Deleuze and Nietzsche 2

Perspectives on Deleuze: Perspectivism

Free to Create

There is only this world, and it is a godless, meaningless world, unless we rise above meaninglessness and create meaning.

We are free to choose our values and embrace our maximum potential; to dare to become what we are.

We are free to choose life as a work of art.

Free to embrace the Dionysian value-standard, the chaos and process at play, and create new Apollonian orders that overcome the resistance of old values that would deny life.

In Deleuzian terms, the Dionysian is the virtual, the pure difference and process that exists in us and is who we are.

The Self

The self is not a transcendent subject, nor a unity.

The self is a multiplicity, a bundle of drives, that collectively lead to a disposition towards certain activities; affects, emotional states, combine with drives, to create perspectives.

The drives are the source that interpret the world, and we each have multiple perspectives on this world.

Knowledge and Thought

There is no objective truth or knowledge. All thought is from a perspective, and there are only interpretations.

Thought is a multiple of perspectives that is at all times experimental and tentative.

Occasionally, thought is plausible and sound, but this is based purely in terms of it ability to reflect life, and to promote the value of life.

In so far as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. — “Perspectivism.” It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm. (The Will to Power)

Models and Metaphors

Nietzsche’s perspectivism declares the limits of objective enquiry, and therefore the limits of what we call reality.

Ontologically, perspectivism points to a reality that is a system of shifting forces.

Kant’s project was not objective; his was a subjective project aimed at maintaining order. In all human activity, there are values at play, value creation, and the adoption of perspectives.

We employ models and metaphors for creating new values, for conceptualizing and constructing values.

When our models and metaphors replace the world of life with a true transcendent world of being, we deny life. When our models and metaphors are devoted to exploring life itself, encounters in life, we overcome nihilism and endow life with meaning:

We embrace the eternal return of the will to power, the eternal return of difference.

Individuation

The great discovery of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which marks his break with Schopenhauer and goes under the name of the will to power or the Dionysian world, is the following: no doubt the I and the Self must be replaced by an undifferentiated abyss, but this abyss is neither an impersonal nor an abstract Universal beyond individuation. On the contrary, it is the I and the self which are the abstract universals. They must be replaced, but in and by individuation, in the direction of the individuating factors which consume them and which constitute the fluid world of Dionysus. What cannot be replaced is individuation itself. Beyond the self and the I we find not the impersonal but the individual and its factors, individuation and its fields, individuality and its pre-individual singularities. (Difference and Repetition)

There is no closed whole, no totality, no unified concept that stands apart from life.

There is only the force of pure difference and the diversity produced; the immanent individuation of life, the affirmation of process, within each of us.

There is only the multiplicity of perspectives within us and amongst us, criss-crossing, and exploring new drives; the pure difference of life.

Reality as Perspective

Perspectivism operates on all levels, the ontological, the epistemological, the ethical.

Reality is perspectival, as is the way we think about reality and how we might live in such a reality.

Perspectivism is incremental thought and action that rejects transcendence. It is thought and action that rejects the unity of the theological, the mystical, the onto-theological. It is thought and action that rejects social and political conformity under the tyranny of a transcendent morality that negates life.

Perspectivism is thought and action that refuses to be separated from its own source, the force of life within us.

Thought based in unity covers over, swallows, diversity, immanence, difference. Perspectival thought stays inside diversity, finds its source in pure difference, participates through diversity to create the new.

Life is denied by an onto-theology that closes off life, creating only sadness. Life is affirmed through creative perspectives in open immanence, creating only joy.

Perspectivism and Becoming

Our challenge is to think and act creatively from a multiplicity of perspectives, to sense the force of perspective swirling within us, and to embrace difference and diversity.

Our challenge is to embrace the open and the new; it is to think being as becoming.

Perspectivism affirms life; it affirms incremental, infinitesimal, continuous, tangential change; change-in-itself. Perspectivism affirms thought focused on problems: localized thought that takes no refuge in the abstract or the infinite, and thinks only the real.

Perspectival thought is creative, experimental, productive, practical.

It is not the nothingness of pure relativism and nihilism, the negation of life. It is the affirmation of life in all genetic contexts: virtuality and actuality, intensities, singularities and multiplicities, the pre-individual and individual, psychological, social and political.

Perspectival thought is machinic thought that embraces the minoritarian and nomadic.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!

Tomas

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Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2021 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.