Episode #125 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode is part one in a series on Gilles Deleuze. I hope you love the show today.

So pretty much since day one on this podcast we’ve seen philosophers come along, look at the world around them, and through intense contemplation and reasoning, holding the world to their version of philosophical scrutiny, they’ve all come up with their own systems that do their best to define the way the world is. The assumption’s always been that, as time goes on, thinkers build off of the work of the thinkers that came before them. Over time, each of these systems becoming a little more unbiased, a little more accurate in terms of understanding the epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics of the world. But more specifically, and more importantly to the conversation that’s going on in the mid to late 20th century that we’ve been talking about, there’s been an assumption that we’ve been heading in the right direction when it comes to the questions of ontology: What is being? What does it mean to be? Dozens of other questions we’ve talked about on separate episodes.

But as we’ve seen in the early 20th century, structuralists come along and show how the views of these individual philosophers are not disinterested, unbiased attempts at trying to answer these questions. Their views of the way the world is has really just been given to them by the cultural climate they were born into and the history that culture has structurally emerged out of. A little later in this century we have the post-structuralists come along that go so far as to criticize this entire tradition of trying to rigidly define the way the world is. The tools we have to conduct philosophy with will never be able to give us access to something that ambitious, in their view.

We’ve seen Derrida do this on the basis of words. The meanings of words are not as stable and definable as we once thought. That when it comes to constructing some elaborate ontology, as thinkers have done in the past, language itself will always be insufficient when it comes to setting up some sort of ultimate set of parameters for the universe. We’ve seen Foucault reject this tradition on the basis of the categories we use to define what a human being is. The terms we use to define ourselves are recent inventions to him. Who are any of these philosophers throughout history, who is Foucault, for that matter, to make any sort of grand assertion about the nature of the way the world is or what it is to be a human being?

Now, the first step for these types of thinkers has often been to shine a light on these grand narratives of the past and then deconstruct or unravel them and show them to be what they really are. At which point, the ideology or dogma associated with them will collapse out of the bottom; we’ll take whatever lessons we can from that process. And the goal at that point will be to find a new way we can proceed with philosophy without falling into the same traps we have in the past, if that’s even possible at all. But the question we all need to ask ourselves right here -- once you begin from the starting point of this postmodernist critique of the grand narratives of the past, do you think deconstruction and fragmentation is the only avenue a postmodernist thinker could possibly take moving forward?

I mean, this may seem like an easy question to answer. Of course, nothing’s ever that reductive. But it’s worth mentioning, there’s some people out there -- almost always people that have a very shallow or nonexistent reading of postmodern thinkers -- there’s people out there that conflate postmodernism with deconstruction. They mistakenly conclude that the overall goal of postmodernism is to unravel these grand narratives, shake the Etch A Sketch of the history of philosophy and start anew, throw out everything. But postmodernism is much more, should I say, multivariate than that. Deconstruction is just one strategy of many that was proposed. Yes, it was a strategy that rose to popularity through the work of a couple key thinkers and, because of that, it’s the one the average person’s probably going to have heard of. But there were many other approaches by postmodern thinkers that have nothing to do with seeing the entire history of philosophy as practically devoid of value moving forward.

One such approach lies in the work of a philosopher named Gilles Deleuze. See, because if you’re someone that looks at these grand narratives of the past and sees them all to be examples of the failures of philosophy, Deleuze would say that there’s a lot of assumptions that you’re bringing to the table there. You know, let’s say for a second you’re someone who agrees with that statement: “Philosophy has largely been a waste of time.” Deleuze would probably want to ask you, what do you think the role of philosophy is? What do you think the role of philosophy has been all throughout history? And more generally he’d want to ask, as he did in his book that we’re covering today, if the history of philosophy is a failure, what is philosophy?

So we’re going to talk about Deleuze’s answer to this question, “What is philosophy?” But before we do that, just to set the stage for this entire series that’s to come, it’s probably best to give a little context about Deleuze. Most of the major works Deleuze wrote were cowritten with the French thinker Félix Guattari. So some of the ideas we’re going to discuss were mutually held by both of them. But, if there’s a hallmark to all of Deleuze’s work that can help us understand where he’s coming from with some of this bizarre stuff we’re going to be talking about through the next few episodes, it’s that what Deleuze is primarily interested in, above all else, are new ideas, new ways of thinking, new ways of looking at the questions of ontology, new ways of understanding the way the world is that can offer us a different perspective on things.

There’s a man named Professor Todd May that’s done a lot of work articulating the biggest ideas in Deleuze’s work. And, at the beginning of one of his books, he talks about how one useful way of thinking of the work of Deleuze overall is to always consider his ideas within the context of the greater continental tradition of asking the question “How might one live?” See, because especially with postmodern thinkers that are so recent, it’s really easy to get lost in some academic discussion where it’s like a snake eating its own tail, you know, some hyper-nuanced interpretation of what Deleuze was saying on page 172, paragraph 3 of a book he wrote during the early to middle period of his thinking when he was on holiday in Switzerland. It can get in the weeds pretty quickly. This is why I think it’s useful for a podcast like this one to frame things in terms of a question like “How might one live?” Because the point May’s making in his book is that this hasn’t always been the question that we’ve asked throughout the history of philosophy.

You want to go back to antiquity -- Socrates, Plato, Aristotle -- these people weren’t conducting philosophy to figure out “How might one live?” No, at the time, the question that seemed obvious to them that philosophy should be trying to answer is “How should one live?” Now, you may ask, what’s the distinction there? Well, their entire work presupposes the idea that what philosophy is looking for is some sort of divine order. Written into the universe is clearly a way that a horse should be, a racoon should be, how a tree should be. And, through their discussions about a transcendent world of forms that contains the essences of things, through the discussions about the teleologies of Aristotle, the goal was to find out how we should be acting if we’re human beings and then, naturally, fall in line with that divine order. The main point was that there’s a level of transcendent order that overhangs all of this that needs to be discovered by philosophy.

Moving on in history, throughout much of the Enlightenment, the question that seemed obvious to philosophers during this time was more like “How should one act?” The distinction between how one should act and how one should live lies in the removal of the idea that a person discovers the significance of their life by appealing to some divine order. May points out that this is commonly thought of as the birth of the individual within history. This moment in history, when a life answers for its own actions -- to a god or to Kant’s categorical imperative or to some other moral philosophy -- instead of seeking and finding its purpose in the actual order it exists in, this is one of the primary reasons there’s a shift in philosophy from how one should live to how one should act.

Later on in history this question shifts from “How one should act” to “How might one live.” And the origins of this are somewhere around the 19th century with the existentialists. Nietzsche’s cited as the guy responsible for it in many ways, the death of god, the death of the possibility for us to arrive at any sort of objective morality, and with it the death of these former questions in philosophy like “How should one act?” that require some sort of transcendent natural order to make them make sense. Like I said before, the new game in town at this point becomes a question more like “How might one live?” And this is the question May believes continental philosophy is still trying to answer to this day and the question we should all consider when looking at the work of Deleuze.

Now, it’s going to take an entire series to get to it, but maybe the best place to begin answering this question “How might one live?” lies in looking at Deleuze and Guattari’s 1991 book titled What is Philosophy? So what is philosophy? Well, I mean, first of all, there’s a sense in which, if it’s 1991 and you’re writing a book called What is Philosophy, you better have something pretty genius to say or at least far different than anyone that’s ever come before you, because a philosopher writing a book trying to give an answer to that question is just beyond nostalgic at this point. But really that’s good news if you think about it. See, already before you even begin reading the book, you can expect to see a completely different take on what philosophy is than has ever come before. And this is exactly what they’re trying to do in this book.

To answer the question “What is philosophy?” a useful starting point is to ask, “What is it that philosophy really does?” And what follows from that is to ask the question, “What is it that philosophy has been doing all throughout recorded history?” To a deconstructionist, the history of philosophy has been a pretty disappointing endeavor because for millennia the assumption’s been by the people doing work in philosophy that their work was getting us closer and closer to an objective, sometimes transcendent understanding of the way that things are. Remember, we talked about how the questions have changed over time. Well, if that’s what you thought philosophy was doing that whole time, it’s no wonder you’d be disappointed. I mean, if you’re a deconstructionist that doesn’t believe in something like an objective truth that can be arrived at, it’s no wonder philosophy starts to look like a couple thousand years of wasted time producing grand narratives.

But Deleuze is going to take an entirely different approach here. See, as a postmodernist himself, he also doesn’t believe in anything like an objective truth. But Deleuze doesn’t base the validity of a philosophical system on whether it’s true or not. See, to a post-structuralist, those philosophers all throughout history, regardless of their intentions or hopes when it came to their work, they were never going to arrive at the truth about things. It was impossible the whole time. So this argument that philosophy’s a failure because it hasn’t yet arrived at the truth, just not something Deleuze thinks is a very interesting argument. To Deleuze, the real question becomes, if philosophers were never going to arrive at the truth anyway, what was it really that they were engaging in all those years?

To Deleuze, what ontology has always been is what he calls a process of creation rather than discovery. What he means by that is that the philosophers of the past thought they were discovering the truth about the universe when they did their philosophy, when in reality the work they did could more accurately be described as creating ontological frameworks that help the people of their time understand the truly ungraspable chaos that reality is. Again, creation rather than discovery. Reality is chaos to Deleuze. To a post-structuralist, we don’t have the tools. We will never be able to grasp the chaos of reality. What we can do, though, what we have done all throughout history is create ontological systems devised of concepts that help bring a semblance of order to that chaos. What is philosophy, to Deleuze? The short answer is, philosophy is the art of concept creation.

Let’s talk about this art of concept creation a bit more because it’s an extremely important thing to understand about the way Deleuze is looking at everything. See, Deleuze doesn’t see the history of philosophy like, “Descartes came along and did his philosophy, and then Hume came along and improved upon the mistakes of Descartes. Oh, but then Kant came along and fixed the mistakes in Hume and got us a little closer to the truth.” No, each one of these thinkers were byproducts of completely different cultures and times. And each one of those unique cultures and times had their own unique mysteries about this chaos that we live in that mattered to them. At which point, the philosophers of the day created systems of concepts to be able to bring a semblance of order to those questions that mattered. See, to Deleuze, it’s not that Descartes and Hume are wrong but Kant’s right because he came after them and could see their work. No, none of them were right. But here’s the thing, neither are we. The goal isn’t to be right or to find the truth about things, like so many in the past have mistakenly thought was the goal of philosophy. The chaos of the reality we live in is impossible to fully grasp. And, when looked at from that perspective, it completely changes the possibilities when it comes to what philosophy has really been doing throughout history and what value it can have for us today.

You know, a common email that I get, a common charge by someone in our modern world that might listen to a random episode of a philosophy podcast and see what it’s all about is something like, “Okay, so I listened to an episode on Descartes. I heard everything you had to say about how his metaphysics breaks up reality. And I just have one question for you. What’s the point? I mean, who cares about what some speculative thinker from the 17th century had to say about the way the world is broken up. We know he’s wrong today. We know he massively oversimplified it. We have way better theories now. I just find myself having a really hard time caring about any of this stuff at all.”

Deleuze would probably say that the value of Descartes’s metaphysics has nothing to do with it being true or it being the best theory that we have today. The value of Descartes, Hume, Kant, and all the rest of them is that they can offer us a window into a different way that people have brought order to this chaos, a different set of concepts answering a different set of questions about the chaos that were interesting to a different culture in time. And when you look at it that way, the history of philosophy starts to look a lot less like a collection of grand narratives and more like a goldmine of useful ideas.

You know, this is part of why I said that Deleuze is first and foremost a philosopher concerned with finding new ideas, new ways of thinking. This is the value of the philosophy of the past, present, and future. The philosophy of the past isn’t something to deconstruct and show to be meaningless to him. The philosophy of the past can provide us with new ways of looking at things that we might otherwise not see. And these new ideas can help us create the ontological frameworks that help us answer the questions that matter to us and build our world. Philosophy is the art of concept creation. And what we might have to painfully come to realize, to Deleuze, is that from the beginning of recorded history philosophy as a practice has been a lot more like art than we previously believed, a creative practice rather than one where we’re discovering things.

Deleuze and Guattari talk about three primary creative acts that human beings engage in: art, science, and philosophy, each serving its own unique and important purpose in its own right. And a significant portion of their book What is Philosophy? is dedicated to showing how these three practices are distinct from each other. The best way to describe what they mean is probably just to pick something. Picture a sunset, for example. Now, an artist, through a creative act, can depict that sunset in a very specific way, through a complex blending of colors and brush techniques or a specific combination of music notes or through a perfect weaving of words in a poem. An artist can depict the aesthetics and the human experience of that sunset in an extremely unique way that a philosopher or scientist could never hope to. That said, a scientist could create their own picture of what’s going on during a sunset. They can talk about the sun as a burning ball of gas, its light emanating across the vacuum of space only for the light to interact with the chemistry of our atmosphere and the ocean. They could talk about the measurements and distance of every aspect of that sunset in a high level of detail. The scientist describes what Deleuze calls the functions between things. And that’s an entirely different dimension of that very same sunset that the artist and philosopher could never hope to describe.

But there’s still another dimension to that same sunset and that’s what Deleuze thinks is the realm of the philosopher. For example, a philosopher might ask a question like “The burning ball of gas in the middle of our solar system and the countless photons that are interacting with our atmosphere and ocean, should we consider these two separate things or different aspects of the same thing?” Before we had the concept of a photon, are the rays of light distinct from the sun or part of it? Philosopher might ask questions like, “What is it to be a sunset? Should we think of all of it -- the sky, the sun, the clouds, the warmly lit ground, and so many other things -- as one totality to be observed that couldn’t exist without each and every one of those pieces? Or maybe we should break it up into pieces. Okay, well, is the ground distinct from the sky? Maybe the ground should be one thing and the sky and lights another. Should we consider the colors of the sunset distinct from the lights or part of it?”

The point is, to Deleuze, there’s something going on in the realm of the philosopher that’s what he calls “pre-empirical.” And by that he doesn’t mean that they aren’t using sensory data to develop concepts. What he means is that all empirical human activity, including science, relies on the art of the creation of concepts. It relies on philosophy. Take science, for example. Science only analyzes existing concepts. What I mean is, it’s not until something is declared a concept that we can have a field of science dedicated to studying it. For example, you can imagine a society that’s formally observing the sun for the first time. Now, stars are incredibly complex things. There are thousands of moving parts. And despite how obvious it seems to us, there really is no intuitive place where they begin or end because their effects span for millions of lightyears around them. In fact, even using the example of a star is a bad idea because it’s an existing concept to us. We’ve already chopped the world up in a particular way and called this thing a star. But you can imagine how other societies might chop up the effects of a star in a million other ways.

The reason this matters to science is that it’s not until we unite things, it’s not until we unite the nuclear fusion going on in the belly of a star with all the light and heat and gravity and tons of other stuff that make up our concept of a star, it’s not until that concept creation happens that we can have scientists dedicated to studying this unity that we’ve defined as a star. Say the world was chopped up in a slightly different way, scientists would be studying a slightly different thing. This is the reason why the concepts we create, the art of concept creation -- philosophy, to Deleuze -- is so important to any empirical area of study. The creation of concepts is a crucial part of what philosophy has contributed to the history of humanity. And Deleuze doesn’t give philosophy any sort of privileged position here. I mean, he sees art, science, and philosophy as equally important all in their own way. It’s just that philosophy is the one historically people have been the most confused about the function of.

Now, before next episode, it’s really important that we talk a bit about how Deleuze describes the way these ontological frameworks are created. Systems of concepts to him are always made up of three primary parts. One are the concepts themselves: red, tree, sun, etc. Two is something he refers to as a “plane of immanence,” which we’ll talk about more next time and throughout this entire series for that matter. But the one sentence version is that it’s a metaphor for the realm philosophers have done their work in or, more accurately, the set of parameters erected underneath the very act of creating concepts that make the creation of concepts even possible. The “plane of immanence” is where a philosopher goes from just a bunch of concepts to a system of concepts organized and made sense by what Deleuze refers to as an immanent logic that precedes the concepts themselves. For example, he talks in chapter one of What is Philosophy? about the relationship between the philosopher and the concept.

What is the relationship between the philosopher and the concept? Well, again, to Deleuze, the work of a philosopher is far more like the work of an artist than we’ve ever considered before. Now, in chapter one he says the relationship between a philosopher and a concept is like the relationship between a woodworker and wood. But you could even use a more explicit artistic example if you want and say that the relationship is like that of a painter to their paint. Both examples make artistic creations out of the raw materials that they have. But consider for a second that the woodworker didn’t create the wood that they’re using. They just go out into the forest and get some. The painter didn’t create their canvas and paints, you know. They just go down to JOANN Fabrics and buy some. Just as the creations of concepts precedes any sort of empirical investigation of the universe we’re living in, there’s something else that even precedes the creation of concepts. And the best term in Deleuze’s philosophy to describe this place is “plane of immanence.” Once again, we’ll talk more on this throughout the series.

So the first part of these systems are the concepts themselves. The second part is this “plane of immanence.” The third and final part is what Deleuze and Guattari call the “conceptual personae,” which, simply put, is the voice a particular philosophy is presented in that gives it context and allows it to make sense. Philosophy is always presented by a particular person or human character. That personae is as crucial to the process as the concepts or the “plane of immanence” are. Just to recap, we have the concepts themselves, existing on this metaphorical “plane of immanence,” delivered by the “conceptual personae” that gives the work context. This is the recipe for the work of any great philosopher throughout history.

We might talk more about that as well. But, look, the point is, we’ve talked many times on this show about this old dichotomy that’s used in tons of different philosophical systems called transcendence versus immanence. We talked at the beginning of the episode about these older philosophical questions that rely on transcendence. Deleuze is clearly rejecting any philosophies of transcendence, like the claim that the essences of things exist in a world of forms, like a world of human experience versus a world of things in themselves, many other examples of philosophers claiming to have arrived at the objective. He’s rejecting this transcendence and is instead offering this “plane of immanence” as an explanation that seems to solve many of the problems philosophers have had over the course of thousands of years.

This will probably be a recurring theme in this series on Deleuze, the resolution of old arguments in philosophy. Because aside from being someone strongly committed to finding paths to new ideas and ways of thinking, he thought so many of the disputes within philosophy, that go back centuries sometimes, really haven’t been about anything that substantive. Many of these disagreements just come down to a bunch of people disagreeing about the definitions or interpretations of concepts and how they work. We’ll explore this in the coming episodes.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.