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Two thinkers, side by side

Life

Portrait of Spinoza
Spinoza

1632 CE – 1677 CE

Early ModernRationalist

Born Amsterdam

God and Nature are the same thing. He was excommunicated for saying it, ground lenses to earn a living, and published his masterwork after he died.

Portrait of Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze

1925 CE – 1995 CE

PoststructuralistContemporaryFrench

Born Paris

He treated concepts as tools to be built and used rather than truths to be discovered, and spent a career arguing that difference, not sameness, is what reality is actually made of.

Connection

Spinoza univocal being and immanent expression Gilles Deleuze — Deleuze's Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza treated Spinoza's single, univocal substance as a model for thinking about reality without transcendent hierarchy, an idea that runs through all of Deleuze's later concepts of immanence.

Ideas

NatureInner FreedomReasonThe Mind-Body Problem
BeingChange

Words

“I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”

— Spinoza

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”

— Gilles Deleuze

“A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”

— Gilles Deleuze

Key Moments

1632 CE

Born in Amsterdam

1656 CE

Excommunicated from the Jewish Community

c. 1660 CE

Grinding Lenses

1677 CE

Ethics Published Posthumously

1972

Publishes Anti-Oedipus with Guattari

1995

Dies by suicide after decades of illness

Works

Ethics

Difference and Repetition

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Volume I · Ancient Greece · 624-262 BCE