Artist-Poet-Shaman-Philosopher
[...] philosophy itself does not throw off its ascetic mask as it grows up: in a way it must believe in this mask, it can only conquer its mask by giving it a new sense which finally expresses its true anti-religious force.
The people are certainly not always wrong: they have a foreboding of the essence of the philosopher, his anti-wisdom, his immoralism, his conception of friendship. Humility, poverty, chastity - we can guess the sense that these wise and ascetic values take on when they are revived by philosophy, by a new force.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.5-6
Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns. It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one, that annoys no one, is not a philosophy.
Is there any discipline apart from philosophy that sets out to criticise all mystifications, whatever their source and aim, to expose all the fictions without which reactive forces would not prevail? [...] turning thought into something aggressive, active and affirmative. Creating free men, that is to say men who do not confuse the aims of culture with the benefit of the State, morality or religion.
Philosophy is at its most positive as critique, as an enterprise of demystification. And we should not be too hasty in proclaiming philosophy's failure in this respect. Great as they are, stupidity and baseness would be still greater if there did not remain some philosophy which always prevents them from going as far as they would wish, which forbids them — if only by yea-saying — from being as stupid and base as they would wish. They are forbidden certain excesses, but only by philosophy.
If philosophy's critical task is not actively taken up in every epoch philosophy dies and with it die the images of the philosopher and the free man.
It is up to us to go to extreme places, to extreme times, where the highest and the deepest truths live and rise up. The places of thought are the tropical zones frequented by the tropical man, not temperate zones or the moral, methodical or moderate man.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.106-7, 110
The species activity of culture has a final aim: to form the artist, the philosopher. All its selective violence serves this end, "I have to do with a class of men whose teleological conceptions extend further than the well-being of a State".
The principal cultural activities of Churches and States form in fact the long martyrology of culture itself. When a State encourages culture "it only encourages it in order to be encouraged itself, and it never conceives that there is an aim superior to its own good and existence".
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.109
Stupidity and baseness are always those of our own time, of our contemporaries, our stupidity and baseness. Unlike the atemporal concept of error, baseness is inseparable from time, that is from this rapture of the present, from this present condition in which it is incarnated and in which it moves. This is why philosophy has an essential relation to time: it is always against its time, critique of the present world.
Thinking actively is "acting in a non-present fashion, therefore against time and even on time, in favour (I hope) of a time to come"
There is no eternal or historical philosophy. Eternity, like the historicity of philosophy amounts to this: philosophy always untimely, untimely at every epoch.
[Gilles Deleuze]
Nietzsche and Philosophy, p.107
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