Steve’s Stuff

I was flipping through “Two Regimes of Madness”, a collection of texts and interviews 1975-1995 by renown French continental philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze is primarily associated with postmodernism, but his work is much more than that. He’s a wild man who provides a radically different approach to philosophy using Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson when everyone else was stuck on Hegel Husserl and Heidegger. His ideas are amazingly complex and, in my experience, quite useful if one takes the time to understand them.

Anyway, I was flipping through his book when I found a brief article entitled “How Philosophy is Useful to Mathematicians or Musicians” (no date listed). Deleuze is arguing for the cross-fertilization of disciplines, encouraging students to seek out other disciplines, not as secondary to their “focused” goal, but as primary support. His example is a lecture on philosophy attended by mathematicians, musicians, psychologists, historians, etc. where each student is finding a way to relate this field back to their own.

Jump ahead ten to twenty years and you’ve got programs like CRATEL popping up all over the country. I’m not suggesting that Deleuze invented the interdisciplinary program (neither is he), but he recognized its importance long before it was available to students. We should feel lucky to have a center such as CRATEL actively encouraging communications between disciplines. It’s not about getting accountants to appreciate music or about getting musicians to understand macro economics. It’s about helping an artist find a way to make engineering benefit his or her craft or vise versa. Since few will become *truly* interdisciplinary individuals themselves (i.e. intimate knowledge of two or more fields with equal facility), interdisciplinary communication and understanding is crucial.

Yeah, maybe it seems axiomatic now, but I just thought it was cool that, dans un sens, Deleuze supports CRATEL!