One of my favorite Deleuze books is his offbeat little homage to his favorite philosopher Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Just like it sounds, this book doesn't emphasize a complete understanding of Spinoza's philosophy. For that, you should read Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, which is a longer and more technical monograph. Practical Philosophy instead introduces Spinoza's ideas through his life and letters, and provides a straightforward dictionary defining his main concepts. It's not anything like any other book Deleuze wrote. It tries to make Spinoza's ideas relevant to our everyday life, and so focuses on his theory of the emotions, on the meaning of good and bad/evil, and on the difference between morality and ethics. It mostly leaves aside Spinoza's complex metaphysical system.
Despite the title, most of this blog has been spent wrestling with Deleuze's complex (lack of) metaphysical system. But I'm also always trying to think of the ways Deleuze can change our life. And this section on questions and the unconscious seems to me rich in that possibility.
The power of the questions always comes from somewhere else than the answers, and benefits from a free depth which cannot be resolved. The insistence, the transcendence and the ontological bearing of questions and problems is expressed not in the form of the finality of a sufficient reason (to what end? why?) but in the discrete form of difference and repetition: what difference is there? and 'repeat a little'. There is never any difference - not because it comes down to the same in the answer, but because it is never anywhere but in the question, and in the repetition of the question, which ensures its movement and its disguise.
We spend most of life focused on whether X is true or false, good or bad. That is, we spend most of life judging it according to whether it conforms to our image of what it should be. Sometimes we may pause and wonder why X happened, or what was the purpose of X. This is maybe a little better than simply judging X because we are trying to make sense of it according to some plan or scheme that might go well beyond our own interests, whereas the judgements passed on X are almost always just veiled versions of "I like" and "I don't like". In other words, questions about the purpose of X just substitute a divine judgement for a human one. Of course, without a pre-existing faith in the divine, this just puts us back at square one.
The more profound way of approaching life is to see each act and each thought through posing the question, "what difference does it make?" Every question can be reworked in this form. "Does God exist?" becomes, "What difference does it make if God exists?" Social and political questions can work the same way: "Should we open up the economy?" or "Should we allow women to vote?" become, "What difference does it make if ...?" You can look at personal life questions in this same way: "Should I quit my job, shave my head, and become a monk?", well, "What difference would that make?" In fact, turns out that you can do this with the most ordinary of experiences: "I don't like my knee hurting," or, "Why is my knee hurting?" become, "What difference does it make if my knee hurts?"
These may all sound like rhetorical questions. In fact, this is usually the way people frame rhetorical questions so as to imply that there is only one possible obvious answer or that some distinction doesn't matter: "What difference is there anyway? It's all the same. Everybody knows that it has to be this way". But of course this is exactly when we should listen carefully. Because there is always a possible difference. Which is simply to say that there is always something happening. Difference is constantly being made, and constantly leading to new differences. This might not be the difference we were looking for. It might be irrelevant to the issue we had in mind; the difference isn't in that question.
But when you actually stop to consider closely what difference even the simplest pain in your knee could make, you suddenly realize that you have embarked on an endless journey. You have to begin thinking about the physiological differences that it makes -- the way the pain ebbs and flows in intensity, moves around in space, causes other muscles to subtly contract in response, etc ... Which then cause all kinds of emotional differences like anger, and mental differences like craving a relief, and behavioral differences like doing something about it. And all those differences add up to make a big difference to me. My pain surely makes a difference to me. This though is neither the beginning nor the end of the chain. The differences created by the pain in my knee keep going and going and I can ask about those too. Will I shout at my wife or kick my dog? Will it make a difference to anyone else? Will I be able to sit and observe this cascade of difference, perhaps even reach the point of posing this very question? What difference does it make? Does it make a difference if I just think about it like this?
Reordering our life to ask this question of everything, to permit as much as possible to make a difference to us, through us, seems like a deeply practical philosophy we can use everyday.
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