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The Limits of Conceptual Thinking

Article in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy · July 2014

DOI: 10.5325/jspecphil.28.3.0219

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The Limits of Conceptual Thinking

Rudolf Bernet
ku leuven

abstract: This article emphasizes the importance of a conceptual analysis of our

experience of the real world, it explores new forms of conceptual thinking, and it
investigates their inherent and persistent limits. It shows that the limits are on both
sides of conceptual thinking—in what allows for it and in what possibly escapes it.
I begin by summarizing Heidegger’s and Deleuze’s objections against making philo-
sophical thinking a matter of a subject that re-cognizes, represents to itself, and con-
ceptualizes identical objects. In a second step I make use of Deleuze to explore the
possibility of a new form of conceptual philosophical thinking that operates without the
presuppositions of the (Kantian) “image of thought.” The last part of the article then
deals with how Husserl, Bergson, and Spinoza promote a form of intuitive thinking that
overcomes the limits of what we can conceptually conceive.

keywords: concept, intuition, representation, Heidegger, Deleuze

Philosophers have thought more about the nature of thinking than about
anything else. After Plato and Aristotle, philosophers’ main concern was
to promote good, that is, correct, thinking. Because correct thinking was
achieved best in propositional statements, thinking became a matter of
logic, and logic became a discipline dealing with the formulation of true
predicative sentences.

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 28, no. 3, 2014

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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 8 rudolf bernet

In the twentieth century, many philosophers expressed their

dissatisfaction with this view. Some, such as Heidegger, have pointed to
the ontological presuppositions of a logic that makes truth a matter of
correspondence between predicative sentences and the reality of states
of affairs. Other philosophers, such as Deleuze, have emphasized that
the art of forming interesting philosophical problems cannot be reduced
to the formulation of interrogative predicative sentences that can lead
to a solution under the form of an affirmative predicative proposition.
True philosophical problems will possibly never reach a final solution,
and both their formulation and their treatment require more than the
correct use of pregiven clear and distinct concepts. Deleuze also stresses
that since logically correct propositions can be perfectly trivial and irrel-
evant, logic provides no guarantee for good philosophical thinking. Even
Husserl is convinced that a logic of consequence or noncontradiction is
insufficient to account for true knowledge. For him, more is required—
namely, a transcendental logic that is less concerned with the forma-
tion of correct statements than with intuitive acts of thinking. Bergson,
finally, is well known for promoting “intuition” as an alternative to the
intellectualism of a conceptual philosophical thinking. His was thereby
inspired not only by Plato’s theory of Ideas but also by Spinoza’s doc-
trine concerning a “knowledge of the third kind.” For Bergson, intuitive
knowledge as a synthetic insight into the unity of organically articulated
and dynamically developing multiplicities was meant to form an alterna-
tive to Kant’s account of knowledge in terms of an analytical conceptual
determination of a raw sensory material. The criticism of logical thinking
became thus associated with a skepticism concerning the epistemologi-
cal value not only of predication but also of all conceptual thinking—and
especially of dialectics as a speculative logic of concepts.
Deleuze’s description of philosophical thinking must be understood
in this historical context. It is an attempt to reconcile Bergson’s intuitive
knowledge with a new form of conceptual thinking. Using concepts for
the sake of forming new philosophical problems can only mean that old
philosophical concepts are pushed beyond their logical limits and that
new concepts and new conceptual orders are created. This famously led
Deleuze to rehabilitate Kant as a thinker of the excess rather than of the
fixation of limits—that is, as a philosopher who understands the relevance
of illusions. Instead of defending a theory of sensus communis or consen-
sus among the subjective faculties, Kant now appears to be a philosopher
who has tried to think how and why each faculty has a natural inclination

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 limits of conceptual thinking 9

to transcend its natural and logical limits (Deleuze 1994, 143–46; 2000,
186–91). In Deleuze’s own “transcendental empiricism” (1994, 138ff.;
2000, 180ff.), it is the invisible that constitutes the true philosophical
problem of perception—just as intensity constitutes the true issue of sen-
sibility, the phantasms and simulacra of imagination, the dissimilar and
immemorial of recollection, and what we do not yet think of thinking.
It will not come as a surprise, then, that in his criticism of a traditional
“image of thought” dominated by a logic of representation, and in his char-
acterization of a thinking in search of the unthought, Deleuze frequently
crosses the path of Heidegger’s (late) philosophy. It is especially striking
how such a thinking of the unthought is related for both philosophers to
a form of thinking that consists in deciphering signs and in recollecting
a past that has never been present. Independently of each other but with
remarkable agreement Heidegger (1992, 183ff.) and Deleuze (1994, 140ff.;
2000, 183ff.) both do not spare their praise for Plato’s doctrine of remi-
niscence as a kind of memory that points to a nonrepresentational and
nonsubjective form of knowledge and thought. Read through a Deleuzian
lens, the later Heidegger, just like Kant, becomes a thinker of transgression
as much as of finitude. Such a transgressing of the limits of our habitual
way of thinking is, for both Heidegger and Deleuze, not a matter of a sub-
jective choice. It, rather, belongs to the response to a pressing demand or
command that has its origin in the event of the encounter with a mys-
tery that remarkably transcends our subjective means of comprehension.
Transcendence thus involves a transgression of the limits of what we can
think by ourselves, and this transgression is made necessary by the insist-
ing force of a presence that is both excessive and receding. Rather than a
subjective act of transgression, it is an event where the oyster of subjective
autonomy is forced to open itself.
With the exception of Husserl and Heidegger, phenomenologists
may have thought too little about the nature of thinking. Anxious, as
most of them were, to free themselves from neo-Kantianism and specu-
lative intellectualism, they have mainly explored the role of the body in
perception, affectivity, and social life. At the same time and inversely,
analytic philosophers have devoted most of their efforts to conceptual
analysis. Things have changed on the side of analytic philosophy, where
perception and other forms of bodily enactments have become popular
areas of research. More needs to be done on the side of phenomenology
when it comes to the investigation of the nature and the possible limits
of conceptual thinking.

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 10 rudolf bernet

I shall proceed in three steps. I begin with summarizing Heidegger’s

and Deleuze’s objections against making philosophical thinking a matter
of a transcendent or transcendental subject re-cognizing, representing to
itself, and conceptualizing identical objects. In a second step I explore,
especially with the help of Deleuze, the possibility of a form of conceptual
philosophical thinking that operates without the metaphysical presupposi-
tions of the traditional image of thought. The last part of the article is then
devoted to the examination of forms of philosophical thinking that pretend
to dispense with the use of concepts. All this is meant to emphasize the
importance of a conceptual analysis of our experience of the real world, to
explore new forms of conceptual thinking, and to investigate their inherent
and persistent limits. These limits are actually on both sides of conceptual
thinking—in what allows for it and in what possibly escapes it.

What Is Wrong with Representational and Conceptual Thinking?

Heidegger is well known for having declared, already more than half
a century ago, that we do not yet think. He added that since science
does not think either, a new beginning of philosophical thinking can
learn nothing from science. In a turn most typical for the circular path of
many of his reflections, Heidegger also claims that the first task of a new
philosophical thinking is to think about our not yet thinking. While not
constituting what is most worth thinking (das Denkwürdigste), our not
yet thinking is at least what is most problematic or thought-provoking
(das Bedenklichste) (Heidegger 1968, 100, 121, 126; 1984, 40, 85–86).
However, our not yet thinking becomes only truly and urgently thought-
provoking when we become aware of its fatal consequences. An acute
awareness of the shortcomings of our habitual way of thinking is thus
needed to open ourselves to another, new mode thinking—to its genesis,
necessity, and direction.
In his account of these shortcomings the early Heidegger, just like
Husserl, most of the time refers to the crisis in the foundation of modern
science. In his later work the criticism of modern technology and of a
globalized technoscientific culture becomes more and more prominent.
According to the latter version, technology not only stands in the way of
a new thinking; it also cannot think its own essence. No wonder, since
this essence is not technological but metaphysical. Consequently, for
the later Heidegger the tasks of questioning the essence of technology

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 limits of conceptual thinking 11

and the essence of metaphysical thinking become essentially linked.

Characterizing technoscientific thinking as “one-track thinking” (einglei-
siges Denken) based on a “one-sided view” (einseitiges Meinen) (Heidegger
1968, 34; 1984, 58) or “representative thinking” (vorstellendes Denken) is a
philosophical statement that already presupposes the openness to another
form of thinking. The realization of an extreme danger holds the promise
of a salvation. In the end, for Heidegger, only the call of Being can save us
by calling us into a new way of thinking that attends to a mode of presence
of things that arises from the event of an unconcealment rather than from
subjective representation. What the new thinking is about is thus the truth
of Being as the event of a reticent self-presencing of Being in its difference
from the beingness (Seiendheit) of all beings.
In Heidegger’s reading, traditional modern thinking, originating
from Galileo and Descartes, is a form of scientific-philosophical thinking
where mental representations turn things into ob-jects for a subjective
inspection, which provides a secure knowledge founded on self-evident
givenness. Criticizing Descartes for his account of representative think-
ing where objects are made present or are represented by an egological
subject in their being present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit), Heidegger obvi-
ously also has Husserl in mind. In his later texts Heidegger associates
this representative mode of thinking more and more with a search for
security, control, and domination that cannot be ascribed to an individ-
ual subject or cogito. Representative thinking becomes thus an epochal
event in the history of Being, the mark of the civilization of Modern
Times where technoscience and especially technological calculation
are predominant. Technology projects the same metaphysical image of
Being on all beings—human beings included. As a consequence, the
claim of things to be understood in themselves and according to their
particular modes of being is ruled out in favor of turning them into
objects-for-us that simply mirror our own cognitive capacities and will to
know. For Heidegger, technology as an offspring of modern metaphysics
has completely substituted itself for the initial Greek understanding of
Being as Physis. Technoscience has transformed the presencing dyna-
mism of nature into a static Weltbild that, as a human image of the world,
is finally nothing else than a Menschbild. Representative thinking must
thus be understood as an endeavor to picture or map the world in such
a way that things become fully present, accessible and transparent for
our intelligence, and in such a way that they offer no resistance to our
manipulation and industrial production of artificial goods.

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 12 rudolf bernet

For Heidegger, a certain image of the human subject is an important

ingredient of this metaphysical image of the world in which representa-
tions (Vorstellungen) are the means of a subjective will to know, which is
in truth a will to power. The conception of the subject that best serves
this global technoscientific-metaphysical enterprise is Descartes’s cogito,
where perceiving, feeling, and so on are claimed to be a kind of thinking
and where thinking is ascribed to a representing mind that is also aware
of itself. As Heidegger puts it: Vorstellen (representing) becomes a Sich-
Vorstellen (representing to oneself ). He (1968, 85; 1984, 33) also refers to
Nietzsche’s analysis of Vorstellen as a Nachstellen (pursuing)—that is, a
kind of persecutory examination where everything is torn into the open
and where things are stripped of their latency and of their secret.1 For
Heidegger (1968, 73; 1984, 69) this nachstellende Vorstellen (pursuing
representation) is a Verstellen (dissimulation and blocking), a pseudo-
understanding of things that creates a false image of the world by reduc-
ing the presence of things to how the human mind posits or represents
them to itself as flat phenomena.
The metaphysics associated with representation is thus not only a
metaphysics of the will to know but also a metaphysics where the presence
of things is reduced to what one can presently perceive of them in full
self-evidence. Representative thinking belongs to the realm and reign of a
metaphysics of presence, where Being means being-present, where being-
present means remaining-present, and where the temporal dimensions of
the future and the past are always understood as modifications of a stable
and static present. Heidegger (1968, 93; 1984, 37) again credits Nietzsche
for having shown how this metaphysics of presence that underlies modern
representational thinking is actually motivated by the fear of “passing”
(Vergehen)—specifically a fear of the passing away of presence.
When accounting for what is wrong with the modern way of thinking
and for what is needed for a new thinking, Deleuze comes surprisingly
close to Heidegger. Heidegger’s opposition between modern, foundational
thinking and a thinking looking into the “abyss” (Abgrund) of Being finds
a most favorable echo in Deleuze’s (1994, 272ff.; 2000, 349ff.) assigning
philosophy the new task to think what is “profound” (profond) or “with-
out ground” (sans fond).2 The same can also be said for Deleuze’s (1994,
140; 2000, 183) emphasis on an “essential forgetting” (oubli essentiel)
that is obliterated by modern thinking. More generally, Deleuze’s analy-
sis of how representational thinking builds on a system of metaphysical

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 limits of conceptual thinking 13

presuppositions advantageously complements Heidegger’s stress on the

ontological prejudices of modern subjectivism. In light of these large
agreements, their disagreement about whether science thinks or does
not think seems to be a matter of mere terminology. Indeed, Deleuze, no
less than Heidegger, holds that philosophy must emancipate itself from
the way in which modern science thinks. They also both affirm that it is
by means of “signs” that we are led from science to a new philosophical
thinking. But where Heidegger (1968, 11; 1984, 7) sees in “man” such a
sign,3 Deleuze (1994, 140; 2000, 182) recommends that we take our lead
from the encounter with signs that hold no promise of signification—that
is, unintelligible sensuous signs. We will also see later that Deleuze only
half agrees with Heidegger’s claim that what most deserves our thinking is
how thinking and Being, despite being essentially different, nevertheless
essentially belong together.
For Deleuze, it is Kant’s concept of an identical I accompanying
all my representations that forms the anchor point of the metaphysical
system of modern representative thinking. This identical I, who thinks,
thinks by means of identical concepts and of eternal logical laws. This
formal logical thinking becomes true knowledge or experience only
when it is properly applied to the material of sensuous perception.
What Deleuze (1994, 262ff.; 2000, 337ff.) calls “the four iron collars”
(quadruple carcan) of representation are the suppositions one makes in
order to secure a successful and lasting encounter between the categories
of thinking and the manifold of sensory material. They support a think-
ing that pursues the goal of transforming a chaotic manifold of brute
data into a stable intelligible order. When compared with Heidegger, Is it possible to replace
the highlighted passage
for Deleuze representative thinking has more to do with stabilization with the following:
than domination, more with territorialization than globalization, more “Compared with
with homogenization than objectivation, more with domestication than Heidegger, representative
thinking has more to do
universalization. But Deleuze agrees with Heidegger that representative for Deleuze with…”
thinking is devoted to order and security, that it seeks to reduce dif-
ference to identity, and that it aims at conceptual determination and
adequate judgments.
These are, then, the four presuppositions of the philosophical sys-
tem of representation (Deleuze 1994, 266ff.; 2000, 341ff.): First, in order
to be more easily subsumed under a concept, the intensive qualities of
the sensible must be homogeneous. Second, in order for judgments to
become the main form of conceptual thinking, the meaning of Being

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 14 rudolf bernet

must be analogous. Third, in order to allow logic to rule over thinking,

the negativity of what is problematic must be a matter of negation,
and difference, a matter of opposition. Fourth, in order to avoid the
fragmentation of the thinking I, it must be expelled from the temporal
stream of consciousness.
This system of modern representative thinking deserves to be called
an “image of thought” because it changes the unforeseeable movement of
the process of thinking into something to be thought as a stable and eas-
ily graspable totality. This mirror image or narcissistic image of thought
is what thinking becomes in most of modern philosophy. Deleuze’s
(1994, 129ff.; 2000, 169ff.) eight “postulates” of the image of thought are
“presuppositions” modern philosophers make even before they begin to
think. The first postulates concern the goodwill of all who think and their
spontaneous interest in truth. One also presupposes that the different
human faculties cooperate harmoniously and form a commonsensical
basis for all philosophical speculation. Accordingly, one also claims that
the different subjective faculties are led by the same values in their inves-
tigation of identical objects. As a consequence, difference and repetition
are reduced to identity, and the negativity of error is said to be profitable
for the attainment of truth. Finally, one presupposes that a logic of propo-
sition will be able to guarantee truth and rule over the formulation of all
meaningful problems. On the basis of these eight presuppositions there
remains no doubt that all problems can be solved and that all learning
will result in a stable form of knowledge.
One can easily guess from Deleuze’s criticism of these presuppo-
sitions and of the consequences of an image of thought governed by
representation what his new way of philosophical thinking must be. It
is a thinking inspired by interesting problems rather than by the search
for true judgments. For such a thinking it is stupidity rather than error
that forms an interesting philosophical problem (Deleuze 1994, 150ff.;
2000, 196ff.). What the unavoidable encounter with stupidity teaches
us is that a fruitful and creative philosophical thinking is about what
still has no recognizable form, it operates without a priori criteria for
relevance, and it lacks the secure ground of all orthodoxy. Unlike repre-
sentative thinking, it takes qualitative differences and sensible intensi-
ties seriously. Freeing itself from the yoke of logic and dialectics, this
philosophical thinking leads to a proliferation of newly created concepts
and rehabilitates the conceptual meaning of singular events.

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 limits of conceptual thinking 15

In Defense of Conceptual Thinking

One can summarize Heidegger’s and Deleuze’s criticisms of modern

thinking by referring to its objectivism, its subjectivism, and its domina-
tion by logic. When logic rules over how things are made present from the
point of view of an interchangeable egological subject, then truth becomes
a matter of correct judgments depending on the correct use of the subjec-
tive faculties and on the proper application of pregiven concepts to raw
sensuous material. As a consequence, overcoming this way of thinking
seems to necessarily entail a departure not only from Cartesianism and
Kantianism but also from all conceptually mediated knowledge. Before
turning to Heidegger’s conception of a thinking that is rooted in the truth
of Being and Bergson’s or Spinoza’s idea of an intuitive knowledge, I would
like to give conceptual philosophical thinking another chance.
When one objects to a standardized mode of thinking in which
knowledge is a matter of recognition, in which recognition becomes
the identification of something familiar, and in which all experience is
made dependent on its matching our concepts, then an alternative way
of thinking must start with sensuous experience and how it gives raise to
concepts. In such a view the meaning of concepts can never be entirely
conceptual, because concepts are formed on the basis of an experience,
the meaning (or the lack of meaning) of which is not yet conceptual. Such
a dependence of concepts on the meaning of preconceptual experience
also entails that conceptual thinking cannot any longer be considered a
matter of an intellect simply following logical rules and blindly apply-
ing or projecting ready-made conceptual forms on a meaningless matter.
Under these premises, phenomenology presents itself as a promising
starting point.
For Husserl, a conceptual thinking that is not based on or at least
accompanied by an intuitive insight into the matters affirmed is either
thoughtless thinking or empty metaphysical speculation. It falls under
what the Logical Investigations calls “inauthentic thinking,” which compre-
hends mathematical calculus, thoughtless logical operations, and empty
conceptual constructions in philosophy. “Authentic thinking,” on the
contrary, comprehends a form of conceptual thinking, the truth-value of
which is corroborated by a categorical intuition into the state of affairs
asserted by a judgment. This sounds more Kantian than it actually is.
Husserl diverges decisively from Kant’s view on conceptual knowledge in

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 16 rudolf bernet

at least three respects. First, for Husserl conceptual knowledge is founded

on a preconceptual (usually perceptual) experience that is already a kind
of knowledge. Second, for Husserl the way in which concepts articulate
sensible experience is not a matter for a transcendental deduction. Third,
for Husserl the validity of conceptual knowledge does not depend on the
legitimate use of the faculty of understanding but, rather, on thinking as
an intuitive process. For Husserl, authentic thinking is a matter of intui-
tively fulfilled judgment.
This being said, Husserl’s view on conceptual thinking also has its
limits. For many readers, its most striking limit is the dependence on a
notion of truth where truth is still a matter of how judgments correspond
to real states of affairs—not in se, however, but as they present themselves
in a categorical intuition. Not only is this said to be a problematic notion
of truth, one also questions whether truth can be the final criterion for
relevant and creative conceptual thinking. One can, in other words, put
forward an alternative notion of truth that rules out pure conceptual think-
ing, or one can contest that creative conceptual thinking is a matter of
truth. Heidegger stands for the first option; Deleuze, for the second.
Unlike Kant, Husserl also has a strong concern for the genesis of con-
cepts. For Husserl, pregiven concepts must have been formed, and the
insight into the process of their formation is crucial for the rigorous deter-
mination of their meaning and of their use. According to Husserl, con-
cepts must have their origin in inner or outer perception—as one can see
already from his first publication on the origin of the concept of “number.”
Overcoming the psychologism that still weighed on his early account
of concept formation also allowed Husserl to refine his theory of outer
perception. The most decisive achievement of this phenomenologi-
cal theory of perception is its liberation from all the presuppositions
of representationalism. For Husserl, there is no need for any internal
intermediaries or mental screens in the relation between perceiver and
perceived. Perception has an immediate grasp on reality—to such an
extent that, as Jocelyn Benoist has often claimed,4 all talk about a percep-
tion’s “access” to reality or about a “givenness” of reality to the perceiver
becomes highly problematic. Husserl’s phenomenological theory of per-
ception must also be credited with the insight that perception involves
meaning. Not only can a perceiver recognize something for which he
has no name or concept, but he can also explore its qualities without
making use of linguistic meanings. Merleau-Ponty has aptly called

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 limits of conceptual thinking 17

such an explorative perception of the qualitative properties of things a

“seeing-as.” Building on Husserl’s claim of a “primacy of perception,”
Merleau-Ponty has also shown—partially against Husserl himself—that
the classical subject–object division fails to grasp the true meaning of
the intercourse between perceiver and perceived—even when changes
of perspective and symbolic equivalences between different perceptual
perspectives are taken into account.
One must admit, however, that Merleau-Ponty stresses the primacy of
perception so much that one finally wonders what concepts and concep-
tual thinking are still good for. On the other hand, Husserl’s claim that
concepts are good for scientific reasoning seems insufficiently in tune with
the primacy of perception. One is therefore inclined to say that the need
for concepts emerges from and in perception—more particularly when the
meaning of what one actually perceives becomes problematic, when the
continuity of a perception is interrupted by the question: “What is it that
I perceive?” This question ordinarily leads not only to a more attentive per-
ception or to a thematization of what one perceives; it also leads to a search
for names and categories. The most common origin or genesis of concepts
thus lies in their answering needs arising in perception. Once a concep-
tual answer is given, the further course of experience can then be either
perceptual or conceptual. The answer can also be delayed when what one
perceives is too strange or when an appropriate concept is not available and
must still be created.
There is no need for us here to go further into the details of how
Husserl conceives of the formation of concepts in terms of empirical or
categorical perceptions being submitted to an eidetic variation. We can
also dispense with making a distinction between empirical and a priori
concepts as well as with questioning whether concepts must indeed, as
Husserl claims, relate to ideal objects. What we cannot leave unmen-
tioned, however (especially before we turn to Deleuze’s views on the cre-
ation of concepts), is that Husserl’s theory of perception and of how it
gives rise to concepts still occasionally falls prey to representationalism
or intellectualism.
While accounting for bodily perception in terms of intentionality
seems (especially in Merleau-Ponty’s formulations) rather unproblematic,
the same cannot be said of Husserl’s theory concerning how sensuous per-
ception is subject to a process of intuitive fulfillment. If sensuous percep-
tion has an immediate intuitive grasp of the perceived, then it can, strictly

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 18 rudolf bernet

speaking, contain no empty intentions or “pretenses” that would need an

intuitive fulfillment. Partial perceptions or perceptual anticipations of what
in the perceived has not yet become fully visible are something essentially
different from empty mental representations or from precipitated state-
ments that for their validation are in need of an intuitive fulfillment. Just
as there are no empty intentions in sensuous perception, the manner in
which incomplete or sketchy perceptions demand further perceptions is
not a matter of confirmation, corroboration, or verification.
A similar kind of intellectualism also prevails in Husserl’s concep-
tion of the relation between perception and conceptual knowledge. For
Husserl, perception not only provides a knowledge of what is perceived;
this knowledge is also already articulated under the form of a precon-
ceptual sense or meaning. Merleau-Ponty has taught us to understand
this perceptual sense or meaning as a sensuous and bodily seeing-as.
However, he is still inclined to share with Husserl the conviction that this
perceptual sense must be understood as the foundation of a conceptual
meaning—that is, of a conceptually articulated knowledge of the object
of perception. Especially for Husserl, the claim of a primacy of percep-
tion is thus linked with the presupposition that perception must naturally
lead to a conceptual knowledge, which consists essentially in nothing
more than a categorical articulation or explication of what has previously
been sensuously perceived. In such a Husserlian view, where conceptual
thought is said to naturally harmonize with a perceptual knowledge that
it only makes more explicit, perception loses its truly thought-provoking
character, and concepts lose their truly creative contribution to thought.
It takes Deleuze and Guattari only a few chapters in their short book
What Is Philosophy? (1991, 1994) to account for the specificity of philo-
sophical concepts, for the basis on which they are created, for the subject
who creates them, and for the manner in which philosophical conceptual
thinking differs from the forms of thinking that one can find in science or
art. Unlike Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari claim that what divides philos-
ophy from science is not thinking but concepts. Unlike Husserl, they also
claim that the value of philosophical conceptual thinking cannot be mea-
sured against a notion of truth borrowed from science. For Deleuze and
Guattari, creative philosophical thinking is primarily about problems and
not, as Husserl would have it, about ideal objects and states of affairs. It is
also primarily about the relevance of concepts and not, as Heidegger would
have it, about the truth of Being. Focusing on how Deleuze and Guattari

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 limits of conceptual thinking 19

account for philosophical conceptual thinking leads us into the heart of their
interest in a thinking that experiments with new concepts and liberates
itself from a traditional “image of thought.”
For Deleuze and Guattari, philosophical concepts are created when
they are needed, and they are needed when the philosopher, in a situa-
tion of disorder or “chaos,” formulates a philosophical question. This lack
of order is not necessarily related to incongruence in the perceived world,
and it is not an uncommon experience that can easily be overcome. For the
philosopher, the disorder of the world is, on the contrary, a lasting fact that
no conceptual thinking can fully surmount. On the other hand, having an
experience of chaos is, of course, not sufficient to become a philosopher; it
is not equivalent with the formulation of a philosophical problem by means
of the creation of new concepts.
This experience of a world that is out of joint is usually veiled by a
network of doxai that is spanned over the abyssal encounter with what
is without meaning. Not unlike Heidegger, Deleuze thinks that there are
different kinds of doxai and that one should not take for granted that philo-
sophical thinking can start from scratch. Among the doxai that stand in
the way of a philosophical thinking, Heidegger and Deleuze both point
to the opinions, information, and statements provided by public figures,
journalists, and academics in conference papers. Another kind of doxa
is what Deleuze and Guattari (1991, 38ff.; 1994, 35ff.) call the “plane of
immanence,” which underlies all creation and creative use of philosophi-
cal concepts.5 Philosophical questions must not only have a direction and
a goal; they also need a plane to get them off the ground. Descartes’s inves-
tigation of the nature of scientific knowledge presupposes that we agree
on what we mean by the words thinking, being, and I and that we share
a goodwill for truth. Heidegger’s investigation of the meaning or truth
of Being presupposes a pre-ontological understanding or familiarity with
Being. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological investigation of how percep-
tion relates to the world presupposes that we share a “perceptual faith.”
For Deleuze and Guattari the relation among problems, concepts, and
the plane of immanence of a philosophical thought is a circular one. This
is to say that the plane or horizon that sustains or frames the investigation
of a philosophical problem does not chronologically precede the positing of
the problem, as would be the case with an external condition or cause. It is,
rather, the problem itself that unfolds its own field of investigation and that
prompts the need for the creation of new concepts. This is why Deleuze

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 20 rudolf bernet

and Guattari call this field or horizon a plane of immanence. In most cases
this immanence results from an internalization and transformation of a
pregiven field of experience and of conceptual language through the posi-
tion of the new philosophical problem. The common experience of self-
awareness and the familiar meaning of the words thinking, being, and I are
reshaped in the frame of Descartes’s appeal to the cogito as an answer to
his new philosophical problem. Newly created philosophical concepts can
thus be words that are taken from ordinary language and are given a new
meaning. They can also be old philosophical concepts, the meaning of
which is transformed through the position of a new problem. Just think of
how much Husserl’s concept of the “transcendental” differs from Kant’s!
Deleuze and Guattari (1991, 38–39; 1994, 36) devote special atten-
tion to the way in which philosophical thinking, which expresses itself
in the position of problems, involves a dynamic exchange between the
“elasticity of the concept” and the “fluidity” of the plane of immanence.
The plane of immanence owes part of its fluidity to the lack of conceptual
determination. Concepts owe their elasticity to their heteronymous and
nonetheless necessary components as well as to their equally necessary
relation with other concepts emerging from a same plane of immanence.
As these internal and external relations, which constitute the “endocon-
sistance” and “exoconsistance” of a philosophical concept (Deleuze and
Guattari 1991, 27; 1994, 22), grow and extend, they contribute to the for-
mation of a new, properly conceptual plane or, to use another terminol-
ogy, to the formation of a specific universe of discourse. Being without
external reference (i.e., being “self-referential” [Deleuze and Guattari
1991, 27; 1994, 22]), this conceptual plane or universe of philosophical
discourse, while differing essentially from the pre-philosophical plane
of immanence, is still immanent. Saying that philosophical concepts are
immanent to the problems that they were made for and allow to posit
also means that their meaning, far from being universal, depends on
a particular process of thinking. This is why, for Deleuze and Guattari,
philosophical concepts relate to events and not to essences, to processes
of individuation and not of generalizing abstraction. Descartes’s cogito is
thus a concept with interdependent components, created on the basis of
pre-philosophical presuppositions and related to the event of the positing
of a new philosophical problem.
A third kind of immanence comes into play when one asks who does
the philosophical thinking. For Deleuze and Guattari, just as for Heidegger,

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 limits of conceptual thinking 21

the philosopher who thinks cannot be an autonomous subject who freely

chooses the topic she wants to think about. Her thinking depends too
much on a question that imposes itself on her, and it depends too much on
a plane of immanence, on the basis of which she first articulates a problem
and creates new concepts to allow for that. A philosopher does not think—
that is, posit problems and create concepts—in her own name. This is why
Deleuze and Guattari call this philosophical thinker a “conceptual persona”
(personnage conceptuel). Unlike Husserl’s philosophizing transcenden-
tal ego, who comports itself as a “noncommitted onlooker” (unbeteiligter
Zuschauer) of the constitution of the world, Deleuze and Guattari’s concep-
tual persona is a thinker who remains embedded in a plane of immanence,
who is entirely absorbed by a specific philosophical problem, and who
becomes an actor acting out her newly created concepts on the immanent
stage of a particular conceptual field. The conceptual persona is thus in
no way transcendent to the process of her thinking. At the same time, the
plane of immanence on which her thinking depends also cannot be said to
belong to the psychological inner life of the conceptual persona.
To Heidegger’s (1978b) question, “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?”
Deleuze and Guattari’s answer must then be: a conceptual persona.
Nietzsche’s own dissatisfaction with what the ontotheological metaphys-
ics and its nihilistic will to power have done to our understanding of the
world is just the starting point for a thinking. The thought of the eternal
return of the same belongs to the thinking of the prophet Zarathustra,
who comes from elsewhere, far away in the mountains, to teach us this
new thought. I quote Deleuze and Guattari: “The conceptual persona is
not the philosopher’s representative but, rather, the reverse: the philoso-
pher is only the envelope of his principal conceptual persona and of all the
other personae who are the intercessors [intercesseurs], the real subjects [les
véritables sujets] of his philosophy” (1994, 64).6
The poetic thinking of Zarathustra, though coming from elsewhere,
still addresses our experience of the real world. It is thus not about another
world; it is not a form of hypothetical or fictional thinking. And yet,
Zarathustra’s thinking is not about observable facts in this real world; it is
about a philosophical problem. This is, of course, not to say that philosophi-
cal problems are of no relevance for our concrete life in the real world. It
only means that, for Deleuze, the task of philosophical thinking does not
consist in faithfully describing and conceptually articulating our experience
of a pregiven lifeworld. Creative conceptual philosophical thinking must

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 22 rudolf bernet

also be distinguished from how natural science relates to the real world.
Only science is about matters of fact in the real world; and only scientific
propositions have a truth-value that can be measured in terms of their cor-
respondence to actual facts. Philosophy is a matter of concepts, the mean-
ing of which depends on other concepts and not on functional relations
between empirical facts.
These Deleuzian views on the task of philosophical thinking and on its
difference from science are surprisingly close to what one can find in the
later Heidegger. Both philosophers share a concern for a dynamic mode of
thinking that cannot be ascribed to an autonomous subject asking ques-
tions and finding solutions. It is the insistence and urgency of questions
that bring about thinking and thinkers—not the other way around. Looked
at through a Deleuzian lens, Heidegger’s (1968, 196ff.; 1984, 119ff.) return
to the Parmenidian belonging together of einai and noein can be understood
as an insistence on immanence rather than on transcendence—specifically,
on the immanence of thinking in the event of the call of Being. Deleuze’s
own reading of the fragment of Parmenides, where thinking and Being
become two sides of the same plane of immanence, and where the differ-
ence in what essentially belongs together is understood as a fold (Deleuze
and Guattari 1991, 41, 46; 1994, 38, 44), is certainly not incompatible with
Heidegger’s interpretation of the poem of Parmenides. This is not to say,
however, that there are no differences. One only needs to think of Deleuze’s
(1994, 321; 2000, 188n) disagreement with Heidegger’s claim that think-
ing has a genuine affinity or “homology” with Being or of his resistance to
make all philosophical problems depend on the truth of Being.
Much more could be said concerning the relation between Deleuze
and Heidegger. In our context, where I have highlighted their common
criticism of how subjective representationalism accounts for thinking,
and where I have shown that, for Deleuze, the new mode of philosophical
thinking remains conceptual, it must suffice to ask how the later Heidegger
sees the relation between authentic philosophical thinking and the use or
creation of concepts.

Beyond Conceptual Thinking

In 1952, Heidegger famously wrote: “Thinking is not grasping [Greifen],

neither the grasp of what lies before us [weder ein Zugriff auf das
Vorliegende], nor an attack [Angriff ] upon it. . . . Thinking is not grasping

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 limits of conceptual thinking 23

or prehending [kein Be-greifen]. In the high youth of its unfolding essence,

thinking knows nothing of the grasping concept [Begriff ]. . . . [A]ll of the
great thinking of the Greek thinkers, including Aristotle, thinks non-
conceptually [begrifflos]” (1968, 211–12).7 For Heidegger, there are at least
two reasons for this nonconceptual thinking of the Greeks: First, their
language was not conceptual; and second, what they tried to think does
not lend itself to a conceptual grasp or grip. What the early Greek think-
ers tried to think was the mysterious event of the truth of Being, of a
presencing that takes the form of an unconcealment. However, what
appealed to them was not a riddle to be solved, and what it appealed
or addressed itself to was not their intellectual curiosity or cleverness.
Rather, the appeal, coming from where they should go, opened a labori-
ous path for their learning to think. This path was not laid out for them;
it was merely indicated by a sign or, better, by a trace of what needed to
be thought. The trace of what was given the Greeks to think could be
found in what was most familiar to them—namely, their own language.
Their own language had its origin in what they must learn to think, and
what they must learn to think was already present and active in their
own language. This was a nonconceptual language to which thinkers and
poets, while using it differently, paid the same respectful attention. Just
as Being and thinking belong together without being identical, the say-
ing of the poet and the thinking of the thinker belong to the same while
remaining different.
Although he thinks that Germans have, through their language,
a privileged affinity with the Greeks, even Heidegger must concede
that they remain German. In Deleuze’s formulation: They are at best
German thinkers and poets who reterritorialize themselves in early
Greek culture.8 For Heidegger, German Greek thinkers do not move to
another territory: they travel backward in time—they remember. Their
thinking and saying have their origin in the repetition of a same gift:
in what the early Greek thinkers have received from a logos anchored in
the truth of Being and in what they can receive through a recollection of
this early Greek thinking. A double gift deserves a redoubled grateful-
ness, which expresses itself in what Heidegger (1968, 140; 1984, 92)
calls a “recalling thinking” (an-denkendes Denken). This an-denken (recall)
involves both a thoughtful recollection and a thankfulness for what has
been sufficiently preserved to allow for this recollection. It is a form
of poetic thinking that Hölderlin, like no other German, has restored
within and against the tradition of modern thinking.

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 24 rudolf bernet

The French version of such a plea for replacing modern conceptual

thinking with a poetic form of thinking can be found in Bergson. Just like
Heidegger, Bergson contrasts his form of “intuitive” thinking with the
method of modern science. However, what modern science cannot think,
and therefore completely misunderstands, is for Bergson not the truth
of Being but the nature of “duration.” This duration is a dynamic prin-
ciple operating wherever qualitatively heterogeneous multiplicities grow
together into organic unities. Bergson’s duration has thus much in com-
mon with Heidegger’s understanding of a gathering, nonlogical logos. It
differs fundamentally with the way in which modern science assembles
quantifiable, homogeneous elements into encompassing totalities. In its
investigation of human mind and of nature, physical science uses a logic
of parts and wholes that it borrows from mathematics. It thus confuses
dynamic unities comprising interdependent moments with numbered
totalities made out of independent elements. As a consequence, fluent
global processes of growth and integration—such as the tension of a tem-
poral duration or the dynamic mobility of a movement—are split up in a
manifold of nonrelated punctual instants, spread out on a line that is drawn
from a point of beginning to a point of ending.
In Bergson’s understanding of duration, the meaning of all parts
depends on the meaning of an intuitively apprehended totality instead
of this totality resulting from the summation of independent elements.
As such a dynamic principle of organization, where totalities implicate
heterogeneous constituents in which they explicate themselves, the
structure of duration applies not only to human consciousness, time, and
movement but also, as Bergson gradually came to realize, to space, mat-
ter, life, morality, religion, and politics. In all these modalities, duration
lends itself to a form of intuitive thinking, which is itself a dynamic pro-
cess exploring the complex organization of mobile totalities, composed
of fluent interdependent moments. Intuitive thinking, as Bergson under-
stands it, is thus never a thinking in one glance.
This method of intuitive thinking serves, in Bergson’s Time and
Free Will and in his Matter and Memory, as an investigation of human
consciousness, feelings, perception, memory, temporality, and, more
generally, the relation between human freedom and material determin-
ism or between mind and brain. However, it is only in his later work that
Bergson explicitly focuses on methodological issues and contrasts his
own mode of intuitive thinking with the intellectualism of a (Kantian)

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 limits of conceptual thinking 25

conceptual thinking. Creative Evolution, besides its well-known polemic

against (Neo-)Darwinism, is also meant to demonstrate that the world
picture of natural science is based on a static metaphysics of presence,
which, in its turn, is the result of the intellectualistic way of thinking
prevailing in modern times. As Bergson’s last major work, The Two
Sources of Morality and Religion, then observes, the same intellectualism,
the same naturalization and objectivation of the dynamism of spiritual
processes, is also responsible for a reductionist view on morals, social
life, and religion. All this leads Bergson to adopt a position where open,
global, dynamic, synthetic intuitive thinking and closed, atomistic, static,
analytic conceptual thinking not only are strongly opposed to each other
but become irreconcilable. Bergson admittedly owes much of his inspi-
ration for this view on intuitive thinking to book V of Spinoza’s Ethics.
Spinoza is, in matters of thinking, perhaps the subtlest among all the
philosophers we have encountered thus far. The least one can say is that
Spinoza’s understanding of conceptual knowledge escapes many of the crit-
icisms Heidegger has addressed to modern science and to its metaphysi-
cal prejudices. No wonder Heidegger has so much to say about Descartes
and so little about Spinoza. Spinoza is best known for his criticism of
Descartes’s notion of substance, which forms indeed the basis of his entire
philosophical system. This leads Spinoza to develop a conception of sci-
entific conceptual knowledge that is free from all subjectivist presupposi-
tions and that purifies the concept of nature from all anthropomorphic
representations. Having its center of gravity or, better, its origin in a divine,
impersonal substance, human thinking is essentially decentered and asu-
bjective. Even conceptual thinking is the work of cogitationes that, instead
of depending on an ego, depend on a body. Further, the cogitatum nature
is now understood as natura naturata and not as an object laid out by rep-
resentation to allow for a better inspection and domination by an autono-
mous intellect. Spinoza’s antisubjectivism as well as his violent opposition
to all forms of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism also make him
the first ecological thinker of modern times.
However, how can modern science, which Heidegger accuses of
destroying nature and of being totally oblivious of physis, be respectful
of a mysterious nature, as Spinoza claims? And how can a philosophy
that is exposed more geometrico escape scientism? This deserves closer
examination. It is undeniable that one of Spinoza’s main objectives was
to make philosophical statements about God, the human mind and body,

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 26 rudolf bernet

and animal and material bodies as scientific as mathematical functions or

physical propositions doubtlessly are. It is also not doubtful that Spinoza’s
rationalistic metaphysics rests on assumptions that, while differing from
contemporary physicalism, must still be called naturalistic. On the other
hand, however, Spinoza’s metaphysical naturalism radically transforms the
way in which one ordinarily understands the meaning of modern natu-
ral science and the role of the scientist. Being herself part of the natura
naturata, the scientist cannot pretend to be an autonomous subject who,
from her central point of view, forces nature to answer her questions and
to fulfill her needs. It is “folly,” Spinoza writes, to think that nature is made
for man, who would then be “its chief part.”9 Finally, and most importantly,
scientifically rigorous, conceptual knowledge is not all that philosophical
thinking can achieve. Such a knowledge of the second kind, though over-
coming the anthropocentric prejudices belonging to sensuous perception
and imagination (i.e., liberating us from the illusions of the knowledge of
the first kind), still falls short of leading to human salvation, which is the
declared goal of Spinoza’s Ethics.
A good human life cannot be taught, demonstrated, and learned as
is the case with science. It depends on a genuine insight into how each
human being and all human conatus belong to the encompassing totality
of Nature or God (Deus sive natura). What thus leads to true human wis-
dom is not general conceptual knowledge but an intuitive knowledge of
oneself and of other human persons as individuals belonging to God. It is
an intuitive knowledge of oneself from the perspective of God, an intuitive
knowledge of one’s own existence and of the existence of fellow human
individuals as being implicated in the existence of God and as explicating
the nature of God. This is why Spinoza famously calls this third, intuitive
kind of knowledge amor intellectualis Dei.
Looked at from what we have seen in Bergson and Spinoza, Deleuze’s
rehabilitation of conceptual philosophical thinking appears now as an
attempt to reconcile what he wants to retain from each of them. This is
already apparent in the way in which he (1998, 1ff.) presents Bergson’s con-
ception of “intuition.” It also shows in his book Spinoza and the Problem of
Expression, where Spinoza is presented (against the mainstream of French
scholarship) as a radically anti-Cartesian thinker. Deleuze’s new model of
conceptual thinking appears now as an attempt to provide creative con-
ceptual thinking with the same fluidity and dynamism that he praised in
Bergson’s conception of duration and intuition.

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 limits of conceptual thinking 27

This leads Deleuze to stretch the relevance of concepts beyond their

contribution to a logic of truth and to extend their meaning beyond what
we can clearly and distinctly conceive. Spinoza’s criticism of Descartes is
thus used to support Deleuze’s own ambition to account for philosophi-
cal concepts that are about intensities, qualitative differences, singular
events, open problems, and so on. Finally, Deleuze also follows Spinoza in
assigning clear limits to all philosophical conceptual thinking. Not all that
deserves our thinking can be articulated and thought through concepts.
What we experience in imagination and intuition, though falling outside
of the realm of conceptual thinking, does not, for that matter, fall outside of
all thinking. Art, religion, and a good human life require another mode of
thinking—just as Spinoza had suggested.
What, then, is to be said of Deleuze’s relation to Heidegger? Manifestly,
what divides Deleuze from Heidegger cannot be their common criticism
of the subjectivism of a representative thinking, where the recognition of
the identity of an object becomes the goal of all knowledge. It also cannot
be their common appreciation of Bergson’s conception of intuition and of
his opposition to all thinking that reduces time to space, qualities to quanti-
ties, totalities to sums, movement to succession, dynamic forces to stable
systems. No less can it be their common opposition to a mode of thinking
that is governed by logic, especially Hegel’s dialectical logic of speculative
concepts. Finally, it cannot be their common concern about the wearing
out of formerly original and creative philosophical concepts or about the
standardization of a philosophical method where pregiven concepts are
stereotypically used and applied.
What separates Deleuze and Heidegger, then, must be Descartes
and Spinoza—more precisely, Heidegger’s ignorance of a Spinozist
form of anti-Cartesianism. It is with Descartes in mind that Heidegger
criticizes “conceptual thinking” (be-greifendes Denken) and turns to the
“recalling thinking” (an-denkendes Denken) of the early Greek thinkers
and poets. It is with Spinoza in mind that Deleuze rehabilitates a form
of philosophical conceptual thinking that concentrates on the mystery
of an unthought and that leaves room for alternative ways of thinking.
It is true, however, that Deleuze is as much a Nietzschean as a Spinozist
thinker. As a reader of Nietzsche he meets again with Heidegger, and new
differences arise. But on this new ground, the debate between Deleuze
and Heidegger stretches far beyond the questions concerning the legiti-
mate role of representations and concepts in philosophical thinking.

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 28 rudolf bernet

notes
1. Cf. Bernet 2010.
2. This is why there is something profound in stupidity: Deleuze 1994, 150ff.;
2000, 196ff.
3. See also Heidegger 1978a, 131.
4. See Benoist 2011, 90ff.
5. This plane of immanence is (somewhat confusingly) said to be a “subjective”
presupposition of philosophical thinking that must be distinguished from the
“objective” presuppositions of ordinary doxa.
6. See Deleuze and Guattari 1991, 62.
7. See Heidegger 1984, 128.
8. See Bernet 2014.
9. Spinoza 1989, chap. VI, 125: “To what lengths will the folly of the multitude
not carry them? They have no sound conception either of God or Nature, they
confuse God’s decisions with human decisions, and they imagine Nature to be
so limited that they believe man to be its chief part.”

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