1. Kant and Plato

Kant uses the term Ideas at the moment in his most important work when he takes up the theme that gives that work its title – the critique of pure reason. Although Kant recognises that a ‘thinker often finds himself at a loss for the expression which exactly fits his concept’, and he was no doubt stretching the use of concepts beyond what others might recognise as legitimate, he nonetheless concludes that ‘To coin new words is to advance a claim to legislation in language that seldom succeeds’ (Kant 1965, 309, A312/B368). Kant thus opts to borrow Plato's term Ideas. The choice of term is appropriate, however, for as Kant argues, ‘Plato made use of the expression “idea” in such a way as quite evidently to have meant by it something which not only can never be borrowed from the senses but far surpasses even the concepts of understanding … inasmuch as in experience nothing is ever to be met with that is coincident with it’ (310, A313/B370). And the term Idea is appropriate as well for clarifying the role reason plays in human life, since, as Plato and Kant will both argue, ‘our reason naturally exalts itself to modes of knowledge which so far transcend the bounds of experience that no given empirical concept can ever coincide with them’ (310, A314/B371). We can thus see that when Deleuze uses the term Ideas in referring to problematic fields, he is also following Plato and Kant in arguing for something that is not to be confused with that which can be given in experience.

In drawing the term Idea from Plato and using it both to capture the sense of that which can never be given in experience and to characterise the tendency of reason to move towards Ideas, that is, towards that which transcends ‘the bounds of experience’, Kant is thus setting up an important contrast between Ideas and that which can be given within ‘the bounds of experience’. To clarify the latter, Kant uses the term ‘concepts of understanding’, which are ‘thought a priori antecedently to experience and for the sake of experience’ (Kant 1965, 308, A310/B367).

1. Mark Wilson, Temperature and Theory Façades

Let us return to Mark Wilson's work, with a perfectly brewed cup of coffee in hand. The coffee was brewed, let us say, at an ideal extraction temperature of 195°F (91°C). Leaving aside for the moment the qualitative judgment tied to the claim that the 195°F temperature is an ‘ideal extraction temperature’ (a judgment we will come back to shortly when we return to the conditions for actual, real experience), and sticking simply for now with the statement that this coffee was brewed with water at a temperature of 195°F, we have already seen that for Wilson such claims disguise an array of complexities. To summarise our earlier discussion, to identify a given property – such as the property of bearing heat or temperature, a property which we then name or categorise in accordance with a particular predicate, such as ‘… is 195°F’ – presupposes a series of relationships that are only identifiable within certain ranges and limits. The understanding of temperature as the mean kinetic energy of a gas, for instance, is relevant only with respect to noble gases at equilibrium, but not for gases in dynamic, far from equilibrium states, or for most other substances; the point at which water boils is relevant to water at sea level, and to water that has not been supersaturated with oxygen or deoxygenated (again, see Chang's 2004, 17–23, discussion); and the mercury thermometer itself only registers accurate readings within a certain range of temperatures and conditions, which is again true for the other measuring devices as well. The provisional conclusion we reached was that given the limits and range of relevant applicability, coupled to a convergence of different measuring devices upon similar readings, we can then with a fair degree of confidence accept the accuracy of the descriptive claims about, or the application of predicates to, a given property.

Where things become more complicated still, for Wilson, is when the accurate description of a phenomenon requires multiple descriptive frames, or facades as he calls them, each of which entails a range over which it provides accurate descriptions but beyond which it does not. The mistake Wilson cautions us against is to assume that the different descriptive frames or facades provide, in combination, a complete and unified account of the phenomena under study.

1. Russell on the Task of Analysis (and the Taste of Coffee)

To set the stage for the Platonic arguments to follow, let us first imagine that Russell has taken up a temporary position as a coffee taster, identifying the various attributes of a wide array of coffees as they come into London. After a few weeks of training, Russell shows up to the coffee warehouse and takes his seat next to another, more experienced taster. With the first coffee he tastes, Russell identifies it as a light body coffee with fruity notes and sweet aromatics. The more experienced taster agrees, though he adds that the fruity notes are actually raspberry in character. Russell tastes the coffee again and excitedly agrees, ‘That's it, exactly!’ he says. The experienced taster also identifies a hint of molasses. Russell tastes the coffee again; this time he is not as sure he tastes the molasses his more experienced colleague tastes, but he trusts the latter's abilities and reputation enough to assume that the molasses notes are likely there.

Back in his Bloomsbury flat, Russell reflects upon how the day's experience typifies his more general understanding of analysis. In his 1940 lectures, Russell argues that all judgments of perception are ‘of the form “P is part of W”’, and thus when we say of ‘this’ coffee that it has raspberry notes we are making the perceptual judgment that P (raspberry notes) is a part of W, the coffee being tasted, and ‘what we naturally call “this”, is a complex which the judgment of perception partially analyses’ (Russell 1940, 315). Moreover, Russell recognises that ‘we can experience a whole W without knowing what its parts are, but through attention or noticing we can gradually discover more and more of its parts’ (315). Russell did indeed experience the whole of the coffee's taste, and through focused attention, and with a little help from his experienced colleague, he was able to discover more parts of the coffee’s taste.

1. Signal-Sign Systems

Shifting our focus slightly from the claim that philosophy and science are two contrasting efforts to the problem of making sense of life, we will turn in this chapter to explore how this problem has been taken up as a communication problem. This shift to communication problems opens up an entire world of research into language and communication. The effort here, however, will not be to encapsulate the many ways in which communication problems have been addressed, but to follow through on the implications of the previous chapter by employing Claude Shannon’s well-known approach to communication problems in order to highlight the difference between scientific and philosophical approaches to the problem of making sense. This difference will then be tracked through a variety of contexts in this and subsequent chapters, including (in this chapter) the territorial behaviour of animals, the challenges of narrative comprehension in AI research, Claude Steele’s self-affirmation studies, Plato’s view that philosophy is prompted by the contradictory nature of perceptions, and finally Heidegger’s understanding of authenticity. This varied, sinuous path will provide us with a number of threads that we will then draw together in setting forth a critical existentialism that can provide us with the tools to sidestep the tendency to become overly reliant on solutions without a problem, solutions that may become, as Foucault recognised, ‘the fascism that is ingrained in our behavior’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1977, xiii).

a) Information theory

In the late 1940s, while working at Bell Labs, Claude Shannon published his landmark essay, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’. At the outset of this essay Shannon states the problem his approach sets out to resolve:

For those old enough to remember making phone calls from as recently as the 1980s, especially international calls, the quality of the call would often succumb to an acoustic fog of static noise and distortion that would make communication difficult if not impossible.

1. Birth of Analytic Philosophy

The most notable and influential criticisms of Bradley were those of Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, criticisms that are often seen as critical to the advent of analytic philosophy (see Candlish 2007 and Della Rocca 2013 [discussed below]). As a sociological and descriptive fact, the history of twentiethcentury philosophy in the English-speaking world is marked by a shift away from Idealism and Pragmatism towards an approach that models itself on the use of scientific methods, which in philosophy is best seen in the application of the formal analytic tools of logic and set theory. Although the task of identifying the precise point that marks the beginning of this shift is fraught with difficulties, turning to Moore and Russell is far from an arbitrary choice. The primary reason for this is that this is the narrative Russell himself tells. As Russell recalls, ‘It was towards the end of 1898 that Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel. Moore led the way, but I followed closely in his footsteps’ (Russell 1959, 54). Bradley was grouped in the Idealist crowd with Hegel, and thus their rebellion against Hegel is exemplified in their critique of Bradley (on the errors of Russell grouping Bradley with Hegel, see Candlish 2007, 29–30). Whether the break with Idealism (and by extension the break with Pragmatism and continental philosophy) is truly a clean and definitive break has been hotly contested of late (see Bell et. al. 2015, Gordon 2012). For our purposes, we will think through the details of this ‘break’ by looking at the role the Third Man Argument plays in both Moore's and Russell’s arguments. By looking at both Bradley's and Moore’s/Russell's arguments as arguments that develop in an effort to respond to the TMA, the implications and consequences of their debate for twentieth-century philosophy will become much clearer, and along the way we will further motivate my argument supporting problematic Ideas.

2. Moore on Bradley

When Russell looks to the ‘end of 1898’ as the beginning of the rebellion against Kant and Hegel, he is referring to Moore's now famous essay ‘The Nature of Judgment’ (Moore 1899).

A final problem that will occupy us in the pages to follow is the problem of the one and the many. In his final publication, Donald Davidson discussed a version of this problem as the problem of predication (see §16). The problem, in short, is how to account for the relation between a predicate, descriptor, or universal and the particular subjects that bear this predicate. This problem arises when we take up the Stranger's challenge in the Sophist (see Davidson 2005a, 80–1) and wonder how we can meaningfully make true and false statements, such as ‘Theaetetus sits’ or ‘Theaetetus flies’ (Sophist 260A-C), when, as in the case of false statements, there is no particular subject (Theaetetus) for whom the predicate (…is flying) applies. How can we meaningfully refer to or speak of that which does not exist? Davidson will chart the history of attempts to address this problem, beginning with Plato’s, and he ends by offering his own suggested solution (to be discussed in §16). Long before turning to Davidson, we will begin with Plato's account of the relationship between the concepts and categories through which we think about the world and the many particulars that are identified by way of these concepts and categories. What is this relationship? Do we again have another version of the problem of relations, this time the problem of the relation between the One category, universal, or form and the Many particulars that share in this One form? It is to these questions that we now turn.

What is new, truly new? If we say that some event or phenomenon, A, is truly new, then by what criterion do we make this claim? The most immediate answer appears to be that what is new is unlike anything that preceded it, or there are no phenomena or events prior to A that include or harbour A, for if they did then A would not be truly new but would be simply the explication of what was already implicitly present. The problem of the new may therefore not even be a problem. One could echo the sentiments expressed in the book of Ecclesiastes and resign oneself to the view that ‘what has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9, New International Version). If one does accept that there can be something that is truly novel, a reality irreducible to what has preceded it, then we have other problems that come along.

1. Plato, Leibniz and Problematic Fields

Earlier (§5.2) we saw that on Wilfrid Sellars’ reading of Plato it was not until the later dialogues (the Sophist in particular) that Plato was successfully (depending on who you ask!) able to deal with the problem of non-being, and hence adequately address the nature of Becoming whereby things are continuously becoming something they are not (Sellars 1955, 430). Sellars points to the Republic (478d), for instance, and notes that Becoming is placed ‘between’ the unchanging reality or Being of the Forms and the nonexistent, though ‘he could have viewed Becoming as somehow a mixture of Being (the Forms) and a Not-Being conceived as an ontological principle or, better, stuff’ (430). As Socrates puts it in the passage from the Republic Sellars cites, ‘if anything should turn up such that it both is and is not, that sort of thing would lie between that which purely and absolutely is and that which wholly is not’ (478d). Becoming is thus a mixture of what is and is not, and this understanding of becoming as mixture, as we have argued, becomes a central theme in the Philebus. As discussed earlier, Plato is quite forthright in his call for a method of mixture. As Socrates puts it, ‘the wise men of the present day make the one and the many too quickly or too slowly, in haphazard fashion … they disregard all that lies between them’ (17a). In other words, in light of the fact that ‘God revealed in the universe two elements, the infinite and the finite’, most rush off either to embrace the One (Being) or the Infinite (Becoming) without looking to ‘a third, made by combining these two’ (16c). Plato offers the examples of grammar and musical composition to explain the nature of this combined mixture, which in (§5.7) we called a relative relation. With the arguments we have developed to this point, we can now expand upon Plato's conception of a mixture between the One and Infinite, or an absolute relation as I called it earlier, and bring in the notion of a problematic Idea in light of the Leibnizian arguments discussed in the previous section.

In his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Immanuel Kant raises an important question about the status of philosophy: despite its long, illustrious history, why cannot philosophy, ‘as other sciences, attain universal and lasting acclaim?’ (Kant 2014, 5). Almost 130 years later, and after a century of impressive developments in the sciences, Bertrand Russell reaffirms Kant's observation, noting that ‘[i]f you ask a mathematician, a mineralogist, a historian, or any other man of learning, what definite body of truths has been ascertained by his science, his answer will last as long as you are willing to listen’. If you ask the same question of a philosopher, however, ‘he will, if he is candid, have to confess that his study has not achieved positive results such as have been achieved by other sciences’ (Russell 2001, 90). More recently, things have gotten arguably worse for philosophers, with some, such as Daniel Dennett, directing his fire at the continental tradition and blaming them for contributing to the cultural climate that allowed someone like Donald Trump to be elected as President of the United States. ‘I think what the postmodernists did’, Dennett claims, ‘was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts.’ In taking up the theme of truth and relevance, as this book will, and by drawing from the work of Gilles Deleuze in the process (a philosopher who could be grouped among the postmodern philosophers), it may appear that I am simply adding yet another work to the list of those that not only do not contribute to the ‘definite body of truths’, as Russell aspired to do, but even worse contribute to the contemporary cynicism ‘about truth and facts’ by watering down truth with discussions of relevance.

In discussing truth and relevance, however, the plan for this work is not to diminish the status of truth, or to provide support and comfort for post-truth relativism. Rather, we will begin with Kant and Russell, and in particular their recognition that philosophy pales by comparison to the sciences when it comes to attaining a ‘definite body of truths’.

1. Arbitrary Power

In this chapter I will continue to develop the distinction between forced and authentic narratives, or what I will also call free narratives. To provide a context that will enable us to clarify this distinction, and then connect the discussion to politics, we will begin by focusing on classical republicanism. With the emphasis it places on doing what is necessary to avoid arbitrary power, or situations where one is at the unpredictable mercy of another, classical republican thought has focused heavily on determining how to resist such arbitrary forms of power, such as through an institutionalised system of checks and balances. In what may seem to be a surprising connection, we will find important parallels between these concerns and efforts of classical republicans and those of Deleuze and the existentialists. Exploring these parallels, and then discussing arguments from recent work on Marxism and the history of capitalism, will provide us with further tools to be deployed in the next two chapters as we develop a critical existentialism.

a) Forced narratives

In his classic book, Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss sets forth an important analysis of the difference between classical and modern natural right. In relation to the former, Strauss claims that ‘[i]t is the hierarchic order of man’s natural constitution which supplies the basis for natural right as the classics understood it’ (Strauss 1953, 127). In other words, human beings possess a higher faculty which is capable of accessing a reality that is irreducible to the everyday reality of experience – the Forms or Ideas for Plato – but this can only be achieved as humans come to realise the perfection that is essential to their nature, and, according to the classical tradition, this perfection occurs only when individuals subordinate their individuality to the identity of the polis, or to civil society. Strauss is clear on this point: ‘Man cannot reach his perfection except in society or, more precisely, in civil society … or the city as the classics conceived of it … a closed society’ (127). The city or polis thus functions as nothing less than the condition for the full realisation of the individual, and the moral obligations and duties of the individual are inseparable from what is good for the city as a whole, or for the common good: ‘The city has therefore ultimately no other end than the individual.

1. TMA and Regress

We can quickly bring Bradley's arguments into the discussion by way of the problem of regress (or TMA). As we saw (§5.2), in the Parmenides the regress gets started by way of processes associated with self-predication (SP) and nonidentity (NI). If we take the One single Form, the Beautiful in the case of music as discussed above, then the Form of Beauty is itself beautiful. Plato is quite forthright in this regard when, in the Phaedo (100c), Socrates presumes that ‘whatever else is beautiful apart from absolute beauty is beautiful because it partakes of that absolute beauty, and for no other reason’. The beautiful sounds of music are in turn beautiful because they partake ‘of that absolute beauty’, and thus the Form and the many sounds related to music all share in the same quality – they are all beautiful. Since a beautiful thing, however, is (by NI) not to be identified with the Form it partakes in, we need a higher form to account for the shared quality of beauty the many sounds and the first Form of Beauty all have. This higher Form is itself beautiful, and in turn capable of being seen as such by virtue of yet another Form, which initiates, as we saw, the regress. It is precisely the shared quality of beauty (F-ness [as in §5.2]), and the relationship it has to that which has the quality, that brings about (by NI) Bradley's famous (or infamous) regress argument.

2. Bradley on Relations

Bradley's arguments against the reality of relations can be found in many places, and we will discuss them at some length (in the next section for instance), but the third chapter of Appearance and Reality, ‘Relation and Quality’, is the most relevant for our current purposes. The central argument of the chapter is to show that while the ‘arrangement of given facts into relations and qualities may be necessary in practice … it is theoretically unintelligible’ (Bradley 1893, 25). To restate the point made in the Introduction regarding Kant's observation that most of Hume's critics had misunderstood Hume's point, Bradley is likewise not contesting the relevance of relations and qualities, he simply argues that they are not ultimately justified in reality.

If the new is new by virtue of its relation to that which precedes it, that which is not new, then we have a relationship that needs to be explained if we are to understand what it is that makes something new. We need to explain, for instance, the relationship between the phenomenon that is new, A, and the phenomenon or set of phenomena, let us call it B, that explains why A is new since A is unlike B but nonetheless related to B in some way. For instance, when Haydn first performed some of the pieces he composed while living in London, many considered them to be astonishingly new. In fact, a new category emerged in the wake of Haydn's compositions, the category now known as the Classical tradition in music, a tradition that is different from the Baroque tradition. At the time of his London performances, however, there was not yet the Classical label with which to identify Haydn's music, and yet this music was sufficiently unlike the music of his time (i.e., the Baroque music of his period) that it was considered new. What the new is new relative to, therefore, is important. Haydn's music was considered new not because of how it differed from the cuisine of his time, though that could play a role in creating the culture or world in which Haydn's music became possible, but primarily in how it related to other music. Even if we do not contest these points, however, we still have the problem of accounting for the relationship between A, Haydn's music in this case, and B, the Baroque music of his time. We cannot account for the novelty of A by simply focusing on A, for then we would neglect B, and it is the relationship between A and B that explains why A is new. We similarly cannot explain the relationship between A and B by just focusing on B, for then we ignore A, and it is the novelty of A we want to explain.

1. Carnap's ‘Elimination of Metaphysics’

As has been noted before (Mares 2010, 53), the difference between the analytic and continental traditions in philosophy can pretty well be summed up by the titles of two books – The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (1991), by Michael Dummett, and Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (1928), by Martin Heidegger. Picking up where we left off with our earlier discussion of the differing approaches Heidegger and Carnap took to purifying the errors that seep into everyday language (§13.7), we can begin to explore this difference further. For Heidegger, the destiny of metaphysics has been the forgetting of Being, or the turning away from Being as the condition for the possibility of the presence of beings, for that which is determinately given to thought. The scientific and logical modes of thought presuppose, on Heidegger's view, the presencing of Being, or the ‘Nothing that nothings’. To base logic on the ‘Nothing that nothings’, however, is for Carnap to turn to the type of metaphysics he seeks to eliminate through logical analysis. As we highlighted in our earlier discussion, statements that cannot be logically constructed are for Carnap at best pseudo-statements. Logical constructions, moreover, must be founded on something determinate; to take Carnap's example, the word ‘teavy’ is a word where, ‘[i]f no criterion of application for [it] is stipulated, then nothing is asserted by the sentences in which it occurs, they are but pseudo-statements’ (Carnap 1996, 64). The same is true as well, as we saw earlier, for Heidegger's terms ‘Being’ or the ‘Nothing that nothings’. In particular, for Carnap, if a word is to have a meaning then it must be reducible to other words and sentences and ultimately ‘to the words which occur in the so-called “observation sentences” or “protocol sentences”. It is through this reduction that the word acquires its meaning’ (63).

In the preface to Unpopular Essays, published in 1950, the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bertrand Russell introduces his collection of essays by claiming that they were ‘written at various times during the last fifteen years, [and] are concerned to combat, in one way or another, the growth of dogmatism, whether of the Right or of the Left, which has hitherto characterized our tragic century’ (Russell 1950, preface). Russell indeed witnessed a tragic century – two world wars, a holocaust and a Cold War that threatened nuclear annihilation. He did not hesitate to speak out against these tragedies, even suffering the loss of his job at Cambridge and six months in prison in 1918 for a speech he gave criticising the US entry into the First World War; forty-three years later, at the age of eighty-nine, he would be imprisoned for seven days for participating in a London antinuclear demonstration in 1961. Speaking truth to power, to the dogmatism, partisanship and irrationality Russell saw in society and politics, was thus a lifelong passion and commitment that he took more seriously than most. Writing now, seventy years after the publication of Unpopular Essays, and in the midst of a global pandemic, one could argue that Russell would be just as concerned about today’s society as he was about his own. In fact, Russell himself saw this possibility when, as he began his Moncure Conway Lecture for 1922, ‘Free Thought and Official Propaganda’, he noted that ‘unless a vigorous and vigilant public opinion can be aroused in defence of [freedom of thought and freedom of the individual], there will be much less of both a hundred years hence than there is now’ (Russell 1996, 125). With the hyper-partisan rhetoric gripping contemporary US politics, the rise of autocratic regimes throughout the world (Russia, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, etc.), and antisemitic hate crimes and white nationalism on the rise, the latter often with the tacit approval of the former US President Donald Trump, it seems quite apparent that we do not have, in 2022, the ‘vigorous and vigilant’ defence of freedom that Russell called for in 1922.