Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (review)

Long eclipsed by brilliant contemporaries like Derrida and Foucault, Gilles Deleuze now has a growing readership in English philosophy. It is good that we are coming to appreciate his highly original, fascinatingly intricate, and perhaps maliciously difficult philosophy. There is nothing like it in our literature. None of the familiar labels — structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics — apply to him. One thing that his work shares, though, with all of these movements is a conviction of Nietzsche’s importance, and Deleuze’s study of Nietzsche is second in influence only to Heidegger’s. The passion for Nietzsche sets Deleuze apart from another original, a quasi outsider, whom he somewhat resembles: Alfred North Whitehead. Shaviro thinks philosophy would be a lot different if Whitehead had enjoyed the attention that the last century lavished on Heidegger and continues to lavish on Nietzsche. Shaviro encapsulates the difference between Heidegger and Whitehead in terms of their guiding questions: What is the meaning of Being? (Heidegger), and How is it that there is always something new? (Whitehead). Heidegger’s interest is in what metaphysics has always said; for him, metaphysics is a monotonous litany of the names of Being. Whitehead is interested in what metaphysics has never yet said — has even denied and rejected: the body, emotion, inconstancy, change, contingency, perspective. Deleuze writes appreciatively of Whitehead but learns more from Bergson (whose current renascence is largely Deleuze’s doing). Shaviro’s book is more about Whitehead than about Deleuze, but that is because he thinks that if we like Deleuze we should like Whitehead too (and should forget about Heidegger and Nietzsche, in any case). When, in Without Criteria, he quotes Whitehead as saying “it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true,” I wonder if Shaviro might not be half right.