Meaning of “aimed to open thought onto its outside..."

Question

I was reading an article called Two’s A Crowd in Aeon magazine online, and came across this passage:

Instead of treating different fields of enquiry as cut off from one another, Deleuze and Guattari tried to show where one discipline seeps into another, challenging the centrality of any one of them. Ultimately, they aimed to open thought onto its outside, pushing against the tendency for theoretical work to close in on itself.

I’m having trouble understanding the part in bold. Specifically, the part that says “to open thought onto its outside pushing against the tendency for theoretical work to close in on itself”is confusing to me. When I looked up the keywords in the dictionary, I saw it means to reverse open the thought pushing against the espoused interpretation by philosophers who favour obscurity over clarity that the theoretical work close in on itself and with it our comprehension of the topic at hand ,sorry for going adrift but that’s it it is the oddity of philosophy for all of us who enjoy reading yet grappling with the language of which we are non natives . but I still am getting confused.

I don’t get the meaning of this text; could anybody explain please?

Answer 1

This article is about philosophy. Philosophers are notorious for using standard English words and phrases in nonstandard ways that are familiar only to those in their discipline or that are unique to their writing. Not being able to make sense of this doesn't imply that you have problems understanding English, but that you don't have a strong background in this type of writing.

OK, so let's try to dissect this as well as we can:

...pushing against the tendency for theoretical work to close in on itself.

The writers in question (and the author) suggest that theoretical work in one area has a tendency to become separated from the other disciplines and presumably from practical application. That's the context.

...they aimed to open thought onto its outside...

Taken literally, this is nonsense. I can understand why you can't understand it. In context, we interpret it to mean that it was their objective do to theoretical work that connected the apparently separated and self-absorbed theoretical disciplines to each other and to the rest of the world outside of their spheres of thought.

The author of this article is expressing himself in lofty and literary ways. There's going to be a lot in there that is difficult for a person to make sense of, regardless of their mastery of the English language. This is especially true if we look at individual sentences without their surrounding context.