Joy! New discovery of a great mind and also rediscovery of the empowering morning jog.

Gilles Deleuze — postwar continental heavyweight whose philosophy is fiercely fresh and completely disconcerting — is a man who believes in secrecy and spent most of his life by staying where he was. “If I stick where I am, if I don’t travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write. … Arguments from one’s own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments.”

But still, this was a life lived to the fullest — despite the fact he’s been suffering from debilitating disease for a quarter of a century and described himself “like a dog chained to an oxygen machine”. The inner journey he took, those internal sojourns…were a true testimony to what Proust once famously said: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

For Deleuze,  to live well is to fully express one’s power, to go to the limits of one’s potential, rather than to judge what exists by non-empirical, transcendent standards. Modern society suppresses difference and alienates persons from their true potentials. To become what we can become, we must at least try to subvert conventionalities, overturn established identities and take a fresh look at sedimentated concepts. For him, philosophy is the construction of concepts, and those concepts are not merely propositions but metaphysical constructions that can render intelligible reality — which is a flux of change of difference.

I like his epistemology — there’s no neutral point of view that one can arrive at after rigorous thinking; and philosophy is no disinterested pursuit that results in a fixed set of truth. Deleuze thinks genuine thinking is a violent confrontation with reality, an involuntary rupture of established categories. Reason is always a footnote to irrationality.

I like how he differentiates among philosophy, arts and science. Philosophy deals with concepts, arts with sensation and feeling, and science raw data from natural world. They’re different ways of organizing metaphysical influx. I especially like what he said about cinema — he doesn’t treat cinema as representing external reality, but takes it as an ontological practice of creating different ways of organizing movement and time.

So for him, the pinnacle of human practice, is creativity.

“Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge.”