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Comment by akuro | Hacker News Reader

Reading this has made me realise that I am nowhere near as literate as I think I am.

IMHO the 1950s and 60s were the pinacle of intellectual life ( at least in france). Students were actually "fans" of philosophical figures like jean paul sartre. The trendiest place for youth wasn't a nightclub or a gym. It was the café de flore, close to "la sorbonne" university, were one could hope to see a famous writer have a coffee. Young people would spend their saturday skimming through books at "gilbert joseph" bookseller.

This is simply gone forever. Whenever i see today's celebrities becoming famous via 20 seconds tiktok, or pseudo intellectuals debating over twitter, and i think about this era that was only 50 years ago, i feel like crying.

Were you one of those youths or are you just romanticizing someone else's past (which you know nothing about) so you can criticize a contemporary youth populace (whom you know nothing about)?

my parents lived that period as students, i got those stories from them. but it's nothing extraordinary, pretty much everyone knows about this period.

as for youth today, i use those apps and i talk to kids in my family. Once again pretty common knowledge.

I am one of the "contemporary youth populace" and will second his comment.

I wouldn’t feel too bad; D&G are notoriously verbose and full of references to obscure topics.

This is also presumably a translation from the original French.

I thought a lot of fancy words were used, but very little was said.

It really helps a lot if you know the game of go.

The florid writing is an elitist fad; you can express the same idea in much simpler language without losing any meaning.

So what? Famously, Anna Karenina is about a woman who jumps in front of a train, why bother to read the other 863 pages.

Anti-Oedipus [1] and especially A Thousand Plateaus [2] is about living in rarefied, futural spaces. Deleuze would be the first to be disgusted even at the faintest idea that his writing has any meaning whatsoever: you want meaning? go and live your life, don't read a book, especially not a philosophy book. In What is Philosophy? [3], Deleuze and Guattari give a very straight and simple answer: "philosophy is the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts"—that's it, nothing more, nothing less. Why would you hurry to admire a concept, instead of doing it repeatedly, now, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow [4]: do you also not smell a flower because its florid and anyway you could synthesize ionones [5] into a vial, why bother with the flower.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Oedipus

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Philosophy%3F_(Deleuze...

[4] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56964/speech-tomorrow...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionone

There's a word for that, it's called "obscurantism". Profound and true ideas can always be put in simple language. See Richard Feynman for one example. When someone uses a lot of complicated words and sentences to make a trivial point, that's a red flag for me.

Again, Deleuze would be offended if you thought any of his work has "profound and true ideas", for him (and Guattari), philosophy is simply not about "profound and true", he mocks endlessly all these people sick with "sign-ificance", every sign must mean some-thing.

Also, accusing Deleuze of obscurantism is absolutely unfair and ignorant: Deleuze was truly one of the great teachers, those who can be pedagogical while keeping and increasing your interest in the topic, much akin to Feynman, in his works which disentangle the works of previous philosophers: Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Kant's Critical Philosophy (1963), Proust and Signs (1964), Bergsonism (1966), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1981), Foucault (1986), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988). The aforementioned What Is Philosophy? is also extremely clearly written, and it is one of the best books ever to tackle in such a direct manner such a question.

Also, accusing Deleuze of "complicated words for trivial points" is just ridiculously funny: it's like accusing Bach of composing too much music: couldn't he just sum up all the toccatas, fugues, partitas, and so on in one single massive beat drop.

I disagree that Bach is simple (I'm not sure what pure means in this context). Bach wrote contrapuntal music. This means you can have two, three, four, or five independent voices that sum up to a whole while maintaining their individual lines. He also included techniques like inversions and retrogrades where the same lines occur backwards or upside down. And he included a great deal of symbolism and numerology in the music. The music is also, at times, very harmonically modern for his time. His music is often wildly virtuosic too — try playing the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue — it is a showpiece. "Simple" is just the wrong word.

"Pure" in this context means "without any extraneous and unnecessary elements".

Google has a few different definitions for the word "simple". I don't mean it in the following ways:

- easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty

- composed of a single element; not compound

I do mean it in the following ways:

- used to emphasize the fundamental and straightforward nature of something

- plain, basic, or uncomplicated in form, nature, or design; without much decoration or ornamentation

- humble and unpretentious

Keep in mind my comment was in the context of a discussion about postmodernism. I think that when compared with some of the more complex postmodern music, even the most virtuosic Bach pieces are simple. A couple examples:

Finnissy - English Country Tunes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8VSRTl9tfw

Ligeti - Etudes for Piano - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHhZ2TzHlow

Bach is a perfect example of the kind of thing that I'm talking about, and he's as far from postmodernism as I can imagine. His music is simple and pure. It isn't trying to impress anyone with technical virtuosity or sentimentality.

>Profound and true ideas can always be put in simple language.

Sure, you can reduce the passage above to "Chess is a game of specific, regimented roles, whereas Go is characterized an emergent, contingent understanding of purpose" — but you lose a lot of information compressing it like that, in the same way you lose a lot of information when you tell kids that black holes work like a bowling bowl on a trampoline. Sure, neither are incorrect at a phenomenological level, but it's such a reductive understanding that you can't accurately reason about it without reintroducing the "complicated words and sentences".

> Anna Karenina is about a woman who jumps in front of a train, why bother to read the other 863 pages.

Spoilers! I hadn't read it yet.

People love to say this, but this is extremely dense writing riddled with technical language, written for people trained in reading it. You could perhaps eliminate some of the jargon, but in doing so you'd have to substitute a book's worth of less "florid" writing to get the same point across.

"florid" as a word means "excessively complicated", not just "complicated". I'd describe this writing as florid because it its fanciness and complexity is obnoxious and unnecessary. Of course it's my opinion, but yeah, I think it's just bad writing, written to sound pretentious on purpose, doing a shit job of communicating its point because it wants to be inaccessible. You could easily write the same thing more clearly in no more space.

I'm not arguing against beautiful writing or technical writing; I'm arguing against this thing that was pasted above, which is obnoxious, full-of-itself, not-at-all-beautiful writing.

>You could easily write the same thing more clearly in no more space.

I certainly couldn't, and I have spent a reasonable amount of time studying Nomadology (the text from which this passage is taken). Why don't you give it a shot? Put your money where your mouth is, let's say just the second paragraph, as that's the more serious offender in terms of jargon. I sincerely don't think you can rewrite it to be ~12 lines, forgoing all the technical jargon used, and retain all of the semantic content.

Frankly, barring a demonstration of this task you could supposedly "easily" accomplish, it reads like you're just denigrating the writing because you can't understand it.

Sure you could:

"In chess pieces have identity and thus differentiated functions, in go they don't. At the level of state/war machine there are also functionaries: the president, the general, but also interchangeable parts: soldiers, workers."

It just doesn't mean anything that you can summarize this or anything (Deleuze or not), you could even use a statistical learning tool to summarize it. You could summarize your deepest pain using just the words "it hurt", or your deepest pleasure with the banal, Owen-Wilson-esque interjection, "wow", so what?

These people have just been mesmerized by Marcus Hutter and the like that "compression is intelligence", or by Richard Feynman and the like that things must be simple and explainable to a child: yes, maybe, if you write equations; no, if you are expressing love: philo-sophia. I just imagine reading their love letters: "Dear beloved, Today, as previously told, I love you also, Signed".

>"In chess pieces have identity and thus differentiated functions, in go they don't. At the level of state/war machine there are also functionaries: the president, the general, but also interchangeable parts: soldiers, workers."

I'm pretty sure you're agreeing with me in a roundabout way, but for posterity: this is clearly not a lossless compression.

To be fair, philosophy is often strong in words and weak in content.

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