A previous post of mine, Warning: This Post May Deterritorialize Your Symbolic Construct, was a stream of ideas inspired largely by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze has some thoughts about the world that are similar to the Buddha’s, but he discusses these ideas in terms of the western philisophy and the modern mind. Both thinkers address some pretty deep issues. Like the Buddha, Deleuze is interested in talking about our immediate experience as a starting place for gaining some insight into what is going on.
We are constantly living in a tension created by the immediacy of sense experience and the meaning that we create through various mental constructs.
For Deleuze, time itself is always in the newness of our immediate experience. Any sense of time that we add to the present experience is a mental construct. But any mental construct is itself experienced in the newness of each moment. So as we realize ourselves foundationally, it’s always within this newness. We are constantly living in a tension created by the immediacy of sense experience and the meaning that we create through various mental constructs. This intersection of habit and immediacy is what Deleuze calls a plane of immanence. A plane of immanence is that which is always there in our experience, just out of reach and just within reach, right where we begin to know that our experience is happening. There’s a kind of habit there, but there’s a newness at the same time, and there’s this kind of tension between this habit and immediacy.
Deleuzes describes three planes of immanence that flow into each other. The first is chaos. Essentially, every moment of experience is chaotic. He says we live in a chaosmos, a chaos prior to any cosmos. This chaosmos is the endless flow of difference prior to any systematic organization. It describes physical, chemical and biological levels as well. So the universe is primarily a chaosmos. The second immanence is the flow of difference that each organism forms within. Each organism is a point of perception that begins to see difference in the chaosmos. On this scale, an organism opens up in two directions: one facing the chaos, and one facing one’s own limited forms. So looking in one direction, you see a tendency arising from and returning to the chaos. In the other direction, you see only the particular limited form that defines your point of departure.
Now, humans of course create this distinction between “inside” and “outside” that leads to our idea of transcendence. We just make this up. In Deleuze’s view, this is of no particular use, and actually, it ends up impeding our understanding, because the actual world is just this immanent flow that has no particular point of departure. In reality, there is no center, no hierarchy, and no difference. And yet within this immanence each organism has its own opening to the world in its own way, whether this organism is a virus, a bacteria or humanity. In this second plane of immanence, we’re completely connected in a web or matrix. There’s essentially no reference other than this dualistic opening to the total interconnectedness of everything, and its return back into chaos.
When we conceptualize our experience, this gives a kind of illusion of consistency to the chaos. The three primary ways that humanity does this is through science, art and philosophy.
The third plane of immanence is our thinking. When we conceptualize our experience, this gives a kind of illusion of consistency to the chaos. The three primary ways that humanity does this is through science, art and philosophy. Each one of these creates a form of territorialization. Through science, art and philosophy we territorialize the chaos. We create a territory, or an illusion of territory, that we think we exist within. But in order to get back to where we really exist, we need to de-territorialize, to re-experience this territory in its newness. Philosophy and art ironically provide the force that brings us back into immediacy, the immediacy of the re-experience. There are new possibilities that can only be discovered through this immediate de-territorialization that happens through philosophy and art. So philosophy and art not only create the illusion of territory, but also have moments where they immediately break back through to place between chaos and conceptualization.
Deleuze runs with these ideas through all sorts of theories about what human beings are doing: everything from individuality and aesthetics to his critique on capitalist economics. For more thoughts on relevance of this immediacy to the modern mind, look to further talks comparing Deleuze and the Shurangama Sutra. [Admin note: Link coming soon.]