“Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty | Phenomenology of Perception
“But let us reflect; it is high time to do so.
‘How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?’
Kant asked himself—and what really is his answer?
‘By virtue of a faculty’—but unfortunately not in five words.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche | Beyond Good and Evil
Is there a problem concerning the category of difference in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason? In this essay, I will argue that there is, indeed, a serious problem of difference lurking within its shadowy background. My argument will proceed with three main steps. First, I will give a sketch of Kant’s theory of experience (representation). This will necessitate explaining the transcendental structure of the human mental faculty and how it relates to the objects it knows. Second, I will present Gilles Deleuze’s main criticisms of Kant and how they are rooted in the problem of difference. In particular, we must turn our attention to Deleuze’s critique of representation in Difference and Repetition in order to understand why he thought that Kant’s theory of the faculties is merely a duplication of doxa but one that raises it to a philosophical and transcendental level. Finally, I will attempt to show that the problem of difference in Kant’s magnum opus goes far beyond the scope of even Deleuze’s arguments. If it can be said that Deleuze gave an extrinsic critique of Kant, then I will be providing an intrinsic one. I will argue that Kant’s theory of experience leads us to an absurd conclusion: differentia ex nihilo — difference out of nothing.
Introduction
Let us begin with a basic truth: the phenomenal field is a differential field. In other words, the world we experience is one of qualitative diversity — diversity in colors, objects, shapes, sizes, sounds, smells, behaviors, species, etc. Coffee tastes different from beer; houses look different from trees; dirt feels different from water; BBQ smells different from perfume; hip hop sounds different from classical. This is because each of these phenomena possesses different determinations (both in primary and secondary qualities). On top of that, these actual qualities are themselves subject to change, i.e., they can undergo transformation at any given moment. Experience is fundamentally the experience of determinate differences that tend to differ from themselves (change over time). It is only on reflection that we first bring to mind the sameness, consistency, and conformity of our experiences (from difference in content to identity in form). Levi R. Bryant says, “Thus, far from difference having a status posterior to questions of knowledge, the thereness of difference is given and is what first provokes inquiry and questions of knowledge”[1]. And since philosophers tend to begin philosophizing in a state of reflection, they inevitably tend to think in terms of identity rather than difference. Or as Deleuze put it, “We tend to subordinate difference to identity in order to think it . . . In other words, we do not think difference in itself.”[2] The concept of difference has traditionally been marginalized throughout the history of philosophy, and as a result, philosophers have failed time and time again to recognize that the primacy of identity is merely an unjustified and implicit presupposition. They have neglected to think through their philosophical systems in relation to the presuppositional subordination of difference, and they certainly have missed out on the prospect of developing a concept of pure difference or difference in itself. Like Deleuze, I find this to be the case with Kant and his transcendental account of representation. But why? How is it that Kant’s system failed to take difference into account? To answer this question, we must first understand the essential parts of Kant’s brilliant theory of how the mind orders and structures its experience of the world.
Kant’s Theory of Experience
By “experience,” I mean the type of conscious interaction with the world, according to Kant, that produces knowledge — this specific knowledge being of the a posteriori sort. Of course, for Kant, there is an a priori (transcendental) knowledge that conditions empirical knowledge, that is, there is a primary and universal knowledge that contributes to the production of secondary and contingent knowledge. When lacking a qualification, “experience” will mean the intersubjective and empirical experience of conceptualized and perceived phenomena (representations comprised of both a concept and an intuition). But what are the essential structures that make this world of phenomena possible?
There are three main constitutive factors in Kant’s theory of experience: 1. the human cognitive apparatus, 2. sensations, and 3. noumena (things-in-themselves). I believe François Laruelle would say that this fundamental triad was Kant’s philosophical decision. Phenomena are merely the products of the dynamic interactions between the mental faculty and sensations. Thus, the world we experience does not exist outside of human intersubjectivity and the a priori structures that belong to it, and yet this world is still not entirely reducible to the human mind — it contains and is conditioned by a trace of the real. Noumena are those things that exist outside and independent of all human awareness; they are non-spatial, non-temporal, non-perceptual, non-conceptual, and non-judgmental things that we can never have direct access to and which always escape us. For Kant, human experience works in the following way: while we never have an immediate encounter with things-in-themselves, they nevertheless are a condition of the experiences we do have. How so? Noumena give themselves to us via sensations. “The effect of an object upon the faculty of representation, so far as we are affected by it, is sensation.“[3] In other words, sensations are the effects that noumena have on our faculty of sensibility — noumena are the faceless causes of sensations.
It ought to be noted that Kant also refers to the entire field of sensations as the manifold. A helpful way to think about the manifold of sensation is to imagine it as being like what many Boomers and Xers called “TV snow” (but what is technically termed “noise”). To me, Kant’s manifold seems analogous to the wild buzz of that random static (dotted pixelation) which would occur whenever a TV signal ceased to be transmitted or received by the antenna. But, if the manifold is a chaotic storm of flashing sensations, then how does it get transformed into the stable field of determinate phenomena we all know and recognize?
At the moment that sensations effect sensibility, a moment so quick that we never catch sight of it, they are immediately processed by the faculties, which all happens so fast that it should be thought of as an unconscious activity (however, considering all of the psychoanalytic connotations this term carries, perhaps “non-conscious” would be a better word for it). The very instant sensations are received, they are spatialized and temporalized by the pure intuitions and conceptualized by the pure categories of the understanding, i.e., synthetically organized by the mental faculty. Once sensations have been synthesized into intelligible and stable phenomena, we then recognize particular objects via judgments and empirical concepts, e.g., “That’s my copy of Difference and Repetition.” But from where do all of the differences come that we perceive in our phenomenal world? What makes the difference? If our most basic experience is that of a differential field, then, from the Kantian perspective, the cause of these determinate differences must either be our mental faculty, or sensations, or noumena, or judgment. To properly frame and contextualize the problem concerning the role of intrinsic difference in Kant’s transcendental idealism, we need to know about the nature of extrinsic difference and why Deleuze thought the Kantian model of representation stood in such a problematic relation to it.
The Dogmatic Image of Thought
Deleuze’s criticism of Kant’s theory of the faculties hinges on the dogmatic image of thought. But what exactly is meant by this? According to Deleuze, the Western philosophical tradition has been rooted in eight postulates (subjective and implicit presuppositions) ever since its early Greek inception with Plato and Aristotle. These postulates essentially comprise our image of thought, which, in other words, means that they form the presuppositional framework of what we take thought itself to be. The word “image” can be a bit confusing here, but we could just as easily speak of our dogmatic concept of thought or dogmatic way of thinking. This image is “dogmatic” precisely because it normally resides at the level of implicit presupposition instead of being justified at the theoretical level, but it is also dogmatic in the orthodox and moral senses of the term. The dogmatic image of thought is the core of common sense and recognition, the form of what everyone always already knows, which is the “a priori knowledge” Kant failed to spot even in his attempted rational proof of it, but we’ll get to that soon enough. The lack of the image’s philosophical dissection and the ubiquity of its status as universal presupposed is what prompted Deleuze to make the staggering assertion that philosophy has never truly severed ties with doxa (popular opinion). If the beginning of philosophy involves departing from the authority of the “Everybody knows”, then philosophy has yet to get underway. Instead, what we have is a long tradition made up of affirmations and defenses of common sense comedically donned in the garb philosophy — the royal robes of the presuppositionless.
“Such an orientation is a hindrance to philosophy. The supposed three levels — a naturally upright thought, an in principle natural common sense, and a transcendental model of recognition — can constitute only an ideal orthodoxy. Philosophy is left without means to realise its project of breaking with doxa. No doubt philosophy refuses every particular doxa; no doubt it upholds no particular propositions of good sense or common sense. No doubt it recognises nothing in particular. Nevertheless, it retains the essential aspect of doxa — namely, the form; and the essential aspect of common sense — namely, the element; and the essential aspect of recognition — namely, the model itself (harmony of the faculties grounded in the supposedly universal thinking subject and exercised upon the unspecified object). The image of thought is only the figure in which doxa is universalised by being elevated to the rational level. However, so long as one only abstracts from the empirical content of doxa, while maintaining the operation of the faculties which corresponds to it and implicitly retains the essential aspect of the content, one remains imprisoned by it.”[4]
The image of thought is eightfold, but only the first four of its postulates are relevant in our context concerning the problem of difference in Kant. The first postulate is that of the goodwill of the thinker and the good nature of thought itself (Cogitatio natura universalis). Obviously, this is the moral postulate insofar as it holds that thinking naturally leads the thinker to the truth — thought gets the thinker to the truth, therefore, it is good. Philosophy has long considered there to be an essential affinity, or even an identification, between truth and goodness: the good is the true and the true is the good. Since thought is believed to necessarily lead one to the true, it follows that it is also good. But because the first postulate is interweaved with the other ones, the dogmatic image of thought takes on a moral status, which consequentially means that anybody who thinks in a manner that is “outside of the box” is immoral. Simply put, the first postulate serves as the “justification” of elevating one mode of thought to the universal rank of thought as such.
The second postulate of common sense is the principle of concordia facultatum, i.e., the concord, agreement or harmony of the various mental faculties: perception, understanding, memory, imagination, reason, judgment, etc. The idea is that the faculties must have some kind of pre-established (transcendental) compatibility. This a priori “communicability” consists of the ability of the faculties to register each of their unique objects as the same object. A memory of x is not a perception of x, and a perception of x is not the concept of x. Common sense is that on the basis of which the different objects belonging to each faculty enter into a correspondence of identity.
Recognition is the third postulate and is closely related to the second. Deleuze defines “recognition” like this: “Recognition may be defined by the harmonious exercise of all the faculties upon a supposed same object: the same object may be seen, touched, remembered, imagined or conceived.”[5] The keyword being “exercise.” The third postulate of recognition is the identification of the object of each faculty as the same, i.e., recognizing an object of perception, an object of understanding, of imagination, and of memory as being identical (recognition is the identity of the object of the faculties). To clarify, the second postulate is the harmonious capacity or unifying compatibility of the faculties, but the third postulate is when this compatibility is actually exercised on a given object and thereby making it recognized as a unified and identical object. If common sense is the unity of the faculties themselves, then recognition is the unity of their object(s) — the second unity being conditioned by and derived from the first. Recognition is also called the “transcendental model,” since it is the condition of the possibility of the identity of the object, that is, it is the a priori synthetic mechanism that makes the representational object possible. Kant was the first philosopher to analyze the a priori synthetic, but this mechanism was implicitly presupposed by many philosophers that preceded him, e.g., Descartes can be shown to have implicitly presupposed it in his famous example of the piece of wax. Recognition is a transcendental exercise that is universally attributed to all subjects; all human beings are presupposed to have this mechanism as a subjective (mental, cognitive, experiential) default setting. In fact, à la Kant, the recognition (unity, identity) of the object(s) of the faculties has the unity or identity of the subject (the “I think” or transcendental unity of apperception) as its transcendental condition. Deleuze says, “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.”[6]
At this point, we have started to see how the image of thought presupposes the privileging of identity over difference insofar as common sense and recognition involve the identification of the different objects of the faculties. Here we arrive at what is arguably the most important postulate of the eight: the postulate of representation. This fourth postulate fittingly has a fourfold determination (identity, analogy, opposition, resemblance). Deleuze’s discussion of representation is centered around Kant’s work in the Critique of Pure Reason since it is arguably the greatest theory of representation ever written. Of these four “shackles,” Deleuze wrote:
“There are four principal aspects to ‘reason’ in so far as it is the medium of representation: identity, in the form of the undetermined concept; analogy, in the relation between ultimate determinable concepts; opposition, in the relation between determinations within concepts; resemblance, in the determined object of the concept itself. These forms are like the four heads or the four shackles of mediation. Difference is ‘mediated’ to the extent that it is subjected to the fourfold root of identity, opposition, analogy and resemblance.”[7]
While Deleuze calls the four aspects of representation “elements,” I think they are better thought of as operations or mechanisms (this type of language helps to clarify what he has in mind). The four “shackles” of representation correspond to four specific faculties: (1) identity to understanding, (2) analogy to judgment, (3) opposition to imagination, (4) resemblance to perception. So let’s go through each of the “elements” or operations of the faculties. What is identity in the concept or, more specifically, what is the identity of the unspecified concept that constitutes the form of the Same with regard to recognition? The idea here is that a concept is always identical to itself, that is, a pure or unspecified concept, a concept without any predicates, is identical to itself without even having any content. An unspecified concept is like an empty container — a container is still a container even when it lacks a contained substance. We could argue that the identity of the unspecified concept is essentially the law of identity — A is A. But how does the law of identity get exercised in the relationality between the faculties?
Imagine the following scenario. You are currently standing in front of the Eiffel Tower taking it all in, i.e., you are perceiving it. But this is not the first time you have done this. You have traveled to Paris many times in the past and have always made it a point to visit the Eiffel Tower, which means that you have already accumulated many memories of it. As a result of all these experiences, you are able to make many sorts of judgments pertaining to the Eiffel Tower, e.g., “the Eiffel Tower is beautiful.” Also, you are able to imagine the Eiffel Tower being in all kinds of strange scenarios, e.g., you can produce the image of the Eiffel Tower being on the Moon. Notice that all of your perceptions, memories, judgments, and images of the Eiffel Tower all have the exact same concept — the concept of the Eiffel Tower. It is the concept of the Eiffel Tower that allows us to identify all of our different representations of it. All perceptions of x, memories of x, judgments of x and images of x all presuppose the concept of x — otherwise, we could not unify all of them under a single identity and thereby recognize it as such. In all of these cases, the Eiffel Tower is the Eiffel Tower (A is A).
What is analogy in regard to judgment? This is the trickiest of the four “shackles” to grasp. One would likely have to explore the thinking of certain medieval thinkers to be able to properly figure it out. However, I know of three possible answers to this question. Analogy in judgment might have to do with our ability to judge that there is a similarity between the determinate concept of x and the determinate concept of y, e.g., the determinate concept of the Eiffel Tower is like the determinate concept of the Leaning Tower of Pisa insofar as both of them share the concept of tower. But perhaps this is too simplistic. Maybe the analogy exists at a far more transcendental level. Maybe it is the analogy between our highest concepts of knowledge and our highest concepts of reality. In other words, the analogy would be the idea that the structures of judgment isomorphically parallel the structures of reality itself — thought is like or analogous to reality, e.g., the concept of subject/predicate (judgment) is analogous to the concept of substance/accident (reality). These concepts would, therefore, be the “ultimate determinable concepts” Deleuze spoke of on p. 29 of Difference and Repetition. Out of these first two options, I tend to lean towards the second, since the principle of the good nature of thought depends upon this analogy. How so? If our main concepts of thought and our main concepts of reality do not have an analogous relation, if their structures do not correspond, then thought (judgment) does not lead us towards the true (reality). However, Levi R. Bryant has proposed a third option to me that I think is probably much more along the lines of what Deleuze was actually getting at. Whenever we make a judgment like “Socrates is a man”, we are essentially saying that there is an analogy between the universal (Humanity) and the singular (Socrates). Somehow the universal and the singular are alike, that is, are analogous. It might be that the “ultimate determinable concepts” are the concepts of the universal and the singular (the category of the particular would probably be included as well).
What is the opposition of the determination of concepts? This simply has to do the old Spinozist principle: all determination is negation. To determine that x is y, to include the predicate y in concept x, is to determine that x is not not-y, that is, it presupposes the opposition between y and not-y, for example, blue and not-blue. We can also extend opposition to ys (e.g., blues) not being a, b, c, etc. (e.g., red, yellow, green). Opposition has to do with the twofold faculty of imagination and memory. I think this because the determination of a concept presupposes our ability to recall to mind past experiences in order to imagine that x is y and not not-y, not-a, not-b, not-c, etc. Memory and imagination, along with the synthesis of reproduction they perform, enables us to compare predicates and determine their oppositions. As Deleuze says, “The determination of the concept implies the comparison between possible predicates and their opposites in a regressive and progressive double series, traversed on the one side by remembrance and on the other by an imagination the aim of which is to rediscover or re-create (memorial-imaginative reproduction).”[8]
And, finally, what is resemblance with regard to the object? This is the easiest of the four to understand as it is simply the perceptual resemblance of two objects of experience, e.g., this chair looks like that chair, this song sounds like that song, this blanket feels like that blanket, this coffee tastes like that coffee, this candle smells like that candle.
These four postulates form of a model of thought/experience that privileges identity and relegates difference to a secondary status. According to this model, differences are always derived from identity, which is to say that a difference is always a difference between identities. Difference is, therefore, dependent on identity and cannot be viewed to have any reality in and of itself — it is epiphenomenal. The ultimate presupposition: identity precedes difference. In other words, identity grounds (accounts for) difference, thus, identity is the sufficient reason of difference. This principle is the principle of the philosophical tradition and can be traced back to Plato and his theory of the Ideas (Platonic Ideas are those pure Identities which serve as the absolute grounds of the differentiated world of particulars and appearances, i.e., the world of becoming). Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is arguably the finest attempt to theoretically justify the dogmatic image of thought, which, in turn, necessarily means that it is a philosophy of identity through and through. Deleuze sought to overturn the entire Platonic tradition by arguing that difference precedes identity, but what exactly would pure difference even be? From our commonsensical-philosophical perspective, “pure difference” or “difference in itself” immediately registers as an oxymoron, a total contradiction in terms. How was Deleuze able to arrive at a concept of pure difference? To answer this question, we must clarify and expand upon Deleuze’s criticisms of the dogmatic image of thought and, more specifically, its theoretical avatar incarnated in the work of Kant.
Deleuze’s Critique of Kant and the Extrinsic Problem of Difference
What are Deleuze’s two main problems with Kantian representation? The first is that Kant’s cognitive apparatus, like all other philosophical instantiations of the dogmatic image of thought, renders difference subordinate to identity and tends to prevent us from arriving at pure difference (intensity). The second issue is that Kant failed to provide a theory of the genesis of representation; he didn’t explain how the mental faculty came into existence. It is important to understand these criticisms since it is in their context that Deleuze situates his discussion of the encounter, which is a very specific type of experience that causes the mental faculty to go haywire and opens up a pathway to pure difference and transcendental empiricism. It’s true that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is an effort to dissect reason (and representation by extension) and force it to analyze itself. However, this analysis never actually got around to challenging the implicit presuppositions at the heart of representation but, rather, uncritically reaffirmed them — even if limiting their range of applicability in the process. In the words of Henry Somers-Hall, “Rather than renounce the image of thought, however, Deleuze claims that Kant simply attempts to determine the bounds of reason, and to delimit its sphere of legitimate employment.”[9]
For Kant, there are five faculties that comprise the faculty: 1. sensibility, 2. understanding, 3. the imagination, 4. reason, 5. judgment. These five faculties work together to “synthesize” (order, combine and produce) the representational experiences we have of the phenomenal world — each one having its own part to play in fulfilling the requirements or conditions of possible experience. The concept of synthesis is essential to the transcendental constitution of our reality. It is precisely this a priori synthesis that enables the faculties to “communicate” with one another. If the respective representations belonging to each of the faculties were not capable of being synthesized in some way, then we could never have knowledge of the world. If knowledge is the synthesis of disparate representations (intuitions and concepts), then knowledge is conditioned by the possible correspondence of the representations of the various faculties. Without the “harmony” of the faculties, sensory representations would stand in isolation from the representations of the understanding, imagination would never synch up with judgment, judgment would never get up and running without being aligned to understanding, and so on. Each faculty, therefore, is a mode of knowledge, meaning that it plays a unique part in the synthetic production of knowledge. Concerning our modes of knowledge, insofar as they are all directed towards a common object, Kant says, “they must necessarily agree with one another, that is, must possess that unity which constitutes the concept of an object.”[10]
Kant defines “synthesis” in the following way: “By synthesis, in its most general sense, I understand the act of putting different representations together, and of grasping what is manifold in them in one [act of] knowledge.”[11] For him, transcendental synthesis is threefold and serves as the most fundamental of the transcendental operations. In our context, the three syntheses raise three questions: (1) What gets synthesized in each synthesis? (2) How do the syntheses relate to each other? (3) How do the three syntheses relate to the dogmatic image of thought? Each synthesis primarily happens within a specific faculty, e.g., the first one occurs within sensibility, but it should be noted that the faculty of imagination is the essential one when it comes to synthetic operations: “Synthesis in general, as we shall hereafter see, is the mere result of the power of imagination.”[12]
The first of them is that of the synthesis of apprehension in intuition. Of the three, this is easily the murkiest, but let us see if we can bring it into illumination like a lotus flower. This synthesis happens within sensibility or perception. Kant’s description of this synthesis is difficult to follow, but I take the main point to be something along these lines: without a synthesis or organization of the raw sense data passively received through the senses, we would only perceive a buzzing confusion very similar to the flat (one-dimensional) screen of flicking TV snow I mentioned above. The synthesis of apprehension takes these wild sensations and gives them spatiotemporal stability. In synthesizing sensations, giving them unified groupings in time and three-dimensional space, the first synthesis turns the chaos of sense data into spatially and temporally distinct intuitions.
Perhaps a little phenomenology will help to clarify what Kant seems to be getting at. First, we obviously cannot do a phenomenology of the first synthesis, since it’s a condition of experience, but what we can do is observe experience itself and transcendentally reason our way back to this condition. At this moment, I’m sitting at Benetti’s (my favorite coffee shop) writing this very paragraph. As I perceptually scan the various objects in the coffee shop, I see all kinds of things. I see chairs, tables, cups, t-shirts, people, smartphones, paper towels, a trash can, bags of coffee, a John Cena action figure, a clock, stickers, plants, tile, an espresso machine, a sink, my MacBook Pro, my copies of Critique of Pure Reason and Difference and Repetition, lighting fixtures, different shapes, different colors, etc. All of these experiences involve me recognizing the assorted objects via concepts, that is, I recognize the chairs as chairs, the tables as tables, etc. This conceptual dimension is precisely what Kant has in mind with the third synthesis, which we will get to, momentarily, but, for now, let us subtract this sort of conceptual recognition from the phenomenological experience. What remains is the experience of determinate phenomena in space and time. That is over there, this is over here, those are behind that, this is closer than those, these are smaller than that, and so on. In other words, even minus all the concepts, what I experience is an ordered field of unified-but-qualitatively-different intuitions in different spaces and times.
It’s easy enough to see how these things are in different spaces, but what does it mean to say that they are in different times? Aren’t all of these things in the coffee shop at exactly the same moment? Yes, of course, but they nevertheless have different times insofar as my consciousness is focused on one of them at one moment, on another in the next moment, and so on. If I only experienced raw sense data, then I could never focus on this thing at one time and on that at another. Thus, the synthesis of apprehension has to involve the spatialization (coherent grouping) of sensations that transforms them into determinate perceptions, which can then be individually perceived as such in a particular moment. In other words, the first synthesis could be argued to be the very condition of what gestalt psychology calls the figure-ground organization. It is this synthetic spatiotemporalization that allows us to apprehend (discern) determinate things (figures over against grounds) in perception. As Kant puts it, “for each representation, in so far as it is contained in a single moment, can never be anything but absolute unity. In order that unity of intuition may arise out of this manifold (as is required in the representation of space) it must be run through, and held together.”[13] What gets synthesized or held together in the first synthesis? Raw sense data, i.e., the manifold of sensations. However, the first and second syntheses are reciprocally determinative of one another, they are mutually conditioning, so we must now find out what the second synthesis is and how it connects to the first.
The second of Kant’s syntheses is the synthesis of reproduction in imagination. While the first synthesis partly involves the faculty of imagination insofar as it is the active principle that synthesizes sensations passively received by the faculty of intuition, the second synthesis relies on imagination through and through. By imagination, normally and usually, Kant means that faculty which reproduces past intuitions — it is the capacity that produces and reproduces images. This means that it is related to memory, which is why Deleuze refers to it as “memorial-imaginative reproduction.”[14] If, in the first synthesis, imagination is what acts on chaotic sensations and produces them as determinate and stable unities in the present moment, then, in the second synthesis, it is that which reproduces the past intuitions (apprehensions) of them. This all sounds very abstract but it is not. More or less, Kant is getting at what Edmund Husserl called “retention.” The idea is that any present experience depends on a trace of the just-now-past being retained within it. Husserl beautifully likens retention to the tail of a comet: “Now-apprehension is, as it were, the head attached to the comet’s tail of retentions relating to the earlier now-points of the motion.”[15] Reproduction in imagination essentially amounts to short-term memory. If we didn’t retain or remember the just-was, then the now would not even be the now. If the intuition, in the form of a memory, I just had of a tree was not synthesized with the current perception of it that I am now having, then the tree would not endure as the exact same phenomenon in my consciousness. Kant himself provided us with a few helpful examples of what he was in mind.
“When I seek to draw a line in thought, or to think of the time from one noon to another, or even to represent to myself some particular number, obviously the various manifold representations that are involved must be apprehended by me in thought one after the other. But if I were always to drop out of thought the preceding representations (the first parts of the line, the antecedent parts of the time period, or the units in the order represented), and did not reproduce them while advancing to those that follow, a complete representation would never be obtained: none of the above-mentioned thoughts, not even the purest and most elementary representations of space and time, could arise.”[16]
To draw an entire line, I must retain each passing moment in order to continuously proceed toward the completion of said line. The first and second syntheses condition one another. Without the first synthesis, there would be nothing for the imagination to reproduce, and without the second synthesis, there would be no lasting apprehension of a thing in space and time. So what gets synthesized here? Present intuitions with past intuitions (memory traces).
The third and final synthesis is the synthesis of recognition in understanding. Whereas the first two syntheses are mutually conditioning and intertwined, the third synthesis can be viewed as operating independently since it occurs in the faculty of understanding and has to do with the application of concepts. One of Kant’s main distinctions is the one between intuitions and concepts. Intuitions belong on the side of sensibility, which is ultimately comprised of both perception and imagination: “Sensibility in the cognitive faculty (the faculty of intuitive representations) contains two parts: sense and the power of imagination. The first is the faculty of intuition in the presence of an object, the second is intuition even without the presence of an object.”[17] But if the third synthesis isn’t necessary as far as the first and second syntheses are concerned, then what necessity does it have in the production of experience proper?
We cannot have the type of experience that produces knowledge without both intuitions and concepts. As Kant famously put it, “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”[18] Both practical knowledge and scientific knowledge are the products of the synthesis of intuitions and concepts, and this is precisely the function of the third synthesis. How so? Kant explains, “If we were not conscious that what we think is the same as what we thought a moment before, all reproduction in the series of representations would be useless” (Critique of Pure Reason, A103, p. 133). Kant’s saying that there must be a unity in thought just as there must be in perception. If the first two syntheses produce the perceptual unity of the phenomenon, then the third one makes possible its conceptual unity, which, in turn, transcendentally constitutes the synthetic unity of these two synthetic unities. Henry Somers-Hall sums this point up quite nicely: “In order to have experience, we don’t just need to have an affinity between different moments of experience, but these different moments of experience need to be related to one another as a unity for consciousness.”[19] To approach this from a different direction, the apprehended intuition can undergo a change, which implies that our past impressions of it would fail to correspond to it, but, nevertheless, it can still be experienced as the same object despite the change (e.g., Descartes’s piece of wax). It is identity or recognition in the concept that makes this possible for consciousness. Again, Henry Somers-Hall is lucidly insightful:
“When we walk around a building, we are given a series of perspectives on it. Now, a condition of seeing these different perspectives as being perspectives on the same building is that I am able to relate them together as being my perceptions of the building. Otherwise, we would simply have a series of fragmentary appearances. We can go further than this, and say that without the unity of consciousness we would not just see appearances of different buildings. We would simply see a series of appearances without any kind of unity – they wouldn’t relate to anything. Now, this is a key point. Kant has claimed that in order for experience (that is, a relation to the world that gives us knowledge, rather than just sensation or appearances) to be possible, we need to be able to see appearances as belonging to the same subject. In order for this to be the case, they need to exhibit some kind of unity. It is the concept of the object that gives all of these moments of appearance a unity, as it is by seeing all the moments of appearance as referring to the same underlying object that we are able to unify them. The concept of the object thus makes the unity of consciousness possible.”[20]
At the level of understanding, it is the concept of the object in general, the transcendental object=x, that allows the subject to have a conceptually unified experience of sensory intuitions. And what comprises the general or transcendental concept of objecthood? The pure categories (rules) of the understanding, e.g., unity, substance, accident, reality, etc. So what gets synthesized by the third synthesis? It is all of our various intuitions (perceptions and memories) with the concept of the object in general. It is identity in the concept that enables the mind to bestow a long-term unity or abstract permanence on a given phenomenon that far exceeds that of the hazy and fleeting reproduction of short-term memory, that is, of the second synthesis. The second synthesis works on the basis of associative resemblance, but what happens when all of the sensory qualities of a thing have changed? Once again, Descartes’ piece of wax comes to mind. It is the concept that sustains the object’s unity across all qualitative modifications. Identity in the concept picks up where resemblance in the percept leaves off.
Now that we understand how the three syntheses and their corresponding faculties operate for Kant, we can begin to see why, from a Deleuzian perspective, they work together to create a model of thought that remains fully rooted in the dogmatic image and its privileging of identity over difference (criticism 1). We can also see how they go about concealing within their synthetic activities the question pertaining to their very genesis (criticism 2). We find that the first four postulates of the dogmatic image of thought hold sway in Kant’s theory of synthetic experience in the following ways: the first postulate of the goodwill of the thinker and the good nature of thought is preserved, albeit in a limited, conditional and qualified manner. So long as thought seeks to only fuse concepts with intuitions, it will naturally produce new knowledge of the world, i.e., attain the truth (the intersubjectively and empirically true). Thought and the thinker maintain their affinity with the true, and, therefore, remain good, even if they now necessitate certain methodological restrictions and guidelines. The second postulate of common sense is at the heart of the threefold synthesis. Kant merely took for granted that the faculties share a pre-established harmony as their common default setting. The principle that Kant implicitly presupposed is the fundamental communicability of the faculties: before the faculties can perform inter-facultic syntheses, the faculties themselves must already be compatible with each other. This harmony amounts to the condition of the condition, but for which Kant gave no supporting argumentation. The third postulate of recognition is situated in Kant’s model at the end of the threefold synthesis; it is the synthetic identification we have of the object of experience constructed by the mental processes of perceptual apprehension, memorial-imaginative reproduction, and conceptual recognition. Finally, the fourth postulate of representation (identity, analogy, opposition, resemblance) can be seen as the condition of the other three in the Kantian model. Henry Somers-Hall explained Kant’s idiosyncratic versions of the first four postulates extremely well:
“These four ‘shackles’ of representation mapped onto Aristotle’s taxonomy of species and genera. They can also be mapped on to the various moments of the transcendental deduction as follows. First, in order to have experience, we need to relate our different representations to a central unity (the identity of the object in the synthesis of recognition). This in turn relies on an analogy between the rules governing our knowledge of objects and the rules governing the structure of objects themselves. Now, in order for these various moments to be related together into a unity, they must have some kind of affinity with one another. This affinity requires that the same properties obtain in the object now and at some moment in the past . . . . In order to determine whether a present object is an instance of a type, we therefore need the notion of opposition (red/not-red). Finally, in order to recognise this affinity, we need to be able to determine whether the object presented by a memory and the object presented by perception have the same property. As we are dealing with different representations, this is achieved by a comparison that determines whether the representations resemble one another. Thus in order for recognition to function, we require the structures of representation to provide the machinery for recognising that we are dealing with the same object, through the diversity of perceptual experience.”[21]
Kant’s Copernican Revolution — the transcendental faculty — was a profoundly brilliant achievement in the history of philosophy. The two pure intuitions, the three syntheses, the twelve pure categories, the schemata and the transcendental unity of apperception all come together to form an amazingly detailed and sophisticated theory of experience. Nevertheless, this theory is much like the analysand undergoing psychoanalytic treatment insofar as it continuously circles around the repressed (the Real) without directly facing it head-on. The repressed of Critique of Pure Reason is difference.
“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. Under these four coincident figures, difference acquires a sufficient reason in the form of a principium comparationis. For this reason, the world of representation is characterised by its inability to conceive of difference in itself[.]”[22]
We know that Deleuze thought there to be major issues in Kant’s work concerning difference, but what exactly are they? Now that we have fleshed out the context let’s focus our attention on Deleuze’s criticisms. What is so wrong with privileging identity over difference? It seems so self-evident that identity is the primary category and difference the secondary and derivative one. Isn’t a difference always a difference between two things (identities)? This is certainly how doxa and philosophy view it to be. Judgment itself presupposes the primacy of identity and turns difference into simple negation, e.g., “A dog is different from a cat because cats do not bark.” Kant’s model ultimately serves to validate representational judgment — the I that knows the world by making judgments comprised of concepts that correspond to intuitions (concepts resemble intuitions via schemata). Is the thought of a pure difference, a difference in itself, even thinkable? It’s certainly not if we try to think it through our representational categories. In the case of Kant, the different qualities we experience are the differences between the stable identities produced by the three syntheses. Since all of the Kantian “machinery” functions in such a way as to reaffirm the metaphysics of identity, it prevents us from being able to think pure difference. Thought becomes trapped within its own limited horizon. The category of pure difference, as Deleuze showed, is enough to give rise to an entirely different metaphysics — the metaphysics of difference — yet this is exactly what the principles of the Kantian faculty prevent us from discovering. The Deleuzian difference is a difference that remains extrinsic to the Kantian discourse. Kantian identity and Deleuzian difference find themselves colliding in a Lyotardian differend. What is this pure difference that Kant’s theory did such injustice to and that Deleuze spent so much time justifying?
Deleuze’s concept of difference in itself is incredibly complicated. To fully explicate it would be a Herculean task. Luckily, such an explication isn’t required for our purposes. Instead, I will be presenting a humble sketch of what it is and why it is so important. Simply and straightforwardly put, pure difference is the virtual and the intensive. Deleuze’s metaphysics is made up of three main planes: (1) virtuality, (2) intensity, (3) actuality. Again, difference in itself resides in virtuality and intensity, whereas the extensive and qualitative beings we experience through our senses belong to actuality. For Deleuze, extensity and quality are basically synonymous with actuality — they are what get actualized. However, and this is of the utmost importance, the virtual, the intensive, and the actual are all real, each one is as every bit real as the others, according to Deleuze. The virtual is Ideas. But what are Ideas? Traditionally, Ideas have been conceived of as pure identities or eternal essences. In Plato’s metaphysics, what all concrete, particular trees have in common is the same Idea, that is, they all belong to the same essence, which means that the ground or sufficient reason of actual trees is the pure identity of Treeness. Deleuze inverts Platonism while preserving an essential aspect of it, namely, the Idea. The inversion happens when Deleuze shows the Idea to be a virtual multiplicity consisting of differential relations (pure differences). These relations are not relations between two identities, but, rather, pure relations in themselves. While Deleuze only mentions Ferdinand de Saussure once in Difference and Repetition[23], his influence is ubiquitous throughout it. Saussure argued that a linguistic sign only takes on a semantic identity by being positioned within a structure of differential relations — it is the word’s position in the natural language that gives it its meaning. In other words, there is no such thing as a word; a word is only a word within a structural network of differences. It’s clear that Deleuze took his cue from Saussure’s differential theory of language and went on to metaphysicalize it — not just words but all actualities ontologically depend on differential relations (Ideas or virtual multiplicities) for their identities.
Deleuze gives three examples of different types of Ideas: physical, biological and social. Let’s quickly have a look at the biological Idea, which, in my opinion, is the most elucidating of them. Deleuze turns to the transcendental anatomy of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in order to explain what a biological Idea would be. À la Geoffroy, Deleuze says:
“An organism is a set of real terms and relations (dimension, position, number) which actualises on its own account, to this or that degree, relations between differential elements: for example, the hyoid of a cat has nine small bones, whereas in man it has only five; the other four are found towards the skull, outside the organ reduced in this way by the upright position. The genesis of development in organisms must therefore be understood as the actualisation of an essence, in accordance with reasons and at speeds determined by the environment, with accelerations and interruptions, but independently of any transformist passage from one actual term to another.”[24]
This passage is a little tricky to follow, but the point is profoundly simple. Geoffroy argued that an organism is best understood in terms of the relations between its parts instead of in terms of the functions belonging to the parts. However, for Geoffroy, these relations between the parts (identities) of an actual organism have a transcendental status, or, in Deleuzian terminology, they are virtual. These transcendental relations are purely differential relations that form homologies (Ideas or virtual multiplicities). These pure differences form the ground (more accurately, unground) of the actual individuals that express the Idea.
“Now, one of the key conceptual developments that made the theory of evolution possible was Geoffroy St. Hilaire’s positing of homologies between different parts of organisms. Rather than seeing an organism as defined by the form or function of parts, Geoffroy, a contemporary of Cuvier, saw it as defined by the relations between parts. By focusing on relations rather than functions, Geoffroy was able to provide an account that explains one of the key results of evolutionary theory – that the same structure can change its function in different organisms (fins becoming arms, for instance). Geoffroy didn’t relate organisms to one another directly to generate his account of homologies, but rather posited a transcendental structure of an ideal organism that other organisms were instantiations of[.]”[25]
So that’s the virtual, but what’s the intensive? Intensity, for Deleuze, is that through which the virtual becomes actual. Just as imagination is the third term, for Kant, that makes possible the synthetic interaction between the faculties of sensibility and understanding, intensity, in Deleuzian metaphysics, is the intervening field which makes possible the expression of the virtual in the actual. However, the intensive (along with the virtual) is not the logical condition of possible experience, but, rather, the real condition of actual experience. By “intensity,” Deleuze means just that. Temperature, pressure, speed, rates of change, rates of flow, force, etc., are all various types of intensity. Deleuze explains that the difference between intensities and extensities lies in the fact that only the latter can be divided. If we have a glass filled with eight ounces of water, then we can divide this body in half by pouring out four ounces of it into another glass. However, in doing so, we do not divide the temperature of the water. Let’s say the temperature of the water was 90 °F before we divided it in half. The act of pouring half out and producing two glasses filled with four ounces each did not simultaneously divide the temperature in half, i.e., the water did not go from 90 °F to 45 °F in simply being divided equally into two glasses. Actualities can be divided, but intensities cannot be. Intensity, like the virtual, is not comprised of identical elements — it is pure difference. To clarify, actualization occurs on the basis of virtual Ideas and intensive events — the morphogenetic genesis or transcendental-productive unground of actual things is located in the interplay between the differential relations of the virtual and the intensive.
It must be stated that there is no negativity (negation) in the virtual or in the intensive. There’s a whole section in Difference and Repetition that seeks to refute attempts to turn difference into the negative, which is the offspring of judgment and the shackle of opposition. Deleuze makes a distinction between differentiation and differenciation; the former has to do with the determination of the virtual, the pre-individual differences or singularities that comprised multiplicities, i.e., Ideas, and the latter has to do with the actualization of the virtual. Or in his own words, “We call the determination of the virtual content of an Idea differentiation; we call the actualisation of that virtuality into species and distinguished parts differenciation.”[26] This leads Henry Somers-Hall to say, “We can see that differentiation does not lead us to posit the negative, as differentiation involves contracting together actual states of affairs to form an affirmation.
Similarly, differenciation is the process whereby we extract a state of affairs from the Idea, and as such is also an affirmation of the Idea.”[27] Deleuze calls this process “indi-different/ciation” and it is the metaphysical process, positive and affirmative through and through, by which the virtual becomes actualized and individualized by way of the intensive. Now, Deleuze thoroughly rejects the idea that negation plays a part in this process. He says, “Consequently — and this is all we wish to say — the negative appears neither in the process of differentiation nor in the process of differenciation. The Idea knows nothing of negation.”[28] Deleuze goes on to argue that the negative is an illusion. “The third illusion concerns the negative and the manner in which it subordinates difference to itself, in the form of both limitation and opposition.”[29] The dogmatic image of thought (representation), with its faculty of judgment (as in Kant), judges x to not be y insofar as x has an extensive difference from y, that is, it qualitatively opposes x to y (not-x) in the judgment. However, there is no negation in the virtual and the intensive — only pure and positive differences. One of the main points of Deleuzian metaphysics is to reject negation or the negative as an ontological principle or a mechanism of becoming.
“Difference is not negation. On the contrary, the negative is difference inverted, seen from below. Always the candle in the bovine eye. Difference is inverted, first, by the requirements of representation which subordinate it to identity. Then, by the shadow of ‘problems’ which give rise to the illusion of the negative. Finally, by extensity and quality which cover or explicate intensity. It is underneath quality and within extensity that Intensity appears upside down, and that its characteristic difference takes the form of the negative (either of limitation or of opposition).”[30]
We can now see what the big problems are with Kant’s metaphysics of identity (transcendental idealism) — in “justifying” the transcendental-representational conditions of possible experience, it blocks us from discovering the transcendental-real conditions of actual experience, that is, the virtual and the intensive. For Kant, what is or what we experience is that which is amenable to the laws of representational judgment. Someone will chime in, “Yeah, but what about noumena? What about the realist remainder in Kant? Can’t Kantian things-in-themselves be pure differences?” No, and here’s why. Kant himself has taken this option off the table by having it swallowed up by the very table itself — his table of judgments. For Kant, there are three ontological judgments rooted in three ontological categories: (1) the affirmative judgment and the category of reality, (2) the negative judgment and the category of negation, (3) the infinite judgment and the category of limitation. Kant limits reality or is-ness to the primary and secondary qualities of extensive actualities which conform to the structure of judgment. As a result, and as it traditionally goes, difference takes on a secondary status; it is the qualitative differences between phenomena. In limiting his concept of reality in this manner, Kant forces difference into being nothing more than an epiphenomenon or derivative of judgment. Differences are not real in the same way as qualitative and extensive phenomena are for Kant. This has profound consequences. (1) Kant’s concept of reality is reductionistic (it reduces the real to the actual). (2) Even if we were able to argue that pure differences are real by expanding and enlarging Kant’s concept of reality, we couldn’t go on to argue that they are also the Kantian noumena without there being a giant contradiction. We would be violating the “property lines” of the pure categories of the understanding. We would be attributing the pure category of reality, which only has a right to be applied to phenomena, to noumena. Pure differences cannot be both real and noumena according to the Kantian model, which they essentially are according to Deleuzian metaphysics. (3) We cannot situate pure differences in the field of raw sense data. Why? Sensations are merely disorganized qualities, whereas intuited phenomena are organized qualities — but pure differences are not qualities, on the contrary, they give rise to them. (4) Pure differences are not in any way imaginable, the products of the mental faculty. This faculty is simply that which imposes identity and form onto sensations. Pure differences cannot be located in the faculty, nor in sensations, nor in things-in-themselves. This means that transcendental idealism truly has a problem of extrinsic difference, a problem of a type of positive and non-conceptual difference that can find no place within it. Pure difference is the Real that cannot be “articulated” in the Kantian Symbolic. This is the first of the main problems of Kantianism.
The second, from Deleuze’s perspective, is that it fails to provide an account of the genesis of the mental faculty. Kant argues that the mental faculty is the transcendental condition of experience, but how did said faculty even come into existence in the first place? Since Kant has negated the very possibility of meaningfully pursuing an answer to this question insofar as it essentially asks about some reality outside of the pure intuitions and pure categories, we are left with no way to investigate the real conditions of the faculty. It’s as if the faculty and the world it experiences came into existence out of nothing — abracadabra! This is the related problem of correlationism and ancestrality that Quentin Meillassoux attempted to solve in After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. If the mind fundamentally constructs the world we experience and if we can only know the world through our very correlation to it, then what are we to think of the historical reality of the universe (what Meillassoux calls ancestrality), presented to us by science, that predates the existence of human minds? Are we really to think of all of the things science tells us about how the universe was before we evolved as mere fictions of our intersubjective imaginations? In Meillassoux’s words, “How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon a manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life — posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world?”[31] These are very serious philosophical problems, and they find their origin in Kant’s transcendental idealism.
“Generally speaking, the modern philosopher’s ‘two-step’ consists in this belief in the primacy of the relation over the related terms; a belief in the constitutive power of reciprocal relation. The ‘co-‘ (of co-givenness, of co-relation, of the co-originary, of co-presence, etc.) is the grammatical particle that dominates modern philosophy, its veritable ‘chemical formula’. Thus, one could say that up until Kant, one of the principal problems of philosophy was to think substance, while ever since Kant, it has consisted in trying to think the correlation. Prior to the advent of transcendentalism, one of the questions that divided rival philosophers most decisively was ‘Who grasps the true nature of substance? He who thinks the Idea, the individual, the atom, God? Which God?’ But ever since Kant, to discover what divides rival philosophers is no longer to ask who has grasped the true nature of substantiality, but rather to ask who has grasped the more originary correlation: is it the thinker of the subject-object correlation, the noetico-noematic correlation, or the language-referent correlation? The question is no longer ‘which is the proper substrate?’ but ‘which is the proper correlate?”[32]
The predominant scientific model of the universe, the Big Bang theory, holds that the universe expanded from an extremely hot, dense phase called the Planck epoch, in which all the matter and energy of the observable universe was concentrated. Within the Lamba-CDM concordance model, the best measurement of the age of the universe, as of 22 March 2013, is 13.798 ± 0.037 billion years, i.e., approximately 13.8 billion years. From the Big Bang up to the present, the chronology of the universe, what I’m calling “universal history”, is an incredibly long and extremely complicated series of events. From the Planck epoch to the Hadron epoch, from the Photon epoch to reionization, from the formation of the stars to the formation of the Solar System, and right on up to the evolutionary development of life on Earth, universal history is the history of spatiotemporal substances with particular qualities standing in causal relations.
If Kant is right, then universal history is a lie or, at least, a misunderstanding. Transcendental idealism undermines the history of the universe posited by science. If time, space, causality and substantiality don’t exist outside of human minds, then there weren’t atoms, galaxies, planets, chemicals, gases, trees, rocks, organs, plants, etc., before human consciousness existed. But if this is really true, then how are we to account for the existence of human consciousness and representation? Having a brain and a nervous system are necessary conditions for the possibility of experience; however, if Kant is correct, then brains and nervous systems didn’t exist until full-fledged human consciousness existed. This is due to the fact that brains and nervous systems are spatiotemporal substances that contingently exist and stand in causal relations with other substances. Even if consciousness isn’t fully reducible to these ontic conditions, it nevertheless presupposes them ontologically. These are real conditions and not merely logical ones. These conditions are not just logically prior to human consciousness — they are temporally and causally prior. But if they’re temporally and causally prior, then time and causality exist apart from the cognitive faculty, and, thus, are not merely transcendentally ideal. If universal history is correct in holding that there were substances existing in space and time for billions of years, and that human consciousness was made possible and caused even partially by the existence of these substances, then Kant’s transcendental idealism is simply false. There’s no way to give a natural account of the emergence of human consciousness (representation) from the Kantian perspective.
What Deleuze showed is that the most basic conditions of actual experience are pure differences and it is in their virtual multiplicities and intensities that we find the real conditions of the genesis of the faculties and representation. But, again, Kant’s model made it so that we cannot integrate the category of pure difference into it without contradiction. This is the extrinsic problem of pure difference. In order for the integrity of pure difference to be established, we must move beyond transcendental idealism into Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism. And what’s the main difference between them? Levi R. Bryant nicely sums it up, “Deleuze’s definition of transcendental empiricism is very simple: transcendental empiricism is that philosophical position which determines the conditions of real rather than possible experience.”[33]
The Intrinsic Problem of Difference
We now have some understanding of how Kant’s model necessarily excludes the type of difference which is the productive force that brings extensities and qualities into actuality. We have seen that these pure differences cannot be stationed on any of the “mainlands” of transcendental idealism. They cannot be subsumed under the concepts of (1) the cognitive apparatus, (2) phenomena, (3) sensations, (4) noumena. However, there is another problem at the heart of the Critique of Pure Reason, namely, that it also cannot account for the qualitative differences between the phenomena we experience. This is the intrinsic problem of difference. Not only does transcendental idealism structurally exclude pure difference, it also fails to explain why we experience qualitative differences. As counterintuitive as this may sound to those familiar with Kant, it turns out to follow from his fundamental premises. Let us run qualitative difference through the Kantian gamut.
The mental faculty: Kant’s cognitive apparatus is a faculty of identity (sameness), i.e., its pure intuitions, pure concepts, schemata, and principles apply to all phenomena; it forces raw sense data to conform to its structured processes of identification. However, what we experience is a world comprised of different things. If our a priori concepts apply to chaotic sense data, which have been spatialized and temporalized through the two pure intuitions, then why do we end up experiencing phenomena that have different qualities, for example, trees, rocks, dogs, etc.? If our syntheses of sense data operate indiscriminately on all sense data, then why are the phenomenal results of these synthetic processes different from each other? Insofar as the cognitive apparatus is the ground of the ontological skeleton of every object, meaning that it is only the source of the transcendental identity or sameness of all phenomena, we must, then, look elsewhere for the ground of the determinate differences we experience in the objects of experience. If our cognitive faculty is a faculty of identity, then how are we to account for the qualitative differences between phenomena? Where is the cause of the differences located? This differentiating cause must be found either in sensations, in noumena, or in judgment if Kant’s system is to truly be able to explain the nature of experience.
Sensations: For Kant, sensations are the way in which noumena give themselves to us. Locating the cause of the determinate differences between phenomena in sensations only makes sense if one presupposes a realist ontology of some sort. Qualities or accidents, by their very nature, ontologically presuppose substances in which to inhere. If sensations themselves are the givings of determinate qualities, these qualities being the qualities of substances, then one must accept that substances exist independently of our minds, i.e., one must presuppose realism/substance ontology in order to even begin to justify this theory of perception, which is exactly the opposite of what Kant’s anti-realism claims to be the case. The Constancy Hypothesis claims that there is a one-to-one correspondence between sensations and the qualities that the sensations give to us, for example, the sensation of red that we experience when looking at a stop sign is simply the perception of the quality of red that actually inheres in the stop sign (the substance) itself. But since Kant rejects the mind-independence of substantiality, there cannot be a one-to-one correspondence between sensation and quality (for Kant, substantiality is merely a pure category of the understanding and not an aspect of things-in-themselves). Despite his usage of the word “things”, Kant didn’t intend for us to conceive of noumena substantially. But if qualities are necessarily conditioned by substances, and noumena are not substances, then things-in-themselves have no differentiated qualities to give to us through differentiated sensations.
Noumena: Now that it’s been established that neither our cognitive faculty nor sensations can be the ultimate ground of experiential differences, perhaps this ground is found in noumena. Obviously, the differences between phenomena must ultimately have their source in noumena (things-in-themselves). Now, an implication of this is that the differences between phenomena are caused by the intrinsic natures of the noumena themselves. But now we’ve arrived at a devastating incompatibility since causality is merely a pure concept of the understanding and not something that is true of things-in-themselves. And regardless of the fact that Kant posited a mind-independent reality, the very fact that he considered it to be unsubstantial means that it must also be considered unqualitative, i.e., having no qualities, thus, having no differentiated qualities. Nevertheless, without positing the differentiating cause of things-in-themselves, there is no way to account for the qualitative differences between phenomena. This undermines Kant’s critical philosophy for the following reasons: (1) We do, in fact, experience differences between phenomena. (2) Kant’s critical philosophy cannot account for these differences without falling victim to intrinsic contradiction, inconsistency, and incompatibility. (3) Therefore, Kant’s critical philosophy is incapable of making sense out of human experience.
Judgment: It should be said that it could be argued that the ground of our differentiated experiences lies in the judgments we make about them; however, this position is phenomenologically inappropriate. Merleau-Ponty showed that what we perceive is not the product of reflective thought or judgment, thereby undermining the Kantian (or as Merleau-Ponty called it the “intellectualist”) theory of perception. Rather, judgment presupposes full-blooded experiences in order to be able to perform a judgmental act. Merleau-Ponty wrote:
“It is in terms of its intrinsic meaning and structure that the sensible world is “older” than the universe of thought, because the sensible world is visible and relatively continuous, and because the universe of thought, which is invisible and contains gaps, constitutes at first sight a whole and has its truth only on condition that it be supported on the canonical structures of the sensible world.”[34]
To illustrate this point, Merleau-Ponty appealed to the Müller-Lyer illusion:
David R. Cerbone nicely expresses Merleau-Ponty’s thinking:
“Even once we have determined that the lines enclosed by the arrows are indeed equal, and so on seeing them judge that they are equal, it still remains the case that we see the lines as not being equal. If perception and judgement were equivalent, then the lines should appear equal once we have been informed of the illusion. That the illusion remains in effect indicates a distinction between seeing and judging.”[35]
According to Merleau-Ponty, intellectualism fails to make sense out of our most basic perceptions.
Conclusion
Kant’s critical philosophy, when confronted by the problem of difference (pure difference and qualitative difference), can only appeal to differentia ex nihilo, which, of course, is completely absurd. Kant’s theory of experience is a great example of the problems generated by focusing all of one’s philosophical attention on identity while putting difference on the back burner. For any theory of perception to truly give an account of human experience, it must first and foremost take account of the vast differentiated richness that we most basically experience. Unbeknownst to itself, Kant’s transcendental idealism is a form of magical thinking. It necessarily excludes difference in itself (the virtual and the intensive) and provides no way to account for all of the primary and secondary differences (the qualitative) we experience in the phenomenal world. In order to do justice to difference, we must transcend transcendental idealism. Deleuze said it best, “Difference must leave its cave and cease to be a monster.”[36]
Notes
[1] Bryant, ‘The Ontic Principle’, 265.
[2] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xv.
[3] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A20/B34, 65.
[4] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 134.
[5] Ibid, 133.
[6] Ibid, 138.
[7] Ibid, 29.
[8] Ibid, 138.
[9] Somers-Hall, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 109.
[10] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A105, 134-135.
[11] Ibid, A77/B103, 111.
[12] Ibid, A77/B103, 112.
[13] Ibid, A99, 131.
[14] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 138.
[15] Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, 32.
[16] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A102, 133.
[17] Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 45.
[18] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A52, 93.
[19] Somers-Hall, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 60.
[20] Ibid, 60-61.
[21] Ibid, 110-111.
[22] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 138.
[23] Ibid, 204.
[24] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 185.
[25] Somers-Hall, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 145.
[26] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 207.
[27] Somers-Hall, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 162.
[28] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 207.
[29] Ibid, 266.
[30] Ibid, 235.
[31] Meillassoux. After Finitude, 9-10.
[32] Ibid, 5.
[33] Bryant, Difference and Givenness, 3.
[34] Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 12.
[35] Cerbone, Understanding Phenomenology. 117-118.
[36] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 29.
Works Cited
Bryant, Levi R. Difference and Givenness: Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008.
––. “The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology” in the Speculative Turn. Melbourne: re.press, 2011.
Cerbone, David R. Understanding Phenomenology. Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2006.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Paul Patton (trans.). New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Husserl, Edmund. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. John Barnett Brough (trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Norman Kemp-Smith (trans.). New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965.
––. Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View. Robert B. Louden (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Ray Brassier (trans.). New York: Continuum, 2008.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Alphonso Lingis (trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
Somers-Hall, Henry. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.