The Limits of Conceptual Thinking

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 philosophical thinking a matter of a subject that re-cognizes, represents to itself, and conceptualizes 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.