[HN Gopher] Gilles Deleuze - What is Philosophy? [audio]
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Gilles Deleuze - What is Philosophy? [audio]
Author : tomtomistaken
Score : 55 points
Date : 2023-12-09 07:38 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.philosophizethis.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.philosophizethis.org)
| starwin1159 wrote:
| nice
| zvmaz wrote:
| "Deleuze's work is characterized by his emphasis on difference
| and multiplicity, which he saw as fundamental to understanding
| the world. He developed a philosophy of becoming, which
| emphasizes the importance of change and transformation."
|
| Vacuous.
|
| Reminds me of David Stove's "What is wrong with our thoughts"
| [1].
|
| [1] https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html
| tomtomistaken wrote:
| Check out all the parts available on Philosophize This!. In
| particular, parts 4[1] and 5[2] talk about flows and
| difference.
|
| [1] https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/deleuze-flows
|
| [2] https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/deleuze-difference
| gexaha wrote:
| Do you consider Whitehead's philosophy also vacuous?
| dlkf wrote:
| Motte (principia) and bailey (process philosophy).
| mannykannot wrote:
| I'm not sure this would be entirely fair to Whitehead
| unless he tried to pass off the latter as being justified
| by the former.
| cyber_kinetist wrote:
| I have heard that Deleuze's works highly derive from
| Whitehead's process philosophy (along with influences of
| Bergson and Nietzsche). Which was pretty unexpected to me,
| since I've previously known Whitehead as a mathematician who
| tried creating a foundation of modern mathematics with
| Bertrand Russell (writing the book Principia Mathematica
| together). So I wouldn't have expected that he's actually one
| of the more foundational people behind continental
| philosophy, which has a (mis-understood) image of being
| illogical and vacuous!
|
| Anyways, should read _Process and Reality_ someday, since my
| interest in panpsychism is growing... (And which might be
| more useful than reading Deleuze /Guattari since they're just
| _too_ cryptic)
| voldacar wrote:
| You're mixing up two Whiteheads
| arketyp wrote:
| No
| CiteXieAlAlyEtc wrote:
| the most underrated comment on this thread; i cackled out
| loud, thank you.
|
| Shaviro's "Without Criteria" which discusses this connection
| was an absolute delight.
| bangkoksbest wrote:
| The Stove essay (in truth it's a prolonged rant) supposedly
| extols the virtues of empirical thinking, and you invoked it to
| back up the sense you had that the description of Deleuze's
| philosophy is vacuous... And yet...
|
| Difference and multiplicity are core to empirical data and
| scientific & engineering modelling. To make a measurement you
| assume there is a scale to measure difference. To have a
| variable is to assume that something can vary. To be a cause is
| to assume something can make a difference. To have a process is
| to assume a system that can change and transform. There's
| nothing vacuous about this.
| mrkeen wrote:
| > To have a variable is to assume that something can vary.
|
| Tautology.
|
| > To be a cause is to assume something can make a difference.
|
| Tautology.
|
| > To have a process is to assume a system that can change and
| transform.
|
| Tautology.
|
| Vacuous is exactly how I'd describe the above.
|
| The only statement with potential depth is:
|
| > To make a measurement you assume there is a scale to
| measure difference.
|
| This invokes quantum mechanics a little. But if those are
| Deleuze's words, he's a bit late to the party. That stuff was
| being quantified and mathematically modelled decades before.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| This is very strange.. Those are not what tautologies are.
|
| In order for something to be tautological, you need to be
| working within some formal system of proof. Proposing
| definitions to terms could never be tautological.
|
| I think you just want to say "I know that already!"
|
| Also, Deleuze would _love_ this comment, precisely because
| of your confusion in the term.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Sense
| bangkoksbest wrote:
| To be fair, I did intentionally write them in a style to
| mimic propositional logical statements (which are
| tautologies) but you are correct that they're not in a
| formal system so they can't _actually_ be tautologies.
| mrkeen wrote:
| > This is very strange.. Those are not what tautologies
| are.
|
| > I think you just want to say "I know that already!"
|
| > "All humans are mammals" is held to assert with regard
| to anything whatsoever that either it is not a human or
| it is a mammal. But that universal "truth" follows not
| from any facts noted about real humans but only from the
| actual use of human and mammal and is thus purely a
| matter of definition. [1]
|
| Moving on.
|
| I assumed parent was trying to make (non-vacuous)
| statements, firstly because he was replying to a comment,
| and secondly because he followed them up with "There's
| nothing vacuous about this."
|
| > Proposing definitions to terms could never be
| tautological.
|
| If you treat them as statements, the tautologies clearly
| appear by substituting the terms' definitions in:
|
| * To have a (thing which can vary) is to assume that
| something can vary.
|
| * To be a (something that can make a difference) is to
| assume something can make a difference.
|
| But if parent was just defining his terms, then let's
| hear those terms used in non-vacuous statements.
|
| [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/tautology
| bangkoksbest wrote:
| As the parent commenter, I already put a reply you could
| respond to
| bangkoksbest wrote:
| Of course they're tautologies in a logic sense, and I
| deliberately wrote them that way (whether they are
| pejorative tautologies is not really a material point.)
| They're statements about the _methods_ for empirical
| thinking, the statements were not supposed to have
| empirical content themselves.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| > This invokes quantum mechanics a little.
|
| It also invokes politics, economics, and all that
| implements some form of notional value, because as some
| other philosopher quipped, what gets measured gets
| treasured.
| dash2 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Deleuze never said anything about difference,
| multiplicity, variables, or process that has proved useful to
| a scientist or engineer, but I'd be very interested to be
| proved wrong.
| bangkoksbest wrote:
| I'm an engineer and I find some of his stuff useful,
| particularly when it comes to thinking through how to think
| about how to use large p, small n data.
|
| But I also don't have a strong reactionary anger to
| Deleuze's penchant for writing in an obscurant quasi-post-
| modern literary style, and I get that many do. In any case,
| it's not like similar ideas are not also worked through in
| less cryptic ways in contemporary philosophy of science
| journals.
| modernpink wrote:
| All of modern science is possible without philosophy. In
| fact, it is when what was called natural philosophy broke off
| into the natural sciences that philosophy per se devolved
| into a series of language games on metaphysics that became of
| little relevance aside from those in the philosophy
| profession itself.
|
| All our modern advances from hypersonic missiles, large
| language models, quantum physics and spaceflight and are in
| spite of what is called philosophy, not due to it.
| dleeftink wrote:
| To turn this around, is all of modern philosophy possible
| without science? And critically, do we want it to be?
|
| Advances, musings and insights in one domain do not
| preclude those in others, just as the ethical and
| epistemological boundaries (and possible trajectories) of
| missiles, models and spacecraft do not suddenly disappear
| just because we invented them.
|
| Even moreso, the surrounding language games can be just as
| impactful: doomsday clocks, Turing tests and space
| supremacy have informed many policies on the docket, well
| before any practical applications were feasible. In these
| instances, it would be (and has been) quite difficult to
| seperate the science from our language, just as the other
| way around.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Let me see if I got this right by echoing it
| aphoristically: science doesn't care about epistemology?
|
| How do you feel about falsifiability?
| asplake wrote:
| Multiplicity, because relationships become important.
| Difference, because that drives emergence. Becoming, because
| when you're dealing with the emergent (eg social structures),
| how they come into being is essential to understanding them.
| espe wrote:
| deleuze was actually pretty well read in the natural sciences
| of his times, especially physics. even if you find this short
| snippet vacuous-sounding, he is actually one of the few
| philosophers whose metaphors about impenetrable parts of
| reality are grounded.
| keiferski wrote:
| These words have specific meanings in Deleuze's philosophy.
| They aren't that complicated.
|
| Your comment is tantamount to someone that doesn't speak German
| saying "vacuous" when they come across a word like Geist. Lazy
| and uninformed.
| specialist wrote:
| I know almost nothing about philosophy and exactly nothing
| about Deleuze.
|
| I do know the ancient philosophers cared a lot about change.
|
| So I assume Deleuze's notions wrt change are serious too, and
| not just some self-help new age crap.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| As a teenager, I was enjoying Sciences classes, but not
| Philisophy at all at that time, I was really lagging behind in
| maturity, of course now 20 years later it's different. I don't
| think Philisophy is something you can only learn, I think you
| need enough life experience, maturity, wisdom so distance and
| time
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Also with a lot of the French philosophers, there's an
| assumption that you've already had a standard Sorbonne
| education, and now you're ready for a revisionist
| interpretation of some fundamental questions in the standard
| model, but if you're just coming to it as an American
| undergrad, you're missing a lot of the context, so the revision
| makes no sense.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Well... Simone Weil very early in life already had a strong
| concept of what philosophy was and how she would like to tackle
| it. She had a genius of her own and is not fair to compair the
| average person interested in philosophy to her.
|
| However I think we can trace somehow a parallel between the
| lack of general interest in those areas of humanity in early
| life and the utilitarian nature of kindergarten and highschool.
| That is, not enjoying philosophy early in life speaks more
| about how outdated our education system is in general and less
| about philosophy itself. We are just not practicing philosophy
| in school.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| > I don't think Philisophy is something you can only learn, I
| think you need enough life experience, maturity, wisdom so
| distance and time
|
| ha ha only serious: the real philosophy is the one we found
| along the way
| nathias wrote:
| Deleuze is one of the best thinkers of the last century, but he
| requires a lot of reading before what he's saying can make any
| sense.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| He is very popular in the arts, but I don't understand why.
| It's vaguely platonic (which I like) but obtuse (like kant).
| pas wrote:
| the only thing I know about him (them, with Guattari), is
| that they went all-in to post-modern stuff with regards to
| the individual and society, and a lot of artists are simply
| find that relatable. (only the non-conformist can survive in
| this capitalist wasteland of ever increasing economic
| efficiency, etc.. etc..)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Oedipus with the subtitle
| "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" ... and in the second part "A
| Thousand Plateaus" they discuss a lot of artists
|
| > obtuse
|
| who isn't? but seriously, first-hand reading of philosophy
| seems like a big no-no, almost all of it is derivative and
| it's very hard to present it in an efficient way (just the
| exposition/background/context required for [comprehending]
| thought experiments is usually a few dense pages, etc.)
|
| _or_ possibly my past encounters were very unfortunate, and
| it 'd be great to hear some suggestions!
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Deleuze shows up in film and sound design, maybe music a bit.
| I get why; process, change, emergence, diversity... all have
| a deep bearing on these arts. Personally find it useful for
| understanding media in a theoretical way. But what practising
| artists can really use from Deleuze, I am unsure.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| The arts are all about saying bullshit that means nothing but
| everyone pretends they understand in order to be part of the
| "in" crowd
| smokel wrote:
| Many contemporary artists are good at associative thought but
| pretty bad at rational thought.
|
| Several popular French philosophers say _a lot_ , so there
| will always be some interesting hook for people to catch on.
|
| The rational thinker will get annoyed, because the drivel is
| unfounded. The artist will feel inspired and enlightened.
|
| (Source: have formal education in both mathematics and fine
| arts.)
| 2devnull wrote:
| The influence of French cinema may be a factor too I would
| guess.
| nathias wrote:
| this is more of a problem of the US reception of Deleuze
| via literary studies not philosophy, Deleuze is a very
| serious and rational thinker, but without context, it's
| senseless (which people use for posturing)
| smokel wrote:
| Hm, I should not have used the word "drivel", that may
| have been a bit too harsh.
|
| A thing with Deleuze is that I still see very little
| value in some of his ideas. The idea of a "rhizome" for
| instance (which might be related to Latour's "actor-
| network theory") seems rather trivial to me. This may
| well be because I grew up in a time when these ideas were
| already fairly mainstream, but I find it highly unlikely
| that people before Deleuze only thought in black and
| white.
|
| A hurdle that I may once have to cross is that I should
| not read these philosophers for their original thought,
| but more for their critique on contemporary society. The
| latter seems rather pointless, because it costs me almost
| no effort to superficially critique contemporary society
| myself :)
| nathias wrote:
| most of it is an attempt to escape
| Hegelianism/Marxism/psychoanalysis, but his earlier works
| (Difference and Repetition, Logic Of Sense) are much
| better in terms of accessibility, to me his best are
| books on other philosophers, on Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz.
|
| The late stages of philosophers' works are often quite
| wacky.
| zupatol wrote:
| I read a few pages of thousand plateaus and I didn't get the
| impression he really wanted the reader to make sense of it.
|
| It's full of quotations of works you would certainly know if
| you had enough culture. It feels like an violent attempt to
| humiliate the reader into submission. Apparently the english
| version came out with a lot of footnotes to provide context.
| This probably betrays the spirit of the original.
|
| I'll try to listen to the podcast though, maybe some civilized
| people did manage to find something valuable in his writing.
| nathias wrote:
| Continental philosophy has some starting points, but some
| authors will be completely incomprehensible without reading
| most of the classical works. It's written for philosophers.
| If you haven't read at least Kant and Hegel, Heidegger and
| know what psychoanalysis and structuralism are about you have
| no basis of understanding for it.
| zupatol wrote:
| Haven't read all of that, but it strikes me that some of
| these authors like Freud and Levi-Strauss are perfectly
| understandable without much background. Haven't tried Kant
| but other authors consider him very methodic and logical,
| about the opposite of Deuleuze, and he's a big inspiration
| for the very readable Schopenhauer.
|
| Maybe Hegel and Heidegger are where things get complicated.
| namarie wrote:
| Do try Kant; being "methodic and logical" in no way
| implies being easy to read!
| nathias wrote:
| Freud and Levi-Strauss were scientists/academics who
| influenced philosophy, but not philosophers. Philosophy
| has a lot of dependencies, this is why every so often a
| fork is needed to 'restart' but it never works and
| dependencies start piling up again.
| standfest wrote:
| I would like to support this observation. Obviously, they
| generated some language of their own, with lots of
| implications and references. Once you start reading it, it
| becomes a rabbit hole (back in the days my entry point was
| Adorno and Horkheimer). Words might be familiar, but their
| meaning is different. There was a reason to study, and the
| trend to render science accessible to laypeople was not yet
| born. Maybe even not wanted, to quote the ideas behind the
| concept of cultural industrial complex.
| steveklabnik wrote:
| I would like to third this as well. Software developers
| are incredibly familiar with the concept of a field that
| contains a lot of jargon and that you can't have
| meaningful conversations about certain things until
| you've learned some of it: that's also software
| engineering!
|
| Just because these folks are writing for people with a
| different background than the one that you have doesn't
| mean it's nonsense, it means you have yet to engage with
| enough of the field to understand what's going on.
| Everyone starts there!
| profeatur wrote:
| +1. Even if many of the mid-twentieth century French
| philosophers were incomprehensible and self-contradictory, they
| certainly provided a lot of useful raw material for more
| grounded thinkers like De Landa.
| mrkeen wrote:
| What was something he said that made sense?
| asplake wrote:
| I have been introduced to Deleuze, but oh my, he is really hard
| work, even secondhand. If interested in assemblage theory, start
| with DeLanda.
| bronikowski wrote:
| Philosophize This is a very beginner friendly podcast. I'd gladly
| recommend it to anyone with even cursory interest. Then you go to
| History of Philosophy without Any Gaps. ;)
| jamesrcole wrote:
| Or if they're looking for written content, the Stanford
| Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a great resource. It has articles
| on lots of philosophical topics, and they're fairly accessible
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/
| pas wrote:
| Excuse my spamminess (and for hijacking the current top
| comment), but I would like to recommend the innocent looking
| episode 162
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-43zh_za_eQ The Creation of
| Meaning - The Denial of Death
|
| ( transcript
| https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-162-tran...
| )
|
| "The Denial of Death is a 1973 book by American cultural
| anthropologist Ernest Becker which discusses the psychological
| and philosophical implications of ..." clickbait! well, no, not
| clickbait, but death, but maybe it's the same thing? listen and
| you'll find out :)
| tim333 wrote:
| "you know a squirrel doesn't sit around and agonize over what
| kind of squirrel they want to be this week" 3:37
|
| I'm not sure about this. Some look quite contemplative.
| aeim wrote:
| yes, it's nuts
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| One of the greatest charlatans of postmodernism
| lxbxc wrote:
| Also one of the most important figures in film criticism [shrug
| emoji]
| abyssin wrote:
| For those interested in reading a great book exposing Deleuze
| and others like him, I recommend Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal
| & Bricmont.
| hackandthink wrote:
| In think Sokal is right. The postmodern academic left is a
| phenomenon of decay and is not helpful for traditional left-
| wing goals such as social justice.
|
| On the other hand, I think Deleuze has a deep understanding
| of philosophy and, to some extent, mathematics. Deleuze
| always tries to make a transition from traditional theories
| to his extreme conception of difference and repetition.
|
| It's crazy, but it has a certain genius.
| standfest wrote:
| I am not a big fan of the Sokal Hoax and the follow ups. They
| made cheap money out of obvious misinterpretations, and did
| much more harm than anything else. While Chomsky, maybe from
| a US perspective, found some value, I am more with Derrida
| who analysed it as what it was: sad. I recommend his
| perspective https://philpapers.org/rec/DERPM
| steveklabnik wrote:
| This post may also be of interest to people:
| http://byfat.xxx/chomsky
|
| And it's not like other fields don't have their own Sokal
| Hoax either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_affair
| z7 wrote:
| Being a charlatan and having a few interesting things to say
| are not mutually exclusive...
| samirillian wrote:
| One may not like Deleuze's system, but I don't think it's fair to
| call him a charlatan. His work on other philosophers (e.g.
| Leibniz) is highly regarded, he provided valuable counterpoints
| to Freud, and Badiou accused him of being a secret platonist,
| which I think most hn-posters would appreciate. His one-off
| observations alone should be enough to grant him the benefit of
| the doubt. If you don't recognize sparks of brilliance in his
| lectures and conversations, well! See the abecediary, or his
| lecture on cinema as the creative act, or any of his readings of
| past philosophers.
| hackandthink wrote:
| If you want to have an idea of what Deleuze's philosophy is all
| about:
|
| (Differential Ontology)
|
| https://iep.utm.edu/differential-ontology/
| oglop wrote:
| I loved a book he wrote. Oeduous and capitalists or something.
|
| Anyway, it was wordy and I think he was struggling to find words
| but it was a great read and helped me construct some useful
| models for myself when speaking to people across varying domains
| of science. Just gotta jump to their ribosome or whatever the
| hell and use their language to transfer data fast.
|
| I could see an analyst mind reading this and having a mental
| break down though and then coming on hacker news to try and offer
| some quick wit to gain reputation about "wow, how wordy. Must be
| a charlatan". Could be. Could be good stuff here.
|
| No need to lecture me btw. I literally won't care.
| dirtyhippiefree wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Philosophy Talk on NPR.
|
| Hosted by two Stanford professors.
|
| "Known as 'the program that questions everything--except your
| intelligence' Philosophy Talk challenges listeners to question
| their assumptions and to think about things in new ways."
|
| https://www.philosophytalk.org/
| Cockbrand wrote:
| There's a quite influential electronic music label called _Mille
| Plateaux_ [0], named after Deleuze 's work. Label founder Achim
| Szepanski often quoted Deleuze in interviews and liner notes. I
| found that somewhat pretentious b/c I could hardly grasp any of
| that. Still, Mille Plateaux released quite a few absolutely
| timeless classics.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mille_Plateaux_(record_label)
| wiz21c wrote:
| A friend of mine was a reseller for them! Fond memories !
| mstep wrote:
| szepanski reactivated the label some years ago. new releases
| can be found on bandcamp [1]. from 2014 onwards he also wrote
| several books on financial capital and marx based on laruelle,
| deleuze and lately especially baudrillard [2]. last year he
| published a "new theory of financial capital" [3], that also
| got published in china [4].
|
| [1] https://forceincmilleplateaux.bandcamp.com/ [2]
| https://shop.laika-verlag.de/search?search=szepanksi [3]
| https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-93151-3 [4]
| https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/wg-EOZVGC2EpSZR7k_Eqbg
| steveklabnik wrote:
| Deleuze is my favorite philosopher.
|
| Eleven years ago I wrote a few blog posts trying to apply his
| concepts to programming. Haven't read them in a very long time,
| dunno if they hold up, but if anyone is interested:
| https://steveklabnik.com/writing/deleuze-for-developers-asse...
| voldacar wrote:
| Most of this seems neither true nor false, but meaningless in the
| Carnapian sense.
| fiforpg wrote:
| I like what Bertrand Russell had to say to that very question, in
| one of _Unpopular essays_ (quoting approximately from memory):
|
| Philosophy is science in the circumstances of insufficient
| knowledge. That is, given insufficient data it may still be
| beneficial to ponder possible future directions of research,
| contemplate lines of attack on long-standing questions, or even
| determine beforehand how these big questions should be posed. All
| of these circumscientific activities and thinking together
| constitute philosophy.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| To me, philosophy is the art of finding the most low-stakes,
| ungrounded problems on Earth, so you can argue about the solution
| ad nauseam until eventually someone who doesn't care about
| philosophy stumbles across the solution by mistake.
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