Well, we've made it to the end of chapter 2, and I think I may hang up the spurs at this point. I've thoroughly enjoyed all this writing; I've never been so involved in a book, and it's fortunate that the book rewards involvement to an almost unique degree. While I may continue to write more in this space, I need to take a step back and figure out what the point of that might be. If I return, I suspect it will be in a completely different form than the line by line reading I've been doing.
But before signing off, I'd like to pay my respects to the reader whose joke about live-blogging Difference & Repetition was so funny that it launched 127 posts -- 1 per page of text we've covered -- over the past two years. Hooocoodanode!? As I've said before, here at FPiPE we are deeply committed to answering reader's questions so thoroughly that they are bored to death by the response. So when I was asked, "What's the point of reading a book where you only cover 0.174 pages per day?" we all knew that no simple answer was going to satisfy ...
One thing is fairly obvious from the start. You don't read a book like this looking for information. If the goal were to efficiently transmit knowledge -- either factual knowledge or description of a metaphysical system -- the book would be a complete and total failure. I mean, 0.174!? This is the kind of baud rate you expect from a dial-up opera.
It's natural at this point to ask questions like, "What is Deleuze's thesis?" or, "What is his metaphysical system like?" And of course we can surely think of various ways to summarize the thesis and describe the system. Actually, I could probably reel off quite a list of possibilities here. Every thing contains the entire universe within it. The core building block of reality is difference, not identity, though this can't really be described as a block. Difference thought in itself is a verb -- the act of differentiating. The only things that repeat are questions. Thought has been civilized and colonized, domesticated, by an obsession with paternity and property. Etc ...
These are all fine as far as they go, but I think they are mostly unhelpful in explaining what you get out of a book like this. Many people, even many philosophers, seem to think of the history of philosophy as a sort of series of propositional flash cards -- Plato said X; Kant believed Y; Heidegger thought Z. If you're feeling ungenerous, you might look at these cards as just a pile of disorganized beliefs that show no progress towards truth. The whole series has no universally accepted criterion for data and no first principle of reasoning, and is therefore a bunch of wanky and meaningless speculation. Or you might look at the cards as a progression of ideas structured by arguments and refutations, giving it at least some sense of continuous forward motion even if it's not clear where it's headed. Either way, the goal in studying philosophy is to know what each philosopher believes. We extract this information and write it down on a flash card and compare that to what other philosophers believe and what we ourselves believe.
This isn't the only approach to learning, however. In fact, when you think about it more, learning mere information is actually the very shallow end of the pool of thought. Do you remember memorizing state capitals in middle school? I imagine being able to state propositionally what we think Deleuze believes is about that important. Even to ask why he believes what he does, what are his arguments for believing one thing versus another, is to miss the point of the book. In fact, I don't think there's been anything so far that we could describe as an argument or justification. The problem is that a learning that focuses on either what or why we should believe something is one that implicitly takes for granted the idea that the goal of learning is reproducing a true belief in our heads. We know by now that Deleuze isn't interested in truth as a correspondence between our ideas and the world, or in the reproduction of a truth in the form of its transmission from one brain to another or from the world to our brain. He doesn't have some packet of information or belief to give us. There's nothing we can copy from the model Deleuze provides.
Luckily, we have another familiar model of learning. How do we learn to swim, or play tennis, or meditate? Learning a craft or a skill is not the same as learning knowledge. Learning how is not learning that. How exactly these are different is a difficult question, but I think we'd all accept that we don't learn a skill by copying a model in any simple sense. As we saw with swimming, you don't learn by standing next to the pool and imitating the instructors' motions, even if they give you feedback about how well your imitation matches what they think it looks like when they do it. Instead, something about their words and motions resonates with some process of your own and enables you to feel how to manipulate the medium for yourself.
Deleuze wants to teach us how to swim. Or perhaps how to meditate. He wants to teach us a craft of thinking, how to fabricate thoughts for ourselves, how to sculpt in whatever medium thoughts are made of, or at least to appreciate this sculpture as an art form. This has nothing to do with truth or belief. Or perhaps, as Deleuze put it in the case of the Eternal Return, it has to do not with true beliefs, but with the truth of belief. What do the concepts we fabricate and believe in enable us to feel and do once we bring them into the world? What new experiences do they open up? Deleuze changes the idea of what we are meant to learn in philosophy. We are not supposed to "do as he does" but to "do with him", and to evaluate what happens to us for ourselves.
Once we relate the book to this other model of learning, we immediately appreciate why it takes so long to read. Learning skills requires practice, and practice takes time. We already accept this notion with physical skills. No one expects to play the piano or win the US open or swim the English channel after watching just one youtube video. You have to watch 3 or 4 at least. The repetition isn't accidental or optional, but necessary, precisely because you are not repeating the same thing every time. But we don't normally think of learning mental skills in this light, at least beyond early education. In fact, we don't normally think of intellectual activities as skills at all. So we find ourselves surprised when they take time to develop. We wonder whether there isn't some short cut. For some reason, we assume that knowledge can be transmitted instantaneously.However, if our goal is to learn a skill, or acquire a habit of thinking, that changes our lives, then we need time in which to practice.
This then is the point of reading 0.174 pages per day, the same point as meditating for 20 years -- to practice. Of course, this practice isn't self-justifying or self-contained; the ultimate goal is to live better and more fully through the practice. This is a pretty open-ended goal though, so we are never really done practicing unless we are also done growing and changing. A good teacher may help speed this practice on its way, but there will never be a substitute for time. No matter how fast we imagine acquiring a skill, there will still be steps to move through that define a qualitative change from before to after. Practicing skills literally requires the form of time. Ultimately, for us humans, maybe this takes the form of the time required for neural plasticity. What we're after in this form of learning is not the production of a particular brain state, but a whole process of rewiring that changes the structure of the brain. New connections need to grow in order for us to make something different happen. It's not so much that this takes time, as that it is time -- the possibility of change, the practice of thinking differently.
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