Ad Hominem à la Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)

Master of the argumentum ad hominem

 

I.

 

Academic philosophers, who like to take a serious and professional approach to their discipline, hate ad hominem attacks. 

 

In other words, they believe that when addressing someone else's argument or position, one should always refrain from maliciously (and fallaciously) attacking the person or some attribute of the person who is making the argument. 

 

Always stick to the substance of what they say; don't question their motives, denigrate their character, or insult their looks. 

 

In other words, play the ball, not the man. To do otherwise, is just not cricket; something that even Aristotle appreciated [1]. 

 

 

II. 

Nietzsche, however, was not an academic philosopher. 

 

He may have been the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, when appointed in 1869, aged 24, but he made his name as a philosopher only after resigning from the post ten years later (due to ill health) and becoming a fiercely independent thinker; one who cheerfully attacked his philosophical enemies - from Plato and Socrates to Kant and Hegel - directly employing an abusive model of ad hominem argument.      

 

As a psychologist, as a clinician, and as a genealogist, Nietzsche was far more interested in what made the individual (or an entire people) tick - what forces were at play within them - than in the validity of their arguments, or the falseness of their judgements. He valued those with healthy instincts over those whom he regarded as decadent, or those whose values betrayed their ressentiment.     

As many readers of Nietzsche have noted, his philosophy consists to a very large extent of speculative diagnoses, concerning the virtues and vices of those figures (or those cultures) that most excite his interest. This certainly makes him unusual amongst philosophers. 

There are times when ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious; and there may even be times when it's relevant to question the personal conduct, character, or motives of an opponent. But it's highly debatable if Nietzsche is justified in dismissing Socrates, for example, on the grounds that his being monstrous of face proves he was also monstrous of soul [2]. 

 

Ugliness may be an objection, but is it really sufficient grounds to refute a persons thought?

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Aristotle is credited with first making the distinction between (legitimate) logical arguments and (illegitimate) personal attacks. In his work Sophistical Refutations, Aristotle showed the fallaciousness of placing the questioner rather than their argument under scrutiny. The proper thing for a philosopher to do, he wrote, is not to question the attributes of an intellectual opponent, but to address the weaknesses and ambiguities in their argument. 

      This isn't to say, however, that all ad hominem arguments are fallacious; one might, for example, adopt a dialectical strategy of using an opponents own ideas and assumptions against them. But the term ad hominem was by the beginning of the 20th century almost always linked to a logical fallacy and today, except within very specialised philosophical circles, the term ad hominem signifies an attack on the character of a person in an attempt to refute their argument.

 

[2] See Nietzsche, 'The Problem of Socrates' (3), in Twilight of the Idols. 

 

 

Musical bonus: 'Attack', taken from the debut album by Public Image Ltd. (Virgin Records, 1978): click here. Note this is the remastered version from 2011.  

 

 

On the Rise of the Useful Idiot

 Adapted from the poster for I Am Greta

(a documentary film dir. Nathan Grossman, 2020)

 

I. 

 

Byung-Chul Han says that the idiot has all but vanished from our society. But Han is not using the term idiot in its familiar modern sense (i.e., to refer to a stupid person). 

 

Rather, he's returning to the ancient Greek term from which it derives - ἰδιώτης - which refers to a private individual who prefers to think their own thoughts rather than simply subscribe to common sense or conform to popular opinion (even at the risk of appearing ignorant or foolish). 

 

For Han, the idiot is thus a type of outsider or heretic; not so much uninformed as unaligned with any party or cause; someone who values freedom and opposes the violence of consensus [1]. The idiot, in brief, is the kind of person attracted to philosophy, a practice born - like psychology - of idleness and characterised - like art - by its uselessness [2].   

 

 

II.

 

Unfortunately, however, there's more than one type of idiot in this world.

 

And if the type of useless philosophical idiot privileged by Byung-Chul Han has all but vanished from contemporary society, the political idiot who prides themselves on their allegiance to a cause, party, or ideology and happily makes themselves useful to such is, it seems, proliferating in number ...

 

Some commentators may clutch their pearls - or even reach for the smelling salts - when they hear the term useful idiot [3], but it's a widely accepted term within political discourse [4] to refer to someone who believes they are fighting for a just cause and have history on their side, without fully appreciating the consequences of their actions or the extent to which they are being cynically manipulated by nefarious forces.  

 

Many supporters of Extinction Rebellion, or Black Lives Matter, or those we currently see larping for Palestine on streets and campuses across the Western world, are probably well-intentioned idealists; i.e., perfectly sincere in their views, but they are politically naive to the point that idiocy hardly even covers it; closing their eyes to reality and shutting their ears to reason, they unwittingly assist in the destruction of their own culture, history, and society.   

 

Notes

 

[1] See Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler, (Verso, 2017). And see also the post 'On Heresy and Philosophical Idiotism' (20 Nov 2021): click here. 

 

[2] Nietzsche famously asserts in Twilight of the Idols (1889) that idleness is the beginning of psychology (and is therefore the result of vice). 

      Oscar Wilde, meanwhile, writing in a Preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) claimed: "All art is quite useless." He later explained in a letter what he meant by this: "Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way." Similarly, philosophy is simply intended to open up a space for thinking - nothing else. Wilde's letter can be read in full here. 

 

[3] For those gentle souls who prefer a slightly less harsh-sounding term, it might be noted that some commentators speak of useful innocents, whilst those within the intelligence community apparently refer to unwitting agents.

 

[4] Frequently used during the Cold War to describe those susceptible to communist propaganda and manipulation, the phrase useful idiot was (ironically but mistakenly) attributed to Lenin by the Russian human rights activist and Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. Lenin may have liked to use it, but he certainly didn't coin it, and nor is it found in any of his writings.

 

 

On Autumn

Giuseppe Arcimboldo: Autumn (1573)

 

"I notice that autumn is more a season of the soul than nature ..." 

 

 

Ever since childhood, autumn has been my favourite season: a time of conkers and bonfires; pumpkins and toffee apples; giant spiders and daddy longlegs ... What's not to love? I even like the first sharp frosts and shortening of the days.    

 

I've certainly never found anything painful or depressing about this season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and poets who do, I would suggest, merely reveal their own melancholic dispositions [1].

 

Still, not to worry; who needs sad and sickly poets when there are philosophers capable of writing lines like these which beautifully capture the joy of this time of year:

 

"Autumn - not deterioration and dying, not the over and done - quite to the contrary, the fiery, glowing entrance into the certain silence of a new time of waking to the unfolding - the acquisition of the restraint of the established jubilation of the inexhaustibe greatness of being [Sein] at its bursting forth." [2]   

 

  

Notes

 

[1] To his credit, although there are traces of sadness and regret in Keats's famous ode that I quote from here, he primarily affirms the fact that autumn is a season of great beauty and abundance. To Autumn (1819) can be read on the Poetry Foundation website: click here.          

 

[2] Martin Heidegger, 'Intimations x Ponderings (II) and Directives', (95), in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 26. 

      One might argue that this short piece demonstrates that philosophy is poetic in a way that poetry never can be (in much the same manner that it's scientific in a way that no science can be). 

 

 

Bonus: to read a fascinating web feature entitled Nietzsche: The Problem of Autumn, by David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates, (University of Chicago Press, 1997), please click here.  

 

 

Deleuze and the Philosophy of Slander

La philosophie est une introduction 

à un monde scandaleux

 

 

I. 

 

In his late work, Deleuze famously defines philosophy as the invention of concepts. But in a very early text from 1946, he suggests that philosophy is that which teaches us "to strip things and beings of their pejorative meaning" [276] and thus presumably defend them from defamation.

 

That's interesting: but isn't all meaning pejorative; i.e., doesn't all meaning essentially slander or disparage the object to which it is applied like a thick coat of doxa? We might even ask if, at some level, all language lies (and, if so, should that concern us) ...? 

 

 

II. 

 

Defined as the oral communication of a false statement in order to inflict damage, slander is a scandalous form of bad-mouthing - even hate speech - but it is not quite lying. It is, rather, a method of "designating beyond the facts" [280], albeit with malicious intent. 

 

Statements that have verifiable evidence to support them can still be hurtful, of course. But slander, in its pure form, is completely different and for Deleuze takes on metaphysical grandeur, becoming "a sort of supreme and spiritual insult" which seeks to "determine the essence" [285] of the one it causes to suffer and reveal a possible world unreliant upon accurate description (what we might term today the world of fake news).   

 

See: Gilles Deleuze, 'Words and Profiles', in Letters and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges, (Semiotext(e), 2020). Page numbers given in the post refer to this work. 

 

Readers interested in other posts that discuss the youthful writings of Deleuze can click here and here.   

On Phlegm, Philosophy, and Apathy

Franz Gareis: portrait of Novalis (1799)

The 18th-century German poet and mystic known as Novalis was fond of the phrase: Philosophiren ist dephlegmatisiren - Vivificiren! This has since become a familiar slogan in the work of post-Romantic writers, often translated along the lines of: 'To philosophise is to cast off apathy and to live!' 

To be honest, however, I'm not entirely convinced by this call to philosophical vitalism, either in the original German or English translation (though would have happily painted it on T-shirt when I was nineteen and regarded myself as a punk revolutionary). 

For one thing, I'm not convinced that phlegmatic is synonymous with apathetic; to be cool, calm, and self-possessed isn't quite the same as being without passion - nor, come to that, does it mean one is deadened in some manner, like an unleavened lump of inert matter.

Ulimately, it's just prejudice to ideally equate the love of wisdom with life and the overwrought, overheated world of feeling. For philosophy can, actually, be something entirely other; something alien, something perverse, something inhuman; something as abstract and as beautiful as a solitary snowflake.  

The fact is - contrary to what Walter Pater might say - we don't all wish to burn like a flame or to think always on the edge of ecstasy (though, etymologically - and ironically - phlegmatic means inflammation); some of us want to put ideas on ice for the same reason we like to add ice to our drinks; some of us, indeed, aspire, like Sade, to a condition of apathy that is pleasurable (in a denaturalised and non-Stoic manner) not only beyond good and evil, but beyond hot and cold.

Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this post.

On Philosophy and Prostitution (Reflections on An Illicit Lover's Discourse)

Everything I know I learned in the School of Vice!

I.

Reading a fragment by Cioran in which he advises the philosopher who is "disappointed with systems and superstitions" to imitate the street savvy scepticism of that "least dogmatic of creatures: the prostitute", reminded me of my own musings from long ago on this topic, collected as An Illicit Lover's Discourse ...    

II.

The aim of this short work, written many years ago and privately published (with a revised title) by Blind Cupid Press in 2010, was not to describe in detail the world of the Prostitute, but to examine the nature of the love affair that exists between her and her clients; for in this relation we discover much of the violence, obscenity, and poignancy of modern life.

The necessity for the book lay in the following consideration: the discourse of the Prostitute and her Illicit Lover was at that time openly displayed in every other central London phone box. This discourse, spoken and shared by thousands of amorous subjects, had received very little attention, scorned as it is by the languages of authority which, nevertheless, often share in its image-repertoire and sustain its stereotypes.

Essentially, I was hoping to indicate the manner in which some of the more frequently occurring myths upon which the pornographic imagination is founded are circulated by and within wider culture and reveal how legitimate discourses - of literature, fashion, and advertising, for example - frequently feed off and into the writings and images of the Prostitute.

The short fragments were written in relation to a large number of cards collected casually over a two-year period from phone boxes mostly in the Paddington and Soho areas of London, where they'd been conveniently placed by the Prostitute. To my mind, these cards constituted a populist and promiscuous medium and could be thought of as an obscene form of folk-art. Mushrooming in the fetid, urine-soaked environment of the phone box, they represented the public face of prostitution and were an affirmation of the Prostitute’s right to self-expression and self-promotion.

I made no attempt to establish any unity or development between the fragments. In fact, the only link between them was one of insistence and repetition; qualities which are of course inherent to pornography as a genre. Thus, as in the cards upon which they were based, the same words would appear over and over in the text, constructing the Prostitute not as a woman like any other, but as a symptomal subject of the pornographic imagination.

Some fragments broke off short; others contradicted something that had already been said elsewhere in the text. Ultimately, however, this was unimportant: the fragments were not meant to be taken too seriously and the success or otherwise of each depended on whether the reader was able to relate it to some aspect of their own experience and in this way be able to declare its truth.

If there was anything central to my assemblage of fragments, then, I suppose, it was the body of the Prostitute - although whether we can actually locate and reveal such is debatable. For the body of the Prostitute must not be thought of as a natural object just waiting to be discovered, but rather as a cultural construction in which is encoded a whole set of values: the shape, size, colour, age and all the ornamental attributes of the Prostitute’s body signify what we imagine illicit sexual desire and femininity to be. Thus the body of the Prostitute exposes our own fantasies.

Wishing neither to celebrate nor condemn the Prostitute, my affection for the figure as a woman who denies nothing and no one and lives beyond judgement, was fairly obvious throughout the text. Found in all places, all cultures, and all ages, the Prostitute is, paradoxically, someone who is forever at the margins of society and has abolished all history in her person. She is, in this manner, untimely.

And if this makes her philosophically interesting, then the manner in which she silently accepts the abuse of those who speak against her and call for her punishment makes her lovable in my eyes.

Notes

E. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, 2018). See the section 'Philosophy and Prostitution' in chapter 1: 'Directions for Decomposition', pp. 81-82.

If I'd known of this text at the time of writing, I almost certainly would have referred to it. For what Cioran writes here is very close to my own position. I agree, for example, that the prostitute offers us a mode of behaviour which philosophers would do well to consider; detached and yet open to everything; lacking moral convictions and prejudices; quick to change position, etc. And, crucially, whores don't fuck between the bed-sheets ...   

Stephen Alexander, Whores Don't Fuck between the Bed-Sheets: Fragments from an Illicit Lover's Discourse, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). 

I'm in a Rut (But I Don't Wanna Get Out Of It)

To play this classic 1979 punk single click here. 

A woman emails to let me know she fundamentally disagrees with almost everything that is posted on Torpedo the Ark - and particularly the anti-Christian Easter message on warmheartedness [click here]:

"Most of the ideas - if we can even call them ideas - are no more than academic clichés. And to these you repeatedly return as if gripped by an obsessive compulsive disorder, offering the same crude assertions and vulgar insults as if also suffering from Tourette's. I'm sorry to say - though as a follower of Nietzsche perhaps you'll appreciate the cruelty - but I think you're in a deep philosophical rut."

This seems a bit harsh, I have to say, even to a follower of Nietzsche ...

For whilst it's true that I can't concentrate and I don't feel straight - and might also have some issues around the notion of sovereignty - I wouldn't say that I'm in a rut; certainly not in the wholly negative sense that is implied here.

I prefer to think that, as Madonna would say, I've got into the groove and that's ultimately how one proves one's love of wisdom. For philosophy demands a certain level of consistency and, yes, obsessive-compulsive behaviour; an eternal return to the same ideas, same scenes, same songs. It also involves the stuttering of language and a display of idiosyncratic tics, both verbal and behavioural in nature, which to an outside eye might seem to indicate a neuropsychiatric disorder.

But, really, why quibble or get pedantic over terms?

Ultimately, I'd rather be entrenched in the deepest and darkest of philosophical ruts than have my head in the clouds like my idealistic critic who concludes her email by telling me to cheer up and insisting that life is beautiful and Jesus loves me (which it isn't, and he doesn't). 

Isn't it Grand! Isn't it Fine! Graham Harman's New Theory of Everything

(Penguin, 2018)

According to Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is first and foremost a form of realism. It is thus a counter-idealism. But it's not a materialism; more a weird and intangible metaphysics in which "reality is always radically different from our formulation of it, and is never something we encounter directly in the flesh" [7]. The fact that things withdraw from direct access into ontological darkness is the central principle of OOO. 

Harman acknowledges the obvious objection that arises: that when you posit an unknowable reality, there's really nothing you can say about it; for any propositions advanced are ultimately unverifiable. But he doesn't let this objection worry him too much. For hey, philosophy isn't a natural science or an accumulated body of knowledge; it's a love of wisdom, man, and OOO is an attempt to share the love and pass the word along. 

As an openly erotic form of aesthetics, OOO is thus heavily reliant upon metaphor to make its case. Or, more accurately, to make itself as alluring as the objects it describes in order to seduce those open to its often provocative - if implausible - ideas. Harman particularly prides himself on the fact that his new theory of everything has emerged as a major influence on individuals in the arts and humanities, "eclipsing the previous influence ... of the prominent French postmodernist thinkers Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze" [8]. 

And, as if that weren't enough, the charisma of OOO has even "captured the notice of celebrities" [8]. So it's obviously very important. Or fashionable. You won't read about Harman's flat ontology or the quadruple character of existence in Nature anytime soon, but you're quite likely to see him on the cover of Art Review and, who knows, maybe you'll one day come across a spread on him in Hello! (perhaps in the private London residence where he once entertained Benedict Cumberbatch).

Never one for false modesty, Harman compares his writing style in this new OOO for beginners book from Penguin, to that of Sigmund Freud. For whatever one thinks of Freud's psychological theories, "he is an undisputed master of the literary presentation of difficult ideas, and is well worth emulating in at least that respect" [14].

That's true. But it's also much easier said than done. And, sadly, Harman doesn't quite pull it off. He hopes that reading his book will be as "pleasant an experience as possible" [17], but this is frustrated by the fact that it is often extremely tedious. Even passionate objectophiles with a good deal of sympathy for Harman's project, will, I fear, struggle to enjoy this text.

Which is a shame. For whilst I'm not convinced that his post-Heideggerean philosophy offers the best hope of a theory whose range of applicability is limitless, Harman and his fellow-travellers do at least offer an opportunity to reimagine a mind-independent reality - even if we can never accurately describe such in the language of literal propositions and must, therefore, either resort to poetic speculation or be reduced to silence, as Wittgenstein famously acknowledged.   

On the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge in Nietzsche's Early Philosophy

Portrait of Nietzsche as a Young Professor
 University of Basel, 1872

What Nietzsche terms in his early writings the knowledge drive, is something he favours subjecting to strict control. For whilst it powerfully propels modern science, it does so in a promiscuous and indiscriminate manner that is incapable of determining value. To give it free reign is, at the very least, a sign of vulgarity.

The role of the philosopher, therefore, is to act as a kind of guardian and ensure that science serves life and furthers the aim of culture; left unchecked, the will to truth will ultimately result in nihilism. But this subordination of the knowledge drive isn't accomplished by means of metaphysics, or the establishment of a new faith. It requires, rather, the granting to art new powers and responsibilities. 

Readers in the analytic tradition of philosophy who are unfamiliar with German Romanticism, might be surprised at this. But, for the youthful Nietzsche, writing as an ardent devotee of Richard Wagner, philosophy - whilst it might rely upon similar methods to science - is, in its desire to invent beyond the limits of experience, a form of art and a continuation of the mythical drive. It is thus essentially pictorial and not mathematical in its expression.

What's more, according to Nietzsche, the reason why philosophy retains its value - and, indeed, a higher value than science - is because it continues to concern itself with notions of beauty and human greatness. Of course, this makes philosophy a refined form of anthropocentrism; one that transforms all nature into man's own image and posits all being as a permanent correlate of thinking, thereby demonstrating its radical incompatibility with scientific realism.     

Leaving us in no doubt about what this means, Nietzsche writes: "Man is acquainted with the world to the extent that he is acquainted with himself ..." A little later, he adds: "We are acquainted with but one reality - the reality of thoughts". And, as if to show how Kantian he remained in his epistemology, he concludes: "The world has its reality only in man: it is tossed back and forth like a ball in the heads of men." 

Nietzsche doesn't at this point flatly deny the existence of the thing-in-itself or dispute the possibility of facts, he simply argues that because objects are mind-dependent, we can say nothing about them outside of this relationship. In other words, for Nietzsche - as for other sceptics - we can only know reality as it appears to us. Consequently, Nietzsche privileges art over science, as art, of course, is all about appearances and attempting to form representations of reality (i.e. pictures of the world that are ever more complete).  

Unlike Kant, however, Nietzsche feels sensory knowledge is more than mere illusion; that it's adequate to the truth of the world and that the mind mirrors what is, because the mind of man has itself evolved out of matter and not out of thin air. The mind might structure and colour things, but it doesn't do so in an entirely arbitrary manner; even if its reflections are distorted, they are not entirely false or simply the product of dreamy idealism.

In other words, objects may conform to mind - but mind is itself an object. Thus, breaking out of the correlationist circle and directly accessing what Meillassoux terms the ancestral realm that exists prior to humanity (or, indeed, any forms of sentient being whatsoever), is not a major concern for Nietzsche. Indeed, even in his later, supposedly positivist mid-period, Nietzsche is still primarily concerned with what is true for us (mankind) and his model of science remains distinctly gay and tied to his understanding of art.

Ultimately, what does an arch-vitalist care about arche-fossils ...?    

See: Nietzsche, 'The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge', in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche's Notebooks of the Early 1870's, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Humanities Press International, 1990). The lines quoted are from sections 80, 94 and 106.

The Owl of Minerva

Photo of  the poet-philosopher Simon Solomon,

by Sara Larsson (2015).  

simonsolomon.ink

Here we are then at the fag end of another year; drifting about in that awful grey twilight zone that lies between Boxing Day and January 1st. Naturally, one reflects with a certain sad shyness on the twelve months past.

Indeed, according to Hegel, one is condemned as a critical thinker to do nothing but look back with large eyes and a sharp beak on historical events and ideas. For philosophy is a retrospective practice par excellence – ‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only when dusk begins to fall’ – as he put it so beautifully.

In other words, philosophy cannot legislate for the future or even legitimately analyse the present, because it understands only with hindsight; it doesn’t appear until life has unfolded and already completed its processes. Like anatomy, philosophy presupposes a corpse.

Perhaps that’s why so many philosophers choose to ignore Plato and turn to poetry, which is a form of thinking and speaking the truth that has maintained something of its prophetic or visionary character – something alien to the world of pure reason. Poetry memorializes the past, but it also responds to the nowness of the moment and anticipates the day after tomorrow (or the god who is coming).

The thinker-as-poet, who challenges the divide between metaphor and concept and the separation of the real and the imaginary, does far more than simply play with words from behind a fool's mask, or frolic on rainbows. Theirs is a thinking which, as Heidegger says, is the topology of Being; i.e., that which tells Being the whereabouts of its actual presence (in things).

Like Lawrence, I think it a great pity that philosophy and poetry have been kept in an antagonistic relationship for so long; it's been damaging to both our intellectual and emotional life. We should value those writers who further textual promiscuity and remember Zarathustra's eagle, or Shelley's skylark, not just Minerva's wise old owl ... 

Lawrence, Derrida, and the Snake: It's Time for Man to Make Amends

Snake is one of Lawrence's most widely known poems, subject to numerous critical readings. But perhaps the best of these - certainly the one that most interests at present - is Derrida's. For it's a reading in which the question of interspecies ethics is paramount, i.e., how should we behave when confronted by the non-human otherness of the animal. 

The fact that we need to develop a new type of ethics and form a new relationship with animals can, I suppose, be regarded as a given. For the old relationship, determined by an implicitly anthropocentric moral philosophy in which the human subject is granted dominion over all other creatures and can treat them or eat them as he will, is clearly not satisfactory or working very well; unless, that is, one actively desires to continue the industrial slaughter of domestic beasts and further the mass extinction of wild things.

I certainly don't want this and, contrary to what some readers mistakenly believe, torpedo the ark doesn't mean exterminate all life forms. Rather, it means destroy the human coordination and exploitation of animals - the making them march two-by-two into captivity and containment within a system described by Derrida as carnophallogocentric; a system in which they are turned into just another natural resource to be processed and negated in their uniqueness of being.  

In his poem, Lawrence as narrator attempts to approach and to know a real snake - not merely an idealized construction or symbol - with a mixture of respect and due reverence. He's not entirely successful, but he tries. Thus he accepts that he is ethically accountable for his behaviour, including his cruelty, towards the snake and this is what fascinates Derrida in his reading. This and the fact that Lawrence openly challenges Judeo-Christian fears regarding snakes that are biblically rooted within our culture. As Anna Barcz notes:

"Derrida does not treat the poem as a challenge to literary criticism; he reads it, paying attention to details, as a sort of guidebook, a summary of human and other species' history of complex relationships and emerging problems. This results in a philosophical interpretation ... [that] sheds light on the issue of human and animal rapprochement and distance, not directly but also not far from the vantage point  of many critical, anti-speciesist and anti- or post-humanist accounts." 

Derrida is convinced that Lawrence's short verse effectively anticipates and contains his own animal philosophy in poetic form, as it touches upon just about everything that he himself is concerned with in a lecture series entitled The Beast and the Sovereign. Like Lawrence, Derrida concludes that we as humans have something to profoundly regret in the history of our relationship to the animal; a pettiness to expiate. 

This healing process begins when we recognise both the victimhood and the sovereignty of the snake; that he has been unfairly persecuted and that he is, in fact, an uncrowned king - one of the true lords of life.

Notes:

Anna Barcz, 'On D. H. Lawrence's Snake That Slips Out of the Text: Derrida's Reading of the Poem', Brno Studies in English, Vol. 39, No. 1, (2013), pp. 167- 82. Lines quoted are on p. 170.  

Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, Vol. I, Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (eds.), (Chicago University Press, 2009); see the 'Ninth Session' for Derrida's discussion of Lawrence's poem Snake.  

D. H. Lawrence, 'Snake', Birds, Beasts and Flowers, in The Poems (Volume. 1), ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 303-05. 

 

D&G: What is Philosophy?

Image by Dick Whyte

One of the things I like about Deleuze is that he never gave up on philosophy. That is to say, he never had any problem with calling himself a philosopher and of happily subscribing to an intellectual tradition stretching back to the Stoics. 

This, by his own admission, didn't make him better than others of his generation who seemed slightly embarrassed by the title of philosopher, or felt guilty if their work too might be shown to belong to the history of Western metaphysics, but it did make him the most naive or innocent.

But what is philosophy for Deleuze? He answers this question very clearly and very beautifully in his final book written in collaboration with Félix Guattari, entitled - appropriately enough - What is Philosophy? In this text, Deleuze argues that philosophy, science, and art all have the essential task of mediating chaos and that each discipline does so in a manner specific to itself as a way of thinking and creating.

First and foremost for D&G, philosophy is neither concerned with the contemplation of ideas, or their communication; rather, it is concerned with the creation of new concepts. This is its unique role and why the philosopher might best be described not as the lover of wisdom, so much as the creator of concepts. 

This is not to deny that the sciences and arts aren't equally creative. But only philosophy creates concepts in the strictest sense of the term (as singularities or events, never as universals). In giving philosophy such a distinct history and role, D&G are not claiming any pre-eminence or privilege for their own work; they fully acknowledge that there are other equally important, equally profound ways of (non-conceptual) thinking. Science and art are not inferior modes of ideation, but they mediate chaos differently (with the latter defined not as a void of disorder, but a virtual realm of infinite possibilities).

Science, for example, in contrast to philosophy, is concerned with inventing functions that are then advanced as propositions in discursive systems to be reflected upon and communicated as such. It wants to find a way to give chaos fixed points of reference and to slow things down; to make chaos a little more predictable and, if you like, a little more human. Philosophy might like to give style to chaos (i.e. a level of consistency) via the construction of a 'plane of immanence', but it is happy to retain the speed of birth and disappearance that is proper to chaos.

Again, this is not to denigrate the work of physicists and mathematicians and D&G are at pains to stress that they find as much admirable experimentation and creation within Einstein as within Spinoza.

As for art, it takes a different approach: if philosophy is all about concepts and science all about functions and their elemental components known as functives, then art is concerned with percepts, affects, and sensations. D&G write:

"Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent ... of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves ... They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art being a sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself."

- Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Graham Burchell & Hugh Tomlinson, (Verso, 1994), p. 164.

Obviously the work of art is created by the artist, but it stands or falls on its own; i.e. it exceeds the life of its own creator. Further, it draws the artist (and the viewer, reader, listener) into a strange becoming - producing them as much as they produce it and giving everyone a little chaos back into their lives.

If, as we have noted, philosophy adventures into chaos via the plane of immanence and science via a plane of reference, then art constructs a plane of composition: this, for D&G, is definitional of art. But by this they refer not merely to technical composition (which could just as well be the concern of science), but an aesthetic composition concerned with sensation. Thus art, like science and philosophy, is a unique way of thinking and of opening a plane within chaos. It is obviously related to science and philosophy, but should not be thought of as an aesthetic mish-mash of these practices. D&G conclude:

"The three routes are specific, each as direct as the others, and they are distinguished by the nature of the plane and by what occupies it. Thinking is thought through concepts, or functions, or sensations and no one of these ... is better than another ... The three thoughts intersect and intertwine but without synthesis or identification."

- Ibid., pp. 198-99. 

Ultimately, we should be grateful for the gifts that they bring us: unlike religion, which has done nothing except open a great umbrella between us and reality in an attempt to protect mankind from chaos. But that's another post ...