The philosophy of 20th-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze makes a more peaceful world possible. He explains that our most common structures of thinking make us dogmatic, meaning that they make us unable to see new ways that we might live because we become stuck in our common ways of thinking.
On my first podcast, I explained that chief among these structures is our tendency to think by assigning identities to things we perceive to have independent existence. These conceptual boundaries come to characterize the way we think about the world, and thus constrain our beliefs about how we might live.
Deleuze believed that rather than structuring our world by identities, we should think in terms of difference, which basically means that what is different between things is not the difference between their identities but a difference that goes deep down. In other words, that means that each thing we identify as being separate actually has smaller and smaller sub-components that makes it up, parts that could also be distinguished as things. Similarly, if we consider things aggregated together into larger systems, each of those larger sub-components could be given a separate identity as well.
The ultimate result of these cascading levels of difference is that the conceptual boundaries that we traditionally give to things become somewhat arbitrary and thinking in terms of difference opens us up to consider new, changeable boundaries and new ways to think.
You can imagine what this means for how we might live our lives, but to start, this provides a summary introduction to Deleuze and his recipe for creativity.
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