“In his consideration of law and repetition in the introduction to Difference and Repetition, Deleuze is not primarily concerned with laws of nature but with moral laws that are based on acts meant to be independent of laws of nature. His target is not science but a Kantian approach to morality.” -Williams, James. Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide (pp. 35-36). Edinburgh University Press. Kindle Edition.
Williams then goes on to say:
“However, this focus on morality is also a weakness. It means that, at this stage of his book, Deleuze continues to evade legitimate questions concerning the role that science may have to play in the development of his own concepts. Does it make sense to speak of intensity, of individuals and of their acts without putting these terms to scientific scrutiny, in the form of experiments, and to scientific criticisms, in the form of comparison with what is known about these concepts (Emotions are produced by these chemical reactions. This individual has these properties. The reasons given for these acts are . . . The chemical genetic and physical explanations for them are . . .)?”
And we have to agree with Williams here. There is just no way around science. I recently came up against this with my model of the psychotic and the sociopathic in the context of the nihilistic perspective and the symbolic order. The two people who were responding to it kept responding in terms of the clinical definitions of psychosis and sociopathy while I was working in the metaphorical: I was attempting to describe a cultural phenomenon. To put it another way, I was offering a model that would be of more interest to artists than anyone who wanted a more expositional understanding of the human condition. And I would humbly offer a model that might lead a consolidation between the continental and analytic approaches to philosophy.
I return to my revision of Russell’s description of philosophy: that it lies in that no-man’s land between science and theology. I, however, given the secular times we live in, have revised it to that which lies in that no-man’s land between Science and Literature. Here, for me at least, we get a more delicate understanding of the difference between the analytic and continental approach: while the analytic leans towards the science side of the science/literature spectrum, the continental leans towards the literature side of it.
And both have value: the scientific for seeing the facts in the face of that which resonates and seduces and the literary for posing the resonate and seductive against the operationalism of the scientific that claims to have exclusive access to facts when it, in fact, gets thing wrong from time to time, especially when it comes to the human condition which can’t be isolated in a lab environment.