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Abstract
Against the tendency to regard Deleuze as a materialist and a naturalistic thinker, I argue that his core philosophical writings involve commitments that are incompatible with contemporary scientific naturalism. He defends different versions of a distinction between philosophy and natural science that is inconsistent with methodological naturalism and with the scientific image of the world as a single causally interconnected system. He defends the existence of a virtual realm of entities that is irreconcilable with ontological naturalism. The difficulty of reconciling Deleuze’s philosophy with ontological naturalism is especially apparent in his recurrent conception of pure events that are irreducible to their incarnation in bodies and states of affairs. In the last section of this essay, I canvass some of the ways in which Deleuze’s thought might be reconciled with a more liberal, pluralist and ethical naturalism that he identified in an early essay on Lucretius.
Notes
1 Recent discussions of Deleuze’s relation to ancient Greek naturalism include Hayden (Citation2008), Holmes (Citation2012) and Ansell-Pearson (Citation2014).
2 See for example Zammito (Citation2008) on Kant and naturalism, Leiter (Citation2013) on Nietzsche, and Ansell-Pearson and Protevi (Citation2016) on Bergson.
3 Joe Hughes (Citation2012, 6) describes this practice of philosophizing through the voice of others as a kind of ‘philosophical ventriloquism’. See also his extended discussion of Deleuze’s practice of free indirect discourse in Difference and Repetition in Hughes Citation2009, 14–17.
4 Brooke Holmes discerns a similar pattern in Deleuze’s recurrent presentations of Lucretius over the course of his career, suggesting that ‘he came back time and again to Lucretius, producing ever shifting images of his philosophical pluralism’ (Citation2012, 341).
5 For discussion of Deleuze’s relation to Rorty and to pragmatism and neo-pragmatism in general, see chapters by Allen and Patton in Bowden, Bignall, and Patton Citation2015.
6 In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze endorsed the concept of structural causality in terms of which Althusser and his collaborators sought to make sense of Marx’s thesis of economic determination, suggesting that ‘this structure never acts transitively, following the order of succession in time; rather, it acts by incarnating its varieties in diverse societies and by accounting for the simultaneity of all the relations and terms which, each time and in each case, constitute the present: that is why “the economic” is never given properly speaking, but rather designates a differential virtuality to be interpreted, always covered over by its forms of actualisation’ (Deleuze, Citation2011, 234–235).
7 ‘There is no doubt that an assemblage never contains a causal infrastructure. It does have, however, and to the highest degree, an abstract line of creative or specific causality, its line of flight or deterritorialization; this line can be effectuated only in connection with general causalities of another nature’ (Deleuze and Guattari Citation1987, 283).
8 On the differences between Kant’s and Deleuze’s conception of the transcendental field, see Voss Citation2013.
9 Deleuze is quoting here from the first book of De Rerum Natura.