Paul Grant

Dr. Joshua Ramey

PHI Senior Thesis

20 May 2016

“Where Truths Live:” Deleuze, Guattari and Philosophy as a Way of Life

Although Deleuze and Guattari titled their final work together What is Philosophy?, it is arguably

more in the spirit of their collaborations to ask “what can philosophy do?” In the Capitalism and

Schizophrenia volumes, less importance is given to furnishing an accurate model of reality or generating

singular answers to old philosophical puzzles. Rather, the authors are interested in how the production of

new theoretical models and perspectives can affect social change and unlock virtual potentialities within

life. In the final section of Anti-Oedipus, they disclose that the task of their proposed psychiatry—an

alternative to psychoanalysis called “schizoanalysis”—aims, ultimately, to unveil the workings of desire

and its repression in a given social formation, with the intention of seeing and manipulating flows of

energy and psychic investments towards the end of emancipating desire (382). In A Thousand Plateaus,

too, the purpose for doing philosophy is highly practical, as evidenced by the development of an

“ontological pragmatics.” Even in What is Philosophy?, where philosophy is defined by its giving

consistency and order to a “chaotic virtuality” through the creation of concepts, the resulting orientation

encourages the creation of new planes of immanence at least as much as it makes sense of the

construction of such planes in the past (160). The problem of defining philosophy too rigidly to the point

of being reductionistic, or too broadly, permitting in what we don’t want to, is here met sophisticatedly.1

The answer to What is Philosophy?, though it serves to orient philosophy away from “idle chatter” and

differentiate it from art and science, has an open-endedness that allows philosophy to shapeshift into

widely different styles of thinking (and being) for its practitioners. But whatever mutations occur, on this

view, philosophical thinking remains deeply connected to life; hence D&G emphasize the necessity of

1 This problem is briefly taken up in the “Mutual Attention” speech of On Philosophy as a Way of Life: A Symposium (p. 89-90; ed. Philip Goodchild).

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creative experimentation in thinking, “becoming-stranger” to ourselves, and journeying to the “extreme

places, to extreme times, where the highest and deepest truths live and rise up” (WIP, 110; Nietzsche and

Philosophy, 110).

It is this Deleuzian move to ground thought firmly in life that begs comparison with the ancient

conception of “philosophy as a way of life.” As Pierre Hadot argues, ancient schools of thought like

Platonism, Aristotelianism, Epicureanism and Stoicism viewed the practice of transformative exercises

and moral conduct guided by “life rules” as the meat and substance of philosophy, to which the teachings,

texts and theory were subordinate—the “why” underlying the “what” and “how.” These philosophers

were keenly aware of how reason, logos, intertwines with the sensibility and imagination, erotic desire,

and attention (consciousness of the present), to the extent that Hadot calls the ancient exercises “spiritual”

with the precise meaning of “[resulting from] the individual’s entire psychism” (82). Their practice, as

part of a style of life that definitively broke with conventional norms and points of view, was geared

towards elevating one’s seeing to the cosmic level and positively reforming one’s responses to life,

nurturing just action and inner well-being.

At first glance, the distance between these philosophical “moments”—between the Deleuzo-

Guattarian world of machines, schizophrenia, and social revolution, versus the ancient world of timeless

ideals and monastic-like discipline—may seem too great to be bridged. Yet investigation reveals linkages

that run deep, and are worth bearing out not for their own sake, but for the sake of revitalizing

philosophy. While Hadot worries that modern philosophy has lost touch with an existential bent at its core

and become too “exegetical,” Deleuze and Guattari warn that philosophy can lapse into mere discussion

and reactive criticism, or even be unwittingly in service to the State (as it often has been). In their

alternative visions, the areas of commonality that emerge concern (1) reconceiving the relationship

between thought and life; (2) accounting for reason’s “guidance by attention” and interplay with love, life

&c; (3) grounding philosophy in social interaction, friends and community; (4) freeing thinking from the

potentially limiting confines of the university. All these are interconnected, and under the guidance of

Deleuze, Guattari and Hadot, we can see how philosophy (apropos of these dimensions) has been

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practiced in the past and how it may be in the future—that questioning the images which are assumed as

bedrocks, and redirecting flows of attention and social engagement, opens up great possibilities lying

dormant within philosophy itself. Just as Deleuze and Guattari see universal history as a “history of

contingencies” in which the series of events leading up to the present day is understood as an arbitrary

sequence that could have deviated from its course at any point, so too is the history of philosophy rich

with contingencies, and may have yet to unlock the true potentials of philosophical thinking. Only our

experiments will tell.

Part I: Images

IMAGE OF THOUGHT

When philosophy turns back on itself, it seeks to understand its own operations—the model of

thought which it tacitly consents to, the relationship between thought and the world. When it is practiced

as a way of life, especially, philosophy forms an ‘image of life’ that informs the way life ought to be lived

and the role of thinking in living. These two images—the image of thought (what does it mean to think?)

and image of life (e.g., what is life that it produces both self-deluding and images “that open life beyond

any of its already actualized ends”?)—are scrutinized and reinvented both on the side of Deleuze and

Guattari, and by the ancients (Colebrook 180). With respect to an “image of thought,” Deleuze argues for

the liberation of thought from the “dogmatic image” that imprisons it in a model of recognition and

common sense, while DG push for schizophrenia as a “possibility for thought” and experimental modes

of thinking-living that inform each other, for instance in ATP (DR 148). As for life, Claire Colebrook

argues that Deleuze/DG seek to expand our concept of life itself to possess “a capacity for sense, imaging,

relation, utopianism and self-enjoyment – and non-relation, inertia and death” (175). This empowered,

productive vision of life attributes the formulation and lived expression of all philosophy to life itself. The

ancients, from Hadot’s point of view, are similarly radical insofar as their images, predating the

‘solidification’ of the dogmatic image in the early-modern period, endow thought with transformative

potential—to see life, and oneself, from the perspective of life ‘for itself’ rather than ‘for us,’ or the

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perspective of universality. At this level, the primary commonality between DG and the ancients is a shift

in perspective beyond the “individual intellect” to the point of view of life itself or “the Whole.”

Colebrook sums up the impact of creating a new image of thought: “Every philosopher who

creates a concept of what it is to think refigures all the concepts of the history of philosophy, allowing

new modes of reading, thinking and feeling all that has been previously created” (WIP 103). As DG write

in What is Philosophy?, “Philosophy is becoming, not history; it is the coexistence of planes, not the

succession of systems” (59). The philosophical planes of immanence, whose contours are formed by their

constituent concepts, which themselves are deployed through conceptual personae, coexist in the present.

A philosopher explores the conceptual edifices and theoretical strata of past names, all equally alive in

that any can be taken as a lens with which to view the other planes or the world—even to create the

present and ground a way of life. With this understanding we can see the importance of the image of

thought: all past philosophical concepts are more or less available to us through inherited texts, but the

meaning of all these concepts and what they may imply for living are indeterminate until an image of

thought subsumes them and relates thinking to life.

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze elaborates the “dogmatic” image of thought that

philosophers have adhered to for millennia, unware that the image is “prephilosophical”—that is, silently

assumed without being subject to the same rigorous questioning (132). Deleuze locates this image, which

“crush[es] thought … and betrays what it means to think,” as far back as Plato and Aristotle and

remaining intact (although taking slightly different forms) during the modern era with Descartes, Kant,

Hegel, etc (167).2 It is worthwhile to revisit what is problematic here. At the heart of the image lies the

doctrine that thought has an “affinity with the true;” thought operates by a common sense that attributes to

it an “upright nature” (131). Now, the true can only be known as such in light of a specific model, which

is integral to the image: the model of recognition and representation. “Recognition may be defined by the

2 One can argue that the same dogmatic image remains silently operative even in contemporary philosophical debates, like the McDowell-Dreyfus debate. McDowell’s Mind and World assumes a definition of knowledge that takes its modern form in Sellars but goes back to Plato—namely, knowledge as “justified true belief.” In Difference and Repetition, the eight postulate of the dogmatic image is the “postulate of knowledge” (167).

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harmonious exercise of all the faculties upon a supposed same object,” so that such faculties as memory,

imagination and understanding are all related, for example, to Descartes’ selfsame wax. The identity in

the wax that is retained through the exercise of each faculty, is mirrored by the “unity of all the faculties

in the subject.” Descartes’ “I” is the prime example: I think, I remember, I imagine, I perceive the

supposed same wax. On the other hand Deleuze wants to suggest that we never encounter this “formal,

unspecified, universal object” (the selfsame wax) but only objects “delimited and specified by a

determinate contribution from the faculties” (133).

Deleuze warns that the other side to the model of recognition is that the act of recognizing

complies with a set of “established values:” “what is recognized is not only an object but also the values

attached to an object” (135). He suggests, then, drawing on Nietzsche, that the preservation of an

unchanging identity within objects by the common sense lends itself, in turn, to the preservation of

preexisting values: the State, the Church (one thinks of the ‘metaphysics of Being’ in Plato, Descartes and

Kant). From an object with fixed identity, the dogmatic image launches “representation” whereby

concepts are determined by opposition, analogized, and resemblances are struck between objects. So,

“difference becomes an object of representation always in relation to a conceived identity, a judged

analogy, an imagined opposition or a perceived similitude,” disabling the thinking of difference in itself.

In Nietzsche and Philosophy, representation is said to poison philosophy as it derives from slave morality

and interprets power in a mediocre, base way (81). Thus, the “crucifixion” of difference is at once

epistemological and moral in its inability to conceive of difference on the one hand and indebtedness to

(in Nietzsche’s vernacular) a morality of ressentiment, reactive thought and judgments of established

values, on the other.

In the way of beginning to think non-dogmatically, Deleuze relies on Plato’s distinction between

things “which do not disturb thought and … those which force us to think.” These forceful events, or

“encounters,” come from what Deleuze calls the “imperceptible” that is defined by its ungraspable nature

with respect to recognition, and spur the “soul” to pose a problem (139-40). An Athenian youth falls in

love with a seductive Socrates; Nietzsche is electrified by a Wagnerian opera; “the starry sky above”

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inspires wonder in the mind of Kant, or Aristotle—these are encounters. The “violence” of an encounter

unhinges thought to the point where the form of common sense breaks down and a rupture with doxa is

created. Philosophy begins in that moment where a problem results from the experience in which the soul

invests itself. This picture of how thinking erupts places the agency not with a knowing subject but in a

meeting between organism and environment where resistance is encountered: “we can encounter reality

and truth in each moment insofar as it resists our thought” (Goodchild 98). This diminishment of

subjective agency testifies, again, to the influence of Nietzsche, who wrote in Beyond Good and Evil:

With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds--namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." One thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty.” (1.17)

We can read Nietzsche here as coming into contact with the internal contradictions of the dogmatic

image. Thinking itself, and not just philosophical thinking, befalls us; thought has, as Deleuze says, only

“involuntary adventures” (145). On this view, then, the individual organism is, in an important sense,

playing a passive role in the events of thought, an observation we will return to.

The final postulates that complete the dogmatic image of thought oppose Deleuze’s own thinking

in important ways—namely by precluding schizophrenia as a possibility for thought, turning concepts

“non-philosophical” and producing reactive, life-denying knowledge. Indeed, not just schizophrenia but

the “Trinity of madness, stupidity and malevolence” are flatly reduced, in the classical image, to error, the

only “sole ‘negative’ of thought” (DR 148).3 Deleuze calls error “false recognition,” arguing that labelling

something an error presupposes the model by which what is not erroneous can be recognized—that is, the

model of recognition. Stupidity, along with cowardice, cruelty, and baseness, should instead be conceived

as a “structure of thought as such … express[ing] the non-sense in thought by right.” Stupidity is just a

consequence of reactive forces—“base way[s] of thinking” that shows not the correctness of the model of

3 Deleuze argues that this reduction occurs in principle if not in practice. For madness, stupidity and malevolence are regarded as being caused by external forces acting on a thinker, yet the effect of their presence is “assimilated precisely to error” (149).

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recognition, but points to the vaster landscape of forces in which thought is born (NP 105). When Deleuze

writes of Antonin Artaud’s difficulty to “manage to think something,” he is presenting us with individual

experience meeting the limits of the dogmatic image (in a way paralleling the schizo’s resistance to the

psychoanalyst’s couch in Anti-Oedipus), in which Artaud is intensely aware of the forces

—“schizophrenic” and erotic; soul-stirring “compulsions”—that create thought and “engender ‘thinking’

in thought” (DR 147).

Deleuze’s critique of “propositions” and “knowledge” that stem from the dogmatic image goes to

the core of “analytic” philosophy. In What is Philosophy?, DG tell us that “logic detaches the proposition

from all its psychological dimensions, but clings all the more to the set of postulates that limited and

subjected thought to the constraints of a recognition of truth in the proposition” (WIP 139). The problem

with the traditional image of thought is its location of truth within the “designation” (extension, reference)

of a proposition, whereas truth is a result of sense that proposition express—“a matter of production, not

of adequation” (154). It is conceded that “we can never say what is the sense of what we say.” We may

designate the sense of one proposition with another proposition, but the sense of the latter then needs to

be designated by still another one, and so on ad infinitum. Ultimately, Deleuze traces sense to the context

in which a proposition appears: the background of problems and questions to which it is meant to respond

. . . [insert: non-philosophical concepts] . . . . The knowledge that originates with thought subsumed by

this whole image is, as we would expect, reactive: “Knowledge is opposed to life, but because it

expresses a life which contradicts life, a reactive life which finds in knowledge a means of preserving and

glorifying its type … this knowledge that measures, limits and moulds life is itself entirely modelled on

reactive life, within the limits of reactive life” (NP 100).4 Because the image begins with the established

values built in to the form of recognition, the end product of dogmatic thinking is, likewise, reactive. We

possess a kind of knowledge that sets limits to life and reinforces old values rather than encouraging the

transgression of supposed limits and creation of new values.

4 . . . Reading NP alongside DR makes a lot of sense in light of their big overlap in content.

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Such are the aspects of traditional thought that Deleuze counters in his own philosophical

‘project,’ which is self-consciously creative, life-affirming and disillusioned with the separate intellect. In

this last vein, Claire Colebrook frames Deleuze’s philosophy as a “tirade against grounding thought on

living beings” and claims that DG “ultimately work against … the identification of life with the living

body or the organism” (98). As we will see, the position of “passive vitalism” that she elaborates in

Deleuze and the Meaning of Life emphasizes a concept of life not limited to living beings, but what is

important now is that neither will thought be so limited. More precisely, Colebrook’s Deleuze opens us to

an image of thought in which the separate intellect does not figure as the source of thinking. Instead,

thinking befalls organisms immersed in an “axiological field” wherein life as a creative power produces

thoughts and images. Drawing on Ruyer, Colebrook argues that our ability to affirm or deny our own free

will—regardless of whether or not it exists—is itself evidence of an axiological dimension, an abstract

“domain of sense” that is omitted from our discourse when we only speak of present actualities and past

statistics without mention of the potentialities from which the present is made actual. If an individual

organism or intellect does not give rise to ideals, themes or senses, then we may view “mind [as] the

intersection of the actual world with the domain of potentiality,” the axiological field being the source of

the ideals that both directs and exceeds the bodies enveloped by it. This “abstract, ideal and trans-spatial

domain” dethrones the Cartesian subject and uplifts the feats of life, as Colebrook says:

… the experience of mind set over and against a world that does not yet make sense … leads to the inescapable admission of a domain of sense beyond man as an organism. Deleuze and Guattari will render this logic fully explicit in Anti-Oedipus… [once man] has recognized himself as the origin of law and judgment … we realize both that there is no end or foundation beyond this immanent life, and that life will nevertheless produce images [which] open life beyond any of its actualized ends (179-80).

Both the images that liberate life and those that imprison and delude it arise from a field of potentialities

that is, in a sense, unknown to the ‘recipients’ of those images, but known through what it actualizes, and

mind is just the intersection of these actual and potential domains rather than a “distinct substance.” In

Anti-Oedipus, although the critique of subjectivity runs along different lines—the fixed subject emerges

only in repressed consciousness; the feeling of being the “doer” arises as an illusion at the third stage of

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psychic syntheses, consummation-consumption—there is a common substrate with Colebrook’s points:

the absence of a central ego, mind, thinker, or doer; the concept of ‘decentring.’

If Deleuze’s critique of the dogmatic image at times takes a moral ground that seems to come

directly from Nietzsche, the idea of decentring, too, recalls the Genealogy of Morals (“‘the doer’ is

merely a fiction added to the deed” (1.13)). It is not surprising, then, that Deleuze’s and DG’s thinking

strives, like Nietzsche’s philosophy, to affirm life, not create knowledge hostile to life: “thought that

would lead life to the limit of what it can do … Life would be the active force of thought, but thought

would be the affirmative power of life … Thinking would then mean discovering, inventing, new

possibilities of life” (NP 101). What is of the essence in this vision is the link between thought and the

domain of potentiality. Thought must have an openness to the never-before-actualized possibilities

sleeping in “the virtual;” in awakening new life from there, thought reaches its most creative, empowering

and liberating heights. Really, what occurs here inverts the relationship that many thinkers in the

dogmatic image have with thought, in which thought generates knowledge that fixes limits for life. It can

be argued, furthermore, that a commitment to affirmation of life in this sense underlies not only Deleuze’s

defining of philosophy primarily as a creative act—great philosophy creates concepts that enables the

release of ‘great events’—but also Deleuze and Guattari’s experimental style and focus on

experimentation (“To think is to experiment … [experimentation] is philosophical” (WIP 34, 111)).

While we have the details of this picture to fill in, we can say that whereas the dogmatic image assumes

established values in the act of recognition and the upright nature of thought, the ‘moral ground’ of

Deleuze’s thought lies here where the vantage point that sees both the restrictive and transgressive

potentials within thought is available, and we choose the power of thought to “make life affirmative.”

Deleuze begins with a “Yes.”

Here as well we uncover one of the strongest bands connecting Deleuze to the ancients and their

conception of philosophy as a way of life. It is not just that philosophy is put in service of actualizing

more desirable or simply unprecedented events, but that the ancient image of thought put thinking in

contact with the forces that form it and direct it. Specifically, the ancients better understood the interplay

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of thought with erotic and spiritual energies, and the importance of guiding attention. A fault of some

consequence with the classic image is, “We are never referred to the real forces that form thought, thought

itself is never related to the real forces that it presupposes as thought” (NP 104). At first we may think

that if Plato turns out to be one of the first representatives for the classic image, then this exempts him

(and Aristotle, Descartes &c.) from providing us with a window outside that image. But if we

acknowledge that the corpus of a philosopher or school of thought can in some ways adhere to the

dogmatic image while in other ways breaking with it, and that chief among these ruptures is contact with

the “real forces that form thought,” then we can see that Platonism and other ancient schools diverge from

the image implicitly—in their practice of philosophy as a way of life, in “spiritual exercises.”5 Departure

from the image, moreover, is just a ‘negative’ commonality between Deleuze/DG and the ancients, set

aside from the ‘positive’ that grounds thought in life and makes it serve life.

One of Hadot’s bolder claims defines philosophy, for the Stoics and Epicureans, as “a continuous

act, permanent and identical with life itself … this act could be defined as an orientation of the attention”

(PWL 268). From this perspective the attention is supremely important, whether it is used for conforming

one’s will to that of Nature, as with the Stoics, or cultivating a state of bliss, as with the Epicureans. Yet

such esteem for the attention is noticeably absent from much of modern/contemporary philosophy,

although it resurfaces in the collection of speeches, On Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise: A Symposium.

The speakers here took Hadot’s central thesis—that “philosophy in the ancient Greek world used to be

practiced as a way of life”—as a sort of starting point for their discussions pertaining to the nature and

object of philosophy itself, in relation to life and “the good life” in particular. The first speaker Phaedrus

remarks on Michael McGhee’s thinking that philsophers ought to cultivate “a certain quality of attention”

more than analyze, or even create, concepts. As Phaedrus explains, McGhee understands reasons as

‘motivating feelings’ that arise and, through their repetition, come to constitute a “form of attention” that

5 To see the ways in which a philosophy breaks with doxa we must, with Hadot, not just analyze the texts but understand the texts (esp. the ancient ones) in context of the lives of their writers. It is fair to say that Hadot reads the ancients with this insight that Deleuze does not wield; so their different modes of interpretation must be taken into account.

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binds us; we become “possessed” by reasoning patterns that imprison us in an “established way of

thinking” on which we fail to reflect. We fail to reflect because we are locked in to the form (mould?) of

attention constantly being reduplicated by our pre-established terms: the same thought-patterns repeating

over and mesmerizing us. For McGhee, then, philosophy requires not merely that we operate within the

“space of reasons” but temporarily suspend reason altogether to “liberate the forms of attention.” Like

Deleuze, McGhee questions the image of thought itself and “what it means to think,” but whereas we saw

that Deleuze calls the classical image into question within the space of reasons (i.e., by critiquing each

postulate with thought), McGhee calls for a perspective on thinking outside (as much as one can be) the

activity of thinking. The underlying principle here is articulated by McGhee himself: “we don’t even

know what someone is talking about who points to things outside [the] scope [of our attention’s focus].

And we take our perceived world to be a ground of judgement, whereas it is only the present scope of our

judgment.” Hence expanding our attentional scope in turn expands the ground of judgment, allowing

novelty into consciousness that jeopardizes established thinking and repetitive, mesmerizing thought.

(PSE 11-12)

So far it does not seem that the ancients and McGhee underscore the importance of attention for

the same reason, with the Stoics and Epicureans uplifting ethics and pleasure on the one hand and

McGhee arguing for the widening of perspective on the other. Yet, for the Stoics and Epicureans, these

uses of attention were inseparable from a shift in perspective that is deeply comparable to McGhee’s

“ascesis” (granted that the motivating intentions differ). Seneca, on the Stoic side, wrote in a letter to

Lucilius that “I look at the world; this world that I quite often feel as though I were seeing for the first

time [tamquam spectator novus],” which Hadot reads as reflecting a transformation in perception that

breaks with habitual seeing. On the Epicurean side, Lucretius notes, in De Rerum Natura, the tendency of

the mind to summon less and less admiration, over time, for things that once appeared novel. For Hadot,

both philosophers grasp the “paradox and scandal of the human condition: man lives in the world without

perceiving the world,” and references, in this regard, Bergson (Hadot 257-8). Indeed, Bergson’s concept

of intellect as necessarily “diminish[ing] the degree to which it attends to difference and complexity” in

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the world, by parsing it in “calculable units,” provides a good explanation for the paradox being

expressed (Colebrook 9).6 In addition, Bergsonian intuition, contrasted with “intellect,” resonates to

Seneca’s spectator novus. What these descriptions have in common is an encounter with the novelty of

the world ‘unfiltered’ or ‘unreduced’ by the mind’s habitual perception—very much like McGhee’s

freeing of the attention from a way of thinking and perceiving that has become entrenched through

repetition. What’s more, in discussing the ancient (Stoic and Epicurean) exercise of delimiting

consciousness to the present moment, which Hadot devotes a whole chapter to, he remarks that

“Concentration on the present instant implies the suspension of our projects for the future” (Hadot 259;

my italics). Thus, we find both a freedom from limiting habits and suspension of mental activity in

ancient exercises of the attention, just as in McGhee, that suggests a truth about the attention: its use to

take in the world afresh—coinciding with ascesis and expanding one’s “scope”—not only transforms

perception but allows us to see our “normal” ways of thinking in new light. The attention is a significant

force guiding and forming thought, even though this is not recognized by many philosophers from the

“modern” period up to the present.

The theme of “attentive thinking” continues into Pausanias’ speech, who concerns himself solely

with the meaning of it (29). Drawing on Simone Weil, Pausanias argues that in the “life of thinking” the

context in which a thought arises is everything—that “the isolated thought has no more significance than

the isolated note from a piece of music.” Direct observation reveals that thought is pulsed, that it

undergoes stoppages and possesses a certain rhythm defined by its pauses or lack thereof; hence he says

the “music of thought” (31-3). Likening thought to music allows Pausanias to make deeper points about

our experience of thought. For if rhythm is like an “energy” that defies measurement in the present

because its nature is “to bind past and future,” then “The intensity of music is built from the entropic flow

of time.” Insofar as thought is musical, rhythmic, then it too is shaped by the presence and amount of this

energy, which he calls “properly spiritual” (since it transcends the “material flow” of time). Pausanias

6 On the same page, Colebrook quotes Bergson: “. . . In the humanity of which we are a part, intuition is, in fact, almost completely sacrificed to intellect.” Here Bergson seems to be expressing in his own words Hadot’s “paradox” and a more refined version of Lucretius’ point about the mind’s “force of habit.”

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concludes simply but profoundly, “Two people could think exactly the same thought, yet where one

merely conceives it following laboriously from another thought, another is awake to the problems it

addresses and the promises it offers” (36; my emphasis).7

I lay out Pausanias’ logic, here, as a way into grappling with the spiritual dimension of ancient

thought—not in thought-content (like the concepts of Forms and divine Logos) but rather in the act of

thinking. Hadot applies the word “spiritual” to the ancients’ philosophical exercises in order to indicate

both their involvement with the “individual’s entire psychism”—not just the reason but also the will,

attention, memory, sensibility, imagination, intuition and soul—and the ‘movement’ within them to the

perspective of “objective Spirit,” a kind of transformation (82). Since ancient philosophy was an activity

that engaged one’s whole being (as it engaged one’s whole life) it is understandable why the transmission

from teacher to “disciple” and the tradition of Socratic dialogue were seen as powerful. Arnold Davidson

says, the “living and animated discourse [of ancient philosophy] was not principally intended to transmit

information, but ‘to produce a certain psychic effect in the reader or listener.’” Hadot himself adds that

“philosophical teaching is given above all in oral form, because only the living word, in dialogues … can

accomplish [the transformation of souls]” (PWL 19-20). If we ask what sets an oral teaching apart from

absorption through texts, then we must return to Pausanias’ insight that thought is surrounded and

characterized by a kind of energy and musicality, which gives it an “intensity” in oral exchanges it may

otherwise lack. (Hadot’s point that oral teaching aims to transform souls only gives us more reason to call

this energy “spiritual.”) Perhaps it is no coincidence that Pausanias uses the word “awake” to describe

the person who will fathom the true depths of a thought, and Hadot describes the result of participation in

the Socratic dialogue—marked by its pulses and rhythms—as “the awakening of consciousness” (PWL

163). In fact, the idea of ‘awakening thoughts’ is repeated in Goodchild’s collection (12-13, 18, 36) with

respect to transforming their listeners’ thinking, consciousness, and capacity to see—even to love. If

7 For the sake of rigor, we could parse Pausanias’ point like this: person A and person B hear or read the same sentence, and have the same thought in that it is the same string of symbols. However if A is the more “awake,” then they will see more connections to other lines of thought, the ways in which the thought is grounded in and could direct realities, and have a better sense of its profundity, than B. A can do this because she has cultivated a rich ‘context’—infused with “spiritual energy”—in which the thought can arise and “harmonize.”

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Pausanias and Hadot point in the same direction, then such awakenings are made possible when thought

reaches an intensity through its immersion in “spiritual energy,” whether by virtue of the presence of the

other and oral teaching or by other means (e.g., drugs). “Philosophy seeks this energy” (PSE 36).

It is interesting that the “Response” to Pausanias’ speech finds his major error in neglecting the

role of desire in shaping thought, arguing that the Weil-derived notion of “rhythm” was supposed to be

understood in erotic terms of “intensifying pleasure” (41). The responder suggests that philosophy’s

abstractions are meaningless if not engaged with desire. As one commentator sums it up, “The light that

illuminates what really matters for me is the desire of another” (45). While Pausanias’ talk of spiritual

energy is not given its due here, the responder’s addition is well justified, for example by homosexual

teacher-student relationships in ancient Greece. Socrates is the prime example, both in his seduction of

Athenian youths into philosophy and conduct of dialogues. In his seductions, Socrates would turn away

from his lovers at just the moment when they were ready to give themselves over to him, provoking

unrequited love but also a sort of magnetization to the “path of extraordinary beauty” walked by the sage.

In his dialogues, there was already a “passionate will,” an erotic energy, behind the pursuit of a solution

to a problem undertaken collectively. These conversations brought about, as we know, the revelation of

one’s ignorance and thus initiation into Socrates’ “school of … not-knowing.” But in all these

provocative acts, seductive and dialogical, Socrates only pretends to be in love, and only pretends to want

the wisdom of his dialoguer, when actually his real motivations concern awaking dormant virtues and

‘non-knowledge,’ which is liberating (PWL 159-163). That he accomplishes this through his desire—

even the façade of it—testifies to the truth in the words of Pausanias’ responder.

So both Deleuze and the ancients challenge our conventional image of thought and invite a new

understanding of thinking that acknowledges the underlying forces, which we have begun to classify as

the energetic forces of attentional, spiritual (-musical) and erotic. The philosophical commonality

between Deleuze and his ancient predecessors, as Hadot reads them, lies in an increased sensitivity to the

influence of such forces and need to account for, and redirect them. This appreciation leads to different

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kinds of philosophical practice—philosophy more engaging of our whole being, experimental with forms

of life, and seeking new, unheralded possibilities for thought.

IMAGE OF LIFE

Thought fashions not just an image of itself but an image of the life in which it exists. A question

that arises immediately concerns the relationship between thought and matter, the living body in

particular—a dichotomous starting point that we might attribute to Cartesian influence. But, really, mind-

body dualism, not as a formulated doctrine but as an approach, goes back at least to Plato’s idea of

philosophy as a training for “spiritual death” in which the soul separates from the body (Hadot 241-2).

More generally, for the ancients philosophy as a lived practice was very much concerned with guiding

behavior by “life rules” that were philosophically reasonable, subject to memorization, and numerous

enough to encompass all of life—a way of disciplining the body with the mind, subordinating the one to

the other. Phaedrus points out that Deleuze, on the other hand, wants to revolt against this subordination

and the whole associated tradition of representing body and mind. He remarks that Deleuze’s

“immanentist revolution consists in encountering life within thought, within the forces that form thought

as such.” We flip subordination of the body on its head by claiming that the living body-mind that

breathes, thinks and excretes is the real ‘stuff of life’ to which thought should be subordinated (if

anything should be). “For the forces that shape our lives, our thoughts, and our conduct are much greater

than what they produce: a few ideas” (PSE 9-10). Deleuze himself writes that Nietzsche reproaches

Socrates when he “makes life the servant of knowledge,” turning all life into reactive life (NP 100).

In this context, it is worth considering the concept of ‘philosophy as a way of life,’ for this by

itself tells us about an image of life implicit in the discourse. First, a way of life is existentially-motivated

and driven by practice as opposed to ‘philosophy qua theory’ which is merely exegetical and concerned

with analysis (Hadot 270-1). We also saw that ancient philosophy engages the forces that direct thought

through spiritual exercises and styles of communication, and noted that the body becomes disciplined by

the mind’s rules. It is the absence of these factors in contemporary philosophy that Hadot laments:

“philosophy is no longer a way of life … this is a danger for its interdependence” (271; emphasis added).

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Thus the image of life employed here implies a connection to the body and to the other aspects of one’s

being (the attention, desire, the rest of the psyche &c.), since these are what become engaged in the lived

practice of philosophy. The other implication is that philosophy that stays ‘in the head’ is, somehow,

divorced from life (as it is not yet a way of life). A different form of this perspective appears in Phaedrus’

speech in the claim that the forces of life are simply “greater” than the ideas they produce. Yet while

Phaedrus looks to Deleuze for an ally, it’s not clear that Deleuze would accept this division between life

and thought—not the ancient one, nor Phaedrus’—even though (as I’m arguing here) he, too, makes a

point of returning thought to life in this sense. Rather, Deleuze’s vision of “univocity,” in which

everything is seen as being equally real, does not consider mind and matter as distinct from each other;

the thought-life division appears to be a split within life (univocal being) with resonances to an

illegitimate mind-matter division (DD 295-6). How, then, should we understand the univocity of being in

relation to Deleuze’s desire to ground thought in the forces of “life”?

Our confusion will disperse when we get a better grasp on Deleuze’s image of life as something

capable of contradicting itself and giving rise to opposing tendencies simultaneously. Colebrook traces a

trajectory in the history of thought in which ‘man’ “figures himself as a uniquely living being detached

from the mechanism of mere life” and later “arrives at the impossibility of figuring the mind as a thing

within the world of things.” The first development makes the second possible: life, in the form of man,

recognizes itself as an “imaging power” only after creating an image of itself as limited man, thereby

“paralyzing” and “injuring” itself (175). Up to that point, we could say life does not ‘know’ itself. Life in

this sense “can only be intuited by considering force before or beyond the relation between the organism

and its world” (177). It is not at all a stretch to equate this with the distinction, in Hadot, between

perceiving the world “for itself” rather than “for us” (254). In fact both Hadot and Colebrook reference

Bergson, with Hadot hinting that this more objective perception was realized by the ancients’

contemplative and imaginative exercises, including Seneca’s spectator novus. The ancients, too, intuited

the world “beyond the organism” without so much falling into the “illogical and sterile images” of the

rigidified Cartesian ego, which is perhaps a tribute to the power of “spiritual exercises.” However, the

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ancients in general do not come to the same concept of life that Deleuze does (life as an “imaging

power”) which at last sees “all possible philosophical articulations … accounted for as ways in which this

life has expressed itself” (Colebrook 185). (This is the view Colebrook calls “passive vitalism” which

begins philosophy with “the event of imaging as such” and sees all questions and positions as posed and

taken by life qua imaging power.) By understanding life in this abstract sense—as fundamentally creative,

differentiating, imaginative, machinic, and also spiritual; life for itself—we can raise the question of how

knowledge impacts life from a new angle. Aware that the assumption of a philosophical position will

close off some potentials in life and open others (possibly unprecedented, possibly desirable or

undesirable), we are enabled to consciously assume a position that actualizes desirable potentials. The

ancients had this awareness insofar as it ‘translated’ to life-transformative philosophical practice, but it is

important to distinguish it from the “passive vitalist” awareness, which Colebrook’s Deleuze would say

has only become possible after hundreds of years of thought evolving, and of life producing infinitely

more images.

The life “for us” versus life “for itself” distinction gets at the central concept of the human ego in

Hadot’s analyses and Deleuze and Guattari. While the ancients and DG advance less of a systematic

approach to the ego, Colebrook provides us a way in through the theories of Freud and Bergson. At the

heart of this theorizing is the revolution of the ego-concept around the border between an organism and its

environment: “the formation of the ego’s border … needed to be accounted for … against a life that was

not opposed to death but that proceeded only through a constant and unremitting self-destruction.” If life

constantly differentiates itself and this differentiation entails the impermanence of all its manifestations,8

then the ego arises as a complex centring on the organism’s instinct for self-preservation (the sense in

which the ego is “against the force of life”). I say “complex” because, for Freud and Bergson, while it is

“first and foremost a bodily ego” the phenomena of it also involves an “illusory and self-emasculating

internalization of an external figure” (Colebrook 156). Deleuze and Guattari adhere to this idea in Anti-

8 “The experience of death is the most common of occurrences in the unconscious, precisely because it occurs in life and for life, in every passage or becoming” (AO 330).

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Oedipus, also, where it’s argued that the conditioning a child receives within a family unit prepares a

subject that is ready to serve and support capitalist power dynamics. “Father, mother, and child thus

become the simulacrum of the images of capital (‘Mister Capital, Madame Earth,’ and their child the

Worker)” (AO 264). Ultimately, Deleuze and Guattari see the oedipalized ego as the psychic structure

that forms when humans internalize herd mentality and the effects of power in the form of repressing

beliefs, penetrating to the level of the unconscious. The ego is “part of those things we must dismantle

through the united assault of analytical and political forces” (AO xx). The psychiatry they develop

throughout the book, schizoanalysis, aims at doing exactly that: “the task … is that of tirelessly taking

apart egos and their presuppositions; liberating the prepersonal singularities they enclose and repress”

(362). For in the first place there is no ego, or more precisely, at the bottom of their model of the psyche

Deleuze and Guattari assume the existence of flows and partial objects that have no connection with, or

derivation from, “global persons” (46). This is the unconscious level of the psyche, and the stipulation of

a person or sovereign subject is just a kind of metaphysical claim (albeit linked to a feeling) that arises at

a later stage of development within the psyche. As Eugene Holland elucidates, “the productions and anti-

productions of desire, like ‘will-to-power,’ always come first, and the appearance of the subject

afterward” (34).

The “Body Without Organs” concept is used in the Anti-Oedipal model of the psyche to explain

how life does not mindlessly and arbitrarily pursue connections, but at a certain point allows for delaying

connections in the realization of the many possibilities available (‘or this…or this…’). Colebrook sums it

up nicely when she says that the BWO-concept is “an attempt to think powers and potentials that take the

desiring machines of life beyond extension.” (163). The BwO is the principle of freedom from instinctual

determination, of a body’s becoming other than the way it is, as well as the condition of experimentation

that allows for “freeing lines of flight” that give rise to “incalculable and inorganic becoming[s]” (ATP

161; DML 163) . In A Thousand Plateaus, one is encouraged to ‘make oneself a BwO’ in part because not

doing so leaves one prey to what they call “the judgment of God—roughly, a strict organization to the

organs constituting the organism—which limits the virtual potential of the body, the BwO, to “a

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signification, a subject.” As one “frees the BwO” through experiments, one’s self is dismantled and the

body is opened to new connections (157-160). In short, the virtual potentialities inhering in the BwO are

an integral aspect of life’s capacity to transgress itself; hence, the BwO is central to Deleuze and

Guattari’s endeavors to think, and live, life “beyond the organism.”

The ancient philosophers, too, strove to achieve an experience of life beyond the individual

organism in their practice of spiritual exercises, as we have mentioned. Specifically, the major schools

prescribe the elevation of one’s perspective to the higher level of the cosmic Whole. (Whereas for ancient

philosophers the world can be totalized as “the Whole,” for Deleuze, by contrast, the Whole is radically

open and unable to be either totalized or, consequently, symbolized.9) Hadot criticized Michel Foucault

for overlooking this in his reduction of the ancient practice of writing and re-reading thoughts to self-

cultivation and forging an identity. Hadot counters that “The point [was] not to forge oneself a spiritual

identity … but rather to liberate oneself from one’s individuality” (210). Indeed, “Seneca does not find

his joy in ‘Seneca,’ but by transcending ‘Seneca’ … the goal of Stoic exercises is to go beyond the self”

(207). As for Deleuze and Guattari, in the ancient schools there was a special concern for transcending the

individual ego; but, as we will see more clearly, for the former this unfolding occurs along the lines of

freeing desire from repressive “molar aggregates” (the task of schizoanalysis) and for the latter it comes

to fruition through perseverance in the “spiritual exercises.”

We could summarize what we have said so far by using a Nietzschean ontology to relate Deleuze,

Guattari and Hadot. At the basis of reality, for Nietzsche, is an uncountable number of forces all

expressing ‘wills to power.’ Within this flux, there is no separate, autonomous agents or egos that are

responsible for willing actions, emotions or thoughts; there are just the forces that express actions,

thoughts, etc. Since this displaces the “traditional” model of a Cartesian subject or individual intellect, we

surveyed Colebrook’s exposition of an “axiological field” as a substitute model for thinking (although

this is not Nietzschean). But whether we conceive ‘mind’ that way or not, we maintain that the underlying

forces of reality “form and direct” thought—call them attentional or erotic or spiritual—more than an

9 Credit to Joshua Ramey for this point.

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imaginary thinker. It is precisely these forces that philosophy must engage if it is to be truly creative and

life-affirming, and able to ‘assist’ life in transgressing its limits. Additionally, the selfless or centerless

nature of life takes us, with Colebrook, to considerations of our interconnectedness and thinking that takes

life beyond its self-imposed limits, and to a newfound significance for interpersonal relationships.

Part II: Experiments

PHILOSOPHY BEYOND REASON

An awareness of and appreciation for the forces that form and direct thought encourages us to be

more experimental in our forms of life and philosophy—to engage more of our whole being in the

‘affirmative quest’ of discovering new ways to think. The fundamental orientation of this philosophical

attitude is openness and humility. As Eryximachus says in the Goodchild anthology, “One rarely makes

progress in philosophy by constructing the most effective arguments, but more often by attending to and

understanding different points of view. At the level of the will, what is required is humility” (60).

Eryximachus speaks of humility in the sense not of assuming that “my point of view” is the absolute, the

most right (and therefore “I must correct you”), but disposing ourselves to listen, seeking to understand

where the Other Person is coming from (their points of view, selection of evidence, experiential bias, set

of assumptions). Humility is then linked to the attention: ‘the virtue of humility is nothing other than

attention.’ Goodchild, in an interview,10 speaks of philosophy as a way of life as concerned with what we

pay attention to, whether we pay attention to the “most important” things, and what aspects we notice or

how we give our attention to the ordinary and mundane. This translates into philosophical discourse, too:

If we’re having an argument, I might hear your reasons, your point of view, and then I might want to dispute them or look for flaws or look for assumptions that I don’t share. But if I want to pay attention to you closely, I want to understand ‘what is it like to think the way you do?’ What are the advantages of it? How does it make sense? How does it make sense for you? What are the values that then seem important? (Interview)

This orientation is simultaneously an exercise in humility and a mindful use of the attention out of ego-

based reaction—more in the ‘mode’ of openness. It is not ego-based insofar as we assume that the ego is

the force in us that generates a feeling of superior righteousness—‘I know better [than you]’—which is

10 The interview can be found on Youtube: “Why Study Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise with Philip Goodchiild.”

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but one case of superiority that can be generated (“the segregated subject believes that he/she belongs to a

‘superior race’” (Holland 39)). On that assumption, this kind of open, philosophical listening is in

accordance with the self-transcendent or centerless experience of life recommended by the ancients, as

well as Deleuze and Guattari.11 It may be considered Socratic in particular, if the new attitude we take can

be identified with “not knowing;” Socrates’ school, in Hadot’s words, is the “school of consciousness of

not-knowing,” and he famously said, “I know that I know nothing.” Deleuze and Guattari, also, say that

philosophy “include[s] an I do not know that has become positive and creative, the condition of creation

itself, and that consists in determining by what one does not know” (WIP 128). The wise I do not know

combines with a strategic use of the attention to orient us anew: we become radically open to different

points of view (in a Nietzschean spirit) and the birth of new insights.

Beyond humility, a philosophy sensitive to the forces that form thought will expose itself to those

forces through experimentation; to induce encounters, spur the ‘soul’ to pose new problems and thus the

creation of new concepts. Deleuze and Guattari write in What is Philosophy?, “To think is to experiment,

but experimentation is always that which is in the process of coming about—the new, remarkable, and

interesting that replace the appearance of truth and are more demanding than it is . . . Without history

experimentation would remain indeterminate and unconditioned, but experimentation is not historical. It

is philosophical” (111). But experiments are not limited to thought experiments, although they mean to

refer to those, too. They also mean experimentation with the forces of life that underlie thought and

inspire it, as in an “encounter.” It would be fitting to link the idea of an encounter, from Deleuze’s

Difference and Repetition, with the emphasis on experimentation in A Thousand Plateaus and What is

Philosophy?, for the reason that both ‘events’ contact the thought-directing forces. Encounters happen of

11 It would take a fuller exposition of Anti-Oedipus to understand the following point fully: that the feeling of being a fixed subject arises within a consciousness that is repressed. As Holland says “subjects often believe themselves to have a specific and fixed identity – and so in a sense, i.e. as a result, they do. The neurotic and the pervert … both have a fixed personal identity in which desiring-machines are locked in a specific configuration favoring either production (the pervert) or anti-production (the neurotic)” (35). And perversion and neurosis are ‘disorders’ that manifest under conditions of repression.

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their own accord, even though we can put ourselves in position to have them; experiments, on the other

hand, have the quality of being able to be planned.

We have already seen, in this section, philosophical experiments with the attention that can be

conducted in the course of dialoguing. In the plateaus of A Thousand Plateaus that concern themselves

with becomings,12 Deleuze and Guattari suggest additional modes of experimentation that tap into the

erotic and spiritual (-musical) forces. The sense of the word “plateau” that they employ in the book

signifies “continuous regions of intensity constituted in such a way that they do not allow themselves to

be interrupted by any external termination,” stemming from the anthropological work of Gregory

Bateson, who discovered a different orientation of libidinal economy in Balinese culture towards plateaus

rather than release in orgasm (ATP 158). Since the book is organized into these plateaus, one can begin to

form the rudiments of an argument that the thought is somehow invested with an erotic charge. Anti-

Oedipus would seem to support this, too: “The truth is that sexuality is everywhere … Flags, nations,

armies, banks get a lot of people aroused” (AO 293). In any case there is an awareness of the

pervasiveness of erotic energy. “Sexuality brings into play too great a diversity of conjugated becomings .

. . Sexuality is the production of a thousand sexes, which are so many uncontrollable becomings” (ATP

278). Our participation in these becomings has philosophical import: “Just as erotic love should be

pursued philosophically, with wisdom … so also must philosophy be pursued erotically,” says Agathon in

the “Mutual Attention” speech. “If philosophy is to be pursued as a spiritual exercise, it must also be

pursued as an erotic practice,” for it is only in erotic practice in Agathon’s inter-personal sense, or in the

Deleuzo-Guattarian inter-being sense of becoming that permits access to an otherwise untapped

dimension of our experience (PSE 99). The relationship between Walt Whitman and Nature, which

Deleuze writes of in his essay on him—“[Whitman] makes something pass between the human body and

the tree, in both directions, the body receiving ‘some of its elastic fibre and clear sap,’ but the tree for its

part receiving a little consciousness (‘may-be we interchange’)”—exemplifies a nonhuman sexuality that,

as an experimental form of life, opens the door for new conceptual forms (ECC 59).

12 “How do you make yourself a Body without Organs?” and “Becoming-imperceptible, becoming-animal

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It is fair to say that experiments concerning “spiritual” forces are various in A Thousand Plateaus.

Drugs, sorcery and arguably art forms all fall under this heading. In agreement with the descriptions of

Terence McKenna, who repeatedly referred to psychedelics as ‘boundary-dissolvers,’ Deleuze and

Guattari say that “drugs eliminate forms and persons” (ATP 283). But they would suggest that we “reach

the point where ‘to get high or not to get high’ is no longer the question, but rather whether drugs have

sufficiently changed the general conditions of space and time perception so that nonusers can succeed in

passing through the holes in the world and following the lines of flight” (ATP 286). It is precisely these

gaps in the “consensus reality,” which drugs provide easy access to, that break the rigidified forms of

thought, the mesmerizing, repeating patterns of habitual thought, trapping attention in determinate

forms.13 The principle that ‘experimentation engenders new perceptions, encounters, becomings, etc.—all

of which inform thinking and philosophical life’ holds for the rest of the instances: Castaneda’s spiritual

experimentation as furnishing a new perspective on transcending the “tonal,” i.e. the organism and the

Self; art’s power to reawaken humans to their “concept-forming or world-forming power (“Music seems

to have a much stronger deterritorializing force…”); and the various forms of freeing the BwO

(masochism, Taoist sexual practices, hatha yoga) that liberate not only the body from a predetermined

organization but the mind from a whole priest-guilt-judgment psychology in which it is bound up (ATP

162; Colebrook 14, ATP 302; “To have done with Judgment”).

Whereas these experimental modes of Deleuze and Guattari are geared towards unlocking the

hitherto unknown potentialities inhering in life, the ancient philosophical exercises have more of a

defined trajectory towards whatever the goal of a particular school’s spiritual path may be—ataraxia,

apatheia, eudaimonia, etc. This helps to characterize, broadly, the ancient exercises as more disciplinary

and regimented than the experimental modes which are free-form and open-ended. Another difference is

the general orientation towards the body. We saw that the BwO is a principle of freedom in multiple

senses: from instinctual determination, the self, “priest psychology.” In the ancient mind, however, while

13 I explore the idea of how the consensus reality is constituted and by what means we may break with it in my essay for the seminar, “Creating and Breaking Consensus Reality.”

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the conception is not diametrically opposite, nevertheless many schools will view the body as a kind of

prison and limitation for the soul and intellect. For example, in Platonism philosophy is portrayed as a

‘training for spiritual death’ since the soul is defiled by the body’s sensual intakes, habits of consumption

and excretion (so on and so forth); death is the soul’s liberation from the body. This is a wide divergence

from Deleuze and Guattari, yet there is arguably more consideration for the body’s relation to philosophy

by the ancients, if only a kind of disdain, than in a lot of modern and contemporary philosophy.

A common element that emerges between these two visions of philosophy as a way of life is an

emphasis on community and relationship. At the end of his book, Hadot reminds us that “ancient

philosophy was always a philosophy practiced in a group, whether in the case of the Pythagorean

communities, Platonic love, Epicurean friendship, or Stoic spiritual direction. Ancient philosophy

required a common effort, community of research, mutual assistance, and spiritual support” (PWL 274).

For the Epicureans in particular, friendship was a kind of spiritual exercise that involved “public

confession of one’s faults; mutual correction, carried out in a fraternal spirit; and examining one’s

conscience” (PWL 89). The ground of interpersonal relationship is a foundation for philosophical growth

for multiple reasons. As some speakers in Goodchild’s anthology argue, philosophical activity is

inseparable from desire; but more than that, what we really care about in life is strongly influenced by the

desires of others. Meeting “the other,” then, constitutes a distinct space. It is there that Hadot suggests,

commenting on the activity of Socratic dialoguing, we may have a unique opportunity to accede “to a

level of being which can only be reached in a person-to-person relationship” (WIP 163). What is

Philosophy? may initially seem to run against the grain of this view. There, “friend” is understood as the

role the philosopher assumes in relation to wisdom, truth, or the concept; “the philosopher is the

concept’s friend” (4-5). The general orientation of What is Philosophy? towards the creation of concepts

that communal vision of philosophical life in Deleuze and Guattari; yet there is at the same time a special

concern for groups that pervades Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, in addition to the lived reality

of Guattari’s several decades spent at the clinic of La Borde in France, which experimented with group

therapy techniques and hosted many students of philosophy. Moreover, the position of a subject-less

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“vitalism” that Colebrook aligns Deleuze and Guattari with, and the associated ‘field theory’ of mind we

saw previously, lends itself to an argument for the value of philosophy practiced interpersonally, in which

the “Other Person” expresses a possible world by virtue of being as they are, and gives reality to that

world by talking with me (WIP 17-18). This perspective does not discount the value of solitary reflection,

but rather laments the current rarity of heated dialogue undertaken in true Socratic style, and of

collaborative projects where we negotiate amidst clashing rhythms of thought, as Deleuze said of his

work with Guattari.

* * *

Arnold Davidson writes in his introduction to Philosophy as a Way of Life that Pierre Hadot’s

historical research gives new life to the question, “What is it to philosophize?” Couldn’t the same be said

for the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari? The work of these thinkers asks us to take a step back and

reconsider not so much the concepts we have created (although, those too!), but perhaps more how we

have created them. Was the life behind them rich with encounters, experiments and exercises that

penetrated deeper than the form of common sense, the realm of opinion and crystallizations of attention to

the fields of divine energies, sexual becomings and oceanic awareness? Or was it stale and stagnant—

circling in the same thought-loops forever, rehearsing very old models, taking the same assumptions

again and again? Here, I outlined the ways in which Deleuze, Guattari and Hadot invite us to participate

in philosophy in a transformative style: to deliberately make contact with the real sources of thought14 and

transcend the limitations of the central self (ego, Cartesian subject, individual intellect, “doer behind the

deer,” “imaginary cause” of thought—call it what you will). We saw why this was reasonable, even

necessary, in surveying the old “image of thought” and “image of life.”

Despite the differences that we encountered along the way—for example between conceptions of

“the Whole” and the self; of orientations towards the bod; orientation to the individual versus the group;

and metaphysical inclinations towards being versus becoming (which we omitted)—the commonalities

14 In Capitalism and Religion Philip Goodchild explores another source of thought he calls “the unconditioned.” In our classificatory scheme this would fall under ‘spiritual force.’

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are promising. Both the ancients and the schizoanalysts of Anti-Oedipus describe their more general

projects as “therapeutic.” The ancient schools generally viewed the ‘common mind’ as plagued with all

sorts of delusions that gave rise to suffering (ego-obsession being one), while Deleuze and Guattari find

culprits in not only our egoic “fascist” impulses but oppressive systems of power (capitalism, the State)

and conditions of psychic repression stemming from these. But in both the ancient therapeutics and the

schizoanalytic therapeutics, the task of healing is accomplished not so much by gaining something that

we don’t already have, but rather by subtracting what is in the way of our authentic life. As Hadot says,

“For the ancients, sculpture was an art which ‘took away,’ as opposed to painting, an art which ‘added

on.’ The statue pre-existed in the marble block, and it was enough to take away what was superfluous in

order to cause it to appear” (PWL 102). This is a metaphor for their philosophical practice. Similarly the

first positive task of schizoanalysis looks to dismantle the “molar aggregates” or accumulations of beliefs

in the unconscious that cause us to ‘go with the heard,’ repress our desires and, thus, live half-heartedly.

Again, it is not an adding but a removing—towards a “higher deterritorialization” that refigures the

human organism and ultimately the social system that arises from the organism’s constitutive relations of

difference (see Colebrook 154). The lesson we may glean from this is encouraging. It is not necessary to

become “better” than we are; we need merely uncover that within us which is good and life-affirming.

Funnily enough, our job is something like ‘to get out of our own way.’

Works Cited

Colebrook, Claire. Deleuze and the Meaning of Life. [DML] Great Britain: Continuum International

Publishing Group, 2010.

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