…[N]o experience of objects of the senses is possible except insofar as I presuppose a priori that every such object must be thought of as a magnitude, and similarly with all the other categories. Here I shall always remark that such objects can be represented by us only as given in space and time. Out of this there emerges a whole science of Ontology as immanent thinking, i.e., a science of things the objective reality of whose concepts can be securely established. Only afterwards, in the second section, will it be shown that in the same science all conditions of the possibility of objects are themselves conditioned …
Immanuel Kant, Letter to Sigismund Beck (20 January 1972)
Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
It is well known that Kant devoted his first Critique to walking a thin line between rationalism and empiricism of his time. While empiricism is ungrounded — and rationalism to some extent trivial — Kant’s transcendental philosophy aims to demarcate the domain of knowledge which can be justified, and designate the ways in which it is justified, distinct from those that lack such validation, namely the pure reason . In this way, Kant's philosophy is seen as orthogonal to the extremes mentioned and therefore are said to transcend, i.e., to reveal a new dimension in which unprecedented philosophical dialogues are made possible. Kant described his position as "transcendental idealism" in that it is a metaphysics of mind in which the objects are confronted by the subject via a specified structuring of sensibility and understanding.
It is perhaps not as well known that Deleuze had tried to also walk a thin line between the extremes of his time. Kant’s critical philosophy for Deleuze, in particular, was subject to criticism because, interestingly, it is not transcendental enough ( DG 33). Deleuze described his position as “transcendental empiricism,” which, contrary to Kant’s project of conditioning all possible experience, conditions real experience. While scholarships between Kant and Deleuze have been fairly abundant, this short essay wishes to unravel Béatrice Longuenesse’s exposition of Kant – especially the three syntheses of time – from the perspective of Deleuze. Given that the invocation of transcendental philosophy lends basis for Deleuze to ground his own metaphysical position, this paper further inquiries into the parallels and divergences between Deleuze’s and Longuenesse’s Kant. This essay will first briefly introduce parts of Longuenesse's interpretation of Kant, and then Deleuze's position as transcendental empiricism, before finally situating Deleuze in a position coordinated by Kant, Longuenesse’s Kant, and other thinkers, without dwelling too much on any of the topics mentioned. Due to the scope of this essay, the aim of which is not at all ambitious. It solely aims to introduce a comparative perspective between the two positions, as it seems there exists nontrivial correspondence yet few scholarships have exposited such a theme as their subject of investigation. Many expositions here, that is to say, will remain in the form of brief presentations instead of delving into the developments and explications of concepts.
The main argument laid in Kant and the Capacity to Judge is centered around the primacy of the logical form of judgment, or the capacity to judge , and its relation to the categories and other concepts, pure or empirical. Unlike many other scholars who discard the connection between the two tables – that of the categories and that of the logical form, Longuenesse attributed an expansive amount of attention to both the A and B editions of the Transcendental Deduction, in which the threefold syntheses of time and the logical use of understanding are discussed respectively, which serve to construct a compatible reading of Kant by connecting these two editions.
A common explanation of Kant’s transcendental philosophy is that our possibility of experience is conditioned. No object is given to us directly, but only after the mediation of the faculties, namely, it must conform to our intuition of space and time and be subsumed by concepts in the faculty of understanding. Longuenesse’s reading, however, adds more nuance into this interpretation. To be brief, Longuenesse does not take the categories to be the a priori conditions of judgment, but themselves already a result of the logical forms of judgment. Similarly, space and time are not only the conditions of sensation but themselves “products of synthesis speciosa ,” that is, the result of understanding on sensibility (Longuenesse 226). Thereof, the forms of intuition and understanding are, so to speak, of the same origin, and thus need no concern the subsumption of the manifolds from the figurative synthesis (which deployed categories as an initial processing) by that of the synthesis intellectualis (which have categories as full-fledged concepts, “universally represented”) ( CPR A78/B104).
Longuenesse named her concluding chapter: The Capacity to Judge and "Ontology as Immanent Thinking." The former phrase denotes the ability by which the transcendental structure as intuition and understanding is produced, namely that it adds contents to what is supposed in themselves as something to be presumed prior to experience. That is to say, the capacity to judge should be conceived as something more transcendental to our transcendental architectonics, since it conditions our conditions. Then, what is “ontology as immanent thinking”? It seems to be referring to the onto-genesis of empirical concepts in the threefold synthesis, i.e., how concepts are produced from manifolds in the process of thinking. Concepts, understood in this manner, are not merely forms to which the sensory contents must correspond, but they are already “themselves the result of that figurative synthesis," which is produced in the act of representation, namely, thinking . (Longuenesse
Experience as the real condition
For a usual reading of Kant, experience conforms to concepts. For Deleuze, however, experience galvanizes concepts, which become the distribution of intensity in the transcendental field. Thinking as movements goes back and forth between the transcendental and the empirical, without assuming the identity of the two. That is to say, concepts are neither the analysis nor synthesis of experience, for they assume the nature of concepts being representational of appearances. From Deleuze’s perspective, Kant views the field of transcendence as the possibility of experience, while the latter of which originates from problematics stimulated by heterogeneity and contingency of our experience. All problems are first of all differentials of intensity, which were endowed with heterogeneity by the act of thinking. It has been summed up briefly by Deleuze: It is strange that aesthetics (as the science of the sensible) could be founded on what can be represented in the sensible. True, the inverse procedure is not much better, consisting of the attempt to withdraw the pure sensible from representation and to determine it as that which remains once representation is removed (a contradictory flux, for example, or a rhapsody of sensations). Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity. It is in difference that movement is produced as an 'effect', that phenomena flash their meaning like signs. The intense world of differences, in which we find the reason behind qualities and the being of the sensible, is precisely the object of a superior empiricism. This empiricism teaches us a strange 'reason', that of the multiple, chaos and difference (nomadic distributions, crowned anarchies). ( DR 57) Here Deleuze is against aesthetics being seen as a subject reduced to passive receptivity, advocating it as something seeking productivity in itself. Here, sensibility is not something that merely conditions the appearances that we percept, but are themselves "the result of productive processes that actually create or produce the qualities of sensibility” ( DG 9). The form of cognition, and therefore our subjectivity, is not a priori determined as human nature but is the product of the process of experience. While Deleuze disagrees with the division of sensibility and understanding (as they differ not in kind but in degree), his project of transcendental empiricism is aimed at uncovering the ways in which intuitions can be produced and subsequently how the world as we experienced is possible.
Just as Nietzsche had claimed: We do not originate thoughts, thoughts come to us. The main problem of transcendental philosophy, as Deleuze pointed out, is that it has caught itself in a vicious circle of explaining the empirical by the transcendental, while justifying the transcendental in terms of the empirical: …to the extent that the possible is open to "realisation," it is understood as an image of the real, while the real is supposed to resemble the possible. That is why it is difficult to understand what existence adds to the concept when all it does is double like with like. Such is the defect of the possible: a defect which serves to condemn it as produced after the fact, as retroactively fabricated in the image of what resembles it. ( DR 212) In other words, Deleuze is unhappy with the fact that concepts as our conditioning of experience define what is or is not possible, without adding anything new to the content.
Deleuze’s solution, on the other hand, is to forgo the binary imposed by transcendental philosophy between the purely undifferentiated matter and the fully structured subject — the Supreme, individuat ed Being. There are no fundamentally two kinds of existence distinct in nature as, respectively, experience, the conditioned, and intellect, the conditions.
The mind is simply a thing that can go through the threefold syntheses and possesses the capacity of memorization, imagination, and conceptualization, understood in a much more general sense. In other words, it is not the human mind which synthesizes, but that which had been synthesiz ed . The Copernican revolution for Deleuze is exactly not attributing time as intuition to human sensibility, but decentering it from the human, as it is the Earth which revolves around the sun, instead of the other way around.
Layers of Realities
The dimension on which I wish to dwell my analysis might have become already clear
it is, so to speak, the degree of transcendence. From a standard reading of Kant, the
possibility of experience is conditioned by a transcendental structure of mind. From Longuenesse’s reading, the configurations of mind to which objects as content must correspond are themselves conditioned by the capacity of judgment, since the concepts are generated from syntheses and deployed in the analysis only afterward. Nevertheless, there is still a distinction between intuition and understanding, which govern their respective realms of jurisprudence. In a way, we could say Longuenesse’s reading of Kant commits less structure of mind as it grants more degrees of freedom by which the mind might evolve in time. Thus, the idea of Ontology as immanent thinking is referring to precisely the process of the transformation of mind by the act of cognition. While cognition is a process of generating experience, it is also a process of recasting the transcendental structure of cognition.
In Deleuze, the minimal distinction between intuition and understanding disappeared.
Not only that the subject is transformed by the act of thinking, but it is also, perhaps paradoxically, produced by this very act. The intuition behind this formulation concerns the vicious circle of justification we mentioned earlier. Perhaps the question that needs to be asked in every metaphysics is: what is the purpose of such theorizations, and what constitutes an explanation? When we seek to explain the phenomena we add more structure to reality, which is justified in terms of phenomena. Yet when we start to ask why such structure exists, one might add without hesitation yet another layer of contextualization, that is to say, to transcend what is already transcendental with regard to experience. Here, it is Longuenesse’s logical form of judgment that governs concept production. One might observe that this type of Ontology would always leave something ungrounded: our reality will be caught in an infinite regress as it is added with layers of transcendental structures recursively. One might ask, for example, where does the logical form come from for Longuenesse? It is not perhaps self-consistent yet hardly self- explanatory . What Deleuze suggests, from my reading, is a new understanding of empiricism: I have always felt that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist. But what does this equivalence between empiricism and pluralism mean? It derives from the two characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness). ( Dialogues vii) Transcendental philosophy was born to be a savior of the empiricist's fallacy, to give justification for causality in the Humean paradox. Yet this transcendence cannot be given out of nowhere, but only from what we have already been given, namely, our experience.
It is experience as flux or syntheses of time which give rise to our subjectivity and subjective reality (experience proper). The things-in-themselves are here not only that which are always unknowable, but constitute exactly the field of immanence that give rise to different forms of subjects and objects and therefore different experiences, that is, realities.
Why did Deleuze claim Kant's transcendental philosophy was not transcendental enough? We now know it is because the transcendental needs something more transcendental, the grounding needs a ground. In a different way (by doing metaphysics), Deleuze gives us a groundless ground, something that can be found in both Heidegger and Wittgenstein.
For Heidegger, our being open to experiencing anything at all is ultimately contingent and gratuitous, which should fill us with awestruck gratitude. We should celebrate and protect this deepest possible mystery from attempts to ground it which are inevitably futile and which, more importantly, exile us from the space of wonder. Wittgenstein wants to eradicate wonder, it is true, but this is because he believes that it tempts us beyond ourselves, seducing us toward an airless space outside world and time… ( GG 239) In some sense, both philosophers respond to Kant’s transcendental philosophy that not only our capacity to know has its limitation, but, more importantly, even that this very limitation itself can not be known. Wittgenstein and Heidegger both avoid doing metaphysics, as they think it yields nothing but fruitless attempts to grasp something beyond the reach of humans. Deleuze, on the other hand, claims himself to be a pure metaphysician. As we have seen, he tries in a way to continue Kant's project of critical philosophy: to give an account of and draw boundaries around our capacity of knowledge.
However, this account does not set a static limit on ourselves once and for all; instead, it creates the transcendental limits out of a field of immanence, in which subjects and objects come and go, and therefore these limitations vary. The account of these limitations is precisely what Deleuze’s “transcendental philosophy” is about.
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