Tag: Deleuze

To Think Philosophically?

”If philosophy did not exist, we cannot guess the level of stupidity [there would be]. Philosophy prevents stupidity from being as enormous as it would be were there no philosophy. That’s philosophy’s splendor, we have no idea what things would be like … So when we say ”to create is to resist,” it’s effective, positive, I mean.” – Deleuze, L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze.

What does it means to think philosophically?

I don’t think that only philosophers think or reflect. Rather, philosophers do so in a distinctive way by creating concepts that can help us see things we weren’t aware of before. It can be the way Simone de Beauvoir made many readers aware of the problematic assumption that men were the first sex and women were merely a diversion. It reminds me of how Deleuze and Guattari, years later, said that for far too long, the hegemonic ideal has been a white, 33 year old heterosexual man called Jesus, which not only discriminates, but also hinders our thinking. In a broader sense, be open toward other ways of living. This is also why solely giving advice, potentially, takes away the responsibility from each of us to be accountable for our actions.

So while we all – or most of us – think daily about what to eat, wear, do, etc. (especially if you have children who need healthy lunches and clean clothes), thinking philosophically requires that we pay attention to the present moment — that we critically reflect on what is happening, including evaluating our own behavior. It emphasizes that philosophy can’t teach you what to think or give you clear steps to attaining peace of mind. However, it can nurture critical thinking that can help us evaluate various forms of thinking. Instead of telling us what to think, philosophers can help us clarify how thinking is possible and perhaps even show us what philosophical thinking looks like.

For example, today it seems rather convenient to say that people who voted for Brexit or Trump can’t think, but here we might just be showing our own arrogant tendency for moralizing, i.e., judging. Instead, differences in opinions are an invitation to confront our own possible lack of understanding. Why do they believe that this is right? Once we get a better grab of their life-situation and moral reasoning, then we might show how the arguments behind these votes exhibit incoherent thinking. Thus, empathy for difference is not a blind acceptance but an ongoing process of questioning.

Similar, Trump voters, for example, seem to fear women, blacks, Mexicans, homosexuals, etc. He discriminates and represses what scares him, but more importantly, he does so based on irrational feelings of fear. He acts stupid. Yet, we should still ask whether Trump is the main problem, or whether it’s the ideology created him and later put him in power. There is, of course, no evidence that shows that men, in general, are better than women at anything, no evidence that Caucasians are better than blacks, etc. His value judgments, therefore, are not based on facts, but ignorance. But how can ignorance seduce so many?

So, although philosophy should not be about giving advice, it can still be taught. People can learn to become more aware about their own unreasonable beliefs and recognize their blind spots, such as whether they unintentionally discriminate by how they use language, etc. Such teaching is not taking away personal responsibility, but instead giving responsibility back to the people so they can become informed citizens and think for themselves.

Another example may illustrate this. Today, the media talk a lot about “fake news.” (I wonder whether all this talk is true or an example of how the concept of fake news can be used strategically.) People seem to ask: Who is responsible? Who should control it? However, instead of blaming Facebook or any other medium, I think it is troubling that so few people apparently are capable of critically questioning the news they receive — the sources, motives, agendas, and how the news is framed. Also, it seems as if many believe that objective journalists exist, even though everything is subjective. The truth is not out there, but created through our engagement with the world. Even journalists who strive to deliver well-researched news are still colored by their career objectives, personal beliefs and ideas, editors’ input, etc.

Therefore, if people really can’t think for themselves, then teaching them how to think becomes a social responsibility for all of us — mostly through schools.

Luckily, I have seen a growing trend, which I embrace, in which philosophy is being taught to children. I think that going forward, teaching philosophy is the best way to combat future sexism, racism, and other discrimination, the sad consequences of not being able to think philosophically. I stress best way because teaching people how to think won’t necessarily guarantee that they don’t repress, discriminate or violate other human beings, still self-knowledge tend to minimize self-deception in most sane people.

Plato's Academy

Plato’s Academy, Athens: Philosophy was from the beginning open to the world, in direct relation with the world – in the streets, parks, etc. Philosophy for all!

The most brilliant philosopher?

Who is the most brilliant philosopher of all time?

It’s a question that forces us to try to answer what can’t be answered. This can be a healthy exercise if we look beyond the unhealthy part—ranking everything, which is so popular today. Still, we can begin with what makes a philosopher brilliant: his or her capacity to think. This is what makes me see, notice, and become aware of things that I can only perceive with their help. Their brilliance lies in the fact that the only true form of creation is the act of thinking. Those closest to my mind, I find, are Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, but, without doubt, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is the one I have found to be the most brilliant. He is original in an extremely creative, yet compassionate and caring way. He is ethical without being normative—which I’ll get back to later.

Unlike most thinkers in the French post-World War II period, he didn’t return to Heidegger but, instead, dealt with Hume and Bergson, as well as Nietzsche and Spinoza. However, what makes him most interesting, among other things, is that he operates within a metaphysic of change or becoming, whereby he avoids the question of being that typically breaks the flow of our thoughts. Becoming is liberating since it resists the existing ideals and norms—or, at least, it doesn’t stop with them—and it is liberating because it dares to imagine another future. Deleuze resists this quagmire because he challenges how we tend to see thing, including challenging the history of philosophy. He even reads Nietzsche and the novelist Proust in a new way.

Deleuze is also ethical because of his utopian philosophy, in which utopia isn’t a good place that is inexistent but rather a now-here place. By paying attention to what happens now, he can decide what to actualize, that is, what to pass on to the next generation. He never settles, which to some can seem stressful and strenuous, but the point is that he can go on thinking. He frees what is kept imprisoned, for example, rigid identities or ideologies and ways of assuming how things are. In his book on Nietzsche, Deleuze writes, “The world is neither true nor real but living.” He then goes on to say that the living world is the will to power, which he translates into a will to create, that is, a will to evaluate, decipher, explicate, and, in short, to think.

The question was originally posed here.

See also Who Killed Gilles Deleuze?

One World

In One World Now: The Ethics of Globalization, Peter Singer, an Australian moral philosopher, discusses humanity’s shared ethical responsibility and sovereignty. We live in a global world that—unlike the older term “internationalization” conveys—emphasizes that we are moving; that is, “moving beyond the era of growing ties between states,” he says.

Within his text, Singer addresses a central question: is the nation state loosing sovereignty? Perhaps. Should it? Yes, according to Singer. And he makes a strong case for overcoming it. Whether or not the nation state is losing its sovereignty is a difficult question to answer.

Read the rest of the review at Metapsychology.

Riverbed

In 2014, artist Olafur Eliasson exhibited Riverbed at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Riverbed is a rocky landscape placed inside the museum. This work has nature and culture folding around one another to an extent that illustrates that everything is culture. The work challenges the participators both physically and mentally, as it facilitates intimate contact with the sounds of the water running through the riverbed, the smell of the wet rocks and the gleam of light reflected on the wet rocks, and challenges your bodily balance as you walk up the hill or try to balance on the slippery or rolling rocks—all of it becomes significant.

In an interview, Eliasson mentions how the landscape appears dead, except for the little stream of water that passes through it. The movement of the water makes the work dynamic. The movement brings life. Yet the water doesn’t come or leave; it just moves and thereby touches the participants. It comes from nowhere, going anywhere. The work is a meditative contemplation addressing time as movement and as duration, not linear sequences that can be split up. It doesn’t lead to a result; it can’t be passed toward something better; on the contrary, time passes. As an internal process, “The walking time is unfolded,” says the artist.

riverbed-by-olafur-eliasson

Riverbed takes place in-between the coming and going. How aware are you of what is happening right here and now? What comes into being? What passes? How do you relate to what is happening? Is your perception already affected by strong beliefs or ideas? Can you only relate in a certain way because of past memories, external pressure or fantasies? Can you meet the world unarmed?

These questions circle around establishing a belief in this world, where our belief is connected with the actual moment, not a projection. The work Riverbed may help us from solely thinking about art as an object of our thinking to having a territory, that is, it makes us think.

A river, like a piece of art, has a past form, a present form and, perhaps, a form to come. It depends on our involvement. This involvement is ethical, I propose.

For example, Gilles Deleuze’s ethic is one of the events; not the present understood as an object, but the present living moment stretched in-between, “What is going to happen? What has just happened … never something which is happening.”

What is happening, therefore, is always a mixture of no longer and not yet. This is why Deleuze says that philosophy is mixture of crime and science fiction, dealing with what has just happened as well actualizing.

Art can teach us a lot about ethical involvement.

The Generous Ethic of Deleuze

I just published “The Generous Ethic of Deleuze“, in Philosophy Study, Vol. 6, No. 8 (2016).

Abstract: This paper argues that the affirmative philosophy of Gilles Deleuze opens for a generous ethic. Such ethic passes on new or different possibilities of life. The paper briefly outlines the basic ideas in Deleuze thinking that can be understood as generous. Then it suggests how paying attention is a prerequisite for practicing a generous ethics, that is, mainly being aware of what, how and why something happens. Finally, it exemplifies how—referring to Christopher Nolan’s film Inception—we may practice a generous ethic.

Read the paper here.

Who Killed Gilles Deleuze?

Who Killed Gilles Deleuze? is a novel about one man’s obsession with the purported suicide of a famous French philosopher.

When a young Danish man, who has just arrived in Barcelona, meets the Spanish writer Rodrigo, he becomes a witness to a four-day-long monologue about philosophy, identity, love, and life and its possible limits.

Rodrigo scrutinizes the suicide of Gilles Deleuze with as much passion as if his own future depended on it. For several years, he has devoted all his time and energy to solving this mysterious death, which he is convinced, is a murder. His own life has been on pause.

How can a life-affirming philosopher kill himself? How can a person who believed that each self is already a multiplicity kill himself without letting any self survive? Is there any part of Deleuze living on the run in hiding in the US?

The Spanish writer approaches this suicide with the methods of a detective elaborating different theories of who to blame and not blame, describing how the philosopher’s fall from his apartment could have happened; he casts doubt on the assumption that Deleuze killed himself due to illness.

The meeting between the young Danish man and Rodrigo takes place in the fabled streets of Barcelona, where Rodrigo draws on the Spanish city’s characteristics and history of political struggles to exemplify the enigma of Deleuze. After four days, Rodrigo disappears, leaving the young Danish man bewildered and with only one choice: to take on Rodrigo’s investigation as his own or risk becoming obsessed as well.

Who Killed Gilles Deleuze? is the young Danish man’s story of his meeting with Rodrigo, whose only reason for living was Deleuze, whose only reason for killing himself was not to die at all.

Who Killed Gilles Deleuze? is 86 pages long and written in Danish by Finn Janning. It was released on the 17th of June 2016. See here.

Or see my essay Happy Death of Gilles Deleuze.

hvem-myrdede-gilles-deleuze

Mindfulness in Rome

May 11 – 15, 2016: 2nd International Conference on Mindfulness, Sapienza University of Rome. See here the website of the event.

Among the many interesting presentations, I presented the paper entitled Mindfulness as an Ethical Practice.

In this paper, I ask two questions. The first is: What is an ethical practice? The second question is: Is mindfulness an ethical practice? My ultimate concern, however, is the possible link between the two issues: What relationship does mindfulness have with ethics? To answer these questions, I first draw on three ethical theories from the Western history of philosophy—Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Deleuze—to define ethics as a particular way of being. Then, I integrate and compare some significant elements from these ethics with the practice of mindfulness, mainly as Jon Kabat-Zinn defines it. This is done to clarify to what extent mindfulness is an ethical practice. My study reveals that not only can mindfulness be viewed as a classical ethical practice (as understood in a Western philosophical context), but—and perhaps more surprising—mindfulness is closer to some Western ethics than to Buddhism, e.g., regarding whether “the Good” is known beforehand, whether ethics is an immanent or transcendent practice, and whether ethics is a judgmental or nonjudgmental practice. Finally, I briefly discuss the ways in which Western philosophy can shed new light on mindfulness.

 

Towards an Immanent Business Ethics?

I just published the paper “Towards an Immanent Business Ethics?” in Asian Journal of Humanities and Social Studies.

Abstract – The aim of this paper is to explore the possibilities for an immanent ethics for business. The paper has three parts. In the first part, I make some general and critical comments about the nature of business ethics. In the second part, I outline the immanent ethics as presented by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Then, I positioning immanent ethics within business, primarily in relation to the terms “best practice” and “best fit.” The main claim here is that an immanent ethics encourages a shift from a merely reactive approach toward an active. This shift opens up the field for an affirmative practice that aims at enlarging the discussion within business ethics as such.

The paper can be read here.

 

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