The Hermetic Deleuze Quotes

“such as species essence of horseness.) Indeed, Aristotle claims there is no science of the singular, and by implication no science of difference, as such. That is to say, intelligible differences, for Aristotle, are always differences known by and through comparisons of sameness or similarity.”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“It is within such an “overturned Platonism” that we again discern the lineaments of the hermetic Deleuze, a Deleuze whose philosophy is geared as much to spiritual transformation as to conceptual creation.”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“Thought is primarily trespass and violence, the enemy, and nothing presupposes philosophy: everything begins with misosophy. Do not”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“However, in Spinoza's philosophy, adequate knowledge, knowledge sub specie aeternitatis, is distinct from knowledge in and through signs. To know in signs is to know inadequately, through apophasis or by analogy, since all signs bear historical and cultural codings that interfere with apprehension of the immanent, univocal inherence of substance in modes. Yet philosophy itself must transpire in signs. How, then, does philosophy hope to be adequate to the movements of infinite substance? How can philosophy think univocity? For Deleuze, the solution lies in the discovery of imperceptible, intensive forms that lurk beneath representation. If”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“There is another, somewhat more cryptic sense of immanence in Deleuze's work. This is the sense that, quite apart from thought, immanence is the character of a singular flow of impersonal consciousness, une vie (a life). This is a sense of immanence Deleuze tends to develop more fully in his later work. Immanence as “a life” is not a reference to an organism, but an “anorganic,” prereflective consciousness that implicates everything in itself, leaving nothing outside—not even thought itself—to which a life could be considered immanent.”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“is develop “baroque” usages of signs such as those envisioned by Cusa and Bruno, where confidence in the adequacy of language can in turn be related back to the confidence of the hermetic tradition in the powers of emblems, symbols, and sigils to activate the deep, if always hidden character of nature. As we saw apropos Foucault, in the Renaissance, signs and symbols, although limited, could surpass the restrictions of ordinary perception and rationality by activating otherwise imperceptible sympathies, analogies, and connections. Deleuze's”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“All things are living in a univocal sense, and there is no longer a hierarchy of rational, animal, sensate, and insensate forms of being. Humans are not distinguished by their rational capacities but by the particular kinds of bodies they have—the particular matter which has attracted and contracted the World Soul.”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“Leo Catana points out, for Bruno, as for Spinoza, “God” should not be conceived as the first cause or the transcendent principle of the universe, but as the infinite, animate universe itself.92 “God” is simply the name of the one infinite reality composed of world soul and matter (what Deleuze, following Bergson, refers to as the Open Whole or One-All).”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“composites). The differences the material cause makes can only be discovered by comparison, and never known in themselves. But Bruno contends that Aristotle's doctrine”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“world may be read, as though in a crystal ball, in the moving depths of individuating differences or differences in intensity” (DR, 247). For Deleuze, as for Bruno, there is an intensive continuum that, while subject to the contingencies of physical, chemical, geological, and historical change, forms the “differentials,” or ideal relations, to which all such change attests. Deleuze sees the alternations, bifurcations, and imbrications of material transformation in terms of series of virtual or ideal relations that are incarnate in such changes, effected by them, but irreducible to spatiotemporal locations. It often seems as if Bruno is attempting, with his theory of the superiority of matter to form, to conceive of what Deleuze will theorize in terms of the explication of intensive quantities in the extensive.”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari envisage animal faith as a form of sorcery, an operative capacity attendant on the powers of the psychic mutation and physical rarefaction of which sorcerers are known to be capable.82 Deleuze and Guattari's argument, in line with Bruno's affirmation of magia, is that sorcery is not an outlying phenomenon, but a model of what all human life might be, beyond the entrapments of the traditional human essence. For Deleuze, sorcerers are able to disorganize the body creatively to avoid the confines of the human organism, confines Deleuze explicitly equates, following Antonin Artaud, to the “judgments of God” (ATP, 150).83 Like Deleuze, Bruno holds that genuine thought and action involve a decisive break with the human condition. It”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“The nature of the triangle, at the infinite, is identical with the nature of the sphere and the line. This “inherence” or “implication” of the sphere and the triangle, at the infinite, is inaccessible to reason.31 To put this in Kantian terms, it is an identity that can be thought, but not understood.”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“Although this notion of singularitate (uniqueness) might have been unthinkable for Plotinus or Porphyry, Iamblichus of Chalcis, the fourth-century Syriac Neoplatonist, had already anticipated Christian notions of the unique status of temporal and finite entities in his reflections on theurgy.18 Deleuze does not mention Iamblichus in his account of the roots of expressionism, but Iamblichus's position, of all those in Neoplatonism, has perhaps the most proximity to Deleuze's own. For”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“(WIP, 223). I will argue here that a series of premodern thinkers—John Scotus Eriugena, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno, were engaged in just such a struggle for immanence within Neoplatonism and Christianity, and that this struggle marks them as “dark precursors” to Deleuze's system. These thinkers, accused of heresy and subversive motives, could be said to have attempted (at great risk, in many cases) to institute a “plan(e) of immanence” within theological discourse, producing paradoxical and esoteric systems of knowledge.”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“Allison Coudert has argued that Leibniz was almost certainly influenced by Jewish Kabbalah, with its own esoteric use of combinatorial procedures for exploring the mysteries of the Godhead through gematria and other arithmosophical theurgies.7 Despite the arcane sources of his inspiration, however, Leibniz was not alone among mainstream early modern philosophers in the quest for a “science of sciences,” nor was he alone among moderns in his quest for secret knowledge, as evidenced, for example, by Newton's vast writings on alchemy. Even Descartes, who argued for a rigid distinction between mind and matter, had insisted on their practical unity at the level of “the living.” As Deleuze puts it in his preface to Malfatti's work, “Beyond a psychology disincarnated in thought, and a physiology mineralized in matter,” even Descartes believed in the possibility of a unified field “where life is defined as knowledge of life, and knowledge as life of knowledge” (MSP, 143). This is the unity, Deleuze asserts, to which Malfatti's account of mathesis as a “true medicine” aspires. Deleuze explicitly refers to mathesis universalis at several key points in Difference and Repetition, particularly in connection with what he calls the “esoteric” history of the calculus (DR, 170). As Christian Kerslake has argued, Deleuze's reference here is not merely to obscure or unusual interpretations of mathematics, but to the decisive significance of Josef Hoëné-Wronski, a Polish French émigré who had elaborated a “messianism” of esoteric knowledge based on the idea that the calculus represented access to the total range of cosmic periodicities and rhythmic imbrications.8 The full implications”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“Deleuze explicitly defines his own metaphysical point of departure as that of “certain Neoplatonists” (PS, 45). In Proust and Signs, Deleuze writes, Certain Neoplatonists used a profound word to designate the original state that proceeds any development, any “explication”: complication, which envelops the many in the One and affirms the unity of the multiple. Eternity did not seem to them the absence of change, nor even the extension of a limitless existence, but the complicated state of time itself (uno ictu mutationes tuas complectitur). The Word, omnia complicans, and containing all essences, was defined as the supreme complication, the complication of contraries, the unstable opposition. From this they derived the notion of an essentially expressive universe, organized according to degrees of immanent complications and following an order of descending explications. (PS, 45)”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“to develop in an apophatic conception of nature as ultimately unknowable.”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“general program of “expressionism” in philosophy. In expressionist thought, being is not essentially substance, but unfolding power and dynamic process. This tradition has its roots in Neoplatonic schemas of emanation and in orthodox accounts of creation. In theological terms, the idea of an ultimate reality that is fundamentally will rather than substance is strongly suggested by scriptural accounts of creation, but was in some ways held back by the influence of classical Greek metaphysics, which tended to obscure the question of cosmogenesis by presuming the eternity of the world, and reality as an eternally perduring substance rather than a singular act of manifestation.”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“Deleuze's own oblique version of esoteric gnosis involves a rupture with any static conception of types, symbols, or archons in favor of a mobile conception of the rudiments of transformation, one that affirms the machinic and schizoid potencies of a “dissolved Self” capable of starting from anywhere and affirming eternal return through its adventures (DR, 254). Despite his fascination with themes of imperceptibility, escape, and “absolute deterritorialization,” Deleuze is clear that the full realization of such states is death itself,”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“of the soul without the sacrifice of the body, and without the sacrificial reduction of matter to form. In the modern, secularized thought of Deleuze, hermeticism takes on the guise of a “deterritorializing” of both spirit and organic matter, envisioning both as expressions of an “anorganic” and “machinic” play of forces. Yet despite his irreligiosity, Deleuze still conceives of the liberating potencies of deterritorialization as a matter of experimental theandric aspiration, an elaboration of the cosmos as a Bergsonian “machine for the making of gods.”24”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“And Deleuze places himself—if somewhat subtly and obliquely—in this very tradition. In very general terms, Deleuze can be situated within hermetic tradition since in his philosophy all thought is immediately a process of transformation and metamorphosis.”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“The basic teachings of the Corpus Hermeticum are found in The Emerald Tablet. This text explains that the cosmos was constructed on the principle “as above, so below,” for the purposes of accomplishing the “mystery of the One Thing.”19 As Hermes explains to his adepts, this One, or All, extends itself through complex hierarchies of interdependence, from the stars down to the human soul. The microcosm is constituted by the same principles as the macrocosm, and the stars have an influence that is as much personal as it is physical. A”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“of affective dynamisms, the deep pulsations and vibrations of the cosmos itself. To diagram the flows of such cosmic intensities is the peculiar grounding or “founding” proper to the Deleuzian conception of immanence.”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze writes that “the purpose of demonstration functioning as the third eye is not to command or even to convince, but only to shape the glass or polish the lens for this inspired free vision” (SPP, 14). Deleuze then elaborates on Spinoza by way of Henry Miller, that great writer of life as adventure and ordeal, who wrote, “You see, to me it seems as though the artists, the scientists, the philosophers were grinding lenses. It's all a grand preparation for something that never comes off. Someday the lens is going to be perfect and then we're all going to see clearly, see”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“Kantian, his conception of immanence is not linked to the theme of finitude but to the recuperation of mystical and heterodox notions of mind as microcosmic.”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“Deleuze argues that modern philosophy discovers the problem of immanence (what Kant will take up as the immanent critique of reason): the paradoxical questioning by reason not by the world, but by reason's own ground. This critique, which Deleuze argues already began with Hume, consists in the attempt to legitimate judgments without reference to any term or entity outside the capacities of a finite mind (ES, 28).7”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“When Deleuze and Guattari argue that Pascal and Kierkegaard model an act of founding paradigmatic for all of modern philosophy, they contend that, after the collapse of scholasticism, all modern philosophy becomes involved in a peculiar ordeal, an ordeal otherwise known as the “justification of belief” (WIP,”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“in philosophy to rival Socrates's ironic stance with one that is humorous, even absurd (WIP, 74). If Socrates is ironic because, tragically, he knows something that in some sense cannot be said, Pascal and Kierkegaard face the comic necessity of saying something that cannot in fact be known, let alone understood.”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal

“The presence of things to God constitutes an inherence, just as the presence of God to things constitutes an implication. An equality of being is substituted for a hierarchy of hypostases; for things are present to the same Being, which is itself present in things. Immanence corresponds to the unity of complication and explication, of inherence and implication. Things remain inherent in God who complicates them, and God remains implicated in things which explicate him. It is a complicative God who is explicated through all things: “God is the universal complication, in the sense that everything is in him; and the universal explication, in the sense that he is in everything.”32 (E, 175)”
― Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal