A couple of weeks ago when John posted his interview with Jason Stanley I was reminded of the need to read Stanley’s Knowledge and Practical Interests. The book is quite good, but I don’t want to launch into a review of it now. Rather, there was a line early on in Stanley’s book that grabbed my attention. Stanley describes his overall philosophical approach as follows: “My philosophical tendency is to preserve as much as possible of common-sense intuition.” This is an important aspect of philosophy, I would agree, but I think it is only half the story. The other half of the story, and as was discussed on this blog a few weeks back (here), consists of creating concepts, and in doing this a consequence is the problematization of common sense—or one inevitably confronts the incredulous stare. Philosophy thus has two tendencies or movements—the movement of common sense and the movement of problematization.
As I read Hume, following through on my take of Deleuze’s reading of Hume, Hume was keenly aware of this dual nature of philosophical thought. As is well known Hume stressed the need to return to the common, to common life in particular. At the same time, however, Hume pushed for the problematization of the common. This is evidenced by Hume’s numerous writings where he discusses the motivating tendencies of trade which gets people out of their routines, their complacent lethargy, and sparks an interest in innovation, in transforming what is commonly done. A thoughtful inquiry into matters of fact can also undermine, to use another of Hume’s examples, common prejudices such as an “Irishman cannot have wit, and a Frenchman cannot have solidity.” After all, many prejudices are simply taken as common sense. Without departing greatly from the guardrails of common life, Hume seeks a philosophy that can nonetheless challenge common sense and transform it.
As Deleuze picks up on Hume’s project, the problem for Hume as Deleuze understands it is very different than one of preserving our common-sense intutions. The problem, instead, is the common itself. How can a multiplicity of impressions and ideas come to constitute and compose a unitary self, for example? As Deleuze states the problem in Empiricism and Subjectivity, it entails understanding how the ‘subject who invents and believes [can be] constituted inside the given [that is, from within the multiplicity of impressions and ideas] in such a way that it makes the given a synthesis and a system’. It is thus the very common nature of our common sense intuitions that is to be explained rather than being the presupposed basis upon which everything else is explained. And it was in the process of setting forth this explanation where Hume, according to Deleuze, develops his particular concepts such as belief and custom, and in doing so Hume no doubt had his own encounters with those who greeted his account of the force and vivacity of beliefs with an incredulous stare.
Deleuze’s work is itself known to have prompted its own share of incredulity. Charles Wolfe reminded me a few weeks back (in the comments to the post linked above) of Deleuze’s reading of Malebranche that interpreted the texts from the perspective of Adam’s rib. What likely began as an incredulous stare from Ferdinand Alquié, the instructor, became impotent fury when he found himself unable to challenge Deleuze’s reading. But Deleuze is not alone in prompting the incredulous stare, nor is it monopolized by continental philosophers. When David Lewis argued, in all seriousness, that possible worlds are real in the same sense that the actual world is real – so there is a real world where I became a geologist instead of a philosopher – then he no doubt was met with many incredulous stares; the same was true for van Inwagen when he argued, in Material Beings, ‘that there are no tables or chairs or any other visible objects except living organisms’; and again, more recently, Ted Sider has probably encountered his fair share of incredulous stares when they hear that he argues that ‘nothing is a (proper) part of anything’. Now simply uttering statements that are met with looks of disbelief is one thing, and indeed many statements are duly met with incredulity and are destined to insignificance, but significant philosophical practice as conceptual development, or as the creation of concepts, is evidenced by the incredulous stare of those who first encounter the concept, but as the concept gets further developed, however, as was the case with Lewis (who is one of my favorite philosophers), van Inwagen, and Sider, the initial movement away from common sense (as evidenced by the incredulous stare) becomes the movement to the common again, but not the common-sense intuitions with which we began, but rather a transformed common sense.
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