Good summary of What is Philosophy? http://www.recalcitrance.com/deleuzelast.htm
excerpt About science I may also be brief, but this time because I feel allowed to be sharp. If, to my initial astonishment, Deleuze and Guattari seemed to forget about nomad, itinerant sciences, whose problems are local, following the singularity of their terrains, it is because those sciences are not threatened by an internal weakness, just by stupidity, arrogance and pseudo-scientific definitions, eliminating away what should be a cause for knowledge creation. They are threatened by the same blind generalization of functional description, that threatens philosophy, by the same forgetting that a scientific function is a creation, that is an event in the history of science. In What is Philosophy ? such a generalization of functional description is related to logicism, as distinct from the formal science called logic. Logicism happens when a matter of fact is not produced together with its function, but preexists as a socially stabilized state of affairs. The function is then making explicit the categories of the affairs, as they have acquired consensual authority, allowing those who define them to feel that they know what they are describing. We deal then with what Deleuze and Guattari name “functions of the lived” (fonctions du vécu) : functions the argument of which are consensual perceptions and affections. Those functions need or entail no creation, only recognition, and they arm those who wish to transform philosophy into a serious academic business when you can agree on some well-defined lived situation, and then progress towards agreement about the propositions this situation authorizes. But such a generalization may also lead to what I would call pseudo-science leading to false philosophical problems. When somebody, who sometimes calls himself or herself a philosopher, proposes for instance to start from the idea that rationality imposes that the brain be defined in terms of the “state of the central nervous system”, this is an insult against science, exploiting its weakness, exploiting the fact that scientists may indeed promote a so-called scientific vision of the world, and hide away the high feat and event that corresponds to the co-creation of a matter of fact and a scientific function. Then follow happy busy days for philosophers, and many publications in serious refereed journals. The convergence of science and philosophy around great problems such as the “mind/body” one, heralds the kind of arrogant stupidity that seems to accompany the adventure of science like its shadow, but today it also makes perceptible the probability of a collapse of this adventure of thought that was called philosophy. This would then be Deleuze’s last message, his call to resist addressed to philosophers, but also to scientists, and to artists, all conceived as equally threatened by a menace that may be common, but that takes for each of them a specific form. It may be that scientists and artists can survive as exotic, protected minorities that may be useful, the first ones because scientific events are a resource for innovation, the second ones because artistic creations are a resource in the art market. But nobody would lack philosophy and its very memory may become a dead memory when all interstices have closed down between consensual knowledge, confirmed by the facts, and ineffable, ultimate but also ready-made questions. As I already told What is Philosophy ? is like an arrow thrown at a time when Deleuze experienced an insistent marginalist evaluation announcing a threshold. An arrow demands to be picked up, and this is what I have done when producing the reason why it did belong to the question “what is philosophy ?” to designate as its correlate the affirmation of art and science as creations, against their reduction to complementary aspects of human experience. The survival of philosophy as a creation of concept may well look like a futile question when considering the massive problems of the future. However learning how to pick up the arrow, at a time when all marginalist evaluations seem to point towards a threshold beyond which stupidity will prevail, is also learning how to resist the wisdom that would propose to renounce trust, to renounce believing in this world, in this life. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
