Deleuze on Nietzsche

Two excerpts from the "Philosophize This" podcast. above:.

If you want to think more along the lines of the picture Deleuze lays out in his work, instead of thinking of the world like there's a bunch of "fixed Essences to things", like a tree is a thing, a person's a thing, rock is a thing, think instead of reality as being made up by a collection of forces that are defined by their interactions with each other. Trillions of different forces that are all vying for expression in each moment as the world unfolds into the future. Well, in that kind of world then, Frederick Nietzsche is not a static identity. What we think of as Nietzsche, when he was alive at least, was the interaction between a collection of forces at a specific location. He was ultimately a "site of becoming". He was many different forces, all vying for expression, overcoming each other, gaining expression.

In other words, think of Nietzsche not as a person with an Essence, like we might typically think of him. Nietzsche is a historical collection of forces that are still having impacts on forces in the world to this day. And when you look at them in that way, again, Nietzsche is not a static identity. To Deleuze, what we call "Nietzsche", in any given moment, is a temporary formation of just a repetition of certain similar forces that gained expression during this particular moment, but haven't changed drastically enough for the illusion of a static identity to go away.

So, on that same note, think of what you are along these same lines. Any identity where it seems like it's what you are right now is really just a temporary pattern of forces that found expression that, through repetition can seem to you like they're a stable identity.

But I mean obviously we also recognize that if other forces that are a part of you found expression, then you would be a different person. And if enough of them changed, and had repetition in another direction for a long enough period of time, then your whole identity would feel like it was something different to people. But never was there a static essence or identity to what you were, and always was there the ability for you to become something totally different, and explore new modes of existence.

Now, this is just a totally different way of looking at what a person is. Classic subjective identity just doesn't apply here. And to take this back to Plato, you can understand this as a totally different way of looking at what a tree is as well. I mean, you go into the Home Depot and you see all those trees. And, on one hand, yes it's all very pragmatic to call all these "trees", the same genus and species, they look kind of similar. But on a different level, this denies the true level of difference that's going on here. Every single one of these trees is a different repetition of forces that are all constantly shifting and adapting within a world and universe that is always shifting and adapting. And this view of reality, in terms of it being an interaction between different forces, is one of the things Deleuze thinks Nietzsche's work lays the foundation for. So, if it's not entirely clear yet, under this view of reality any attempt at making Identity or reality into something fixed and static, while it's undeniably useful when you're checking out at the Home Depot. Which is nothing to gloss over, by the way. It's at another level always in denial of the true state of change that the world is always in.

So you can see here where the critique starts to make sense for the history of philosophy and the supposed "image of thought" put forward by philosophers. To Deleuze, even our concept of thinking is always subject to change. And why wouldn't it be? There are no static categories of thought. There are an infinite number of ways the universe could be conceptually framed and mapped out by philosophers. And, thinking in this limited way sabotages our ability to arrive at new ways of thinking, or new forms of what life is.

You can also start to see how, when you're affirming your place as one small piece of this constant unfolding of reality into the future, how always looking to the past to verify the present starts to deny something very important about what existence is altogether. In other words, you can start to see the similarities we're building to here between the tendencies in our philosophy, and the tendencies in the way people live their lives.

More on that in a second, but for now, since we have a basic picture here of the universe in Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche, this is a good place to start to make a case for why he thinks Nietzsche's work is actually the enemy of Hegel and dialectics. He's going to say that the dialectic is making too many assumptions to try to eliminate difference. And it's interesting, cuz usually people will think of the dialectic, and they'll see it as something you use if you're actually acknowledging the true complexity of reality. "You know, Justice isn't some thing out there with an Essence," they'll say. "It's just one piece of an opposition within a more complex network of oppositions."

In the more Marxist type of dialectics, when it comes to social relations, like we talked about in that Zizek episode we did, one very simple way of looking at the world is to see something like a "school" and to think, "well a school is just a school". It's a place where kids go, you send them there to get an education. But as we talked about, somebody thinking more dialectically might look at that and say, "that's an oversimplification, that when you truly dig into what a school is to anyone in a particular structure of meaning, a school is something that has the meaning it does to us only because of its' relationship to all the other things around it in a given Society, or in a network of oppositions. For example, the meaning of a school requires how it relates to what a company is in that Society, or what the government is, or what the economic setup is, or the faculty of the school. These things are not as separate as an Essence driven view of reality might suggest they are. And, as it's said in dialectics, "what this means is that the form of what something is becomes an important piece of what the content of the thing is now. "

As I was just saying, this is typically seen as moving away from oversimplifying things. But, if we take the ideas of Nietzsche seriously through this interpretation by Deleuze, then the dialectic becomes yet another example of one of these needless rational scaffoldings that we're projecting onto a reality that's actually more complicated and dynamic than the dialectic can allow for. Let me give an example. One of the ones Deleuze uses is the dialectic between Master and Slave. Now in dialectics, these two seemingly different things, of being a Master or being a Slave, are in reality two sides of the same coin. They are oppositions to each other. The meaning of them is Unified. You can't understand the meaning of one of them without presuming the existence and the meaning of the other. But under Nietzsche's worldview, he says there's no reason to chop up reality into these oppositions that need to be resolved. Because difference, to Nietzsche accounts for all of these things. For example, Master and Slave to Nietzsche are not two sides of the same coin. Masters and Slaves come from two completely different genealogies. They're explained by two completely different histories. They often come from two completely different moral approaches to reality. So, if each one of these forces are distinct and very different from each other, why do we got to make them the same thing? What, just to remove difference and replace it with negation?

See to Nietzsche, in the actual world, when a master overcomes a slave, or slaves rise up and overthrow a master, that's not an opposition that's being resolved. In Nietzsche's view, this is the affirmation of difference. This is one will to power overcoming another will to power. And subordinating difference to it simply being a negation of a more unified thing, is again a needless rational scaffolding that denies how Dynamic the reality of difference truly is. So picture that world. It's not a bunch of Essences that are all competing with things that have other Essences. It's not a bunch of oppositions seeking resolution and clarification. This just a near infinite collection of Wills that are all competing for and striving for differentiation. The dialectic, in that kind of word world then, the argument is, it becomes unnecessary and quite distorting.

Now the takeaway from this, in a more practical sense, will lead people to call the end result of Nietzsche's philosophy an approach to life that's based on a type of Joy, lightness, or playfulness. The reason for this is, because if we take what Nietzsche has to say seriously, then the picture of life is not one where you have this rigid set of protocols, like a moral code from a God your entire life. It's not a picture of life where there are these countless dialectical oppositions that need to be worked out, so you better go get to work on them. No, the picture of life to Nietzsche becomes almost like a game you're playing, where through affirmation of what life is, you're essentially rolling the dice over and over again, hoping to roll a seven one of these times. But, even if you don't ever get a seven, you're still at least playing the game. In other words, there's a seriousness and an expectation to what life is, that just gets lifted. And instead, it starts to make more sense to just affirm difference in each moment of your life heading into the future, whether it lines up with a set of protoclls that you've created in the past, or not. And this recurring affirmation of difference in each moment as it unfolds in the universe is what Deleuze believed was the true significance of Nietzsche's "Eternal Recurrence". It was the affirmation of difference in each moment.

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...Society itself is a reactive Force that's trying to govern people's behavior. And if history is full of these people that are choosing more reactive ways of living, does that maybe have something to do with the way those societies have been set up? Is it maybe easier to control people when they're encouraged to be passive and reactive?

And for Guilles Deleuze, one of the promising ways forward, when it comes to all this we've been talking about today, is going to be for us to emphasize Art, as opposed to information. Let me explain, because hearing that, you may be like, "Good God, is this guy really going to say we need to do more finger painting and that's going to free us from the bonds of the digital panopticon"? No, just think of what information truly is in the type of Society we live in.

We typically think that information is something that's liberating. You know, "if only people had the information, then they'd be able to make decisions that were better for them and their families". But so often, what happens in the Information Age is that whoever dominates the flows of information, gets to dominate the limited worldview of the people that they're reaching. So when you're given information in one of these modern control societies to Deleuze, it's obviously not about transmitting knowledge. It's most of the time hardly even verified. So what this information becomes is a method of mass communicating the meanings, norms, and directives of the day that people are supposed to internalize and believe in, and then go throughout their lives.

Information is like a police communication, he says. When you watch a news story or a political debate or whatever it is. This is not some neutral thing that's happening, or just "take this information for what it's worth guys, here it is". No, it's a prescription of the meaning of the events that are are going on. Information in a control society he says, is both a snapshot and a command at the exact same time. It carries with it an implicit order that this is the view that polite Society is going to believe in next.

And it's this, combined with the other ways, that people are turned into bits of that information and then manipulated. Information turns out to be a massively effective way of controlling people's behavior. Turns out, it's also very easy to convince people that they have a different sort of way of looking at things, a diverse perspective, even though they're just funneled into the same algorithmic channels that so many other people are given their information in. It's "fake difference" to Deleuze.

But if it's not obvious by this point in the episode, Deleuze is a philosopher that has, as maybe his chief goal above all others, to find ways to facilitate the creation of the new "real difference". In other words, think about what we know about him so far. This constant unfolding of existence into the future. Difference and repetition to replace the traditional idea of a static identity. The critique of philosophers being stuck in the image of thought from the past. Philosophy, to Deleuze, true thinking is a creative activity. It's not prescriptive. It's not a set of protocols to determine how valid someone's thoughts are. Philosophy is about the creation of a new tracing of Concepts that can understand reality in a totally different way. And as important as what Nietzsche would call reactive forces may be, we also need people who are not sitting back being reactive all the time. Deleuze himself doesn't break these forces down into this kind of binary like Nietzsche does, but he's going to say that any activity that truly has as its' goal to not sit around and repeat the traditions and the way that things have been done in the past, but one that actually genuinely aims to find new lines of escape from these traditions, or new forms of what life can look like, that is an activity that he is deeply interested in finding better ways to facilitate, no matter what the context is.

And if you had to give a name to that sort of activity, whether it's in philosophy, science, painting, music, the only name that makes sense that we have really, is Art. Deleuze says that Art is not a form of information, it's not even a form of communication to him. True Art, in the sense that it's about creating a new tracings of reality, in the sense that it's inspiring people to see life in a new way, this is something fundamentally different than what information is, which again, is only trying to give people a snapshot of the past that's loaded with a bunch of meanings and directives. True Art, to Deleuze, helps people think and feel beyond the prescribed limitations of the information they get on a day-to-day basis.

So if you hear Deleuze's philosophy and you feel a little disoriented, like "man this is a truly bizarre picture of what our reality is, how am I ever going to use this way of thinking practically in my everyday life"? Well, that's actually part of his entire point. True Art gets people thinking outside of these rigid boxes. So, you know how they say there's a comedian's comedian, or a musician's musician? This is why I think one way to describe Deleuze is, that he's a philosopher's philosopher. Or at the very least, an artist's philosopher. Cuz his work is designed to inspire someone to think, think different than they otherwise do. Truly different.