The Vertigo of Philosophy: Deleuze and the Problem of Immanence
Christian Kerslake
Published in Radical Philosophy no. 113, May/June 2002.
One of the few
terminological constants in Deleuze's philosophical work is
the word 'immanence' and it has therefore become a foothold
for those wishing to understand exactly what 'Deleuzian philosophy'
is. That this ancient and well-travelled notion is held to have been
given new life and meaning by a Deleuzian approach is evidenced in
much recent secondary literature on Deleuze, and, significantly, in
one central theoretical section of Hardt and Negri's Empire,
which takes up the theme of 'the plane of immanence'.
Yet on closer inspection it becomes clear that what is at stake in
Deleuze's contribution to the history of this term is actually
quite elusive. I will claim here that 'immanence', despite
appearing to connote philosophical transparency, is in fact a problem
for Deleuze; indeed perhaps it is the problem inspiring his work.
Not for nothing does Deleuze suggest that 'immanence is the
very vertigo of philosophy.'
Can a preliminary definition of immanence be given at the outset?
I would suggest that two features ñ one formal, the other ontological
ñ are pre-eminent. Formally, a philosophy of immanence is a
philosophy that does not appeal to anything outside the terms and
relations constructed and accounted for by that philosophy. Ontologically,
we might say that in a philosophy of immanence, thought is shown to
be fully expressive of being; there is no moment of 'transcendence'
of being to thought. Such general criteria, however, could be said
of a multitude of philosophies from early Greek cosmology onwards.
By which criteria, then, could a philosophy be said to be 'more'
immanent than another?
Hardt and Negri, by focussing explicitly on what they take to be an
exhaustive opposition between immanence and transcendence, claim that
there is something specifically modern about the notion of immanence.
'The primary event of modernity', they say, is 'the
affirmation of the powers of this world, the discovery of the plane
of immanence'. For them, the characteristic of this-worldiness
appears to sanction the step of equating immanence with materialism.
Modernity achieves its apogee in the powers of affirmation liberated
by Spinozism, rather than in the deepening of the powers of reflexivity
and self-consciousness liberated by Kantianism. Indeed, they complain
that the 'relativity of experience' introduced by Kant
'abolishes every instance of the immediate and absolute in human
life and history. Why, however, is this relativity necessary? Why
cannot knowledge and will be allowed to claim themselves to be absolute?'
These words will seem strange to those coming from the Kantian tradition.
Whilst the complaint is reminiscent of Hegel, the word 'immediate'
suggests otherwise. Rather than raising the Kantian stakes as Hegel
does, Hardt and Negri seem to retreat from them altogether. But, the
post-Kantian might say, isn't it with Kant that the claim to
immanence is first truly justified? The purpose of the Kantian critique
is surely to ask how immanence is to be achieved, to ask how it is
possible, and to secure it by right against the transgressions of
theology and metaphysics. The ancient metaphysical idea of immanence
must yield to the project of immanent critique. Hardt and Negri seem
to suggest that immanence is something that can be immediately affirmed,
without any prior investigation into its possibility. Things become
odder still for the post-Kantian philosopher when Hardt and Negri
suggest that although 'Hegel restores the horizon of immanence
... [this] is really a blind immanence', in which all activity
is subordinated to a divine teleological order. Again, it is easy
to see how from an Hegelian perspective it is Hardt and Negri's
notion of immanence that is blind, in that they are not concerned
with the critical questions of the justification of structures of
knowledge and action that occupy Hegel in the Phenomenology and serve
to secure the Hegelian right to absolute immanence.
In this essay I will claim that Deleuze's views on immanence
are far removed from those espoused by Hardt and Negri, and in fact
are much closer to the Kantian tradition than is generally suspected.
I will also call into question Deleuze's apparent Spinozism
regarding the question of immanence. Deleuze does hold that thought
can immanently express being, but nevertheless he crucially holds
to the Kantian distinction between thought and experience. This is
also the key to situating Deleuze between Kant and Hegel: for Deleuze,
to claim that the absolute is open to thought does not, as it does
for Hegel, imply that it is open to experience.
This said, I will also suggest that if the word 'immanence'
appears continuously throughout Deleuze's work, this is not
because it is a sign of philosophical continuity, but because it designates
the site of an enduring problem. When Deleuze finally comes explicitly
to elaborate the notion of immanence in his late works, it has undergone
radical change. This essay will take an eccentric path because it
attempts to reconstruct and defend Deleuze's early approach
to immanence, as opposed to his final views. Despite the absence of
explicit discussion of 'immanence' in his magnum opus
Difference and Repetition, I claim that it is there that we find Deleuze's
most defensible formulation of a new philosophy of immanence.
Deleuze, Hyppolite
and Hegel
In 1955 Deleuze wrote a review of his teacher Jean Hyppolite's
book Logic and Existence in which he both makes clear how much he
accepts of Hyppolite's reading of Hegel and provides the only
published plan, to my knowledge, in which he lays out the aims of
his future philosophical project. Deleuze begins by saying that Hyppolite's
main theme is that 'Philosophy must be ontology, it cannot be
anything else; but there is no ontology of essence, there is only
an ontology of sense'. He adds 'that philosophy must be
ontology means first of all that it is not anthropology'. Let
us first unfold Hyppolite's interpretation of this notion of
sense.
The use of the word 'sense' (Sinn) does not seem especially
central in Hegel's own work, but Hyppolite makes clear that
he is identifying it with the more familiar 'notion',
or 'concept' (Begriff). Why does he do this? While there
is undoubtedly a Husserlian inspiration at work, this move also draws
out the sense in which the concept in Hegel is a philosophical reality,
it expresses reality. Hyppolite cites Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics:
Sense is this wonderful word which is used in two opposite meanings.
On the one hand it means the organ of immediate apprehension, but
on the other hand we mean by it the sense, the significance, the thought,
the universal underlying the thing. And so sense is connected on the
one hand with the immediate external aspect of existence, and on the
other hand with its inner essence.
For Hegel these
two opposite meanings signify a common source; they signify that the
universal will be generated in the sensible; that the universal concept
and the singular intuition are two aspects of the self-differentiation
of the absolute. The intelligible articulation of the structure of
self-differentiation is what Hyppolite will call sense, while the
movement itself can be called expression. For Hegel, the problem with
Kant's critique is that the concept remains too external to
the thing itself: 'the categories are no fit terms to express
the Absolute'. Moreover, the concept as such is never merely
possible in Hegel. A Kantian possible concept (eg. of '100 thalers')
is for Hegel not really a concept, but merely 'a content-determination
of my consciousness'; that is, it is merely a representation.
A concept, rather, is ultimately and intrinsically neither representational
nor referential, but expressive of a reality. This couple sense/expression
will be taken up by Deleuze. Both Hegel and Deleuze are against philosophies
of representation because such philosophies claim to express what
should be genuinely universal within a framework that remains relative
to subjective representational experience (ie. which has only been
justified anthropologically), so that the concept of expression doesn't
ever gain its full extension, and thought is denied its rightful access
to being. The notion of the thing-in-itself is symptomatic of Kant's
contradictory position: he forbids himself to say anything determinate
about it, yet insists that it has essential content for thought. Kant
therefore is only partially aware of the transition to which he is
midwife: 'from the being of logic to the logicity of being'.
For Hegel, there will ultimately be nothing outside the concept: absolute
idealism will transparently and immanently express every aspect of
being. It is for this reason that Hyppolite says that 'immanence
is complete' in Hegel.
Now, Hyppolite also gives primacy to the notion of sense because he
wants to lay priority on the special character of the Logic in Hegel's
system. For Hyppolite, the Logic is the expression of being itself;
it is the high point of Hegel's system in which 'the concept,
such as it appears in dialectical discourse, is [unlike in the Phenomenology]
simultaneously truth and certainty, being and sense; it is immanent
to this being which says itself'. Hegel's logic is a logic
of sense, in which the sense of being itself is said through the genesis
of concepts produced by the philosopher. Attempting to avoid the anthropomorphic
view of Hegel promoted by Koj've, Hyppolite tries to restore
the high metaphysical status of the Hegelian system. Hence, like Deleuze,
his anti-humanism is an echo of the claims of classical philosophy.
In an important passage for Deleuze, Hyppolite says that
Hegel is still too Spinozistic for us to be able to speak of a pure
humanism; a pure humanism culminates only in skeptical irony and platitude.
Undoubtedly, the Logos appears in the human knowledge that interprets
and says itself, but here man is only the intersection of this knowledge
and this sense. Man is consciousness and self-consciousness, while
at the same time natural Dasein, but consciousness and self-consciousness
are not man. They say being as sense in man. They are the very being
that knows itself and says itself.
The implication
of Hyppolite's reading here is that the phenomenological and
historical parts of Hegel's system are anthropological entries
into the system. Hyppolite is influenced by Heidegger's 'Letter
on Humanism': man is the 'place', the structural
possibility that Being can reveal itself as such, and express its
sense through 'man'. After man has been broken down and
introduced into the absolute by the Phenomenology, the Logic, absolved
of humanism, retraces the ideal genesis of the sense of being. This
would be the meaning of Hegel's statement that the content of
the Science of Logic 'is the exposition of God as he is in his
eternal essence prior to the creation of nature and a finite mind'.
In his review of Hyppolite, Deleuze affirms fully this reading of
Hegel. Two passages are of particular importance. The first places
Deleuze's development of the notion of difference explicitly
within the context of Hegelian self-differentiation:
[T]he external, empirical difference of thought and being [in the
Kantian system] has given way [in Hegel] to the difference identical
with Being, to the difference internal to the Being which thinks itself....
In the Logic, there is no longer, therefore, as in the empirical,
what I say on the one side and on the other side the sense of what
I say ñ the pursuit of one by the other which is the dialectic
of the Phenomenology. On the contrary, my discourse is logical or
properly philosophical when I say the sense of what I say, and when
in this manner Being says itself.
Deleuze will never
leave behind this image of a 'properly philosophical'
discourse. That is, his philosophy will be a philosophy of the absolute;
it will accept the move from the perspective of the limitations of
knowledge in Kant to the claim that dialectical thought can express
the absolute and in turn ground knowledge. Deleuze shares none of
the reservations about Hegelian immanence that are exhibited by his
fellow post-war French philosophers. He has no bad conscience about
the notion of immanence and he does not construct a philosophy of
difference in order to subvert immanence (and introduce some notion
of 'irreducible otherness' into it), but rather in order
to fulfil it - precisely as Hegel does. Our problem will be to explain
how and why Deleuze returns to elements in Kant to carry out this
aim.
Deleuze concludes his review with some pregnant questions for Hyppolite
after summarising the mains claims of the book:
Following Hyppolite, we recognise that philosophy, if it has a meaning,
can only be an ontology and an ontology of sense. The same being and
the same thought are in the empirical and the absolute. But the difference
between thought and being is sublated in the absolute by the positing
of the Being identical to difference which, as such, thinks itself
and reflects itself in man. This absolute identity of being and difference
is called sense.... The richness of Hyppolite's book could then
let us wonder this: can we not construct an ontology of difference
which would not have to go up to contradiction, because contradiction
would be less than difference and not more? Is not contradiction itself
only the phenomenal and anthropological aspect of difference?
We thus have four
criteria laid out in 1955 for Deleuze's future philosophy. Firstly,
like Hegel, he believes that Kantian critique must at a certain point
be subordinated to a philosophical affirmation of the logicity of
being. Secondly, he affirms that as the philosophy of immanence concerns
the absolute, therefore all differentiation found in it will be internal,
self-generated, differentiation. Thirdly, this philosophy must be
able to 'say its own sense', and through this reflexive
act, coincide with the sense of Being itself. Finally, we also have
the suggestion that the absolute claims of Hegelian philosophy must
be purified of dependence on phenomenal and anthropological content,
and that this latter category, for some as yet unspecified reason,
includes the concepts of contradiction and negation. The decisive
problem for Deleuze's project will lie in consistently articulating
the third criterion along with the others.
Now, if we look for an actualisation of this project, we appear to
find it not in Difference and Repetition, but in Spinoza and the Problem
of Expression, also published in 1968. It is in Spinoza that Deleuze
finds the fullest flowering of an alternative model of immanent self-differentiation
that remains faithful to the Hegelian schema, but which also presents
a notion of difference without contradiction. However, the place of
Spinoza in Deleuze's philosophy turns out to be extremely complicated,
and he remains just as haunting and irresolvable a presence for Deleuze
as he was for the work of the post-Kantians.
Spinoza and the
'best plane of immanence'
In the Spinoza book of 1968, Deleuze fashions a history of the philosophy
of immanence, from the Neoplatonists through to Duns Scotus, which
culminates in Spinoza. He also reaffirms in 1991 that it is Spinoza
who sets out 'the 'best' plane of immanence'.
I will claim shortly that the meaning of immanence has nevertheless
undergone a radical shift between these dates.
Much of Spinoza and the Problem of Expression is concerned with the
theological history of the notion of immanence. For Deleuze, Spinoza's
contribution is to claim that there is no transcendent God, only a
God immanent to nature, whose attributes must be conceived not as
'eminent' to natural attributes, but as 'univocally'
sharing the same meaning. But once the theological issue of the identity
of God with nature has been achieved in principle, one is still left
with a set of purely ontological questions. How is the specific structure
of this ontology to be defended? In what form will the nature of being
express itself in thought? Why would Spinoza's philosophy be
'more immanent' than Hegel's for instance, when
Hyppolite has given strong reasons for affirming that immanence only
becomes truly 'complete' in Hegel?
We come to close to an answer if we follow Deleuze's attempt
to enact a philosophical construction of absolute immanence in his
reconstruction of the first part of Spinoza's Ethics. Deleuze
presents an account of absolute difference that is formally coherent
and provides a foil to the Hegelian view that difference is primarily
negation, and that the self-differentiation of the absolute must be
conceived in the form of a totality. I will only mention the gist
of the argument here, as my aim is rather to assess its role and status
in Deleuze's theory of immanence.
The first few propositions of the Ethics state that 'two substances
having different attributes have nothing in common with each other'
(E1P2), because an attribute is 'what the intellect perceives
of a substance as constituting its essence' (E1D4), and a substance
is 'conceived through itself' (E1D3). Substances, moreover,
cannot be distinguished from one another by their 'modes',
but only by their attributes. No substance can therefore be in a relation
of limitation or causality with another. We thus start with a bare
plurality of substances with one attribute, each of which has nothing
to do with the other. Deleuze points out that it would be incoherent
to introduce a unifying, eminent substance 'behind' these
substances-with-one-attribute. This would be a merely 'modal'
or 'numerical distinction', as it would presuppose a division
between substances that share something in common. This would go against
the definition of substance, which therefore requires a rigorous logic
of 'real distinction'. The universality at work in this
picture is distributive rather than collective; it concerns the 'each',
rather than the 'all'. Spinoza's next big move is
to argue that there can only be an absolute infinity of these really
distinct substances-with-one-attribute. But in this case, the notion
of 'substance' should really be resituated at the level
of absolute infinity itself; therefore the framework is now reconceived
so that there is one substance composed of the set of really distinct
attributes. The attributes are univocally affirmed of the absolutely
infinite substance; there is no transcendent genus or substance 'behind'
them, to the extent that it is their univocal affirmation that constitutes
their status as substance. Only the real distinction of the attributes,
taken to infinity, dispels the need for an eminent unity, or a spurious
collective totality of the components of the absolute. Only through
this theory of 'real distinction', or pure difference,
can Spinoza think absolute immanence, 'the absolute identity
of Being and difference'.
At strategic points in the book, Deleuze appears to imply that all
the aspects of Hegelian immanence are to be found in Spinoza: expression,
the absolute, self-differentiation, genetic method. However, for the
presentation of absolute difference to be more than formally coherent,
Deleuze would need to commit himself to an account of the relation
between the logical (or formal) and the real. Immanence must be realised.
In an important phrase, Deleuze claims to have revealed “the
only realised ontology'. Now Spinoza's version of the
realisation of immanence fundamentally rests on a recapitulation of
the traditional ontological argument ('it pertains to the nature
of a substance to exist', E1P7). But will Deleuze himself rely
on the ontological argument to fulfil the four criteria mentioned
above for his own philosophy of immanence? There are three problems
with this possibility.
1. Wouldn't Deleuze have to make more effort to defend this
kind of ontological argument from well-known criticisms such as Kant's?
For Kant, 'existence' cannot be predicated of the absolute
in a formal argument, as to say that something exists requires an
extra-logical moment (for instance the presence of an intuition).
Now if Deleuze wishes to appeal to the expressivist theory of concepts
mentioned earlier in relation to Hegel, then this would be circular,
as the validity of that theory depends on a successful demonstration
of an internal relation between being and thought. And while Hegel
often speaks highly of the ontological argument, the weight of his
theory of expression does not rest on a return to that argument, but
on other more post-Kantian anti-skeptical arguments about the relation
of thought and being, presented in the Phenomenology. Yet there is
no Phenomenology at all in Deleuze, no 'introduction to the
System'.
2. For Deleuze, the presentation of absolute difference is 'an
immediate and adequate expression of an absolute Being that comprises
in it all beings.' To cite a phrase Deleuze uses elsewhere,
it involves a 'static genesis' of the structure of the
absolute. Hegel's Science of Logic, on the other hand, performs
a 'dynamic genesis' of 'the logicity of being'
in such a way that 'it says its own sense' (accounts for
itself through the concepts it has generated) through the very movement
of thought presented step-by-step in the book itself. The Logic therefore
enacts the complete and immanent interpenetration of the logic of
being with the logic of thought. For instance, the movement from being
to nothingness and then to becoming at the start of the Logic is simultaneously
a movement of thought in which the bare thought of being reveals itself
to be nothing determinate. Moreover, it is also through this approach
that Hegel completes his response to the Kantian critique of the ontological
argument: by arguing that the notion of bare 'existence'
or 'being' cannot be conceived without introducing some
determinacy into it: to be is to be something.
Now Hegel's articulation of the logicity of being is of course
only made possible by the claim that difference must be fundamentally
understood as negation. We know that Deleuze disagrees with this,
but is the necessary consequence of this disagreement that he also
has to give up on a determinate and genetic account of the development
of thought? If so, then he will have concomitant problems defending
his account of immanence against Hegel's. Hegel manages to generate
a lot of determinate possibilities out of the structure of negation:
it is hard to see what determinate possibilities can be strictly generated
from 'difference in itself'. In the Spinozist account,
there is no direct movement from the real distinction of the attributes
to the position that thought and extension are two of these attributes.
3. Let us return to the issue of the 'immediate' genesis
of absolute immanence. Can Deleuze's formal demonstration of
absolute difference by itself present a criterion of absolute immanence
that can serve as a standard by which to criticise other philosophies
of immanence as failures? It is sometimes suggested that Hegelian
immanence introduces an illegitimate transcendence by the mere fact
of presenting an order for absolute self-differentiation, or by presenting
this order as teleological (see the remarks of Hardt and Negri above).
Although here a materialist impulse tends to confuse the argument
(the animus being against any claim to hierarchy in the absolute),
the idea seems to be that if only one appeals to the notion of immanence
itself, as rigidly oppositional to transcendence, that is enough to
dispel any spectres of God, teleology, etc. Now, such an approach
does not answer the questions above concerning the realisation of
immanence, which Hegel has arguably answered better. Nevertheless,
might it not be possible to perform an initial theoretical affirmation
of the structure of absolute difference that, by illuminating the
mere formal possibility of a structure of difference that would avoid
negation, opens the possibility of seeing reality in such a way? I
believe this thought is definitely being ventured by Deleuze, but
it is not clear that this is the path that could lead to 'the
only realised ontology'. It is important to remember that Spinoza
thinks he is demonstrating the structure of the absolute, and would
be critical of any interpretation of 'affirmation' which
suggested voluntarism. Spinozism is not a kind of inverted Pascalian
wager by which one bets that a transcendent God does not exist. If
absolute immanence is to be affirmed, it cannot be as a possibility,
but as a necessity. And that requires that it defeat the other ontological
possibilities.
We come here to a crossroads. On the one hand, it could be that the
Spinozist argument is really a model of absolute difference that is
put to work elsewhere by Deleuze in the service of another, more hidden,
theory of immanence which will be able to compete with post-Kantian
theories of immanence. On the other hand, it is equally clear that
Deleuze did indeed go on to affirm the Spinozist theory of immanence
as 'the best plane of immanence' in works such as What
is Philosophy? Nevertheless, in the following passage it is clear
that something has changed:
Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was
only immanent to itself ... He is therefore the prince of philosophers.
Perhaps he is the only philosopher never to have compromised with
transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere ... He discovered
that freedom exists only within immanence. He fulfilled philosophy
because he satisfied its prephilosophical presupposition. ... Spinoza
is the vertigo of immanence from which so many philosophers try in
vain to escape. Will we ever be mature enough for a Spinozist inspiration?
Firstly, the immanence/transcendence
opposition is now taking on all the work. Moreover, this notion of
transcendence is highly unusual in that it includes not only concepts
of entities such as God, but even the notions of subject and object.
As Deleuze elaborates in his last ever published article, the short
opuscule entitled 'Immanence: A Life', both the subject
and the object are not transcendental, but 'transcendent',
whereas the field of immanence itself is 'an impersonal pre-reflexive
consciousness, a qualitative duration of consciousness without self'.
Here Deleuze in fact appeals to the later Fichte, and he seems very
close to the philosophy of pre-reflexivity found in Fichte by Dieter
Henrich in his seminal article 'Fichte's Original Insight'.
However, the suggestion that 'immanence is related only to itself',
yet must be considered to be pre-reflexive is a difficult one, as
how is the 'self-relation' supposed to be justified if
it has no intrinsic connection with reflexive self-consciousness?
This leads us to the second change: immanence has become a 'pre-philosophical
presupposition'. Now, this move towards a late-Fichtean position
has two major consequences for Deleuze's project. Firstly, the
apparent embrace of a featureless form of intellectual intuition raises
problems with the continuing philosophical affirmation of 'difference'
and 'multiplicity'. As we will see, Deleuzian 'dialectical
difference' was elaborately and determinately worked out in
Difference and Repetition in a way that is antagonistic to any reliance
on some source of primal 'indifference'. Secondly, Deleuze
can no longer claim to have found 'the only realised ontology',
because such a philosophy of immanence could never be realised; its
pre-reflexivity precludes this. Thus we come to the conclusion that
Deleuze's late affirmation of the Spinozist notion of immanence
occurs at a huge cost: immanence is now a 'presupposition'
that must be 'pre-philosophically' affirmed. And this
surely amounts to a return to Fichte's criterion, that it depends
on the kind of person one is whether one accepts this version of things.
I have said that in Spinoza and the Problem of Expression, immanence
genuinely appears to be a matter of philosophical construction. I
ventured that Deleuze's static genesis of absolute difference
could provide a model for the construction of immanence itself. What
was needed was an account of its critical validity in relation to
other philosophies of immanence. The materials for this are present
in Difference and Repetition.
Immanence and
Ideas in Kant and Deleuze
It is Deleuze's return to Kant in Difference and Repetition
that provides the most powerful approach to a new philosophy of immanence.
Kant's own 'plane of immanence' could be said to
have two aspects. Firstly, the implication of the whole project of
a 'Critique of Pure Reason' is that reason can perform
a critical operation upon itself - an immanent critique. However,
exactly how this reflexive act is to be accomplished is not clear.
Kant at first seems to envisage that there is a pure element of reason
that has 'its own eternal and unchangeable laws' and is
a 'perfect unity' and that therefore provides the necessary
vantage point for an auto-critique of human experience. However, since
the thrust of the first Critique is precisely to show the dependence
of reason on the other features of cognitive functioning (such as
sensibility and the understanding), Kant makes it clear at the protracted
end of the work that the 'unity of reason' must be considered
rather as a 'single supreme and inner end, which first makes
possible the whole'. That is, the fulfilment of an immanent
critique systematically requires the teleological projection of an
actualised unity of the diverse aspects of cognition. It turns out
that the work of the Critique of Pure Reason is to be part of a metaphysics,
which 'is also the culmination of all culture of human reason'.
Metaphysics in turn is a part of 'philosophy', which is
'the science of the relation of all cognition to the essential
ends of human reason (teleologia rationis humanae)'.
The second aspect of Kantian immanence is much more well-known. Kant's
method of transcendental argumentation secures an enduring restriction
upon all the faculties and features of cognition so that they can
only be legitimately used if they conform to the structure of experiential
cognition. That is, their immanent use is justifiable, but their transcendent
use is shown to be illegitimate. Kant's main use of the term
'immanence' is in fact with regard to the immanent use
of the faculties of cognition.
Two related questions are relevant here. First, the procedure of the
self-critique of reason and the restriction produced and consolidated
by that procedure are related in a mysterious way. The latter is by
right the result of the former, but the former is the most obscure.
If the wider method of the self-critique cannot be justified, then
how can Kant say that he has strictly drawn the line between legitimate
and illegitimate cognition? Second, it appears that Kant is guilty
of using the notion of 'reason' equivocally. Reason acts
both as the subject and object of critique, without it being made
clear how reason (as subject) could save a bit of itself from its
involvement with the other faculties of cognition (in its role as
object of critique). These metacritical issues are encountered in
one way or another by the post-Kantians, but the Deleuzian take on
them is quite specific, and perhaps closer to Kant than the post-Kantians
were prepared to go.
Kant's notion of immanent critique seems to involve an unstable
oscillation between noumenal and teleological claims. In the first
edition Critique Kant appears to affirm some kind of cognitive access
to noumena, for instance in the section on noumenal freedom where
the human being is said to be 'one part phenomenon, but in another
part ... a merely intelligible object'. This echoes the distinction
in the 'pre-critical' Inaugural Dissertation between 'things
thought sensitively ... as they appear, while things which are intellectual
are representations of things as they are.' Nevertheless, as
Kant elaborates his system (particularly under pressure of his development
of the theory of inner sense, and of problems in the 'deduction'
of freedom), he begins to shift all the metacritical weight of reason's
power to criticise itself onto systematic teleology. The claims about
the 'culture of human reason' are expanded in the Critique
of Judgment, where the functions of experience and knowledge themselves
are more explicitly tied up with purposive activity (for instance
through the development of the notion of 'reflective judgment').
Now in his philosophical works of the 1950's and 60's,
Deleuze too appears to appeal both to some kind of noumenal access,
and to a teleology of the cognitive faculties. On the one hand, Deleuze
often comes across a high rationalist. He argues in 1956 that it is
only by 'determining the differences in nature between things
Ö that we will be able to 'return to things themselves'
... If philosophy is to have a positive and direct relation with things,
it is only to the extent that it claims to grasp the thing itself
in what it is, in its difference from all that it is not, which is
to say in its internal difference'. With its quasi-Hegelian
appeal to 'internal difference', this desire to 'return
to things themselves' is by no means an echo of the trusted
phenomenological maxim: on the contrary, Deleuze appears closer to
resurrecting the rationalist project of returning to noumena. Elsewhere,
Deleuze writes of attaining a 'truly sufficient reason'
which will enable us to determine things in themselves in their internal
difference.
On the other hand, Deleuze is concerned in all of his works up until
Difference and Repetition with the notion of teleology. Kant's
Critical Philosophy is an explicitly teleological reading of the structure
of Kant's system. In an article on Kant's aesthetics from
1963, Deleuze writes that 'in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,
Kant poses the problem of the genesis of the faculties in their primary
free accord. He discovers an ultimate foundation, which is lacking
in the other Critiques. Critique in general ceases to be a simple
conditioning, to become a transcendental Formation, a transcendental
Culture, a transcendental Genesis'. It is at this point, however,
that we can locate a crucial development of the Kantian position.
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze attempts to push further the
theory of the 'ends of reason' by reconstructing Kant's
theory of Ideas of reason, so that the concepts of the understanding
are seen to depend fundamentally on the orientation of cognition towards
Ideas. My claim in what follows is that Deleuze fuses the noumenal
and the teleological in his new notion of 'Idea', in such
a way that he can legitimately claim that thought has access to noumenal
being (while experience, understood in terms of recognition according
to the generality of concepts, does not). This achievement of the
immanence of thought to being, however, is achieved critically in
Deleuze, rather than metaphysically, as in Kant.
To proceed it is necessary to bring out the general teleological structure
of cognition present in Kant's work right from the first edition
Critique. The basic aim of the Transcendental Deduction of Categories
is to discover an apriori structure that grounds the connection between
concepts (as 'functions of unity') and the sensible manifold.
It is now recognised that the argument of this Deduction continues
well into the 'System of the Principles of Pure Understanding'.
However, I would claim that the argument extends even further, right
into the further reaches of the Transcendental Dialectic. In fact,
it is precisely here that the general task of the Transcendental Deduction
meets up with the metacritical status of the Critique, in the teleology
of pure reason. Kant in fact is clear about the general importance
of Ideas for the basic activity of cognition in the first edition
Critique when he suggests at length that a third Deduction ñ
a Transcendental Deduction of Ideas - is also necessary. While the
apriori forms of the understanding are often taken to be sufficient
conditions for the 'coherence' of experience, Kant himself
argues directly against such a view. Just as the Deduction of Categories
was a response to the possibility that spatiotemporal 'appearances
could after all be so constituted that the understanding not find
them in accord with the conditions of unity', presenting a mere
rhapsody or 'confusion' of sensations (the crucial passage
at A90/B123), so does Kant admit that it is conceivable that 'among
the appearances offering themselves to us there were such a great
variety ... of content ... that even the most acute human understanding,
through comparison of one with another, could not detect the least
similarity'. Kant now appeals to reason to finally ground the
applicability of concepts to experience, and to ground the coherence
of concepts in judgments in general. 'For the law of reason
to seek unity is necessary, since without it we would have no reason,
and without that, no coherent use of the understanding, and lacking
that, no sufficient mark of empirical truth'. Kant says that
the understanding presents only a 'distributive unity'
among appearances, without granting a 'collective unity'.
It is only by projecting a 'horizon' or guiding totality
that the analytic unity of concepts can be used logically, in such
a way that higher and lower 'functions of unity' converge
with each other. This would fulfil the fundamental requirement that
is at the root of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories.
This horizon, says Kant, must 'direct the understanding to a
certain goal respecting which the lines of direction of all its rules
converge at one point'.
However, obviously the collective unity (or totality) of appearances,
as a 'focus imaginarius' is precisely what can never be
experienced as such, so the principle can only be regulative, not
constitutive; that is, it is an Idea. Nevertheless, Kant insists that
Ideas legitimately project a logical world, a mundus intelligibilis,
of complete representation. In fact, the Idea has an anomalous transcendental
status: on the one hand it is a peculiar kind of 'problematic
concept', which itself does not conform to the usual criteria
for concepts (it is not related to an intuition, nor does it serve
as a tool for recognition). On the other hand, it is a transcendental
condition: it is thus a condition of the possibility of unity in a
concept; it gives unity to a concept, by acting as the horizon in
which unification can occur. Ideas themselves cannot be known (one
cannot know God, or the self, etc.), but they are necessary conditions
for the coherence of concepts (and therefore of knowledge and experience).
Two problems arise for Kant. First, how can Ideas be both particular
concepts and conditions of concepts in general? Second, while the
first stages of Kant's critique demonstrate the constitutive
role of pure forms such as the categories and space and time, to go
on to affirm the transcendental necessity of the Ideas involves affirming
the necessity of something unconditioned. But what grounds this claim?
How can this teleology be justified in such a way that it does not
merely depend once more on a noumenal postulation about the “essential
ends of reason', or the structure of conceivability in general?
On the other hand, if the ends of reason are merely “regulative'
for finite minds, then how can this teleology be related to the teleology
of reason necessary for the self-critique of reason itself to be possible?
The weight Kant places on the 'outer limits' of the critique,
on teleology, reason and the Ideas, is in danger of producing an implosion
in the critical structure.
Deleuze finds a way through these problems precisely by exploiting
the Kantian discovery that Ideas must be different in kind to concepts.
Kant was onto something when he implied that Ideas are not themselves
unified or objects of recognition. Deleuze's ingenious move
is to take a peculiarly literal reading of Kant's statement
that Ideas are 'problematic'. If Ideas are complete determinations,
but concepts are general, then Ideas are problematic because they
do not withstand coherent generalisation: this is their quality, that
they cannot be recognised or experienced. Nevertheless, they are in
principle open to thought, as the necessary horizon of complete determination.
Not only this, they are also essential to motivate knowledge at all.
The fact is that [reason] alone is capable of drawing together the
procedures of the understanding with regard to a set of objects. The
understanding by itself would remain entangled in its separate and
divided procedures, a prisoner of partial empirical enquiries or researches
in regard to this or that object, never raising itself to the level
of a 'problem' capable of providing a systematic unity
for all its operations ... [it] would never constitute a 'solution'.
For every solution presupposes a problem .
This is really
an echo of Kant's theme in the Preface to the second edition
Critique that
reason ... compel[s] nature to answer its questions ... Reason, in
order to be taught by nature, must approach nature with its principles
in one hand, according to which alone the agreement among appearances
can count as laws, and in the other hand, the experiments thought
out in accordance with these principles.
Knowledge itself
is preceded by the posing of questions, that is, by thought. Knowledge
should not be understood as simply involving descriptions of states
of affairs according to rules; rather knowledge concerns solutions
to problems. Therefore, established knowledge, or what permits recognition,
is really nothing but the realm of established solutions.
Kant does not spell out explicitly this difference in kind between
Ideas and concepts. For him, one of the main criteria for the problematic
'horizon' is that it be unified. But is this a relevant
criterion for the structure of problems? The criterion of unity is
strictly speaking a function of the understanding. Concepts are 'functions
of unity' and empirical cognition or knowledge is the locus
of 'unification' through concepts. Kant is therefore presupposing
the projected unity of Ideas only as a telos from the standpoint of
knowledge, that is, from empirical representation. The power of Ideas
is understood in terms of logical representation, in terms of a logical
calculus that can only be a pale reflection and amplification of the
realm of already established empirical concepts. However, if Ideas
are to be thought primarily as problems (according to Deleuze's
literal reading), this implies that they must already have their own
consistency and form as problems that stand structurally outside achieved
empirical knowledge, 'feeding' and conditioning knowledge.
Any empirical knowledge is only 'determined by the conditions
of the problem, engendered in and by the problem along with the real
solutions. Without this reversal, the famous Copernican revolution
amounts to nothing'.
Deleuze proceeds to argue that Ideas can be conceived as already possessing
the power to synthesise difference in themselves. Again, this thought
is familiar from Hegel: the Kantian dialectic is taken by Hegel to
be the clue to the real extra-representational structure of the determinable
world, a structure which lies beyond the 'concept' in
the Kantian sense. Deleuze too is content to use the word 'dialectic'
to describe the specific mode of differentiation for Ideas; Deleuze's
account of problems is said to explore 'the dialectical half
of difference'. Also like Hegel, Deleuze believes that Kantian
'complete determination' is conceivable at the level of
thought (if the correct means are used), even if it is not 'experienceable'
as such by a finite being. Complete determination is reconceived by
Deleuze as the ideal determination proper to a problematic field.
However, contra Hegel, he excludes a dialectics of negation as the
correct means to undertake an exhaustive determination of the Idea.
As mentioned above in the first section, Deleuze believes that the
form of contradiction is a 'merely phenomenal' aspect
of difference itself. What can this mean?
Again one returns on the rebound from Hegel to Kant. For Kant, although
concepts are 'functions of unity' in judgments, synthetic
judgments are perpetually amplifying concepts, revising them according
to the problem or Idea according to which they are 'focussed'.
As a result, concepts are ultimately indefinable. The principle of
contradiction in fact refers only to concepts that have already been
established and given preliminary definitions, and serves as a rule
of unity within experience. But due to the de jure immersion of the
concept in the problematic field, in which established concepts and
definitions can be broken down and reformed once a problem becomes
transformed, the principle of contradiction has only relative significance.
Hegel can thus with some justice be said to have failed to plunge
deep enough into the nature of difference in the absolute. Instead,
for Deleuze the Idea is determined according to a logic of structure,
in which contradiction between terms that actualise the structure
should not be confused with the relations and transformations set
out in the structure itself. If the structure is taken purely in its
'pre-actual' state, as a set of ideal transformations,
in which the elements are subject to reciprocal determination, then
the contradictions that might arise between the actualised elements
and relations remain undecided or unselected. In this pure state,
of course, the problem can only be thought, not experienced, precisely
because experience functions by means of conceptual recognition.
Such problematic structures may apply to particular fields of knowledge
and experience, or may ground the question of what counts as knowledge
itself. As an example of a particular structure, Deleuze sometimes
refers to the Lacanian school's theories of psychic structure.
Take the Oedipus complex: there are a number of possible positions
in the structure (mother, father, female child, male child) which
can be occupied ('identified' with) in various ways, and
thus can become caught in various vectors of desire. The Oedipal structure
'itself' cannot be experienced, although it can be completely
determined. If the identifications break down, pathology may ensue,
as in Dora's case. Dora may begin to experience her identity
as a 'problem', oscillating between subject-positions.
While fantasy and dream may be able to give form to and sustain the
transformations of thought, the introduction of the problematic field
into experience itself, bound by the rules of conceptual recognition
and a particular spatiotemporal structure, can only be deeply destabilising,
in Kantian terms a 'transcendent' exercise of one's
faculties.
Such problematic structures must also extend to the most abstract
philosophical levels. The criteria for knowledge itself are set up
in response to the 'problem' of knowledge. Again, these
criteria themselves cannot be 'experienced' or 'known',
and the philosophical exploration of a problematic field cannot itself
be judged by the standards of knowledge, as it sets those standards.
It is the sense of the destination of cognitive activity in a horizon
that is to remain by right problematic that marks the singularity
of Deleuze's extension of the teleology implicit in the Kantian
Copernican turn. For Deleuze, indeed, the result of transcendental
philosophy will not primarily be the dictum that all philosophy must
conform to the conditions for the possibility of experience, that
is, enact the immanent use of the structures of experience - in fact,
Deleuze encourages their transcendent use or exercise [exercice],
as it is precisely this that will critically reveal the limits of
experience. For Deleuze, all activities, both voluntary and involuntary,
in which thought becomes caught up in a problematic field which undermines
the structure of experience, go under the name of 'transcendental
empiricism', a phrase which is analogous to the Hegelian notion
of 'speculative experience'. Hegel's view that the
critical apprehension of limits requires that they be transgressed
is thus taken up in a new way by Deleuze. As is the case for Hegel,
Deleuze's notion of immanence actually requires the transcendent
use of the faculties, and the activity of thought beyond experience.
But unlike for Hegel, experience never becomes fully reconciled with
thought. This allows Deleuze the space to develop a new, non-Hegelian
'logic of sense' (Hyppolite's phrase), which attempts
to express the paradoxical act of thinking problems. In The Logic
of Sense Deleuze elaborates on the ability of problematic thought
to perform an 'ideal genesis' of its own conditions, and
thus to 'say its own sense'.
It is clear that Deleuze's potentiation of Kantian Ideas therefore
involves an inversion of Kantianism. It is no longer that the empirical
use of Ideas is a transcendental illusion; rather it is our attempts
to apply the rules of conceptual representation to problems and Ideas
that is the real transcendental illusion. For here, representation
transgresses its own limits and treats problems as concepts. Kant
had misinterpreted what he discovered: the real illusion is to interpret
Ideas as concepts which lack an intuition, and not rather according
to the specific logic of problematic, complete determination. Kant's
claim that the realm of Ideas was ordered in the form of a purely
logical world of representation is in fact an uncritical presupposition,
which Deleuze critically rectifies.
Given the destination of cognitive thought in the Idea, the only choice
for the critical philosopher is to univocally affirm problematicity
as such. But what form can this take? It is at precisely this level
that the Spinozist argument for absolute difference finds its true
place. Absolute difference is shown to be formally coherent in the
Spinoza book, but its existence could not be assumed without recourse
to an ontological argument. As we saw, the procedure of 'starting'
with absolute immanence risks falling back into 'pre-philosophical
presupposition'. But in fact, absolute immanence lies at the
'end' of the system, rather than its beginning: it is
the telos towards which cognition and critique move, and which must
be philosophically affirmed. Now, the demonstration of the formal
coherence of the thought of absolute difference gives us the right
to replace the Kantian collective horizon, in which all Ideas converge
in a presupposed unity modelled on the concept, with a truly, intrinsically
differential horizon, whose only foundation is absolute difference
without unity. Reason itself can be remodelled ('a truly sufficient
reason'): it is no longer be immediately considered to 'seek
unity'. From the ideal notion of collective unity we move to
a permanently distributive structure of reason. And while the Kantian
'common horizon' is shattered, chaos or indeterminacy
does not ensue; rather the splinters can assume a new formation.
This philosophical affirmation of 'the absolute identity of
Being and difference' provides Deleuze with a novel ontological
position between Kant and Hegel. For Kant, Ideas are merely problematic,
'merely ideal', while for Hegel, the dialectical Idea
is fully actual. However, for Deleuze, Ideas are essentially problematic
in themselves. Like Hegel, Deleuze will affirm that there is no noumenal
reality that cannot potentially be captured by dialectical thought.
Thought can indeed fully express being ñ but (contra Hegel)
only through a (non-conceptual, non-negative) form of differentiation
that remains intrinsically problematic for experience. Between Kant
and Hegel, Deleuze's claim is that Ideas, as problems, are constitutive.
That is, they are univocally affirmed of being itself, against the
equivocity of Kantian reason.
So why does Deleuze insist that 'immanence is the very vertigo
of philosophy'? There are perhaps both manifest and latent answers
in Deleuze's work. The manifest answer is that immanence is
the telos of reason, which in its full differential and dispersive
form, can only signify the undermining of experience on the part of
reason. The latent answer invokes structural limits within the very
notion of immanence. Since Deleuze's account of absolute difference
does not allow for an immanent unfolding of determinate categories
(in the way that Hegel's theory does), he must instead take
a more crooked path to immanence, involving a complex mixture of transcendental
(Kantian) and formal and ontological (Spinozist) argumentation. In
other words, it is because Deleuze attempts to construct an immanent
theory of difference which escapes the forms of negation and the concept
that he must sacrifice the self-generating and self-validating features
of Hegel's system of immanence, features that make it not only
a philosophy about immanence, but a philosophy that demonstrates at
every step its own immanence in its very writing and being read. How,
then, is one to adjudicate between Deleuze's and Hegel's
systems? Perhaps this question is closer to the 'vertigo of
philosophy' Deleuze really had in mind, which may explain his
attempts to move beyond his early system. The vertigo would be latent
in the problematic notion of immanence itself.