Gilles Deleuze: Philosopher for September

Gilles Deleuze: Philosopher for September

My plan for each month of every year is to study the thoughts of one philosopher or, alternatively, to dwell on one existential controversy.

For September, I’m reading Deleuze.

‘Gilles Deleuze (January 18, 1925–November 4, 1995) was one of the most influential and prolific French philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century.“

He develops a metaphysics “in which the concept of multiplicity replaces that of substance, event replaces essence and virtuality replaces possibility.”

“In 1968, he met Félix Guattari, a political activist and radical psychoanalyst, with whom he wrote several works, among them the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia, comprised of Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Their final collaboration was What is Philosophy? (1991).’ (Stanford)

A few morsels to whet your appetite.

What is Philosophy?

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”

Philosophy creates concepts for a reason.

First, it’s creative work. “The philosopher creates, he doesn't reflect.”

“A creator is someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities.”

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world!”

And secondly, philosophy is to solve problems.

“Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.”

“Underneath all reason lies delirium and drift.”

Dealing with existential problems requires the virtue of courage and recognition that everything is mobile, unstable movement.

“Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges.

Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things.”

Life and Self

“The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.”

Life is an experiment.

Life is always moving along, a changing process. There’s no permanence in life or a permanent self.

“But since each of us, like anyone else, is already various people, it gets rather crowded.”

Communication

“The shame of being a man - is there any better reason to write?”

“Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.”

“I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous.”

“What one says comes from the depths of one’s ignorance; the depths of one’s own underdevelopment….they’re an attempt to jolt, set in motion, something inside me, to treat writing as a flow, not a code.”

“…you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is ‘Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through, you try another book.”

Politics

“A tyrant institutionalises stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it.”

“You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.”

“Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”

“There’s no democratic state that’s not compromised to the very core by its part in generating human misery.”

“It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity.”

Art and Culture

“Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive. Art, science, philosophy are neither contemplative, neither reflexive, nor communicative. They are creative, that's all.”

“I have no admiration for culture. I have no reserve knowledge, no provisional knowledge. And everything that I learn, I learn for a particular task, and once it's done, I immediately forget it, so that if ten years later, I have to get involved with something close to or directly within the same subject, I would have to start again from zero, with some few exceptions.”

Religion

“Christianity taught us to see the eye of the lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They bind us to other realities and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.”

Notes

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/

https://www.iep.utm.edu/deleuze/#H7

Recommended “Negotiations 1972 - 1990”, an introductory collection of Deleuze’s essays:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&ved=2ahUKEwjhtJ_ArpTdAhWHYo8KHUYvAp0QFjAFegQIBRAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.preterhuman.net%2Ftexts%2Fthought_and_writing%2Fphilosophy%2FDeleuze%2FDeleuze%2520-
%2520Negotiations.pdf&usg=AOvVaw2-arpqADb128I9H-Rqkalo

It's A Matter For Interpretation

Blind Men and the Elephant

A Poem by John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887)

It was six men of Indostan,

To learning much inclined,

Who went to see the Elephant

(Though all of them were blind),

That each by observation

Might satisfy his mind.

The First approach'd the Elephant,

And happening to fall

Against his broad and sturdy side,

At once began to bawl:

"God bless me! but the Elephant

Is very like a wall!"

The Second, feeling of the tusk,

Cried, -"Ho! what have we here

So very round and smooth and sharp?

To me 'tis mighty clear,

This wonder of an Elephant

Is very like a spear!"

The Third approach'd the animal,

And happening to take

The squirming trunk within his hands,

Thus boldly up and spake:

"I see," -quoth he- "the Elephant

Is very like a snake!"

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,

And felt about the knee:

"What most this wondrous beast is like

Is mighty plain," -quoth he,-

"'Tis clear enough the Elephant

Is very like a tree!"

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,

Said- "E'en the blindest man

Can tell what this resembles most;

Deny the fact who can,

This marvel of an Elephant

Is very like a fan!"

The Sixth no sooner had begun

About the beast to grope,

Then, seizing on the swinging tail

That fell within his scope,

"I see," -quoth he,- "the Elephant

Is very like a rope!"

And so these men of Indostan

Disputed loud and long,

Each in his own opinion

Exceeding stiff and strong,

Though each was partly in the right,

And all were in the wrong!

MORAL,

So, oft in theologic wars

The disputants, I ween,

Rail on in utter ignorance

Of what each other mean;

And prate about an Elephant

Not one of them has seen!

Saxe’s poem, Blind Men and the Elephant, clearly illustrates humanity’s finite understanding and limitations.

Our understanding is an interpretation of an experience that’s formed with the aid of senses and ability of the human mind, which in turn is limited by mental horizons bounded within given traditions and supported by presuppositions.

All books, written documents, science, history, laws, cultural artifacts, performances, events, spoken communication and music require interpretation first by the author and then subsequently by the reader-audience.

Such a long chain of interpretation and re-interpretations of earlier interpretations leads inevitably to multiple understandings. And possibly it leads to misunderstandings.

The technical term for the study on interpretation as a human understanding is “Hermeneutics”.

“Hermeneutics as the methodology of interpretation can provide guidance for solving problems of interpretation of human actions, texts and other meaningful material….

Throughout its historical development hermeneutics has dealt with specific problems of interpretation, arising within specific disciplines like jurisprudence, theology and literature….

…general problems of interpretation are treated by the discipline of hermeneutics and to identify some important procedures leading to their efficacious solution—always keeping in mind that these procedures, like all epistemological procedures, are bound to remain fallible.” (C. Mantzavinos in https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/#TextInte)

You may say that the problems of the world are a consequence of differing interpretations of what the best world should be.

I shall highlight two obvious cases as examples.

- Problems of Religious Hermeneutics, Pluralism and Epistemology

Rudolf Otto regrads human religious experience of the Ineffable Holy Other as a Mystery.

“He describes it as a mystery (Latin: mysterium) that is at once terrifying (tremendum) and fascinating (fascinans). Otto felt that the numinous was most strongly present in the Old and New Testaments, but that it was also present in all other religions.”

Since finite humans can never “know” God as an Absolute In-It-Self, apart from mediating senses, all theologies must be constricted human interpretations confined within a history, culture and tradition.

Hence it is not surprising to find in every religion a cacophonic mixture of historical ‘facts’ and myths.

This is evident in the many religions that originated from their respective social traditions and cultures.

Thus the history of religions attributes to ‘God’ different anthropomorphic names and ‘Incarnations’ such as Heavenly Father, Jesus, Buddha, Kuan Yin, Shiva, Tao, etc.

A problem arises when one religion asserts itself as uniquely true and all other competing religions as false.

It’s common to hear Christians claim Jesus’ incarnation, death and resurrection stories as unique and truly factual. However, we also find similar claims in Mahayana Buddhism in the deification of Gautama Buddha and his Three Bodies.

Why accepts one theology as factual and another as mythological? Isn’t this being prejudicial?

Karl Bath aptly remarks, “There is a notion that complete impartiality is the most fitting and indeed the normal disposition for true exegesis, because it guarantees a complete absence of prejudice. For a short time, around 1910, this idea threatened to achieve almost canonical status in Protestant theology. But now we can quite calmly describe it as merely comical.” (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 1.2: The Doctrine of the Word of God)

How then shall we interpret these divergent stories of religious experience?

Remember, they’re traditions.

We need to be openly critical of our prejudices that are entrenched in our traditions and in everyday actions. Only after we’ve recognized our prejudices can we learn anew.

“It is the tyranny of hidden prejudices that makes us deaf to what speaks to us in tradition.” (Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Truth and Method’)

As John Paul II said, “Those who devote themselves to the study of Sacred Scripture should always remember that the various hermeneutical approaches have their own philosophical underpinnings, which need to be carefully evaluated before they are applied to the sacred texts.” (Fides et Ratio: On the Relationship Between Faith and Reason)

- Problems relating to Legal Pluralism

We expect laws to be universally applicable that’s based on clear logic and common sense.

However, we don’t find this to be so. Laws are being interpreted according to social and political interests.

For instance, laws of various countries differ on LGBT’s social and civil status. Citizens’ rights are defined according to different assumptions about relation between majority’s morals and minority’s right to differ and live alternative lifestyles.

Another example is in some countries’ adoption of strict laws that prohibit pornography. However, not every country adopts the same legal stance.

Each country interprets its laws according to its culturally defined presuppositions.

Let us take heed of William James’ observation, psychologist and author of ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’,

“For pluralism, all that we are required to admit as the constitution of reality is what we ourselves find empirically realized in every minimum of finite life.

Briefly it is this, that nothing real is absolutely simple, that every smallest bit of experience is a multum in parvo plurally related, that each relation is one aspect, character, or function, way of its being taken, or way of its taking something else.”

Further Readings

Antonin Scalia, Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, 2012

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Otto

Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1969

Ayon Maharaj, "God Is Infinite, and the Paths to God Are Infinite": A Reconstruction and Defense of Sri Ramakrishna's Vijñana-Based Model of Religious Pluralism

(https://philarchive.org/rec/AYOQII)

Jacqueline Marina, Schleiermacher on the outpourings of the inner fire: experiential expressivism and religious pluralism (https://philarchive.org/rec/MARSOT-16)

Religions in the Holy Land: Conflicts of Interpretation

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3033197?read-now=1&loggedin=true&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962

"Kuhn made several notable claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon "objectivity" alone. Science must account for subjective perspectives as well, since all objective conclusions are ultimately founded upon the subjective conditioning/worldview of its researchers and participants." -Wikipedia

Valerie Kerruish, Jurisprudence as Ideology, 1991

In the introduction, she writes:

"Workers, women, gays and people of colour have had a hard time with the common law

of England, at home and on export, and these injustices continue. Yet, he would have it, this is not law’s fault. Law is innocent. Law, far from being complicit in social practices

which are destructive of human wellbeing, is, of all social institutions, the one which embodies the ideals and procedures of and for that well-being.

The claim of law’s innocence is ideological. It is made within interpretations of our ways of life which give law a particular nature, purpose and value.

These interpretations claim their own truth and prescribe their own values in adversarial argument against other

ideas of law. They imagine their own most persuasive case and pursue it against those who tell a different story.

Their arguments are paradigms of the lawyer’s in-court skills;

and they prosecute those whose beliefs undermine them with the assurance of one who knows that guilt must be punished if innocence is to survive."

Poverty of Existence: Suffering, Asceticism and Irrationality

There's so much I find intriguing and consonant with in E. M. Cioran, (8 April 1911 – 20 June 1995) a Romanian philosopher, who struggles for years with insomnia and spends long nights walking around his quiet city thinking about his despair.

His lyrical essays revolve around themes of suffering, failures, decay and nihilism.

Even as a young man, he thought of suicide.

What prevented him was this lucid insight that “Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?”

“The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.”

And writing was his way to tame his ferocious despair.

“A book is a suicide postponed,” he says.

He sees futility everywhere and so distances himself from society and keeps only a few friends.

“I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more?"

He continues, "Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?”

 

“As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man."

His response to meaninglessness is to clearly accept that all of life is pointless.

"What should I do?

Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable?

Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals?

It’s all too little.

I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone.

But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?” (On the Heights of Despair)

What is the source of man's despair?

Man is cursed with his ability to think deep.

"True thinking resembles a demon who muddies the spring of life or a sickness which corrupts its roots. To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and life,.. all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.”

Cioran believes thinking lucidly is incompatible with life.

He says, "That kind of thinking, that understanding that pushes too far, is dangerous....life is only bearable because one does not go to the end (of thinking); doing something is only possible when one has particular illusions...for everything."

To be happy, don't think!

Just vegetate with illusions.

Eat, drink, be merry.

Contra Socrates, the unexamined life is a happy life.

“Only those are happy who never think or, rather, who only think about life's bare necessities, and to think about such things means not to think at all," observes Cioran.

In an interview, he insightfully remarks in conclusion and with total resignation,

"I am ... fed up with cursing at the world, at God;

the whole thing is simply not worth it."

Notes

 

His best-known works are "On the Heights of Despair" (1934) and "The Trouble with Being Born" (1973).

His first French book, "A Short History of Decay", was awarded the prestigious Rivarol Prize in 1950.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emil_Cioran

 

Wakefulness and Obsession An Interview