What is Philosophy?

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What is Philosophy? is in many ways quite a departure from their previous joint-signed books. I say “joint-signed,” rather than “joint-authored” because François Dosse in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives (which I reviewed for H-Madness) makes it clear that the book “was manifestly written by Deleuze alone”; he included Guattari’s name “as a tribute to their exceptionally intense friendship” (456). But even considered within the lineage of Deleuze’s solo output, it is somewhat anomalous. If anything, it hearkens back to his seminal texts of the late 1960s, Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, not least because it is not dedicated to any particular individual (unlike his books on Foucault, Bacon, or Leibniz) or any particular genre (unlike his books on the cinema). It is, almost, pure philosophy.

I say that it is “almost” pure philosophy because, first, as the title indicates What is Philosophy? is better classified as meta-philosophy. Deleuze is as interested in the “prephilosophical” or even the “nonphilosophical” that subtends philosophy. Regarding the latter there are a couple of interesting references to the work of François Laruelle, who is right now somewhat in vogue. Deleuze tells us that “Laruelle is engaged in one of the most interesting undertakings of contemporary philosophy. He invokes a One-All that he qualifies as ‘nonphilosophical’ and, oddly as ‘scientific,’ on which the ‘philosophical decision’ takes root” (220n5). The fact, however, that he finds Laruelle’s equation of the nonphilosophical with science “odd” indicates the second reason why Deleuze’s book is only “almost” pure philosophy: it is as much concerned with answering the questions “What is Science?” and “What is Art?” Indeed, the book as a whole might have been better titled “What is Thought?” For Deleuze is above all concerned to delineate the nature and specific domains of what he calls “thought in its three great forms–art, science, and philosophy” (197). And while it would therefore be tempting to say that the book therefore develops a philosophy of science and a philosophy of art (as well as a philosophy of philosophy), Deleuze is careful to warn that these three practices are very different and can only intervene in or interfere with each other in particular ways and within certain limits. Of the relation between philosophy and science, for instance, he claims that “The two lines are therefore inseparable but independent, each complete in itself [. . .] Philosophy can speak of science only by allusion, and science can speak of philosophy only as of a cloud” (161). Perhaps it would be best to describe Deleuze’s intent as an attempt to think about thought.

In most concentrated, telegraphic terms, Deleuze sums up the differences he discerns between the three forms of thought:

plane of immanence of philosophy, plane of composition of art, plane of reference or coordination of science; form of concept, force of sensation, function of knowledge; concepts and conceptual personae, sensations and aesthetic figures, figures and partial observers. (216)

Essentially (and still more telegraphically), these differences revolve around modalities of multiplicity: different forms of multiplicity, different means of organizing or navigating multiplicity, and different operations performed on multiplicity. What they have in common is that they each constitute a particular relation to chaos. On the one hand, they “want us to tear open the firmament and plunge into the chaos. [. . .] The philosopher, the scientist, the artist seem to return from the land of the dead” (202). On the other hand, they “struggle against chaos (203) and work to extract something from it: respectively, variations, variables, and varieties. As Deleuze puts is of art: “Painters go through a catastrophe, or through a conflagration, and leave the trace of this passage on the canvas, as of the leap that leads them from chaos to composition” (203). Chaos itself is unbearable. But the passage to or through chaos is (quite literally) vital, as it arms us in the still more important “struggle against opinion, which claims to protect us from chaos itself” (203).

Thought continually risks catastrophe–as Deleuze says, “what would thinking be it if did not constantly confront chaos?” (208). It even risks death, or a form of death, as the brain becomes “a set of little deaths that puts constant death within us” (216). But this is the risk we must take, for in fact there is nothing more deadening than opinion, with all its vapid discussion and dreary clichés: “the struggle with chaos is only the instrument of a more profound struggle against opinion, for the misfortune of people comes from opinion” (206). Opinion is the death of thought, but it will also be the death of us: a suffocating, weary, anticlimactic demise. Deleuze claims at the outset of the book that the very question “what is philosophy? can perhaps be posed only late in life, with the arrival of old age and the time for speaking concretely” (1). Faced with the possibility of death as a life-sapping “weary thought” incarnated in “those weary old ones who pursue slow-moving opinions and engage in stagnant discussions [. . .] like a distant memory of their old concepts to which they remain attached so as not to fall back completely into chaos” (214), it is as though Deleuze were striving instead for what Jorge Luis Borges describes as “The Other Death”: a passionate death willed upon the past that negates the present. For Deleuze, far better than unthinking cliché is the “nonthinking thought” that plunges the brain in chaos so as to extract “the shadow of the ‘people to come’ [. . .] mass-people, world-people, brain-people, chaos-people” (218). This sounds like a Nietzschean gesture to something like the Overman; perhaps it’s the particular utopianism of (non)thought, “revolution” as the “absolute deterritorialization even to the point where this calls for a new earth, a new people” (101). Still, it’s a reminder of the dangers of this line, or a certain ambivalence in Deleuze, that this book should end with a discussion of the negative, of “the three Nos” of nonphilosophy, nonart, and nonscience, described as collectively constituting “the same shadow that extends across [philosophy, art, and science] and constantly accompanies them” (218). Here Deleuze almost seems to be affirming the power of negation in quasi-dialectical manner. Almost.

Frankenstein

It’s easy enough to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a warning against scientific hubris, or what might these days be termed “over-reach.” Indeed, this is the moral drawn for us in Victor Frankenstein’s own death-bed speech: “Seek happiness in tranquility, and avoid ambition, even it if be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries” (220). And Maurice Hindle, the editor of the Penguin edition of the book, expands upon the same theme in somewhat leaden terms:

The “incestuous” violation of life on this planet has reached epidemic proportions, and much of the blame for this state of affairs must surely be laid at the feet of those who find an endless thrill of excitement in scientifically “penetrating” the “secrets of nature,” taking little or no responsible account of the damaging implications “theory” might have for “practice.” (xlvii)

Is this then a Romantic critique of Englightenment hubris, an argument for more feeling and sensibility, against single-minded dedication to abstract goals?

Yet it is surely strange that a book purportedly promoting tranquility and repudiating excitement should be written in such a thrilling manner, with the design (it seems) to perturb even the calmest of souls.

The book reveals a fundamental ambivalence about its own terrifying narrative. The Creature that Frankenstein created suggests (in what is his final speech, following the scientist’s demise) that it is best that the whole story be buried and forgotten: “He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish” (224). But of course Walton, the narrator who conveys us this tale, is keen to record and preserve its memory: he tells his sister, to whom he is notionally addressing his account, that the Creature’s revelations pronounced over the corpse of his maker constitute a “final and wonderful catastrophe” (221). And the book itself sets out to provoke and excite: born of a competition among friends who are bored on a rain-soaked holiday (“’We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron” [7]), and inspired by Shelley’s frightful dream (“My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me” [9]), it has been both distracting readers and giving them nightmares ever since its original 1818 publication.

How much in any case can we trust Frankenstein, given that he has just reprimanded Walton’s crew for their faint-heartedness in the face of their “glorious expedition” in the high Arctic: “And wherefore was it glorious? [. . .] Because danger and death surrounded it, and these you were to brave and overcome” (217). He and Walton alike have a decidedly Romantic conception of scientific inquiry. Walton ascribes his “passionate enthusiasm for [. . .] the dangerous mysteries of ocean [. . .] to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets” (21-22). For his part, Frankenstein finds inspiration in medieval alchemists and has to be reminded by his university tutors that these are not real scientists: “In what desert land have you lived, where no one was kind enough to inform you that these fancies which you have so greedily imbibed are a thousand years old and as musty as they are ancient?” (47). And the Creature himself is surely as much an offspring of the Romantic imagination–as “sublime” in his own way as the “awful majesty” of the Alps in which he thrives where humans struggle and stumble (100, 101)–as he is the product of scientific experimentation and toil in the laboratory.

If anything, Frankenstein is a polemic against neither Romanticism nor Science, but against the mixing of the two. It is not opposed to passion or affect or “unremitting ardour” (55); rather, it censures misplaced affect, the “enthusiasm of success” in domains that should be preserve of desiccated reason and careful consideration. Nature should induce high passions, the “sublime ecstasy” that gives “wings to the soul”; human artifice should not. Romanticism should know and keep to its own preserve; Science should do likewise.

And yet, again, the final irony is that there is no greater instance of the powerful admixture of scientific fascination and the Romantic sensibility, than the memorable and pulsating tale told by Frankenstein itself.