problematic
To think is not to try to tell the truth about any particular given objects (be these living organisms, things in motion or brains), as if there was a world out there waiting for us to lay our eyes on it; to think is to try to solve specific, singular problems. It might be worth observing that this substitution of the category of problem for that of object is something the French epistemological tradition shares with both the Popperian and the Heideggerian traditions. It accompanies what Deleuze calls in Difference and Repetition the critique of representation. Problems cannot take the form of an inquiry about the essence of things (‘what is matter?’, ‘what is life?’, ‘what is X?’); instead they constitute that which makes it important, relevant, critical, to know about X. Bachelard thus argues that * This dossier is the result of discussion following Patrice Maniglier’s contribution to ‘The Concept of Problem’, the second day of the first Workshop in the AHRC-funded research project, ‘Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Methods, Histories, Concepts’, organized by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, at Dorich House, Kingston University London, 25–26 January 2012.there is not, on the one hand, the world, divided into large ontic domains (matter, life, etc.), each one characterized by a certain number of properties or laws that the various disciplines (biology, sociology, etc.) would have to learn about, and on the other hand, the mind, which would try to map this reality and fill in any blanks with the right information; there are only singular problems which simultaneously determine the subject to think and the object to be thought: ‘We must first posit the object as a subject of the problem, and the subject of the cogito as a consciousness of the problem’ (RA 56).