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. |
| 14650 | Maybe proper names involve essentialism [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps the notion of a proper name itself involves essentialism. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (De Re and De Dicto [1969], p.43) | |
| A reaction: This is just before Kripke's announcement of 'rigid designation', which seems to have relaunched modern essentialism. The thought is that you can't name something, if you don't have a stable notion of what is (and isn't) being named. |
| 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. |
| 14648 | Could I name all of the real numbers in one fell swoop? Call them all 'Charley'? [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: Can't I name all the real numbers in the interval (0,1) at once? Couldn't I name them all 'Charley', for example? | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (De Re and De Dicto [1969], p.40) | |
| A reaction: Plantinga is nervous about such a sweeping move, but can't think of an objection. This addresses a big problem, I think - that you are supposed to accept the real numbers when we cannot possibly name them all. |
| 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. |
| 14647 | Surely self-identity is essential to Socrates? [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: If anything is essential to Socrates, surely self-identity is. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (De Re and De Dicto [1969], p.37) | |
| A reaction: This is the modern move of Plantinga and Adams, to make 'is identical with Socrates' the one property which assures the identity of Socrates (his 'haecceity'). My view is that self-identity is not a property. Plantinga wonders about that on p.44. |
| 14646 | An object has a property essentially if it couldn't conceivably have lacked it [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: An object has a property essentially just in case it couldn't conceivably have lacked that property. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (De Re and De Dicto [1969], p.35) | |
| A reaction: Making it depend on what we can conceive seems a bit dubious, for someone committed to real essences. The key issue is how narrowly or broadly you interpret the word 'property'. The word 'object' needs a bit of thought, too! |
| 14649 | Can we find an appropriate 'de dicto' paraphrase for any 'de re' proposition? [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: To explain the 'de re' via the 'de dicto' is to provide a rule enabling us to find, for each de re proposition, an equivalent de dicto proposition. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (De Re and De Dicto [1969], p.41) | |
| A reaction: Many 'de dicto' paraphrases will change the modality of a 'de re' statement, so the challenge is to find the right equivalent version. Plantinga takes up this challenge. The 'de dicto' statement says the object has the property, and must have it. |
| 14642 | Expressing modality about a statement is 'de dicto'; expressing it of property-possession is 'de re' [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: Some statements predicate modality of another statement (modality 'de dicto'); but others predicate of an object the necessary or essential possession of a property; these latter express modality 'de re'. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (De Re and De Dicto [1969], p.26) | |
| A reaction: The distinction seems to originate in Aquinas, concerning whether God knows the future (or, how he knows the future). 'De dicto' is straightforward, but possibly the result of convention. 'De re' is controversial, and implies deep metaphysics. |
| 14643 | 'De dicto' true and 'de re' false is possible, and so is 'de dicto' false and 'de re' true [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: Aquinas says if a 'de dicto' statement is true, the 'de re' version may be false. The opposite also applies: 'What I am thinking of [17] is essentially prime' is true, but 'The proposition "what I am thinking of is prime" is necessarily true' is false. | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (De Re and De Dicto [1969], p.27) | |
| A reaction: In his examples the first is 'de re' (about the number), and the second is 'de dicto' (about that proposition). |
| 14651 | What Socrates could have been, and could have become, are different? [Plantinga] |
| Full Idea: Is there a difference between what Socrates could have been, and what he could have become? | |
| From: Alvin Plantinga (De Re and De Dicto [1969], p.44) | |
| A reaction: That is, I take it, 1) how different might he have been in the past, given how he is now?, and 2) how different might he have been in the past, and now, if he had permanently diverged from how he is now? 1) has tight constraints on it. |
| 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). |
| 22086 | The most important aspect of a human being is not reason, but passion [Kierkegaard, by Carlisle] |
| Full Idea: Kierkegaard insisted that the most important aspect of a human being is not reason, but passion. | |
| From: report of Søren Kierkegaard (works [1845]) by Clare Carlisle - Kierkegaard: a guide for the perplexed Intro | |
| A reaction: Hume comes to mind for a similar view, but in character Hume was far more rational than Kierkegaard. |
| 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. |