Take for example Aristotle’s (probably the master of this procedure of divining essence as whatness) discussion of Friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. After deriving three forms of friendship (the useful, the pleasant, and the virtuous), and then arguing how the “higher form” of friendships of virtue form the ground of the other two, who reading this can escape without the feeling that, in fact, it’s possible they have had no “real” friends hitherto? Lacking in one’s actual friendships is the kind of disinterested moral purity that the inquiry posits as the essence of friendship. One feels that the pleasure and utility mixed in with all friendship is an abhorrent, pathological trace. What is needed is a completely inconvenient and unpleasant friend, such that we can definitely say this friendship participates in the pure form. But what madness is this?

The essence cooked out of the question “what is” always has this normative dimension: what begins as a purely speculative, descriptive enterprise, terminates at a normative judgment determining degrees of participation. Now we know what an X is, we find ourselves surrounded by deficient and impostor X’s. Life is doomed to never achieve the clear surety of a clean bundle of necessary and sufficient conditions. In this procedure we always come up lacking.

“This is why, in Plato, the opposition of essence and appearance, of being and becoming, depends primarily on a mode of questioning, a form of question.” (Deleuze, 2006, p.76)

Enough. Anyone with ears enough to actually follow Nietzsche, his project, the import of it in the context of 2,500 years of thought, will realize that he’s not down there in the foot notes of Plato, he’s climbed up into the text and is making his own comments and alterations, in ball point pen nonetheless, on your library’s copy of The Collected Dialogues of Plato.

So how does Nietzsche reformulate this question? Simply by treating seriously the response Socrates’ contemporaries favored for getting at essence. Not “What is?”, but “Which one?”.

The mistake is to take this question as asking for mere examples. We can only take this question in this way if we are beholden to the model of thought that sees the question “What is” as the premier form, and thus “which one” becomes a derivative game. But beyond the horizon of the question that sees in essence primarily a transcendent whatness, there is a whole other art for discerning essence. The question ‘Which one is just/beautiful/true?’-

“-does not refer, as Socrates believed, to discrete examples, but to the continuity of concrete objects taken in their becoming, to the becoming-beautiful of all the objects citable or cited as examples” (Deleuze, 2006, p.76)

This form of question does not discard the notion of essence, merely transforms its status. No longer some abstract universal that supervenes in the flux of becoming from beyond, imparting form, but as a particular species-region of becoming. There is no longer the pure form of the True, the Just, the Beautiful, but a becoming-true, becoming-just, becoming-beautiful that demonstrates itself as a capacity, as an effect or symptom of multitudinous, inter-related becoming, itself multitudinous. A force in the world among and against all others. Not something coiled in waiting, but a genuine event heterogeneously and actively created through the case.

“Asking which one is beautiful, which one is just and not what beauty is, what justice is, was therefore the result of a worked-out method, implying an original conception of essence and a whole sophistic art which was opposed to the dialectic. An empirical and pluralist art.” (Deleuze, 2006, p.76)

Central to this art is the act of interpretation, rather than the positing of abstract conditions. Key to Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche is his characterizing of Nietzsche’s main contribution to philosophy being the introduction of the concepts of sense and value. From here Deleuze develops his notion of force. Nietzsche aimed to dispense with all things. He saw in even the notion of the atom just one last crutch of an erroneous metaphysical picture: if there is force, then it must be force of some thing. If there is thinking, it must be the thinking of some one. Against all of these residual (grammatical) grains Nietzsche puts forward the image of a multiplicity of pluralist forces — each forming a perspective, dominating, and being dominated, acting and reacting. Phenomena, then, are the effects of the inter-relations of forces. However, this is not in the sense of phenomena being mere appearances. What appears, in its appearing and being made to appear, is also a devolving of force. What Kant got wrong, vis-a-vis this picture, then, is the belief in the pure passivity of the sensibility. In every perception there is an evaluation — a bringing forward and a making primary, and, through this, an interpretation, a bestowal of a sense. One never sees, one always looks.

“The question “which one?” (qui) means this: what are the forces which take hold of a given thing, what is the will that possesses it? Which one is expressed, manifested and even hidden in it? We are led to essence only by the question: which one? For essence is merely the sense and value of the thing; essence is determined by the forces with affinity for the thing and by the will with affinity for these forces.” (Deleuze, 2006, pg.77)

When examining a beautiful thing, we don’t dump it into some intellectual acid to burn away everything that is particular to it. We don’t reduce beautiful things to the beautiful as such. Instead we consider each thing in its becoming-beautiful, of which we are also always a part (as a region towards-which this becoming-beautiful absorbs and impinges). Nietzsche laughs at Kant’s notion of beauty as being “the disinterested pleasure”, as if there were some impotent, uninvested perspective from which beauty could be made to appear (some sublimely passive consciousness that manages to discriminate without an active bringing forward). All phenomena are the effects of multitudinous forces — optic nerves, thermodynamics, appetites and hungers, lust and fear. The becoming beautiful of a fragment of the world within which we find ourselves is an interrelation of forces imparting senses and establishing rank orders of values. Somewhere in that vortex is the subject referred to as “I”.

Accordingly, there is not one “beauty” as is implied by the question “what is?”, rather, the becoming-beautiful of things is always multitudinous and heterogeneous. We do violence to sun sets, deserts, faces and bodies alike when we say that each takes part in the “form of the beautiful” which escapes each one. Each case is inseparable from its particular constellation of becoming, the particular perspectives, senses, and values that compose it, the meteorology of forces that have breathed it into being, and is in a sense unrepeatable.

The idiotic conclusion to be drawn here is that “oh, okay, then nothing matters #FML”. This conclusion is still issuing from within the Platonic paradigm, thus hasn’t actually altered its perspective. It’d be like opening the door of the cockpit mid-flight to discover there are no pilots and then, on the basis of this, assuming it does not matter if the plane crashes or not. No, the stakes have just been raised immeasurably. Where previously we had faith in some transcendent guarantee, we discover that there is nothing truly “out there” for us to rest upon, save for what we have established there over history. History furnishes us with a horizon, within which we work and make sense. But beneath and beside this horizon there are other terrains which we previously thought impossible (mistaking the horizon for the limits of the world). Value is modulated by this discovery, but not obliterated, unless of course the will behind our thought is to obliterate, and then any suitably shaped insight will do. Copernicus, Moses, Darwin, Dawkins, Dickens. Take your pick.