21844
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The history of philosophy is an agent of power: how can you think if you haven't read the great names? [Deleuze]
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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.
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From:
Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
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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.
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21839
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When I meet objections I just move on; they never contribute anything [Deleuze]
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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.
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From:
Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
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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.
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21842
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Don't assess ideas for truth or justice; look for another idea, and establish a relationship with it [Deleuze]
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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.
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From:
Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
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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.
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21850
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Dualisms can be undone from within, by tracing connections, and drawing them to a new path [Deleuze]
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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.
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From:
Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], II)
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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.
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21843
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People consist of many undetermined lines, some rigid, some supple, some 'lines of flight' [Deleuze]
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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.
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From:
Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
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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).
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4366
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We can't accept Aristotle's naturalism about persons, because it is normative and unscientific [Williams,B, by Hursthouse]
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Full Idea:
Williams has expressed pessimism about the project of Aristotelian naturalism on the grounds that his conception of nature, and thereby of human nature, was normative, and that, in a scientific age, this is not a conception that we can take on board.
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From:
report of Bernard Williams (works [1971]) by Rosalind Hursthouse - On Virtue Ethics Ch.11
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A reaction:
I think there is a compromise here. The existentialist denial of intrinsic human nature seems daft, but Aristotelians must grasp the enormous flexibility that is possible to human behaviour because of the open nature of rationality.
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21848
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Some lines (of flight) are becomings which escape the system [Deleuze]
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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.
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From:
Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], II)
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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.
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14014
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Space alone, and time alone, will fade away, and only their union has an independent reality [Minkowski]
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Full Idea:
Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.
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From:
Hermann Minkowski (Space and Time [1908], Intro)
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A reaction:
Notice the qualification that it is a 'kind of' union. Deep confusion arises from exaggerating the analogy between space and time. Craig Bourne remarks (2006:157) that this shows independence of measurement, not of reality
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