A View on What Philosophy Should Be

The day's work is done. One has just had a good meal. There are no urgent domestic chores to attend to nor anything in particular to worry about for the next day. There are no mate or friends around . One sits comfortably on a cosy sofa. The light from the ceiling sparkles on the rim of the wine glass and turns it into an oval of gold. One stares blankly at the surface of the liquid red which one knows will soon give one a slightly tipsy feeling. One begins to think, about nothing in particular. One's mind starts wandering into areas which one would not normally think of. That probably may be the moment when one begins to reflect upon what many would call "philosophic" questions. What exactly is philosophy?

There are probably as many answers to that question as there are philosophers. Some would say that philosophy is the systematic application of reason to the most general, the most abstract, the most fundamental and the most ultimate questions affecting the human condition and that philosophy seeks to explore whether there is and if so, what a reasonably persuasive view of the nature of this world and man's relations to it and his relations to other objects and people in it may be like and problems regarding the details of such a view and generally how to make sense of this world. One may provide a mythological answer, a religious answer or a philosophic answer. A mythological answer may involve some kind of comprehensive big picture story of the creation of the universe by some entities and why there are some things in this world in the form they are and why certain things happen the way they are. A religious answer may involve some kind of gods or God and may claim that somehow their gods or God have "revealed" the "truth" about everything to certain privileged individuals or would give some views upon the "purpose" of human life and how one might transcend human suffering and attain eternal happiness. Or one may provide certain "philosophic" answers with or without reference to any supernatural entity but with the help of reason and which answers one may defend also with its help. Or shall we go back to the etymology of the Greek word "philo" or "love of" and "sophia" or "wisdom". Some university philosophy departments have divided their area of reflection and pedagogy into: ethics, logic, epistemology (questions about what we know and how we know what we know or theories of what knowledge may be or is), metaphysics ( concerned with such questions as the study (or science) of "being as such" or "things which do not change or "first causes" and such like ) and the history of philosophy.

All looks fine until Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri came along and published their book "Qu'est -ce que la philosophie? " (1991), translated in 1994 as "What is Philosophy?". So what is philosophy according to these two radical French writers? They say that philosophy is "knowledge through pure concepts", that "The object of philosophy is to to create concepts that are always new." and that "philosophy is not a simple art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts because concepts are not necessarily forms, discoveries or products...it had to determine its moment, its occasion and circumstance, its landscapes and personae, its conditions and unknowns"

The authors rely upon Nietzsche and say that philosophers "must no longer accept concepts as a gift, nor merely purify and polish them, but first make and create them, present them and make them convincing" and that "trust must be replaced by distrust, and philosophers must distrust most those concepts they did not create themselves." They say that the task of philosophy when it creates concepts and entities, is "always to extract an event from things and beings, to set up the new event from things and beings, always to give them a new event: space, time, matter, thought, the possible as event."  To them, "the philosopher...knows which of [the concepts] are not viable, which are arbitrary or inconsistent, which ones do not hold up for an instant...also which are well formed and attests to a creation, however disturbing or dangerous it may be." I think what they mean by "concepts" here are principles which claim to be universally true at all times and in all places, concepts like Plato's concepts of "truth/falsehood", his theory of forms, Christian ideas about what constitutes "good/evil" and what is "moral/immoral", Aristotle's ideas what is "beauty" and what is the "essence" of man, Descartes' idea of "cogito" as the basis of his rationalist philosophy, Kant's ideas about "transcendental" mental categories in this Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgement and Hegel's concept of "dialectIcs" and Heidegger's idea about "Being" and "Existence" or some similar ideas.

 Deleuze and Guatarri Guatarri do not agree that philosophy is dead. They say: "Why, through what necessity and for what use must concepts, and always new concepts, be created? And in order to do what?...To say that the greatness of philosophy lies precisely in its not having any use is a frivolous answer...the death of metaphysics or the overcoming of philosophy has never been a problem for us: it is just tiresome idle chatter. Today it is said that systems are bankrupt, but it is only the concept of system that has changed. So long as there is a time and a place for creating concepts, the operation that undertakes this will always be called philosophy or will be indistinguishable from philosophy even if it is called something else."

They also tell us what they think philosophy is not. "It is not contemplation, reflection or communication.This is the case even though it may sometimes be believed that it is one or the other of these, as a result of the capacity of every disciple to produce its own illusions and to hide behind its own peculiar smokescreen. It is not contemplation, for contemplations are things themselves as seen in the creation of their specific concepts. It is not reflection, because no one needs philosophy to reflect on anything. It is thought that philosophy is being given a great deal by being turned into the art of reflection, but actually it loses everything. Mathematicians, as mathematicians, have never waited for philosophers before reflecting on mathematics, nor artists before reflecting on painting or music.So long as their reflection belongs to their respective creation, it is a bad joke to say that this makes them philosophers. Nor does philosophy find any final refuge in communcication which only works under the sway of opinions in order to create "consensus" and not concepts..The idea of a Western democratic conversation between friends has never produced a single concept. The idea comes, perhaps from the Greeks, but they distrusted it so much and subjected it to such harsh treatment, that the concept was more like the ironical soliloquy bird that surveyed (survolait) the battlefield of destroyed rival opinions (the drunken guests at the banquet). Philosophy does not contemplate, reflect or communicate, although it must create concepts for these actions or passions. Contemplation, reflection and communication are not disciplines but machines for constituting Universals in every discipline. The universals of contemplation, and then of reflection, are like two illusions through which philosophy has already passed in its dream of dominating other disciplines (objective idealism and subjective idealism). Moreover, it does no credit to philosophy for it to present itself as the new Athens by falling back on Universals of communications that would provide rules for an imaginary mastery of the markets and the media (intersubjective idealism). Every creation is singular, and the concept as a specifically philosophic creation is always a singularity. The first principle of philosophy is that Universals explain nothing but must themselves be explained."

They have provided many colorful images of what philosophy is like: "A philosophy is a table, a plateau or a slice; it is a plane of consistency or more accurately, the plane of immanence of concepts, the planomenon"; "all philosophic concepts resonate in a plane of immanence or planomenon" and that "the philosophy that creates them always introduce a powerful Whole that, while remaining open, is not fragmented: an unlimited One-All, an "Omnitudo" that includes all the concepts on one and the same plane."

Similarly they have also "created" various equally colorful metaphors for what they call "concepts" which they say should be the main concern of the philosophers: "Every concept has an irregular contour defined by the sum of its components, which is why, from Plato to Bergson, we find the idea of the concept being a matter of articulation, of cutting and cross-cutting" ; that the concept is "the contour, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come." and that "a concept has a becoming that involves its relationship with concepts on the same plane.". The concept is complex. In some ways, it is absolute. In other ways, it is relative. They explain: "The concept is ...both absolute and relative: it is relative to its own components, to other concepts, to the plane on which it is defined, and to the problems it is supposed to resolve; but it is absolute through the condensations it carries out, the site it occupies on the plane, and the conditions it assigns to the problem. As a whole it is absolute, but insofar as it is fragmentary, it is relative." To them the concept is self-positing, self-consistent creative singularities in a plane which allows it to retain its autonomy: "The concept is defined by its consistency, its endoconsistency and its exoconsistency, but it has no reference: it is self-referential; it posits itself and its object at the same time that it is created. Constructivism unites the relative and the absolute." and "constructivism requires every creation to be a construction on a plane that gives it autonomous existence." But even so, the areas covered by one concept may partially overlaps with those covered by others. "Components or what defines the consistency of the concept, its endoconsistency are distinct, heterogeneous and yet not separable. The point is that each partially overlaps, has a zone of neighborhood (zone de voisinage) or a threshold of indiscernibility, with another one.....Components remain distinct but something passes from one to the other, something that is undecidable between them. There is an area ab that belongs to both a and b and where a and b "become" indiscernible. These zones, thresholds or becomings, this inseparability, define the internal consistency of the concept. But the concept also has excoconsistency with other concepts, when their respective creation implies the construction of a bridge on the same plane. Zones and thresholds are the joints of the concept." 

I find that they way they think about how we find out what is "reality" and what consistency there may be between our "ideas" or "concepts" about what we think or perceive or conceive of as "reality" and the relationship between one idea or concept about such reality and another conform very closely to the way I think about "reality". Their ideas really "resonate" with those of mine! I am so happy to have read their book which seems to confirm what I have been thinking all along.