Glendinning on the EU and Widder on Deleuze

Simon Glendinning proposes in this blog post a trinity of philosophical stances toward the EU: Skeptics, Experimenters, and Dogmatists. Dogmatists think they have derived a political program from their insight into human nature; Skeptics think human nature (or less dramatically, the current state of human knowledge-production) doesn't allow for such insights into human nature; and Experimenters, taking their lead from Isiah Berlin, combine a suspicion of grand progress narratives with a willingness to commit to ends one nonetheless knows stand alongside other commitments in a pluralism of values. Glendinning adopts the Experimenter's position, looking toward

a Europe to come that ‘stands unflinchingly’ for the ideal of freedom to choose our own ends (including all sorts of collective ends at different levels); a condition where people increasingly feel themselves the author of their own lives rather than subjected, in imperious fashion, to Dogmatic ideals of a single end for all.

Now as luck would have it, I'm working on an NDPR review of Nathan Widder's new book, Political Theory after Deleuze, and one of Widder's points resonates here.

Widder distinguishes "strong" and "weak" versions of the "ontological turn" in (continental-friendly) political theory.* Strong versions establish ontological verities and derive political principles and programs from them, while weak versions establish ontological claims to which one can be deeply committed yet remain self-consciously contestable in virtue of an epistemological modesty vis-à-vis one's ability to discover real structures. In Glendinning's trichotomy, strong versions are Dogmatic and weak versions are Experimental because ultimately Skeptical.

What's of interest to me is the way Widder places Deleuze as strong without being Dogmatic and weak without being Skeptical. That is, Deleuze has a strong ontology: he never hid his disdain for the notion of the "end of metaphysics" and so really does think he's found the way reality works. But the way reality works is that virtual differential structures (Ideas or multiplicities) are integrated or resolved or actualized or dramatized (the four are equivalent for Deleuze) in a way that preserves the problematic structure of the Idea -- there can be no final resolution of a problem. In fact, it's precisely because resolutions feed back into problems in the process known as "counter-effectuation" (from actual back up to virtual) that guarantees an open future in which problems are continually posed anew.

So what we get with Deleuze is a strong ontology that by virtue of its having uncovered the structure of reality grounds the experimental status of concrete commitments typical of "weak ontology." But for Deleuze, experimentation is not the result of epistemological modesty but of having discovered ontological truth.

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* I found Jacob T. Levy's reflections on the differences between political theory and political philosophy very helpful.