What Is Philosophy? Quotes

“We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes.”
― Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?

“the question of the one or the multiple once again becomes the most important one, introducing itself into the plane.”
― Félix Guattari, Janis Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?

“Empiricism knows only events and other people and is therefore a great creator of concepts. Its force begins from the moment it defines the subject: a habitus, a habit, nothing but a habit in a field of immanence, the habit of saying I.”
― Félix Guattari, Janis Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?

“He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence. He fulfilled philosophy because he satisfied its prephilosophical presupposition. Immanence does not refer back to the Spinozist substance and modes but, on the contrary, the Spinozist concepts of substance and modes refer back to the plane of immanence as their presupposition.”
― Félix Guattari, Janis Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?

“Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates.”
― Félix Guattari, Janis Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?

“The Judeo-Christian word replaces the Greek logos: no longer satisfied with ascribing immanence to something, immanence itself is made to disgorge the transcendent everywhere. No longer content with handing over immanence to the transcendent, we want it to discharge it, reproduce it, and fabricate it itself. In fact this is not difficult—all that is necessary is for movement to be stopped.9”
― Félix Guattari, Janis Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?

“From Epicurus to Spinoza (the incredible book 5) and from Spinoza to Michaux the problem of thought is infinite speed. But this speed requires a milieu that moves infinitely in itself—the plane, the void, the horizon. Both elasticity of the concept and fluidity of the milieu are needed.1 Both are needed to make up “the slow beings” that we are.”
― Félix Guattari, Janis Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?

“As for the other aspect, creative or signed enunciation, it is clear that scientific propositions and their correlates are just as signed or created as philosophical concepts: we speak of Pythagoras’s theorem, Cartesian coordinates, Hamiltonian number, and Lagrangian function just as we speak of the Platonic Idea or Descartes’s cogito and the like. But however much the use of proper names clarifies and confirms the historical nature of their link to these enunciations, these proper names are masks for other becomings and serve only as pseudonyms for more secret singular entities”
― Félix Guattari, Janis Tomlinson, Graham Burchell III Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?