Immanent Critique: Conference Paper.

Dear friends,

Here is my conference paper from 26th August at Greenwich. Apologies if it does not read well. I prefered not to read it out straight when I delivered it but to discourse from key points and quotations. Therefore, in joining it up in this form it may not flow as well as it should. I hope it does argue it's point well - I was worried that due to the limits of time my ability to actually make the encounter resonate properly might be limited. I hope that the account of Deleuze's engagement with Maimon that I get to towards the end of the paper doesn't seem too rushed or insubstantial. If it does then my attempt to motivate or encourage a turn to Maimon through the limitations of 'Nietzsche and Philosophy' is to blame for taking up too much space. The handout that I include here originally had the diagram's arrows drawn by hand and in trying to represent them on the computer I show the limits of my I.T. knowledge.

It is a bit of a digression from the flow of our discussions here on the Parallel Campaign but I suppose that it does flesh out Deleuze's concern with the virtual and in this way indirectly builds a case for considering that he can defend himself well against Badiou. It does also leave the way open for others to suggest that perhaps Maimon has productive affinities with Badiou.

Best wishes,

Ed


Immanent Critique: Evaluating Deleuze’s 1960s Readings of Kant
(Paper Presented to the Society for European Philosophy Annual Conference, University of Greenwich, 26-28th August 2004)


Title of this paper is very broad. My aim here is to argue that Solomon Maïmon provides a very productive link between Kant and Deleuze. By this I mean that Maïmon’s development and extension of ideas put forward by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason combines creatively with Deleuze’s philosophical project of the 1960s. Maïmon in this way allows Kant to be found and connected with anew.
To make this move I want to first provide some reasons for Maimon being liberating and offering something that might be lacking elsewhere. I want to suggest before I talk about Maïmon that the evaluations of Kant formed in Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy are not as productive as the Maïmon link. This is not to say that they are wrong or incorrect. Rather, the reading of Kant occurring in the Deleuze-Nietzsche encounter does not allow as much creativity or innovation as when a Deleuze-Maïmon-Kant encounter is activated. I want, therefore, to show that Maïmon is a key player and not just a footnote in Deleuze’s thinking. It is therefore a question of whether greater possibilities for advancing thought can be attained in the situation of the particular encounter. I have chosen not to talk about Deleuze’s Kant’s Critical Philosophy and ‘The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics’ essay. This is not to downplay their importance but what I want to do here is activate a marginal encounter so as to suggest that it deserves as much attention as the more established sources of understanding Deleuze’s relationship with Maimon. I am also interested in the specific encounter of Nietzsche-Deleuze and that of Deleuze-Maimon and how Kant becomes the third partner in each case. The issue is the productive capacity of each encounter.
Turning to Nietzsche and Philosophy we find a very intense and productive encounter between Nietzsche and Deleuze. This produces a reading of Kant that is both positive and negative. We notice without difficulty that the evaluation and genealogy practiced by Nietzsche contrasts with Kant’s faith in the ends of reason. In Chapter 3, ‘Critique’, we find Kant recognised for having correctly seen that experience had to be constructed and the purpose of critique is to scrutinize claims that are made about the existence of things. This is ‘immanent’ critique because it looks at the forces at work within human thought itself. Kant reveals that illusion is an active and powerful state and he uncovers it with rigor. This is a radical and creative Kant. At page 89 he is recognised for having understood critique as total and positive - restricting the power of knowing whilst also ‘releasing other previously neglected powers.’ Experience can now be seen as constructed and transcendence is undermined in ways utterly positive for Deleuze’s 1960s thought.
The more negative reading of Kant is one produced by the limits of the Nietzsche-Deleuze encounter to affirm Kant. There is so much that is productive in this book but the logic of this very productivity limits what can be done with Kant’s ideas. He is deemed to have restricted his critique through compromise with tradition and morality. By always aiming at justification he is said to begin by believing in what he criticises (page 90). Kantian critique is blunted because it isn’t able to overcome certain limits. The role of values in the construction of experience is not recognised - this is fatal for his reception within this encounter. For Nietzsche-Deleuze this is a blindness they can’t work or engage with because their encounter produces questions like: what are the forces of reason and of understanding? What stands behind reason? (page 91) Kant doesn’t ask these questions so the engagement with him can’t go any further. In this way, Kant gets sucked into the radical questioning of Nietzsche and Philosophy which leaves nothing outside of the active science of symptomatology, typology and genealogy. At page 94 Nietzsche-Deleuze affirm that the aim of critique is not the ends of man or of reason but in the end, the Overman. This means a critique driving forward ‘…not justification but a different way of feeling’ which is also ‘another sensibility.’ In this concern with overcoming moral symptoms, Kant inevitably comes out badly because he isn’t attuned to Nietzschean genealogy.
It is not my intention to argue that this reading of Kant is wrong or incorrect. Therefore I want to suggest only that it is a particular encounter that is not the right situation in which the full creative and productive potential of Kantianism for Deleuze’s philosophy of difference may be revealed. If Kant seems somewhat flat in Nietzsche and Philosophy it is because a Deleuze-Nietzsche system comes into life here and leaves limited room for anything else. A great deal has been achieved but the greater realisation of Kantianism for Deleuze is to be found in other situations. These need to be open to making the connection, able to further Deleuze’s thought without restrictions and inhibitions.
Maïmon engaged with Kant’s first critique with an intention not unlike Deleuze’s. He believed that the ideal method was to form a ‘coalition system’ with other thinkers.
In his book The Philosophy of Solomon Maïmon Hugo Bergman (upon which I shall rely in the absence of an English translation of Maïmon’s works) describes this as clarifying the vague idea of a thinker through one’s own reflection (p. 5). In other words, thinking one’s way into a system through creative engagement with it meant that the fundamental directions could be realised in new ways. The potentiality of a system could in this way overtake the intentions and certain conclusions of its author. Maïmon, in his most optimistic moments, hoped to find in his own thinking a unifying point common to Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz and Hume. This he came to reject as his scepticism grew and established itself later in his life.
He was very positive about Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and considered that he was only adjusting it whilst remaining true to its original insights. Unlike Nietzsche he didn’t find Kantian morality alienating -nor was morality nearly as important for him as it was for Nietzsche’s whole approach - and was able to connect with or attune to the directions and possibilities of the system of the Critique of Pure Reason affirmatively and creatively.
I’ll try now to show how this was done and then try to connect it with Deleuze’s 1960s work. Maïmon wrote, concerning the Critique of Pure Reason in a letter to Kant, that he had ‘tried as hard as I can to draw the final implications from this work’. (7 April 1789, p. 133, Arnulf Zweig [editor and translator], Kant: Philosophical Correspondence, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).
Drawing the ‘final implications’ meant realising the potential of the Critique of Pure Reason by overcoming its problems, developing its internal dynamic so as to remove impurities or contradictions. In this endeavour Maïmon rejected the notion of the thing-in-itself because he felt that anything outside and alien to the intellect was not necessary or meaningful, it was non-sense. He wanted to conceive of the production of objects from only one source, without a role for sensibility or matter. He argued that anything that can’t be explained by the intellect isn’t meaningful. Despite rejecting Kant’s belief in ‘given’ sensation, Maïmon saw this as actually developing Kant’s own powerful ideals of unity. Human beings feel incomplete as sensible beings and have Ideas that are ideal focal points for thought and life. We see this in the Critique of Pure Reason especially at chapter three of the Transcendental Doctrine of Method: The Architectonic of Pure Reason. Here, structuring the whole involves ‘a single supreme and internal purpose’ making the whole possible. The Idea of a final purpose is made ‘the whole vocation of a human being.’ But Kant says that we can subordinate the particular only using something whose origin is completely different. What if he took Ideas (the ultimate expressions of unity) in Kant and made them part of a system productive of experience? We would have so complete a system that no contribution by sensibility would be needed. The finite-infinite sides of humankind conceived by Kant are taken further, developing the infinite roots that seem to deepen things. This depth offers unity as an Idea of internal production without any notion of content, sensation or matter that cannot be explained.
In constructing his system of the production of experience Maimon took and expanded another idea from the Critique of Pure Reason. The ‘infinite intellect’ is an Idea of Reason and the thought of an understanding which could produce the unity of consciousness without needing to synthesise the manifold of perception (B138-9, Transcendental Logic). Such an understanding would be one whose presentation of objects would also constitute the existence of those objects. The human understanding does need the synthesis of the manifold and this is inescapably the human condition. This becomes in Maïmon a conception of the production of experience (the unity of consciousness) which is unified and does not involve any contribution from a separate source. In this way Kant’s Ideas of reason - soul, world, and god - are reduced to one alone: the infinite intellect.
This means that human beings possess only a limited, fragmentary or finite intellect but every object can be accounted for by ‘conceptual relations’ if we can conceive it completely i.e. as it is ‘thought’ or presented in the infinite intellect. In this way, there is no gap between the object and its source so that an ideal continuum encompasses all of experience within a productive unity. This complete and perfect cognition is an ideal and is attained only by the infinite intellect. Human, finite intellect can think the object to a lesser degree of completeness but it is still the same object.
The diagram on the handout shows how the infinite mind or intellect is the sole source of experience. The arrows going upwards show our infinite striving for the perfection or completion we can never reach and also how the object is an incomplete representation of what is presented in the thought of the infinite mind. Both subject and object are schemas of their complete realisation in the infinite intellect, they are realised within its continuous production of experience. This is the infinite progress that Kant recognised in his regulative Ideas but never took to these lengths.
Quickly we see that this diagram is necessarily limited and imperfect (hence it is titled ‘an incomplete representation of Maïmon’s system’) because it does not show the ideal continuum that connects our finitude to the complete object. It doesn’t represent they way in which the object and the subject are situated, integrated and immersed within an infinite production and that they arise within this. There is no dualism but a single production through which objects are produced according to rules. This actualisation of objects is internal to the system of the infinite intellect. Appropriately the diagram can only represent inadequately the system of production. The distances and the arrows shown in the diagram distort the unity of the system.
Given that matter is an incomplete form of thought it involves very human illusions. The crossed out line on the diagram between ‘finite mind as schema’ and ‘object of intuition as schema’ shows that there is no external link between subject and object. Instead of a mysterious connection between two different sources of cognition we have an ideal continuum. The finite stage of knowledge - the human condition - in which we are situated, is therefore full of illusions. This is explained by the imagination filling in the gaps in our knowledge so that we conceive a world that is composed of both sensation and intellect as different sources of experience. There seems to be no internal production but only external and mysterious correspondence.
Deleuze shows his affinity with Maïmon when he refers to neo-Kantian interpretations in the Introduction to Difference and Repetition. He agrees in seeking an ‘internal genesis’ related to Ideas rather than to concepts of understanding.
This link will really make sense and take on importance when we introduce the thinking of difference. As with Maïmon, for Deleuze we do not have an external difference (between sense and intellect) because this would not allow any combination or synthesis to develop internally. They both want to think this because they see it as providing the conditions for experience.
Let’s now look at the role of difference in Maïmon’s system as an element of its internal production by turning again to the handout. The first quotation shows how sensation is not ‘given’ but actually produced through combination. ‘White’ and ‘black’ exist in or through their relation to each other. The judgement ‘white is not black’ occurs instantly without having to rely upon sensation. This implies that there is no need for anything to confirm the judgement since it is produced internally to the infinite intellect as a continuous production.
The second quotation develops this by introducing the term ‘differential’. The relations of a triangle always remain the same even if the extensive magnitude has ceased. Thus the intensive is the differential of the extensive. Maïmon is drawing upon the qualitative determination of the lines of a triangle. This allows him to think the production of the objects rather than beginning with given and unexplained extensive magnitude as sensation or matter. This effectively situates objects within the production of an infinite intellect since internal relations or qualities can account them for without needing to draw on any further source.
The real interface between Maïmon and Deleuze emerges in these passages and it is a creative elaboration of Kant’s Ideas. Maïmon writes of this in a letter to Kant:
‘I define a new class of ideas which I call ideas of the understanding, which signify material totality, just as your ideas of reason signify formal totality.’ [Maïmon to Kant, April 7, 1789, P. 133-4] In Bergman (page 63) we find Maimon’s differential defined as a ‘unit of production’ as opposed to being an atom or part of an objects. Instead, they realise a productive depth because they express that depth in sensation. The infinite intellect thinks objects by thinking the rules of production. These are ideas of understanding and at the same time an element of a particular intuition. Thus we see that Maimon wants to conceive of the actualisation of Ideas at the finite and human stage of knowledge through difference, i.e. in the intensive differential. We could say that differentials translate Ideas of the infinite intellect into finite and human knowledge. The finite is expressed in our experience whilst it is only a degree of the complete and perfect Idea of the Understanding.
Let us now turn to Deleuze’s concerns in Difference and Repetition. Here at chapter four he argues that Kant had held to the viewpoint of conditioning without attaching a genesis (p. 170). This is precisely what seems to be overcome in the passages from Maïmon we have just been considering. Deleuze moves to engage productively with Kantianism by seeking the ‘critical’ point at which its potential could be fulfilled. This is ‘the horizon or focal point at which difference qua difference serves to reunite.’ In this spirit he turns to ‘the esoteric history of differential philosophy’ (ibid) in which he includes Maimon.
Deleuze seeks continuousness in the actualisation of virtual Ideas through difference: these unite all particulars in an internally productive depth. At page 172 he argues that objects are ‘differentiated’ not in the particular and the general but ‘in and by’ the universal, through ‘relations of the universal.’ This universality therefore involves not isolated particulars or anything abstracted or generalised but each term exists only in and through its relation to the others. Maimon’s differential is affirmed here to again relate human experience to a productive depth. This allows a univocal resonance, this is universal not in being a static state but as continuous the production of experience. This is a principle of ‘reciprocal determinability’ immanent to experience itself. Maimon uses this univocal conception in his Versuch über die Transscendentalphilosophie because the unity of his system comes from a similar kind of thinking. Combination is an active principle because predicates are thought only as part of the synthesis (page 377). This means that the determinant is not external but it creates internal synthesis (p. 391). This is a univocity where actual objects are the expression of the infinite intellect, which is complete enough to emanate the whole of experience within itself. In both cases a principle of determinability unites all differences through an expressive unity of process or production rather than as a static state. This means that no objects are isolated from the standpoint of the system as a whole since relations connect a body to all other bodies in our system (Bergman p. 178). It is in these relations that experience is expressed. This connection means that for Maimon (Bergman chapter 6, p. 124) we find that the state ‘a and b’ expresses a relationship of determinability holding between them. This leads to the judgement that ‘a is b’ and, due to the meaning given the relation between the two, this instantiates the category of reality. It is between objects that categories are realised in such a way that they cannot be thought of in isolation. In the relation of the particular to the resonating whole of experience there can be reality itself.
Maïmon’s genius, Deleuze argues, is that he showed conditioning to be an inadequate point of view (Difference and Repetition, p. 173). Determinability itself must be conceived as pointing towards ‘a principle of reciprocal determination.’ ‘Reciprocal synthesis’ as source of production of real objects. Everything is connected and in this sense there can be internal production, internal genesis. In the third quotation on the handout we see that, for Maimon, ‘fire melts wax’ concerns not a judgement concerning or conditioning sensation but a representation of the elements; the differentials that have a conceptual relation sufficient onto themselves occur within sensation. Beneath apparently ‘given’ and finished representations, depth is uncovered by both Maimon and Deleuze, which allows us think in a new way the unifying role of the Kantian Idea.
There is in Maimon the openness of objects to their being constructed that Kant realised and Deleuze affirms. It is taken to these new lengths in conjunction with the Kantian drive to establish greater unity. This unity comes to connect all particulars in a univocal and ongoing expression:
‘Hence, it is necessary that the understanding should think this triangle, from the standpoint of all its constructions, not as already in existence but in the process of being created…’ (Tr, pp. 33-35).
There is much more I could say but I hope that I have given a sense of the possibilities opened up for the relations of Kant and Deleuze by Maimon. Kant’s concern for unity and his use of Ideas are developed into a philosophy of difference. Maïmon’s productive ‘coalition system’ seems to have the creativity and rigor to take Kant forward and Deleuze recognises this. If Nietzsche and Philosophy did not recognise this potential of Kantianism this is because it was not open to this aspect of Kant’s work. This shows that Deleuze needed a different perspective and situation to connect with Kant fully. He works to realise and activate a productive and vital depth and this resonates and works in partnership with Maimon’s creative coalition to produce a further coalition. Differential relations are internal to a process of production that is universal through this very production. Kant’s opens up the way to seeing objects as constructions - for asking ‘how’ instead of ‘what’ concerning an object - allowed Maïmon to expand this in a bid for fuller unity. Deleuze’s concern with the actualisation of virtual ideas engages with a Kantian inspired production of objects according to differentials. This must not obscure the fact that Maimon’s conception of productive depth is different from the virtual and the complex virtual-actual circuits of Deleuze. Maimon doesn’t include difference within that depth but only in its translation into finite knowledge. Yet the use he does make of the differential and of depth beneath representations resonates through Deleuze’s engagement with his work. I have tried to show that Kant’s Ideas are the key to this because they give life to a thinking of the actualisation of differences and thus to Maimon and Deleuze’s work.




Bibliography
Gilles Deleuze (1983) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, London: The Athlone Press.
(1994) Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, London: The Athlone Press.
(2004) Desert Islands and Other Texts, trans. Michael Taormina, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Samuel Hugo Bergman (MCMLIV) ‘Solomon Maïmon’s Philosophy’ in The Autobiography of Solomon Maïmon, trans. J. Clark Murray, London: The East and West Library.
(1967) The Philosophy of Solomon Maïmon, trans. Noah J. Jacobs, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, The Hebrew University.


Handout: Immanent Critique: Evaluating Deleuze’s 1960s Readings of Kant.

Infinite mind-----------thinks----------------> Real object
[presentation of…] [pure concept]
s
t ^ ^
r
i
v
i
n
g
Finite mind/ / / / / [object not reached]/ / / / / Object of intuition
as schema as schema
[representation]
An imperfect representation of Maïmon’s system.
---------
Relevant passages from Maïmon’s work translated by Hugo Bergman in his Philosophy of Solomon Maïmon (trans. Noah J. Jacobs, Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967).
‘The syllogism occurs outside of time, i.e. instantly. For example, the judgement "white is not black" contains two feelings, white and black, and one intellectual representation, that is, the representation of difference between white and black. It is impossible that the two feelings mentioned should occur in the senses or the imagination except successively, that is, at different times; however, their combination in a judgement (white is not black) can only occur instantly, in such a way that through it the successive feelings are combined in one intellectual representation.’ [Gibeath hamore, p. 61]
‘If we reduce an extensive magnitude to its differential, we can still think it as existing because of its intensive magnitude within an extensive magnitude relation. For example, if we think of a triangle, one of whose sides moves in the direction of the angle lying opposite to itself, in such a manner that the side constantly remains parallel to itself, and do so until the triangle becomes smaller and smaller ad infinitum (differential), we find that the extensive magnitude of the sides has ceased … but the relations of the sides of the triangle always remain the same … In this way the intensive (the quality of the quantity) becomes the differential of the extensive, and the extensive the integral of the intensive. Quality abstracted from all extensive quantity can, nevertheless, be thought in a quantitative relation … This relation does not exist among the lines insofar as they are measured but insofar as they are determined qualitatively.’ [Versuch über die Transscendentalphilosophie, p. 395]
‘If we say, for example, that fire melts wax, this judgement does not refer to the fire nor the wax as objects of intuition but rather to their elements (the differentials) thought by the understanding’ [Ibid, p. 356]
‘The intuitions receive their objective reality only be being resolved ultimately into the idea’ [Ibid, p. 366]