The Dogmatic Image of Thought

Deleuze’s critique of Kant’s epistemology (continued).

How do we construct the universe? How can we continually think the new, continually move beyond the commonplace, and boldly create something never created before?

This is Gilles Deleuze’s perspective in his approach to Immanuel Kant.

Representation

Kant’s epistemological system relies on a mechanism or process of representation that takes place in the mind. Under this view, the brain re-presents an object or content in our mind, via the categories (eg., causation etc).

The image that we have of that object in our mind, made possible via the categories, will have a distinct identity and boundaries which enable us to classify the object, and distinguish it from other objects.

The mechanism of representation mediates the object, from its presentation to re-presentation in the mind, and in so doing provides a stability to the concept or identity of that particular object. The stability of this process, the faithful and accurate re-presentation, the reliability of the re-presentation, the objective quality of the re-presentation, is grounded in a correspondence between the thing presented and the representation.

Put another way, correspondence via representation is a validation of truth. A thing is true when our representation of it corresponds with what the thing is (or more accurately, to the extent we objectively agree on what the appearance of the thing is). And that correspondence must be stable in space and time.

The Unity of Apperception

But how do we know it is true? Kant goes a step further with what he calls the “unity of apperception.” Kant makes the claim that judgement is what enables us to distinguish between objective representations, ie., truth, and subjective representations, ie., opinion.

The mental act of judging is a synthesis, which is “the action of putting different representations together with each other and comprehending their manifoldness in one cognition.” The objective world is constructed by exercising an a priori capacity to judge, which Kant calls the “faculty of understanding.”

The understanding constructs experience by providing the a priori rules, or the framework of necessary laws, in accordance with which we judge representations to be objective. That is, a good judgement is a synthesis of representations formed via objective application of the categories, which are themselves the rules of good judgement.

Truth is the result of good judgement.

Truth

Truth is a function of the objective synthesis of images re-presented in the mind. Presentations in the mind are stable, and hence capable of being true, if they are capable of being understood or judged under a rubric that involves objective application of the categories.

This results in our mind being able to distinguish representations via operations such as identity, analogy, opposition and resemblance. These four operations are the means by which we construct a world we call true.

Enter Deleuze

Deleuze argues that the epistemology of Kant (and other philosophers who rely on transcendence) constructs a view of thought that conjures up a conforming image based on identity, to the detriment of pure thought as difference. For Deleuze, thought stagnates under this tyranny of representation and identity, this dogmatic image of thought.

How does he arrive at this conclusion? He starts by identifying two aspects of the dogmatic image of thought: common sense and good sense. We judge under the dogmatic image of thought by applying common sense and good sense.

Common sense coordinates and harmonizes the perceptual, cognitive and linguistic into a united image inside our head that matches phenomena in the outside world. Good sense distinguishes one phenomenon from another. Together, common sense and good sense deliver a self-consciousness, a subject, me, the “I think,” that is distinct and united and opposed to objects in the world.

Together, common sense and good sense ensure the stability of concepts based in identity. Difference is subordinated insofar as common sense and good sense classify and categorize phenomena in accordance with criteria that create identities and see difference as nothing other than the distinction between them.

Things are different only if they are not the same.

Doxa

Common sense and good sense combine to deliver judgement via recognition. To recognize something is to judge it, to apply the categories to it and be done with it. The operations of judgement, identity, analogy, opposition and resemblance, are supported by common sense and good sense, which delivers a representational vision of a world we recognize, judge and can control.

The problem with a process of thought based on common sense and good sense, in Deleuze’s view, is that it relies on what everybody already knows. Common sense and good sense come together to form doxa. Doxa is common opinion, common judgement, what everyone accepts as true.

Reliance on an image of thought that has its ground in doxa can only lead to thought that is conforming, unremarkable. Philosophy that is based on doxa can only lead to uncreative thought, stagnating thought:

The form of recognition has never sanctioned anything but the recognizable and the recognized; form will never inspire anything but conformities.

Deleuze condemns a philosophical system that legitimizes established thought, at the expense of novel and creative thought:

What is a thought which harms no one, neither thinkers nor anyone else? Recognition is a sign of the celebration of monstrous nuptials, in which thought ‘rediscovers’ the State, rediscovers ‘the Church’ and rediscovers all the current values that it subtly presented in the pure form of an eternally blessed unspecified eternal object.

We always have as much truth as we deserve in accordance with the sense of what we say. Sense is the genesis of the production of the true, and truth is only the empirical result of sense. We rediscover in all the postulates of the dogmatic image the same confusion: elevating a simple empirical figure to the status of a transcendental…

Papering Over Reality

If thought and philosophy are to progress, representational thought must be abandoned and replaced with something more creative. And Deleuze views this as the natural outcome:

When representation discovers the infinite within itself, it no longer appears as organic representation but as orgiastic representation: it discovers within itself the limits of the organized; the tumult, restlessness and passion underneath the apparent calm.

In other words, common sense and good sense paper over reality. Reality suffocates under a blanket of judgement that relies on identities to create order and blind us to disorder, fluctuation, uncertainty, change.

Paradox

In order to see reality for what it really is, its dynamic quality and unpredictability, its basis in difference-in-itself, common sense and good sense must be traded in for paradox:

Philosophy is revealed not by good sense but by paradox. Paradox is the pathos or the passion of philosophy. There are several kinds of paradox, all of which are opposed to the complementary forms of orthodoxy — namely good sense and common sense. Subjectively, paradox breaks up the common exercise of the faculties and places each before its own limit, before its incomparable: thought before the unthinkable which it alone is nevertheless capable of thinking; memory before the forgotten which is also its immemorial; sensibility before the imperceptible which is indistinguishable from its intensive…

And thought confronted by paradox thinks in terms of problems, not solutions.

Problem-Oriented Thought

Common sense and good sense seek solutions so that we might have order. They seek conformity and result in a static view of experience. A focus on solutions results in doxa.

On the other hand, to focus on problems, questions, without desperately seeking to be done with them, leads to remarkable thought.

Thought must seek out that which not everybody knows. For Deleuze (and Nietzsche) thought can only progress, can only be affirmed, if we stop seeking recognition for that which everybody knows, stop seeking dogma, stop seeking the truth, and begin to think in creative, experimental ways.

We must learn to think thought without an image.

We must go beneath the identities created by representational thought and dare to witness difference-in-itself. But doing so will require the fortitude to abandon the presumed stability of identities, the false security of handed-down dogma.

Philosophy is not the search to discover truth and knowledge.

Creative Philosophy

Philosophy is an activity that affirms pure thought itself, the pure creativity of thought. In order to think remarkably, we must be willing to release a constructed world and a constructed self in which a unified self-consciousness views itself reflexively as standing outside and above the field of experience:

The “I think” is the most general principle of representation — in other words, the source of these elements and of the unity of all these faculties: I conceive, I judge, I imagine, I remember and I perceive — as though these were the four branches of the Cogito. On precisely these branches, difference is crucified. They form quadripartite fetters under which only that which is identical, similar, analogous or opposed can be considered different: difference becomes an object of representation always in relation to a conceived identity, a judged analogy, an imagined opposition or a perceived similitude… the world of representation is characterized by its inability to conceive of difference in itself; and by the same token, its inability to conceive of repetition for itself.

Real thought has its genesis in an immanent self created and immersed in the field of experience, immersed in becoming.

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.