timelets | Entries tagged with deleuze

The only intelligible doctrine of causation is founded on the doctrine of immanence. Each occasion presupposes the antecedent world as active in its own nature. This is the reason why events have a determinate status relatively to each other. ( Read more... )

-- AF Whitehead, Modes of Thought, Lecture 8.
https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Whitehead/Whitehead_1938/1938_08.html

Gilles Deleuze. Spinoza, Practical Philosophy, 2001.

“In 1952, tired of seeing MDs deem premature babies too weak to survive and allowing them to die, she introduced the Apgar score, a ten-point measure of a neonate’s breathing, heart rate, complexion, reflexes, and muscular activity, gathered at one and five minutes after birth. Its spread into medical practice has saved hundreds of thousands of lives and raised our awareness of the costs of premature births”

--- Dacher Keltner. “The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence.”

To make it actionable, she introduced relevant dimensions and their quantification.
Also see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3712619/

The eternal and exclusive Becoming, the total instability of all reality and actuality, which continually works and becomes and never is, as Heraclitus teaches—is an awful and appalling conception, and in its effects most nearly related to that sensation, by which during an earthquake one loses confidence in the firmly-grounded earth.

It required an astonishing strength to translate this effect into its opposite, into the sublime, into happy astonishment.

Heraclitus accomplished this through an observation of the proper course of all Becoming and Passing, which he conceived of under the form of polarity, as the divergence of a force into two qualitatively different, opposite actions, striving after reunion.

A quality is set continually at variance with itself and separates itself into its opposites: these opposites continually strive again one towards another.

The common people of course think to recognise something rigid, completed, consistent; but the fact of the matter is that at any instant, bright and dark, sour and sweet are side by side and attached to one another like two wrestlers of whom sometimes the one succeeds, sometimes the other. ”.

-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. “Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays / Collected Works, Volume Two.”

Watch on YouTube

“Now philosophical systems are absolutely true only to their founders, to all later philosophers they are usually one big mistake, and to feebler minds a sum of mistakes and truths; at any rate if regarded as highest aim they are an error, and in so far reprehensible. Therefore many disapprove of every philosopher, because his aim is not theirs; they are those whom I called "strangers to us." Whoever on the contrary finds any pleasure at all in great men finds pleasure also in such systems, be they ever so erroneous, for they all have in them one point which is irrefutable, a personal touch, and colour; one can use them in order to form a picture of the philosopher, ”

--- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. “Early Greek Philosophy & Other Essays / Collected Works, Volume Two.”

Deleuze's "What is philosophy?" is a book-length essay developed from Nietzche's original idea.

When Plato expressly opposes reminiscence and innateness, he means that the latter represents only the abstract image of knowledge, whereas the real movement of learning implies a distinction within the soul between a 'before' and an 'after'; in other words, it implies the introduction of a first time, in which we forget what we knew, since there is a second time in which we recover what we have forgotten.

-- Giles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.

The before and after technique works extremely well in trying to understand quantitative differences, i.e. recognize a difference maker, within a chain of events.

A scar is the sign not of a past wound but of 'the present fact of having been wounded': we can say that it is the contemplation of the wound, that it contracts all the instants which separate us from it into a living present. Or rather, that we find here the true meaning of the distinction between natural and artificial: natural signs are signs founded upon passive synthesis; they are signs of the present, referring to the present in which they signify. Artificial signs, by contrast, are those which refer to the past or the future as distinct dimensions of the present, dimensions on which the present might in turn depend.

--- Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.

The past and the present do not denote two successive moments, but two elements which coexist: One is the present, which does not cease to pass, and the other is the past, which does not cease to be but through which all presents pass. It is in this sense that there is a pure past, a kind of "past in general": The past does not follow the present, but on the contrary, is presupposed by it as the pure condition without which it would not pass. In other words, each present goes back to itself as past.

G. Deleuze. Bergsonism. 1988.

This quote made my week because I had never thought formally about processes as products of sequential steps. This approach is, among other things, consistent with Deleuze's idea of desiring-machines and his model of reductionist [techno]science. It also explains why we make trade-offs in the production process of value creation.

Multiplication often appears in the guise of independent choices. Here is an example. Some restaurants have a list of options for the first course and another list for the second course; a ‘meal’ involves one item from each list. First courses: soup, pasta, salad. Second courses: steak, veal, chicken, fish.

This scheme with three ‘objects’ and two ‘maps’ or ‘processes’ is the right picture of multiplication of objects, and it applies to a surprising variety of situations.

--- Lawvere, Schanuel. 2009.

A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.—and an abstract machine that sweeps them along? ... when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work. Kleist and a mad war machine, Kafka and a most extraordinary bureaucratic machine...

G. Deleuze & F. Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. vol 2.

Art preserves, and it is the only thing in the world that is preserved.

The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself.

The artist’s greatest difficulty is to make it stand up on its own.

--- Deleuze, Gilles. “What Is Philosophy?.”

Deleuze distinguishes between propositions of science, logic and opinion (modalities of judgement). Last night I read these paragraphs and couldn't make head or tail out of them:

... what opinion proposes is a particular relationship between and external perception as state of a subject and an internal affection as passage from one state to another (exo- and endoreference). We pick out a quality supposedly common to several objects that we perceive and an affection supposedly common to several subjects who experience it and who, along with us, grasp this quality.
...it is a function or a proposition whose arguments are perceptions and affections.

He gives an examples of cat or dog lovers that form a group ( or a tribe, as we'd say today):

...we grasp a perceptual quality common to cats or dogs and a certain feeling that makes us like or hate one or the other: for a group of objects we can extract many diverse qualities and and form many groups of quite different, attractive or repulsive, subjects (the "society" of those who like cats or detest them), so that opinions are essentially the object of a struggle or an exchange.

The last phrase stuck me as particularly important, but I still couldn't understand his reasoning. So I watched some Vonnegut videos and went to bed slightly frustrated with my own thickness. Then in the middle of the night I woke up with an idea of how to think about it.

Let's say, there's an external object - a kitten. I have positive feelings about the kitten because it is extraordinary fluffy and I extend this feeling to all other cats and kittens. Now, I use the feeling to divide everybody into those who share my feelings and those who do not. I accomplish that, by sharing my feelings with people ("the society") and observing their reactions. We form a sharing community and fight or ignore those who don't share our feelings.

Needless to say that the web was originally created for sharing propositions of science and logic, but it became a medium for sharing opinions (e.g. stars on amazon and likes on facebook) and forming loving/fighting tribes.

Logic is reductionist not accidentally but essentially and necessarily: following the route marked out by Frege and Russell, it wants to turn the concept into a function.

--- Deleuze, Gilles. “What Is Philosophy?.”

Division of labor is also necessarily reductionist because it relies on logics of relationships b/w the participants

All types of propositions are prospects, with an information value. Logic has therefore a paradigm, it is even the third case of paradigm, which is no longer that of religion or science but like the recognition of truth in prospects or informative propositions.

-- ibid.

... on both sides, philosophy and science (like art itself with its third side) include an I do not know that has become positive and creative, the condition of creation itself, and that consists in determining by what one does not know—as Galois said, “indicating the course of calculations and anticipating the results without ever being able to bring them about.

...

Partial observers are forces. Force, however, is not what acts but, as Leibniz and Nietzsche knew, what perceives and experiences.

--- Deleuze, Gilles. “What Is Philosophy?.”

the assertion of an identity of being amounts to something more than a mere identity of connection; so that it appears likely that connection already involves something more than order. And indeed, identity of connection means not only the autonomy of corresponding series, but an isonomy, that is, an equality of principle between autonomous or independent series.
...
When Spinoza asserts that modes of different attributes have not only the same order, but also the came connection or concatenation, he means that the principles on which they depend are themselves equal.

[The points of a curve are not linked together (concatenantur) in the same way as those of a straight line.]

---
By his strict parallelism Spinoza refuses any analogy, any eminence, any kind of superiority of one series over another, and any ideal action that presupposes a preeminence: there is no more any superiority of soul over body, than of the attribute of Thought over that ofExtension.

G. Deleuze. Expressionism... : Spinoza.

identity seems to be based on what we choose or happen to ignore.

Formal distinction is definitely a real distinction, expressing as it does the different layers of reality that form or constitute a being. Thus it is called formalis a parte rei or actualis ex natura rei. But it is a minimally real distinction because the two really distinct quiddities are coordinate, together making a single being. Real andy et not numerical, such is the status of formal distinction.

G Deleuze. Expressionism...: Spinoza.

We may (have to?) use different formal methods to explore different layers of reality.

upd: it's an old argument between Duns Scotus and Ockham.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_distinction