Abstract:

Deleuze, who criticizes the Western metaphysics, which he calls Platonism, through his philosophy of immanence and difference and expresses his philosophical orientation as “reversal of Platonism”, often refers to the examples from the history of philosophy while grounding his thoughts. Deleuze finds the orientation of “reversal of Platonism” in his monographs on discrete philosophers of the history of philosophy and traces the beginning of this orientation. According to Deleuze, this orientation is found for the first time in Stoicism, which first and radically reverses Platonism. According to Deleuze, the Stoics made this reversal with "theory of the incorporeals", "theory of double causality" and "image of the new philosopher." For Deleuze, Stoicism appears to be valuable in that it presents perhaps the first example of an ontology that can be built on singularity, immanence and difference. These claims of Deleuze, who devoted his philosophy to “reversal of Platonism”, seem worth discussing. In this study, these three novelties, which Deleuze finds specific to the Stoic philosophy, will be discussed, and then these novelties will be compared with the Stoic texts, and Deleuze's attachment to Stoicism, and/or detachment from it will be discussed. Thus, Deleuze’s interpretation of Stoicism will be evaluated in terms of its literalism and it will be revealed whether Stoicism offers an ontology based on the difference, singularity and immanence.