THE MISADVENTURES OF THE “PROBLEM” IN “PHILOSOPHY”

Abstract

Notwithstanding the recent prominence of the term “problem” in the humanities, few scholars have analysed its history. This essay tries to partially fill that lack, principally covering the period from late modernity through to the 1960s, in order to understand the role that the term plays in “Continental” philosophy, with special emphasis on the writings of Gilles Deleuze. This analysis focuses on the strategies employed by different agents to define “philosophical” problems, or “philosophical” ways of posing problems. The term, originally used in antiquity by knowledge-producers located in an autonomous position, implied an idea of cognition oscillating between production and reproduction. Once the term escaped the context of geometry, it was involved in symbolic struggles that radicalized during modernity. The Kantians placed “philosophy” in a supposedly neutral position of science treating “the problem of all the problems” and invented a new genre, the “history of philosophy,” focusing on the analysis of “philosophical problems.” This approach had great institutional success in the German and French universities and clashed, during the twentieth century, with another usage of philosophy as a practice of “dissolution of problems,” developed in the United Kingdom and the Austro-Habsburg Empire.

Keywords:

• Deleuze
• problem
• sociology
• history of philosophy
• Kant

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

This essay is one of the outcomes of research funded by the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (BEPE 2017/15538-7) entitled “Gilles Deleuze: Genesis of a Creator of Concepts.” I owe much to friends and colleagues who helped me during the process of research and writing: Daniel Sherer, Pietro Terzi, Sophie Roux, Davide Crippa, Gabriele Vissio, Jacob Levi, Lucien Petrescu, Vincent Guillin, Daniel Nagase, Camille Limoges, Domenico Collacciani, Eugenio Petrovich, Charles T. Wolfe, Tijana Okić, John Raimo, and Tzuchien Tho.

1 This expression “humanities,” used in English starting from the late sixteenth century, is often taken as a “rigid designator” (Kripke), despite implying the sedimentation of semantic strata coming from different epochs, implying terms such as literae humaniores, umanesimo, Geisteswissenschaften, Culture, Moral Sciences, Belles Lettres and sciences de l’homme. As for terms such as “philosophy” and “problem,” the actual meaning of “humanities” depends on the divisions of cognitive labour during modernity, and in particular on the different national reforms to higher education that happened during the “long nineteenth century.” This point will be clarified in the course of the essay.

2 For the history of this wave of exportation, see Cusset.

3 By “Studies” and “Theories” we indicate the different specialities that were born from the encounter that took place in the United States after the Second World War between the field of Comparative Literature and the non-empirical sociology of the Frankfurt School, which went under the name of “Critical Theory” after the publication of Max Horkheimer’s (1895–1973) Traditional and Critical Theory (1937).

4 For the type of analysis we adopt here, see Bourdieu, The Field.

5 For a history of the term in mathematics and philosophy, see Catana; Holzhey; Lachterman.

6 The “pragmatic” dimension proper to mathematical practice, underlined by many contemporary mathematicians, is the point of departure for evolutionary numerical cognition’s research programmes.

7 For these practices, see Le Goff.

8 For the history of hermeneutics, see Gadamer; Szondi; Jauss.

9 Up to the end of the eighteenth century the term “philosopher” was used in a multiplicity of different contexts, therefore cannot be compared to contemporary usage. For this unstable situation, see Ribard.

10 For this pre-Kantian situation, see Beck.

11 For the strategy behind the Kantian operation, see Collins 650–51.

12 For the early story of Neo-Kantianism, see Beiser, The Genesis; Köhnke; Luft.

13 For this polemics, see Beiser, After Hegel.

14 For the history of the psychology around psychologism, see Kusch.

15 For the history of Problemgeschichte, see Kemper; Geldsetzer.

16 For an analysis of eclecticism in relation to French politics, see Goldstein; Staum.

17 For the history of philosophy in French secondary education, see Poucet.

18 For a sociological analysis, see Pinto.

19 For the dispute around pessimism, see Beiser, After Hegel.

20 For the emergence of a literary field, see Bourdieu, The Rules.

21 For the history of philosophy in the United States, see Kuklick.

22 For the meaning of this term and German academia before the Weimar Republic, see Ringer.

23 For the emergence of sociology and social theory, see Heilbron; Joly.

24 For the intellectual field during the Third Reich, see Muller.

25 For the relation between Heidegger and Problemgeschichte, see Fehér.

26 For the relation between Gadamer and Problemgeschichte, see Grondin.

27 For this network, see Baring’s ongoing research.

28 For the emergence of British academic philosophy, see Gibbins; Daunton; Snyder.

29 For the institutional history of Austrian philosophy, see Sauer; Johnston.

30 For the history of the Vienna Circle, see Stadler.

31 For the relations between the Vienna Circle and Neo-Kantianism, see Glock; De Warren and Staiti.

32 For the exodus of the Vienna Circle, see Dahms.

33 For the Vienna Circle and the Nordic countries, see Manninen and Stadler.

34 For the history of the institute, see Klibansky; Renoliet.

35 For the particular institutional dynamics dealing with the creation of chairs at the Collège de France, see Feuerhahn.

36 For the movement of de-professionalization of French philosophers between the 1930s and the 1940s, see Boschetti.

37 For the usage of the term “problem” in “historical ontology,” see Hacking, and in “historical epistemology,” see During.

38 For some hints concerning Deleuze’s initial trajectory inside French philosophy, see Bianco.