Problems in Twentieth Century French Philosophy

Sean Bowden, Mark G. E. Kelly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367193775
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429514104
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Read through the lens of a single key concept in twentieth-century French philosophy, that of the "problem", this book relates the concept to specific thinkers and situates it in relation both to the wider history of philosophy and contemporary concerns.

How exactly should the notion of problems be understood? What must a problem be in order to play an inaugurating role in thought? Does the word "problem" have a univocal sense? What is at stake – theoretically, ethically, politically, and institutionally – when philosophers use the word? This book addresses these and other questions, and is devoted to making historical and philosophical sense of the various uses and conceptualisations of notions of problems, problematics, and problematisations in twentieth-century French thought. In the process, it augments our understanding of the philosophical programs of a number of recent French thinkers, reconfigures our perception of the history and wider stakes of twentieth-century French philosophy, and reveals the ongoing theoretical richness and critical potential of the notion of the problem and its cognates.

Working through the twentieth-century, and focussing on specific thinkers including Foucault and Deleuze, this book will be of interest to all scholars of French philosophy.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

giuseppe bianco

THE MISADVENTURES OF THE “PROBLEM” IN “PHILOSOPHY”

from kant to deleuze

During the last three decades, in the discourses produced in what are called the “humanities,”¹ the noun “problem,” the substantivized adjective “problematic,” and the verb “to problematize” have been used with an unusual frequency, almost becoming buzzwords. One author to inspire this fashion would seem to have been the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–95), who used these terms extensively in his work on the history of philosophy, in his 1968 Ph.D. dissertation “Difference and Repetition,” and especially in his last book, the best-selling, What is Philosophy?, co-written with Félix Guattari (1930–92) and published in France in 1991. Beginning in that decade, following the wave of exportation of texts by French auteurs from his generation such as Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Michel Foucault (1926–84) and Roland Barthes (1915–80),² Deleuze’s work was an impressive success in the anglophone world: for many scholars and knowledge-producers, his idea of philosophy as an inventive activity that consists of “posing problems” and “creating concepts” seemed like an appealing alternative to the two dominant ways of conceptualizing the discipline inscribed in the institutional organization of the production of knowledge in Western democracies. According to the first orientation, the epistemological-analytical, which dominates the vast majority of Anglo-American departments today, philosophy has to eliminate pseudo-problems: using tools borrowed from logic, it takes into account the propositions used in ordinary language or produced by the different regional sciences, and debunks their eventual internal inconsistencies or incoherence with scientific doxa. According to the second orientation, the phenomenological-hermeneutic, or “Continental,” important in Europe, but subaltern in the Anglo-American world, philosophy has to comprehend questions: using a method combining various forms of idealism with the historical approach developed in the study of biblical texts, it interprets culture and knowledge as the historical outcome of a fundamental experience of the world, supposedly accessible only to philosophers.

Despite their enormous differences, these two orientations have something in common: by conceiving philosophy as a second-order cognitive activity focused on language, they prevented its absorption into the natural, human, historical and social sciences. The success of Deleuze’s texts outside of philosophy departments, in non-empirical areas of the humanities including Comparative Literature and different “Studies” and “Theories,”³ must be related to the French philosopher’s peculiar insistence on creativity. In the Anglo-American world, because of the technical method used by analytic philosophy, the texts produced in philosophical departments circulated in a very restricted market, whereas texts produced by Anglo-American departments of Comparative Literature and Cultural Theory have been involved in a much broader and “inter-disciplinary” one.⁴ In this market, the injunction for originality, proper to the literary field, combined with an economy dominated by the neo-liberal ideology of production. Despite the philosopher’s critique of commodification, in this context Deleuze’s artistic conception of philosophy took root and fructified.

Notwithstanding the success of the term “problem,” few scholars have analysed its history.⁵ This essay tries to partially fill that lack, covering the period beginning in modernity through the 1960s, in order to understand the role that the term plays in “Continental” philosophy, and especially in Deleuze. The analysis focuses on the strategies employed by different agents to define “philosophical” problems, or “philosophical” ways of posing problems. According to a dispositional approach to culture, proper to the sociology of knowledge, speaking of “strategy” does not imply the idea that the agents were consciously “choosing” a position or that they were “aware” of the broader logic of the game they were playing. The history of the successive re-significations of the notion of problem is a history, “despite” its protagonists.

The term “problem,” originally used in Antiquity by knowledge-producers located in an autonomous position, implied an idea of cognition oscillating between production and reproduction.⁶ As will be argued section-by-section below, once the term escaped the context of geometry (1), it was involved in symbolic struggles that radicalized during modernity (2). By defining the human mind and its different modalities of problem solving and by pacifying the disagreements, Kant placed “philosophy” in a supposedly neutral position of a science treating “the problem of all the problems” (3). Kant’s legacy also invented a new genre, “history of philosophy,” focusing on the analysis of a set of “philosophical problems.” This approach had a great institutional success in the German (4) and French universities (5 and 6), where the idea of philosophy as “problematization” coexisted with two other conceptualizations: an artistic one, conceiving philosophy as “creation” of concepts (7) and a religious one, underlining the importance of “questions” (8). The areas of the United Kingdom and the Augsburg Empire, where Kantianism was not successful, developed another idea of the role of philosophy as the dissolution of problems (9), an idea that clashed with Kantianism from the 1940s onwards (10 and 11).

1 problems and questions

The Greek term πρόβλημα, obtained from the verb προβάλλω meaning “to set (βάλλω) before (προ),” originally indicated a protective barrier used by soldiers, and it soon came to be used to mean any obstacle, protrusion, promontory. Starting from the fourth century BC, the term is present in the texts by Herodotus (484–25 BC), Aeschylus (525/524–456/455 BC), Euripides (480–06 BC) and Plato (427–347 BC). It is used, on the one hand, in geometrical and physical contexts and, on the other, in dialectical contexts – despite the anachronism of this division.

According to Proclus, inside the circle of Oyopides of Chios (mid-fifth century BC) an inaugural distinction appears: that of separating the problem from the theorem (θεώρημα). The solution to a problem is a task demanding the construction of one or several entities satisfying its expressed conditions; a theorem describes the essential properties of an entity given in its definition. During the following century, because theoretical sciences such as geometry dealt with eternal objects, there was disagreement over whether they should include problems, as Menaechmus (380–20 BC) claimed, or whether problems should be transformed into theorems, as Speusipp (410/407–339/338 BC) claimed. Plato (428/427–348/347 BC) mentioned the term in passages concerning geometry and astronomy in the Republic (380 BC) and, following him, Proclus (AD 412–85) considered that all operations in geometry should be considered theorems.

Plato also used the term to designate a task that can be resolved through dialectical reasoning (λóγοι): a problem starts from a series of accepted premises (ἐξἐνδóξων), often from an authoritative author to make them amenable to debate. In the Theaetetus, for instance, Socrates and Theodoros consider the theses of Ionian natural philosophy as problems. In this sense, following Plato, in the Topics, Aristotle (384–22 BC) separated the definition, a proposition that one is asked to accept, from the problem, which implies the possible existence of another thesis contradicting the former. Aristotle distinguished three classes (μέρη) of problems – ethical, logical and physical – which would structure the Problemata, a collection of texts written in a question-and-answer format composed during the fifth or sixth century which circulated extensively during the Middle Ages.

Solving problems and proving theorems was the prerogative for a distinct group of agents who, owing to their social status, could consecrate the majority of their time to an intellectual practice, separated from both everyday life and ritualized religious interactions. Finding solutions to problems has been used for heuristic and pedagogic purposes, and the activity implied an existing corpus of knowledge considered authoritative – theorems or theories – and a method – the geometric or the dialectical.

During the Middle Ages, the history of the term followed the parallel lines of geometry and dialectics, which would only intersect again in the sixteenth century. Between the end of the fifth century and the beginning of the sixth, Boethius, in his De Topicis Differentiis (AD 522), developed the Aristotelian Topics, but instead of problema, which was reserved for geometry, he used the term quaestio, derived from quaestione, which had been used since the second century to designate a tribunal. According to Boethius, a quaestio is a proposition containing ambiguities and, therefore, provoking doubts. With the advent of Christianity, all the possible questions were framed by the transcendent horizon of revelation, manifested in the biblical texts. Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) is considered to be the first Christian thinker to conceptualize biblical exegesis, the interpretation of the divine signs in the sacred scriptures made possible by a series of acts of conversion, including self-humiliation and discipline. In the following centuries the different signs had been classed according to different modes: the literal, the moral, the allegorical and anagogical. While in a juridical-religious context the quaestio also played an important role in the Sacred Inquisition, in the medieval universities controlled by the religious authority of the Church the exercise of the quaestio, which consisted of the discussion of a text from the limited corpus, was a part of a set of exercises including the lectio (reading), the disputatio (discussion) and the predicatio (enunciation).⁷ In post-Reform Europe, and in particular in the pietistic German context of the sixteenth century, the practices of the lectio, quaestio and predicatio converged in the art of hermeneutics, often resumed in the triad “comprehension,” “interpretation” and “application.”⁸

During the fourth century, Pappus of Alexandria formalized the Euclidian distinctions between theorems and problems, distinguishing the analysis of a theorem, in which an existing truth is explored, from the construction of a problem, in which a new truth is discovered. It is only with the new circulation of his texts, along with those of Proclus and the resulting interest in geometry, that the term “problem” gained a new importance. In the Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1626–28), René Descartes (1596–1650) employed “problema” exclusively in a mathematical sense, whereas, in other contexts, he used “quaestio.” He distinguished between simple and complex questions, perfectly or imperfectly understood; but he also began comparing certain questions, which were considered perfect, to problems, in so far as their solution was beyond any doubt. This movement towards the conflation of the terms problema and quaestio progressively gained importance, while the figure of the geometer became the model for the new knowledge-producer. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in De Corpore (1655), Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) in The Search after Truth (1679), Antoine Arnauld (1612–94) and Pierre Nicole (1615–95) in the Logic of Port Royal (1662) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) in the New Essays of Human Understanding (1704) suggested that questions should be posed in terms of theorems and problems. While Spinoza (1632–77) was the first to use the term “problem” in a theological context, in Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy Demonstrated in the Geometrical Manner (1663) and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), Leibniz underlined the distinction, which dates back to Ramon Lull (c.1233–1315), between an ars inveniendi, concerning problems, and an ars demonstrandi, concerning theorems.

Once the geometrical method began to be applied successfully to natural science in the seventeenth century – an effort epitomized by the publication of Galileo Galilei’s (1564–1642) Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) – the notions of theorem and problem started to be connected to notions of “system” and “architecture,” which analogically began to designate a series of interconnected thoughts (nexus rationum). God was compared to an architect who creates using the laws of mechanics, organized in a system. The demonstration of theories and the construction of problems relied on this system created by God, to whom man was compared analogically: the question was whether humans could produce new knowledge, or if he or she could only imperfectly read the thoughts of a divine intellect. As critiques of the Aristotelian scholastic framework intensified, many knowledge-producers began using the term “system” to designate the works of Descartes and Spinoza and, then, their own doctrine. The term was used by Malebranche in On the Research of Truth (1674), Ralph Cudworth (1617–88) in The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), Leibniz in the New System of Nature (1695) and by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–80) in the polemical Treatise on Systems (1749).

2 the powers of human understanding

The conflation of the terms “problem” and “question” was complete at the beginning of the eighteenth century with the publication of Logic, or Rational Thoughts on the Powers of the Human Understanding: with their Use and Application in the Knowledge and Search of Truth (1713) by Christian Wolff (1679–1754). For the first time Wolff translated into German the basic geometric and arithmetic terms which had had been used in Latin and French during the seventeenth century, and he vulgarized Leibniz’s texts and terminology. Before Kant, he represented the most important German man of science,⁹ and the Logic’s divisions of human knowledge and faculties dominated German-speaking Europe for more than a century. The Logic informed Johann Georg Walch’s (1693–1775) essential Philosophical Lexicon (1726) and Georg Friedrich Meier’s (1718–67) Excerpt from the Doctrine of Reason (1752), a manual used by most German professors of Logic, including Kant. Wolff’s works had also been translated into other languages: the Logic appeared in French as early as 1736, and in English in 1770.

Wolff’s “system” was a synthesis of the modern project of a mathesis universalis and the old structure inherited from scholasticism. The totality of knowledge, “philosophy,” defined as the “science of the possible,” was divided into the theoretical and the practical. Logic represents an overar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword: Problems in Twentieth-Century French Philosophy
• Introduction: Problematizing Problems
• 1 The Misadventures of the “Problem” in “Philosophy”: From Kant to Deleuze
• 2 Bergson’s Method of Problematisation and the Pursuit of Metaphysical Precision
• 3 An Anti-Positivist Conception of Problems: Deleuze, Bergson and the French Epistemological Tradition
• 4 Cavailles, Mathematical Problems and Questions
• 5 Lautman on Problems as the Conditions of Existence of Solutions
• 6 Simondon on the Notion of the Problem: A Genetic Schema of Individuation
• 7 On the Problem and Mystery of Evil: Marcel’s Existential Dissolution of an Antinomy
• 8 Towards A Phenomenology of Sagesse: Uncovering the Unique Philosophical Problematic of Pierre Hadot
• 9 The Errors of History: Knowledge and Epistemology in Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault
• 10 Problematizing the Problematic: Foucault and Althusser
• 11 Foucault, Psychoanalysis, and Critique: Two Aspects of Problematization
• 12 Problematization in Foucault’s Genealogy and Deleuze’s Symptomatology: Or, How to Study Sexuality Without Invoking Oppositions
• Index