Wither Universities? Whither Universities, Composing, 29/05/2018

So I ended up taking an extra day off the blog because election campaign season can be pretty draining. I don’t know how Americans live like this nearly every day, with some kind of intense election happening all the time.

But the extra day off marks a decent transition. I’ve finished going through all my most meaningful notes on Paul Patton’s stuff about Gilles Deleuze. At the time, when I finished that book, I wanted to walk away from secondary material on Deleuze.

You could kind of tell that I was getting a bit annoyed at how Patton’s focus on writing secondary material on Deleuze kept him from exploring his most interesting ideas. So I thought I’d pick up a direction that engaged more in political work. Focus on the real world.

There’s one part of the real world that embodies some of the major political problems we face today. Universities have been battlegrounds of radical politics over the last few years. They’re also deeply corrupted spaces – wide-scale underfunding and the growing influence of a culture of greed have made universities into parodies of the values the institution supposedly embodies.

Apparently, when this comic was first published, it described how
the Russian Bolshevik Communist party would infiltrate and
overthrow the free society of the United States. But when I see this
panel, the first person I think of is Rupert Murdoch.

Writing Utopias, I don’t want to focus entirely on the student movement. But I think there should be a passage there that reflects on what the universities of North America are, and the terrible processes that make the institutions fall short of what we tell ourselves we want from them.

There’s an ideal to the university in a democratic context – in our ideals and our political rhetoric* – as a place of impartiality, of the pure pursuit of learning for the sake of knowledge alone.

* Or as I could call it, our ideals turned into soundbites for political parties, business leaders, and TED Talks.

Who’s laughing yet? I know I am.

So I turned to a book that examines how the university system has fostered left-wing radicalism in its faculties, and what that radical thought has done to make real change in the world. Of course, I didn’t go to any of the right-wing works. They tend to be filled too much with stereotypes and cheap character assassination. Or else full on delusional theories about globalist communist conspiracies in our secular education system.

I wasn’t going to go down that road. Conservatives tend to do a terrible job of understanding how left-wing politics actually works. It’s their greatest weakness against the left – the total inability to know their enemy.

No – no one can trace the failure of the left better than a leftist. So a friend told me to get hold of a book by Jeremy Gilbert, called AntiCapitalism and Culture. It’s an insightful study of the role of Cultural Studies as a university-based research discipline in actual agitation against the neoliberal economic system and the institutions that uphold it.

It asks if the core right-wing smear of the university system is really true – Is it really a place that fosters dangerous radicals capable of helping overthrow the state and the industrial capitalist economic system?

Or are they all just jerking off?

What Kind of Politics Is This Anyway? Jamming, 17/05/2018

Yesterday, there was no energy at the end of a long – but very pleasant – day for me to blog. Right now, I have barely any energy left, but I want to throw a short reflection together.

I wrote earlier this week about one of the limitations of Paul Patton’s book Deleuzian Concepts – It’s too securely rooted in the academicians’ sub-discipline of ‘Deleuze Studies,’ so he doesn’t explore the most interesting directions that come from what he finds in Deleuze’s work.

He’s writing mostly for an audience of academics who specialize on writing secondary material on Gilles Deleuze’s books and life.

What the conservative disciplines of philosophy call "Continental" is
just the stuff that they reject for challenging their own ways of
thinking too much. If John Searle couldn't understand what Derrida
was on about, we should just dismiss what any of their contemporaries
had to say. Because John Searle is such an admirable guy.

There’s another, wider audience he’s talking to. Unfortunately, it isn’t a wide enough audience to reach that most interesting path of thinking either. There’s a part as well where Patton talks about political theorists throughout North America.

His argument – which did apply quite broadly – was that Deleuze and Guattari should be read as political philosophers. Their major run of joint works were fundamentally political – from the long sections of Anti-Œdipus that were explicitly an analysis of capitalism and statism as a political-economic processes.

And so on for all the other works they made together. Kafka: A Minor Literature was about a mode of cultural resistance to a hostile and racializing mainstream. I feel like calling it multi-vector creole resistance. A Thousand Plateaus contained several different analyses of different dynamics of stability and chaos rooted in human life – psychological, political, economic, cultural, ethical. And beyond.

All of it deals with issues of progressive politics that are quite mainstream now. But in the academy, they aren’t considered political theorists at all. Patton doesn’t say it, but he means that they’re still called “Continental.”

But all the designation really means is that Deleuze and Guattari are rejected by departments across North America because they don’t speak the typical language of liberal philosophy. They don’t talk about rights, principles, and universality.

They come up with entirely different language to talk about things that are much more important for how societies actually work at all. They talk about the material dynamics among institutions and forces that destabilize – maybe it’s a better description to say “deterritorialized” – human societies. Among other things, but that’s a major focus. That’s inherently political – and yet they aren’t political theorists.

So Patton effectively calls out the mainstream of North American philosophy departments. But he does it without saying so. Because no one will read a call-out. A call-out is – from the perspective of the called-out in our university faculty – ‘terribly rude,’ ‘an unnecessary hostility,’ ‘a crude polemic.’

So you trick them. Explain the true nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas in words they’ll understand. Simple language. Basically, it’s just, “Guys, they’re just not liberals, okay?”

I mean, it doesn’t go so far to say that this is a better philosophy than liberalism. Maybe I’ll write about that part tomorrow. Or on the weekend.

You Don’t Know When It Happens But You Know When It Has, Research Time, 15/05/2018

A few paragraphs about a curious metaphor. It might be a metaphor, and it might be an application. I’m honestly not sure, because it only comes up for a couple of pages. Even though it could be a whole book.

What am I actually talking about? It’s a passage in Paul Patton’s book Deleuzian Concepts. It shows up about halfway through the book, as he’s working through different ways to explain the nature of iterability.

I’m not going to get into Patton’s concept of iterability in much detail. In very short form, he understands becoming and change as the repetition of a process with a few chance variations each cycle. What I found interesting was how he used this concept to describe a complex political and historical process.

Too much philosophy forgets the real suffering of the people caught up
in the radical transformations of the real world. If philosophical
thinking remembers them, it would become epochal again.

Colonialism. It’s impossible to say for sure, in the middle of a colonization process, when the place truly transitions from a free land to a colonized space. Some white dude showing up in the middle of a forest in Gaspé and saying, “I claim this land for France!” as he plants a flag in the ground is fundamentally ridiculous. He’s a bloody cartoon.

By the time the government is taking your children away to boarding school to have their culture beaten and raped out of them, you can be certain you’ve been colonized. Patton is exploring how we think of this transition from the ridiculous to the terrifying.

You can follow the transition, the small changes that make up a massive transformation. As a process, you can see it all unfolding, bit by bit over time. But what is the event of colonization?

See, this is where Deleuzian Concepts suffers from an unfortunate tendency in academia. When you specialize in writing secondary material in a particular main figure – like how Paul Patton always writes books and articles about Gilles Deleuze – there’s often a tendency to think of their work as a unified system.

So you produce articles or book chapters about, say, how to reconcile two concepts of the event in Deleuze’s work. Before he started working with Guattari, Deleuze thought of the event largely through a Stoic lens – the sudden transformation, the moment when everything changes. Afterward, he started thinking of events as processes – transformative processes whose changes are fractal pretty much to the Planck length.

Here's one way in which I've been thinking of Russian global policy
these days. Among many things I've been thinking about the Russian
government lately. We Westerners have been raised, pretty much, to
think that international relations have moved past this weird way of
fighting over territory on Earth. That's not the model of politics that
we developed international law for – it's a game of Risk, not politics.
But Russian leaders these days act like they never got the memo.
Maybe they really didn't.

Those two ideas don’t go together – if you try to call them both “the event,” the conceptions just about contradict each other. The only reason you’d try to reconcile them is because of the unfortunate tendency in philosophy scholarship to think about a figure’s works systematically instead of historically.

If you thought historically, you’d actually have to think about the concepts themselves, and the thinkers themselves as people. You’d realize that the question has a pretty simple answer. Ask why Deleuze developed these two seemingly incompatible concepts of the event?

You won’t get anything all that philosophically fascinating. You won’t get some complicated attempt to build a system of philosophy, a hermetically sealed “Deleuze Studies.” No, you’ll get the ordinary story of a writer who thinks one way for a few years, then a happy encounter convinces him that he’d been barking up the wrong tree. So he went in a better direction.

And in all this academic posturing, the events at the heart of the example are forgotten. Because you actually could use the tension between the two concepts of the event – instantaneous transition and slow process of variation on variation – to develop a complex, powerful, and illuminating conception of how colonialism works.

As a whole book, it would be an transdisciplinary blend of history, indigenous narrative, economics, ideological analysis of racism, and social ontology. But Paul Patton is not such a writer. He specialized in Deleuze Studies. So two pages is all he’s got.

I know what the better book would be. And Patton didn’t write it.

Letting the Resentment Settle In, Research Time, 09/05/2018

So I mentioned the other day that Paul Patton established his professional reputation by shifting a lot of folks in the North American academy’s community of Continentalists.*

* These are the researchers who specialize in pretty much any philosophical writer from the European continent from Hegel onward. This is the slightly disdainful label they’re given in the North American mainstream of university philosophy. In Cultural Studies departments, they’re just called profs.

There's no need to take affront on his behalf.
Deleuze never took affront at anyone, as far as
I know. The occasional awkward moment, but
never affront. He was very consistent that way.

Patton was trying to shift the whole field’s centre of gravity – from Jacques Derrida and deconstruction to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of becoming and production. That’s great. But there are some passages of Deleuzian Concepts that make me cringe – the tone of his writing makes his critique feel uncomfortably personal.

Not personal in the sense that it involves a particular person in Patton’s circle, about which he has biases or excess sympathy. Aside from Gilles Deleuze, of course.

See, there was one event that kind of dropped the ball on Deleuze and Félix Guattari's international public relations. It was a conference at Columbia University in 1975.

Total disaster. There was a group of radical feminist activists who were so essentialist about the nature of gender that hearing Félix Guattari give a talk about how any essentialism would send them into a frenzy.

Up next, Félix Guattari discussing how all forms of essentialism are utter failures as theories because they include no possibility for change. A man will always be phallocentric in all aspects of his existence – ridiculous, when we are all processes, changing all the time.

Really, gender is changeable as both a social and physical construct, so there can be as many genders as our ingenuity and self-discipline can successfully create.** They refused to hear it and heckled him all lecture.

** TERFs. Félix Guattari was heckled by a bunch of TERFs. You do know, right, that the philosophical basis for all TERF activism and ideology is this utterly obsolete, bumbling theory of gender essentialism? It’s a theory that has failed as knowledge because reality is utterly different from how it says the world should be.

Then a bunch of guys from the local Lyndon LaRouche society started interrupting Michel Foucault’s closer, screaming that he was paid by the CIA. Yeah, that Lyndon LaRouche.

If he's in the CIA, then the Maidan protestors were all gay fascists
working for the Americans, whose government is funded by
George Soros and the Freemasons' cabal whose Grand Wizard
is Barack Obama. Here to our newsdesk at RT to explain why
all this makes sense, aside from government orders to believe it,
is respected American economist, philosopher, and activist
Lyndon LaRouche.

Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault were all so upset at how they were insulted all though the conference, that they all decided they didn’t want to go back to America again. Foucault overcame his initial disgust more quickly.

The next time he did an appearance in New York, another dick from the LaRouche society asked him about the charges that he was CIA. At least he had the decency to wait until question period. But Foucault immediately goes on the warpath.

“Yes! Yes, I am CIA! And she’s CIA! And he’s CIA too! And everyone in this room is CIA except you. You work for the KGB!”***

*** Michel Foucault. You know how to deal with crazy fascist internet trolls when the internet was still secret military tech. We lost you too soon, old man.

But Deleuze and Guattari themselves hardly went back to America. It took that extra generation of mostly Canadian philosophy researchers who first translated and wrote on Deleuze to bring him to the prominence he has in the North American academy today. Paul Patton was part of that generation, even if he does suffer from being Australian.

It was a public relations screw-up. The conference let too many extremists in, when they needed an audience of thoughtful nerds. Like the generation of Patton, Boundas, Genosko, Massumi. But Deleuze and Guattari were too pissed off about it to bother going back to America. They presumed they’d get the same reception.

That is painful in so many ways, paths, vectors. Sports teams need
therapists to help players deal with their own-goals.

Own goal, guys.

Yet when Patton writes his remarks about the feminist and postcolonial misinterpretation of Gilles Deleuze, including the 1975 conference, a bitterness seeps into his tone. And it isn’t necessary.

He’s trying to make an important point – don’t take Deleuze’s words like ‘becoming-woman’ or ‘nomadism’ as metaphors, but as literal descriptions of thought processes in the most abstract language he and Guattari could muster.

Patton seems bitter at the misinterpretation, as if it was an affront to be misunderstood. That somehow these feminists and these post-colonial writers were foolish, inadequate thinkers for taking Deleuze to be writing metaphors, saying that disruptive thought is merely “like” a bedouin nomad.

He strings well-meaning, professional, thoughtful theorists with extremist radical TERFs. I don’t think Patton would like it if I said explicitly what I don’t like about this part of his book.

Don’t make me say it. I don’t want to say it.

When a Lost Monk Meets a Happy Wanderer, Research Time, 07/05/2018

Paul Patton wrote another book about Gilles Deleuze that I read as part of my research. It was called Deleuzian Concepts. It’s a more complex study than his earlier Deleuze and the Political, though it deals with many of the same topics.

But a few more years of work and thought have made it a richer book. Let’s have a look through some of its ideas and arguments.
• • •
Early in the book, Patton sees a curious relationship between Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida – they’re mirrors of each other in a particular way. Their different approaches maybe show something intriguing about what philosophy as a tradition can do.

We forget so much of the ones we're certain we
know everything about.
Art by this guy.

The way Derrida thinks philosophically, he always ends up in aporia. He’s illuminated and interrogated a problem from so many different angles that he understands it very deeply. But the key to his understanding is the precise part of the problem that makes it impossible to solve.

What makes it impossible to solve? Applicability. You can understand a philosophical concept in its abstract form very well – almost as a diagram. But now put that concept to work when you design institutions, laws, moralities, economic conventions, religions and so on. Or keep it in thought – use that concept to understand and build a wider framework of other concepts.

It might work fine, but doesn’t unfold precisely as the diagram said. There’s a slippage of the concept with the world and with wider systems when you put it to work. An inconsistency that undercuts the meaning of the concept itself. You’re left with all this work falling into inconstancy, instability.

Aporia – Philosophers sputtering. Very poetically written sputtering, but still sputtering.

Deleuze thinks about philosophy very differently. For him, the slippage is where philosophy actually does its work. He understands concepts themselves totally differently.

The way Deleuze sees it, thought is actually stagnant when you have a perfect idea that never expresses any inconsistency and acts just as you conceived it every time you use it. He thinks of concepts as producers of new concepts. With each use, the concept changes – your job as a philosopher is to trace the continuities and differences. Now you see if the shifted concept can do anything new, or has lost some of what it could do.
• • •
So Deleuze builds on the failure of Derrida. That’s how Patton spins it.

Now, I'm going to be frank here. I don’t actually know what the relationship between Deleuze and Derrida really was. I’m not sure that they were really very close at all. They knew each other, were familiar with each other’s work, but they were both aware that they were each involved in very different projects.

People always associate Derrida with irony, I think because of mediocre
readings of his work. But I see a profound irony in Deleuze – not in
what he wrote or how he lived, but how he's been received. He wanted
his followers to be creative thinkers developing concepts by
schizzing his own, pushing them to reveal inconsistencies or changes
so you could create a new concept from them. Instead, they act like
traditional academics – squabbling with each other over whose
interpretation of their Great Figure is the right one, always certain
that it's theirs.

I know what the relationship between Derrida and Deleuze is now that they’re dead, when you go to the academic departments that study them. When the French theory that we generally call post-modernism or post-structuralism* blew up in North America, Derrida had the best reputation.

* Radical democracy, actually.

Deleuze and Guattari tried one crossover event, a conference in New York that was an unmitigated disaster of mansplaining and misinterpretation. So Deleuze and Guattari’s work took some time before it was noticed on a large scale.

Patton’s book came out in the boom of interest for Deleuze’s work. So he was engaged in a little succession management. Not of Deleuze himself, but for the other academic philosophers called Continental. He had to show them why they should lay down their Jacques and pick up their Gilles.**

** I’m so, so, sorry.

It was based entirely in trying to shift academic territorial claims – who we all in a particular (sub)-sub-discipline going to squawk about now. But I’m not an academic, so I don’t have to squawk secondary material about anyone to any paywalled journals that will only accept writing about someone else.

I keep Derrida and Deleuze on different shelves, but they’re both valuable for me to have as sources of ideas. It’s better to combine them and see what new concepts will result. Which I believe was Deleuze’s point.

Too Much Reality, Research Time, 20/03/2018

When I was first reading Anti-Œdipus and really getting into it, I didn’t fully understand all the book’s arguments about psychiatry. I could follow the political philosophy well, but a more experienced researcher on Gilles Deleuze’s thought told me I needed some more background knowledge on the psychiatry before I could really dig into its concepts.

It’s been about 12 years since then. I think I’ve got this down reasonably.

Now, quite a lot of academic philosophy departments don’t consider Deleuze and Félix Guattari credible voices on scientific or medical issues. This is because they’re French philosophers whose major works dropped in the 1970s, so are associated with dreaded postmodernism.

Flying from reality? An excess of reality? By Mathieu Laca

Many university philosophy departments have characters more like Petersonian reaction than popular stereotypes about the discipline would have you believe.

As I’ve said before, Guattari was a groundbreaking psychiatrist, whose clinic La Borde was at the leading edge of creative new ways to treat psychotics and schizophrenics. The reason is because of his thorough materialism.

Under the influence of Freud – as well as Jung and pretty much the whole psychoanalytic model of thinking – you conceive of psychiatry as a rationalist practice. Your paradigm is what was literally called “the talking cure.”

So psychiatric practice is about the patient themselves analyzing themselves – the actual analyst acts as a guide so the patient learns the tools and understands the arguments and inferences to cure themselves. The patient understands the causes, conditions, nature, and the steps to follow in their daily lives to overcome their mental health problems.

That works for some mental health issues, but when Freud himself dealt with schizophrenics, he could do nothing. He described such patients as falling away from reality. Reality on his thinking was a material order of things and processes which you understood with rational human thought, language, and discourse.

Figure out the nature of a problem in clear thinking, after self-consciously exploring it. You can always fix your own mind if you understand its mechanics. Schizophrenics fall or fly from this because they can’t understand the world’s mechanics – empiricism is impossible.

Guattari had a totally different way to describe the schizophrenic state of mind – an excess of reality. Functioning people perceived and understood with a powerful focus. We cut away so much of a chaotic, messy environment.

Everyone is a machine. How fine is your tuning?
By Nychos

We sit on a busy bus without being overwhelmed by the activity around us – people moving back and forth, weaving through crowds in all directions, fumbling with bags and boxes, announcements of the next stop or slow stretches, cute puppies poking out of purses. We can keep our eye on a couple of things at a time.

We’re also doing this actively – making sense of all this mess on the damn bus. We remember who sat where, when our stop is, waddle to the door two or three stops in advance, stick our gloves deeper in our pockets so we don’t lose them, keeping an eye out for seated riders about to move. We can use this focussed attention as a basis to understand what’s going on and what we should do.

Schizophrenia explodes our focus. We can’t discriminate among possibilities because we spontaneously understand more causal processes than really exist. The imagination flies radically from the most trivial details. A passenger on the bus snorts out a sneeze, and it means that he’s part of the clandestine CIA plot to replace citizens with plastic machines.

We generate an excess of reality – an explosion of causes, explanations, and conditions. Unable to cut away any of our thought in perceiving or understanding, we overwhelm ourselves.

Funny part is, neurological research has a good angle on the causes of schizophrenia. It’s a destabilization of inhibitory signalling processes in the brain’s neural transmission. Destabilizing a process that should be in a proper range of inhibition.

Unable to regulate our reality – our thinking and world.

What Commentary Is For, Composing, 11/03/2018

When I gave up on a conventional career in the university sector – prof hustling the tenure and paywalled journal circuit – I also realized that I’d have to change how I wrote philosophy.*

* Some of the comments are going to be part of my next book review at the Reply Collective. Still not sure precisely how I’ll lay it out, because it’s my biggest critical point.

When we write our dissertations, they have several different functions. Some of those functions can make you a generally good writer, but others can cause some bad habits.

One of the first people who ever taught me about Jewish philosophy
told me about how Talmud works – commentary upon commentary.
But unlike too many humanities academics, the goal of commentary
isn't to demonstrate who among commentators is perfectly correct.
It's to return again and again to the Torah and commentary to work
out how best to apply the old thoughts to new situations.

An example of a dissertation habit that makes you a good writer – You’re able to analyze, synthesize, and explain with reasonable clarity some incredibly complicated ideas, concepts, and discussions. Transdisciplinary projects like my Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity are especially good for this.

An example of a dissertation habit that makes you a worse writer – You have to demonstrate to a committee of elders how much you know. Doesn’t sound like a problem, but let me explain.

Of course, any big research project, no matter the discipline(s), requires you to learn and come to know a lot. But on the dissertation, you have to put all those references and arguments in detail, as explicitly as possible – because the work itself has to demonstrate to the committee members that you actually did all the research.

They’re obligated to go through your work with a fine tooth comb, if they want, to catch you out. Wider audiences can largely take an author on a bit more faith.

Say you’re a non-fiction author writing a passage that you want to make a specific argument to your audience. You don’t want to fill that passage with so many details that a reader loses track of the point, and so many references that a reader can’t even tell what your own idea is.

A related, but different, example of a dissertation habit that makes you a worse writer – Having to include as much commentary, interpretation, and disputation as you can. This is part of the dissertation’s function to demonstrate a writer’s expertise.

See, there are a lot of side effects to academic overproduction. One, as I’m very familiar with, is creating a class of well-educated researchers and writers who have to hustle their way into second careers in a corporate environment that devalues education.

Talmudic commentary offers a better model for knowledge production
than conventional academic norms in the humanities. Its purpose is
to adapt and update the application of abstract laws and implicit
commandments to the unforeseeable changes of human life as we
create history. Originalism is an obscenity; life is dynamism.

The most important side effect for what I’m writing about today is that commentary proliferates. Because there are so many outlets in academic publishing for historical work and battling interpretations – secondary material – it’s an incentive against an early-career researcher trying for ambitious projects.

By the time you’ve earned an institutional place secure enough for more ambitious work, you’ve been producing commentary for so long that it’s difficult to do new stuff.

This is my long-winded way of talking about why I approach the research for Utopias differently than a standard academician’s project. I’m focussing the manuscript on discussions about ideas and concepts themselves – unpacking the process of engaging ideologies and moralities in our daily lives.

So I don’t need to prove to a reader how much I’ve learned of the proliferating commentary from an always-expanding group of interpreters. I’m not writing a book of commentary myself, so I have no imperative to argue about other people’s commentaries. That’s just not the message or purpose of what I’m writing.

It’s why I chose Ian Buchanan’s book on Anti-Œdipus as one of the few commentaries I’ll rely on. He’s already produced some excellent primary material – a book applying concepts and insights from ethology and animal behaviour to ontological questions about the nature of perception and thought.

Since I’ve already seen him write high-quality primary philosophical work, I know that a commentary he writes won’t get bogged down in interpretive squabbles. Exegetical and practical all at once. That’s the best way to use philosophy – as the explicit raw material to make more philosophy.

Follow the Causes Not the Office Walls, Research Time, 06/03/2018

There's a particular kind of academic thinker in philosophy departments that holds the discipline back from what it can be. I’m not sure how best to label them.

It would be one of those pithy, insulting but accurate labels. The kind of label that would make you chuckle when you’re reading Nietzsche. In my research circles, there aren’t too many of these people. But if you’ve had any experience in different universities’ philosophy departments, or been to a few disciplinary conferences, you’ll know the type.

The Skull of the Smoking Mirror, representation of the Aztec god
Tezcatlipoca – co-creator of the human world, god of time, and
the embodiment of change through conflict. I suppose you could
call Tezcatlipoca the god of creative destruction.
I could see an eccentric egomaniacal Silicon Valley billionaire
building a shrine to Tezcatlipoca in his home.

I could call them the over-specialist, but it’s connected to a term – specialist – that’s still complimentary. Maybe the disciplinary conservative, but that’s too clunky. Here’s a cheeky word – tell me what you think.

Mirror-skull.

Whenever they think they’re looking outside at the world, they’re actually looking at more of what they already know. Here’s their model action, what best exemplifies the way they think.

A student brings a paper to a Mirror-skull prof for comments. The prof reads it, and among his* comments are stars written next to some footnotes, reference list items, and sources throughout the paper. They’re the places where he’s marked “Not philosophy – Remove”

* While they’re often his, sometimes they’re hers as well. One of the most insufferably (and sadly unexpectedly) such academics I’ve met is a woman.

If a work isn’t part of the academic discipline of philosophy, it isn’t worth including in a philosophy paper. For example. Say I’m writing a paper about Richard Rorty, and I refer to Neil Gross’ excellent philosophical biography of Rorty. It’s a book that threads philosophical exploration of Rorty’s ideas with an argument about how his life circumstances conditioned those ideas.

What would a Mirror-skull say? Cut it all – it isn’t philosophy.

Now, there probably aren’t this many people working in academic philosophy who embody this attitude so intensely. I’ve met a few, but they’re just the purest expression of a tendency that I’m not the only one to highlight. It’s a tendency to fly away from any kind of transversal approach to knowledge.

How can people learn from research when all the new material is
locked away where no one can reach it without paying thousands
in subscriptions or tuition?

The Review and Reply Collective has recently posted some pretty brutal critiques of the state of contemporary university philosophy. Kenneth Westphal has published an artful and artistic fist of rage against a university system that has given itself over to elitism and marginalization.

It’s a complex piece, but if I can summarize the basic message in a sentence or two, it’s like this. It’s utter hypocrisy to position your institutions as the leading edge of human knowledge when original research is so heavily restricted from the general public through the enormous paywalls of academic publishing prices.

Here’s another example. The first in a round of reviews of Taking Back Philosophy by Bryan Van Norden is scheduled to post at the Review and Reply Collective next week. The book is a polemic, following up a gauntlet he threw down in the New York Times a couple of years ago.

Van Norden is an American researcher who specializes in Chinese and Indian philosophy, specifically Confucian and Buddhist strains. He writes comparative philosophy for journals. It’s a very respectable university career.

His book is a call for diversification in philosophy departments, for basically two reasons. The one he concentrates on most is, I think, the least persuasive. That reason: North America is becoming more diverse ethnically and in cultural heritage, so departments must design curriculums to speak to the positions of their students.

I don’t think this is the most persuasive because a major movement of political revanchism in the West today is turning all the power of the state machinery to holding and reversing that diversity growth. There’s nothing inevitable about the diversification and pluralism of Western countries.

Western people can no longer treat the cultures and traditions outside
our lineage as unworthy of attention. Business leaders, politicians,
and activists all understand this. Yet there are still so many in
philosophy departments that remain stuck in their minds that have
become mirror-walled prisons.

His other reason for diversifying the philosophy curriculums of the West is more compelling to me, despite Van Norden’s relative de-emphasis. Our world is globalized. As non-Western economic centres grow in power and influence, we’ll need to study their own philosophical, ideological, moral, and political traditions to deal with people from these regions as competitors, friends, and partners.

Just as a study of Western philosophy can help you understand German, French, English, or US-American cultures, a study of East Asian philosophy can help you understand Chinese, Korean, Cambodian, and Indonesian cultures.

The Review and Reply Collective itself is rooted in the global community of Science and Technology Studies, Social Studies of Science, Social Epistemology and other sub-disciplines that – instead of narrowing their focus – expand and diversify their influences and research bases.

For about a decade now, I’ve understood that breaking through common-sensical disciplinary boundaries improves your knowledge. The causes of real phenomena don’t pay attention to the contingent structures of our university disciplines.

I got to thinking of this reading some old notes on Deleuze and Guattari, about their critique of Jacques Lacan in Anti-Œdipus. They understood how psychological states have their causes and conditions not just in the psychiatric, but in historical, social, and economic processes as well.

It seems common sense to us now, but an academic orthodoxy had fallen across French psychiatry and psychology, stating that mental health had only mental causes. Transversality often breaks with common sense – so much the worse for common sense.

A Thinker Is a Process Because She’s a Person, Jamming, 12/02/2018

Two passes at the mistake of searching for the universal, for the one true truth.
• • •
I pity the fool who had to write the essay on Sigmund Freud in Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy. It’s because there actually isn’t much to say when a thinker so powerfully rejects a former influence in a fit of rage.

One of the most influential books Gilles Deleuze ever wrote was Anti-Œdipus with Félix Guattari – definitely the most influential among the political thinkers who build on his work. That book was built around a detailed, incisive, forceful, and total rejection of the core dynamics of all Freudian thinking.

Freudian concepts of desire dominated French thought about
psychology early in Deleuze and Guattari's career. They
wrote against it with the fury of a betrayed disciple.

Now, before meeting Guattari, Deleuze did take Freud’s ideas seriously. Many of Freud’s ideas were the core principles of the analysis in Deleuze’s book on Leopold Sacher-Masoch. Several chapters in The Logic of Sense explicitly relied on Freud to build a theory of desire and sexuality.

Nothing reversed so radically in Deleuze’s intellectual life than his belief in Freudian ideas. It took meeting Guattari for him to realize that Freudian psychology was the closest thing possible to an opposite of the direction he wanted to develop – a metaphysical framework based on heterogeneity, variety, difference, becoming.

Working with Guattari helped Deleuze realize that Freud’s entire system was built on a premise that those images – Œdipus in particular – constituted a universal structure to human consciousness.

Guattari – a man who worked all his life with schizophrenics – knew from the examples of his daily professional life that it was far from universal. More than that, the dynamics of Œdipal imagery, concepts, and principles in action on people’s personalities and identities grounds an ethic of unearned submission and servitude to authority of force and might. Father–King–Policeman–Gun–Man.

Fucking patriarchy, man.
• • •
Ronald Bogue ended up writing the most boring kind of history of philosophy paper imaginable – the list. He lists and dispassionately describes the appearances Freud’s ideas made in Deleuze’s work. Doesn’t contribute any more analysis than that.

There's a masterful essay in cultural theory on how Freudian
philosophy of desire and sexuality leads to the ideology of Zardoz.
But I'm not about to write it. That would mean I'd have to watch
Zardoz.

Bogue’s essay expresses a weird kind of regret that Deleuze rejected Freudianism and never relied on Freud’s work again. I can’t quite explain it.

Best I can do is speculate – about the habits and norms of the academics of the global university system. Not what everyone does, of course. I’m just talking about the tendencies people get socialized into as they teach their courses, hunt for research grants and contracts, submit their articles and edit their journals, chase tenure.

There’s a tendency to crave wholeness in a primary material philosopher. At conferences, in classes, and in articles, so many ask questions like, “What was Aristotle’s concept of the soul?” for example. As if there could only be one answer to that question.

Some philosophers are allowed breaks. Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of those, but he was so extreme in declaring it in his life that no one can deny it. Kant was way more professional with his declaration, but it was still pretty extreme.

I was trained to think of such figures as outliers in the broader tradition of philosophy – those were consistent thinkers. Even the two Kants and the two Wittgensteins are each treated as being consistent. The concepts are clear in each one. You’d get weird looks if you suggested that the primary material thinkers were just as uncertain of the ideas they wrote about and the concepts they developed as anyone else.

So much secondary material is scholarship arguing over what a given philosopher really meant by a particular concept. If even the primary material writers didn’t quite know the exact concept – if they were figuring it all out like the rest of us – there isn’t any real hook for why they’re among the ranks of the great philosophers.

Well, there is. It’s the ambition, care, and skill with which they wrote their battles with difficult, vital concepts. Plus, they had the social and institutional connections and reputations to publish their work where it would be widely read and taken seriously.

If you think primary material philosophers reached any truth that make them categorically different from anyone else. We don’t read Aristotle to follow and join along with his concepts about the nature of the soul – We read Aristotle to know Aristotle’s concept of the soul.

Maybe we shouldn’t. You know that everybody shits, right?

Can a Philosopher Let Herself Trust? A History Boy, 07/02/2018

After a very intense post yesterday, I want to relax a little bit. So I’m going to talk about the philosophical implications or mutual expressions of Riemannian geometry.

That's a serious joke. See, I’ve studied mathematics as someone learning about mathematics. So I know how to follow and read equations, I can see what a given operation is doing in a particular step, I can look back at the whole thing and have a decent idea of how you got from the beginning to end.

Here's how Deleuze described how Riemann changed the way people
did geometry. How he shook it to its core. Geometry had traditionally
been about the construction of different shapes. But Riemann figured
out a way to study mathematically space itself, how to construct
different spaces as well as different shapes, to see how different
shapes would behave in different spaces. A whole new axis of
complexity in geometrical possibility.

If I read the history or philosophy of mathematics, I can understand all the concepts fairly easily. I have to think a bit about it, but as long as the writer is reasonably competent, I can understand what they’re talking about.

It’s like being able to read a language, but not speak it.

I know enough mathematics to know that I’d be a terrible mathematician. When it comes to mathematics, I rely on colleagues I can trust. I run an idea by them – sometimes on a space like this blog. I ask them to comment, give a few thoughts. Tell me if I’m on the right track – definitely if I’m missing something.

I feel like university-trained researchers – I’m talking especially about the humanities and social sciences – get trapped in some paradoxes. Quite a lot of them. This one is mistaking a need to build expertise for your job, for expertise being the necessary condition of saying anything at all.

For instance, my case. If I were at a research conference, and there was a talk on some really interesting ideas in philosophy of mathematics in an otherwise lacklustre timeslot, I’d probably go. I’m pretty sure I have gone.

Sometimes – not all the time – folks would react with astonishment that I’d go see a talk in a field in which I wasn’t some level of expert. I do political theory, ethics, European thought, philosophy of ecology and biology.* Why would I go to a math theory talk?

* The people who know philosophy of ecology and biology would know that you have to understand mathematics at least as well as I do. But anyway.

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself—
Finite infinity

My best friends in the university sector would, if that slot was lacklustre for them too, consider coming to the math theory talk with me. But others have been incredulous. As if the only thing you were allowed to be curious about anymore was what you were already an expert in.

Gilles Deleuze was a much better mathematician than I am. He studied mathematics well enough to teach it at the secondary level in France, which is more than I ever managed.

Study of Gottfried Leibniz’s work on differential calculus and Bernhard Riemann’s heterogeneous geometry helped Deleuze develop concepts of change and variety as fundamental principles of existence.

So when I read an article by someone who’s themselves become an expert in philosophy of mathematics and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, I’ll learn from what they say. Same way I learn from anyone who’s become an expert in what I want to learn about.

I read about how Deleuze interpreted Riemann’s work as tracing the mathematical structures of heterogeneous spaces – spaces that have entirely different properties, but are contiguous, that flow into each other. Objects can travel casually among all these spaces – ordinary as a walk between neighbourhoods – and be unaltered.

They just tumble differently. Into a valley, up a hill, around a bend, around several bends that seem like straight paths when you walk through them. Whatever. Doo bee doo.

Reality seen topologically. Perfectly legitimate – simply not quite what most of us are accustomed to. Let’s explore what makes us uncomfortable. And rely on people we trust – in their expertise and their character – to be our guides so we don’t lose ourselves.

Being Without Existing, Composing, 05/02/2018

It’s a basic rule of thinking decently-well that you shouldn’t apply concepts from scientific fields to moral or political thinking, and vice versa. But . . . .

The most famous example of these cross-domain applications gone horribly wrong is social Darwinism. There are plenty of opportunities to read up on how this popular interpolation of a scientific idea to a political imperative caused horrifying human disasters. Please read the links – they’ll open in separate tabs.

Riffing on a hilarious misinterpretation I've heard from too many
old conservative academic philosophers – Deleuze as simulacra.

Aside from the horrifying political consequences of the most notorious example, it’s just bad form epistemically. You can’t make a straight translation of abstract scientific concepts into a moral imperative. Especially when your example gets all the actual principles of the science totally wrong anyway.

Even Gilles Deleuze, well known philosophical weirdo, would say so. One of the major principles of his last book, What Is Philosophy?, was that scientific knowledge was mathematical and referred to specific situations – philosophy operated very differently.

But . . . . there’s a way to carry scientific concepts into other domains of thinking. It’s a process of abstraction.

Identify the most fundamental aspects of a scientific concept, abstract them into a diagram – so hold onto the complexity, but without the specificity – and experiment to see where else that abstract diagram makes sense.

You aren't so much drawing a conclusion – like the social Darwinists did – as you are an investigation. Where else can this concept apply fruitfully?

Where’s an example of this actually working? Then we can see, in specific terms, how that process of thought works. Well, Deleuze developed one – how the abstract structure of the scientific concept of the infinitesimal and the strange attractor can make sense of the existence of impossible ideals.

That’s a weird and dense thing to say. So what do I mean? In Leibniz’s calculus, an infinitesimal is the smallest possible differential relation. No differential – a dynamic relationship of ∆x/∆y – can ever reach zero. That’s just zero. But their smallest possible relationship is an infinitesimally small difference.

The thing is, infinitesimal quantities can’t exist. They definitely can’t exist in experience, because our perceptual powers give out at sizes of objects and movements way bigger than the infinitesimal. They can’t exist in reality either – the smallest any physical fluctuation can be is about 1.6x10^-35 metres. Way longer than infinitesimal.

All you have to do for your dream to become reality is become a
god. That's well beyond the realm of possibility, but sadly, it's an
ideal that all too often guides our actions.

Infinitesimals can’t exist materially, but they exist as asymptotes in reality – you approach it, and can get closer and closer to it, but never actually reach it. It’s infinitely far from you, or infinitely small. An unreachable target that guides the trajectory of your approach.

And that’s what a moral ideal is – an unreachable target that nonetheless guides your real action. An ideal is real without existing – it’s the principle that provides the underlying logic of your action.

Any ethical act or project you work on will always be disappointing and an utter failure if you treat your ideal as achievable – if you think that a practical action plan will actually make an ideal come true.

Best case scenario, you’ll be disappointed when your ambitious plans to make the world a perfect place fall short of what you aimed for. Instead of pride in what you’ve achieved, you’ll feel ashamed that you couldn’t have done more.

Worst case scenario, you’re Mao Zedong leaving tens of millions dead and a nation of a billion horrifically traumatized. Yeah, that’s fine.

The function of the moral or ethical ideal in human thought is to be the asymptotic attractor for our lives – it governs our development without itself ever being a real state of affairs.

Now ask how such an ideal can be used for the betterment of humanity or for brutal destruction. What facilitates its progressive uses? What facilities its destructiveness?

That right there is what Utopias is about. I think I’ll start the introduction this weekend.

What In the World Will People Think?! Research Time, 04/02/2018

When I was reading through that book of essays on Gilles Deleuze’s influences, one name struck me for an odd reason – it was totally unfamiliar to me.

Who are some of these guys?

Josef-Maria Hoëne-Wronski. Who the hell was this guy? He got a brief mention in a small corner of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s most dense book. But I’ve never come across him in all my research into the corners of Napoleonic-period German philosophy.

Here was his major project, in a few paragraphs.

It’s the 1780s. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason drops, and blows a lot of the intellectual scene in Germany away. It broke with long-established ways of thinking about human nature and thought, but did so by explicitly engaging with its major problems and solving them.

Naturally, Kant's solutions set up an entirely new set of problems. Wronski was a major figure in Polish mathematics and physics, so he had the knowledge base to approach many of the problems Kant’s work posed for the foundational principles of physics.

Kant’s first revolutionary book described how the structures of the mind – frameworks as simple and built into our experience as space, time, number, causality – conditioned experience. Human reason alone – as in logical reasoning – had no power to reach any foundational principle for why the frameworks of our mind were as they were.

Now, Kant would ultimately centre those principles in ethics and morality – practical reason. Wronski would move in a totally different direction – physics, particularly calculus.
• • •
Quick jump out of this to talk history. At the undergraduate level, the history of Western philosophy is usually taught as though there are clear boundaries in its development – classical, medieval, modern, critical, contemporary. 

Steve and I disagree on a lot of substantial ontological and
epistemological issues and debates. But we always have very
fruitful – or at least very entertaining – engagements and
conversations.

All too often, those boundaries settle into researchers’ thinking as they progress as a scholar and specialize. That’s why philosophical work that shows the continuity through all these breaks – the little differences and influences across what we think are distinct periods – is the most valuable history of philosophy to me.

I’m indebted to my SERRC colleague Steve Fuller for having written books that taught me so much about those continuities that our oversimplifying undergrad curriculum paints over and erases. Of all the mentors, teachers, and elders I’ve had over the years, he’s taught me the most about this.
• • •
The choice made sense to Wronski. He was a physicist who came from the German-Polish professional world, where you learned Leibniz’s calculus alongside his complex and imaginative ontologies. So intensely creative, ontologically fertile metaphysics was an ordinary part of mathematical thinking for him.

In most of our undergraduate educations in philosophy, we learn that no one thought this way after reading Kant’s Critiques. That was the long-term effect, but just because it’s happened by now, doesn’t mean that it never took a long time anyway.

Wronski may have thought little of bringing Leibniz’s multivector hybrid approaches to physics, mathematics, and ontology. But the presumption got him into trouble, costing him a job at the Marseille Observatory.

It turns out that it isn’t always acceptable to develop a complexly hybrid ontology of the origins of the universe when you’re supposed to be mapping star movements. At least not outside your lunch breaks anyway.

Who are these guys, Kemo Sabe? Another inadvisable direction.

Wronski eventually became most famous in the intellectual circles of his day as a bit of a crank. As people were abandoning the approaches of Leibniz, he was carrying them forward. As it became less acceptable to motivate philosophical and scientific work using religious and theological principles, he was discussing how mystical visions helped inspire his metaphysical work.

The first major product of this exploration was his Introduction to the Philosophy of Mathematics and Algorithmic Science. It was a massive synthesis of Leibnizian ontologies of calculus with Pythagorean numerological mysticism, all tuned to the problems of post-Kantian philosophy.

His correspondences and friendships with major figures in European mathematics like Joseph-Louis Lagrange meant that this first book was reviewed in high-rolling circles. This quickly turned into a problem for Wronski, since IPMAS was universally panned, including in the review by Lagrange.

Eventually, Wronski’s own faith in the universality of algebra and calculus ended up just as limited as the Pythagorean faith in flat-planed geometry. After ambitious mathematical papers were likewise panned, he spent the last 30 years of his life in poverty. Still grinding away at epochally-ambitious philosophy and mathematics. But fruitlessly.

Wronski’s work turned out to be a dead end. So associating him with Deleuze becomes incredibly dangerous. The insults Wronski received on his way out of intellectual prominence – mystic spewing madness and nonsense – sound very similar to the insults academician analytic philosophers spew at post-structuralist thinkers like Deleuze.

So an essay talking about the influence of such a reviled figure as Wronski on Deleuze – who is widely reviled as a charlatan in many university circles – has to be careful not to associate them too much. Lest you justify the haters.

Clues, Signs, Traces, Imperatives I: Change Must Come, Research Time, 22/01/2018

One of my favourite images in Gilles Deleuze’s work is that of the detective. By the end of his life, writing What Is Philosophy?, he’d given such images a different name – conceptual personae.

A conceptual persona is a style of thinking, but understood as the model for the thinker herself to follow. It's the shape you settle into as you fly along the narrative, making it up as you go along – in this particular case – thinking as a detective.

Seeing through chaos. Returning to old models, but offering new
paths to explore. Gilles Deleuze called philosophy catching hold of
chaos in thought. But would an empiricist philosophical practice be
able to catch hold of chaos in the physical world of everyday life,
make a new kind of sense out of what was only confusing,
disorienting, and mysterious before?

Detective philosophers are empiricists – their primary questions are about understanding, in Deleuze’s words, “what happened.” Such an empiricism brings philosophical thinking – whose peculiar styles Deleuze describes as "catching hold of chaos" – with cultural theory and the social sciences.

I think that's a great idea. Philosophical thinking is about the careful creation of new concepts, the analysis of their components, and their relationships with each other. Bringing that conceptual engineering to the empirical research programs of cultural studies and the many branches of sociology can create a powerful new research program – even a revolutionary way of thinking.

Naturally, there are a lot of factors in the way of such a development. One is that it’s – in Deleuze’s words – a minoritarian intellectual movement. It’s a rebellion against the mainstream institutional norms of scholarship – disciplines fragment, but rarely unite.

Academia is an institution whose growth engine is schism, division, breaks, fragmentation into isolated silos of discourse. Create a new journal with an even narrower research constituency. Start creating new departments and hire more contingent adjunct professors to teach their courses.

Doesn’t matter that fewer universities can subscribe to all those new journals, since no journal ever lowers its subscription price in this supply-crowded market. Doesn't matter that new departments will compete with each other and older disciplines for limited pools of research, teaching funding, and student pools. Doesn’t matter that the system is perverse and devouring itself.

Academia needs people to open paths of rebellion and revolution against its vicious incentives. We have a piece going up at SERRC tomorrow discussing this exact need to demolish the most destructive institutional habits of humanities scholarship. So I have this on the mind.

Our images of detectives in popular culture have plenty of
complications – colonialist, racist, sexist, classist. The
implications are everywhere – the detective is, after all, a
police officer. The endpoint of a detective narrative is when
someone goes to prison. The question is how to become a
detective in your thinking that opens a liberatory path.

But I’ve been thinking recently that such a radical change is necessary. Consider this notion. I describe to a friend the idea to combine philosophical conceptual and critical techniques with the historical and sociological methods of cultural studies and the different social sciences.

My friend’s reaction: “That sounds like an amazing inter-disciplinary field!” We apply for research grants, build up a few major methodological works and studies, set up a few offices, start a journal, develop a graduate (and then an undergraduate) curriculum. We’ve ended up creating our own fragmented silo of a narrow discipline.

This is the institutional tragedy of what’s typically called interdisciplinary studies. You first approach the problem wanting a vector that Deleuze and Félix Guattari called trans-disciplinary – a new direction of thinking, writing, and research that explores entirely new territory with an entirely new structure than the academy.

You ended up with another academic department. Shit. It makes you think you might have to leave the university institutions behind to have any real success with these creative new directions. Or at least head out to its limits while still being able to access some of its funding and office space.*

* Or at least office supplies.

What would such a new kind of empiricist philosophy look like? Well, I can start with a brief thought about the institutions. Unfortunately, that thought is that I have no idea what those institutions would look like at all.

Such a research program would have to rely largely on universities for funding. Even if funding could be taken care of independently, the program would still need existing bodies of actual research. There would probably be a lot of online organizing among participants, making it potentially a global enterprise.

But that’s all I’ve got right now. So what would the actual research and writing practice be?

On What There Is, Research Time, 21/12/2017

When Neil DeGrasse Tyson opens his mouth about philosophy, he usually doesn’t know what he’s talking about. If I was going to make this a pissing contest, I’d tell him what a better grasp many philosophers have on the core concepts of the sciences and scientific knowledge.

I could cite him plenty. I’ve known several specialists in philosophy of science who also have bachelor’s degrees in different sciences. An old McMaster colleague has a degree in physics, the department has run a joint degree program in philosophy and mathematics, a friend from my doctoral program has a biology degree, and my old friend Johnny Five has a colleague with a degree in microbiology.

These days, I feel like Bill Nye has simply lost his
touch. He's less an advocate for science, and is now
just one more talking head.
Nice poster, though.

We don't fuck around.

Maybe that’s why philosophy is such an unpopular subject, a tradition that Tyson and Bill Nye shit on. Philosophers don’t even fuck around enough to do children’s entertainment and become national icons of education.*

* John Dewey would be enraged. He might even furrow his brow.

Gilles Deleuze has plenty to say about science, which is actually very insightful in his weird way. Remember that extended riff I went on about his idea that philosophy was about catching hold of chaos? In What Is Philosophy?, he contrasts science.

Scientific thinking is rooted in mathematics – as Deleuze terms it, functions. You use mathematics to plot and describe quantities, intensities, and differentials. You end up with specific measurements. Even in the many situations and disciplines where you deal in probabilities, you’re still dealing in ranges or numbers.

A mathematically indefinite limit is still an infinitely more sane number than the kind of thinking Deleuze calls chaos in this context – ideas changing so infinitely fast that they change completely in the moment of grasping.

Deleuze says philosophy is thinking in terms of what a process can do – its potential, its virtual existence – the limits and frameworks for all that a process or machine** can achieve. Philosophy’s domain is purely about the structure of potentials. At least that’s one reading of this very complex book.

** Same difference, really.

Science, as he contrasts it, is about the actual. Sciences are mathematical ways to describe different domains of actual existence – how things are right now, what they become, what they can become, and the likelihood of their becoming.

Properly speaking, philosophy and the sciences are partners. Historically, they were united in a single, multifaceted discipline. But the different sciences proliferated, differentiated, developed more complex knowledge in more unique domains.

We understood enough about the world to realize how many unique approaches to knowledge were needed to understand more of the world. So now we don’t have ‘natural philosophy’ anymore. We have a discipline that’s purely conceptual.

Rather, we have many disciplines that constitute together a human knowledge practice more profound than any single tradition within it – whether you start with Parmenides, Kongzi, Moses, or the Vedas. The creation of frameworks for understanding and thinking.

Now we also have the sciences – the detailed, mathematical knowledge of what is. They can exist in a positive feedback loop, each informing different aspects of the other’s practice. In philosophy, that’s what a lot of us do explicitly. How about the sciences?

Creative Energy V: Listing Some Categories, Jamming, 12/12/2017

I think I’ve at last figured out how to talk, in the fairly ordinary language of my blog, about the most intense kind of creativity in philosophical thinking and discourse. I had to talk around it for a while first – getting a sense of what it wasn’t before I could wrap my tongue around the idea.

When I was re-reading What Is Philosophy? I could understand the idea well. But I couldn’t just repeat Deleuze’s lines about catching hold of chaos. I wanted to take what, in his language, remains really weird, and make it more broadly understandable.

To catch hold of chaos and ride it as long as you can. That's what it
means to create at the speed of thought.

So let’s list what we’ve got here.

D) Your work becomes an object of historical study.

C) Other people pick up your concepts and elaborate them into more complex, versatile, multifaceted ideas and problem spaces – or else they devolve into sniping and arguing over each other’s interpretations.

B) Actively applying your novel logic of thought in more specific problems, or to issues in different disciplinary discourses.

A) Developing an entirely new logic of thought in the thinking, blurring the distinction in your thought between your own acts of thinking and the movement of the new logic itself.

Qualifier. When I say the phrase, ‘logic of thought,’ I’m not necessarily talking about a new symbolic logic.* I’m talking about inference in general, how you move from one idea to another. So a new logic of thought is a new way to infer from one idea to another, leading you to construct entirely new concepts to suit those new kinds of inference.

* But developing symbolic logics can be one way, among many, to develop a new logic of thought. Look at Saul Kripke or Graham Priest for examples.

My first education in philosophy, at Memorial
University's philosophy department in the mid-
2000s, had a very Kantian framework, simply
because there were so many Kant specialists
and Kant fans in the department at the time. It
didn't make me a Kantian, but I think the
influence is pretty clear in how I use the word
'understanding' on the blog and in my other
essays.
Also, if you want a print of this cartoon, or
any other funny pictures of great thinkers,
it's by Gary Brown.

Let’s go back to that example of Kant’s thought. After all, he’s a famous thinker in the Western tradition of philosophy, who also embodies very distinctly each category of how creativity begins and is received in philosophy.

Example of (D). Read any essay or book discussing Kant’s development as a thinker, or explaining his philosophical ideas and concepts.

Example of (C) – the bad kind. Go to a conference of tenured or tenure-seeking Kant scholars and listen to them talk to each other. It’s infuriating. “I’m right!” “No, I’m right!” “No, you’re both wrong! But I’m wrong too!”

Example of (C) – the good kind. Books and essays that adapt Kant’s ideas to contemporary problems in morality, politics, and science. They don’t even have to reference or quote Kant in any detailed sense – simply demonstrate your skills at applying the concepts.

Example of (C) – the best kind. Use Kant’s concepts as a launching point or components for your own attempt to build a new logic of thought. Think of the Kantian components of John Rawls’ liberalism, or Hannah Arendt’s fascinating spin on the Critique of Judgement that informs her own departure into a new language of political thinking.

Example of (B). Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. Kant applies the concepts he developed in the Critique of Practical Reason to pretty much every moral question that mattered to Prussians in the 1790s.

Also, think about the later chapters of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, where he applies the concepts he developed in the first half of the book to the major debates of political and social philosophy in the 1970s.

Example of (A). Kant’s three Critiques. The concepts of empiricism, mind as a framework for understanding experience and empirically limited reason in the Critique of Pure Reason. The postulates and machine of universal moral reasoning in the Critique of Practical Reason. The positive account of empiricism and as-if concepts in the Critique of Judgment.

So we have our examples. Now what is actually happening in the (A) mode of philosophical thinking? This is where things can get super-trippy.