Deep Water
Today is to be a “normal” day at the office. Pay no attention that my mind seems to be in molasses, barely able to rise above idle. Perhaps that will improve as the day progresses.
I struggled to read and understand the text in this mornings reading of the comparison between philosophy and science. Granted the material is difficult by any measure. But I have read it before. I struggle and grasp only the edge of the meaning that is presented. Perhaps that is enough. There is much at stake in life, for myself and for others. A little knowledge goes a long way.
To be sure, there is as much experimentation
in the form of thought experiment in philosophy
as there is in science,
and, being close to chaos,
the experience can be overwhelming in both.
But there is also as much creation in science
as there is in philosophy or the arts.
There is no creation without experiment.
page 127But on both sides,
philosophy and science
(like art itself with its third side)
include an I do not know
that has become positive and creative,
the condition of creation itself,
and that consists
in determining by what one does not know—
page 128Perspectivalism,
or scientific relativism,
is never relative to a subject;
it constitutes not a relativity of truth,
but on the contrary,
a truth of the relative,
that is to say, of variables whose cases it orders
according to the values it extracts from them
in its system of coordinates….
page 130A problem,
in science or in philosophy,
does not consist in answering a question
but in adapting, or in co-adapting,
with a higher “taste” as problematic faculty,
corresponding elements in a process or being determined.page 133
excerpts from What Is Philosophy
by Gilles Deluze and Felix Guattari
