In his Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel says that “what the history of philosophy displays to us is a series of noble spirits, the gallery of the heroes of reason’s thinking,” but that the history of philosophy would have little value if thought of as a mere collection of opinions, in themselves arbitrary: “philosophy contains no opinions; there are no philosophical opinions.” Hence, Hegel says, those who wish to understand the history of philosophy by studying the individual philosophers it comprises, rather than achieving a more universal idea of the totality of its thought, will be missing the forest for the trees. “Anyone who starts by examining the trees, and sticks simply to them, does not survey the whole wood and gets lost and bewildered in it.” For Hegel, the history of philosophy is the overarching concept, and the evolutionary realization, of philosophy itself.

Gilles Deleuze, it might be said, built a career in philosophy in which he attempted to subvert this view, and he was particularly critical of “the history of philosophy” as an enterprise. In a well-known letter, Deleuze wrote, “I belong to a generation, one of the last generations, that was more or less bludgeoned to death with the history of philosophy,” adding that

In the same letter, Deleuze says, “What I most detested was Hegelianism and dialectics,” so perhaps it is not surprising that he would approach the history of philosophy rather differently. However, Deleuze does not abandon or reject the history of philosophy. Rather, he transforms the project into something else, a “nomadography,” which projects an alternative history of philosophy that not only allows Deleuze to “get out” of that institution, but allows us to re-imagine it in productive new ways.