A couple of weeks ago Bill Vallicella, the ‘Maverick Philosopher’, posted a very interesting entry about the question concerned to the meaning of life [here] which I wanted to comment as it alluded to one very specific schizosophical concern: the fact that life is in itself meaningless. On that occasion I posted there my comment, and as I usually do with many of them, I published it at my Nwp comments-blog [here] despite it was still awaiting for moderation. The next day, as I usually do: I checked out if the comment was published but it was not, so I decided to wait another couple of days so to see if Bill would moderate it. As this neither happened, I posted it there again exactly with the same content and with no changes. But the next day I found again that the comment was not yet published, so I started to wonder what was wrong with it and wanted to contact Bill to ask him what was happening. I went to his about page [here] in order to get his email and speak more directly to him. There I learned that Bill allows comments only in some of his posts, just in the ‘technical’ ones, and that if one wants to have any kind of exchange and share any thoughts about the matters of his blog, one needs to email him the comment. According to Bill’s comments policy, the comments received will be pasted in the section of the respective post, or even considered in a separated one, but only if they merit any discussion. Despite all these filtering restrictions, I did want to communicate him my viewpoint on the question in a way to receive a retroactive response on his part. So I did follow the instructions and email him my comment, though this time including some references of my person as well, given the epistolary fashion of the exchange. This is what I commented:
“That what we ask when we are asking about the meaning of life is in fact that life’s matter, the matter of life which is life itself, is meaningless. Life itself has no existential meaning. This lack of meaning is the line from which to departure any philosophical thinking of life itself and its absoluteness. The ‘ultimate and objective point, purpose, end, or goal of human willing and striving’ is to experience this absolute meaninglessness of life, so to embody it as an absolute difference. Indeed, life itself can be experienced empirically as such through an existential meaningful event that would imply in a hit an absolute epistemological rupture of the self, its total death, leaving no room for any existential first persons any more, and thus, leaving to experience nothing to mean. This is the ‘ultimate and objective point’ that philosophers should be aimed to seek: a total break with their own always-meaningful-self, with their own individual existential meaning. And after experiencing this intensive event what comes as the very ‘dominating non-trivial purpose’ of our existential meaning, what drives this meaning of our existence, is not but life’s lack of meaning, is not but life itself as a full existential excess: a plan where to compose and recompose such existential meaning ethically (a plane of immanence, as Deleuze and Guattari puts it). While there is no transcendent meaning to mean this plane, being it immanent and thus full of meaningless, it permits us to mean and fill our existence through it. It is precisely because this purpose is non-trivial that the experience, while it is hard to achieve, it still is ‘achievable’. But this achievement is not on purpose, it has nothing to do with the process of achieving it: it happens in existence, no previous call, no sense of why, no relation with what we tended to think about our own life so to achieve it: it comes as a strike that breaks actively with all what we are habituated to mean about life and existence. So, it is true that ‘the question about the meaning of life is restricted to human life’ but this should not impede us to see that life itself is meaningless to human life, this does not impede us to conceptualize it objectively as such, in order to take this conceptualization as a point of departure to mean our existential life subjectively. The more subjectively meaningful is our existence, the more it will tend to induce objectively the event of life as an empirical experience.”
The readers of this blog would immediately recognize the same schizosophical argument about life wielded several times here and there in many of my posts. But I would not say that my comment had no fortune and that was not worth for Bill to merit any discussion –though he never published it and never got in contact with me at all–, because he did react and responded on this regard through a more interpellating modality, by posting two related entries concerned to the subjective aspects of the question [here and here] and a third one related to its aporetics [here]. It is clear for me that my comment resulted a nice stimuli for Bill to object it through and dig further into his own deductive disquisitions, and though it is a shame that such a comment would remain unreferenced despite he used it as a sort of raw malformed material to be pragmatically sterilized, I feel satisfied to have fed a bit of his view with it, suggesting him how such a question can be affirmatively responded beyond any dualistic scholastic remnant, and far from reproducing any bad non-recursive epistemology. While it is true that Bill has been writing on the subject for quite a time [here], it is also true that I can also apply the same interpellating modality, though with a bit more of courage and frankness of speech, in a way to use Bill’s disquisitions a sort of prude objectivistic textualization to be critically revitalized.
, the query also deserves to be responded beyond any personal considerations, without underestimating the beginner’s philosophical restlessness, and without wielding any user-friendly academic recipes: the query deserves to be responded by putting some historical facts on the table with respect to Deleuze’s work, and by taking them as objective criteria in order to discern which book is finally the best material for beginners to draw for themselves a heuristically well-oriented conceptual portrait of Deleuze. It is precisely because the beginner deserves to set a direct treat with the very body of Deleuze’s oeuvre –which is also what the question is finally about– that responding to the query implies a challenge for those who already have a broader panorama about Deleuze’s work: a challenge concerned not to a personal perspective but to a genealogical retrospective to be abstracted with respect to the whole of his oeuvre.
