Creation?

Philosophy, as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is ‘the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts’ (1994: 4). More specifically, it is ‘the discipline that involves creating concepts’, because concepts are not ready-made, and even though they are incorporeal, what we usually refer to as intellectual or mental, there is no heaven of concepts; they must be created (1994: 5, 21). There are creators; creators are not persons but personae, a force of ideas that provide a signature, a name like Descartes or Kant that is a cluster or assemblage of concepts, and every concept is a multiplicity as there is no concept with only one component. Every concept has some sort of history as well as a becoming; it undergoes evolution, and so is both absolute with respect to the problem it addresses but also relative to its components, as well as infinite in its survol, its reach, but finite with respect to its Leibnizian indiscernibility (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 15–21). Although many things can be said about this designation, what I wish to draw attention to here is the problem of the creation of concepts. What does it mean to say that the creation of concepts is possible? How can we justify even the possibility of creation, not merely as a linguistic phenomenon but as a reality, even if an incorporeal one?

The reason creation rises to the level of a problem has to do both with Deleuze and Guattari’s own philosophy and with the mathematical and scientific framework, which their philosophy must confront in utilising the tools offered by the mathematics and cosmology upon which they are reliant. Beginning with a schematic history of philo-scientific accounts of the universe, and not simply of nature, western philosophy of science was formalised by Plato’s (fourth century BC) and Ptolemy’s (100 AD) models of the universe, both grounded in the idea of heavenly bodies moving in perfect circular motion guided by either Plato’s ‘pilot’ (in The Statesman) or Ptolemy’s Aristotelean god’s realm of heavenly perfection in which nothing that is true undergoes change. Much later (1687) there is Newton’s similarly eternal and cyclical universe (inherited by Albert Einstein) in which any event, no matter how improbable, must occur an infinite number of times (Smolin 1999: 143–4).