Conceptual Personae as Coming to Life

Allen's concern regarding the autonomy of the conceptual personae is a legitimate one. It's not evident how we can think of the fictional character, a mere figment of the philosopher, as coming to life. Certainly, it makes sense to say of e.g., a novelist, that one can 'bring a character to life', even when such a character is purely fictional. At the very least, it is not strikingly contrary to talk about the fictitious as if it were alive. Yet to insist that such characters are alive in the sense that they may free themselves from the puppet strings pinning them to the manipulating hands of their creators, to think of them as more than mere representatives, is a substantially bolder claim. We think of the ego as belonging to Descartes, Socrates as the mouthpiece of Plato. In what sense then are the conceptual personae autonomous? When D and G suggest as much, are they advocating some kind of subversion of the philosopher himself? Is philosophy no longer his own proper domain but that of his inventions?

Regardless of their status as free agents, the conceptual personae, G and D suggest, play an important structural or intermediary role in philosophy. If philosophy demands the creation of concepts, and this creation takes play on a plane of immanence, then the conceptional personae is that which felicitates the creation of such concepts on the plane; the CP link or draw together the creation of new concepts from or out of the pre-philosophical plane. The CP are the methodological tool of the philosopher. The question then becomes how a tool can be considered autonomous from its operator.

Perhaps this tool is one of necessity. The philosopher employs the CP to do as such because he wouldn't be able to do so without them. This might transfer the relation of dependence between the philosopher and the CP. But are they necessary? We've occasionally discussed the process of creating concepts in almost super-natural terms: concepts are created in a moment of infinite survey at an infinite speed; their coming together of their constituent parts traverses the plane infinitely but instantaneously. Yet we should be careful to posit some kind of magical emergence of concepts from the philosopher. To the contrary, D and G suggest he requires methodological tools, without which he would be unable to complete his task.

One such example is Descartes. How could Descartes himself doubt away the external world, ridding himself of all his personhood except for his ego? That is, how could he himself truly employ the violent doubt for which he advocates in the Meditations? He would be defying his own biology do so, not to mention that success in such an attempt would result in an ego that would no longer be properly understood as Descartes (i.e. it would not possess 99% of his believes, desires, intentions, etc). Yet this ego, which contains genuine subjectivity almost by definition performs most of the work of the Meditations. Descartes requires the ego to instantiate the properties it does in order to advance his argument. Descartes liberates the ego in the sense that he himself cannot instantiate it, so he detaches himself from it, allowing is to take on the subjective nature Descartes wants to exploit. Yet Descartes does not himself determine the nature of this ego; he simply postulates its existence, allows it to develop and observes the properties it takes on. This rotates the relation of dependence 180 degrees of what we might expect. The ego does not rely on Descartes, for it possesses its own subjectivity, its own properties. But rather, Descartes relies on the properties of this subjectivity (i.e. not being able to doubt its own doubt) in order to advance his meditations and flesh out other concepts that he puts forth. Descartes doesn't determine these properties of the ego, he merely relates them to us. In a sense, it makes more sense to speak of the subjectivity of the ego as genuinely possessing these properties for itself, which suggests a legitimate claim to autonomy from Descartes.

It would be foolish to infer from this example that somehow the philosopher serves a subsidiary role in philosophy. I think this merely suggests that he (at least in this case) does not create concepts by some deus ex machina process, but rather, he possesses legitimate tools, which themselves contain subjective properties, undetermined by the philosopher, that are required for the formation of concepts. We might say then that conceptual personae are alive and autonomous in the sense that they possess subjective qualities undetermined by the philosopher, and thus, they don't rely on the philosopher for themselves. It is rather the contrary: philosophers rely on them for the creation of concepts.