Ontology in Heidegger and Deleuze

A Comparative Analysis

G. Rae

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137404565
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

The first book in English to offer an extended comparative analysis of Heidegger and Deleuze. Those familiar with Heidegger's and Deleuze's thinking will find a detailed, well-researched book that comes to an innovative conclusion, while those new to both will find a clear, well-written exposition of their key concepts.

1

Introduction

Philosophy has a long history; indeed, one of the longest amongst all the disciplines. Importantly, throughout the majority of its long history, the traditional view of philosophy, at least amongst philosophers, has been that only it is capable of truly revealing the truth. For this reason, philosophy, starting with Plato, has tended to see itself as having a privileged place in the human world. Yet this privileged position has increasingly come under attack due to perceived failings internal to philosophy, such as its inability to reveal, beyond all dispute, the truth it has traditionally claimed to be capable of revealing, and the rise of other disciplines, each of which questions the legitimacy of philosophy and tries to establish itself as the true guardian of truth. In particular, the rise of the sciences to ever greater heights of legitimacy and legitimisation, not to mention economics in the practical sphere, have not only led to a questioning of philosophy’s place in the world, especially in relation to other disciplines, but also to the appearance of something like an onto-existential crisis in philosophy itself. However, before we follow its critics and conclude that philosophy is inherently useless and frivolous and should, therefore, be consigned to history, it should also be remembered that the last one hundred years or so of ‘crisis’ in philosophy has resulted in a tremendous outpouring of philosophical innovation and creativity. Indeed, the so-called crisis in philosophy coincides with one of the most productive and innovative periods in the history of philosophy. One only has to think of the number of ‘schools’ found in the twentieth century alone, such as phenomenology, existentialism, logical positivism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, postmodernism, and linguistic analysis to name but a few of the dominant trends, to see the diversity of thinking constitutive of philosophy’s recent history. Philosophy may be ‘living’ through an onto-existential crisis relating to its purpose, content, and place, but it is responding to this crisis affirmatively.

Given this dynamic, reflexive questioning, this book resists the temptation to simply proclaim philosophy’s downward spiral. Before reaching such a conclusion, if indeed this conclusion is reached, a more patient engagement with the question of philosophy, including its purpose, content, and place, is required. This will not entail a detailed historical analysis of all aspects of the history of philosophy, nor will it engage with developments in other disciplines, but will look to philosophy ‘itself’ to engage with what philosophy ‘itself’ thinks about its future. To do so, I turn to philosophy’s traditional relationship to truth and, from there, to the question: truth of what? While it may not have thought of itself in quite this manner, my guiding contention is that philosophy is and has always been an inquiry into being. This, however, leads to the following questions: What is being? How does philosophy think being? What is thinking? And what is philosophy?

Heidegger and Deleuze

The thinker in the history of philosophy most intimately connected to the question of being is Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Through his re-raising of this question, Heidegger not only stimulated thought, but produced a detailed and powerful critique of metaphysics and, through this, the mode of thinking Heidegger maintains has traditionally been associated with metaphysics: philosophy. Engaging with Heidegger’s thinking on this issue will not only demonstrate that philosophy itself entails a reflexivity that enables it to examine and critique its history, but will also reveal a powerful line of critique against the thinking of being that has traditionally been employed by philosophy. In essence, Heidegger criticises thinking that associates being with presence, by which he means thinking of being in terms of fixed, static, ahistoric, essence(s). By demonstrating that this form of thinking fails to think the becoming of being, insofar as it imposes itself on being to affirm a partial, technologically orientated anthropocentric revealing of being, Heidegger highlights deficiencies in philosophy’s historical thinking of being and uses these to point towards future action. Having undertaken a detailed, if unorthodox, reading of the history of philosophy, Heidegger comes to claim that all the possible permutations of metaphysics have been exhausted, which does not mean that its scope or influence has waned. Indeed, for Heidegger, philosophy is in crisis precisely because it continues to cling to metaphysics despite having exhausted all its possibilities. It is caught in a return of the same, which is slowly destroying it. Heidegger is, therefore, pessimistic about philosophy’s future; indeed, he may even be more pessimistic than the most ardent critics of philosophy. Rather than belittle philosophy or criticise its methods, presumptions, and proclamations, all the while accepting its continuation; or, accepting its continuation, call for a rejuvenation of philosophy based on a ‘correct’ methodology which will allow philosophy to reveal the truth in accordance with the premises of metaphysics, Heidegger demands a more radical path. For Heidegger, philosophy is so irreparably damaged by metaphysics that nothing other than its wholesale abandonment will rejuvenate thinking to being’s becoming. With this, Heidegger advocates the overcoming of metaphysics and, through this overcoming, the form of thinking emanating from metaphysics: philosophy.

Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and, by extension, philosophy revolves, therefore, around the question of being and, in particular, whether being is properly thought in terms of presence (= identity). While interesting and important in itself, Heidegger’s raising of the question of being and related critique of previous ways of thinking gains in significance because of the tremendous impact it had on subsequent thinking, including the work of the second thinker this book engages with: Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995). While Heidegger never, to my knowledge, mentions let alone discusses Deleuze or his work, if looked at from the perspective of Heidegger’s influence on Deleuze, we see a very different story. Such is Heidegger’s influence on Deleuze that, according to Constantin Boundas, ‘Deleuze’s choice of the title “Difference and Repetition” for his most important philosophical text was meant as a response to Heidegger’s “Being and Time”. “Difference” is asked to eliminate the last vestiges of identity in “Being” and Time turns into Repetition of the eventum tantum in the eternal return of infinite different/ciation’ (2009: 326–327). In line with this provocative claim, one of the arguments this book defends is that Deleuze’s thinking is both ‘grounded’ in and distanced from Heidegger’s.

Deleuze’s ‘grounding’ in Heidegger is seen from the way he cites Heidegger in numerous texts and places throughout his career, including Difference and Repetition (DR: ix, 64–66), Negotiations (PF: 107), Foucault (F: 34, 93), The Fold (FLB: 10, 30), and Essays Critical and Clinical (ECC: 91–98). The span of these writings indicates that Heidegger is a thinker who continues to shadow Deleuze. In particular, Deleuze agrees with and so takes off from Heidegger’s privileging of ontology. Only once the question of being is raised and engaged with can all else be answered. As such, we find that ‘philosophy’s weighed down with discussions about attributive judgements (the sky is blue) and existential judgements (God is) and the possibility or impossibility of reducing one to the other. But they all turn on the verb “to be”’ (STT: 44). Much like Heidegger, Deleuze holds that the question of being is the question that grounds all others. Even if the questioning does not explicitly engage with being, every questioning always refers to being with the consequence that the question of being delineates the horizon of thought. Indeed, Heidegger’s claims regarding the primacy of ontology and, linked to this, his re-raising of the question of being were so esteemed by Deleuze that we find him proclaiming that, along with Foucault, its Heidegger ‘who’s most profoundly transformed the image of thought’ (LWA: 95).

This affirmative appraisal is, however, accompanied by a critical distancing most evidently seen from Deleuze’s remarks regarding Heidegger’s pervasive influence, especially in France in the 1930s and 1940s, an influence he thinks not only needlessly undermines the place and creativity of philosophy, but, by identifying a number of traces of what he will call the ‘image of thought’ in Heidegger’s ontology, leads Deleuze to charge that, for all his talk of overcoming the identity of metaphysics, Heidegger’s thinking not only continues to be bound by representation, meaning it continues to insist on a singular truth (the truth of being) which reduces difference to identity, but also, as a consequence, continues to defend and help perpetuate this mode of thinking. To escape this, Deleuze turned to Sartre, who was ‘a little fresh air’ in comparison (DII: 9).

Rather than offering a Heideggerian reading of Deleuze, therefore, or one that turns Deleuze into a Heideggerian, I will argue that Deleuze’s appreciation of Heidegger is accompanied by a certain, foundational critique (OP: 136; PPM: 214), which will be fully elaborated as the discussion proceeds, but which can very briefly be summarised as entailing two different, but related, arguments. First, by reducing being’s becoming to temporality, Heidegger fails to think the different ways being becomes. In contrast, while Deleuze will agree that being becomes temporally, he will recognise that being also simultaneously becomes spatially and intensively. Far from being reduced to a linear, unitary, temporal becoming, being is, according to Deleuze, thoroughly differentiating and differentiated. This brings us to the second line of Deleuze’s critique relating to Heidegger’s relationship to difference. Deleuze charges that Heidegger fails to truly understand and think from difference because he maintains that being is that which is ‘common’ to all entities, but that which must be thought in terms of the being of each particular entity (NIV: 192–193). While an admittedly controversial reading of Heidegger, one that Heidegger would most probably reject as ‘metaphysical’, Deleuze takes this ‘commonality’ to entail a moment of identity and so claims that Heidegger does not go far enough in affirming the relationship between being and difference. As such, Deleuze concludes that Heidegger does not go far enough in thinking being’s becoming and remains stuck in the orbit of presence/identity (DR: 66).

To overcome these problems, Deleuze re-examines the role of difference in Heidegger’s ontology. While Heidegger establishes an ontological difference between being and entities and claims the truth of the latter is revealed through a questioning of the former, Deleuze maintains that ‘being is a bad concept’ (B1: 25) because it sweeps everything ‘under’ it. Rather than privilege the question of being and answer it by analysing being’s difference to entities, Deleuze ‘collapses’ being and difference ‘into’ one another to claim that being is difference. The consequences of this are dramatic. In the first instance, it means that Deleuze will undertake an original analysis of difference that takes aim at the tradition that, he insists, has privileged the unity of identity. With this, I argue that Deleuze not only goes beyond Heidegger’s account of being’s becoming, but, in so doing, also offers a radical and innovative account of difference and its relationship to identity. In particular, Deleuze: (1) thinks difference as and from difference; to (2) show that identity emanates from difference. As Deleuze puts it, the aim is to ‘think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same, and the relation of different to different independently of those forms which make them pass through the negative’ (DR: ixx). For Deleuze, therefore, the only similarity between entities is difference and, importantly, difference that emanates, not from a prior unity or identity, but from difference itself. In other words, Deleuze offers an ontology that privileges difference over identity, meaning he will show how difference precedes, founds, and escapes identity.

The argument developed

Importantly, therefore, Deleuze does not simply criticise Heidegger, but uses this encounter to affirm an alternative account of being. My overall argument will show that Deleuze’s differential ontology depends upon and so emanates from perceived problems in Heidegger’s questioning of being. In turn, this will show that, because Heidegger and Deleuze develop their respective accounts of philosophy’s purpose and content from their differing ontologies, the fundamental differences between them regarding the nature of philosophy emanate from differences in their ontological analyses.

Heidegger’s thinking on philosophy emanates from and revolves around his destruction of metaphysics. While the exact nature of this will become evident as we proceed, it is important to note that, in general, Heidegger takes metaphysics to entail a particular understanding of being whereby human being takes on a privileged place in relation to other entities and views them through a particular closed world-view which has its own logic and unexamined foundations. Heidegger’s problems with this are multiple, but can be boiled down to his rejection of the idea that thinking genuinely reveals being by imposing itself on being. For Heidegger, this gets the order of the thought–being relationship back to front: thinking doesn’t determine being; thinking emanates from and is dependent on being. While Heidegger gropes with a variety of ways to effect transformations in philosophy to ensure it takes its cue from being as being reveals itself, ultimately, I suggest, he becomes so despondent with the link between philosophy and metaphysics that he rejects the idea that philosophy can be transformed to truly reveal being. Philosophy has to be abandoned for thinking and, in particular, a type of thinking called meditative thinking which lets being be to reveal itself to thinking as and when being ‘decides’.

While there has been much discussion on the nature of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and subsequent affirmation of meditative thinking, many commentators either fail to make connections between aspects of his thinking and so fail to understand what he means by certain concepts or simply assume prior knowledge of Heidegger and so are unable to explain why he comes to the conclusions he does. By producing detailed analyses of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, anthropocentrism, technological being, and philosophy, I not only show the intricacies of Heidegger’s thinking, but am able to offer a number of original contributions, the most substantial of which is a detailed discussion, across four chapters, of: (1) the issue of how to effect the transformation to meditative thinking; and, linked to this, (2) the role human willing plays in bringing about this transformation. These issues are crucially important to any understanding of Heidegger but, unfortunately, too often, commentators note Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and subsequent affirmation of meditative thinking without ever engaging with how this transition is to occur. Alternatively, if this issue is engaged with, commentators tend to maintain that, whereas metaphysics places humans as the Archimedean point controlling and determining being, Heidegger’s critique of metaphysical anthropocentrism means the transition to meditative thinking cannot emanate from any form of human willing, but must simply wait for being to mystically open itself to thinking if, as, and when ‘it’ sees fit (Caputo, 1986: 267; Osborne, 1989: 94; Zimmerman, 1990: 264).

While there are certainly a number of statements of Heidegger’s that appear to support, what I call, this ‘mystical’ interpretation, I identify a number of problems with it, as a precursor to demonstrating that Heidegger engages with this issue and tries to resolve it by identifying and showing that a particular form of human willing has a role to play in bringing about the transformation to meditative thinking. In particular, by positing the active domination of metaphysical anthropocentrism to the passive relaxation of meditative thinking, I argue that the mystical interpretation emanates from a binary passive/active opposition that re-affirms the logic of binary oppositions that Heidegger claims underpins metaphysics. The second main problem with the mystical interpretation is that it leaves absolutely no room for human activity in the transition to meditative thinking, which not only posits a fundamental rupture between metaphysics and that which comes ‘after’ metaphysics, a position that contradicts Heidegger’s insistence that a trace of metaphysics will remain in that which overcomes metaphysics, but also leaves no room for socio-political action to bring about this overcoming. Indeed, given that political activity emanates from human willing, the mystical interpretation claims that such political action would only exacerbate the problem. All human beings can do is wait for being to reveal itself without any sign or guarantee that ‘it’ will do so.

In contrast, I take seriously Heidegger’s claims regarding the left-over trace of metaphysics to argue that Heidegger does not posit a radical rupture between metaphysics and the overcoming of metaphysics, but holds that the movement will be a transition constituted and, in part, effected and affected by a form of human willing. By appealing to a number of texts, I demonstrate that Heidegger comes to reject the underlying interpretation of the mystical reading by showing that a particular form of human willing can contribute to this transition in accordance with a particular gifting from being. Recognising that Heidegger’s thinking on the transition to meditative thinking entails and depends upon a particular form of human willing overcomes the problems of the mystical interpretation of Heidegger by: (1) escaping the passive/active binary opposition upon which the mystical interpretation depends, an opposition that is, for Heidegger, metaphysical; (2) showing the transition is dependent on being revealing itself and a form of human willing in combination with transformations in technological being and thinking; and (3) reconciling Heidegger’s critique of anthropocentrism with his claim that a trace of metaphysics will continue to inhabit that which overcomes metaphysics, a reconciliation that also brings Heidegger’s thinking into the realm of the political by opening a space whereby human socio-political action can help effect the overcoming of metaphysics and the transformation to meditative thinking.

Having outlined Heidegger’s ontology and critique of metaphysics through detailed discussions of his critiques of anthropocentrism, technology, and philosophy, I turn to examine Deleuze’s ontology, including his critique of Heidegger’s, as a precursor to examining his understanding of philosophy. Deleuze’s ontology is highly imaginative and because commentators tend to gloss over its fundamental parts I first engage with the main concepts of his ontology: multiplicity, difference, and virtuality with a fourth, immanence, identified as that which runs through all three. By doing so, I provide a holistic account of Deleuze’s ontology that not only shows how these pieces fit together, but also relates them back to Heidegger to support my argument that Deleuze’s ontology goes beyond Heidegger’s by identifying an onto-genetic account of being rooted in difference. This culminates in a discussion of the concept ‘virtuality’ and its relationship to actuality, possibility, and reality which is not only often overlooked in the secondary literature, but, when it does find its way into discussions, is often conducted with the underlying assumption that it is clearly understood by readers. The aim of my discussion is to not only clearly outline this fascinating concept, but to do so in a way that explores its multi-dimensionality, an important undertaking given the central role it plays in the process of individuation that Deleuze claims creates actuality. By piecing together various comments Deleuze makes on virtuality, I offer an interpretation of it that not only engages with alternative understandings, but which is also of crucial importance to my later argument that Deleuze’s differential ontology continues to depend upon a certain form of identity at the onto-genetic level.

Having outlined the core concepts of Deleuze’s thinking, I then turn to explore the relationship between his ontology and account of philosophy. Deleuze’s analysis of philosophy is rightly famous, most notably for his insistence that it involves the creation of concepts. This has become passé in the literature to the extent that its meaning tends to be taken for granted. I deconstruct Deleuze’s notion of the concept to show what this creation entails, an explanation that also relates it back to his ontological descriptions of multiplicity and difference. By outlining the transcendental features of philosophy, namely the creation of concepts, th...