The Postmodern Configuration of Philosophy – Reading Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy

What is philosophy? The ancient Greeks saw philosophy as a pursuit of wisdom, and Hegel went deep into the history of philosophy to explore philosophy. Throughout the ages, philosophers have pondered this question, but we still have only vague ideas about it. There is always no shortage of specious applications of philosophical concepts. Philosophy is used both as an unspoken category to distinguish between philosophy and non-philosophy, and as the highest category of knowledge. There are philosophers whose doctrines are regarded as philosophies but deny that they are philosophers; there are also "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" and "Animal Philosophy", which although they are titled philosophy, they have never been regarded as works of philosophy. In order for thought to be orderly, it is necessary to clarify the philosophical meta-question of "what is philosophy". According to Pierre-Félix Guattari, what is philosophy is a question suitable to be asked and answered at a later age, and that philosophy has entered the twilight of the postmodern era through the criticism and questioning of modern scientific and logical positivist thought. We do not know whether postmodernity is the twilight of philosophy, but when Deleuze and Guattari wrote What is Philosophy, it was definitely the twilight of the philosopher Deleuze himself, and it also meant the maturity and integrity of Deleuze's thought.

Philosophy is the creation of concepts, the understanding of how concepts are constructed, and the channel through which philosophy is understood. Deleuze and Guatary define philosophy as knowledge acquired through pure concepts, and a prerequisite for knowledge acquired through concepts is conceptual construction. The new, or more comprehensive, understanding of philosophy is obtained by reconstructing how concepts are constructed, which is Deleuze and Guatary's answer to the question "What is philosophy?" Conceptual understanding can be divided into three stages: the encyclopedic stage, that is, entering the history of philosophy to list, introduce and interpret concepts; the stage of teaching methods, tracing the origin of philosophy and tracing the context of concept construction; and the stage of commercial vocational training, the purposeful use of concepts by philosophical communication. When the second stage is missing, philosophy transitions directly from the first stage to the third stage, which brings about an absolute disaster in the world of thought. At this time, the concept is detached from its own generative context, loses its original depth of thought, is dismembered, and is taken out of context to cater to a specific purpose, the spirit of philosophical skepticism, criticism and reflection is replaced by unquestionable arbitrariness, and thought enters an era of obedience and pandering.

A concept is an event. The pure concept of stripping out empirical content consists only of a whole that contains specific constituent components. In deleuze and Guatary's analysis, philosophical concepts consist of three components: concepts, conceptual figures, and internal planes. These three are the subheadings of the first three stanzas of "What is Philosophy" in the "Philosophy Section". The essence of the concept is the thinking event, and the understanding of thinking from the perspective of occurrence, postmodern philosophy is thus classified as the philosophy of events. How do you understand that a concept is an event? Events such as the "other" are the discovery of a possible world around self-generated. Philosophy as an event implies that the mind creates, beginning with and ending with the concept of creation. The essence of a concept lies not in its definition, but in its generation, in which the "cause", "what" and "why" of the concept can be reduced. Concepts, conceptual figures, and the inner plane, as the trinity of philosophy, become an indispensable part of the creation of concepts. The intrinsic plane is a flattened mental picture. The concept is not a wood without a root, a water without a source, and the inner plane constitutes the foundation of the mind in which the concept is rooted, and the concept formulates the intrinsic plane from which the concept is generated at the same time. For example, Plato's conceptual type and the external objectivity of knowledge, Descartes's subjective certainty of self-thinking and cognition, Kant's rational transcendental theory of innate synthesis and cognition, and even the phenomenological occurrence of philosophical and thinking events as Deleuze speaks here. Conceptual characters are the human settings for creative behavior, just as there is an unavoidable existence of "I" after "I think", and after thinking there are also thinkers, who are the real agents of philosophical expression of behavior, the creators of concepts, and the formulators of the inner plane. As a conceptual figure in Plato's pen, Socrates is not only the spokesman of Plato's philosophy, but also the seeker of wisdom, the practitioner of virtue, and the critic of the wise. Conceptual figures become nodes of conceptual intent for all branches.

Events are located in the time and space of the mind. Deleuze and Guattari introduced new concepts of time and space, which can also be seen as an innovation of philosophical concepts by the philosophy of events. Events boil down to mental events, and time and space come down to time and space in thinking. The change in thinking time occurs when new concepts arise, i.e., the formulation of new planes of inner nature. Neoplatonism inherits Plato's "idea-type" external objectivism and can be regarded as a continuation of Plato's thinking; Neo-Kantianism inherits the transcendental law of Kant's court of reason and is the latecomer of Kant's thought in time; Deleuze's "transcendental empiricism" begins with the criticism and expansion of Kant's "transcendental idea theory", and also belongs to post-Kantianism in thought. The concept of thinking time stipulates the undertaking, development and change of the thinking path, and the before and after is not a causal relationship, but a reconfiguration of inspiration, addition, reorganization, and cutting, which is a creative redecoration. Events are distributed in the space-time of the mind. The history of philosophy is not the temporal flow of philosophical events, but the spatial juxtaposition of philosophical events, or the coexistence of differences in different internal planes.

Philosophy, science and art are all events of thought. Science and art, as philosophical others, provide a differentiated definition for understanding what is philosophy. In terms of occurrence, philosophy, science, and art are all events of thought, but they belong to different modes of thinking and cognition. Deleuze and Guattari inherit the basic structure of Classical Western dichotomy, with material chaos on the one hand and phenomenal cognition that occurs within the mind on the other. Material chaos has an intrinsic potential that can be known, and the occurrence of cognition is the manifestation of the intrinsic potential of material chaos. From the concept of material chaos, we can see the shadow of Kant's own thing, which belongs to the unknowable realm, but material chaos can be understood in a flattened part through the lens of art, science, and philosophy. "In order to avoid falling into chaos, we only want a little order." Art, philosophy, and science establish a partial order for chaos in three different ways. Artistic thinking creates perceptual objects through the combined plane, the counterpoint method stipulates the harmony between different melodies, and the difference becomes a cluster of feelings through the integration of perception in the mind; philosophical thinking creates concepts in the inner plane, and by giving order to difference, perception constructs coordinates in the mind to reproduce material chaos, so that difference becomes speakable; scientific thinking defines the correspondence through the reference plane, assigns value to the difference with the help of limits and boundaries, and the difference is described in the geometric coordinates of the set closed system. And predict its changes. Things, events, and states of events are three different objects of thought; images, conceptual figures, and local observers are involved in three different perspectives; concepts, feelings, and functions are three different ways of thinking; the plane of combination, the plane of immanence, and the plane of reference are three different cognitive cross-sections of material chaos. This is the basic configuration of the occurrence of the three thinking events of art, philosophy and science.

Event backtracking opens up the potential for philosophical thinking to deconstruct and re-domain. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guatari borrow the behavior of a mockingbird to express how a functional substance is transformed into an expressive marker. The robin pecks off the leaves and flips them over so that the lighter inner side stands out above the dust, "flipping to produce an expressive substance." The premise of expression is to create differences, and differences are inherently material chaos, but the meaning of differences is given by thinking in events. Thus, various material differences such as sound, color, form, and so on acquire expressive functions. Robins mark their territory by flipping their blades. The marker detaches a certain place from the environment as its own territory by setting the boundary, which is the junction domain. This is a place we call the territory of the robins, the homes of the robins. By knotting domains, we acquire the concept of territory, or the concept of home. From material chaos, through differences and labels, to the junction, the natural operation of thinking and cognition is initiated. Of course, the flipped blade of the robin can be regarded as a territorial marker, and "seeing it" also stipulates a narrative context that the robin knows. In the narrative of non-mockingbird expression, these leaves may simply be blades of different colors, marked by reduction to differences of no meaning, or even to material chaos, which is the domain of the domain; or to be given other meanings, such as a natural picture, which is to re-domain. The backtracking of thinking events opens up the infinite possibilities of thinking, and all fixed views can be regarded as thinking events, and their meanings are found in the solution domain, and a new understanding is gained in the re-knot domain. At the same time, What is Philosophy can also be seen as a mental event that decouples and re-domains philosophy. In this way, we can say that the event occurred, but how to determine the choice of the event? A reasonable corollary is that, as far as the occurrence of meaning is concerned, it is not the truth or falsity of rational judgment that makes a statement of philosophy, but the harmony of art.

(Author Affilications:Institute of Philosophy, Hunan Academy of Social Sciences)

Editor: Chen Xuanyu