and the Investigator). A solution has no meaning independently of a problem to be determined in its conditions and unknowns; but these conditions and unknowns have no meaning independently of solutions determinable as concepts. Each of the three instances is found in the others, but they are not of the same kind, and they coexist and subsist without one disappearing into the other. Bergson, who contributed so much to the comprehension of the nature of philosophical problems, said that a well-posed problem was a problem solved. But this does not mean that a problem is merely the shadow or epiphenomenon of its solutions, or that the solution is only the redundancy or analytical consequence of the problem. Rather, the three activities making up constructionism continually pass from one to the other, support one another, sometimes precede and sometimes follow each other, one creating concepts as a case of solution, another laying out a plane and a movement on the plane as the conditions of a problem, and the other inventing a persona as the unknown of the problem. The whole of the problem (of which the solution is itself a part) always consists in constructing the other two when the third is underway. We have seen how, from Plato to Kant, thought, “first,” and time took different concepts that were able to determine solutions, but on the basis of presuppositions that determined different problems. This is because the same terms can appear twice and even three times: once in solutions as concepts, again in the presupposed problems, and once more in a persona as intermediary, intercessor. But each time it appears in a specific, irreducible form.

No rule, and above all no discussion, will say in advance whether this is the good plane, the good persona, or the good concept; for each of them determines if the other two have succeeded or not, but each must be constructed on its own account—one created, one invented, and the other laid out. Problems and solutions are constructed about which we can say, “Failure … Success … ,” but only as we go along and on the basis of their coadaptations. Constructivism disqualifies all discussion—which holds back the necessary constructions—just as it exposes all the universals of contemplation, reflection, and communication as sources of what are called “false problems” emanating from the illusions surrounding the plane. That is all that can be said in advance. It is possible that we think we have found a solution; but a new curve of the plane, which at first we did not see, starts it all off again, posing new problems, a new batch of problems, advancing by successive surges and seeking concepts to come, concepts yet to be created (we do not even know if this is not a new plane that has separated from the preceding plane). Conversely, it is possible that a new concept is buried like a wedge between what one thought were two neighboring concepts, seeking in its turn the determination of a problem that appears like a sort of extension on the table of immanence. Philosophy thus lives in a permanent crisis. The plane takes effect through shocks, concepts proceed in bursts, and personae by spasms. The relationship among the three instances is problematic by nature.

We cannot say in advance whether a problem is well posed, whether a solution fits, is really the case, or whether a persona is viable. This is because the criteria for each philosophical activity are found only in the other two, which is why philosophy develops in paradox. Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure. Now, this cannot be known before being constructed. We will not say of many books of philosophy that they are false, for that is to say nothing, but rather that they lack importance or interest, precisely because they do not create any concept or contribute an image of thought or beget a persona worth the effort. Only teachers can write “false” in the margins, perhaps; but readers doubt the importance and interest, that is to say, the novelty of what they are given to read. These are categories of the Mind. Melville said that great novelistic characters must be Originals, Unique. The same is true of conceptual personae. They must be remarkable, even if they are antipathetic; a concept must be interesting, even if it is repulsive. When Nietzsche constructed the concept of “bad conscience” he could see in this what is most disgusting in the world and yet exclaim, “This is where man begins to be interesting!” and consider himself actually to have created a new concept for man, one that suited man, related to a new conceptual persona (the priest) and with a new image of thought (the will to power understood from the point of view of nihilism).13

Criticism implies new concepts (of the thing criticized) just as much as the most positive creation. Concepts must have irregular contours molded on their living material. What is naturally uninteresting? Flimsy concepts, what Nietzsche called the “formless and fluid daubs of concepts”—or, on the contrary, concepts that are too regular, petrified, and reduced to a framework. In this respect, the most universal concepts, those presented as eternal forms or values, are the most skeletal and least interesting. Nothing positive is done, nothing at all, in the domains of either criticism or history, when we are content to brandish ready-made old concepts like skeletons intended to intimidate any creation, without seeing that the ancient philosophers from whom we borrow them were already doing what we would like to prevent modern philosophers from doing: they were creating their concepts, and they were not happy just to clean and scrape bones like the critic and historian of our time. Even the history of philosophy is completely without interest if it does not undertake to awaken a dormant concept and to play it again on a new stage, even if this comes at the price of turning it against itself.

* Einfühlung, or empathy, as in the title of Wilhelm Worringer’s great work Abstraktion und Einfühlung, translated into English as Abstraction and Empathy by Michael Bullock (London: Routledge, 1953).