The Underground Current of the Idealism of Problems

The article deals with the fundamental influence on Deleuze of the little-studied strain of French philosophy and epistemology from the 20th century that deals with such concepts as question, theme and problem. Some figures adjoining this lineage are known outside France (Bergson, Bachelard, Canguilhem, Althusser, Foucault), and others are just beginning to arouse intense interest (Lautman, Ruyer, Simondon); but they have rarely been seen as part of a single tradition of theorizing about problematics. And in spite of the fact (or thanks to it) that thinking about problematics has nominally entered the mainstream of the contemporary academy as a principal methodological basis, its actual current remains unknown and underground.The author offers a brief analysis of Martial Gueroult’s dianoematics. Dianoematics is a structuralist approach to the history of philosophy which consists of two parts: the history of the history of philosophy and the philosophy of the history of philosophy. Gueroult regards the latter as a transcendental science, one which takes philosophy (or, more precisely, the multiplicity of philosophies or problematics) and the conditions of its possibility as its subject. When philosophies lay claim to timeless truth about Real, this inoculates them against any reduction to the pure subjectivity of thinkers or the social circumstances of their thinking. And so Gueroult postulates that the philosophical choices which ground philosophies have their own unitary ahistorical logic. That unity of logic, however, does not reduce the multitude of philosophies to one. Therefore, in place of a single Real there is a multiplicity of Reals which are internal to philosophies — that is the so-called “radical idealism” of Gueroult.The author points out the interplay between Gueroult’s approach not only with the history of philosophy from What Is Philosophy? but also with Laruelle’s non-philosophy, with which Deleuze carries on a dialogue in his book. While Deleuze tries to “sublate” Gueroult’s idealism by taking it as a positive basis for materialist thought regarding immanence, Laruelle takes it as the clearest expression of the idealism inherent in all philosophies and uses it negatively as a building material for non-philosophy.