Gilles Deleuze For You
@deleuzeforyou.bsky.social
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The writings of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), French philosopher, pure metaphysician.
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saying that this is nonetheless odd. You see, we indeed saw the difference between the two conceptions of philosophy. In the first conception of philosophy, that I am calling abstract, they have but a single image that haunts them, it’s the tree.
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It was even thought that the processes didn’t stop colliding into each other, and since an aggregate can include the most heterogeneous givens, we opposed, for example, the processes of arborization to processes of rhizome,
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But all this, it’s just words. A fuzzy aggregate, how does one define it? Uniquely through what occurs to it after. It’s an aggregate in which a series of consolidations is going to be produced.
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It’s a fuzzy aggregate, that is, a collection of disparates; we still have to choose them, the disparates. It’s in this way that there’s a Combinatory. We choose them in light of given problems. Fine.
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We must create the map, and for me, this is an activity, a cartographic activity that is strictly opposed to the activity of principles. So what is this, this cartography? Simply put, in the end, experience is what could be called a fuzzy aggregate.
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That is, one must trace the domain of experience to which the problem refers, these domains of experience never existing ahead of this process. We have to construct them, and the domain of experience is extraordinarily heterogeneous.
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There is only one exploration of multiplicities that can cause experience to emerge. In other words, I believe that far from starting off from abstract principles, philosophy must proceed into cartographies, and whatever might be the given problem, creating a cartography is necessary.
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simply, and that there is only one exploration of what we must call multiplicities, that is, that which is freed from any principle, such principle being the principle of objective or subjective unification.
deleuzeforyou.bsky.social
Well, I think something very simple about this, and it’s that here there is a link between pure logic and empiricism, specifically the determination of experience is much less concerned with intuition than concerning with Combinatories,
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and lineages but of alliances, which suits us perfectly. Because if we try to define Neo-evolutionism, which is to say Post-Darwinian evolutionary theory, we would say that it’s a theory that has increasingly been forced to renounce the primacy, the hegemony of the theme of filiations.
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while classical schemes don’t acknowledge this. I would say that the bridge is always a term of alliance, an alliance between two realms, so the living world is no longer understood – I’m exaggerating – so the different parts of the living world are no longer understood in terms of filiations
deleuzeforyou.bsky.social
So already here, we have no choice if we accept all this, that there are bridges. Bridges don’t only exist in biology. Physicists and chemists too speak of having to introduce bridges into piles. In current theories regarding polymers, for example, there is a need to introduce bridges –
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But here at the top of the board we have a common filiation, and the bridge makes it collapse. We would have to find a common filiation, a common ancestor of the wasp and the orchid. We can actually go as far as saying that a bridge is always ‘between realms’.
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If I was to seek a common filiation, my whole schema would collapse because I placed the bridge between two series, two differentiated lines.
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A kind of transversal bond is created between two realms, between an element of the vegetable kingdom and one of the animal kingdom. This is what I would call a ‘bridge’. You see what we’re attempting to derive. You can never derive a bridge from a filiation.
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Let’s go back to some examples that Guattari and I have already developed at length. There’s an odd story we keep going back to, which is quite fascinating: wasp-orchid. In simple terms, the orchid reproduces a sort of image of the wasp in such a way that it can wed itself to the wasp’s image.
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Now everything is clear, it’s all wrapped up, okay. Well, it’s pretty pathetic! But okay…
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So here, it would be like… it becomes so schematic that it’s too beautiful − no, actually it’s too bad − Plato, the great theorist of analysis, Aristotle, the great theorist of the categorical synthesis; the Stoics with hypothetical synthesis, ahh… The Neoplatonists, disjunctive synthesis.
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You will ask me about Plato… what did he contribute? Well, he was the first one. It was not clear. For him the idea of synthesis was not yet free from the idea of analysis. Plato is undoubtedly the greatest theoretician of analysis.
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thanks to a theory of events that is very particular to them. And because the boxes of thought have always been filled since the dawn of time, well, there remained the disjunctive syllogism, the great theory of disjunctive syllogism elaborated by the Neoplatonists.
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But precisely speaking, it’s not by chance that the fundamental category in Aristotle’s theory of substance is the one to which the categorical syllogism corresponds. The Stoics were the ones who concocted a great theory of the hypothetical syllogism,
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So, to simplify a lot we could say that…we could say that Aristotle is the great theorist of the categorical syllogism. Simplifying less we could say that the whole theory of Aristotelian substance is subordinated to the categorical syllogism, although Aristotle also theorizes other syllogisms.
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one of which is called “categorical”, of the type “All men are mortal”; another is called “hypothetical”, of the type “If it’s day, there must be light”; and the third, which is said to be “disjunctive”, of the type “A living being is either immortal or mortal”.
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And the theory of syllogism − I’ll have to cover this one year or another − the theory of syllogism distinguishes − and this will be very important, even in Kant’s case − three main types of syllogisms:
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What is a synthesis that divides? That’s a very odd idea. It has a name, after all, it’s not impossible, it has a name. In logic and in the theory of the syllogism, it’s called ‘disjunctive synthesis’.