Comment by ly3xqhl8g9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ly3xqhl8g9 | Hacker News Reader

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So what? Famously, Anna Karenina is about a woman who jumps in front of a train, why bother to read the other 863 pages.

Anti-Oedipus [1] and especially A Thousand Plateaus [2] is about living in rarefied, futural spaces. Deleuze would be the first to be disgusted even at the faintest idea that his writing has any meaning whatsoever: you want meaning? go and live your life, don't read a book, especially not a philosophy book. In What is Philosophy? [3], Deleuze and Guattari give a very straight and simple answer: "philosophy is the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts"—that's it, nothing more, nothing less. Why would you hurry to admire a concept, instead of doing it repeatedly, now, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow [4]: do you also not smell a flower because its florid and anyway you could synthesize ionones [5] into a vial, why bother with the flower.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Oedipus

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Philosophy%3F_(Deleuze...

[4] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56964/speech-tomorrow...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionone

There's a word for that, it's called "obscurantism". Profound and true ideas can always be put in simple language. See Richard Feynman for one example. When someone uses a lot of complicated words and sentences to make a trivial point, that's a red flag for me.

Again, Deleuze would be offended if you thought any of his work has "profound and true ideas", for him (and Guattari), philosophy is simply not about "profound and true", he mocks endlessly all these people sick with "sign-ificance", every sign must mean some-thing.

Also, accusing Deleuze of obscurantism is absolutely unfair and ignorant: Deleuze was truly one of the great teachers, those who can be pedagogical while keeping and increasing your interest in the topic, much akin to Feynman, in his works which disentangle the works of previous philosophers: Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Kant's Critical Philosophy (1963), Proust and Signs (1964), Bergsonism (1966), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1981), Foucault (1986), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988). The aforementioned What Is Philosophy? is also extremely clearly written, and it is one of the best books ever to tackle in such a direct manner such a question.

Also, accusing Deleuze of "complicated words for trivial points" is just ridiculously funny: it's like accusing Bach of composing too much music: couldn't he just sum up all the toccatas, fugues, partitas, and so on in one single massive beat drop.

I disagree that Bach is simple (I'm not sure what pure means in this context). Bach wrote contrapuntal music. This means you can have two, three, four, or five independent voices that sum up to a whole while maintaining their individual lines. He also included techniques like inversions and retrogrades where the same lines occur backwards or upside down. And he included a great deal of symbolism and numerology in the music. The music is also, at times, very harmonically modern for his time. His music is often wildly virtuosic too — try playing the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue — it is a showpiece. "Simple" is just the wrong word.

"Pure" in this context means "without any extraneous and unnecessary elements".

Google has a few different definitions for the word "simple". I don't mean it in the following ways:

- easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty

- composed of a single element; not compound

I do mean it in the following ways:

- used to emphasize the fundamental and straightforward nature of something

- plain, basic, or uncomplicated in form, nature, or design; without much decoration or ornamentation

- humble and unpretentious

Keep in mind my comment was in the context of a discussion about postmodernism. I think that when compared with some of the more complex postmodern music, even the most virtuosic Bach pieces are simple. A couple examples:

Finnissy - English Country Tunes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8VSRTl9tfw

Ligeti - Etudes for Piano - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHhZ2TzHlow

Bach is a perfect example of the kind of thing that I'm talking about, and he's as far from postmodernism as I can imagine. His music is simple and pure. It isn't trying to impress anyone with technical virtuosity or sentimentality.

>Profound and true ideas can always be put in simple language.

Sure, you can reduce the passage above to "Chess is a game of specific, regimented roles, whereas Go is characterized an emergent, contingent understanding of purpose" — but you lose a lot of information compressing it like that, in the same way you lose a lot of information when you tell kids that black holes work like a bowling bowl on a trampoline. Sure, neither are incorrect at a phenomenological level, but it's such a reductive understanding that you can't accurately reason about it without reintroducing the "complicated words and sentences".

> Anna Karenina is about a woman who jumps in front of a train, why bother to read the other 863 pages.

Spoilers! I hadn't read it yet.

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