Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari
Che cos'è la filosofia?

Before writing a review, DeB gives you some tips on how to write a review. Whoever has taken the trouble to read them will have noticed the passage "Furthermore, you are not a philosopher" - a passage quite hermeneutical in itself. Or at least, I found it so. For this reason, after a long delay, I have decided to write this review, examining a book I haven't read for quite some time, namely "What is Philosophy?" by Deleuze & Guattari.

Unlike many of my previous reviews, however, I will not talk about the subject of the review, or rather I will talk about it indirectly, that is, by tracing the stages that led to that idea of Philosophy, and I will do so starting precisely from that little book that Deleuze titled "Empiricism and Subjectivity," where the French philosopher analyzed the magnum opus of Hume. But first a step back: Hume's "Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding" concludes with the following words, prophetic for the skeptical attitude developed later in the "Treatise on Human Nature": "When we run over libraries, persuaded by these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion"; essentially, it is about bringing sciences back to the only true science, which is the nature of man, a conception that will allow him to discern two types of philosophy from knowledge, one extensive and one critical, and only the latter is positive because it dismantles and destroys beliefs founded on instinct and intellect, terms which he will oppose, in his radical empiricism, impressions and ideas, whose connection resolves every reality in the sense that every reality is resolved in the relationship that exists between impressions/ideas, whose regularity is due to the three properties that belong to them – properties of resemblance, contiguity, and causality, the latter, in particular, referring to experience; indeed, it reads in the Treatise: "Adam, though his rational faculties be supposed, at the very first, entirely perfect, could not have inferred from the fluidity and transparency of water, that it would suffocate him; or from the light and warmth of fire, that it would consume him. No object ever discovers, by the qualities which appear to the senses, either the causes which produced it, or the effects which will arise from it; nor can our reason, unassisted by experience, ever draw any inference concerning real existence and matter of fact", which necessarily implies that if on the one hand causality is necessarily given by experience, on the other causality is necessarily deprived of any form of objectivity and necessity, but – says Abbagnano – "if we would suspect that the course of nature may change, and that the past may serve no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless": it will then be habit, which being intrinsic to human nature will render causality subjectively necessary, which is another way to talk about contingency having, however, the opportunity to explain why we believe (and consider [= we human beings]) necessary cause/effect relationships, and the typical example is the sunrise.

But why can't habit have a metaphysical foundation? Metaphysics has believed it possible, indeed obligatory, to establish determinations, for instance, astronomical determinations, in a stable manner even though the data was deduced from experience, which, based on probability, remains without foundation. Habit and experience are the ways we know, so ours is an empirical knowledge, not metaphysical: metaphysics is an a-posteriori masked as a-priori. And, that the probabilities that founded metaphysical foundations change, metaphysics does not take this into account. But what does it imply to base knowledge on habit, if not to exclude metaphysics (tomorrow I will be able to say what time the sun will rise, if it will rise – a prediction, this, that transcends experience), and isn't excluding metaphysics also a metaphysical action? Empiricism itself, by eliminating metaphysics since there is no experience of it, does it not found itself in an anti-metaphysical metaphysics, a metaphysics nonetheless, because, like metaphysics, it bases itself on the exclusion of something of which it has no experience (in this case metaphysics itself)? There's more. Metaphysics was born from an Eleatic delirium known as the One. The Parmenidean One, to be clear. And this One, Western thought has carried with it more or less consciously, so much so that by the term Western metaphysics, all Western philosophy from its beginning to, say, Nietzsche, is delineated. Platonic thought, in particular, has excluded simulacra, in the sense that it relegated them as perversions of truth: in this sense, then, the task of philosophy is to unmask simulacra to distance them from thought and separate them from copies. It's about selecting a lineage, authenticating an idea – a process the Athenian carries out through mythical narration, i.e., the representation of a foundation (see myth of the charioteer in "Phaedrus") through which to certify copies (a term that refers to an idea of resemblance, as the copy resembles inwardly and outwardly the Idea on which it models itself), i.e., authentic participants ("The foundation is what possesses something in the first degree, but that gives it in participation, that gives it to the claimant, possessor in the second degree insofar as it has been able to pass the test of the foundation. The participated is what the unparticipable possesses in the first degree. The unparticipable makes participate, gives the participated to the participants" writes Deleuze in "Plato and the Simulacrum," appendix to "The Logic of Sense"), called copy-icons in contrast with simulacra-phantoms, devoid of resemblance to the Idea, thus no longer catalogable as a model of the Same but rather as a model of the Other: catechism will borrow this copy/simulacrum conception when Adam and Eve, created by God in His image and likeness, will be expelled from Eden (from moral existence to aesthetic existence, to use Kierkegaardian terminology).

The reversal of Platonism Nietzsche was talking about thus becomes a reversal of the icon/simulacrum dialectic, aimed at bringing the second to the fore, the truth of the Same being in its being simulated and in its (continuous) simulating, but simulate no more in the degraded and degrading sense Plato gave it but, rather, as the only possible reference to the Platonic Idea: in Nietzsche's eternal return, the Same is precisely this, an eternal simulated, for all simulacra, the single phantom (in the thirtieth series, "On the Phantom," Deleuze lists its three main characteristics, namely, (1) it is the result of a passion or event, therefore a pure event, that in result it is (2) "the movement by which the self opens to the surface," but it (3) distinguishes itself from what it arises from, representing the very essence of the event). Writing, for example, harshly criticized ("Then he who thinks he can leave behind him an art in the form of writings, and he who receives it supposing it to contain something certain and durable, would be far from the truth, and must be very simple-minded, being altogether without alarm on this point, or if he has given any alarm expecting the matter to be otherwise" reproaches Socrates in "Phaedrus") as it refers to something not there on the page, becomes, as in Joyce's last novel, the only possible means to return and/or reach the truth, also as it refers to something not there on the page (see "Plato's Pharmacy" by Derrida, for whom writing is for Plato a "pharmakon" that could be a poison and harm or even destroy memory); however, the task philosophy has given itself does not ascend so much to Plato as it does to Parmenides, the Eleatic One being a perversion that removed from philosophy the Naturalism which, according to Lucretius, it should have, because its attributes are not so much unity as, rather, the conjunctive form: it then becomes "principle of the different and its production" ("Lucretius and the Simulacrum"), infinite sum tending to conjugate, i.e., to vivify its elements one by one, and the lex atomi, where by atom is meant the object of thought formed by minimum considerations, is reduced to this, to the irreducibility of the plurality of causes in an Eleatic One: through the "clinamen" (or "parénklisis") the atoms meet and form compounds, and these compounds (formed from determined elements) are immersed, besides in the void, in an infinite sum of atoms (determinate scope), necessary when the atoms themselves separate from the compound they form, creating emissions of depth (sounds, odors, tastes...) and simulacra of surface (visual determinations) that make perception of the Other or to the Other possible, necessarily deviated perception as it is not original (from the thinkable to the sensible, from the sensible to the thinkable), and it can create the idea of a false infinity (the post-mortem one of the soul) which in the human mind generates terrors and anxieties and which for this reason Naturalism must demystify and demolish: "To early days of mankind, to invention of language, as fire, and metallic tools have acceded kingly power and great wealth, foundations of mighty empires, with them associated. Then came conventions of law and justice, infused with credence of gods; by usage of bronze and iron's sturdy might, war's propelling's ensued; inventions of arts and industries ensuing, frenzy and luxury evermore growing. Events of human distress, result of such myths, are not separate. In separating in man what is mythical and what part of Nature; in Nature, distinguish between infinite infinities and what truly is infinite: such is the practical and speculative objective of Naturalism." Deleuzian philosophy, therefore, shares much with the second Wittgenstein, and in part also with the first; indeed, there are two types of philosophies, one of extensive type and one corrective ("All philosophy is a critique of language," Wittgenstein claims) that bases itself on the extensive one to find the strength to make it no longer exist – a kind of suicidal philosophy. And if Kant distinguished between intellect and thought, Carroll's Alice understanding what lies behind the mirror is the most important thing, at once extensive and later corrective, but what is sought from things if not the relationships that relate various things while always being outside those things, on this side and not on the other side of the mirror? An epistemologist of the Thirties will say that "science does not have a philosophy that is up to it" after all, and yet existence has no purpose, life is not a thing – vitalism itself pushes towards life, but man does not procreate to fulfill life – and man rationalizes the world through a sensitive-material experience that gives him the logical scheme with which (then) he rationalizes the world so much so that any experience is considered under a logical experience yet logic does not originate, by itself, from experience, indeed logic is the experience in the way experience gives logic or the way experience is transfigured in/by a logical point of view: here lies the theological error, the error of God – belief in God. Because there is no experience of God, thus saying that he exists and/or does not exist is erroneous. The response to the problem is in the dismantling of the problem itself.

And thus, here is philosophy. Philosophy which is critical of. Does reality exist? Reality is my impression, a collection of impressions gives me the real, but my impressions are not reality, and philosophy is psychology of these rather than of the mind. It is indeed critical. It seeks the error, corrects it. And when one critiques (what is a review if not a critique? The most dreadful review is the one idolizing the reviewed object, despite DeB's claim), whether DeB acknowledges it or not, one engages in philosophy, but the color green is of the same green in dreams as it is here, now, in reality. So what is the line of demarcation, where lies the boundary?