Skip to content

Details

We will discuss chapters 5 and 6 of "What is Philosophy?" by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It's been difficult finding good days to schedule so I'm only doing one Friday session. We'll hold a final session to complete and summarize the book a week or two after this one.

Here are some study questions prepared by Gene (thanks again!):

In Chapter 5, there are many ways in which science and philosophy are contrasted. Per Deleuze, how are science and philosophy different?

Paradigmatic and syntagmatic are contrasting terms in (structural) linguistics. Every item of language has a paradigmatic relationship with every other item which can be substituted for it (such as cat with dog), and a syntagmatic relationship with items which occur within the same construction (for example, in The cat sat on the mat, cat with the and sat on the mat). What do you think Deleuze means when he says "..amounts with saying with Kuhn that science is paradigmatic, whereas philosophy is syntagmatic".

In Fashionable Nonsense, the physicist Alan Sokal devotes a chapter to D and G. This chapter discusses material from Chapter 5, as well as from other Deleuze books. Regarding Deleuze's use of scientific terms:
"However, on closer examination, one sees that there is a great concentration of scientific terms, employed out of context and without any apparent logic, at least if one attributes to these terms their usual scientific meanings. To be sure, Deleuze and Guattari are free to use these terms in other senses: science has no monopoly on the use of words like “chaos”, “limit” or “energy”. But, as we shall show, their writings are crammed also with highly technical terms that are not used outside of specialized scientific discourses, and for which they provide no alternative definition.
But the allusions are so brief and superficial that a reader who is not already an expert in these subjects will be unable to learn anything concrete. And a specialist reader will find their statements most often meaningless, or sometimes acceptable but banal and confused.
We are well aware that Deleuze and Guattari’s subject is philosophy, not the popularization of science. But what philosophical function can be fulfilled by this avalanche of ill-digested scientific (and pseudo-scientific) jargon?"

What do you think about this criticism? (Fashionable Nonsense is freely available online if anyone wants to see specific passages that were criticized). Note that in Chapter 6, D and G state: "it is always unfortunate ... when philosophers do science without real scientific means (we do not claim to have been doing this)". Also: "If philosophy has a fundamental need for the science that is contemporary with it, this is because science constantly intersects with the possibility of concepts and because concepts necessarily involve allusions to science that are neither examples nor applications, nor even reflections."

What does Deleuze mean when he says "A real hatred inspires logic's rivalry with, or its will to supplant, philosophy. It kills the concept twice over"?What does Delueze mean when he says: "Opinion is the rule of the correspondence of one to the other; it is a function of proposition whose arguments are perceptions and affections, and in this sense it is a function of the lived."?

What does Deleuze mean when he says "In every conversation the fate of philosophy is always at stake, and many philosophical discussion do not as such go beyond discussions of cheese, including insults and confrontations of worldviews."?

Related topics

You may also like