Neither Science nor Theology is Philosophy

If we accept Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that philosophy is the creation of concepts, then both science and theology distinguish themselves as distinct pursuits. This seems to follow from the engendered qualities that characterize the philosophical concept. That is, despite its entrenchment in the history of conceptual schema (17), as well as its reliance on and appropriation of this history, the philosophical concept is truly an original creation, a distinct singular entity apart from other members of its kind (22). Deleuze and Guattari concede that the concepts lies on the same plane as others, instantiating itself in the history of philosophical concepts (indeed, there must be some accounting for the unification of philosophical concepts as a class; this common plane seems to be their description of such an attestation), but the genuine uniqueness of each concept is such that it doesn’t quite fit alongside the others, its zone de voisinage is riddled with uneven overlap; it embraces partial similarity but evades complete consistency with other concepts. It is relative to other concepts (21), perhaps arising out of them or helping define the contours of their problems, but the concept is also absolute in itself, its own constituent components qualifying it as a whole (albeit a fragmentary one) distinct in itself, bringing forth a problem whose solution is found solely within its own conceptual schema. The originality of the concept doesn’t only resist a perfectly ordered placement within the its class (concepts, D and G tell us, are self-referential; unlike their own components, which possess intensive ordinates from which the concept emerges, the concept itself possesses no numerical chiffre itself that could locate its precise location relative to other concepts within the philosophical plane), but the concept is also unbound by the history from which it emerges. The secretions that extend the philosophical plane, the plane of eminence, move in unpredictable directions, guided only by the unrestrictive force of thought (36). The philosophical concept then, is distinct in its almost ex-nihilo creation. But this in not quite right. Philosophical concepts do come out of something: a rich philosophical tradition, but good philosophy is in no way limited or confined to any prior philosophical concept within this tradition. Undoubtedly, the concept of Levinas’s ‘I/Other’ was in part born out of Descartes. But Levinas is free to construct an ‘I’ that resists violently that of Descartes. The former’s ‘I’ may be one that relies on ‘the Other’, that cannot exist apart from ‘the Other’, that is even unintelligible without ‘the other’, whereas the former denfines the ‘I’ as that which must exist even in a case in which ‘the Other’ does not. Conceived as such, the two ‘I’s are not only incompatible in the sense that they define themselves as seemingly binary conceptions of self, but also in the sense that Descartes couldn’t construct his sceptical problem with Levinas’s ‘I’, and Levinas couldn’t construct his problem of death with Descartes’. Levinas draws on the philosophical tradition, but his concept emerges in total contradiction from one of its predecessors.

Is science or theology able to produce that which, although instantiated in and continuing a history, is free to also resist any/all of its most fundamental constituents of that history? Clearly not. The history of both advance in such predictable fashion, all contributions, in ordered fashion, advancing the clear goals of both, the understanding of the physical world, the understanding of God. Is the scientist able to construct an experiment which doesn’t conform precisely to the scientific method? No, for this would be decried as pseudoscience. Can the theist preach that which denies the existence of a God? No, for this would preclude his adherence to theology. Only philosophy is the creation of that which partakes in, yet is completely free to deny and thereby transform its own history, what D and G call the concept.