​The Poisonous Gift of Platonism:

​The Absence of Transcendental Authority as the Condition of Philosophy

For understanding Deleuze’s quarrel with essentialism and Platonism, it is helpful to look at his analysis of the Platonic concept of the Idea. Daniel Smith has written a very insightful essay on this topic (Platonism in Essays on Deleuze 2012). In Deleuze’s approach, each concept is formed as a function of a problem; this means that the concept of the Idea in Platonism can only be properly understood in the context of the problematic that created the conditions of its formulation. For Deleuze, the concept of the Idea derived from the problem of rivalry and the necessity to measure rivals for the selection of a proper claimant. This was a historical condition of Athenian democracy in Plato’s time, where virtually all domains of social life, from a lover to a magistrate and a member of the assembly, were faced with a situation of competing contenders. In this context, the concept of the Idea came to play the role of a mechanism for sorting the contenders and determining the legitimacy of their claim to a given role.

For Deleuze and Guattari, this historical condition not only formed the ground for the development of the concept of the Idea by Plato, but it served as the very genetic condition for the emergence of philosophy as we know it. The absence of ultimate authority in Athenian democracy, not only in political or social life but also in intellectual life, generated the need for ways of choosing and deciding among a multiplicity of possibilities.

​The Poisonous Gift: Ideas, Essence and the Logic of Selection

Within a field with no divine or ultimate authority, the problem of sorting between contenders becomes a domain of thought and judgment. This is where the Platonic Idea became a mechanism for distinguishing false claimants from true ones by providing a way to evaluate to what extent, if at all, contenders could lay a legitimate claim on a given role.

Yet by this very move, through which Plato was solving a problem of sorting in the context of the absence of transcendental authority, he reintroduces a new form of transcendence, that of the Idea itself. What at first glance might appear as a mechanism of solving the problems of selection and judgment immanently, in the absence of transcendent authority, turned out to establish an entire plane of immaculate transcendence.

The Platonic Idea effectively functions as a transcendence that is capable of having a form of operational presence within the field of immanence while remaining external to it. From the perspective of pure immanence this is seen as an attempt to establish a hierarchical structure inside the world rather than referring to an actual transcendent realm of ideas. Deleuze refers to this as a “poisoned gift of Platonism” (Expressionism in Philosophy p. 136–137).

While the transcendence of an emperor’s authority rests on exclusive, perhaps divine authority, and that of a priest and sage on privileged access to a higher truth, the transcendence of the Platonic Idea resides in its claim to the essence of meaning. The Idea with Plato becomes the pure form, the sole locus of true essence to which any empirical being or phenomenon can only hope to approximate. This understanding of Ideas effectively reduces the entirety of the empirical world to contenders. All empirical phenomena become mere secondhand claimants to predicates. It is as if the experiential world has been robbed of its soul. Everything in the world becomes deficient, never fully embodying its true nature. Every empirical man becomes but a claimant to the status of man that is only retained in its purity in the Idea of man. Every empirical lover becomes but a derivative participant in the Idea of lover. No red flower is ever truly red, no gold is true gold, but only an approximation.

Within this framework, myth becomes an indispensable mechanism for sorting the true claimants from the remote or false. Myth effectively forms the foundation of the concept; it alone seems capable of capturing and expressing the essence of the Idea to the extent that no definition can truly accomplish. The Platonic Idea introduces the logic of contiguity into the evaluation of the true meaning of the form, where no actualized form ever truly embodies the essence. Contenders are evaluated based on their perceived contiguity to the Idea or the essence. In this logic, only the Idea itself remains truly identical to itself, while empirical claimants relate to it through more or less resemblance, proximity, and imitation.

​Simulacrum and the Limits of Platonism

The status of claimancy is not a marginal feature of Plato’s system but rather the very nature of all phenomena. Every appearance and entity lays claim to a certain quality of being, which is never guaranteed. Indeed, it is only ever granted secondhand, mediated through the logic of proximity and resemblance to an essence that is unreachable in principle.

Plato’s theory of the Ideas signifies the birth of essentialism in philosophy. The Idea comes to play the role of the essence that effectively functions as a substitute for the transcendent authority of a sage, tradition, or an emperor. In stark contrast to this stands the figure of the sophist, or more precisely, the concept of simulacrum that, in terms of its internal structure, bears no resemblance to the essence. It is a contender without any legitimacy. The concept of simulacrum adds an additional function to the Platonic Idea, namely to distinguish genuine copies that bear structural resemblance to the essence from false claimants, which are mere appearances of resemblance without any structural affinity.

This, in Deleuze’s reading, is also the birth of representationalism. The moment the world of essences is established, every expression in the empirical world becomes a mere representation, a copy, or a contender of participation in an essence that cannot itself be empirically presented. Overturning Platonism, in Deleuze’s reading, requires picking up and developing a concept of the simulacrum from a marginal and merely negative image into a concept with an affirmative status. A concept that is no longer defined in opposition to the essence but rather on its own ground and based on its own power.

Yet ultimately, attempt at reform of Platonism by Deleuze, which would seek to develop a new concept of idea fully grounded in the immanence and difference instead of the transcendence of an essence and the immanence of the copy, has not been realized. Deleuze proceeded to develop his concept of the idea outside the framework of the essence-simulacrum dynamic of Platonism altogether. Perhaps the concept of simulacrum proved too entangled in the framework of original and copy for Deleuze to allow any viable reformation after all.