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What Is Philosophy? (European Perspectives)

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First of all, this book is not an introduction to philosophy and should not be read by beginners who has not read any philosophical text before. Rather, as the writers say, this should be read by people who are engaged with philosophy for sometime either as a student or as an enthusiastic reader and who reached the point of asking the question ''What the hell I' m doing?'' This book gives the answer and lets the philosophy student recognise his/her task and continue work being much more conscious about the topic. The book carefully analyses the differences between scientific, philosophic and artistic knowledge and also succeeds in giving their relations in a clear way. Defining philosophy as ''creation of concepts'' may, at first, seem like an old and unoriginal definition but as you continue reading the book you will easily see that that definition gives way to a really original and successful conceptualization of philosophy and science. As a result I recommend this book to all students of philosophy except the freshmen whether coming from the analytic or continental tradition.

For a grad class "Recent French Philosophy" I am reading Deleuze and Guattari's "What is Philosophy?". I certainly don't have a review ready for it. Nor can I claim to have concrete and clear thoughts about it yet. But I do have questions and rough ideas which I will endeavor to set down simply for the practice of articulating these thoughts.

Regarding style: Many have and will complain that Deleuze obfuscates what he ought to want to make clear. The meaning of a sentence or paragraph, I will admit, is not always clear if only because Deleuze refers often to ideas outside philosophy without providing clear meaning. He alludes or make explicit reference to art works, history, his previous work, film, and political concerns without pausing to describe more completely each of these.

Deleuze however is completely serious in his task; I would deny anyone who wished to claim Deleuze was trying to evoke a mind-fudge which would somehow disrupt the knowledge-seeking mind the same way knowledge-seeking has been disrupted by poststructuralist insights. He may do this in Mille Plateau but so far in "What is Philosophy?" he is not being artful with his style. His style is dictated not by a desire to have commensurability between "gist" and mode of expression. His style is dense and difficult because he has a lot to say, is at the end of a career with much ground work done; and feels he must talk to his schoolmates (to use a phrase of Spivak's concerning Derrida). The issues dealt with in "What is Philosophy?" exist at a high level of abstraction which Deleuze has arrived at the end of his career. Let his earlier work, a familiarity with art and culture, and a close dedicated slow reading fill in the gaps in his style.

Deleuze begins with an introduction in which he suggests that the question of what is philosophy, is a question proper for old age. Indeed, this book was written not long before Guattari died and after many of their great collaborative works. Deleuze wrote at the beginning of his career detailed histories of particular individual philosophers that he felt to be in line with his and his generations project to do without Hegelian dialectics (this according to Hardt's reading). Deleuze wrote on Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche and Spinoza in this fashion. Deleuze then partnered with Guattari, a psychoanalyst and activist, to write "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" as well as the sequel, "Thousand Plateaus."

"What is Philosophy?" is very much a work in which Deleuze and Gauttari step back to survey as only an older person can do what it is they've been doing all along. The book does actually provide definitions of what philosophy is and is rigorous in explaining what the definitions mean.

Philosophy is the creation of concepts. It is not an extension of logic, nor an inquiry into the textual nature of everything. Nor is philosophy reflection, contemplation or communication although philosophy creates concepts of each of those three eventually.

So, what is it to create concepts? It seems to me that the easiest way to understand what Deleuze says about concepts is to think about it all with the aid of a 3D Cartesian graph like in a CAD program.

There is no simple or originary concept as every concept consists in more than two components and every concept is situated in relation to a philosophical problem (such as free will or perception) and is situated in relation to other concepts on the same plane and on other planes.

"For, according to the Nietzsching verdict, you will know nothing through concepts unless you have first created them -- that is, constructed them in an intuition specific to them: a field, a plane, and a ground that must not be confused with them but that shelters their seeds..."

What the concept is named, who is it's creator, and the components involved in its relation to its philosophical problem are all the idiosyncratic components of a concept each existing in our Cartesian 3D space...the concept being the "Fragmentary whole" connecting all the components.

In light of their definition of a concept, Deleuze and Guattari are able to say something to those who are often found arguing about subjectivity and objectivity or relativism and absolutes. A concept belies this dichotomy as a concept is both relative and absolute. In that a concept consists roughly speaking of relations between its components and other concepts, then a concept is relative. But to attack a concept as not-absolute is only to bring another component into our range and thereby change the concept we are dealing with.

"The concept is therefore both absolute and relative: it is relative to its own components, to other concepts, to the plane on which it is defined, and to the problems it is supposed to resolve; but it is absolute through the condensation it carries out, the site it occupies on the plane, and the conditions it assigns to the problem" [p.21].

D and G explain themselves in concrete examples which is wonderfully helpful. The examples include "the Other" and the Cartesian Ego which includes a drawing.

I am still trying to figure out if neighborhood zones, bridges, planes, and history of a concept, refer to the concepts endoconsistency and endorelations or its exorelations. I think zone is endo and plane is endo.

More later.

Nicely reasoned work on the role of philosophy, science, and art in the human approach to organizing meaning in the material world. Deleuze is of course a key thinker in terms of understanding the current state of how we come to terms with origins and potentialities. It can be difficult at times because of translation and the unique terminology necessary to explore certain innovative concepts; but if you're not familiar with Deleuze, and want a fresh look at the subject, this is a good start.

Of course Deleuze and Guattari's self-explication does not read like an introduction to philosophy, but this compact and rich text is a wonderful and provocative entry into their work. Deleuze has brilliantly reconceived philosophy as the production of concepts and has attempted to reintroduce metaphysics back into the project of creative thinking. If accepted, this is a radical and crucial turning point in the development of contemporary philosophy-Heidegger may not have the final word on metaphysics after all. This difficult text is composed of three essential parts, concepts, science, and art. There are mordantly brilliant critiques of logic and positivism here, as well as crucial articulations of Deleuze's commitment to artistic expression. In the final analysis, it is the `plane of immanence' that grips me most completely. The power and radicality of Deleuzian metaphysics will be felt for a long time.

Deleuze and Guattari's masterful reconception of thought, succinctly packaged and clearly articulated - although not the clear articulation you might expect. D&G define philosophy as "the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts," as opposed to science's art of describing patterns that already exist, or art's creation of percepts and sensations. Part One explains the nature of the concept; the plane of immanence on which all philosophy depends; the philosopher's use of conceptual personae to explore their concepts (like Plato's Socrates or Nietzsche's Zarathustra); and tracing the movement of the concept through its formations and reformations (what D&G call territorialization and deterritorialization). Part Two then compares philosophy's role to science's and arts, reserving special criticism for logic's (misguided) assumption of philosophy's role. Finally, D&G creatively introduce the brain as the intersection of these three planes: philosophy, science, and art. A wonderful final masterpiece from two "conceptual personae" who really cause us to think in an original way, and will not settle for anything less.

The book is what one could call the image-thought of Deleuze himself. What is explained in chapter two is the book itself. If one wants the answer to the question: "¿what is then the image of thought of Deleuze and Guattari?" then this book is the answer. Now, one cannot simply answer: "Creation". After reading the book and some other parts of their philosophy, one understands that that is just the external form of the answer, not worng, but not whole. A new system of philosophy "is finished" with this book. Not a hegelian system, but as Hegel did.

Here is the big picture: thought has "three great forms -- art, science, and philosophy...."(197) This three-part framework is not explicated, but these categories clearly refer to culture, leaving out distasteful areas of culture, such as technology, which are certainly merely "material."
To explain culture, the writers move back and forth between two varieties of positivism: intellectualistic positivism and anti-intellectual positivism. Intellectualistic positivism is the position associated with Hume, Hobbes, and Locke that reduces culture to ways of thinking, especially among intellectuals. Anti-intellectual positivism is the position associated with Malthus and Darwin, and that derives culture from some underlying biological forces.

The book is divided into two parts.

Part I says that "forms" of culture arise from composing one's feelings (art), referring to instants of experience by measuring motion (science), and forming concepts (philosophy). "Concept" is some entity of "thought." "Concept" is never defined but is catalogued by words like "fragmentary whole, plural," and "incorporeal." Concepts, references, and feelings make up "planes," also never defined, which are "immanent" for concepts, "referent" for science, and "monumental" for art.
The "plane of immanence" among the academic philosophers is the highest plane, of course:
"If the three ages of the concept are the encyclopedia, pedagogy, and personal commercial training, only the second can safeguard us from falling from the heights of the first into the disaster of the third -- an absolute disaster for thought, whatever its benefits might be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalism." (12)

Philosophers communicate their concepts by "personae...leaping like Kierkegaard, dancing like Nietzsche, and diving like Melville." (71) Scientists communicate their references by "observers," like Maxwell's demon (129). Artists communicate their feelings by compositions. All these are variations on the theme of intellectualistic positivism, the center of which is the philosopher's acting like an atom, swirling about, intellecting concepts.

Part I closes with a digression on sociologistic positivism shading into radical anti-intellectualistic positivism. The digression is on "geophilosophy." The writers adopt a form of radical anti-intellectualistic positivism: animals form territories, abandon them, and recreate them. So "social fields are inextricable knots in which the three fields are mixed up so that in order to disentangle them, we have to diagnose real types or personae." (68) Geopolitics means that some concepts, observations, and compositions are good ones, because they are "territorialized" by relation to the values of a particular society, as among the ancient Greeks. They are "immanent."
But others are bad ones because they are "deterritorialized" by political domination. They are "transcendent." Transcendent geophilosophy is "imperial," and "paradigmatic, projective, hierarchical, referential" (89) like Chinese, Hindu, Jewish, Islamic "pre-philosophy." Immanent "geophilosophy" is "syntagmatic, connective, linking, and "consistent" (91). Because of transcendent geophilosophy, the "two great modern revolutions, American and Soviet, have turned out so badly." (100) We are in just a terrible state today, having damaged our environment with our transcendent concepts. "The Greeks lived and thought in Nature, but left Mind in the "mysteries," whereas we live, think, and feel in the Mind, in reflection, but leave Nature in a profound alchemical mystery that we constantly profane." (102)

Part II recovers from geopolitical environmentalism, and the writers return to science, portraying science as measurements or "functives...propositions in discursive systems" (117) in a "plane of reference" (127) among states, "enunciated" by..."partial observers." (129). While science has reference, philosophy has logic, which "wants to turn the concept into a function" (135), but is just the confrontation of opinions about "virtuals." Art has "composition," by which the artist memorializes his sensations, especially the unhappy depressed ones like Van Gogh, Woolf, Dickenson, and Klee. Here a variety of cultural idealism emerges, as the concepts and the compositions take over. We are treated throughout to many precious metaphors ("The philosopher is the friend of the concept") and obscure references ("Kant's hose suspenders") which show how piquant it is to be an intellect aware that "immanence is only immanent to itself." (48)
The last chapter, "From Chaos to the Brain," returns to the intellectual and anti-intellectual themes. Thought (intellectual) must be localized in the brain (organic, anti-intellectual), because opinions are an umbrella we put up to protect us from chaos. "The brain is the "junction" of the three planes: immanence of philosophy, reference of science, composition of art...." (217) In sum, "Art struggles with chaos...to render it sensory...science is perhaps inspired by a sinuous reptilian movement. (205) Philosophy struggles in turn with the chaos as undifferentiated abyss or ocean of dissemblance." (207)
Their position that the object world is grounded in chaos is really an assumption that science is impossible, because "chaos" has no intrinsic order. The book has an extensively commented bibliography of mostly continental writers in the footnotes and an index that valiantly substitutes a heroic catalogue of page references for definitions, since, in the end, they say concepts cannot be defined.

Condition? Unbelievable! Delivery? It arrived so fast, time was suspended and then went backward for about half a second. Seriously.

Deleuze and Guattari present their perspective on philosophy, science and art. According to them, philosophy is to create concepts. The writing is quite dense but you will find the D-G's final spark in this book.

Nietzsche, who started all this, may or may not have been the deepest thinker since Socrates, but he was a stylistic virtuoso. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, were founder members of a postmodern cult whose watchword is: obscurity = profundity. But while some profound things may be ineluctably obscure, by no means all obscure things are profound.

This book, which runs to 250 pages scarcely burdened by a coherently expressed thought, is in line for the prestigious prize, the Golden Merde de Taureau. It contains, along with much else, the authors' mature lucubrations on the foundations of calculus, which have greatly impressed readers who flunked high-school math. Others maintain that these passages are not about mathematics at all, just as the passages about science are not about science, and they may be right. What, if anything, it is about is anyone's guess, and many have speculated, some to their own satisfaction. One thing we can be sure of, because the authors tell us: they are creating concepts. This important work should not be undertaken by those in whom unfortunate defects of education have left a residual respect for language and joined-up thought.

The book was a bestseller in France - possibly the most unread bestseller since a 'A Brief History of Time', but for different reasons.