Philosophy as a Way of Life: Deleuze on Thinking and Money

Philosophy as a Spiritual Exercise

What is immanence? A life …

(Deleuze, 1997: 4)

The work of Pierre Hadot has re-established an approach to philosophy as a way of life, a set of spiritual exercises (Hadot 1995, 2002). As Socrates explained his task, "I tried to persuade each of one of you to concern himself less with what he has than with what he is, so as to render himself as excellent and rational as possible" (Plato, Apology, 36c).¹ In practice, this means that heroic and virtuous souls "despise Being for the sake of the Good, when they voluntarily place themselves in danger."² Hadot describes this as the fundamental philosophical choice: to prefer the Good above existence itself, and thought and conscience above the life of the body. It is in this sense that philosophy is an apprenticeship for death: it subjugates the body's will to live to the higher demands of thought (Hadot, 1995: 94). While Michel Foucault may have been fascinated by this tradition of care of the self, manifest among the Stoics as constant attention and vigilance, one cannot imagine Gilles Deleuze having much time for such a moral image of thought. For the splitting of the Good and Being, and the consequent judgement and perpetual disciplining of life in the name of the Idea, is precisely the practice of transcendence that constitutes the opposite pole to Deleuze's philosophy of immanence.

In what sense, then, can one suppose that Deleuze understood philosophy as a way of life? Deleuze has a formula for the immanentist reversal: "Life will no longer be made to appear before the categories of thought; thought will be thrown into the categories of life" (1989: 189). In reading Spinoza, what mattered for Deleuze was not the first principle, but the plane of immanence, the single nature shared by all the modes, so that to think is "to install oneself on this plane – which implies a mode of living, a way of life" (1988: 122). Deleuze shared Foucault's concern for "an art of living" (1995: 11). This is perhaps why Foucault described the Anti-Oedipus as "a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time."³ Immanence means ethos, a life. Deleuze's distinction between morality and ethics is, of course, crucial here (1988, 17-29). Instead of subjecting the body to conscious ideas represented in the mind, the life of the body and the mind escapes representation. Ethics is a matter of experimentation rather than representation in an attempt to discover what the mind and the body can do. Once one has put aside the moral image of thought, such experimentation becomes an art of living. Deleuze described the most important point of Nietzsche's philosophy as its radical transformation of the image of thought:

Nietzsche snatches thought from the element of truth and falsity. He turns it into an interpretation and an evaluation, interpretation of forces, evaluation of power. – It is a thought-movement … in the sense that thought itself must produce movements.

(1983: xiii).

Thinking itself is an intervention: what demands attention is "that difference that thinking makes to thought" (1994: 265). Thinking itself is ethical. The mind is already involved in ethical evaluations – evaluation is the element in which it moves. Deleuze's immanent understanding of evaluation is that they are "not values but ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate. This is why we always have the beliefs, feelings and thoughts that we deserve given our way of being or style of life" (1983: 1). This suggests that philosophy is less the art of judging, or of disciplining the body to conform to the mind, but a formation of a "way of being or style of life". The mode of existence is the phenomenon that replaces the function of the idea. Yet philosophy remains a cultivation of ideas. It is not simply a matter of habit, lifestyle or character. Indeed, such ideas are, for Deleuze, objectivities. There is a second reversal that constitutes...