Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Mahaprajnaparamitashastra', 'Scientific Thought' and 'A Conversation: what is it? What is it for?'

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18 ideas

1. Philosophy / C. History of Philosophy / 1. History of Philosophy

21844	The history of philosophy is an agent of power: how can you think if you haven't read the great names? [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought. It has played the oppressor's role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: I find it hard to relate to this French 1960s obsession with everybody being oppressed in every conceivable way, so that 'liberation' is the only value that matters. If you ask why liberty is needed, you seem to have missed the point.

1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 1. Philosophy

21849	Thought should be thrown like a stone from a war-machine [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: Thought should be thrown like a stone by a war-machine. …Isn't this what Nietzsche does with an aphorism?
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], II)
	A reaction: It sounds as if philosophy should consist of nothing but aphorisms.

1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 5. Aims of Philosophy / a. Philosophy as worldly

21845	Philosophy aims to become the official language, supporting orthodoxy and the state [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: Philosophy is shot through with the project of becoming the official language of a Pure State. The exercise of thought thus conforms to the goals of the real State, to the dominant meanings and to the requirements of the established order.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: [He cites Nietzsche's 'Schopenhauer as Educator' as the source of this] Is Karl Marx included in this generalisation, or Diogenes of Sinope? Is conservative philosophy thereby invalidated?

1. Philosophy / F. Analytic Philosophy / 7. Limitations of Analysis

21839	When I meet objections I just move on; they never contribute anything [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: Not reflection, and objections are even worse. Every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: 'OK, OK, let's get on to something else'. Objections have never contributed anything.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: I know it is heresy in analytic philosophy, but I love this! In analytic seminars you can barely complete your first sentence before someone interrupts. It's like road range - the philosophical mind state is always poised to attack, attack.

1. Philosophy / H. Continental Philosophy / 1. Continental Philosophy

21841	We must create new words, and treat them as normal, and as if designating real things. [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: This sounds like the attitude of someone creating a computer game. A language game! The idea is to create concepts with which to 'palpitate' our conceptual scheme, in order to reveal it, and thus put it within our power.

2. Reason / C. Styles of Reason / 1. Dialectic

21842	Don't assess ideas for truth or justice; look for another idea, and establish a relationship with it [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area, so that something passes between the two which is neither in one nor the other.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: Neither relativism nor dialectic. Sounds like just having fun with ideas, but a commentator tells me it is a strategy for liberating our thought, following an agenda created by Nietzsche.

21850	Dualisms can be undone from within, by tracing connections, and drawing them to a new path [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: It is always possible to undo dualisms from the inside, by tracing the line of flight which passes between the two terms or the two sets …and which draws both into a non-parallel evolution. At least this does not belong to the dialectic.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], II)
	A reaction: Deleuze disliked Hegel's version of the dialectic. Not clear what he means here, but he is evidently groping for an alternative account of the reasoning process, which is interesting. Deleuze hates rigid dualisms.

5. Theory of Logic / L. Paradox / 2. Aporiai

21838	Before we seek solutions, it is important to invent problems [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: The art of constructing a problem is very important: you invent a problem, a problem-position, before finding a solution.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: I get the impression that Deleuze prefers problems to solutions, so the activity of exploring the problem is all that really matters. Sceptics accuse philosophers of inventing pseudo-problems. We must first know why 'problematising' is good.

7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 3. Being / i. Deflating being

21847	Before Being there is politics [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: Before Being there is politics.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: [He says he is quoting Felix Guattari] I can only think that this is a very Marxist view - that politics permeates and dictates everything. This seems to tell me that I am forever controlled by something so deep and vast that I can never understand it.

9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 4. Four-Dimensionalism

14759	A thing is simply a long event, linked by qualities, and spatio-temporal unity [Broad]
	Full Idea: A thing is simply a long event, throughout the course of which there is either qualitative similarity or continuous qualitative change, together with a characteristic spatio-temporal unity.
	From: C.D. Broad (Scientific Thought [1923], 10 'Duration')
	A reaction: At least he is trying to give some sort of principle that links the stages of the event together.

11842	If short-lived happenings like car crashes are 'events', why not long-lived events like Dover Cliffs? [Broad]
	Full Idea: We call a lightning flash or a motor accident an event, but refuse to apply this to the cliffs of Dover. ...But quantitative differences (of time) give no good grounds for calling one bit of history an event, and refusing the name to another bit.
	From: C.D. Broad (Scientific Thought [1923], p.54), quoted by David Wiggins - Sameness and Substance Renewed 2.3 n13
	A reaction: Wiggins calls this proposal a 'terrible absurdity', but it seems to me to demand attention. There is a case to be made for a 'process' to be the fundamental category of our ontology, with stable physical objects seen in that light.

15. Nature of Minds / A. Nature of Mind / 1. Mind / d. Location of mind

21840	A meeting of man and animal can be deterritorialization (like a wasp with an orchid) [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: The wasp becomes part of the orchid's reproductive apparatus at the same time as the orchid becomes the sexual organ of the wasp. …There are becomings where a man and an animal only meet on the trajectory of a common but asymmetrical deterritorialization.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: [second bit compressed] The point here is to illustrate 'deterritorialization', a term which Deleuze got from Guattari. It seems to be where the margins of your being become unclear. Recall the externalist, anti-individualist view of mind.

16. Persons / E. Rejecting the Self / 1. Self as Indeterminate

21843	People consist of many undetermined lines, some rigid, some supple, some 'lines of flight' [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: Things, people, are made up of varied lines, and they do not necessarily know which line they are on or where they should make the line which they are tracing pass; there is a whole geography in people, with rigid lines, supple lines, lines of flight etc.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I)
	A reaction: An example of Deleuze creating a novel concept, in order to generate a liberating way of seeing our lives. His big focus is on 'lines of flight' (which, I think, are less restrained by local culture than the others).

23. Ethics / C. Virtue Theory / 3. Virtues / a. Virtues

7903	The six perfections are giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom [Nagarjuna]
	Full Idea: The six perfections are of giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom.
	From: Nagarjuna (Mahaprajnaparamitashastra [c.120], 88)
	A reaction: What is 'morality', if giving is not part of it? I like patience and vigour being two of the virtues, which immediately implies an Aristotelian mean (which is always what is 'appropriate').

25. Social Practice / A. Freedoms / 2. Freedom of belief

21848	Some lines (of flight) are becomings which escape the system [Deleuze]
	Full Idea: There are lines which do not amount to the path of a point, which break free from structure - lines of flight, becomings, without future or past, without memory, which resist the binary machine. …The rhizome is all this.
	From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], II)
	A reaction: The binary machine enforces simplistic either/or choices. I assume the 'lines' are to replace the Self, with something much more indeterminate, active and changing.

27. Natural Reality / D. Time / 1. Nature of Time / g. Growing block

8160	The present and past exist, but the future does not [Broad, by Dummett]
	Full Idea: Not only the present but also the past exist, but the future (so long as it is the future) does not.
	From: report of C.D. Broad (Scientific Thought [1923]) by Michael Dummett - Thought and Reality 1
	A reaction: This is quite appealing, and seems right if you believe that every truth has a truthmaker, and that there are no truths about the future. And yet the whole misery of people dying is that they cease to exist.

14609	We could say present and past exist, but not future, so that each event adds to the total history [Broad]
	Full Idea: One theory accepts the reality of the present and the past, but holds that the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world.
	From: C.D. Broad (Scientific Thought [1923], II)
	A reaction: This is now known as Broad's 'Growing Block' view of time. It is tempting to say that neither past nor future exist, but it seems undeniable that statements about the past can be wholly true, unlike those about the future.

27. Natural Reality / D. Time / 2. Passage of Time / d. Time series

22933	We imagine the present as a spotlight, moving across events from past to future [Broad]
	Full Idea: We imagine presentness moving, like the spot of light from a policeman's bulls eye traversing the fronts of houses in a street. What is illuminated is present, what was illuminated is past, and what is not yet illuminated is the future.
	From: C.D. Broad (Scientific Thought [1923], II)
	A reaction: This is the 'moving spotlight' compromise theory, which retains the B-series eternal sequence of ordered events, but adds the A-series privileged present moment. Le Poidevin says Broad represents time twice over.