How to understand this intimacy between the future and the original? The philosopher of the future is at the same time the explorer of the old worlds, peaks and caves, and only creates by dint of remembering something that was essentially forgotten. That something, according to Nietzsche, is the unity of thought and life. Complex unit: one step for life, one step for thought. Ways of life inspire ways of thinking, ways of thinking create ways of living. Life activates thought and thought in turn affirms life. We have no idea of this pre-Socratic unity. We only have examples where thought impregnates and mutilates life, feels it, makes it judicious, and where life takes its revenge by driving thought crazy and losing itself with it. We have no choice but between mediocre lives and crazy thinkers. Lives too wise for a thinker, thoughts too crazy for a living being: Kant and Hölderlin. But the beautiful unity is still not found, so that madness would not be the same as it - that unity that turns an anecdote from life into an aphorism of thought and an evaluation of thought into a new perspective on life.

The secret of the Presocratics, in a way, was already lost from the beginning. We must think of philosophy as a force. Now, the law of forces is that they cannot appear without covering themselves with the mask of pre-existing forces. Life must first imitate matter. In fact, it was necessary for the philosophical force, at the moment when it was born in Greece, to disguise itself in order to survive. It has been necessary for the philosopher to adopt the ways of the preceding forces, to take on the mask of the priest. The young Greek philosopher has something of the old Oriental priest. We are still delusional about this today: Zoroaster and Heraclitus, the Hindus and the Eleatians, the Egyptians and Empedocles, Pythagoras and the Chinese—all possible confusions. They speak of the virtue of the ideal philosopher, of his asceticism, of his love for wisdom. We do not know and cannot guess the particular solitude and sensuality, that is, the too unwise ends of a dangerous existence, that are hidden under that mask. The secret of philosophy, since it has been lost from the origins, remains to be discovered in the future.

It was therefore fatal that philosophy in history only developed by degenerating and turning against itself, allowing itself to be trapped in its mask. Instead of the unity of an active life and an affirmative thought, one sees how thought assigns itself the task of judging life, of opposing it to supposedly higher values, of measuring it with these values and of limiting it, condemning it. At the same time that thought thus becomes negative, one sees how life is despised, how it ceases to be active, how it is reduced to its weak forms, to sick forms, the only ones compatible with the so-called higher values. Triumph of "reaction" over active life and of denial over affirmative thought. For philosophy, the consequences are dire. Because the two virtues of the legislating philosopher were the criticism of all established values, that is, of the values superior to life and the principle on which they depend, and the creation of new values, values of life that demand another principle. Hammer and transmutation. But at the same time that philosophy degenerates, the legislating philosopher gives way to the submissive philosopher. In place of the critic of established values, in place of the creator of new values and new evaluations, there arises the conservative of accepted values. The philosopher stops being a physiologist or a doctor to become a metaphysician; he ceases to be a poet to become a "public teacher." He declares himself subject to the demands of truth, of reason; but behind the demands of reason, forces that are not so reasonable are often recognized, States, religions, current values. Philosophy is not only more than the recount of all the reasons that man applies to obey.

Gilles Deleuze