Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, Part 2

Deleuze’s critique of the transcendent subject.

Real experience is created in the immanent field via a genetic process of difference.

This article is a continuation of Deleuze’s critique of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.

Duality of Subject

Deleuze has two primary criticisms of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. The first is that Kant did not go far enough in his critique of rationalism.

Kant developed an approach to bring reason together with the immanent empirical field, but failed to fully realize this by making the field of consciousness immanent to a transcendent subject, thereby reintroducing a unified identity external to the field. All powers of synthesis, representation, understanding and judgement reside in a transcendent subject capable of limitless identity formation with respect to phenomena in the immanent field.

Deleuze objects that Kant’s duality of the transcendent intelligible and the immanent sensible creates a hierarchy in which the intelligible governs experience, conforms experience from a seat beyond experience itself. Kant has introduced a transcendent intelligible that creates order and unity in the universe but exercises this authority a priori to the experience of the universe.

Deleuze argues that while Kant set out to reconcile rationalism and empiricism, he failed to explain the transcendent subject empirically.

In his book on Hume, Empiricism and Subjectivity, Deleuze discusses an empiricist reversal of Kant. Whereas Kant’s question had been, “how can the given (the empirical) be given to a subject?” Hume’s question had been, “how is the subject (human nature) constituted within the given?”

It is the latter question that Deleuze is interested in: how can the process of thought be characterized, assuming the subject that thinks is itself a product of and within the confines of an immanent empirical field of consciousness?

Deleuze insists that all powers of cognition, sensible and intelligible, must be explained in the empirical field.

Salomon Maimon

Secondly, Deleuze criticizes Kant’s critique insofar as it assumes the prior existence of knowledge (and morality) as “fact.”

Here, Deleuze turns to the work of Salomon Maimon (1753–1800), who wrote a critique of Kant’s philosophy around the time it was published. Maimon was also a philosopher of immanence, and his primary objection to Kant was that he had ignored the demands of a genetic methodology.

Maimon objects that Kant’s method assumes there are a priori facts of reason (the fact of knowledge or the fact of morality) and then seeks conditions of their possibility in the transcendent. He insists that Kant cannot make such an assumption, but must show how these facts are generated immanently from reason.

Kant failed to develop a theory of the genesis of the fact of knowledge, demonstrating that knowledge is the natural result of an immanent process of thought. Further, Kant’s categories, such as causality, are only held up as possible conditions for experience, but are not thoroughly tested as necessary for real experience.

Hume’s proposition that causality itself is nothing more than habit has not been answered in Kant’s critique.

Genetic Process

In effect, Maimon objects to the fundamental separation and duality of sensibility and understanding, seen through Kant’s lens as separate sources of cognition.

Maimon proposes to overcome this problem by investigating not the conditions of possible experience, but the conditions of real experience, the genesis of qualitative sensations. He argues that ideas in the Kantian sense are the product of the application of transcendent categories, and as such are unifying, totalizing, and fundamentally rely on a concept of identity as the possibility of knowledge.

He asserts that to explain the genesis of thought immanently, one must instead introduce a concept of difference.

For Maimon, real experience is not the product of a transcendent identity or concept being applied to immanent experience, but instead is created in the immanent field via the generation of qualities he calls “differentials.” From differentials flow intensive qualities called “ideas of understanding,” which are finally fixed as objects of sensibility through imagination and representation.

Difference is the necessary genetic condition for the creation of real thought in the immanent field.

Thought as Multiplicity

Deleuze adapts Maimon’s critique of Kant and further explicates what is meant by the genesis of real thought via a principle of pure difference.

In doing so, he envisions a continuous process in which the sensible and intelligible arise immanently within the field of consciousness; a process that does not rely on a transcendent subject that unifies and orders experience.

Thought no longer is viewed as unifying and totalizing, but instead multiple, differential, genetic.

In order to understand this vision fully, we must first outline what Deleuze refers to as the “dogmatic image of thought.”

I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!

Tomas

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Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2021 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.