18 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. |
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. |
19508 | Contextualism needs a semantics for knowledge sentences that are partly indexical [Schiffer,S] |
Full Idea: Contextualist semantics must capture the 'indexical' nature of knowledge claims, the fact that different utterances of a knowledge sentence with no apparent indexical terms can express different propositions. | |
From: Stephen Schiffer (Contextualist Solutions to Scepticism [1996], p.325), quoted by Keith DeRose - The Case for Contextualism 1.5 | |
A reaction: Schiffer tries to show that this is too difficult, and DeRose defends contextualism against the charge. |
19509 | The indexical aspect of contextual knowledge might be hidden, or it might be in what 'know' means [Schiffer,S] |
Full Idea: One might have a 'hidden-indexical' theory of knowledge sentences: they contain constituents that are not the semantic values of any terms; ...or 'to know' itself might be indexical, as in 'I know[easy] I have hands' or 'I know[tough] I have hands'. | |
From: Stephen Schiffer (Contextualist Solutions to Scepticism [1996], p.326-7), quoted by Keith DeRose - The Case for Contextualism 1.5 | |
A reaction: [very compressed] Given the choice, I would have thought it was in 'know', since to say 'either you know p or you don't' sounds silly to me. |
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. |
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). |
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. |