<<TRANSMATHOME

'a book on an enemy...'

Le discrédit dans lequel est tombée aujourd’hui la doctrine des facultés, pièce pourtant tout à fait nécessaire dans le système de la philosophie, s’explique par la méconnaissance de cet empirisme proprement transcendental, auquel on substituait vainement un décalque du transcendental sur l’empirique.

(Despite the fact that it has become discredited today, the doctrine of the faculties is an entirely necessary component of the system of philosophy. Its discredit may be explained by the misrecognition of this properly transcendental empiricism, for which was substituted in vain a tracing of the transcendental from the empirical).[1]

The slenderness of Deleuze’s book on Kant - his book on an enemy, he says - seems to belie the immensity of the task implied by its title, La philosophie critique de Kant: Doctrine des facultés. Yet in little over a hundred pages, Deleuze produces an elegant and efficient map of the three Critiques which is far from a simple commentary or introductory text.

 ‘[L]a bêtise...est la faculté des faux problèmes, témoignant d’une in aptitude à constituer, à appréhender et déterminer un problème en tant que tel’ (stupidity...is the faculty for false problems; it is evidence of an inability to constitute, comprehend or determine a problem as such’).[2] The intelligence in Deleuze’s reading of Kant lies in his constitution of critique as a real problem, on his selection of elements and in his concentration on its systematics. Focusing on the network of the faculties, on the two senses of this word in Kant’s own writing, on their disjunction into higher and lower forms, and on their illegitimate and legitimate employment, he deduces a consistent geography of Kant and takes up the keen edge of critique. This first chapter looks briefly at La philosophie critique de Kant and then more broadly at themes in Kant of importance to Deleuze’s philosophy.

I           System: Faculties in Theory and Practice

Two senses of the word faculty are always in play; faculty as source and faculty as relation. Each faculty is understood both as a type of relation between a representation and something else (an object or subject), and as a source of representations. To each relation corresponds an interest (or disinterest, in the case of aesthetics) of reason and each source legislates a means of realizing this interest, since ‘rien ne nous garantit que la raison se charge elle-même de réaliser son propre intérêt (there is no guarantee that reason itself undertakes to realize its own interest)’.[3] Where reason is disinterested, it is because it has no affective relation with the world, nothing to either gain or lose; this allows feeling to achieve it’s higher and culturally dignified form, as a pure operation of judging of which pleasure is a consequence, independently of desire and knowledge. Faculties in the first sense, as relation, are knowledge, desire and the feeling of pleasure and pain, whilst faculties in the second sense, as source, are sensibility, understanding and reason.

It is immediately clear that the correspondence between the two senses of faculty is not straightforward. Establishing a relation of correspondence between knowledge and an object involves input through sensibility; the accord of sensibility and understanding relies on the schema of imagination; systematizing knowledge requires the aid of reason. So two problems emerge. Taking the faculty of knowledge as an example, there must first be a convergence of sources, each contributing a unique component to  the production of objective knowledge - intuition, in the case of sensibility, concept, in the case of understanding, synthesis (according to schemata), in the case of imagination, and Idea in the case of reason. There is a further difference, in that three of the faculties are active, whilst sensibility is passive. So the common accord of the elements of knowledge involves a dynamic as well as a formal element; it is a problem of forces as well as of form.[4]

The second problem addresses the first, that of convergence in a common form. The achievement of common sense - whether logical, moral or aesthetic - is dependent on an attitude of reason - interest in logical and moral common sense, and disinterest in aesthetic common sense. So common accord amongst the faculties becomes a question not only of establishing relations, but also of ensuring that they reflect (for a naturalized common sense) or realize (a priori common sense) an interest (or disinterest) of reason. ‘L’idée d’une pluralité (et d’une hiérarchie) systématique des intérêts...domine la méthode kantienne (The idea of a systematic plurality (and a hierarchy) of interests...dominates the Kantian method’)[5]: this community of interests is the ‘principe d’un système des fins (the principle of a system of ends)’ unrealizable by nature.[6] Immanent critique, as the method of transcendental philosophy in a Kantian sense, sets out the nature and realization of these ends.

The balancing of interests of reason does not form common sense, but good sense: privileging speculative interests threatens practical interests, and Kant’s statement of good sense, of limiting knowledge to make room for faith, indicates two things. Firstly, that achieving equilibrium of interests requires both limitation and negation, which, as will be seen later in this chapter, are two of the functions which Deleuze argues corrupt the critical method and lead to a degenerate formulation of the transcendental. And secondly that good sense and common sense complement each other, in the formation of a single Image of thought, another line in Deleuze’s relation with Kant which is addressed in chapter two.

To ensure the balance of interest and system of ends, one faculty (in the first sense, as relation) must play two rôles: it must contribute, on a horizontal plane of integration, to common sense, and also, through the discovery of an autonomy from natural common sense and an internal legislative capacity, determine the relation of common sense to its objects, legislating vertically, from above, for the realization of an interest of reason. That is, one faculty provides  the a priori conditions of natural common sense, colouring it as logical, aesthetic or moral. In the case of knowledge, it is understanding that legislates: it determines imagination to synthesize schematically, according to the concepts, and generalizes over intuition. In a ‘synthesis which does not belong to the senses’ but to an imagination constrained to schematize by universal rule ‘the understanding determines the sensibility’, defining it as a receptive channel, and as contributing to the delimitation of differences, between objective and subjective knowledge, and between legitimate and illegitimate theoretical claims.[7] To contribute to theoretical or logical common sense, sensibility must be free of subjective sensation - pleasure and pain - but nonetheless have a form of immediacy with the real in experience which legitimates the claim of objective knowledge, confirming or contributing towards a speculative interest of reason.

Determination of sensibility by understanding also produces a limiting device, the noumenon, the representation of an object in a purely intelligible, non-sensible world. At the same time as understanding ‘entitles an object in a relation mere phenomenon...[it] ...forms, apart from that relation, a representation of an object in itself (Gegenstande in sich selbst)’, on which the concepts have no legitimate purchase, but which, nonetheless, the understanding ‘must think’.[8] Thinking in the absence of sensibility - and so in the absence not only of intuition, but also of intensive magnitudes, the real in experience, understanding thinks of a negative object which forms a conceptual limit of the objective validity of sensible knowledge, preventing the intellectualization of sensibility, (an Aristotelian failing which Kant accuses Locke of perpetuating).  Although Kant appears to assimilate the thing-in-itself and the noumenon, the function of the two is quite different. The noumenon concerns limits, and the negotiation of a single territory under the forms of two different laws. Articulated in relation to phenomena which are objects constituted according to the unity of rule of categories, the noumenon is a gap which can be filled and made positive only by practical reason. The thing-in-itself, however,  attaches to problems of thresholds, to matter and sensation, and so to intensities.  The thing-in-itself  will be addressed in chapter two, however. .

The noumenon, as the negative doctrine of sensibility, is an object produced by understanding when it claims determinate knowledge  of something in general, extending its legislation beyond the aggregation of particulars in experience and seeking knowledge independently of sense. Since the accord of the faculties in knowledge is not free, as it is in aesthetics, the production of common sense must involve not only mechanisms for convergence amongst the various sources but also the exclusion of differences which are either not commensurate with realizing a speculative interest of reason, or which trample on other interests of reason. The noumenon is a solution to the co-ordination of speculative and practical interests.

The transcendental use of understanding, its claim to know  something in general, or the negative noumenon, converges with the transcendent use of reason, and reason’s claim of knowledge of an object corresponding to an Idea. Under what conditions of possibility? It is this latter uncritical ‘supposition qui entraîne l’entendement lui-même dans son usage transcendantal illégitime (supposition that draws the understanding itself into its illegitimate transcendental employment)’[9]. Or as Kant puts it, speculative reason is ‘compelled to assume’ the noumenon, pressed by law to provide the negative space for the transfer of one kind of causality into another.[10] The Critique of Pure Reason mitigates against the confusion of these two zones. Whilst different legislative powers are involved, they occupy a single territory, and  only by acting negatively against the passivity of sense is the negotiation of this space between reason and understanding successful in realizing an end of reason.

Understanding utilizes the noumenon negatively, limiting sensibility by providing a foundation for appearances, only if it does not also suppose itself to have legislative authority over this object: it must, at the same time as limiting sensibility ‘set[-] limits to itself’.[11] Reason allows understanding to operate in its speculative interest only if, whilst legislating over experience it also recognizes the limits of its jurisdiction: so understanding legislates in two senses, both in relation to the convergence of faculties in common sense, and in relation to itself. In relinquishing the claim to know an object in general independently of sense, understanding leaves free a space which, in its positive sense is filled by morality: understanding projects a negative surface on which practical reason inscribes its positive face, the pure form of Law.