Surgeons must be very careful

Surgeons must be very careful

When they take the knife!

Underneath their fine incisions

Stirs the Culprit,--Life! Emily Dickinson

 

If you don't admire something, if you don't love it, you have no reason to write a word about it. Spinoza or Nietzsche are philosophers whose critical and destructive powers are without equal, but this power always springs from affirmation, from joy, from a cult of affirmation and joy, from the exigency of life against those who would mutilate and mortify it. For me, that is philosophy itself.--Deleuze (1969) "Gilles Deleuze Talks Philosophy"

Because my wife -- a surgeon -- has gone skiing with our son in the French alps, I had time to glance at some poetry; my eye through the hidden magic of association, naturally rested on Dickinson's lines quoted above. I wondered upon reflection, if Dickinson saw her words as a remedy in a fallen world, despite or, perhaps, because of "the mocking sky."

A surgeon can heal or mutilate.

Professional philosophers often use metaphors when describing the skilled deployment of our tool-kit [logic, distinctions, analysis, etc.] that in the more than seven years since I know my wife, often remind me of surgery: we make precise and careful distinctions, that are used in razor-sharp arguments. As it happens, my wife is a retina-surgeon, and so the similarities extend to all the significant metaphors dealing with vision: when we make progress, we philosophers see things; we cut through confusions to gain clarity, which we often value for its own sake.

I don't mean to overstate the similarities between surgery and philosophy, of course. For example, sterility is a good thing in surgery; it's not so good in philosophy. Surgery is embedded in a hierarchical intellectual division of labor, something that while present, sits uneasily with philosophy's self-understanding. And, unlike surgeons, we philosophers do not have a do-no-harm-principle as a ruling ethos. Even so, by simple substitution, we get the following:

Philosophers must be careful

When they analyze concepts!

Underneath their fine distinctions

Stirs the Culprit,--Life!

That is to say, not unlike surgeons, who sometimes conflate health with life, we philosophers tend to conflate articulated truth with lived experience.

Of course, all reflective poets and philosophers know that words can have, again to borrow from Deleuze, destructive powers. Within philosophy, one responsible option is Wittgensteinian schweigen. While leaving the culprit untouched, this also entails a monastic withdrawal from life. Another option is the Deleuzian cult of affirmation. But above Deleuze comes close to suggesting that the ends justify the means, as if to allow that while Φιλαδελφία and ἀγαπη can generate a lot of collateral damage, noble intentions redeem. Perhaps we need -- to close with Dickinson -- hands that try to chalk the sun.

 

Comments

[John Protevi]

Hi Eric, this is a lovely post. I have two quibbles.

1) I wouldn't want to equate (or even bring into close proximity) Deleuze's concept of "life" and the phenomenological concept of "lived experience." Here's a post at NA that sketches out how Maimon's insistence on the genesis of real experience figures into DR. http://www.newappsblog.com/2012/02/gutting-on-deleuze.html

2) Life as the object of "affirmation" is not purely positive (in the sense of a plenum); rather, it proceeds by pushing the boundaries and experimenting with novelties, and that happens by negotiation with an environment (the "line of flight"). What "mutilates" life is I think the prohibition on experimentation. So critique of that wouldn't I think constitute "collateral damage"; it would be getting rid of the damage already being done.
Of course, (by the time of ATP, as opposed to the more wild-eyed AO) "experimentation" has to be sober and delicate, like a surgeon's cut! ATP161E

[Eric Schliesser]

On (1), above I use 'lived experience' equivocally between the ordinary and the phenomenological.
on (2), I don't think we disagree. On my views on directed experiment, see this post at NewAPPS: http://www.newappsblog.com/2012/01/the-secret-cord-bewteen-adam-smith-and-thoreau.html

[Ruth Groff]

You mean like Plato makes the character of Socrates say in, like, every single dialogue?! But especially, of course, in the Phaedrus. And the Republic. I'm assuming that the "Yes, just like that" is implied. Still, I feel compelled to say it. "Hands that try to chalk the sun" is about as good a description of Plato's own account of his dialogues - including why they are written as they are - as it gets. For which thank you. It's a beautiful post.

[M. Suárez]

Have you taken a look at Paul Feyerabend's last writings? He has a very similar view regarding abstractions. Always be very careful and always remember your concepts - including philosophical ones - are not perfectly made to fit, but are rather imperfect tools. And below, there really is a very variegated life. His optimism, like Mill's, is infectious.

Funny to read this now - I've been down with the heaviness of existence recently and seeing a few doctors (not surgeons fortunately) and so reflecting a little bit myself about medical practice v philosophy v life …