Introduction to Problematics

The Deleuze-Lucretius encounter begins with the main concept guiding our whole project: Deleuze's theory of immanent ideas. For Deleuze, ideas are problems, and the task of this first chapter is to define what exactly Deleuze means by the problem. Since a philosophical theory, Deleuze argues, is basically a developed response to a selected problem, the first task of any philosophical theory is to select its constituting problem. Once we see the specific sense that Deleuze attaches to the problem, we can then develop the basic structure of Deleuzean ideas. This structure, which we call the problem-structure, has three parts. This chapter will articulate the three-part structure of the problem as it operates in the three most important theorists of ideas: Plato, Kant and Deleuze.

Each section of what follows is dedicated to an analysis of the respective theories of the problem in these three theorists of ideas, starting with Plato. According to Deleuze, Plato developed the theory of ideas as a method for selecting from among people who all claim to be the true lover of wisdom, that is, the true philosopher. This very method of selection, however, ends up destabilising and inverting itself. As Deleuze argues, Plato is the first philosopher to invert Platonism. In the end, Deleuze extracts from Plato's theory of transcendent ideas the basic distribution of a three-part problem-structure. The second section will do the same to Kant, whose theory of regulative ideas both appropriates and transforms Plato's account. Kant's improvement on Plato, according to Deleuze, is to make explicit the truly problematic nature of ideas. Ideas, for Kant, are like horizons that guide the understanding in its ordering of nature. Kant's critical move is to distinguish between the illegitimate or transcendent and legitimate or immanent uses of ideas in the ordering of nature. Kantian ideas are legitimately employed when they have a merely regulative, rather than constitutive, role. In addition, Kant will determine the three-part structure of ideas even more distinctly than Plato.