Deleuze and Guattari on the philosophical trinity

I am trying to understand at least four (possibly) kindred philosophies before I finish and release my own: 1) Deleuze/Guattari, 2) Whitehead, 3) Jaspers and 4) Spinoza.

Deleuze and Guattari’s late collaboration What Is Philosophy? outlines the components of philosophy and the relationships among them as philosophies are brought into existence. There is a lot of useful material here that I suspect might sharpen my own understanding the subjective “objects” of my diagrams and how those subjects relate and interact in the process of intentionally designing philosophies.

The passage below is a relatively clear encapsulation of what I hoped to take from the book, or at least it is clear-ish compared to the rest of the book.

Philosophy presents three elements, each of which its with the other two but must be considered for itself: the prephilosophical plane it must lay out (immanence), the persona or personae it must invent and bring to life (insistence), and the philosophical concepts it must create (consistency). Laying out, inventing, and creating constitute the philosophical trinity — diagrammatic, personalistic, and intensive features.

…Since none of these elements are deduced from the others, there must be coadaptation of the three. The philosophical faculty of coa­daptation, which also regulates the creation of concepts, is called taste. If the laying-out of the plane is called Reason, the invention of personae Imagination, and the creation of concepts Understanding, then taste appears as the triple faculty of the still-undetermined con­cept, of the persona still in limbo, and of the still-transparent plane. That is why it is necessary to create, invent, and lay out, while taste is like the rule of correspondence of the three instances that are diferent in kind.

For a moment I wondered why they didn’t just start with this and develop the ideas on that foundation, but I suppose it would have been opaque if I hadn’t already struggled to make sense of each of the components earlier. It’s one of those necessary difficulties of philosophical writing — in the best philosophy the predicate precedes the subject, often dissolving existing subjects and suspending them prior to resolving them. The protests “what are you even talking about?” or “the words you are using, and way you are talking about that subject is fundamentally off!” or “what is the antecedent to all these damn pronouns you’re flinging about…!?”

Philosophers tend to redefine common words in painfully different ways (and are accused of torturing language), invent new words (and are accused of using technical jargon), or resort to poetic indications of new meanings (and are accused of obscurity and vagueness) — but in all three cases, the objections are in fact to philosophy itself — of being asked to leave an established way of thinking and the language that supports, and reinforces it, in order to inhabit another after a long and painful stretch of trying to get the free-floating, bits and wisps of predicate to coalesce around a cast of subjects!

And I’ll be damned if I’m not finding myself making these protests myself to D&G! Agonizing process, in the most precise meaning of the word.

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The closer I get to my own philosophy in the philosophical works I read, the harder the reading becomes.

It might be because these philosophies are pushing far beyond the familiar common experiences that mold the socially-accepted meanings of words, and saying truly new things is intrinsically difficult. But part of me wonders if it is like all proximal differences — between siblings’ ages, differences in social standing, cost differences, balances of pros and cons in a difficult choice, minuscule flaws in the near-perfect — the smaller the difference, the greater the rancor! The smallest discrepancy rankles most!

Maybe this principle helps explain the devastation of the minuscule loss described in these lyrics:

Nothing’s changed 
I still love you, oh, I still love you 
Only slightly, only slightly less than I used to, my love 

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