Gilles Deleuze: Thinking as Making Sense Against Common Sense

In this chapter, I turn to Deleuze to demonstrate how making sense can become an educational encounter that breaks hierarchies and generates thinking independently of the thinker’s knowledge and place in the sociopolitical order. I start with an analysis

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Gilles Deleuze: Thinking as Making Sense Against Common Sense

4.1  Introduction For Gilles Deleuze, philosophy is all about thinking differently, in an unorthodox, non-commonsensical way. Thinking is one of the key concepts he repeatedly discusses throughout his work, attempting to conceive of alternatives to what he views as the traditional, “dogmatic” image of thought. Genuine thinking, according to Deleuze, is one that makes sense – yet sense must not be understood in a commonsensical way, but rather as an effect transcending and contradicting ordinary common sense. Deleuzian education for thinking therefore makes sense only by opposing commonsensical views, including those pertaining to the very notions of education and thinking. It is generally thought that eliciting or cultivating common sense – whether considered a sociohistorical construct or ascribed to human nature – is a key role of education. In doing so, the community fosters shared values and meanings, and renders them self-evident for its members (see Chap. 3 above; Gadamer 2004; Kumashiro 2004; Gasparatou 2017). Thus, adherents of common sense tend to refer to it as fundamental to all thought, and claim that criticizing any aspect thereof must rely on others (Rescher 2005; Peirce, 2011, pp. 290–301). Deleuze disagrees: he believes that common sense is radically challenged by education for thinking, that thinking requires breaking free of common sense and of the image of thought that it produces. Thus, he argues, educating for common sense actually frustrates thinking, and only education focused on making sense can trigger thinking that transcends the self-evident and produce effects that are truly political. Despite the fact Deleuze has barely concerned himself with educational questions (Morss 2000, p.  195; Bogue 2004, p.  327), his philosophy is increasingly attracting the attention of education scholars (Reynolds and Webber 2004; Semetsky and Masny 2013; Masny and Cole 2015). Indeed, several recent studies examine the

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 I. Snir, Education and Thinking in Continental Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education 17, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56526-8_4

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4  Gilles Deleuze: Thinking as Making Sense Against Common Sense

relation between thinking and education in his works (Semetsky 2003, 2004; Kohan 2011; Munday 2012; Wallin, 2014). Nevertheless, the available literature tends to ignore the Deleuzian sense – a concept developed mainly in Logic of Sense (1990) and Difference and Repetition (1995). Also largely disregarded is the strong relation between sense and thinking. Consequently, that relation, as well as the relation between thinking and the different cognitive faculties in Deleuze’s radical political philosophy is yet to be explored in the educational context. In the following, I try to put some sense into the Deleuzian brand of educating for thinking, thereby shedding new light on its counter-commonsensical, radical-political potential (see also Snir 2018). I show how

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