21 ideas
| 21844 | The history of philosophy is an agent of power: how can you think if you haven't read the great names? [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought. It has played the oppressor's role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: I find it hard to relate to this French 1960s obsession with everybody being oppressed in every conceivable way, so that 'liberation' is the only value that matters. If you ask why liberty is needed, you seem to have missed the point. |
| 21849 | Thought should be thrown like a stone from a war-machine [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Thought should be thrown like a stone by a war-machine. …Isn't this what Nietzsche does with an aphorism? | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], II) | |
| A reaction: It sounds as if philosophy should consist of nothing but aphorisms. |
| 21845 | Philosophy aims to become the official language, supporting orthodoxy and the state [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is shot through with the project of becoming the official language of a Pure State. The exercise of thought thus conforms to the goals of the real State, to the dominant meanings and to the requirements of the established order. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Nietzsche's 'Schopenhauer as Educator' as the source of this] Is Karl Marx included in this generalisation, or Diogenes of Sinope? Is conservative philosophy thereby invalidated? |
| 21839 | When I meet objections I just move on; they never contribute anything [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Not reflection, and objections are even worse. Every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: 'OK, OK, let's get on to something else'. Objections have never contributed anything. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: I know it is heresy in analytic philosophy, but I love this! In analytic seminars you can barely complete your first sentence before someone interrupts. It's like road range - the philosophical mind state is always poised to attack, attack. |
| 21841 | We must create new words, and treat them as normal, and as if designating real things. [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like the attitude of someone creating a computer game. A language game! The idea is to create concepts with which to 'palpitate' our conceptual scheme, in order to reveal it, and thus put it within our power. |
| 21842 | Don't assess ideas for truth or justice; look for another idea, and establish a relationship with it [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area, so that something passes between the two which is neither in one nor the other. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: Neither relativism nor dialectic. Sounds like just having fun with ideas, but a commentator tells me it is a strategy for liberating our thought, following an agenda created by Nietzsche. |
| 21850 | Dualisms can be undone from within, by tracing connections, and drawing them to a new path [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: It is always possible to undo dualisms from the inside, by tracing the line of flight which passes between the two terms or the two sets …and which draws both into a non-parallel evolution. At least this does not belong to the dialectic. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], II) | |
| A reaction: Deleuze disliked Hegel's version of the dialectic. Not clear what he means here, but he is evidently groping for an alternative account of the reasoning process, which is interesting. Deleuze hates rigid dualisms. |
| 21838 | Before we seek solutions, it is important to invent problems [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: The art of constructing a problem is very important: you invent a problem, a problem-position, before finding a solution. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: I get the impression that Deleuze prefers problems to solutions, so the activity of exploring the problem is all that really matters. Sceptics accuse philosophers of inventing pseudo-problems. We must first know why 'problematising' is good. |
| 10735 | Abstraction from objects won't reveal an operation's being performed 'so many times' [Geach] |
| Full Idea: For an understanding of arithmetic the grasp of an operation's being performed 'so many times' is quite indispensable; and abstraction of a feature from groups of nuts cannot give us this grasp. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.170) | |
| A reaction: I end up defending the empirical approach to arithmetic because remarks like this are so patently false. Geach seems to think we arrive ready-made in the world, just raring to get on with some counting. He lacks the evolutionary perspective. |
| 21847 | Before Being there is politics [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Before Being there is politics. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: [He says he is quoting Felix Guattari] I can only think that this is a very Marxist view - that politics permeates and dictates everything. This seems to tell me that I am forever controlled by something so deep and vast that I can never understand it. |
| 22049 | Transcendental idealism aims to explain objectivity through subjectivity [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: The aim of transcendental idealism is to give a basis for objectivity in terms of subjectivity. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010], 1) | |
| A reaction: Hume used subjectivity to undermine the findings of objectivity. There was then no return to naive objectivity. Kant's aim then was to thwart global scepticism. Post-Kantians feared that he had failed. |
| 22055 | The Idealists saw the same unexplained spontaneity in Kant's judgements and choices [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: The Idealist saw in Kant that knowledge, which depends on the spontaneity of judgement, and self-determined spontaneous action, can be seen as sharing the same source, which is not accessible to scientific investigation. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010]) | |
| A reaction: This is the 'spontaneity' of judgements and choices which was seen as the main idea in Kant. It inspired romantic individualism. The judgements are the rule-based application of concepts. |
| 22054 | German Idealism tried to stop oppositions of appearances/things and receptivity/spontaneity [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: A central aim of German Idealism is to overcome Kant's oppositions between appearances and thing in themselves, and between receptivity and spontaneity. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010], 2) | |
| A reaction: I have the impression that there were two strategies: break down the opposition within the self (Fichte), or break down the opposition in the world (Spinozism). |
| 22056 | Crucial to Idealism is the idea of continuity between receptivity and spontaneous judgement [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: A crucial idea for German Idealism (from Hamann) is that apparently passive receptivity and active spontaneity are in fact different degrees of the same 'activity, and the gap between subject and world can be closed. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010], 3) | |
| A reaction: The 'passive' bit seems to be Hume's 'impressions', which are Kant's 'intuitions', which need 'spontaneous' interpretation to become experiences. Critics of Kant said this implied a dualism. |
| 21840 | A meeting of man and animal can be deterritorialization (like a wasp with an orchid) [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: The wasp becomes part of the orchid's reproductive apparatus at the same time as the orchid becomes the sexual organ of the wasp. …There are becomings where a man and an animal only meet on the trajectory of a common but asymmetrical deterritorialization. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: [second bit compressed] The point here is to illustrate 'deterritorialization', a term which Deleuze got from Guattari. It seems to be where the margins of your being become unclear. Recall the externalist, anti-individualist view of mind. |
| 10732 | If concepts are just recognitional, then general judgements would be impossible [Geach] |
| Full Idea: If concepts were nothing but recognitional capacities, then it is unintelligible that I can judge that cats eat mice when neither of them are present. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.164) | |
| A reaction: Having observed the importance of recognition for the abstractionist (Idea 10731), he then seems to assume that there is nothing more to their concepts. Geach fails to grasp levels of abstraction, and cross-reference, and generalisation. |
| 21843 | People consist of many undetermined lines, some rigid, some supple, some 'lines of flight' [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Things, people, are made up of varied lines, and they do not necessarily know which line they are on or where they should make the line which they are tracing pass; there is a whole geography in people, with rigid lines, supple lines, lines of flight etc. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: An example of Deleuze creating a novel concept, in order to generate a liberating way of seeing our lives. His big focus is on 'lines of flight' (which, I think, are less restrained by local culture than the others). |
| 10731 | For abstractionists, concepts are capacities to recognise recurrent features of the world [Geach] |
| Full Idea: For abstractionists, concepts are essentially capacities for recognizing recurrent features of the world. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.163) | |
| A reaction: Recognition certainly strikes me as central to thought (and revelatory of memory, since we continually recognise what we cannot actually recall). Geach dislikes this view, but I see it as crucial to an evolutionary view of thought. |
| 10733 | The abstractionist cannot explain 'some' and 'not' [Geach] |
| Full Idea: The abstractionist cannot give a logically coherent account of the features that are supposed to be reached by discriminative attention, corresponding to the words 'some' and 'not'. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.167) | |
| A reaction: I understand 'some' in terms of mereology, because that connects to experience, and 'not' I take to derive more from psychological experience than from the physical world, building on thwarted expectation, which even animals experience. |
| 10734 | Only a judgement can distinguish 'striking' from 'being struck' [Geach] |
| Full Idea: To understand the verb 'to strike' we must see that 'striking' and 'being struck' are different, but necessarily go together in event and thought; only in the context of a judgment can they be distinguished, when we think of both together. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Abstraction Reconsidered [1983], p.168) | |
| A reaction: Geach seems to have a strange notion that judgements are pure events which can precede all experience, and are the only ways we can come to understand experience. He needs to start from animals (or 'brutes', as he still calls them!). |
| 21848 | Some lines (of flight) are becomings which escape the system [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: There are lines which do not amount to the path of a point, which break free from structure - lines of flight, becomings, without future or past, without memory, which resist the binary machine. …The rhizome is all this. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], II) | |
| A reaction: The binary machine enforces simplistic either/or choices. I assume the 'lines' are to replace the Self, with something much more indeterminate, active and changing. |