PREVIEW-Episode 76: Deleuze on What Philosophy Is

0:08 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 76 is what is philosophy? And we read chapters one through three of what is Philosophy? By Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari from 1991. You can join the discussion and get loads of supplemental material at partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:30 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Austin, Texas.

0:32 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:34 Daniel: And this is Daniel Coffee in San Francisco.

0:37 Mark: Hey, Daniel. Thanks for coming.

0:39 Seth: Welcome.

0:40 Daniel: Thank you, guys. I'm so happy to be here. Truly honored.

0:43 Mark: Yeah, it's been a long time brewing.

0:45 Daniel: It has. We've been talking about this for like a year and a half or something.

0:48 Mark: Yes. Oh, but we have to do the conference. We have to build up to it. We have to do all these other episodes first.

0:53 Dylan: We can blame Daniel for that stuff.

0:55 Mark: No, sorry. So tell us a little about your background.

1:00 Daniel: I got my doctorate in rhetoric from UC Berkeley. I, in fact, have never taken a philosophy class in my life. I did undergraduate work at UPenn in history and wrote about historiography for my thesis. Wrote about Foucault. I went haywire at some point during my very bored undergraduate years when I read Derrida and Foucault and Kierkegaard and Gadamer. But then I ended up writing a dissertation on trope theory using Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. So I ended up actually studying rhetoric. So in many ways, it's funny to be on a philosophy podcast. I call myself a sophist.

1:32 Mark: You know, I'm very excited to have, I'll just say one of the others here. So we. We did Lacan without a guest. There's this whole branch of philosophy that we've been looking at a little bit with the Lacan episodes and the Derrida. And I'm not sure if Deleuze qualifies in there. I did not hear the name Deleuze said even once in my entire time in graduate School from 1994 to 2000 at the University of Texas. That could just be that he's on the ascendancy now. He was recommended to us by enough listeners. There was some activity around him. In fact, there have been three, more than for any other figure.

Three, not school groups. That is the groups that go with our member only site. So listeners get together and read stuff. But he's not somebody that I'd heard of before. And so it's always been a little fascinating why these sociological barriers are there. You know, it's not like philosophy, the department I was in was an edifice. It's not like there was any consensus at all among the people there. But yet, in all of my experience with all those different people, none of them had us read Deleuze or Lacan even.

2:34 Daniel: You know, you see Berkeley rhetoric presumably like the hotbed of all this stuff. I started writing about Deleuze and everyone thought I was fucking nuts. They weren't into Deleuze and that all changed. But I was really sort of outcast. I mean, I was outcast for a lot of reasons, but that was definitely one of them. I think everyone thought he was just sort of a fucking nut. Not unjustifiably, and I'll say even I was really into Deleuze and thought Guattari was sort of a nut. And I was like, you know, I'm into Deleuze, is a little more rigorous. But since then I've totally changed and I'm crazy about Guattari. The more untethered I've become from the academy, the more I've embraced the sort of schizopsychedelic worldview of these guys.

3:14 Mark: Well, I think that's the only time so far that the pair had come up in this podcast was on our Foucault episode where our guest, who is a grad student studying Foucault, she made some comment about the two of these guys just smoking weed together and coming up with a lot of crazy ass shit.

3:30 Daniel: Yes.

3:31 Mark: The book that we read this time, what Is Philosophy? I didn't see that so much. This is their last of their three. Their first was in 1972, the second was in 1980, and this was 1991.

3:40 Daniel: They also have that small book on Kafka somewhere in there.

3:42 Mark: Ah, and this is pretty close before Guattari died, right?

3:46 Daniel: Yes.

3:47 Mark: He was a Lacanian psychoanalyst and political radical. And so Deleuze wrote many more things than these three or four collaborative efforts. Among them, a lot of apparently very perceptive and clear secondary literature about Spinoza, about Hume was the first big thing that he wrote about, which was very.

4:06 Dylan: He got his dissertation, I think.

4:07 Mark: Yes. Which was apparently not the cool thing to do in France when he was doing it. And one of his whole. His books, I believe it's called Logic of Sense, takes as the starting point Frege and Russell on the Fregean sense. The guy was very widely read and should not be Thought of from what I read in like the Stanford Encyclopedia as some sort of. He doesn't seem to talk about Derrida, for instance, at all that I saw in any of the stuff that I've seen by him. He really saw himself as an old style metaphysician of some sort, just building off of Nietzsche and Kant and Hume and all the greats.

4:41 Daniel: Well, there's no question you'll have a lot of people squirming in their seats as you say that. Because, you know, his own relationship to the history philosophy is interesting. I'm not disagreeing or agree.

4:49 Mark: I don't, you know much more than I do. That's why you're here. So correct me.

4:53 Daniel: What he argues is that there's another history of philosophy. So if you look at Derrida, you know, Derrida was always sort of trying to undo the history of philosophy and always show its sort of failure and a double movement. But Deleuze was this positivist. He really said, what if we don't begin with the failure of metaphysics, but then try to find those kind of moments that are decentered, that are multiple. Right. I mean, he's really a philosopher of multiplicity, if nothing else. And he found this alternate history that he would sort of track.

He talks about all these people, you know, Duns Scotus, you know, Bergson plays this huge role in Leibniz, and then he does take some from Kant. But he also talks about, when he's writing about Kant, that it's not a question of having a camp. And I think that's what comes really clear through what his philosophy was. So great having this opportunity to reread it really closely. And I was sitting down, taking notes. I felt like I was in grad school again. And it's just kind of fun now.

5:43 Seth: You know what I feel like every two weeks?

5:46 Mark: Yeah, Darth.

5:47 Daniel: It's kind of intense, like being back in this world with these guys. He's not interested in again, setting up this camp. He never said, you know, the end of metaphysics. At one point he says, you know, it's a boring question, like who even asked that? And, you know, that was the Derridean thing and all the terrible Derridean Gestapo that flooded the Academy in the 90s, just trying to constantly enforce anyone was essentialist. They attacked you. And for Deleuze, it was such an idiotic approach. He was again, more positivist. And he found this, again, this alternate history streaming through wherever he could sort of find it. And he'll take pieces of anything that turns him on.

6:21 Mark: Well, just as an example, that what's. Use the writings of an actual schizophrenic as one of the jumping off points for the first book that Deleuze and Guattari did together. Guattari, Sorry, I will pronounce. We got somebody. Somebody emailed us to say, I like your show, but you really should look up the French pronunciations of things, you know.

6:39 Daniel: Though I gotta say, I think people should pronounce it any way they want.

6:43 Dylan: I'm with you, man. Who cares?

6:46 Mark: Certainly Guattari does not care.

6:48 Daniel: No, he does not. You know, my son's first name is Felix. Not. And everyone thinks that's why. But I did not name my kid after Guattari. That's insane.

6:56 Mark: If you named your kid Gilles, then, yes, that would be more obvious.

7:02 Daniel: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I just. I like that notion that he's, again, not part of a camp and not part of that postmodern positioning against the greats or for the greats or anything like that. Like, it's just, here's my world. It's this proliferation of worldviews, right? All these planes of immanence, all these different problems and different concepts.

7:19 Mark: Well, that's what he might say. But just his writing style itself puts him sociologically, as far as the American academy is concerned, in a particular camp. In other words, it's very hard to read.

7:33 Daniel: It is really hard to read.

7:35 Dylan: After reading What Is Philosophy?, I did want to read some of his explications of maybe Spinoza or something like that, because he really is very astute in condensing, in interesting ways, the history of philosophy in between things that are very difficult to understand about what he's saying. The articulation of the various personae in philosophy. I thought he was pretty good on that.

7:57 Daniel: Oh, my God. Yeah, he's very generous. He doesn't have that kind of snarky thing that we want to associate with what people want to call the postmodern. He wants things to be great. He wants them to be interesting. He doesn't want to reduce them.

8:09 Dylan: You can kind of see him saying, can't we all just get along, man?

8:14 Daniel: Yeah, kind of. But he also is into, again, I love this, these images of the multiplicity that may or may not get along, that may have conflict, but have more interesting sort of spatial relationships than either being parallel or in conflict or in unity. And it's that other space that's always sort of attracted me, this other sort of logic. Probably most famous concept out of Deleuze and Guattari is the rhizome. It's the figure that has multiple roots, multiple points of growth. That's what he's always imagining, right? Imagining philosophy that way.

There's all these ways in. And sometimes you'll crisscross somebody else. And you know, you're reading Descartes and you're into Descartes. And then you can weave down and find this weird moment of Dostoevsky was a great example in what is philosophy? You know, is Descartes going mad in Russia with this version of the idiot who's doubting everything, then resurfaces in this totally new guise in Russian existential literature? And it's a beautiful moment to me that's so respectful of everybody.

9:08 Seth: Yeah. It's worth noting too, that his program is, generally speaking, positive and constructive. Even though stylistically he dons the clothes of the postmodernists. He's not embarking on a campaign of deconstruction. He's not trying to dislocate, locate the self. He's not articulating some unstructured parallel discourse of the other in the unconscious. And his favorite philosopher is Spinoza, in a weird way. Spinoza, I guess, is extremely radical and not radical at all. I get where you're coming from, Dylan and Daniel, when you talk about him being positive and constructive, he's also not

9:45 Dylan: full of anxiety and self abnegnating nihilism. He doesn't have that disease that Nietzsche in particular has and even Heidegger of Sartre and existentialism of just kind of wringing your hands about the bigness of the world or staring into the abyss. It's none of that. Despite the difficulty of the writing, and I admit that it is quite difficult, I have to say of the stuff that we've done recently, of the French stuff we've done, I enjoyed this the most by far. I found myself captivated, if confused often, and a little bit irritated here and there. I thought it was much more provocative in trying to articulate this middle space about an answer to one of the oldest questions in philosophy, about being wrong and not being wrong, and how we talk about the world in a way that admits of multiplicity without having it be merely relative. He's going after big game.

10:43 Mark: Yes. Well, this book, just from what I experienced of the previous A Thousand Plateaus, this is a much more calm, sober sort of project that the Thousand Plateaus introduction specifically has a. You can read these chapters in any order. They're like tracks on a record. If you don't like it, just move on to the next one. And the way it read was just. They figured some concept and they just went on about it like jazz musicians. Like, how can we just unweave this concept? And I got a little of that in here. Like, okay, we have a chapter on the plane of Imminence.

So it's not entirely a systematic presentation. And it seems like it could have been presented in five pages instead of 15 or 20 or whatever it is. So there's a little bit of still that feeling. But overall you still get the feeling that this book is a systematic whole. This is a creation, which people say that about the previous books as well. So I'm misrepresenting a bit. But.

11:36 Daniel: No, no, you're 100% right. I mean, thousand plateaus, there's a lot of stuff in there they mess up. It's absolutely gobbledygook sometimes. And they don't care. You're supposed to kind of jump around all over the place. So this is no doubt more formal, more rigorous, more. They have a system, you see. They have science, they have the arts, they have philosophy. Different kinds of concepts they are mapping through. What's the role of the concept? What's the role of affect? What's the role of the Persona? There's more form here, if you will. No doubt about it.

12:06 Mark: Just to summarize, Ostensibly, this is a book presenting a framework for thinking about doing philosophy. Of how to compare different philosophers, different works by the same philosopher, shifts historically over time. He wants to characterize what makes philosophy different than science, what makes it different from art. And in the three chapters we hit, it's actually a pretty small number of central concepts, which are the three chapters, right? That he thinks that what philosophy essentially is is the creation of concepts. But he has a very strange notion of concept.

It's not just. You're looking at a bunch of chairs and you figure out what they have in common. And that's the concept chair. Philosophical concepts in particular, he has a pretty complicated explanation for. So that's the first thing. The second chapter is the plane of Immanence, which has to do with. When you create a philosophy, you're creating concepts, but there's always a background into which these concepts fit. It's pre philosophical, but he says at the same time it's created at the same time as the concepts. You might think of it as the set of intuitions and questions and things that would make coming up with this concept make sense at all.

And there's a lot more Complexity to the notion, of course, of the plane of immanence. So then you've got those two things. And then the third chapter is conceptual personae, which are in many cases they're equivalent to the names of the philosophers. But he wants to make it clear that he's not saying that the conceptual Persona that created the cogito is Descartes himself. He wants to point at some kind of icon that you can figure out just by. You don't have to read a Descartes biography to figure this out. The conceptual Persona in that case would be, well, he calls it the idiot, but it's the doubter.

It's the one that I'm going to deny all this stuff that's been handed down to me from Aristotle and the scholastics, and I want to just use the light of reason to figure stuff out. So there's a personality that for one thing makes the concepts make intuitive sense. A little more so than if you just had a discursive set of sentences of describing the concept to put a personality with. It helps us to understand it. But he also just thinks that it's an essential co creation with a philosophy. So all three of these things go together, the concepts, the plane of immanence that they're on as the horizon stretches out to infinity in all directions, whatever, but yet it's not a perfect plane.

It has folds, it has eddies, it has illusions all around. So he has this whole topographic metaphor. And then the personae that populate the plane and give life, give motive, force to the concepts. So most of what we need to do here is just explain what those three things are and whether this combined picture that they end up giving us jibes with what we understand philosophy to be. Fact, just a few episodes ago, we set out to record a what is philosophy discussion. Now it actually turned more into why philosophy? And turned into more of us telling about why we personally each got into philosophy, which is, I think, a fairly natural chain that Deleuze would have a lot of sympathy with that.

It's very similar to why with concepts you run chasing into conceptual personae and all that kind of stuff very quickly. But as far as a definition of what is philosophy? The only thing I could pull out of our past discussion was, I recall I characterized it as just general inquiry before it gets specific enough for a specific science, or the things left over after a lot of specific sciences take out their bit. And that is exactly not what Deleuze thinks it is, that it's a fundamentally different enterprise.

15:21 Daniel: I taught the Introduction to Rhetoric at UC Berkeley for many years, six years as a big lecturer. It was really fun to really introduce people to what rhetoric is because people certainly didn't have really many associations with it other than sort of empty political language. But I used to say, well, you know, just look at the course catalog for philosophy and look at the course catalog for the rhetoric department. And in philosophy there's always these classes, right? There's a class on mind. Who's teaching mind this semester? Who's the mind guy?

There's the language guy, there's the self guy, and of course there's other courses. But as you guys must know much better than I do, once you're out on the market, right? Those are the field. I'm a cognitive guy, right? I'm the language guy, I'm the natural language guy. There's these clear sort of categories, these clear questions that everyone's trying to answer. In rhetoric department, the classes were completely idiosyncratic. I taught a class called Joint Complexity. I taught another class called Bring on the Strange. The classes, they had their own logic, call it immanent logic.

They made sense on their own terms. They didn't bubble up. There were all these sort of discrete moments that connected to other things in these funny ways, maybe common texts. Foucault and Nietzsche was really the main figures who linked a lot of different things together. But not always. But yeah, you get this very sort of fundamentally different approach that they come along and say, philosophy is not about answering these big questions. We're not all collectively trying to figure out what is mind, what is truth, what is self. For them, the philosopher is the person who poses a problem that they see that's bizarre and wrapped up in their whatever, pre conceptual, free analytic world and then creates concepts.

So it becomes this thing that hangs together but unto itself in this sort of sui generis way. When I read that, I was like, okay, this is rhetoric. This is how I'm imagining rhetoric in a way, not philosophy. So it's interesting to have them be calling that philosophy.

17:20 Mark: Well, he does say, late in our reading, he quoted Bergson to the effect that a well posed problem is a problem solved. And a way of saying that is, as soon as you come up with these questions, you've already done a lot of the difficult philosophical work, just to phrase the question itself. And in Deleuze's picture, a lot of this is done sort of under the table and rather irrationally, you know, so why do you think a question, and ultimately the way that he's going to judge different philosophies is not about whether they are true, because truth itself is a philosophical concept. It's sort of raised within a given philosophy. The whole picture of what is going to count as a true response to something is part of the philosophy itself, I think.

18:05 Daniel: Yeah.

18:06 Mark: So it turns out what is interesting, if something is interesting or enlightening. And this really goes very well with, I think, the way we have ended up judging philosophies insofar as we judge them at all in these podcasts is, yeah, I see where he was coming from, but I didn't really see the point. That was a fairly common one. I understood what was being said. I don't know why this would be interesting or important to anybody. In disputes between different philosophers, you don't have so much, though. Of course, it happens. Direct disagreements about facts.

I mean, facts are something you can usually investigate and gain some agreement on, but it's a matter of, well, fine, I'll grant that, but that's not central. That's not important. So what determines what is important in the first place? What questions are worth asking? The conceptual priority? What words you use to ask the question? A lot of that comes out of this, what he's going to call the plane of immanence, right? Which is part and parcel of creating the philosophy.

19:02 Daniel: Since reading this, I first read this book, and then I read a lot of Bergson. Bergson talks about asking the right question. He says, you know, all these philosophers, they begin from the wrong place. They begin by saying, the mind is of a different stuff than the world. And then you inaugurate all these very convoluted epistemological problems, right? How can I know something if I'm mine and it's there? And he's like, but if we just begin with a different question and say it's all stuff, then all your questions, all your thousands of pages, your centuries of solutions, all become irrelevant, Right? We just began from a different place. I say mind is not different than the desk. It's all just stuff going with stuff.

19:40 Mark: Well, it's not that it's not different. The difference is not of central philosophical importance. Deleuze is coming with Bergson and Heidegger, and there are a lot of folks that were criticizing metaphysics itself, the project of doing metaphysics. What is it that you actually think you're doing? And I think that's one of the things. If you start with something like a substance, metaphysics, and then you think about these observed differences, obvious, undeniable differences between the desk in front of me and a memory I have that. You can't say those are all the same thing, of course they're different.

But the question is, is that of central ontological importance? And you have to have a notion of ontology to ask that question. You have to have this traditional picture of metaphysics, of substances, of this presence metaphysics that Derrida criticized it as, to then give rise to the difficulties of the mind body problem, say in the way that you were alluding to. What I'm trying to respond to Deleuze here is yes, you could say a lot of the work as a matter of fact is done under the table, right? This is Nietzsche's big complaint, this is an ongoing theme in his work, that if he's criticizing ethical philosophers, say we've mentioned, you know, he would criticize the British ethical philosophers, utilitarians and stuff is really just being boring, drab computational people and say that's why they think utilitarianism is a good idea, or that's why somebody would believe in God or any number of things.

You can claim that as a psychological theory, but that's different from saying there is no argument against such things except to dismiss their psychology as warped. Certainly you would not want to do that uniformly across all types of concepts, types of areas of knowledge. You might think about values in particular with the sharp is ought distinction. You could say we could agree about all the different ises that there are, but still have different values. And the only way that I can ultimately critique you on your values is by saying you are a nutcase or you do not have proper empathy for the people around you.

I have to argue on that sort of basis. And so there's a certain stopping point that especially admits of the Nietzschean kind of critique which I'm reading here into Deleuze. But it wasn't entirely clear to me whether Deleuze is actually committed to saying that, because a lot of the setting up of a philosophy is laying down a plane of immanence, is laying down a set of unarticulated. It's not a matter of there are 10 assumptions here, 10 that I haven't unearthed. And the proper part of doing a philosophy is to actually write down all 10 of them or something.

Obviously that's a pretty ignorant way to think of what the pre philosophical intuitions are, but there's still a sense back to Socrates that it is the job of philosophy to unearth the pre philosophical to evaluate it, that that's what the examined life is all about. And it seems like in the thing that you say is similar to rhetoric that Deleuze is doing is admitting that this is impossible and is a wrong headed approach in the first place. Because any philosophy can only sort of be judged by its own light. It's all imminent to itself. You can't judge a set of pre-philosophical opinions by unearthing them one by one and subjecting them to evaluation, because you're always going to be evaluating it from a plane of immanence that is irrelevant to the one that is different from the one that you're evaluating.

He seems to think of philosophers talk past each other. Yes, all the time. He even says dialogue itself is useless. Discussion is a discussion. Discussion is useless.

23:10 Seth: Right.

23:10 Mark: It just distracts because this creation of concepts, this figuring out the internal logic of your system is a very solitary activity. And if you get another person into it to ask you questions, they're coming from a different place and it's just. It's not going to be helpful to you. He says, we think we see in Socrates, in Plato, a model of discussion, but really it's Socrates made discussion impossible

23:29 Daniel: because he just shuts everybody down.

23:32 Mark: Yes, exactly.

23:33 Dylan: It's a funny thing for someone who did this work collaboratively to say, yes, no, but come on, can I just. Mark did a nice job I think of, in a very condensed way, in a couple sentences, summarizing. But I think it would be worthwhile to go through those chapters a little bit more and talk through what is a concept and what is a plane of immanence and articulate those parts that Mark rightly glossed over in order to make this question much more interesting and accessible. Because right now I think as it is, it's basically unaccessible to anybody who hasn't read this book already.

I think that the question that Mark is presenting gets at the heart of what is a difficulty with Deleuze and a way in which he stands at odds with the philosophical tradition. He's making a move to try to avoid some of the old classic conflicts in philosophy that a deconstructionist might try to. His approach might go head on. And he's trying to avoid that and evaluating that's going to require us to understand a little bit about what he's doing.

24:38 Daniel: Yeah, no question.

24:39 Mark: All right, let's start with chapter one, then.

24:41 Daniel: Do you guys read the introduction?

24:43 Dylan: Yes.

24:43 Daniel: The notion of the friend I thought was really kind of beautiful. What is the philosopher's relationship to the concept? He begins talking about the philosopher as a friend. He says, you Know the philosopher is a kind of friend of the concept. The way the wood joiner is a friend of the wood. What's nice too is he doesn't just say that that is the relationship of a philosopher to the concept, but he begins to posit that and try to feel that out a little bit, and then wonders what other kinds of friends, who else can claim these relationships? Who else claims to be the friend of the concept?

And it's really a question of the posturing and how you stand towards this practice and towards concepts, right from this introduction, the very notion that he's suggesting that there are postures, he's already situating us in a certain vision of philosophy, right? In a certain mode of operation or of practice and of critique. So that rather than coming out and saying philosophy is thinking about big questions, he says, who's the friend of the concept? It was a little off putting. You know, I had to read it many, many times when I first read, I was like, what the fuck are you talking about?

25:46 Mark: He's not coming with this out of nowhere. He's pointing to the Greeks, right? That that's they call philosopher is the friend of wisdom. Those who seek wisdom but do not formally possess it, they're not sages. He makes that distinction a few times. That's not handing down received wisdom.

25:59 Daniel: Exactly. I like that. He begins to compare it to again, the woodworker and to this notion of creation, of doing something, that there's a kind of labor and a kind of work that's not solely while it is the realm of thought. He says, concept is thought, happens at the speed of thought. There is still this figure of the manual side of things, the constructivist side of things, that's already beginning to position us as we begin this book in a slightly different vantage point. I find there's something very, I want to say, cute about this introduction.

Who is the friend? They just want to be friends. And am I the facilitator? Am I, is a friend a facilitator? Am I tearing at it? Am I the master of it? Well, no, that's not really being a good friend. You know, we talked about the positivism, right? The kind of generosity here. How will we stand towards philosophy? How we stand towards our own concepts? How will we stand towards the concepts of others? And he makes it this sort of socioethical question, but also a question of comportment and posturing. Where am I and what am I doing and how do I feel about myself?

And already he's just in that simple move Introducing a fundamentally different image of thought, an image of the philosopher.

27:08 Mark: Even before that, at the very beginning of the introduction, it struck me very much like Heidegger's when he starts his discussion about being. That he says, you don't even know how to ask the question of being. Of course, reading that, what justification do you think that there's a question there to ask? So the way that they start this book here is the question what is philosophy? Can perhaps be posed only late in life is a question posed in a moment of quiet restlessness at midnight when there's no longer anything to ask. That point of non style when one can finally say what is it that I've been doing all my life?

Had not yet been reached. Which that doesn't match my experience that philosophers are so self reflective that almost as a corollary to doing any particular philosophical work, they're also asking why am I doing this? What is this for? What is philosophy itself? So for him to say that we don't even ask this question until we're old because we're so pulled into particular philosophical investigations is just like Heidegger to deny that everybody who thinks they know what they're doing is correct in that.

28:07 Daniel: Well, there's a couple weird moves to do here, right? Right from that get go. The first figures they actually introduced are not philosophers, but painters. You're reading a book on philosophy and all of a sudden he's talking about Titian, Turner and Monet. And then he's going to end up talking about how these multiple logic, science, art, philosophy, all participate and bleed in and out of each other and amplify. And what that does of course is say that philosophy will not be the master figure. So there's an implied sort of deconstruction going on, right?

And then he says, well, in the case of philosophy, there's Kant, who, you know, the end overthrows everything, but then there's that paragraph and he says, we cannot claim such a status. Simply the time has come for us to ask what philosophy is. He's sort of setting up this sort of narrative juncture, the propitious moment, you know, the kairos has come and I'll. I'll reckon all the things I'm doing and look at all these great people who have done this. And he's like, yeah, but that ain't us, we're just doing it. And that's sort of again that jam respect for everyone else.

But then we're going to do this other thing and we'll dovetail and nod it's a different time for us with them and not with them. I don't know why that brings me such pleasure after setting that all up. We cannot claim such a status.

29:15 Mark: They're doing the modest task of a pedagogy of the concept.

29:19 Daniel: I like that.

29:20 Mark: Well, let's say, what does that mean? What could that possibly mean? We want to teach the concept something. This is on page 12 here. The post Kantians concentrated on a universal encyclopedia of the concept that attributed concept creation to a pure subjectivity, rather than taking on a more modest task of a pedagogy of the concept, which would have to analyze the conditions of creation as factors of always singular moments.

29:40 Daniel: Well, I think the pedagogy in that case is not them teaching the concept, but the entire pedagogic exchange of concept to me. And mean to concept, of philosopher to concept, world to concept, it's teaching. You know, I never read Heidegger, so the whole unveiling thing, I can't really say, but it is this repositioning, but also a coming forth. Right. A sort of reckoning of the sort of efficacy and functionality of the concept. And the concept's going to teach us. We're going to teach it. The philosophers are going to rethink what concepts are. Concepts are going to rethink what philosophers are. It's a shift, right, from a catalog to this sort of productive engagement with.

30:14 Mark: He wants to give a genealogical account, which is like he apparently does for every other part of his philosophy, that some encyclopedic take would not be in line with his picture of a reality that is in constant motion. He's basically a process.

30:28 Daniel: Yes, very good.

30:29 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

30:29 Mark: Rather than a substance metaphysician. Love that these things are all events and you have to give the history of that event. The growth of knowledge is not just progressively uncovering and refining concepts to capture reality. In other words, something that boils down basically to the empirical. I have in mind Ayn Rand here, because that's who I'm reading for one of the episodes coming up, a very simple idea that concepts are all just taken off of the given. And then there are of course, higher level concepts that capture the abstractions. But that's a common view throughout quite a lot of philosophy that was adapting to our own purposes.

But as soon as you take a fundamentally historicist view here, then you say, well, maybe not so much that it's not true in a particular endeavor, but that what endeavor you are engaged in is going to change quite constantly, depending on quite a lot of factors. Including not only the society you're in, who you are, what the intellectual moment is, what other things you have been reading. What's going to make a concept is this massive, implicit. And he says, suspicious, really. He says the plane of immanence that will make a concept make sense.

In other words, what you consider a good question in the first place is going to come from a history.

31:48 Daniel: He actually also says it comes from an empiricism. And empiricism is an important concept for Deleuze because it really is just a reckoning of your vision. I think often of my own just when I have an idea, and what's happening when I have that idea. It's something I got obsessed with about a year ago, trying to really sort of articulate the event of having an idea. What happens to me as this idea takes shape, and what changes, and where did it come from? I know how I always take when he talks about empiricism is that I see these things happening.

32:17 Mark: Sure. This is a phenomenological report from people who've been doing philosophy for a while that what is the best way to capture this process of coming up with and refining ideas and, of course, studying lots of other philosophers? So here's a new vocabulary for talking about this. So of course, they invented the vocabulary. The plane of immanence is itself a concept. The concept, as they conceive it is itself a concept.

32:42 Daniel: Exactly.

32:42 Mark: Exactly.

32:43 Daniel: But this is the trick reason I come back to rhetoric, too. And I always. What I always tell my students is like rhetoric is the logic of making sense of the world that's in motion, while part of the world in motion, oneself. If you can read a lot of the postmodernists, the very possibility of the outside. And what happens when you fold the outside into the inside and say that these strict boundaries between inside and outside don't exist for Derrida becomes difference. But for Deleuze, he comes up with something different, which is this constant sort of, you know, the set of all sets.

Right. What happens when you just fold those sets inside? Right. And so he's giving this vision of philosophy that is itself the position of all positions. That's what I used to call rhetoric. I said rhetoric is the position of all positions, which, of course, is a position. Right. And at some point, the position of all positions has to embrace the position that says, you're a fucking flake. Coffee. Right. This is my position. My position is you're a flake. But the position of all positions stands towards that in a strange way. So Deleuze, his own plane of immanence, his own set of concepts on his plane of immanence.

The plane of immanence itself, of course, being a concept that lets all these different things, all these different positions be articulated without effacing each other. He calls that philosophy.

33:53 Dylan: But he says explicitly, the plane of immanence is not a concept.

33:58 Seth: What is at stake whether we decide it's concept or not a concept.

34:01 Mark: I think I can solve this. This is a question of use versus mention that the thing that the phrase plane of immanence refers to is this massive, unarticulated whatever. This is where I saw the connection to Lacan. It's kind of like the real is for Lacan, and there are many of them. So every philosophy sort of comes with its own plane of immanence. So it's kind of like the background intuitions that a person has. But Deleuze wants to stress that it's not a psychological thing. It's not particular to a person. This is like a Fregean sense, like a proposition. It's a public thing, when he's actually talking about his system. The plane of immanence and concepts have to be very clearly distinguished. The concepts are something that go on the plane of immanence. However, in coming up with this philosophy, of course, all these components are themselves concepts.

34:48 Daniel: Exactly.

34:49 Mark: So the phrase itself, you could say, is a concept, but what it refers to is not a concept.

34:56 Daniel: Yeah, I think that's really well put. Yeah.

34:57 Dylan: Where he says this is in the very first page of the plane of immanence chapter at the bottom. He says, the plane of immanence is neither a concept nor the concept of all concepts. If one were to be confused with the other, there would be nothing to stop concepts from forming a single one or becoming universals and losing their singularity. And the plane would also lose its openness. So the reason that it's important to maintain the distinction. I agree. Mark that with basically the analysis that you gave of maintaining the distinction. But the reason is that the plane of immanence as not being a concept is part of the key into avoiding the problem of the one and the many. He wants to maintain ones and manys at the same time.

35:42 Daniel: Yes.

35:43 Dylan: And so the reason that it has to not be a concept is that that will subvert the whole goal of maintaining ones and manys at one time.

35:53 Mark: I guess I just don't see this as any more difficult than saying the real for Lacan is unarticulated. But, hey, the word real, that's a word that's part of the symbolic order. Like, no, that's obviously not a conflict.

36:04 Daniel: I agree.

36:05 Seth: It could become much more complicated.

36:07 Daniel: When I was reading this, I was like, what are Deleuze's concepts? Is rhizome a concept, or does it become a figure? Is repetition for him a conc. Concept, or is it an operation? That discussion gets sort of academic, in the worst sense, pedantic. But there are these terms that are operating.

36:21 Mark: Let's stop turning his own apparatus on himself and talk about the examples like Descartes and like Kant that he actually gives that are much more manageable, seemingly.

36:32 Seth: So, first off, have we even mentioned that the point of the book is for Deleuze to distinguish between philosophy, science and art?

36:40 Daniel: We mentioned it, but it's worth saying now.

36:41 Seth: Please. Part of what he's trying to undertake here is to distinguish the activity that we identify as philosophy from the activity that we identify as science. Philosophy differs from science in this way. Philosophy is a creative activity, and what it creates is concepts. So everything you said earlier about the method of reflection and not communication and all that is all in service of creating concepts. The plane of immanence and these other things are all ways of explaining how philosophy creates concepts and how that differs from science.

So earlier you mentioned something about the empirical and the idea that concepts kind of arise out of empirical experience. And I think that what Deleuze is kind of saying with the plane of immanence, whatever that may be, is that it somehow is the thing in his system that allows concepts to come up so that they may be created in such a way that these concepts do not come from empirical experience, or at least not directly. I think the reason that he's trying to say that, and I'm trying to say this in the most sort of neutral and common sense language I can, is that the plane of immanence represents a kind of nexus of concepts and potential concepts, whereas the empirical world has a certain kind of structure to it.

And what he wants to say is something to the effect of science takes what the physical world gives it, and it identifies functions for how the things in the empirical world interact. But things are not things in the empirical world until we identify them as such. And the decision to identify something as a unity under a concept is a decision that takes place pre, empirically, in this plane of immanence. So whether we decide to call a tree everything that we see above the ground or the roots plus the trunk plus the leaves or something like that, is a conceptual decision.

And then once that conceptual decision has been made. You can have a science of botany that determines the ways in which trees interact with sunlight and soil and so forth. If we believe that the empirical world would dictate the way we create concepts, then in some way we're impregnating the empirical world with this ability to create constructs and unities itself. Or for us to impose those constructs and unities on the world, when in fact there's somehow something else at play. It's a little more subtle exercise. Does that sound like a decent interpretation?

39:31 Daniel: I thought that was incredibly eloquent. The only qualification I would put is, I think when you're using empiricism, I think you're talking more about what he calls the state of affairs or things. Because I think there is an empiricism to thinking, too, to conceptual creation. It's a philosophy, but it's not empiricism of the physical world of actual states of affairs. It's a different kind of empiricism.

39:51 Seth: I probably should have said sensation.

39:52 Daniel: Yeah, no, exactly. I know it sounds pedantic, but I think it will come back to haunt us if we didn't make that distinction.

39:57 Seth: Yeah, that's fair.

39:58 Dylan: Yeah. He would point to the activity of science as creating functions that have. Uses this word ordinate, an ordinate in things that have extent, masses and distances and stuff like that.

40:11 Mark: You're just using function in the ordinary sense of you put something in and by some rule, you get something out.

40:17 Dylan: Exactly.

40:18 Mark: Like any physics, I tap the billiard ball with such and such a force, Then what I will get out is the action of that moving. And so you could just generalize that to any kind of scientific explanation.

40:28 Dylan: What came to my mind immediately when he was talking about it in this way is you write down Planck's quantization of light, and you have a function now, and it accounts for the phenomena, but you immediately are presented with all kinds of questions about what is it exactly that they're referring to? What kinds of entities are those? And science, from Deleuze's perspective, is simply not providing that for you. And that's a characteristic of science. The philosopher would have said, well, what are those things you're dealing with? And would be constantly preoccupied with that, this way of thinking about the difference between philosophy and science.

He never talks explicitly about pragmatism, but at the end of the chapter on concept, in particular, the last paragraph, Starting on page 33, he says it is pointless to say that there are concepts in science, even when science is concerned with the Same objects. It is not from the viewpoint of the concept, it is not by creating concepts. And then he makes this distinction. He wants to say science is about propositions, not about concepts. And so at the end he says science needs only propositions or functions, whereas philosophy, for its part, does not need to invoke a lived that would give only a ghostly and extrinsic life to secondary bloodless concepts.

The philosophical concepts does not refer to the lived by way of compensation, but consists through its own creation, in setting up an event that surveys the whole of the lived, no less than every state of affair. So he's saying, even if he would concede that there's something like a concept in science, it's utterly bloodless, if not bankrupt. And this whole section implied to me that he would just say that pragmatism isn't philosophy. It's science in this kind of functional way, but it's not philosophy.

42:19 Mark: So in other words, if you observe the billiard balls hitting each other and you just say, as a shorthand, we're going to call that causality so that we can capture a whole bunch of different things, that is the kind of bloodless concept that you would think, because you're not actually thinking, what is causality? It's not until somebody like Hume comes along and says, well, what actually is? Is it necessary connection? Is it? No. Are the people that he was specifically reacting to, that's what the philosopher is supposed to do. So in that sense, yes, if science is not doing anything like that, if it's being purely pragmat, in other words, I just need a name to give to this thing to keep track of the regularity that I'm noticing, then it does not use real concepts as far as he's concerned, certainly not philosophical concepts.

On the other hand, I don't think I would characterize him as rejecting pragmatism in general, because the way that I was reading what the plane of immanence is, and the fact that all this work, when you put down a concept, what makes it seem like a good concept is because you are also drawing on and creating at the same time a plane of immanence. That's a bunch of largely pragmatic concerns. What you consider to be a legitimate question that this concept is supposed to help you answer is going to be determined in part by pragmatics.

43:29 Dylan: Yeah, I think he has some very perceptive things to talk about. The difference in the way philosophy works and science works in a way that articulates them as covering different, different parts

43:40 Daniel: of experience, life, cosmos, Experience.

43:45 Dylan: Yeah, that's fine.

43:46 Daniel: I know those are loaded words.

43:48 Dylan: Yeah. But in ways that aren't merely derivative of one of the other. But even on his own analysis of what he means by a concept, it seems hard to say that there are not concepts within science.

44:02 Daniel: He's never going to come on and say that. In fact, as it goes on, it's going to talk about.

44:06 Dylan: He said it explicitly,

44:10 Daniel: philosophical concept. There are going to be functions and ordinates in philosophy, there's going to be percepts and affect and philosophy. There's going to be concepts and functions in art, there are going to be percepts and affect in science, and there are concepts. It's their relative position and their fundamental goal. So science for him is this incredibly creative thing, but that operates at the level of the relations of things, at the state of affairs. And these functions as he's all about causality. For him, that's not a concept, it's a function. And it's exquisite in its own right. There's no sense of privileging the concept here. I mean, if anything, it's just concept is just simply the purview, the domain of the philosopher. It's not a privileged thing.

44:49 Dylan: I'm willing to admit that part of my sense is that the notion of concept is somewhat privileged. But something like force or a field is not purely functive. Without worrying about the notion of the privilege of the word concept, it seems to have the baggage that the way he uses concept comes with of being an instance within a plane of immanence.

45:14 Daniel: Yes.

45:14 Dylan: Now they may be few and far between, maybe a much smaller handful of them within science than there is within philosophy.

45:23 Seth: What would be the purpose of philosophy or philosophers creating concepts if not for them to be used by others? I have to believe that what he's talking about here is the activity of science. Science as an activity, as a methodology, is this identification of functions in these existing elements. But at some point science is going to be utilizing concepts. The question is, where did those concepts come from? The way I understood this was him saying something to the effect of the activity of philosophy is to generate concepts. The activity of science is to generate functions which describe the way in which the natural world is ordered.

And insofar as a scientist in the tradition, creates a concept that then gets employed, I would think what they were doing was. He would have to say they were doing philosophy. But what happens is, after the concept is created, scientists or the method of science simply uses that in order to do the descriptive or the Functive activity. That was the way in which I took what he was saying. Not that philosophy and science are tied to individuals. And you're either a scientist or a philosopher, and never the twain shall meet. But if you're the kind of scientist who has access to the plane of immanence and is able to create a new concept like force or mass, then that's a philosophical activity.

But hundreds of thousands of people will just. Just learn how to use that in a formula and spend more and more time in front of machines in order to get more accurate measurements of that are doing science.

47:03 Mark: Yeah. We should even say that he has a picture of a lot of people who would call themselves philosophers also being functionaries in this way that unless you're actually being creative, creating the new plane, a new image of thought, changing the picture of what it is to think, then you're not a great philosopher or

47:20 Daniel: even a philosopher at all. I mean, it gets more severe. Right. Or you're something else, or you're a sophist. And I don't. Again, I don't think there's a hierarchy here. There's distinctly. Not throughout the book, these three things, science, art and philosopher begin to bleed. So obviously, I mean, especially when he starts to talk about the conceptual Persona, he has to distinguish it from the literary figure. Right. He says, well, what's the difference? Well, the literary figure functions first and foremost at the level of percept and affect.

Take up art. You know exactly sort of what he's talking about. Right. I look at a Mark Rothko. I don't lead with concept. I could. But that's not what the artist is doing. It's not the artist's job. It's not the purview. It doesn't mean there's no concepts in a Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock. Pollock throws his paint on the canvas and then stands back and looks at it. Is he creating a concept? No. Is there conceptual affinities in these drips? Well, sure, of course. Could I explain it conceptually? Yes. Just as a scientist or a philosopher, when they write, you know, especially when we started talking about delicious style, the perception we have of him, which is slightly different than his percepts, but the affect, which can really.

We talked about people being annoying, Lacan. It's. Well, it's obfuscating. It's annoying. I don't like your affect. And that's somehow impinging on my conceptual understanding or. Because all these things are happening all the time. So I think it becomes a unfruitful discussion at some point to try to talk about, again, this hierarchy or this rating or this ranking of them. They're all. It's fundamentally, what is this practice? And he sees these three creative endeavors and he says, well, these guys. I'm going to call these guys philosophers.

And this is what I think they're up to. These guys are scientists is what they're up to. And they have different domains. There's going to be overlaps inevitably and joyfully. That's not a problem with the system or world he's giving us. He likes those moments. There are going to be concepts and signs, but pretty much they're talking about states of affairs. And they invent concepts in so much as they can explain states of affairs.

49:14 Mark: So it's domains of reality, just to be clear on that, that he wants to unreality too. I mean, the state of affairs is part of reality, what we would call the physical. But he doesn't pull that out because saying it's physical is to make some philosophical claim about it. You know, we can describe it neutrally as a state of affairs and then the plane of immanence. I think the way that we get into this is the notion of the Fregean sense that when we considered what is it that, say, a proposition or a concept, what is the entity that carries the sense of a proposition or the sense of a term that we said?

The morning star and the evening star, they both have the same reference. There's only one physical object, the planet Venus, but yet there's something that distinguishes the two. And you could say, oh, it's a purely psychological thing. But it's not a purely psychological thing. Because the morning star and the evening star, those have objectively different senses. Just that notion right there creates the mental space to think about something that is neither a particular idea in one person's head or a physical thing. The most natural way for us to think of it is, well, okay, so it's a social idea, it's something that is shared.

But I think he wants to give the realm of sense more objectivity than that. And he explicitly refers at one point, or maybe I just read this the way that we talked about it in our Sartre episode. We read Transcendence of the Ego. And instead of saying experience belongs to a transcendental subject, we said, there's just experience, there's just consciousness. William James is another guy that in his later work, his Essays in Radical Empiricism, I think he took a very similar tack. Basically, that each person's experience is not just A private sphere.

And I don't really know what's going on in your head. And you don't know what's going in my head. No. In fact, what the mental is, is made up of all this really largely shared stuff. Maybe there's a little bit of private stuff. Primarily this centers around the concepts that we use and the network that knits those together. So that's really what the plane of immanence is. You could think of it again as the individual philosopher's mass of pre philosophical conceptions or something. But he wants to describe all these things. Even when you were saying an affect is supposed to be something that, that it's not an emotion that somebody has.

It is an objective thing that we can all get in touch with. So we described. Yeah, a percept or an affect that a piece of art is not just inspiring private mental events in all of us. It presents itself as an objective percept with affect. That is the beautiful right there. We might not all be able to sort of see that affect clearly. There's a lot of epistemological difficulties in this and some of this can be explained. Oh well, you're coming at it sort of with a different plane of immanence, the different batch of preconceptions, blah, blah, blah.

But he wants to just throughout, and this is just one of his very radical things in terms of his metaphysics, is he doesn't want to say that there's a realm of the mental and a realm of the physical. There's just stuff. And even when we talk about physical stuff, we're using a metaphor, we're using concepts to get at them. And he doesn't want to talk about like Kant would. Okay, well we use concepts and maybe they're even shared concept, but there's a real thing underlying it that we are then psychologically grabbing and conceptualizing. No, his whole philosophy is about imminence, is about these groupings and being imminent inside the field of experience, shared experience itself.

So so much of his unique language, White wants to talk about state of affairs instead of physical objects and things, is to put forth this new, in some ways very open ended ontology that doesn't break things down into those traditional categories.

53:02 Dylan: But it's really important in this respect to highlight the multiplicity of the planes of immanence. Yes, because it's very easy to talk about this and say that the plane of immanence is like the real for Lacan, but I don't think it is. Deleuze might say it is, but I don't think Lacan would, because it's not the one soupy thing out of which everything is coming. It's not experience that is somehow held in common. He describes it as a sieve. And in the end of the day, there is a multiplicity to it. There's a cohesive and consistency within a plane of immanence out of which concepts reside within it. But concepts don't build up or make a plane of immanence, but they are naturally part of that plane of immanence. And you can have a multiplicity of planes of immanence in which you would have concepts that were naturally part of them.

53:57 Mark: Yes.

53:58 Dylan: And where those planes of immanence reside, you know, he does at some point want to take up the question of, well, is there a sort of ultimate plane of immanence out of where all the planes of immanence sit in, you know, this kind of reductive problem? The closest he seems to actually think of it as being serious would be something like chaos. Because a plane of immanence is not the same thing as chaos. It is actually a structure. And when I was reading this whole. This thing, it made me think, this is just quantum field theory, conceptually, that you have a field that has its own rules and structures out of which particles are the manifestation of that field.

But you can never touch the field itself, except by interacting with particles. And those particles, they do not build up the field. They're not bricks that then lay the pavement that the field is. They are manifestations of the field, in fact, the only manifestations of the field. So in quantum field theory, there is a universe permeating electron field, out of which electrons are the manifestation, the instances of it. But those electrons are tied to that field. They are resonance of that field. And that's why they're tied to each other and tied to photons and stuff like that, because those are manifestations of the underlying electromagnetic field.

And then there's another field, the quark gluon field, that particular the strong force that has some ways in which it overlaps and it can cross over through charge and interacting with the electrons and photons.

55:30 Mark: Now, it sounds like the field entails those particles being there. Is that right?

55:36 Daniel: I think it's more the field is the set of conditions, right? I mean, take any philosopher, take Nietzsche, you know, and he's sitting around, he's teaching his classics, and he's kind of going nuts. And all of a sudden he sort of begins thinking about things, you know, and he's sort of Oriented in this funny way. And he begins putting out the world and he's beginning to see bodies and appearances and Socrates and Jesus and things are beginning to sort of rile him and provoke him and make him literally think, just begin making connections. And there's a sort of.

Literally begins to see the world in a certain way that poses a certain set of problems here in this world. It's sort of like your quantum field there, but except that it has a kind of logic unto itself. And a lot of those logics come from things he's read from, reading Plato, from Dionysus, from just his experience at the academy with douchebags. And all these things are working together. And he's beginning to sort of participate and see a world, a set of conditions in which certain problems are posed. He begins creating concepts and all of a sudden the will to power sort of emerges from within there that to solve a kind of problem of movement and directionality or pre causality.

Right. Like things go as they go, hence the will to power. And that explains things and. And creates a kind of coherence within his world, whole set of conditions which is overladen with other people's planes. Yet his particular plane of immanence is particular, even if it's made up, is itself a network of lots of other peoples. Right. It's historical, it's cultural.

57:11 Seth: Just real quick, do we want to say his plane of immanence or do we want to say his access to the plane of immanence or his.

57:18 Daniel: I want to say his. Because it's, you know, he talks about delis, says, you know, the philosopher lays down the plane of immanence. And it's not his in terms of some sort of absolute private. It's not that.

57:28 Mark: Right. This is all communicable.

57:31 Daniel: Yes. Even if it. Parts of it are incommunicable, but it's all potentially communicable. Right. So it might be. We're reading this and it's fucking hard, but it's there. And it is the set of conditions and all the various particles and articles and their terms. So there is a kind of science in there and functions and ordinates and intensives. And within there there's a set of problems. And those problems are going to be solved by concepts and animated with conceptual Persona.

57:57 Dylan: Yeah. And so this is where I took Seth's question to be. Is that saying that it's his. Nietzsche's plane of immanence seems to conflate the distinction that Deleuze makes between conceptual Persona and planes of immanence. And concepts. I want to take the distinction between those things as important.

58:17 Daniel: Yes.

58:18 Dylan: And then not merely just reflections of new ways of talking about different ways of talking about the same thing.

58:24 Daniel: That's fair. I don't want also to be, though, that the plane of immanence precedes me. We talked earlier about the friend. If I'm the friend of the concept, just as the wood joiner's friend of the wood. I'm not making the wood. The wood precedes me. I just have a way of operating with it and my very particular way, which is my style, which is my taste, which is. I was glad it shows up that as a figure in the end of the third chapter here, the philosopher having a taste. So, yeah, it's not his in terms of either possession or his subjectivity or anything sort of humanistic like that, but it is of him.

He's participating in it. It exceeds him. It overlaps other people and other worlds, but it's his laying down. Just as the wood joiner makes. You know, I don't really know what Joyner is. I don't know if that's a carpenter. I don't. But, you know, just as Witchwater makes this thing, it's not really his. But he shaped it this way.

59:18 Mark: He has signed it.

59:19 Daniel: He signed it. Yeah. Yeah.

59:21 Dylan: I took the philosophers as making concepts and that Deleuze wants to say, well, look, the concepts are part of something. They are within this plane of immanence. They don't construct the plane of immanence, but they are embedded within this plane of immanence. And so that maybe the way into saying that the philosopher also creates a plane of immanence or that it's proper to him, is to say that in the process of constructing concepts, that they are also articulating the sieve that's the plane of immanence. The importance of the plane of immanence seems to be that it is a richer landscape than merely the concepts allow.

1:00:03 Daniel: Absolutely.

1:00:03 Dylan: That a enumeration of the concepts is not sufficient to span the plane of immanence that is proper to them. And so there is a possibility of discovery. I thought your example of Nietzsche was really good here. That within this plane that he's building up these concepts, you could discover a concept. And the question of, well, is it a discovery or is it a construction? Becomes a kind of moot point. From Deleuze's point of view, love that is that it's the same activity, but you can have the possibility of discovery that is also a construction within this plane of immanence that is of a concept. But I think that for that to be true, you can't conflate concepts with a plane of immanence. And you can't conflate the philosopher with the concept or the philosopher with the plane of immanence either. It's important because it's the source of the richness.

1:00:54 Daniel: Yep. The reason I was insisting on his part of it is it's. There are certain things that are just simply going to fall out of the purview. Now, what would Nietzsche say to this? Well, it's just not part of his world. It doesn't come up on the radar.

1:01:06 Mark: Why does Nietzsche think of Twitter?

1:01:08 Daniel: Right, right.

1:01:08 Mark: Exactly like Twitter.

1:01:09 Daniel: Exactly. It's irrelevant. I mean, it's literally not of his plane. And in that sense it's his plane. Right. It's literally what's in his purview. Everything you said I thought was really beautiful. I like that you brought it into to science. But you begin to see concept creation as a kind of operation, similar to the scientist who's looking at states of affairs that could never just be the physical world. Scientists are obviously concerned with the relationships between them, which are invisible. But there is looking at how things go together and looking for that sense, that sort of problem solving.

Like, just as the scientist sees what happens, you know, dropping the ball out of the moving train, Newton solves that problem. He sees the situation and he solves it by putting together, by creating functions. And I can see the philosopher in a similar sense, just he's not looking at states of affairs. He's looking at the plane of immanence. He's looking at this other site where there are other kinds of problems, other kinds of bodies, and a different kind of empiricism. And there's a kind of logic by which things will begin to go together and cohere.

And the manner in which they cohere and how I can make them cohere becomes a concept. So you get Descartes within the skeptical field, and he's looking at all this shit, and then all of a sudden, within this, he begins to see the body and the body that doubts. And the body that doubts is the body that thinks. And he begins to see this operation cohering and you see them map it, much as a scientist might map a set of relations. And I think that's why he's making this book in these distinctions. All right, I'll shut up.

1:02:37 Seth: You know, I'm wondering. I'm trying to. We're on the subject of the plane of immanence. But I'm going back to this idea of the concept and I'm wondering if we broadened it too much. You know, if I say, like, hey, I came up with the concept of tree and I came up with the concept of red and I came up with the concept. The examples he gives, you know, we have Platonic ideas, the Cartesian ego I or thinking thing, doubting thing, the Kant, Parmenides, the 1. They're not trivial concepts.

1:03:08 Dylan: No, they're not.

1:03:10 Seth: So I don't know whether this means anything or not. If we want to make a distinction between certain types of philosophical concepts or that's ultimately going to crash and burn if we do try. But just to be clear to the listeners, Deleuze is not entertaining the idea of conceptual creation. Like the person who came up with the word meme. Or maybe he is. Maybe that was a bad example. I'm trying to think of something that

1:03:35 Mark: seems like a philosophical concept to me.

1:03:37 Dylan: Well, wait, no, no. The concept of meme might be a concept, but a example of a meme. An instance of a meme wouldn't be a concept. I thought that's what Seth was pointing to.

1:03:45 Seth: No, I'm saying I'm trying to think of like he has a lot of bad things to say in this book about marketing and advertising.

1:03:51 Daniel: I was about to say that's the obvious example, right, that he gives. Yeah, he does say that there are lots of other people making concepts. They're just not interesting. We don't have to care about them.

1:04:01 Seth: Yeah. Like maybe the concept of a tiger who represents cereal and is so infatuated with grain based cereals that he can get children to eat them. That's a concept, I guess. The concept of Tony the Tiger.

1:04:16 Daniel: I'll humiliate myself briefly here because this is what I do for a living, right? I do brand strategy, right? And this is the language we use. We come up with the concept to come into a big company. They say this is what we're all about. I have to, in the language of the industry, conceptualize it. And what that is is sort of put it together into these set of moving parts. We are this thing that operates in this way to perform this, this function. But it's never just reductive to a function. It is, it supersedes that. Sometimes it leaps. Concept becomes an idea. We're all about love. But the best brands presumably are the concepts and that they're more specific than an idea. They are a particular kind of love. They get articulated in this way and have these parts. But I would never call in that capacity myself or any of my co workers not to offend any of them philosophers.

1:05:00 Seth: Well, it's actually, I'm glad you brought that up, Daniel, because that's sort of what I do in my line of work also, or at least it's a big part of what I do. And when we had the episode of on what is Philosophy? And we were talking about rhetoric, the, you know, the Gorgias, we were talking about rhetoric versus philosophy. And I was like, I thought the rhetoricians got a bad shake. You know, I was like, isn't pitching ideas and being persuasive important? You know, And I was kind of talking about how my experience in philosophy has made me a better product marketer.

I understand that idea of what's the concept? Although you could easily say, what's the message? Or what's the value? There are other ways you might characterize it. And I think maybe what we could do is dig into a little bit about what Deleuze says about one of these examples, whether it's Descartes or Parmenides or whoever, and then see whether or not it sounds like we could apply the same things to BMW, the ultimate driving machine.

1:05:58 Daniel: Yeah, I'm loathe to sully our conversation with. It's humiliating to me. As you know, it is a side. I remember being in a room once and a new project came in and it was like, this is a really interesting project. I think it was like, Brand Jordan. Right? It's so interesting because it's this brand, race and class within this bigger structure. And I think it's really interesting. And I was like, yeah. Have you ever read Kant's third critique? It's like, I'll give you three pages. That's really interesting. This fucking Brand Jordan. That's not interesting. It might pose certain issues to us. Yeah. It didn't go over that well with my colleagues. Insulting them.

1:06:38 Seth: Never talk philosophy with my co workers.

1:06:41 Daniel: That didn't go so well. But part of that was not totally irrelevant, Right? Because they talk about how do we assess a concept? It's not a question of error. Right. It's not a question of, oh, that really solves this problem. Well, it's. Is it interesting? Not is it true? This isn't knowledge. And there's something about that that to me, again, shifts the whole register. Right. I mean, I think about someone like Kant. I don't agree with agree. I don't even know what that would mean with a word he says that has nothing to do with my worldview in there for the most part.

But I love it. I love how convoluted it is. I love its elaborate sort of acrobatics. I see it as this exquisite sculpture. So remember when I picked up what Is Philosophy and saw their hilarious fall down funny sketch, their portrait of Kant, right. With the ox head wired for sound. I was so delighted. And I think that's, you know, you talk about Deleuze having these early books on human Kant. He just, he wants the beautiful thing. Is this beautiful? Is this interesting? This turn me on. I don't care if it's true. Right. And that's the Nietzsche in Deleuze.

Right. His book on Nietzsche, as an aside, is really, really great. It's a great introduction to Nietzsche for people who don't read Nietzsche. But it's again, this fundamentally different sort of register, this way of standing towards philosophy and concept. If we think about the philosopher as the truth seeker, this is a really different world and it's why he begins to relate it to art. How does it make you feel? What does it do for you? Does it sound cool? Is it beautiful? Is it interesting that as an approach, right. To say this concept coming up with.

For Brand Jordan, it's not that interest. Interesting. That is the realm of conceptual assessment for Deleuze and Guattari in this book.

1:08:25 Seth: Right.

1:08:26 Daniel: It's not its efficacy per se, how deftly it solves a problem. Although that might turn you on, right. Or be an aspect of what turns you on.

1:08:36 Seth: Well, I think that element has to be present because the whole purpose of philosophy and science, according to GND in this book, is to, I don't want to say impose order, but create order out of chaos or identify structures within the manifold of intuition or.

1:08:54 Daniel: Yeah, that's nice.

1:08:55 Seth: Whatever language you want to use. So as a motivation or a purpose for both science and philosophy and art for that matter, they are attempting to take chaos and put some kind of structure to it. So a concept that's created that somehow does not achieve that, I would think would be a failure in their system.

1:09:16 Daniel: Or if it's too steadfast. Right. I mean, that's the other risk. It's too close for them. The concept should really be able to traverse infinitely and have this infinite movement. But a concept that's sort of dead or bloodless or too still, too static doesn't really work for them. It's not that they're trying to overcome chaos. Again, think about their plane of immanence. That's what they See, they look out and they see chaos and it really comes from this sort of schizo world. And then how do forms begin to take shape? How do things begin to emerge amongst us? It's the smoke, the clouds.

1:09:48 Dylan: I was just going to, wanted to go back to your comment earlier. That concept for them seems to be a weightier thing than maybe we're used to tossing around in general. I mean the examples that he gives when he talks about Plato for instance, are the one and the idea. Those are, you know, gold plated concepts or whatever you want to call.

1:10:10 Mark: Right.

1:10:10 Dylan: You know, those aren't, they're remarkable.

1:10:13 Mark: Earlier in the chapter, the beginning of chapter one, I think he even covers, I mean of course he's going to talk about the big philosophical concepts as his examples because that's the point is analyzing how people do philosophy. But right at the beginning of the chapter he says even so called universals as ultimate concepts must escape the chaos by circumscribing a universe that explains them them. Contemplation, reflection, communication. So even something like Red isn't a simple concept. And we're kind of having to make this up if we're going to talk about this.

But we see it as, oh, I'm just reporting experience. But he says even that is assuming some sort of, I would guess a general metaphysical structure like the subject object connection. And the fact that we're talking about red as something that can be isolated from these things and found in different things, that there's a whole structure there. So any concept, even a seemingly ultimately simple concept like Red is in fact complex. It's not complex in a very interesting way.

1:11:14 Dylan: Every entity isn't a concept. We're not going to conflate every kind of thing, every distinction we make in the world and say that every distinction is an example of a concept. Are we, or are we going to just say that every kind of distinction that we make is a conceptual distinction?

1:11:29 Mark: Yes, I think if you can name it and point to something else, I mean I can point to you know, even like a little crack in the sidewalk. Obviously there's no name for that particular kind of crack, but the fact that it's a crack at all means it is a general concept in the way that we ordinarily think of the term. And technically I think according to the way this book lays out things, even such concepts of that are complex, they're just not complex in a very interesting way. The ones that are interesting are like Descartes cogito, which are, I guess, let's give that. Unless you want to keep going on this.

1:12:01 Daniel: I think, you know, it might be an interesting exercise and we can say no. But I like the figure you just used actually of the crack in the pavement. If you look at it right, because you can picture the artist's reaction. I know. I love the old pavement, the rocks in it and seeing the cracks in it and the way trees break through it is incredibly beautiful. There's something just affectively sort of interesting from an artist's perspective, and it's the world making this beautiful thing. From a scientific perspective, I could probably explain it and give a whole series of functions, right, of weight and mass and the roots and the give and the sort of elasticity of various components.

Question is, what would the philosopher do? What is the philosopher's relationship to that crack? Is it in naming it a crack that he's created the concept, the concept of crack? Is it that this crack is actually figuring within a different system? And as his concept is actually, you know, the fray. And the fray for him is that things give way. It is the nature of things such that they give way.

1:12:58 Mark: Or even just more simply that if you're going to call it a philosophical concept or involve philosophical concepts at all, and is not purely just a keeping track of things that look like that in the way we were saying that scientific concepts are so poverty stricken, then you are making up, say a physicalist ontology to go with it and saying this is a crack in a physical substance that not only has a certain solidity, but just making some sort of metaphysical claim about it. And that's what makes it a philosophical concept insofar as crack participates in physical object. Physical object is the concept.

1:13:32 Daniel: We keep coming back to this in a sort of secret way, right? Which is what the hell is a concept?

1:13:36 Mark: Can we read his quotes? Let's read some definitions.

1:13:38 Daniel: I know, but it's very. They're very empirical, they're very descriptive that we know. Concepts do all these different things. They have these different parts, they're a multiplicity. These parts relate to each other. They hedge all chaos there.

1:13:49 Seth: They're functional.

1:13:50 Daniel: They are functional. They're functional within the plane of immanence as problem solving.

1:13:55 Mark: This is page 21. The concept is defined by the inseparability of a finite number of heterogeneous components. So we just say they're multiple, traversed by a point of absolute survey at infinite speed. I really didn't know exactly what to make of this speed thing. This is an image that he uses throughout other than just I Can fit the whole thing in my head at once. It's not such a complex thing that I can't survey it in a glance. Is that all that means?

1:14:23 Seth: Yeah.

1:14:23 Daniel: But speed. I think it means something slightly different. I think he's talking about. Taunted me a little bit too, because I'm trying to figure out what he means. It's a figure he uses a lot, the speed of thought. But then I think about the speed of thought. The speed of thought is so ridiculously fast. Not the speed of understanding, which often is laboriously slow, but the speed of thought itself. Of the connection of that sort of what's happening when you're sitting there thinking. You actually think it's. It literally is infinitely fast. Much faster than the speed of light.

1:14:52 Dylan: That's just crazy.

1:14:54 Unknown speaker: What do you mean?

1:14:56 Dylan: He can't possibly mean infinite in an ordinary sense of time. In the ordinary sense of what we would think of extension being gigantic. It's infinite in the sense of being uncountable.

1:15:07 Daniel: Yes. And of always happening, of continuing to happen. It's never going to stop. It's not static. And hence will always be infinite in some sense.

1:15:15 Dylan: But infinite is.

1:15:16 Mark: Well, don't get stuck on it. Say it's a Heideggerian, subjective Bergsonian account of time. And it doesn't matter. It's infinite as far as we can tell.

1:15:26 Dylan: But speed here. Well, I didn't think it was anything different than change.

1:15:31 Daniel: No, but I think that's sort of what I was just saying. It's the event happening.

1:15:35 Seth: Let's not lose sight of the fact that we're trying to understand what he means by concept here.

1:15:39 Dylan: Yes, thank you. Thank you.

1:15:40 Daniel: So there's a bunch of stuff through which there's a kind of movement. A movement amongst the parts.

1:15:45 Seth: I think all of this is just language to try to describe the idea that a concept is something that functions in thought and is, let's call it, applicable to experience in a kind of instantaneous and pre deliberative way that when concepts come into play in your consciousness, you don't have to apply them to the world. You experience the things as falling under these concepts and it's just instantaneous. It's part of your experience. I think that's all we need to say.

1:16:21 Mark: That includes high level philosophical concepts. So once you get the idea of the cogito in your head, then you experience things that way?

1:16:28 Daniel: No, no, because it's not that direct correlation.

1:16:30 Seth: I was talking about the boring, uninteresting concepts. Sorry, no, no.

1:16:34 Daniel: But even the cogito you do experience the cogito. It doesn't. You experience the life within the logic that the Kojito would inaugurate.

1:16:41 Seth: Well, actually, my argument in many previous podcasts has been that we actually don't experience not just the cogito, but also the transcendental ego and the whole mind body distinction. I mean, all kinds of things that are philosophical concepts never play out in reality. And that's why I got seduced by phenomenology in graduate school.

1:16:59 Daniel: I'm with you 100% in my reading of the Luis V. Ferris comes really through Merleau-Ponty and vice versa. To me, reading Kant and going to Matthew Ritchie, the painter. Right. Going to a Matthew Ritchie show, they're very similar experiences. For me. There is the experience of Kant, there is the experience of Descartes, who. The cogito is an experience doesn't mean it affects material life one to one, as if it's determinative. But I don't think that's the role the concept has for Deleuze and Guattari. Right. I think that's the old version of the concept as this determinative thing. Right. It's somehow the legislator from on high. That's the Platonic idea. It's the thing that imbues the world with its truth somehow. But for these guys, that's not what it is. This is at the root of his

1:17:45 Dylan: distinction between philosophy and science in which he wants to say, a concept is not a proposition. And this way of talking about it was helpful to me to understand the distinction he's trying to make about a concept. One place that he does this is on page 22 and 23. He says the concept is not discursive and philosophy is not a discursive formation because it does not link propositions together. Confusing concept and proposition produces a belief in the existence of scientific concepts and a view of the propositions as a genuine intension what the sentence expresses.

Consequently, the philosophical concept usually appears only as a proposition deprived of sense. This confusion reigns in logic and explains its infantile idea of philosophy. Concepts are measured against a philosophical grammar that replaces them with propositions extracted from the sentences in which they appear. We are constantly trapped between alternative propositions who do not see that the concept has already passed into the excluded middle. So there he's characterizing analytic philosophy.

1:18:53 Daniel: Yeah, I was going to say this is a not subtle bash. Yeah.

1:18:56 Dylan: So then he continues, the concept is not a proposition at all. It is not propositional, and the proposition is never an intension. Propositions are defined by Their reference, which concerns not the event, but the relationship with a state of affairs or body. And with the conditions of this relationship. And this distinction that he wants to make that a concept is not about reference. I think it's central to understanding what he means by a concept. So he continues, far from constituting an intension, these conditions are entirely extensional.

They imply operations by which abscissas or successive linearizations are formed that force intensive ordinates into spatiotemporal and energetic coordinates by which the sets so determined are made to correspond to each other. So there you get a sense of how he speaks gobbledygook. And then these successions and correspondences define discursiveness in extensive systems. The independence of variables, variables in propositions is opposed to the inseparability of variations in the concept. So the concept is bringing together things, whereas in propositions it's taking apart things and finished to the end of where I wanted to go.

Concepts which have only consistency or intensive ordinates outside of any coordinates freely enter into relationships of non discursive resonance. Either because the components of one become concepts with other heterogeneous components, or because there's no difference of scale between them at any level. Concepts are centers of vibrations, each in itself and every one in relation to all the others. So this idea that a concept is a center of vibration, a center of activity, a resonance, it's a coming together. And in that way it's opposed to the notion of a proposition in his mind, which would be a successive bifurcation one after the other.

So the idea of drilling down in that way, and a notion of an axiomatic philosophy. He thinks those philosophers have just missed the boat of understanding what the activity of philosophy is.

1:21:04 Daniel: Right. I like this. In the center of vibration, it's this coming together, but it's an operation of coming together. It is itself an event. And again you go back to there, his example of the cogito and his whole little mapping. It is the succession of things that are cohering according to a logic. Right? Again, much as a scientist might create a function to explain the crack in the pavement or why the ball moves when you drop it outside of a moving train. It is this moving thing, right? So it's an event that's constantly happening within that plane of immanence to sort of explain your problem and maybe create new ones. But it is this field of coherence that's not a set thing, but is an event. It's an action as a process.

1:21:42 Mark: So he describes the components of a Concept as intensively related, which means that you can't pick them apart without losing the whole concept. Concept. In the case of the. The cogito, it has three components. Doubting, thinking and being. The complete statement of the concept qua multiplicity is I think, therefore I am, or more completely, myself who doubts I think I am. I am a thinking thing. According to Descartes, the cogito is the always renewed event of thought. We often read that as an argument. You know, there is thinking, so there's the concept of thinking. We all understand what that is, and therefore there must be something that thinks. Okay, so how does that then make the concept has the thinking, in fact, doubting. Right. Doubting is just a type of thinking, so you don't even really need the doubting in there. You could just use the shorter formulation.

1:22:31 Daniel: Yeah, but that's important. Doubting is important. Right, because it comes back again to the conceptual Persona and the world that a philosopher creates. Right. And so they come. The fact that begins with the doubter is everything. Can you imagine Descartes without the doubting? He gets to the thinking from the doubting. But there are other ways he could have gotten to the thinking. Right, which is what Kant does. Kant doesn't have the doubting the way Descartes does.

1:22:54 Mark: I guess the idea is once you rip a concept apart from a system, then it's dead. And so it's no wonder that people just look at. Really, you think mind and body are ontologically different things. That division only makes sense according to D and G. When you start with Descartes starting point, when you're on the same plane of immanence that he's on,

1:23:19 Daniel: the logic is imminent to their worldview. The condition of the relationship between philosophers for him, for them is often the difference. They're often incommensurable. They're different worlds. Their questions simply don't apply. Yes.

1:23:32 Mark: So it's not even the same concept.

1:23:35 Seth: Right, Right.

1:23:36 Mark: That's why discussion is problematic, because I think we're using the same concept, we're defining it in the same way. I'm talking about what an incorporeal thing that is grounded only by the fact that I'm experiencing. Thought you could agree with my words. And still if somehow we're not coming from the same perspective in a larger sense of the plane of immanence, then the point is not going to be communicated. You're not going to be talking about the same concept at all. Yeah, that's wacky.

1:24:05 Unknown speaker: It's funny.

1:24:06 Daniel: It's One thing I actually thought about the quote he had me in here about. Discussions has always been a seminal part of my life and really informed my own pedagogy, how I taught for a long time. And I used to tell my students, don't ask me questions. I mean, you can ask me questions if you don't understand, but this is not a discussion. All I ask, don't disagree with me. Just understand what the I'm saying. And they used to say, well, you're so conceited, you think you know things. I'm like, well, first of all, I'm your professor. Of course I think I know things you don't know students these days.

But I was more. I was like, no, no, you don't have to agree with me. You can leave the room and say, that guy's full of shit, that I don't care. Just listen to what I'm saying and try to understand. See this worldview, see the plane of immanence I'm trying to lay out for you, and then see if you can play and participate and create concepts and stretch the plane into other places. And then it made me think about what we're doing right here, right now. Right. The four of us. Right. What are the terms of it? But I always found grad seminars, they were so hard because everybody.

People like to argue, and there's a tone. There's often a hostile, argumentative tone. I never understood because, like, we're not even talking about the same thing. I don't understand what everybody's getting so upset about.

1:25:16 Seth: In your grad seminars, there was a hostile, argumentative tone. Yeah.

1:25:19 Daniel: Did you guys have arguments? There was always these arguments, and people get very upset and.

1:25:24 Mark: No, not at the graduate level. I didn't find that very much at all.

1:25:27 Seth: Well, you were in rhetoric. Well, this softness.

1:25:30 Daniel: True.

1:25:31 Mark: It's not quite the same thing.

1:25:33 Seth: It's just too damn hot in Texas to get worked up about anything.

1:25:36 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:25:37 Mark: And that's one of the preconceptions people have about philosophers, that we are like debaters or something. When once you get. You just get humbled by philosophy very quickly. You know, on this podcast, occasionally we will find something to argue about and the other person is just being blind and not understanding the reading correctly or something. But for the most part, it would be very hard to maintain a hostile tone in the face of this book. Book. Right. Can you really. The difficulty in just understanding this book is such that we need to cooperate as much as possible.

1:26:08 Daniel: Well, I like that vision of cooperation in understanding. It's really interesting.

1:26:12 Mark: And that's the same with almost any issue. It's only when you think you've mastered it, then you take this attack tone of people that don't get the point that you think you have or the opposite.

1:26:22 Daniel: Right, or you never got.

1:26:23 Seth: It's not just when you think you've mastered it, it's when you think that, that the very fact of being right is something that's of critical importance, that you share it with everybody else. This is the way I think of proselytic religions and logos and there's this compulsion to impose your truth or your attachment to a specific piece of the truth on other people. And just as legitimate a response would be to say like, well, I tried to explain it to this person and they didn't get it and they're deluded and that's cool, that's not my problem.

Right? But that's not the way things play out because people are attached to the idea of being right and having other people recognize that they're right, which is a very ego thing. That kind of raised a question for me about what makes a concept take hold in the broader context and what determines whether of two competing concepts, one is successful. Because the way it's laid out here, it's kind of a very Hegelian progression where the plane of immanence is boiling and bubbling under the surface. And there are these hyper aware philosophical types who get into the right vibe, I mean, the right tune, they're vibrating at the same frequency, if you will, and they're able to receive whatever would be constitutive of a concept and create it and then, then share it with the world.

But it's almost like he's suggesting that there are these concepts waiting to be born and they're just looking for conduits to get out there. And there's no friction in the process around how an idea gets promulgated or supported or marketed for that matter. And I was just curious if that was an issue for anybody else or if it was just me.

1:28:10 Daniel: What is the issue? That it just seems too easy or too naturalistic.

1:28:14 Seth: He's trying to describe a sphere of influence, a way in which philosophy brings order out of chaos or structure to chaos. Here's philosophy, here's science, here's art. In the case of philosophy, philosophy creates concepts, science creates functions, and art creates. What was it again?

1:28:33 Daniel: Percepts and affects.

1:28:34 Seth: Percepts and affects. Okay, so in art you can have contradictory, differing and conflicting percepts and affects, and there's no consequence to that, you don't put a Pollock and a Twombly next to each other and decide which one is correct or right. In the case of science, there's a mechanism for determining whether a function is correct or incorrect, false or not false, descriptive or not descriptive. In philosophy, what is a mechanism by which concepts take root and how conflicting concepts. Idealism versus realism, or are there primary or secondary attributes or not? Are there atomic facts or aren't there atomic facts or states of affairs, those sorts of things? What's the mechanism? Is it pragmatic? There's an implied utility to the creation of concepts in the philosophical world. And is the value of a concept related to its utility or. Or its longevity?

1:29:35 Mark: That's partly where he describes taste.

1:29:37 Daniel: Yeah, yeah.

1:29:38 Mark: Which I think taste is what judges whether the concept fits or is interesting on the plane.

1:29:45 Daniel: Yes.

1:29:45 Mark: And then it's a separate question whether the plane itself is something you. So here on page 59, he says, is there a best plane that would not hand over immanence to something, would no longer mimic anything transcendent? We will say the plane of immanence is at the same time that which must be thought and that which cannot be thought. It is the non thought within thought. It is the base of all planes, imminent to every thinkable plane that does not succeed in thinking it. It is the most intimate within thought and yet the absolute outside. An outside more distant than any external world because it is an inside, deeper than any internal world. It is immanence.

1:30:20 Seth: Were you quoting that to try to answer my question? Because if you were, I don't understand what you're saying.

1:30:26 Mark: I was. I was trying to say that a plane of immanence is a bunch of unarticulated intuitions. Surely there's a way of saying look, but your unarticulated intuitions are all bullshit because you're a 15th century peasant or whatever, compared to mine now, which are so much more informed by my greater knowledge of the world. You could make some sort of. From an ahistorical perspective, or from your current perspective, you could make some judgment of past planes and say this is why that concepts that were created for those 15th century folks don't seem to apply now because they are just based on a plane that is impoverished and silly.

I compare this to this pragmatic notion of truth, that in our whole William James discussion, truth was not something that was transcendent, it was something that is imminent within inquiry itself. Whenever you say I didn't know that and now I know it, that my knowledge has improved. The only way you could say that is according to a pragmatist, because of some pragmatic reason, I didn't know whether there was a snake in that ditch or not. And then I looked and I found that there in fact was a snake there. And so I, you know, there's some advantages to that.

And from that, that's enough for you to abstract and come up with the idea of absolute truth, something like that. So in the same way, yes, there are differences in quality between planes of immanence. We experience them. And so inherent, imminent in any plane is the idea of the plane. The best plane, something, thing. The infinite is wrapped up in that as well. If you're asking why these things catch on, I'm trying to answer part of that question as to why one would judge a philosophy to be particularly effective and why it would spread, why it would promulgate, is because the plane of immanence from which the thing emerged, and we do have to clarify that it's not just that the concepts emerge from it.

It is a creative act, that the plane does not entail the concepts. It takes the philosopher to go in there. It really does matter. It's not Hegelian. It's not that just any philosopher would have come along and come up with this. It is an honestly creative act. But once you've done that, if it addresses particularly well, according to the prevalent taste, the plane that is a widely shared plane among the intellectuals of the time, it captures the zeitgeist, then it would spread.

1:32:47 Daniel: Is the question why something becomes popular? Or is it the question that they sort of keep coming back to is how do I assess one concept vis a vis another, even if no one's heard of it? I'm not quite sure what we're trying to address right now because there seem two very different questions. And the question of why something becomes popular, I thought, mark, that was great. But it seems like that raises so many freaking questions that I wouldn't even know how to answer, even want to begin to try to answer, as opposed to how do I assess concepts, Assess the Kantian versus the Cartesian eye versus the Nietzschean I versus that. Right. And what are those possible criteria in

1:33:20 Seth: the case of me posing the question? I'm not smart enough to have made that distinction. So I was asking both of them. Them.

1:33:26 Daniel: Okay, fair enough.

1:33:28 Dylan: Seth, you were brilliant enough not to make the distinction.

1:33:32 Daniel: But I think there is. I mean, we talked about art. He said, well, I could just put these two things together. But let's say I put Jackson Pollock next to some sort of, let's say even the Mona Lisa, right? These are two very different, fundamentally different worldviews. You know, one's privileging the hand, one privileging the eye. One is the event, one is the thing. They're incongruous, but they can exist side by side because I as their point of consumption and capable of containing multitudes, right? I can look at different things and enjoy them in different ways.

Same concepts, right? So I can take up this or that notion of the Kantianae and this notion of the Cartesian, this is the Nietzsche, and I can put them together and make an assemblage of pastiche. Or say, I like this and don't like that. To me it's not that different. And that's why D and G use taste. It's a matter of taste. And they say is the concept interesting, remarkable. And the most complicated word they use is important.

1:34:25 Dylan: I think the use of their word important belies a lurking issue. And I think Mark brought this up earlier. Even if we are talking about different sorts of things and if we were coming at it from different points of view, and even if we would want to say that, well, this particular set of concepts is they bounce off one another and they kind of line up with one another. Might not be merely progressive in that philosophy is constantly getting closer and closer and closer. The truth or anything like that. And they might be real differences nevertheless, that there's something they're all talking about, that they are different takes on a one thing that's out there, something in common.

And if they're not, if they don't have much really at the end to do with each other at all, then you are kind of left with sort of, ah, what's the point? I mean, if it really is just like a jumble of different paintings or different songs on a record or something, or different bands that don't have any relationship to one another. It's at least the conceit of the history of philosophy. The conceit is stronger than that. And I think that when they want to say that, well, if the distinction is important enough, they're even belieing the fact that they buy some of that as well.

That they want to allow for this multiplicity and this kind of groovy intersection of all different kinds of planes. And I think the. The notion of a plane of immanence is actually pretty provocative and useful. But that you would say that there are not important distinctions to be made between them and they aren't somehow intending to speak to one another or possible to translate into one another.

1:36:08 Daniel: It makes you wonder why I think the important. It's not a question of translatability. All talking about the same thing. When I was talking about works of art, I mean, you know, Jackson Pollock changed my life, right? It's a whole fundamentally different way of going. A redistribution of sense, body, mind and thing, right? So I was not trying to be reductive at all. On the contrary. And when they say important, one thing, they come back to a bunch is that changing the image of thought, you change the way what it means to think and be a thinking being in the world.

And when they use important, that word is weird to me because it sounds moral or something, but like, resonance is a word I might use, right? But that it fundamentally shifts. So when I read this book, they fundamentally change how I could think about and talk about the very doing of philosophy that is un freaking real. That is a whole reorientation of everything I'm doing and how I think about myself. And I think for art, it's the same thing. For science, it's the same thing. These things that are important, and there's the. The trivial crap, this concept for the Brand Jordan.

But then there are the things that really resonate and change your image of thought.

1:37:19 Mark: And just to clarify for the listeners. So that's one of the definitions that they give of what the plane of immanence is, is an image of thought.

1:37:27 Daniel: That's a figure that runs all through Deleuze, right? Difference, repetition. His first book, right? There's a whole chapter, right? And it's. And I love that, like, what is thought? And in this book, it taught me that artists are thinking, right? That they don't have to be conceptual. I taught MFAs critical theory seminars for years at the SF Art Institute here. They were so used to thinking about making art. That was the application of a theory. I was like, no, these are encounters here. If I show you the work of Van Gogh, and this is a painting class, he's teaching you some things, some ways of going with paint, with color, relationship between the artist and the world and the canvas.

I'll show you Pollock. It's a fundamentally different one. It's the same when I give you Kant, or I give you Deleuze, or I give you Merleau Ponty, it's an engagement. Here's a way of going in the world of distributing sense and bodies and the relationship between words and language and readers. And there's so much happening There. And I think that's what interests them. And it's again what I love. And maybe I sounded too dismissive saying I love concrete because it's beautiful. But that to me is hugely resonant, right? I mean, I have the concepts of the beautiful, which is my.

One of my favorite pieces of philosophy. The moves he makes, right? It's like following a martial arts master and just trying to follow their moves. And I can never move like that, but I like watching the moves and trying to make my body move that way. And it's awkward and I don't look very good doing it. But there's a kind of incredible re shifting of what my body body can do when I follow those moves. And that's what it is when I read that and think those things.

1:39:00 Mark: So giving a good example here or an illustration of how a philosophy as a set of concepts attached to a conceptual Persona who sort of gives life to it. And we gave one example of Descartes as the doubter or the idiot, as it's called. And then the concept of the cogito that comes out of that. So you could see that there's something different of seeing things through Descartes eyes by understanding his movement in the Meditations, that's different than just. He's given us a new set of propositions that I'm evaluating and I find true. I want to go back to the difference between a concept and a proposition.

So Dylan quoted an extensive passage. There's Another passage, page 79, right at the end of the section that we read for today. Little is gained by saying that philosophy asks questions because question is merely a word for problems that are irreducible to those of science. Since concepts are not propositional, they cannot refer to problems concerning the extensional conditions of propositions assimilable to those of science. If all the same, we continue to translate the philosophical concept into propositions, this can only be in the form of more or less plausible opinions without scientific value.

Philosophy must therefore extract from opinions a knowledge that transforms them, but that is also distinct from science. The philosophical problem thus consists in finding in each case the instance that is able to gauge the truth value of opposable opinions, either by selecting some as more wise than the others or by fixing their respective share of the truth. Such was always the meaning of what is called dialectic. And that reduces philosophy to interminable discussion. I found that very provocative. If you try to turn, you try to say, oh, what is Descartes really saying?

So there are two approaches to Descartes again, you could try to sort of see through his eyes and figure out what he considered a problem and how this is a relation to the problem. Or you can just pull out, what is he really saying? And this is the way that we normally do it in analytic philosophy. Oh, well, he's making the claim that everything is dubitable. Okay, well, that is a pretty dubitable thing right there. That's a point at which a lot of people critique Descartes. You're also saying that, well, the only thing that I can't doubt is the contents of my own mind.

Well, look at a more modern conception or even Spinoza's conception of mind. No, your mind is not actually transparent to you. Okay, well, given that I do have mental activity, that must prove that there is a self that is having this. Well, no, that's this sort of subject predicate logic that we're approaching. So every time you try to pull out. And it's not just because Descartes is obsolete or a shitty philosopher or something, but I think that Deleuze is going to say that this is going to be true maybe of anybody that you consider this way.

This is why scientism exists, because you pull off philosophical claims and try to evaluate them scientifically. It either becomes, well, say Freud, to use another example, he was either doing very poor science, right? He didn't use controls. He was doing a lot of speculation. And, you know, it's an interesting idea, but it's not borne out by the evidence that that's the way scientists end up condemning philosophers and dismissing all of philosophy. That is, it's either proto scientific or it's meaningless, worthless. So that approach to philosophy is not a fruitful one.

D and G are saying we need to take the artistic one of how is seeing through this person's eyes transform things. That is supposed to have a value above and beyond the practical applicability of the particular claim.

1:42:36 Dylan: And I think part of that import is that it's a solution. The part I'm thinking of is just after what you read. Mark is on the bottom of page 80.

1:42:45 Mark: I always stop the quotes because they've already gone on for half a page. But then the good thing is right after.

1:42:50 Dylan: No, that's okay.

1:42:52 Daniel: There's a metaphor there somewhere.

1:42:54 Dylan: Yeah. So he says the concept is indeed a solution, but the problem to which it corresponds lies in its intensional conditions of consistency and not, as in science, in the conditions of reference of extensional propositions. If the concept is a solution, the conditions of the philosophical problem are found in the plane of immanence presupposed by the concept. And the unknowns of the problem are found in the conceptual personae that it calls up. A concept like knowledge has meaning only in relation to an image of thought to which it refers and to a conceptual Persona that it needs.

Needs. A different image and a different Persona call for other concepts. Belief, for example, and the investigator. A solution has no meaning independently of a problem to be determined in its conditions and unknowns. But these conditions and unknowns have no meaning independently of solutions determinable as concepts.

1:43:50 Daniel: Yeah, that's imminence.

1:43:52 Mark: We better make sure we really hit that hard. Because it sounds like from a lot of what we've said here that, oh, any philosophy is just fine.

1:43:59 Daniel: No, we're not.

1:44:00 Mark: But no, the whole formulation of this as plane of immanence is a way of ruling out all religious philosophy. It's a way of ruling out Plato. It's a way of ruling out. He doesn't even like, yo, sure, I buy this. I don't think that we should posit that a thing in itself, you know, has to be causing the objects of our experience. Let's just talk about the objects of our experience in the way that I was saying William James does, or Hegel does, or as the world of experience is the world. So on that view, the only sense to make of the word objectivity is intersubjectivity, right?

We both say that that stone is there because we can both go and look at the stone and kick it around, and it, you know, it makes sense whether it really exists, whether there's a transcendent stone that is thereby showing up to both of us becomes for a lot of philosophers post Kant, a meaningless question. So that's the first step toward immanence. However, a big thing in our phenomenology episodes, say, for Husserl, was that you find in the realm of the imminent, you find that it can encompass the transcendent. The way I described this in the Husserl episode was if I say, see that stone, the stone appears to me as having an indefinite, infinite, maybe number of unseen aspects.

So the stone actually appears as a transcendent. Even though I'm not saying there's a thing in itself or whatever that's causing my appearance, I'm saying that I can turn it all around and I expect there will be other things there. I can break it apart. The fact is that Deleuze even objects to that kind of transcendence. He doesn't want any transcendence to come into the plane of the imminent at all. I'm not sure I completely get why that is a improper transcendence and why I guess Sartre's version or Deleuze's version is superior to that.

1:45:50 Daniel: There is that great moment though, where he talks about Sartre as being okay, right, because it's. This is the Nietzsche that runs through here, right? Is that, first of all, this is a radically critical book. It's not we all get along and hold hands. It's a little nasty. And his radical aversion to transcendence, the distinction between the inside and the outside will disappear. That's his aversion, right? That there'd be some term outside that would somehow be determinative. It's why he takes up in his example Plato's idea, as in a concept, because it seems like the one thing that shouldn't be a concept, it's somehow outside or pre concept or.

And he's like, no, no, it's still the very notion of the idea is itself this concept. And that's the Nietzschean move, right? Giving a genealogy to morality, right? Giving a history to those things we imagine as transcendent and showing them embedded in the flux and flow of life. Not material life per se necessarily, but phenomenological life.

1:46:44 Mark: So even the distinction I was making before between states of affairs as being physical things going on that sciences and then this Fregean realm of sense, they're actually one and the same thing. And I think this can be best explained by Deleuze's worshiping of Spinoza, that for Spinoza, mind and body are ultimately the same thing. They are different aspects of a single thing. So you might say that the plane of immanence encompasses even physical objects, right? Because we said even when you talk about physical objects, you're talking about them conceptually, right?

So if I say stone again, this is the kind of thing our language is made, has built into it this distinction between the things and then the ideas about the things that's built into the language. And so that's why this is so hard to read in the way that many other post Kantian philosophers are difficult to read. Why they make up their own languages? Because they're trying to convey that somehow, no, it's not an idea in your head, it is objective, but yet it has a lot of the characteristics that we've associated with these fregian senses, with these free floating, what Frege considered an idea as opposed to the thing.

So there's nothing outside the plane of immanence that's the point. That's nothing else. It's an imminence. I mean, there are other planes of immanence because those are other sort of social bodies of intuitions and blah, blah, blah, but the intuitions themselves. That's why my description of the plane of immanence as intuitions is also misleading, because that makes it sound like it's in somebody's head. But as I've been trying to say, they're not in one person's head. It's the whole. The social take on the environment and the environment itself.

There's no meaningful distinction to be made. There's no ultimate distinction, I should say, to be made between them. Yeah, they're meaningful. There are points of concept that I can say this idea stands for this physical thing that makes sense in a particular situation, but it's not part of the ontology. Somehow all this stuff has to be stuck into the plane.

1:48:49 Daniel: Yes.

1:48:50 Mark: I find this one of the most difficult things to get my head around.

1:48:53 Dylan: This is the part that I think is right at the center of why I found it appealing was the absence of transcendence.

1:49:01 Daniel: When Deleuze died, somebody sent me all the obits that were in the Parisian newspapers. And Derridaz is hilarious because he's going on and on, and then finally he's like, but I gotta tell you, I have no idea. And I don't think anyone knows what the hell he meant by imminence. I don't know what a plane of immanence is. And that's the end of his eulogy.

1:49:22 Mark: Right. If Wes were on here, like in our Pragmatism episode, he would bring up the Kantian point. Right. Why does Kantian believe in a thing in itself? Because you need a transcendent to explain why you and I both supposedly perceive the same thing, even if it's an idea. Even if you're Berkeley and you think that the nature of material objects is that they're all ideas in God's mind, that's still a transcendent something. It is beyond my view of the stone and your view of the stone. Deleuze is just simply going to deny, and I think in common with Hegel and many other people before him, are just going to deny that you need the transcendent to explain intersubjective agreement. Intersubjective agreement is what? It's just a brute fact. It is what defines the plane in the first place. Something like that.

1:50:10 Daniel: Yeah, I think that's right. And it's a funny refrain you've had of the intersubjective. It's clearly like in your plane of immanence, that is a prominent problem. Even posing that as a problem is funny for me because I'm like, well, is that a problem? Right. From the phenomenological perspective, it's not necessarily a problem at all. Right. We're all just shooting off each other and pushing into each other. Might or might not be. What I love about this, and again, I think it is this Nietzschean thing, is that there's, you know, his whole passage on there's nothing.

It's not imminent to. There's no two. There's nothing on the other side of that preposition. It's this stuff, this world and nothing but it. That's Nietzschean. I mean, it's Nietzschean life with a capital L. Right. And that was one of Nietzsche's great metaphysics. Right. Is this concept of life as all this, this ness of all this. And, yeah, that is very much part of their agenda. And I think the moment it becomes transcendent, he wants to call that religion as opposed to philosophy.

1:51:03 Mark: Yeah, well, and that's the diversion, right? Even though he says Spinoza is so great, partly for the reason that I just laid out is because he gave us a model of monism, of not having the decision. But the reason, the way that Spinoza makes these, the physical and the mental, is that they somehow inhere in the same transcendent underlying substance, which is God. So he likes the imminent part of Spinoza. He likes the practical consequence of what this means for how you deal with your emotions and art and all that kind of stuff. But he doesn't actually like Spinoza's metaphysics.

1:51:36 Daniel: That may be one of the great sort of lessons of this or pedagogies of this book, is that you can, as you lay out a plane of immanence as a philosopher, you cut across different things, you know, and you take up some people's problems and you don't other aspects of them. And it's sort of the, you know, again, I come back to the hippie dippy stuff. But it is this kind of openness, right, to just sort of like, take shit out that we don't have to keep pounding over the same old questions. I can. There's a sort of freedom to sort of take things up and arrange them in various sort of different configurations.

1:52:08 Mark: I think what distinguishes openness and hippie dippiness in any intellectual pursuit like this is the hippie dippy will say in advance, whatever you say is going to be fine.

1:52:19 Daniel: Right, Right.

1:52:19 Mark: Whereas the person that's simply open. Open is going to say, I'm willing to try out any of these things. I'm willing to test them. You might look at it and say, this is boring or this is completely conceptually incoherent. You could be a completely hugely judgmental person and still be open to new things.

1:52:38 Daniel: I think that's Nietzsche.

1:52:39 Mark: Yes.

1:52:40 Daniel: But it is, right? Because you have to have. At some point you got to hone your instinct for those things that make you worse, those things that make you sick. I don't got to eat a fucking funny Funyun to know I don't want it. Right. That doesn't make me close minded. I don't want a Funyun. It's not gonna make me feel good. I'm gonna be burping that all day. I don't need a cheese doodle. Right. My instincts have gotten good enough at this point that I can say no to things. Which for Nietzsche is the affirmation. Right. Of what I am and who I am. Yeah. This is not a hippie dippy book. There is a will to multiplicity and a will to non transcendence and the worldliness and to the complexity of it. But it's not everybody getting along by any means.

1:53:15 Mark: All right, we have recorded for a long time now. Are there main factual things about these three chapters?

1:53:22 Dylan: I think we did pretty good. Pretty good.

1:53:24 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:53:24 Daniel: I'm impressed.

1:53:25 Mark: Are you satisfied, Seth, having not read all the way to the end? Do you feel like you understand what a conceptual Persona is and that kind of stuff?

1:53:32 Seth: Well, I'll say this much as I have run out of time prepping for this and I was trying to just hit up some. Some explicative sources on the interwebs just to kind of some expletive sources. Explicative. I think we did a much better job of talking through some of these things than some of the things that I read go us. It's the same symptom that you get with all philosophers where you go to read somebody who's trying to explain and they end up just using the same language and the same terminology in the same style. I could read you examples without citing the sources.

This is two sentences. Deleuze and Guattaris. Deleuze and Guattaries. Undertaking here is quite simple to define philosophy and delimit its scope and responsibilities. Along the way they will radically re envision in relation to territory and de- and reterritorializations that pre philosophical image of thought so sharply criticized in Dr.

1:54:46 Daniel: So yeah, that's awesome. That's beautiful.

1:54:48 Mark: Oh, my God.

1:54:49 Seth: It started off promising.

1:54:51 Dylan: It did. The first sentence was. Sounded good.

1:54:54 Seth: Yeah. So that was kind of my experience in trying to get some conceptual background. I got a lot of help from some class notes from a college. I guess they'd started a blog and students were kind of hashing out ideas together. And it helped me understand some stuff. But I just gotta say, I mean, in short, I had a really hard time with this book. But I was buoyed by Dylan's enthusiasm when we had spoken over the last couple weeks. And I kept looking for the anchor. And I had a hard time time finding the anchor. I think what I needed for this was maybe a think. And that would have helped me tremendously. And then I could have come back to it, but I really struggled. And maybe I'll go back and revisit it since I bought the book.

1:55:38 Mark: But I'll have to say, on behalf of some of the not school people that were studying this, if I didn't bring this name in, they would be very mad at me. Manuel delanda is like the big secondary.

1:55:50 Daniel: He's very good. You can look up his YouTube videos. He's very charismatic. He's a cool dude. Mood.

1:55:54 Mark: So we'll put some of that on the site also.

1:55:56 Daniel: It just really is just an aside. Chapter seven, the chapter on art, Percept, affect, Concept is one I taught a lot to undergraduates. And it's not easy, but they could get it. And it was sort of a nice, you know, so I'm not talking about art. It just. There's more of these little material examples that just seem easier to sink your teeth into. But that might become an anchor. It was an anchor for me. And I actually worked from that chapter outwards. When I first read, I wanted to

1:56:22 Mark: add something about conceptual Persona. I mean, we've said a little about how those are distinguished from the author himself. And part of it has to do with just the imminence that you're supposed to be able to see the conceptual Persona in the philosophy itself. When you read Descartes, you don't have to go read Descartes biography or something to get it. You just read it and you get the doubter right there. And it doesn't always have to be even something that's just a name, you know, that the name of Descartes. The doubter could just stand for Descartes.

But, you know, Nietzsche creates Zarathustra, he creates the Antichrist. Kierkegaard had all these different pseudonyms that he created different conceptual Persona. So there are these very much like literary characters and that are supposed to motivate the philosophy and really make the problems come into focus if you can sort of see through the eyes of this conceptual Persona. And so I was thinking about this question I want to ask you guys is if do you feel like you've done enough original work, that you are enough of a philosopher as opposed to a mere student and reader of philosophy, that you have created any conceptual personae yourself?

I can give my answer because I actually thought about this in advance. I guess my initial name for it was. And actually we've just described it, just basically attributed it to Deleuze themselves, but is the sensitive ironist. In other words, on this podcast, you know, I'll get comments from people who have not heard that many episodes or of being like the Donald Trump of the podcast or.

1:57:49 Seth: Or what the hell does that mean?

1:57:52 Mark: Just the irreverence and the acerbicness and the apparent dismissiveness. Somebody really objected, for instance, on the Lacan episode, when I compared the punning nature of the unconscious to something that was said in Dianetics, because that was said in Dianetics. But. But see, the thing is, is that that has to do with just my taking amusement in the things around me. And it is a way of conceptually processing it. But it doesn't mean that I'm actually dismissing the thing, you know, so maybe the unconscious is punning. It's just that we don't have time in that discussion right there to actually take that up in a serious way.

So we'll just say something snotty about it and bat it aside. But, you know, that doesn't mean we couldn't do a whole future episode on that particular issue. So that's the way I see that tendency in me is directly an influence of the culture that we are in, in a very heavily ironic culture. But also this hippie dippy part, just being willing to try anything but having this bullheaded analytic. But ultimately I'm only gonna let something into my head if I actually understand it with my puny little brain. And things that I can't understand, I will mock, at least for the moment.

And then I thought of a better name for it. I was reading with my son the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books. Wowbagger. Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. So this is the name of the conceptual Persona. He's an alien. His purpose is the thing that would drive him on, in which, as far as he could see, Would drive him on forever. It was this. He would insult the universe. He would insult everybody in it individually, personally, one by one, in alphabetical order. So that doesn't quite do justice to the more extensive, sympathetic version of myself, but it'll do.

The Wowbagger, I think, you know,

1:59:30 Daniel: to be honest, it sounds like a good literary character. I'm not sure it's a conceptual Persona, but it's a good character. And there's that funny point at which they all begin to bleed. Right, Ahab? At what point it becomes a conceptual Persona versus a character?

1:59:43 Mark: Well, folks, listeners periodically try to fit us into patterns, right? Like, oh, Wes is the Lennon, and. And I'm the McCartney. So what is. Does that make, like, Seth the Ringo? What is. You know, people will do shit like that. It's an unavoidable. Yes. You want to try to put these things in patterns.

2:00:03 Seth: Yeah. I have not created any concepts, and I have absolutely no aspirations to do that. That's not my motivation. I am sympathetic, and I do appreciate the approach that assembles ideas and sees connections between things. I mean, I firmly believe. I think it was Aristotle said, you know, there's two kinds of minds, those that see distinctions and those that see commonalities. And I'm definitely one of those people that makes connections between things, But I don't consider that necessarily a creative act. Maybe it is to be able to see connections between things, but that's what makes me good at what I do professionally, and that's what makes me satisfied in my personal life. And that's also the way I think I can improve people's lives and bring positive change to the world. And that's really my goal. So if I do that with other people's concepts, I'll be perfectly happy.

2:00:50 Daniel: That's nice.

2:00:51 Mark: I think it would be the humble seducer. I think that would be your Persona, based on what you just said there. Oh, I'm so unpretentious. And I. I really. I'm just. I didn't say I was the world a better place.

2:01:03 Seth: Just for the record, I did not say I wasn't pretentious. I just said I have no aspirations to create a new idea.

2:01:09 Mark: There's a reason why in the last year, as you've come out of your shell and we've forced you to talk more, that now you have these people asking for Seth fanboy merchandise on their Facebook action figures.

2:01:23 Seth: Oh, yeah.

2:01:25 Daniel: You know, you do use a trick. A guy I work with does a bunch. I don't mean to trick pejoratively at all, but just I'm not smart enough. I don't know if I understand it. That sort of humility thing. The guy I work with who's, you know, lightning fast smart, I'm not a big brain like you guys. Somehow his ideas become all the more powerful for it. Fo said the opposite problem. I've always been a sophist.

2:01:47 Dylan: You're a sophist?

2:01:48 Daniel: Yeah. I've always imagined myself as a reader. Right. All the things I always taught was, what is critique? What does it mean to critique a text, to write about a text, to read anything, a work of art, a film, just to read the world. And all the little books I've written have all been called various versions of reading. Reading the way of the world, reading things. I've never tried to create a concept. I don't think.

2:02:08 Mark: Dylan.

2:02:10 Dylan: I'm a mechanic.

2:02:12 Seth: Yeah.

2:02:13 Daniel: Make things run.

2:02:14 Dylan: Yeah. I like to make things work and I like to make new things out of other things that are around.

2:02:22 Mark: Speaking of that, Dylan made the mobile part of our website look really nice. So you should open partiallyexaminedlife.com on your smartphone. I've not done that because it looks quite a bit better.

2:02:31 Daniel: Better?

2:02:32 Mark: It's not a mobile app yet. We'll get that someday.

2:02:34 Daniel: You built an alternate site or it's just responsive?

2:02:36 Dylan: I used a plugin.

2:02:37 Mark: Yeah. It wasn't from scratch.

2:02:40 Dylan: To say that I generated that is probably overstating a little bit. It was found rather than built.

2:02:49 Mark: I couldn't do it.

2:02:49 Daniel: I'm not smart enough for that. It's better, isn't it? It's funny. One thing I was actually thinking about, I wrote an essay recently on the relationship between design and art, and it made me think about philosophy as conceived as a collective problem solving. We're all trying to figure out what is mind. And throughout the history of the world of philosophy, everyone's got their different opinions and we're all trying to solve the same problem. I was like, well, that's actually how I define design. Design really is this collective problem solving.

You purposefully take up other people's ideas. You say, oh, you did this. I have a better solution if I take that and add this little piece and then someone else comes along and it's always trying to solve some kind of experiential problem, either of flow of action or manipulation of bodies. There was something funny to me about a certain traditional notion of philosophy actually being how I define design. It was sort of a surprising intersection

2:03:44 Mark: for me, just taking it back to conceptual personae. I don't think, contrary to what D and G say, that the utility of that concept stops with. With people who create original concepts. I think that it's just an essential part of our philosophy. So Ayn Rand didn't seem to create an original thing ever, as far as I could tell from reading her. Yet her personality looms so large. You know, I even realized like, that's one of the people, since I read her fairly early on, that I react to and feel the need to like, as if there's an objectivist contingent of listeners here that I need to point out specifically how Wittgenstein is different from. From this figure that I have. So it doesn't even have to be a good philosopher. That can become one of the philosophical points of view that is in your head that then will shape how you view everything else.

2:04:30 Daniel: Yeah.

2:04:31 Mark: So I am very glad to have had this long conversation with you.

2:04:35 Daniel: Good. I was fun. To me, it's just, it's interesting. I don't interact with a whole lot of people. Who am I going to talk to? Girlfriends about this shit? My kid? I talked to Salma Dill's dad.

2:04:45 Mark: Well, do you buy that? You were saying you use it in your class, but that philosophy is essentially a solitary process of figuring shit out as this book seems to present it.

2:04:53 Daniel: Yeah. I actually have engineered my life this way. I like being alone. That's what makes this sort of interesting. It was really enjoyable, I gotta say. It's been a long time since I was in a group talking about a text. A long time since I was in grad school. It was a pleasure.

2:05:05 Dylan: Well, good. That was one of the things that didn't resonate with me with Deleuze and Guattari was the insistence of the non conversational aspect of philosophy. And there might be technical reasons that they want to put it that way, but for me it is absolutely central. Even without buying everything that Socrates or Plato ever said, that formulation of the activity of philosophizing as being conversational.

2:05:33 Mark: And I think the long term exposure to each other in this thing, like I really get what I was just saying about conceptual Persona. You guys have worn on me so long that whenever I'm thinking of a new thing, like if I say that Wes is going to crap all over me. And like any long term relationship, you get sick of people after a while. And then you. But then you. But you know, I'm so glad that none of you are assholes.

2:05:58 Daniel: So just. I gotta just say one, not to be pedantic. I think Their thing is conversational. They're just against the discussion, which is very, very different to me. And I think they are all about the conversation because the conversation is more like a jam session. And you know, they wrote these books together and that was their whole thing.

2:06:13 Mark: So the discussion is the critical part. The discussion is if we to want. We're doing what we characterized the cliche of philosophers to be, which is we come in and we all have an ax to grind. And I don't let Dylan finish his sentence because I have to cut him down right.

2:06:28 Daniel: Or we're all talking about the same thing. What I love about a conversation is you say something, go on this, you know, someone takes it somewhere else. There's no transcendence. A discussion is fundamentally. I think it's conceptual in that there's like today this was a discussion that we're all talking about what is philosophy. We're all trying to gear towards the same thing. But a conversation is really a jam session. Like you did something. Fuck. Now I'm going to go this whole other way and we might end up in a whole new place.

2:06:51 Seth: All right.

2:06:52 Mark: Any other last words from anybody?

2:06:55 Daniel: Just thanks.

2:06:57 Seth: Thank you.

2:06:57 Mark: Yeah, thank you so much for being on.

2:06:59 Daniel: Thanks for having me, folks.

2:07:00 Mark: Should look@PartiallyExaminedLife.com for some follow up blog posts. Maybe we can even rope Dan into doing some or we'll at least link to his stuff, learn more about him.

2:07:10 Seth: Do you have anything you want to pimp?

2:07:11 Daniel: My blogs are actually hilarious. Bookbinder, blogspot, spot.com. yeah, I write about all kinds of things. Anything films and art and philosophy and that's the most thing I'll pimp my blog.

2:07:22 Seth: There you go.

2:07:23 Mark: Well, and he has. And you have your whole rhetoric course online. I listen to some of which is pretty interesting. So some of the provocative things that you've brought up here about we don't want to have agreement. We want to celebrate diversity or what, you know, whatever are actually explained in that.

2:07:39 Daniel: It's true.

2:07:39 Mark: So if you think that, that Daniel was talking a big load of nonsense.

2:07:43 Daniel: Well, you can have advertising.

2:07:44 Mark: Maybe you'll still think that, but at least it'll make more sense. I think next time we're going to be reading the Greater part of the Sense of Beauty by American philosopher George Santayana from 1896. Join our Facebook group. Follow us on Twitter. We have the not school discussion groups that I mentioned. If you make a $5 recurring contribution to partially examine life, then you will get access not only to a lot of bonus audio, but you will get to take part in these really wicked ass discussion groups, including many things about Deleuze. And there is in fact another discussion of Deleuze that I took part in of a Thousand Plateaus posted there. So you can join that and get another hour and a half of discussion right this second about one of his other works. Yes, we are supported by your donations. Thanks to all that have contributed. Good night.

2:08:35 Seth: Good night.

2:08:36 Dylan: Good night.

2:08:36 Daniel: Goodbye all.

2:08:39 Unknown speaker: I'm tolerated Circles I'm tolerated I'm tolerated circles they think I'm okay They don't care if I fall asleep at their parties they don't care if I show up with nothing to say they don't care if I persevere Something here inappropriate I'm tolerated in circles I'm tolerating I'm tolerating in most circles they think I'm okay They don't care if I take a little advantage they don't care if I borrow some stuff and it breaks they don't care if I drink so much that I piss myself Cuz I got what it takes Unsaturated. In full circles but not yours Guess I'm sorry for whatever I said that offended Guess I'm sorry for using some too many words Yes, I thought that my natural charm would kick in and would make up for being me you see Because I come from a line of no social skills It's a wonder with bread before I'll get killed But I know I've got something to add to posterity I live in will I'm sorating.

In most circles I think I'm okay In most circles I've been in today in most circles I just stay away.

2:10:35 Mark: From.