The Concept Of Qi (气) In Ancient Daoist Thought And The Concept Of Intensity In The Thought Of Gilles Deleuze

The following paper takes the distinction made by Gilles Deleuze between intensive and extensive quantities as fundamental not only to the analysis of mind and matter but also to the analysis of Chinese concepts of matter and spirit. Although the conservative tradition of Western philosophy only understood matter in terms of extension and only understood spirit poorly as the negative opposite of extended things, yet the "minor tradition" of Western philosophy including Spinoza, Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Deleuze has continuously offered much better ways of solving the problematic distinction between mind and matter.It is this tradition that should enable us to produce better analyses of Ancient philosophical characters like Qi, which doesn't hold up to rigid distinctions between spirits and material bodies, and hints further at a wonderful concept of matter that is inspired to do creative things. I would like to say that this is what my paper has discovered:Qi is the vital flow of heat and energy pumping ecosystems and skies with life, and Dao is the intensive, deterritorialized embryonic body within which all beings and territorializing material systems are enveloped. In other words, Dao is the unity of beings that is reached by subtracting a higher dimension that would homogenize them like "space" or "extension," a Dionysian unity that connects intensive differences to intensive differences in a vortex of free becoming. The following paper thus elucidates the concept of intensive difference with which Deleuze built his new metaphysical ground for the contemporary sciences, and attempts to show that Qi, the ancient Daoist concept of "spirit-matter", still has a future so long as it is rigorously defined in contraposition to the Western concept of "extended-matter".