Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio] | Hacker News Reader

Gilles Deleuze – What is Philosophy? [audio]

philosophizethis.org

65 pointstomtomistaken84 comments

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.

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...

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.

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.

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)

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

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

"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

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

Do you consider Whitehead's philosophy also vacuous?

Motte (principia) and bailey (process philosophy).

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.

I’m not accusing Whitehead of the fallacy, I’m talking about the parent post.

Parent is suggesting that if we don’t take Deleuze seriously, we should also not take Whitehead seriously. (Despite Whitehead being a fav of the analytic crowd.)

But the Deleuze comparison, to the extent that it makes any sense, only applies to the later Whitehead. We don’t have to reject the Pricipia. The obvious position is that Deleuze is not-even-wrong, process philosophy is not-even-wrong, and the principia is merely wrong (which is amazing in philosophy.)

yeah, sorry for not being more specific, I meant "process philosophy"

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)

You're mixing up two Whiteheads

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

> 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

As the parent commenter, I already put a reply you could respond to

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

That's interesting. Could you give a specific example?

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.

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.

Let me see if I got this right by echoing it aphoristically: science doesn't care about epistemology?

How do you feel about falsifiability?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ;)

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/

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 :)

"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.

yes, it's nuts

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.

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

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!

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.

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.)

The influence of French cinema may be a factor too I would guess.

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)

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Do try Kant; being "methodic and logical" in no way implies being easy to read!

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.

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.

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!

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.

+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.

What was something he said that made sense?

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

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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

(Differential Ontology)

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

I have been introduced to Deleuze, but oh my, he is really hard work, even secondhand. If interested in assemblage theory, start with DeLanda.

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/

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.

One of the greatest charlatans of postmodernism

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

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

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.

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

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

I don't like to side with Chomsky, but he's right. The French postmodernists invented a nonsense language primarily to sell books. Postmodernism is the last dying gasps of a branch of philosophy which has found itself increasingly irrelevant since its main thinkers turned out to be utterly wrong about every single political position they held dearest

I think there is a significant difference between “I don’t think they were right,” which is a real, meaningful criticism, and “this is impenetrable nonsense,” which is a surface level criticism.

It's impossible to disagree with substance if there is no substance. If the point is to sound smart without saying anything at all. Postmodernism (especially french postmodernism) is a scam designed to sell books to pretentious undergrads

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

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.

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

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

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.

nice

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