I'm afraid my Quine is limited to a couple of essays here and there, and not on this subject. Would be interested in any particular readings you'd have to recommend though. Prima facie I'm suspicious of treating learning as a psychological, rather than properly ontological property however.

I think Plato's emphasis in his Meno is on the (necessary) relationship/roles between the teacher and the student. Is there really a choice in what the slave boy answers, only in the sense that he can submit or not submit to the necessities of his own thinking. I think this is what Plato means by recollection, the active search for the necessities that comprise thinking, it is unlike memory; Aristotle (I think) also makes this distinction. — Cavacava

What's interesting though is that the reflection on the necessity of thought directly and explicitly excludes any consideration of teaching and learning. The lines right before the slave is introduced in the dialog say exactly this:

Meno: Yes, Socrates; but what do you mean by saying that we do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection? Can you teach me how this is?

Soc: I told you, Meno, just now that you were a rogue, and now you ask whether I can teach you, when I am saying that there is no teaching, but only recollection;... — Meno

And then further down, in discussion with the slave:

Soc: Mark now the farther development. I shall only ask him, and not teach him, and he shall share the enquiry with me. — Meno

(my emphasis).

Necessity here is reserved only for recollection. What would be interesting though is to rethink necessity on the basis of learning: that pedagogy imposes it's own necessity, as when, to go back to swimming, one is forced to 'learn', at every moment, the sway of the current and the way in which to compose oneself among it in order to stay afloat. In a formula, the idea would be to 'keep' the emphasis on necessity, but displace the the field of it's functioning: not knowledge already constituted (residing in some mythical past), but knowledge in the process of coming-into-being.

Thus, in an implicit critique of Plato, Deleuze, for example, will argue: "Do not count upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think." - One learns in relation to an encounter with that which must be learned from - the current of the wave, a language, the grain of wood out of which one sculpts, etc.

I like this part because it is possible to forget knowledge, which is also important to consider as well when thinking about how we gain knowledge. If you don't practice a certain activity well and long enough, you will forget the very things you have previously learned. It's the same with muscles as well. Our muscles connect to our brains in a sophisticated way in which the brain remembers and memorizes complex muscle movements; for example, batting or throwing a ball or even running in a certain way. (why do you think physical therapy exists?) Thus, if we don't train our muscles enough, both in quantity of time and quality of training, they will become lazier and forget how to operate previous complex muscle movements well. The same principles on our muscle movements can be applied similarly to how the brain learns knowledge I believe. — WiseMoron

Yes, thinking of things in terms of forgetting is quite a useful way to approach things too. If we move to valorize learning instead of knowledge, forgetting no longer becomes something 'external' to knowledge, as if a defect or a blemish on an otherwise perfect thing, but part and parcel of what it means to know to begin with. If, in swimming, we 'learn' all the time, then in a similar manner we forget all the time too. Indeed there is no learning without forgetting, to the point where learning and forgetting basically become two inseparable sides of a single coin.

To use a more technical vocabulary, neither learning nor forgetting are merely 'empirical' matters, contingent events that occur 'on the way' to knowledge, but become properly transcendental structures of all knowledge as such. Deleuze, who I cited above, speaks for instance of forgetting as a "positive power", rather than a negative one, one which is necessary for any instance of knowledge at all. (In this he basically follows Nietzsche, who also esteems the power of forgetting:

"Forgetting belongs to all action, just as both light and darkness belong in the life of all organic things. A person who wanted to feel utterly and only historically would be like someone who was forced to abstain from sleep, or like the beast that is to continue its life only from rumination to constantly repeated rumination. For this reason, it is possible to live almost without remembering, indeed, to live happily, as the beast demonstrates; however, it is generally completely impossible to live without forgetting." (On The Use and Abuse of History for Life).

In every case it's always a matter of knowledge being something constitutively 'on the move', a matter of continual, unstillable learning. Knowledge, understood in the old way, as static 'pieces of information' which we come to either know or not-know (and in which forgetting is wholly negative), would be entirely impossible, an untenable idea of what knowledge is.

Pragmatism.

Given your idiosyncratic 15 word vocabulary, I dont want to make any presumptions about what you're asking.

Sure, but the Platonic understanding of knowledge still bears it's rather considerable influence over epistemology today. Whether it be knowledge of the Ideas or knowledge of the sublunary, the same model tends to be at work in both, one in which learning remains a matter of contingent realization. The problem isn't that people have forgotten the Platonic problematic - it's that they still remained far too governed by it. There's still a lot more work that needs to be done before we twist ourselves free of the Platonic legacy.

Gilles Deleuze - Bergsonism
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet - Dialogues II

What do you mean?

Also, William Connolly has a great discussion on the above quote on flux, especially with respect to the sciences, where he directly makes the connection to complexity theory:

"Why entertain his perspective, then? [that of flux - SX] Because of the ethico-political stakes of doing so: the Nietzschean perspective — in conjunction with efforts to overcome existential resentment of a world with these characteristics — invites us to become more responsive to natural/cultural processes by which brand-new things, beings, identities, and cultural movements surge into being. It encourages us to develop more nuanced balances between the comforts and agonies of being on one side and the forces of becoming on the other.

The Nietzschean portrait of nature is often thought to reflect a faulty image of science. The fact that Nietzsche links the scientific problematic to an asceticism previously attributed only to devotees of religious fideism has not endeared him to philosophers of science either. His scattered reflections on nature, then, would be consigned to a dustbin in the history of science if it were not for recent re- flections on the character of science by Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry and an inventor of complexity theory. ...The Prigoginian update of Epicurean physics and Nietzschean cosmology engages a nature that is sometimes creative and novelty producing, “where the possible is richer than the real,” and where, therefore, new structures come into being over time.

Even though such systems retain a persistent power to surprise and the evolutionary ability to create what has never before existed, they also display a kind of intelligibility retrospectively. This is where Prigogine expresses appreciation for the “approximations” Nietzsche notes. “What is now emerging,” writes Prigogine, “is an ‘intermediate’ description that lies somewhere between the two alienating images of a deterministic world and an arbitrary world of pure chance. Physical laws lead to a new form of intelligibility as expressed by irreducible probabilistic representations.” A far-from-equilibrium system is neither the reversible system of classical dynamics nor a condition of constant flux unrecognizable as a system. Some read Nietzsche’s “flux” the latter way. My Nietzsche, the philosopher of torsion between being and becoming, is closer to Prigogine’s contention that “a new formulation of the laws of nature is now possible... , a more acceptable description in which there is room for both the laws of nature and novelty and creativity.” (Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed).

And ‘islands of stability’ is not a bad way to put it. Here is TSZ:

"If timbers span the water, if footbridges and railings leap over the river, then surely the one who says “Everything is in flux” has no credibility. Instead, even the dummies contradict him. “What?” say the dummies, “everything is supposed to be in flux? But the timbers and the railings are over the river! Over the river everything is firm, all the values of things, the bridges, concepts, all ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – all of this is firm!” –

But when the hard winter comes, the beast tamer of rivers, then even the wittiest learn to mistrust, and, sure enough, then not only the dummies say: “Should everything not – stand still?” "Basically everything stands still” – that is a real winter doctrine, a good thing for sterile times, a good comfort for hibernators and stove huggers.

“Basically everything stands still” – but against this preaches the thaw wind! The thaw wind, a bull that is no plowing bull – a raging bull, a destroyer that breaks ice with its wrathful horns! But ice – breaks footbridges! Yes my brothers, is everything not now in flux? Have all railings and footbridges not fallen into the water? Who could still hang on to “good” and “evil”?

“Woe to us! Hail to us! The thaw wind is blowing!” – Preach me this, oh my brothers, in all the streets!"

One way to dance around this is to say that 'truth' is itself a kind of fiction, but that the adherents of 'truth' have found a way to create a particularly spectacular fictional effect where one type of fiction ('non-fiction') appears to have this kind of eminent, majestic quality. So then the real question (tho what does 'real' mean!) would be how this non-fiction/truth 'effect' is produced (or, in a transcendental register, how it is producible at all.) But it's very hard to try to answer this question without recourse to a less sophisticated non-nietzschean (deflationary?) understanding of true vs false. — csalisbury

I think this is more or less exactly the move Nietzsche makes: truth and falsity becomes forces in Nietzsche, they are expressions of 'will-to-power'. To affirm the true or the false is, in the last analysis, to affirm as such (we simply call one affirmation true, the other, false, in a purely nominal fashion). To think in terms of the will-to-power or force is to 'flatten' or level the field of the true and the false so they no longer differ in kind. Moreover, The Genealogy of Morals is exactly Nietzsche's attempt to account for how this one kind force prevailed over and above others, and Nietzsche is very clear that even slave morality is a kind of creative, affirmative force, even though it is creativity at it's lowest intensity, as it were.

"The beginning of the slaves’ revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who, denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying ‘yes’ to itself, slave morality says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside’, ‘other’, ‘non-self ’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed. ... A race of such men of ressentiment will inevitably end up cleverer than any noble race" (GoM, Bk I). And also the famous lines about the fact that man would "rather will nothingness than not will"; In the ascetic ideal there is "a will to nothingness, an aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental prerequisites of life, but it is and remains a will!" (Bk III, Nietzsche's emphasis).

It's this attempt to level the true and the false - in the direction of the will-to-power - which constitutes Neitzsche's 'twist' or undermining of metaphysics, and which gives his project a measure of internal consistency.

Yep. Nietzsche always maintained a healthy scepticism towards what he understood as the science of his day, and only total and utter ignorance could make one think that the 'new language' he refers to is the language of science. You'd have to be talking out of your ass, in other words.

Yeah, alot will stick to an intellectually dishonest hack.

Yeah, glad that your scholarship is so deep that 'oh I Googled some random quotes' is your pathetic excuse for literally making shit up as you go along.

I mean that when N. refers to 'our new language', he means modern scientific method - Science. — Wayfarer

Doesn't sound like a question to me, back-peddler. Sounds like you vomiting words out of a keyboard based on zero textual evidence whatsoever, unmotivated by any of the quotes so far cited in this thread.

I swore at you because you're literally making shit up.

Ugh, come on dude, do better than this shit.

Just another way of saying 'our new way of talking about things', I suppose.

You seem to have got it down relatively well, albeit in a bit grandiloquent terms.

Right so we may know what the idea of truth does, but we do not know what it is an idea of. — John

It's not a question of ignorance ("don't know what truth is..."), so much as it is a question of indifference. That is it an idea - whatever it is, of truth, or the false - is enough to ask of it: how does it affirm life? Who cares (to know) what it 'is'? Hence - again - Nietzsche's relative indifference to the specificity of truth (and his question: "why should we be forced to assume that there is an essential difference between “true” and “false” in the first place?"). Truth might be many things - one could reply: truth is x, y, z - and in all cases, Nietzsche would deem the 'is' of that truth not very relevant, lacking in significance, so long as we do not know what that truth 'does'. This is not a 'bug' so much as a 'feature' of his approach to truth (I don't want to say 'theory of truth...').

Recall also that it's a bit anachronistic to speak in general about 'theories of truth' with respect to Nietzsche's time: Truth still has a Platonic ring about it, in the sense of eternal Truths (of Man!, or Reason! of the Absolute!), and not 'is the cat on the mat?' sort of truths which philosophy today tends to speak about. Nietzsche inveighs against the former.

Sure, but then, Nietzsche would probably argue that all truth is 'the idea of truth'. Hence the wonderful line about truth being a mobile army of metaphors: truth is as truth does, in all it's various guises - rendering it no less different in kind from falsity, save a nominal difference.

In a way, I'm not sure it matters all that much for Nietzsche what his - or any - 'theory of truth' would be. Nietzsche's questioning rarely broaches the question of what truth 'is', so much as what truth 'does' - how 'useful' is it, how much does truth - regardless of what it is - affirm life? Nietzsche has a 'theory of the value of truth', much more than he has a 'theory of truth'. Consider the following lines:

"We do not object to a judgment just because it is false; this is probably what is strangest about our new language. The question is rather to what extent the judgment furthers life, preserves life . . . ; and we are in principle inclined to claim that judgments that are the most false (among which are the synthetic a priori judgments) are the most indispensable to us, that man could not live without accepting logical fictions, without measuring reality by the purely invented world of the unconditional, self-referential, without a continual falsification of the world by means of the number — that to give up false judgments would be to give up life, to deny life. Admitting untruth as a condition of life: that means to resist familiar values in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that dares this has already placed itself beyond good and evil."

And the following, far more famous lines on truth: "[truth is] A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins."

In each case it's a question of how truth can be mobalized, used or employed with respect to the affirmation of life. And Nietzsche's judgement is that in general, truth hasn't really been used all that well for the purposes of affirming life. But this in turn means that truth may nonetheless have the potential to affirm life, if employed in the 'right' way. Hence some of his other pronouncements, which acknowledge the value of truth nonetheless: "How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare? More and more that became for me the real measure of value. ...My philosophy will triumph one day, for what one has forbidden so far as matter of principle has always been — truth alone." And "so far, the lie has been called truth."

Elsewhere, truth even constitutes a 'test' of one's spirit: "Something might be true, even if it were also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it might be part of the essential nature of existence that to understand it completely would lead to our own destruction. The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much “truth” he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified." Again, all of this is to say that it's not so much 'a theory of truth' that matters in Nietzsche so much as a 'theory of the value of truth (whatever it may turn out to be)'.

This is why Nietzsche doesn't really care at all for the specificity of truth, and says that there's no real reason to assume a difference in kind between truths and falsities to begin with: " Really, why should we be forced to assume that there is an essential difference between “true” and “false” in the first place? Isn’t it enough to assume that there are degrees of apparency and, so to speak, lighter and darker shadows and hues of appearance—different valeurs, to use the language of painters? Why should the world that is relevant to us not be a fiction?"

You haven't yet addressed the key point of my argument though, and that is the nature of selection itself. Deleuze characterizes selection as non-voluntary, necessary, whereas I consider selection as a free act of will. As an act of free will, we have to allow for will-power, which is to resist the temptation to choose, and to resist the habituated choice. As I described, the act of will-power is resistance to change and difference, therefore a selection of the status quo, lack of change, the same — Metaphysician Undercover

I didn't address this because I have nothing to say about 'free-will' that isn't disparaging. Nobody has any idea what a 'will' is, let alone a 'free' one. If 'free-will' is your (completely arbitrary) criteria for a metaphysics, then there's nothing to discuss.

If you have an inkling of what I'm saying, I'll proceed deeper to what really concerns me. What is at issue here is the nature of "the same". "The same" is very important epistemologically, as the basis of "identity", the basis of "one, of "unity", of "the set", all the geometrical figures, etc.. "The same" is the foundation of all of these, and therefore the foundation of epistemology itself. Identity is how we know that you and I are talking about the same thing, and unless we are talking about the same thing, any knowledge which we may claim to have, is really nonsense.

Notice that all the differences referred to are said to be different, because they are observed to be not the same. So for Aristotle, difference is really just a determination of "not the same". — Metaphysician Undercover

You couldn't have set out any better the exact premises that Deleuze's philosophy explicitly sets out to undermine. Showing these assumptions to be illusory is precisely the project that is announced at the very beginning of Difference and Repetition, and is carried out throughout the rest of the book:

"[The concepts of] difference and repetition have taken the place of the identical and the negative, of identity and contradiction. For difference implies the negative, and allows itself to lead to contradiction, only to the extent that its subordination to the identical is maintained. The primacy of identity, however conceived, defines the world of representation. But modern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities, and of the discovery of all the forces that act under the representation of the identical. The modern world is one of simulacra. Man did not survive God, nor did the identity of the subject survive that of substance. All identities are only simulated, produced as an optical 'effect' by the more profound game of difference and repetition. We propose to think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same, and the relation of different to different independently of those forms which make them pass through the negative".

So what you call out as bugs are exactly the features of the Deleuzian philosophy of difference, one which is at every point opposed to the primacy of the Same and of Identity: opposed, in other words, to the entire Aristotelian schema of Being. Central to the arguments of D&R is also an attempt to point out that far from the Same as being the 'foundation of epistemology', thinking epistemology in terms of the Same is absolutely ruinous for any critical thought, and it's only by thinking the Same on the basis of the Different that thought as such can get off the ground. As it stands, I've not relayed any of those arguments here, but then, neither have you in your assertions about the primacy of Identity. In any case, what you call your 'concerns' are exactly what Deleuze joyfully assents to.

Peguy is interesting, though. And I only know him through Deleuze. But: the celebration repeats that which it celebrates - while the event itself only exists to generate its future celebrations. This seems somehow closer to Deleuze's own analysis, only I can't quite put my finger on it.* What's your take on the peguy/celebration thing? — csalisbury

I pretty much know nothing about Peguy either, but I've puzzled over that passage for a long time too. What I make of it is this: repetition (in the strong, Deleuzian sense) belongs to the order of singularities. Only singularities repeat, and what they repeat is precisely their own singularity. The new always retains it's status as new, rather than becoming subsumed as a particular in an order of generality. Moreover, this 'spiritual' repetition is the very condition which enables what Deleuze calls 'bare' or mechanical repetition - one can celebrate Bastille day to the extent that the fall of the Bastille eternally repeats its own singularity, outside of the order of extensive, historical time (Aeon, and not Chronos).

Zizek has a nice passage about this in his otherwise rather meh book on Deleuze: "the standard opposition of the abstract Universal and particular identities is to be replaced by a new tension between Singular and Universal: the Event of the New as a universal singularity. What Deleuze renders here is the (properly Hegelian) link between true historicity and eternity: a truly New emerges as eternity in time...* To perceive a past phenomenon in becoming (as Kierkegaard would have put it) is to perceive the virtual potential in it, the spark of eternity, of virtual potentiality that is there forever. A truly new work stays new forever—its newness is not exhausted when its “shocking value” passes away. For example, in philosophy, the great breakthroughs—from Kant’s transcendental turn to Kripke’s invention of the “rigid designator”—forever retain their “surprising” character of invention". (Organs Without Bodies)

Moreover, singularity itself belongs to the order of difference - pure, aconceptual or sub-representative difference (difference-in-itself) - insofar as (this kind of) difference is precisely what resists subsumption into conceptuality and identity. Singularity is the hinge which relates difference and repetition to one another.

*In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze, following Peguy, will actually refer to a time of the 'aternal', rather than either the eternal or the temporal, and also to a 'dead time' that corresponds to a 'meanwhile' or 'para-time' (un entre-temps), a kind of dimension of time that runs diagonal to our usual concepts of time and eternity.

--

As for Kierkegaard, I'm sure at some point it's possible to read him as meeting Nietzsche down the line - there's enough richness and ambiguity there to last for millennia - but at some point it's a choice between Christianity and not, no? It's the difference between "God is Dead" and "God is effectively Dead, You're On Your Own and All You've Got Is Your Faith, But Really, Imperceptibly, In A Way I Cant Really Talk About Because Its Not a Matter of Talk... God is There, He Really Is".

Mr. Men gotchya covered.

Is there any comparison between Deleuze's take on eternal return and Kierkegaard's repetition? — Mongrel

Yeah for sure - Deleuze cites Kierkegaard as a principle inspiration for his thoughts on repetition, although he ultimately criticizes him for subordinating repetition to faith and the grace of God. Speaking of Kierkegaard and Charles Peguy (French poet/essayist) together:

"Athough Kierkegaard and Peguy may be the great repeaters, they were not ready to pay the necessary price. They entrusted this supreme repetition, repetition as a category of the future, to faith. ... How could faith not be its own habit and its own reminiscence, and how could the repetition it takes for its object - a repetition which, paradoxically, takes place once and for all - not be comical? Beneath it rumbles another, Nietzschean, repetition: that of eternal return."

This is why Deleuze ultimately opts for Nietzsche as his ultimate point of reference, rather than Kierkegaard: while both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche oppose the generality of law to the singularity of repetition, only in Nietzsche does repetition remain a properly temporal and hence immanent category. Kierkegaard's recourse to faith on the other hand, "invites us to rediscover once and for all God and the self in a common resurrection. Kierkegaard and Peguy are the culmination of Kant, they realise Kantianism by entrusting to faith the task of overcoming the speculative death of God and healing the wound in the self".

This though, all comes after a long interlude where Deleuze heaps praise upon Kierkegaard for coming really close to thinking repetition in the way he thinks it ought to be thought of as: as a faith in the future as such, a future without Grace (à la Abraham)

First, I'm not even sure it makes much sense to talk about specific or generic difference for Aristotle---as mentioned, this seems to be a Porphyrian element extrinsic to the way Aristotle himself thought. — Nagase

But Aristotle does employ the genus-species distinction, specifically in relation to difference, in book Delta of the Metaphysics:

"We call contraries (1) those attributes that differ in genus, which cannot belong at the same time to the same subject, (2) the most different of the things in the same genus, (3) the most different of the attributes in the same receptive material, (4) the most different of the things that fall under the same capacity, (5) the things whose difference is greatest either absolutely or in genus or in species.

...Things are said to be other in species if they are of the same genus but are not subordinate the one to the other, or if, while being in the same genus they have a difference, or if they have a contrariety in their substance; and contraries are other than one another in species (either all contraries or those which are so called in the [5] primary sense), and so are those things whose formulae differ in the infima species of the genus (e.g. man and horse are indivisible in genus, but their formulae are different), or which being in the same substance have a difference. ‘The same in species’ is used correspondingly." (Book Δ, 10).

And in book Zeta: "Nothing, then, which is not a species of a genus will have an essence--only species will have it, for these are thought to imply not merely that the subject participates in the attribute and has it as an affection, or has it by accident; but for everything else as well, if it has a name, there be a formula of its meaning--viz. that this attribute belongs to this subject; or instead of a simple formula we shall be able to give a more accurate one; but there will be no definition nor essence" (Book Z, 4).

These are certainly not extrinsic formulations imposed upon Aristotle from the outside.

I think that there is a question concerning the relationship between these two. In the op it is said that metaphysics selects the field, and ontology operates within that field. But when you refer to Deleuze, the inverse is implied, that the ontological, eternal return necessitates selection. However, you also said "it's the eternal return that 'selects' what returns, and of course what returns is 'difference'". Now, there seems to be some ambiguity in your posts, could you clarify one thing for me? Do you think that the eternal return actually selects, or does the eternal return necessitate selection? — Metaphysician Undercover

I think I know what you're getting at, and part of the complexity here is that Deleuze ontologizes the selective principle. That is: if every metaphysics implies a selection, Deleuze's whole objection to the history of metaphysics is that it never sufficiently justifies it's particular 'method' of selection. Why Being and not-Being in Parmenides? Why model and simulacrum in Plato? Why converging and diverging series (best of all 'possible worlds') in Leibniz? How to positively discriminate between these differing, 'selective' claims to reality? Deleuze's solution here is to make selection a principle of reality: reality just is that which selects.

So in this sense you're right: metaphysics and ontology run together in Deleuze, and in so doing, he immanentizes metaphysics. Metaphysics no longer becomes an arbitrary imposition of a rule of selection onto reality (from the outside, as it were) but is rendered 'ontological' to begin with. So part of the complexity of Deleuze is this running together of metaphysics, ontology, and even epistemology and ethics, which is kind of what happens when you stick to the thesis of 'univocity', in which being is "said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said" (think of Spinoza here, who is the principle inspiration, and whose principle work of metaphysics is given the title of the Ethics).

The question of exactly how to make sense of all this remains however, and this entire account remains abstract and incomplete without an account of the subject of selection: if being is what is selects, what is selected for? Deleuze's answer is: difference. While the whole first half of D&R sets up this 'problem' of selection and it's immanentization, the second half (chapters 4 and 5) will go on to provide the account of difference which works to complete the full picture. I won't go into that, but hopefully this kind of schematic overview gives a taste of whats at issue in all of this rather abstract theorization.

I probably can, but I really don't want to. Deleuze's use of the eternal return is easily - for me anyway - one of the most complex aspects of his philosophy, and while I kind of already have, I don't really want to make this thread about Deleuze, so much as about the notion of selection and it's possible usefulness in thinking about metaphysics. Suffice to say that the eternal return is Deleuze's own 'mechanism' of selection, the formulation of which is meant to function immanently, rather than in a transcendent manner as it does with many of the thinkers listed in the OP. Also, I simply don't like Deleuze's use of the phrase itself. I get what he's trying to do with it - it's basically an incredibly clever rejoinder to Plato - but it's unnecessarily confusing and leads to objections exactly like the one you've formulated. Sorry if this is a bit of a disappointing reply, but it's not a topic I'm keen to discuss, especially with those unversed in Deleuze already.

Heh, I was literally reading those passages this morning. But yeah, I don't think it's wishy washy at all: the whole repetition chapter is set up to mirror the structure of the difference chapter. Where chapter 1 seeks to discover the realm of intensive difference acting 'beneath' the realm of conceptual difference, chapter 2 seeks to discover 'underneath' the time of representation (active synthesis), an intensive time of repetition (passive synthesis), and to do so in each of the temporal dimensions (past, present, future). And at each point Deleuze gives quite precise arguments as to why the time of representation always needs to be accounted for in terms of intensive time.

As far as selection is concerned, it takes place at the level of the first and second syntheses of time (contraction of habit and synthesis of memory), while the third synthesis (eternal return) ensures that a selection must be made at every point. It's basically the imperative of an inescapable 'NEXT' which forces the affirmation of selection at every 'point' in time. So it's a question of whether we comport ourselves to affirm the singularity of this imperative (throw of the dice), or whether or not we 'fall' back into treating time in terms of probability and 'bare' repetition - generality ("things have always gone on this way, so..."). Can we make ourselves equal to that which dissolves the solidity of our identity at every moment (the Deleuzian ethical imperative: become equal to the unequal within us)?

The whole thing is Nietzschian from top to bottom basically (with a Bergsonian spin re: memory): do we act actively or re-actively to the singularity of the Moment (cf. the parable of the Moment in Zarathustra). The difference from Nietzsche (this is Bergson) tho is that selection takes place not with respect to future 'choices' (as you said, 'x or y? vanilla or chocolate?'), but with respect to how we bring the past to bear on the present: "This is why destiny accords so badly with determinism but so well with freedom: freedom lies in choosing the levels [of the pure past]". Sorry if it seems like I'm just recounting my reading and using you as a foil - I kinda am.

Hi - the 'we' in the thread title refers to humans as a species, on an evolutionary level, not on an individual, psycological level.

Nope, I don't mean that.

I know this is not the topic of the thread, but I don't agree with this characterization of Aristotle (I think he's a much better reader of Plato). I don't think he was much concerned with "genus" and "species" (these are latter terms), this concern being much more the product of Porphyry (who was a neo-Platonist). Rather, I'd say that he was much more concerned with what is essential and what is inessential; in the case of living organisms, this distinction is rooted in the form of life of that particular organism (so he's very distant from current taxonomical paradigms, which focus more on anatomical features; for Aristotle, anatomical features are something to be explained, not what does the explaining). In other words, essential features of an organism are those which actively contribute to the organism's way of living, whereas inessential features are those which are a mere byproduct of the essential features.

This is not just nitpicking, because Deleuze's argument against Aristotle (in the first chapter of DR) depends on his Porphyrian reading of Aristotle (and here I think he may be operating under the influence of Le Blond), and I'm not sure if it can be patched once Aristotle's subtler points are in view. — Nagase

I agree that it's almost certainly a Porphyrian Aristotle in the background here, but in truth, I don't think I did justice to Deleuze's reading in the OP. In reality, the engagement with Aristotle in D&R takes place almost exclusively with respect to Aristotle's impositions upon difference. If anything, what is 'selected' for is not where individuals fall under in terms of genera and species (as I put it in the OP), but the kind of difference which is given legitimacy in Aristotle. Aristotle 'selects for' specific difference, while ruling out, as ontologically illegitimate as it were, generic difference - hence the turn to equivocal/analogical Being.

Of course, that doesn't detract from your general point, namely that metaphysics is concerned with selection. I think that's an interesting thought, specially since you presumably select something for some purpose, and one could ask what purpose this is (I think Deleuze's reading of Plato is especially nice in this regard). But I'm not sure if I agree. Generally, one would say that one doesn't select one's metaphysical picture, but rather that that picture is somewhat forced upon one. — Nagase

As I said to Moliere earlier in the thread, the associations of language here might lead us astray, because despite it's 'voluntarist' tenor, 'selection' is anything but voluntary in Delezue, and selection is always the result of an 'encounter' with or 'interference of' a 'question-problem complex' which forces one to creatively engage and fabulate responses as a result (the quoted phrases are Deleuze's). The kind of 'phenomenology' - if we may call it that - of Lewis being 'gripped' by the necessity of imposing the sorts of divisions he does is very much in keeping with the Deleuzian conception of philosophy as involving a 'pedagogy of the concept', where creation - or in this case selection - is very much a matter of imposition, of 'subjective dissolution', if we may put it that way.

Wilfried Sellars' definition of philosophy (which helps one understand philosophy's methodological approach): "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." — Terrapin Station

I used to be impressed by this but now not so much. I mean, I like Sellars, and even then I find this a kind of nothing-definition of philosophy. One of those horoscope-like profundities that seems nice but really doesn't say much at all. Not a dig at you, it's just a statement I find far too trivial and overquoted.

Jaegwon Kim is an analytic philosopher of Korean decent and who is something of a giant among analytic philosophy, having written some field defining work on supervenience and philosophy of mind. That said, I am neither very familiar with the state of contemporary analytic philosophy nor can I really name anyone else. But there you go.

One thing to note is that in Asia, there's not exactly a premium placed on philosophical education, which is pretty low down on the list of aspirations. Speaking purely anecdotally - as a 'halfie' who has lived in South East Asia most of my life - most families would most likely seriously disprove of their kid becoming a professional philosopher. But that's just a bit of doxa for you.

I guess with respect to epistemology, it's the status of selection that is in question: if it's status is unclear or unstated, there's no being sure about where one's metaphysics stands in relation to one's epistemology. As far as Deleuze goes, he will short-circuit the whole metaphysics/epistemology distinction by ontologizing selection itself: Being just is a matter of selection. Things 'are' to the degree that they make selections, and thus any 'metaphysical procedure' of selection is no different, and is continuous with what happens in nature anyway. It's important to emphasize though that 'selection' is anything but voluntary in Delezue, and selection is the result of an 'encounter' with a 'problem' which forces a selection one way or another. This last bit needs a bit of fleshing out to make proper sense (nothing has been said so far about what is selected for), but you get a flavor of what's at stake I hope.

The thing with chapter 1 of Difference & Repetition, though, is that, in it, the concept of selection isn't just a matter of metaphysical methodology. It makes the more radical move - and correct me if you disagree - of making selection ontological, of painting being itself as a kind of continuous process of selection. — csalisbury

Yeah, this is exactly right. If anything, Deleuze's problem with previous thinkers is that they aren't clear about the nature of selection: what is it's status exactly? Part of what motivates D&R - and why he relates the history of metaphysics through selection - is to provide that clarification which he finds missing in all those previous thinkers. Deleuze's doesn't simply want to provide another in a long line of 'selection mechanisms'; he wants instead to justify his. This is why univocity becomes so important: univocity 'ontologizes' selection, it gives it the status of being itself. Thus re: the 'hinge' of selection in my post above, Deleuze's own 'hinge' will be the eternal return: it's the eternal return that 'selects' what returns, and of course what returns is 'difference'. How to understand that though.... In any case, I'm on chapter 2 right now, and it's the 3rd upon which everything turns I think, as far as 'method' and it's implication with ontology goes.

I guess, if you wanna go whole-hog immanentist, that the metaphysician's act of selection must itself be ontologically explicable. & so this is how you avoid the perspicuous concern that @Moliere raises about metaphysics bleeding into epistemology - you make being itself a process of 'laying claim' or 'selecting', so that the metaphysican's act is but one instance of a universal process.

Yeah, Deleuze's account of individuation for 'things' will more or less parallel his account of the individuation of 'the thinker', who only ever thinks by way of an 'encounter', just as individuation only ever takes place by way of a 'heterogenesis'. It's univocity all the way.

Out of sincere, non-rhetorical curiosity, is your current reading of D&R especially colored by any particularly secondary source or interpretation? — csalisbury

I'm reading Henry Somers-Hall's philosophical guide along with the book atm (chapter-for-chapter), but what's really motivated me to pick up D&R again is having read Anthony Wilden's System and Structure a couple of months ago. Wilden doesn't actually talk about Deleuze at all (with the exception of a dismissive footnote in which he brushes Deleuze off as an uninteresting neo-Kierkegaardian), but reading Wilden (and his treatment of negation) really, really helped me figure out so much of what I think Deleuze is up to.

Also, having now read some of Gilbert Simondon's work (especially - vitally - the essay "The Genesis of the Individual"), I'm convinced that no one can read D&R without having read some of Simondon first. Like, you cannot read D&R without Simondon, you just can't. Everything Deleuze writes about affirmation, ?-being, 'problems', negation, the dialectic, etc, owes itself to Simondon (OK maybe not everything....) - but it's through Wilden and Simondon that I'm approaching D&R this time. Not exactly secondary reading, but yeah, definitely a set of lenses. Also maybe Zourabichvilli's book (Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event) which has been really important to me for a while now.

Re: this thread in particular, I don't know many/any secondary reading that really focus on the question of selection. Everyone seems to approach chapter 1 though the lens of difference (which, yeah, OK, the chapter is called 'difference-in-itself'), but it's real subject matter seems to me to be selection (of difference).

I don't know if epistemology is the right word. In Plato, for example, the question of epistemology follows quite straightforwardly from the doctrine of Ideas (metaphysics). Knowledge is a matter of anamnesis/reeminscence, a theory which requires that one has already constructed the whole edifice of eternal souls and so on to begin with. What (I think) you're after is what motivates or justifies say, 'this' particular selection procedure over another, and in Plato at least, it's not entirely clear (Deleuze criticizes Plato for basically resorting to myth each time: the myth of the cave, the myth of the demiurge, the myth of the 'Shepherd-God', as he calls it).

One interesting thing that Deleuze's reading brings out is that each 'selection' procedure has what he calls a 'differentiator': In Hegel it's contradiction, in Leibniz it's what he (Leibniz) calls 'vice-diction', in Plato it's myth, and so on. There's always a kind of 'hinge' which sorts out what belongs where (what does the selecting - a kind of metaphysical Laplace's Demon). Anyway, it seems to me that your question bears upon what Kant will end up calling 'critical' philosophy: a matter of justifying one's initial pressupositions without falling into 'dogmatic metaphysics' (metaphysics which has not sufficiently justified it's own notion of selection, nor the 'hinge' which does the sorting). My suspicion is that after the critical turn, one can't - in the manner of Plato - have an epistemology simply 'follow' one's already-established metaphysics, and it needs to be entwined with it somehow (from the 'start', as it were).

It's an open question how one will go about doing this, and whether, after it is 'done', one can neatly parse 'metaphysics' and 'epistemology' as two separate spheres. My intuition is that to speak of epistemology as a kind of self-enclosed sphere of study is a 'pre-critical'/'dogmatic' (in the Kantian sense) kind of move, and there needs to be a transformation of what 'epistemology' itself is, if one is being properly critical about things. This doesn't quite answer your question, but eh...

You might be on the last page of what is a multi-page thread. At the bottom of the thread is a series of numbers (it goes up to 11 as of this post), and if you click on '1', it will take you to the start of the thread.