Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]

https://www.philosophizethis.org/podcast/deleuze-pt-1

by tomtomistaken • 3 years ago

65 84 3 years ago

nice

zvmaz• 3 years ago

"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• 3 years ago

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

gexaha2• 3 years ago

Do you consider Whitehead's philosophy also vacuous?

dlkf2• 3 years ago

Motte (principia) and bailey (process philosophy).

cyber_kinetist• 3 years ago

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)

CiteXieAlAlyEtc• 3 years ago

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.

bangkoksbest5• 3 years ago

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.

mrkeen3• 3 years ago

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.

dash22• 3 years ago

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.

modernpink• 3 years ago

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.

asplake2• 3 years ago

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.

leschak• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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

nathias5• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

He is very popular in the arts, but I don’t understand why. It’s vaguely platonic (which I like) but obtuse (like kant).

pas2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

smokel2• 3 years ago

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.)

zupatol2• 3 years ago

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.

nathias5• 3 years ago

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.

steveklabnik5• 3 years ago

So a thousand plateaus is great but also very weird, by design. One of their goals is to reject the very structure of a book. One of the forwards by the English translator elaborates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35459054

Honestly I think his forward is one of the better simple examples of the big ideas of the book.

But anyway.

Deleuze’s own work and his work with Guattari are very different. The series of books he wrote on other philosophers, and his own thesis, have a much more straightforward style. In my understanding they are often considered unorthodox readings of the source material (in particularly Nietzsche) but that is on purpose. You may find that stuff more interesting than the more adventurous stuff.

profeatur• 3 years ago

+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.

mrkeen3• 3 years ago

What was something he said that made sense?

asplake2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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/

pas2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

"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.

shortrounddev23• 3 years ago

One of the greatest charlatans of postmodernism

lxbxc• 3 years ago

Also one of the most important figures in film criticism [shrug emoji]

abyssin• 3 years ago

For those interested in reading a great book exposing Deleuze and others like him, I recommend Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal & Bricmont.

hackandthink2• 3 years ago

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.

standfest2• 3 years ago

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

z7• 3 years ago

Being a charlatan and having a few interesting things to say are not mutually exclusive...

samirillian• 3 years ago

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.

hackandthink2• 3 years ago

If you want to have an idea of what Deleuze's philosophy is all about:

(Differential Ontology)

https://iep.utm.edu/differential-ontology/

oglop• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

A friend of mine was a reseller for them! Fond memories !

mstep• 3 years ago

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

steveklabnik5• 3 years ago

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...

voldacar2• 3 years ago

Most of this seems neither true nor false, but meaningless in the Carnapian sense.

fiforpg• 3 years ago

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.

d-lisp• 3 years ago

This is why the product of philosophy cannot be valuable compared to a random opinion outside of the context of a system.

Nevertheless the activity of speculating about the possible paths a system (such as science) can take regarding a specific problem is of great importance, that's probably what Russel meant by this text.

AussieWog93• 3 years ago

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.

jackstraw14• 3 years ago

what's an example of something argued successfully/unsuccessfully in your definition?

curation• 3 years ago

Philosophy is accurately describing an antagonism instead of asking questions which just further mystify the antagonism allowing it to continue, unabated. This is the time for philosophers.

mistersquid• 3 years ago

Perhaps a small point, maybe irrelevant, but the Stephen West's pronunciation of Gilles Deleuze and (Jacques) Derrida in the first 2 minutes are not in step with how philosophers pronounce these names.

Such idiosyncratic pronunciations suggest West may not understand the target discourse community, let alone be acknowledged informative by the same.

Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]

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