Deleuze Interprets Nietzsche. - Identity and difference

(Original episode was released October 13th, 2024. Minor edits for clarity of text.)

Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

If you’re someone who heard what Nietzsche had to say in the last couple posts and went “Wow. Checkmate, philosophy!”

“I mean this guy Friedrich just destroyed all of you! Go grab your herd membership cards and find a place to moo at each other in a field for the rest of your lives! Let the cultural elites like Friedrich take over from now on”— well, if that’s how you feel then unfortunately it’s going to be a very short-lived party for you.

But that’s a good thing I think, ultimately.

As is always the case in philosophy: other smart people came along shortly after Nietzsche and pointed out all the assumptions he was making that led to the shape and scope of his work. One of these was his fellow German Martin Heidegger who next post will be about.

But today I want to talk about someone who was a little more favorable towards Nietzsche’s work. It’s an interpretation that many people out there believe to be the best interpretation of his work that has ever been done. People say it’s the one that reflects the direction Nietzsche probably would’ve been headed in had he not gotten sick and died as early as he did. It’s a book written in the year 1962 called Nietzsche and Philosophy by the now world famous philosopher named Gilles Deleuze.

To Deleuze—yes, Nietzsche’s work was flawed. He was in many ways a product of his time: the hyper-individualism, the herd-mentality stuff. We’ll talk about why these ideas don’t necessarily hold up as concepts when you take the implications of his work seriously. But Deleuze is not interested in spending much time dwelling on these sorts of problems. Because the real interesting piece of Nietzsche, ironically, is what we can affirm about his work, not what we can critique about it.

See, Deleuze is always in the business of getting away from just critiquing things.

He’s always interested in constructing something new when he writes.

And what he said about Nietzsche is that he’s a philosopher that managed to lay the groundwork for an entirely different way of thinking about affirmation and difference as concepts—where when you truly affirm difference at this radical new level that he introduces, it not only allows us to escape the dialectic of Hegel and most of his admirers, but it also allows us to escape from the narrow boxes that philosophers have had us thinking in for basically the entire history of Western philosophical thought.

Now, that’s a big claim. So what did Deleuze mean when he said this? And didn’t we already talk about Nietzsche smashing the idealism from the history of Western society? Is this Deleuze just repeating something we’ve already heard here before?

Well, no. It’s actually more exciting than that. What Deleuze is saying is if you really take the implications of Nietzsche’s work seriously then they actually go farther than even Nietzsche himself realized as he was writing them.

In the spirit of Deleuze let’s start with something like a game show segment today. The title of the segment is:

Dismantling Philosophical Assumptions That Have Been Going on for Over 2,000 Years or So.

Honestly, it could use a better title.

One of the most world-shifting points that Deleuze brings up in his own work is his critique of Western philosophy and what he calls the Image of Thought that’s gone on all throughout it.

A classic example to start explaining it is to look at Plato’s world of forms. How does it generally go when we talk about it?

There’s an ideal version of a tree, for example, that all particular trees are just imperfect copies of.

Meaning, when you’re walking through the garden section of the Home Depot, and you see that line of flower pots with the trees coming out of them—to Plato, those things are trees only because they resemble, or represent, the more ideal form of a tree, that we can arrive at through reason if we just think about stuff well enough.

This is what Deleuze calls an example of representational thinking.

And just for the sake of full clarity here, the same thing goes for the ideal form of justice that you can reason to versus a particular representation of justice when a particular judge bangs a gavel in a courtroom.

Same thing goes for the ideal form of courage versus a particular representation of courage if you pushed past your fears while doing something.

Point is: particular things are representations of an ideal for a thinker like Plato.

Now, one of the assumptions that comes out of this representational thinking that you’ll notice is that say you have a theory about what justice is— well, that theory you have about justice, when you argue for it, is only made valid to the degree that it corresponds to that ideal form of justice that’s been previously established by philosophers.

For Deleuze, the move here that philosophers are making that’s going to be important for us to notice is that in this representational thinking: how valid someone’s thoughts are always comes down to how well they correspond to some pre-existing set of criteria.

And this hasn’t just happened in Plato’s work. You can notice this same exact thing going on in the work of Descartes where thoughts are valid only if they’re clear and distinct as defined by the criteria Descartes lays out.

You can notice this in the work of Kant where knowledge is only valid if it can conform to the categories of our understanding as laid out by Kant.

But real quick, just for a second—remember how Nietzsche viewed the work of all these philosophers, and what he thought about their attempts at arriving at “truth.”

When a philosopher or anyone has a worldview: that worldview says a whole lot more about them personally—their own bias, history, or personality—than it does anything about the truth of the universe.

So think of the kind of situation this creates in the history of philosophy for Deleuze.

We have a history of thinking about stuff where philosophers have come up with a set of rigid protocols for what valid thinking is—an Image of Thought, as it’s called—where along with these protocols come a bunch of other assumptions philosophers have made. Lots of them.

From the fact that everybody has a natural ability to think clearly—where if only they work on their thinking they’ll be less prone to error. Or how about the assumption that it’s error about the facts that’s usually the problem that’s leading to bad thinking— not the rigid protocols that everything is being filtered through.

Point is for Deleuze: there are a lot of assumptions philosophers have been making over the years about what thinking even is.

But to him one of the main problems he would want to point out about this whole setup is that it is always, by design, a reactive process.

Meaning, it is always trying to take new states of affairs that we’ve never seen before, and we’re always supposed to measure the worth of these things based on how well they represent some previous standard arrived at by another philosopher in a different state of things using their own criteria.

But if everything is always understood in terms of how well it matches up to some former snapshot of the world, in a world that is always moving and in a state of becoming, then aren’t we severely limiting our ability to construct new, valuable ways of looking at things—arrived at from an entirely different perspective?

If it’s confusing as to why this would ever be a problem, just think of this applied to the realm of movies.

Imagine a movie director saying,

“I am the Plato of the movie industry. And unless a movie conforms to this ideal standard I’ve set up—unless there’s three acts, a hero, a climax, and a resolution—well then, that’s not really a movie now, is it?”

or

“Unless the plot of this movie is written in a way that is clear and distinct then it’s not a movie! And who decides that? I decide what’s clear and distinct!”

What would you say to someone who said something like that?

You’d say, “Get over yourself, ya weirdo. A movie’s a lot more than whether it follows some protocol you’ve set up.”

And for Deleuze, maybe the more important thing here is to consider how this process goes in the other direction as well—when people sit down to write a movie. Someone can be primed to always think in this representational way.

To think, “Okay, well if I’m going to write a movie, then it’s gonna need three acts, it’s gonna need a hero, it’s gotta be clear and distinct.”

This is always needing to conform to a set of protocols that limits the creativity of the artist. It limits people’s ability to arrive at new forms of what life even looks like.

This is why Deleuze would later go on in his work to critique things like psychoanalysis. Same sort of relationship.

Imagine living your life having a psychological experience of the world and then you go see a psychoanalyst whose whole bag of tricks is to find ways to explain the experience you’re having through how it corresponds to, or represents, the terminology and theory that they’re educated in.

In other words, to some pre-existing overly rational framework of how human psychology operates.

If you were always primed to understand your experience through a framework arrived at by someone else it may give you an understanding of a piece of it—no question—but it might also prevent you from coming up with new psychological tracings for navigating the changing world you’re actually living in with a changing psychology as a part of it.

If you’re noticing a pattern here—that Deleuze is concerned about the reactive ways that we organize our thinking and how they may prevent people from a more active approach where they’re involved in the creation of the new—well then, I’ve done my job here so far explaining this.

And you can see the comparison here to the Übermensch of Nietzsche that we’ve been talking about where it’s a person that doesn’t conform to a passive, reactive approach to life given to them by other people.

Well, this Übermensch becomes a nice, macroscopic, human-level example that we can relate to—to start explaining a process that is going on for Deleuze practically everywhere, all the time, at every different level.

Gilles Deleuze is a process philosopher. He describes himself in his work sometimes as just a metaphysician.

Meaning he sees himself as someone that is primarily doing metaphysics in his work. He’s not giving particle analysis. He’s not a biologist. He’s talking about what is going on within or beyond physics—metaphysics—so that it may give us a new explanation as to what’s going on in the world.

And to him a fundamental component that can be used to make sense of our reality in a new way is difference.

This is the thing most earlier philosophers have missed in their work, because they’ve always been trying to distill reality down into something fixed and stable.

We got seven episodes of the podcast we did on Deleuze—not going into all of it here—but the short version of this is that if you’re one of these people that go throughout your life thinking about yourself as a static identity:

“I am Friedrich Nietzsche,” for example. And that I, as Friedrich Nietzsche, am a human being. And that there’s an essence to what being a human being is. That I can think about that essence and arrive at a definition of it—if that’s the way you’re thinking about this aspect of your identity—well this might be a nice, pragmatic way for you to operate as you go throughout your life, but Deleuze’s entire picture of the universe would pull basically every one of those assumptions you just made about yourself completely apart at the seams.

If you want to think more like him: instead of thinking of the world like there are fixed essences to things—where a tree is a thing, a person is a thing, a rock is a thing—think instead of reality as being made up by a collection of forces that are defined by their interactions with each other.

Trillions of different forces that are all vying for expression in each moment as the world unfolds into the future.

In that kind of world then, Friedrich Nietzsche is not a static identity.

What we think of as Nietzsche—when he was alive at least—was the interaction between a collection of forces at a specific location.

He was ultimately a site of becoming. He was many different forces all vying for expression, overcoming each other, gaining expression.

In other words, think of Nietzsche not as a person with an essence like we might typically think of him.

Nietzsche is a historical collection of forces that are still having impacts on forces in the world to this day.

And when you look at him that way—again, Nietzsche is not a static identity.

To Deleuze, what we call “Nietzsche” in any given moment is a temporary formation of just a repetition of certain, similar forces that gained expression during this particular moment, but haven’t changed drastically enough for the illusion of a static identity to go away.

So on that same note, think of what you are along these same lines.

Any identity where it seems like it’s what you are right now is really just a temporary pattern of forces that have found expression— that through repetition can seem to you like they’re a stable identity.

Obviously we recognize that if other forces that are a part of you found expression then you would be a different person. And if enough of them changed and had repetition in another direction for a long enough period of time then your whole identity would feel like it was something different.

But never was there a static essence or identity to what you were, and always was there the ability for you to become something totally different and explore new modes of existence.

This is just a totally different way of looking at what a person is. Classic, subjective identity doesn’t apply here. And to take this back to Plato, you can understand this as a totally different way of looking at what a tree is as well.

You go into the Home Depot and see all those trees, and on one hand, yes, it’s very pragmatic to call all of these trees the same genus and species. They look kind of similar.

But on another level for someone like Deleuze: this denies the true level of difference that’s going on in the universe.

These trees are a process that is embedded into a larger collection of processes.

Every single one of these trees is a different repetition of forces that are all constantly shifting and adapting within a world and universe that is always shifting and adapting.

And this view of reality in terms of it being an interaction between different forces is one of the things Deleuze thinks Nietzsche’s work laid the foundation for.

So, if it’s not entirely clear yet: under this view of reality, any attempt at making identity or reality into something fixed and static—while it’s undeniably useful when you’re checking out at the Home Depot, which is nothing to gloss over—it’s at another level always in denial of the true state of change that the world is always in.

Notice where this critique starts to apply to the history of philosophy and the supposed Image of Thought put forward by philosophers.

To Deleuze, even our concept of thinking is always subject to change.

And why wouldn’t it be? There are no static categories of thought. There are an infinite number of ways the universe could be conceptually framed and mapped out by philosophers. And thinking in this limited way sabotages our ability to arrive at new ways of thinking or new forms of what life is.

You can also start to see that when you’re affirming your place as one small piece of this constant unfolding of reality into the future: to always be looking to the past to verify the present starts to deny something very important about what existence is altogether.

In other words, you can start to see similarities between the tendencies in our philosophy and the tendencies in the way people live their lives.

More on that in a second. But for now, since we have a basic picture here of Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche, this is a good place to start to make the case for why he thinks Nietzsche’s work is actually the enemy of Hegel and dialectics.

The bottom line is that compared to Nietzsche: dialectics simplifies the true level of difference that is going on.

And it’s interesting because usually people will think of the dialectic and see it as something you use if you’re actually acknowledging the true complexity of reality.

You know, “Justice isn’t some thing out there with an essence,” they’ll say.
“It’s just one piece of an opposition within a complex network of oppositions.”

In a more Marxist type of dialectics, when it comes to social relations one very simple way to look at the world is to see something like a school and to think, “Well, a school is just a school. It’s a place where we send people to go get an education.”

But, as we talked about, somebody thinking more dialectically might say that that’s oversimplifying things.

That when you truly dig into what a school is to anyone in a particular structure of meaning: that school is something that has the meaning it does to us only because of its relationship to all the other things around it in a given society in a network of oppositions.

For example, how a school relates to what a company is, to what the government is, to what the economic setup is, to the faculty of the school. These things are not as separate as an essence-driven view of reality might suggest. And as it’s said in dialectics what that means is: the form of what something is becomes an important piece of what the content of the thing is.

Now, as I was just saying, this is typically seen as moving away from oversimplifying things. But if we take the ideas of Nietzsche seriously—through this interpretation by Deleuze—then the dialectic becomes yet another example of one of these needless rational scaffoldings that we’re projecting onto a reality that is actually more complicated and dynamic than the dialectic allows for.

Let me give an example. One of the ones Deleuze uses is the dialectic between master and slave. In dialectics these two seemingly different things of being a master or being a slave are in reality two sides of the same coin. They are oppositions to each other; the meaning of them is unified. You can’t understand the meaning of one of them without presuming the existence and meaning of the other.

But under Nietzsche’s worldview, he says there’s no reason to chop up reality into these oppositions that need to be resolved, because difference accounts for all of these things.

For example, master and slave, to Nietzsche, are not two sides of the same coin.

Masters and slaves come from two completely different genealogies. They are explained by two completely different histories. They often come from two completely different moral approaches towards reality.

So the idea is: if each one of these forces are distinct and very different from each other:
why do we gotta make them the same thing? Just to remove difference and replace it with negation?

To Nietzsche, in the actual world, when a master overcomes a slave or slaves rise up and overthrow a master that’s not an opposition being resolved. This is the affirmation of difference. This is one will to power overcoming another will to power.

And subordinating difference to it simply being a negation of a more unified thing is, again, a needless rational scaffolding that denies how dynamic the reality of difference truly is.

So picture that world. It’s not a bunch of essences all competing with things that have other essences. It’s not a bunch of oppositions seeking resolution and clarification.

It’s just a near-infinite collection of wills that are all competing for and striving for differentiation.

The dialectic in that world, then, becomes unnecessary and distorting.

I mean, you can imagine the mistakes you might make in seeing forces in the world—revolutions, historical movements—and if you were fixated on this idea that everything is just directly part of and solely in reaction to some other thing that came before it: you might miss out on things that were uniquely characteristic to a particular movement that were important for understanding what they were.

The takeaway from this in a more practical sense will lead people to call the end result of Nietzsche’s philosophy an approach to life filled with a type of joy, lightness, playfulness.

The reason for this is because if we take what Nietzsche has to say seriously
then the picture of life is not one where you’re held to a rigid set of protocols like a moral code from a god your entire life.

It’s not a picture of life where there are these countless dialectical oppositions that need to be worked out, so you better go get to work.

The picture of life to Nietzsche becomes almost like a game you’re playing,
where through affirmation of what life is, you’re essentially rolling the dice over and over again, hoping to roll a seven. With the understanding that even if you don’t ever roll a seven, you’re still at least playing the game.

In other words, there’s a seriousness and expectation to what life is that just gets lifted. And instead it starts to make more sense to just affirm difference in each moment of your life heading into the future whether it lines up with a set of protocols created in the past or not. And for whatever it’s worth: this recurring affirmation of difference in each moment as it unfolds in the universe is what Deleuze believes is the true significance of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.

Now, for Nietzsche, these trillions of forces going on in the universe—if you were to analyze them—they can be broken down into categories of either active forces or reactive forces.

And you’ll of course recognize the terms active and reactive from discussion we had around active or reactive approaches to life. The active being the approach of the Übermensch who creatively differentiates their existence. The reactive being the approach of the herd mentality that critiques, moralizes, sits around, and seeks recognition in external events.

But it should be said that, to Nietzsche, through this interpretation by Deleuze,
this goes beyond just how this shows up in actions. You can also see these active and reactive forces all over the place in other scales of reality.

So, what are some examples of what these might be? Well, take a potential example at the level of microbiology.

Think of a virus that attacks a body and spreads all around attacking different pieces of the body. That would be the result of a collection of active forces asserting a type of will on the forces of the body.

On the other hand, in response to this: there are often reactive forces—like, say, the immune system of the body. These are forces that mitigate or govern the active forces by fighting off the virus trying to return the body back to a level of stasis.

Now, of course, we know all of this is a metaphor. There is no stasis for Nietzsche or Deleuze. The body is always in a state of flux as are other active forces in the world looking to impose themselves on the body around it.

But nonetheless, this is an example of how we can visualize active and reactive forces in their constant interplay at the level of microbiology. And we can see this dynamic all over the universe.

Let’s look at another example of this at a bigger scale– at the level of political action.

Say there’s a revolution going down somewhere. What are the active forces in that revolution?

Well, you have the revolutionaries who are spreading the word, the ones rallying, fighting, creating new forms of order on the fly as the situation develops. These are people that are asserting their will and are actively creating something new.

On the other hand you have the reactive forces in things like the existing government—the institutions, the military of the governing body,
the laws designed to maintain the existing order of things.

These are not forces that are creating anything. They are reacting to external events, trying to govern them, trying to return things back to the way they were before.

And it’s through seeing these forces as either active or reactive that Nietzsche starts to look at aspects of our everyday lives as active or reactive.

For example, criticism is, to him, a reactive thing to do. If someone else is actively trying to do something or create something new, and your whole contribution is to sit around and offer criticisms about it, you are engaging in a reactive sort of tendency.

You’re just looking at external things that are happening and trying to mitigate them or govern them down.

Moral judgment is another one of these things that falls into the reactive category,
because what do you do when you aren’t doing much yourself to be morally judged for? You call out other people for not living up to some rigid set of protocols for their behavior.

You can start to see the overall picture that’s being painted here. Not only is he saying that there is a reactive bias to almost the entire history of human thought—remember, with that representational thinking, we’re always looking to the protocols of the past to justify future thought—but then we also create entire societies out of this surplus of reactive energy that then go on to create very reactive tendencies in the people that make those societies up.

So this is a perfect time to return back to the comments about the herd mentality from Nietzsche. Is it right to call 99% of people out there members of the herd?

Should be said: there is a reading of Nietzsche that says the only reason he’d ever refer to people as members of the herd is to inspire those that are trapped in chains they don’t realize they’re in.

But what critics will say in the years following Nietzsche’s work is—okay, let’s take what you have to say seriously here. Let’s say there’s no good and evil written into the universe and that pretending as though there is just distracts us from the real work we need to be doing of understanding the power dynamics that really determine what goes on. And let’s say that most people fall into this “herd-like mentality,” where they’re all adopting a reactive approach to life.

Well, then the first question you have to ask is—why is that, Nietzsche?

Is that because they’re born weak or bad people? Or is that because they are born into power dynamics that regularly expose them to forces that influence them to be passive and reactive?

Like, let’s say there’s a child born into a Christian home—and I use Christianity here because Nietzsche specifically calls it a slave morality—when that child grows up and favors the “virtues of the weak,” as Nietzsche calls them: was that because they were born weak? Or because they grew up in an environment, a set of power dynamics,
where those virtues were nurtured into them and rewarded from the moment they were born?

In other words, calling someone a member of a herd—short of this being a way of inspiring people—seems to be making the same mistake he’s accusing people of:
of not considering the power dynamics that really determine people’s worldviews.

Now, to many thinkers who comment on Nietzsche’s work, it’s obvious Nietzsche did understand that this was a matter of power dynamics—which is why he spent so much time engaging with the power dynamics of his time. Much of his work is spent untangling things like morality and the egalitarian politics that he thought were often used as tools to be able to control people in that reactive, governing sort of way.

But there’s another layer to all this that needs to be addressed here.

There’s probably someone out there who’s been thinking this since we started talking about this—is he saying that reactive forces are totally bad and that active forces are totally good?

If the example we’re working with is that a reactive force is like the immune system of the body, or laws and rules, or moral accountability—well call me crazy but these things seem important to me.

I get that just sitting around and critiquing things can be insufferable, but isn’t throwing this stuff out just missing a huge regulatory component of what our lives are? Of how our societies function well?

These are great questions, and the answer to them is: of course we need reactive forces in the world.

The question that is more relevant here to Nietzsche is, again through the interpretation of Deleuze: if you had to do an analysis of what kinds of forces are most prevalent in the world we live in, would you say the typical society is set up with an equal level of support for people choosing lives that are active and reactive?

Is it 50/50 exactly? No.

Is it more likely to be reactive?

Well, then how much more on the reactive side are we?

To Nietzsche, it’s clear we have a huge bias in the reactive direction. Society itself is a reactive force trying to govern people’s behavior. And if history is full of people choosing more reactive ways of living does that maybe have something to do with the way those societies have been set up? Is it maybe easier to control people when they’re encouraged to be passive and reactive?

And for Gilles Deleuze, one of the promising ways forward when it comes to all of this we’ve been talking about today is going to be for us to emphasize art as opposed to information.

Now hearing that— you may be like: good God is this guy really gonna say we need to do more fingerpainting to free ourselves from the chains of the world? But just think of what information truly is in the type of society we live in.

We typically think that information is something that’s liberating. If only people had the information then they’d be able to make decisions that were better for them and their families. But so often what happens in the information age is that whoever dominates the flows of information gets to dominate the limited worldview of the people that they’re reaching.

So when you’re given information in one of these modern control societies,
to Deleuze, it’s obviously not about transmitting knowledge. It’s most of the time hardly even verified. So what this information becomes is a method of mass communicating the meanings, norms, and directives of the day that the people are supposed to then internalize and believe in.

Information is like a police communication, he says at one point.

When you watch a news story or a political debate or whatever it is: this is not some neutral transmission of information– take it for what it’s worth! No, it’s a prescription of the meanings of the events that are going on.

Information in a control society, he says, is both a snapshot and a command at the exact same time. It carries with it an implicit order—that this is the view polite society is going to believe in next.

And this, combined with the other ways people are turned into bits of that information and then manipulated, information turns out to be a massively effective way of controlling people’s behavior. Turns out it is also very easy to convince people that they have a different sort of way of looking at things—a diverse way of looking at it—
even though they’re just funneled into the same algorithmic channels that so many other people are given their information in.

Fake difference.

But if it’s not obvious by this point in the episode—Deleuze is a philosopher that has as maybe his chief goal above all others: to find ways to facilitate the creation of the new.

Real difference.

Think about what we know about him:

This constant unfolding of existence into the future.

Difference and repetition to replace the traditional idea of a static identity.

This critique of philosophers being stuck in the Image of Thought from the past.

Philosophy, to Deleuze—true thinking—is a creative activity. It’s not prescriptive. It’s not a set of protocols to determine how valid someone’s thoughts are. Philosophy is about the creation of a new tracing of concepts that can understand reality in a totally different way.

He’s going to say that any activity that truly has as its goal to not sit around and repeat the traditions and ways things have been done in the past—but one that actually, genuinely aims to find new lines of escape from these traditions
or new forms of what life can look like—that is an activity that he is deeply interested in finding better ways to facilitate, no matter what the context is.

And if you had to give a name to that sort of activity—whether it’s in philosophy, science, painting, music—the only name that makes sense that we have, really, is art.

Deleuze says that art is not a form of information. It’s not even a form of communication to him.

True art, in the sense that it’s inspiring people to see life in a new way—this is something fundamentally different than information, which is only trying to give people a snapshot of the past that is loaded with meanings and directives. Art is something that helps people think and feel beyond the prescribed limitations of the information they get on a day-to-day basis.

So if you hear Deleuze’s philosophy and you feel a little disoriented; that’s actually part of his whole point.

True art gets people thinking outside of these rigid boxes. It inspires new thoughts and new ways of engaging with the constantly changing circumstances we live in.

You know how they say there’s a comedian’s comedian? Or a musician’s musician?

This is why I think one way to describe Deleuze is that he is a philosopher’s philosopher—or at the very least, an artist’s philosopher.

His work is designed to inspire someone to think different. Truly different.

Recommended Reading

• Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. Columbia University Press, 1983.
  

• May, Todd. Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
  

• Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton University Press, 1974.