From: "John Duryea" <jtduryea-AT-dmv.com>
Subject: Re: Re. noology vs conceptual personae
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 21:03:47 -0500


>
>>In Deleuze's study of Nietzsche, "Nietzsche and Philosphy" he suggests the
>>question "What does the one who says 'this is..' want" is a path to
>>arriving at a noology - an "image of thought" applicable to the thinker.
In
>>Deleuze and Guattari's "What is Philosophy", they put forth example's from
>>Nietzsche's work, such as Socrates, Jesus, Dionysus, Zarathustra, as
>>"conceptual personae". On first read, these two ideas appear to be the
same
>>and both derivative of Nietzsche's "psychological" practices.
>>
>>Thoughts?
>>Evan A. Leeson
>
> One of our teachers was fond of saying that there are no stupid
>questions, only stupid answers.  But this would presuppose that somehow
>questions, in order to be exempt from stupidity, would always have to be
>thoughtless, thought - as measured by its degree of truthfulness - or
>its lack ("stupid thought"), belonging solely to answers.  Only false
>answers could then be construed as being stupid.  Further, if finding
>the solution to a problem already depends upon the way the problem is
>posed, how it is posed, how the question is raised well before it is
>answered, then, in a perspective of truth and falsity, questions would
>have to be entitled as much as answers to be false and thus stupid.
>
> At stake here, from where we stand, is 'more' than just the new image
>of thought described by Deleuze - such as Nietzsche proposed to analyze
>it, as deploying an element irreducible to truth and falsity:
> "A new image of thought means primarily that truth is not the element
>of thought.  The element of thought is sense and value."("Nietzsche and
>Philosophy")
>
> It is not as if the categories of the noble and the base, the high and
>the low, the active and the reactive, the light and the heavy, etc, are
>not part of that new image of thought.  It is that their concepts have
>not yet been disengaged as actual functions, neither by Nietzsche, nor
>by Foucault or Deleuze, precisely because thought needs not so much a
>new image as it ought to apprehend knowledge (le Savoir) and itself as
>functional processes, deformable processes that are neither teleological
>nor formally fixed but necessarily incident upon functions.
>
> This brings us back to the question of the concept versus the function
>- and whether the parallelism proposed in "What is Philosophy?" between
>conceptual personnae ("philosophical sensibilia" of the concept) and
>ideal partial observers ("scientific sensibilia" of the function) -
>where the former "function" (sic) on the basis of "nonenergetic
>differences" and the latter through "energetic relationships" - is
>adequate to frame the relations between philosophy and science .  The
>argument revolves around the determination of quality as pure affect and
>quantity as ideal affect, as if philosophy alone could deploy a " plane
>of consistency" and science was by "its quantitative nature" limited to
>referenciality.  The problem here lies in the way it is posed -  for
>"choosing the good independent variables" is no less a question of their
>functional adequacy to a flux, than is selecting the active affects of a
>conceptual personna.
>
> The function of a concept and the concept of a function are already
>implicated in a relation of force *and* adequacy (to what extent "What
>is Philosophy" overlooks this?).  In fact, the ideal partial observers
>described in "What is Philosophy", with the exception of Maxwell's
>demon, are partial observers that depend strictly upon concepts rather
>than upon actual or empirical functions: Einstein's observer depends on
>the Lorentz-Fitzgerald transformation, which is a concept of Space and
>Time before it is a function (the concept is that Time is a line
>equivalent to a distance; this assumption is what permitted Einstein's
>concept of Space-Time); Heisenberg's observer depends on a probabilistic
>concept of chance (and chaos) as much as upon the concept of a
>Dirac-point particle (which is a notorious concept devoid of any
>functionality) for which probabilities of position, speed and momentum
>are calculated.  Which brings us to Reich's question - to what extent
>are ideal scientific observers the product of the 'character structure'
>of the 'philosophical personna or personnae' of the scientist?
>
> What then is stupidity?  Stupidity is not thoughtlessness, nor can it
>be gauged by the degree of its falsity or truth.  As Deleuze says:
>"there are imbecile thoughts, imbecile discourses, that are made up
>entirely up of truths".  It even happens that those who claim Nietzsche
>was a fascist have the right to that truth -  *un droit de cité*.
>Stupidity is the base structure of thought.  It thrives on error as much
>as on truth.  It is as much a virtual part of the question as it is of
>the answer but, by the same token, it belongs solely to the problem
>(what is inadequate in a question or in a problem), not to its solution.
>There are no stupid solutions to real problems, only stupid answers,
>only stupid ways of posing the problem: this is why most problems appear
>to have no solution, because they are stupid to begin with.  Only
>adequate problems have solutions.
>
> Stupidity is not error or persistence in error; stupidity as structure
>of thought is inadequacy of both concepts and functions.
>
>Lambda C
>

"We are still in the 'Age of Rationalism' which began in the eighteenth
century and is now rapidly nearing its close. We all are its creatures
whether we know and wish it or not. The word is familiar enough, but who
knows how much it implies? It is the arrogance of the urban intellect,
which, detached from its roots and no longer guided by strong instinct,
looks down with contempt on the full-blooded thinking of the past and the
wisdom of ancient peasant stock. It is the period in which everyone can read
and write and therefore must have his say and always "knows better." This
type of mind is obsessed by concepts - the new gods of the Age - and it
exercises its wits on the world as it sees it." - Oswald Spengler _The Hour
of Decision_

Lambda C, read your post and then compare it to anything you may find in
BGE. Instead of the piercing insight of the physiognomic predator which
comprehends the secret of its prey in a single glance, what do we have...
a would-be eagle with coke bottle bottom glasses which cannot even find the
rabbit!

John T. Duryea



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