“I am interested: was Deleuze arguing for treating thoughts as being as real as matter? And also I want to ask are you saying, as I think that Leonardo da Vinci said, that nothingness is the impossible?” -Christopher
As promised, Chris, to answer your first question: yes. I mean think about it. What could be more objective to us than our subjective experiences which include our thoughts and our emotions? Why would a thought that passes through our head be any less real to us than the rock that stubs our toe? Especially when you consider the fact that the only reason that rock registers to us is because our brain (via the mind (tells us it’s there via the pain we experience because of it?
And because I am contractually obliged to connect this (keep on topic (with the Pragmatic board (and because it does connect (this was the very issue that Rorty was addressing when, in Philosophy as Mirror of Nature, he chipped away at the common notion of ontological status. The point (as it was with Deleuze (was to undermine this notion that there could be some reality outside of our perception of it, that we could somehow just be here and it could be there without it having to register in our brains. It was a reaction to the realist position.
And anyone that has experienced psychedelics knows better. If the realist position were true, the psychedelic experience would be one of everything looking like it normally does and the hallucinations in the brain being superimposed upon it. But that is not the experience I have ever had with Acid or Shrooms. Reality, for me, was completely transformed into something that felt kind of cartoonish –which I assume to be a throwback to when I was kid and more impressed by bright colors.
As for your second question:
“And also I want to ask are you saying, as I think that Leonardo da Vinci said, that nothingness is the impossible?”
I have to admit that, at first, I was unimpressed. I had all kinds of answers to the question that I would respectfully offer as an alternative. But when I read it before I set out to write this, I realized you’re pretty much spot on. Sometimes I’m a little slow on the uptake. But you’re right: nothingness is that kind of thing that philosophers have always struggled with in that it seems like it is something that should exist (Leibniz: why all this rather than nothing? (but that we have no way of proving that it actually exists. Sartre spent a whole chapter of Le Etre et Neant criticizing three notions of Nothingness by three great philosophers (Hegel, Heidegger, and Bergson (only to offer us the equally unsatisfying explanation (even though it was an impressive attempt (that nothingness was curled into the heart of Being like a worm. And we could address the debate over whether nothingness actually exists by switching to the more phenomenological issue of Presence and Absence. But that hardly answers the question: does Nothingness actually exist? All it offers us is a kind of representation of nothingness.
Unfortunately, I have failed to actually address your question in ways I actually set out to do. Your point about Nothingness and the impossible has implications I have somehow managed to distract myself from. And I really hope to address them before our jam on this theme is over.