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III Deduction I: Kant

‘[T]hat laborious deduction of the categories was needed for theology and morals and how fruitful it was for them.’ [162]

Dieter Henrich argues that model for the deductions in Kant’s critical writings comes not from logic but law. Whilst the steps in the proof may function syllogistically, its status as a deduction is not defined by this.[163] Deduktionsschriften (deduction writings), used in Germany since the late fourteenth century, were widespread by the beginning of the eighteenth century, and for the most part sought to justify claims of the succession of reigns or of territorial inheritance. Henrich points out that Pütter, coauthor of the text Kant used in teaching natural law and defender of the imperial ideal of the Reich, was ‘the most admired deduction writer of Kant’s time’ and that its widespread practice gave Kant reason to think that the transference of ‘the term “deduction” from its juridical usage to a new, philosophical one’ would be understood.[164] Henrich argues for a structural similarity too; Kant’s deductions follow the requirement for brevity and solidity and the custom of appending a brief summary of the salient points of the case at the close of the argument - Henrich points to the Brief Outline of this Deduction which closes the B edition of the first Critique as an example.

Deleuze says of Kantian critique that it ‘consiste-t-elle...à donner des états civils à la pensée considérée du point de vue de sa loi naturelle (amounts to giving civil rights to thought considered from the point of view of its natural law)’[165] and Henrich also argues that Kant uses ‘Natural Right...as a paradigm’.[166] Beneath the regional specificities of civil rights lies a generic concept of natural right, a reference to an ‘original acquisition’ which cannot be legitimated because no objective account of its possession can be provided.[167] No physiology could warrant the supreme situation of man in relation to the law, even if Kant thought such a physiology possible. Nonetheless, this natural right, whilst not being instrumental in the deduction of civil rights both grounds and is supported by them. The relation of natural right to civil law is analogous, in Kant, to that of the sublime to culture. Neither culture nor natural right ground either the sublime or civil rights. Nonethess, just as the sublime requires culture, civil law requires natural right. As has been seen, Law is meant to be exercised empirically, but this requires the natural capacity to do so: in talking of women, Kant refers to their physical weakness and to the superior strengths of men. Here is a direction in which the natural rights required by civil law might be found.

Natural right functions much as repulsive forces do in the discussion above, when brought into relation with attraction. The channels and conduits of the law define the civil rights of a body, but these have no real power in the absence of the natural right which underpins them, just as the striations of empty space have no real force independently of the tactile full space of the actual continuum. What counts as a legitimate and quantifiable action is in both cases defined in terms of its difference from a mobile diversity of intensive distributions on the one hand, and from a centre of resonance on the other, and what is diverse in relation to action so defined is rendered uniformly exterior to the problem of law, as  legally and substantially inert. The centre of resonance becomes the source of all form, of the power in its application and the end towards which true actions lead: possession.

Extended corporeal space is established in the relation of repulsive and attractive forces, and compressed between true and apparent attraction. Whilst the court of reason constitutes its territory in the space between the two parallel series of natural and original right, the ground of the court, the substratum of so-called natural right, is formulated reductively through the evacuation of bodies, passions and sensuous interests: there is no feeling implicated in the proper exercise of law, for either subject or legislator, and just as feeling, or the physical contact of repulsion needed to be weeded out in the construction of royal science, so too must it be eliminated here. For nature to carry right a law extrinsic to it must govern its application. And it is the critique of practical reason, for which as Kant says, the deduction was so necessary, that ‘the obligation to prevent the empirically conditioned reason from presuming to be the only ground of determination of the will’.[168]

Henrich points out that deduction means ‘to carry something forth to something else’ [169]: it is thus implicated with a channel or duct, the dimensions and directions of which are defined according to principles of law which in turn define the legitimacy of empirical objects brought before the law, and the conditions of possibility under which actions are recognizing in the court of reason. The deduction is thus also a reduction, compressing actions into legal form and eliminating intensities not commensurate with a juridical concept of action. The real possession of an original acquisition cannot be justified independently of factual data, but the data must be formulated in a manner that ‘suffice(s) to justify the claims attached to our knowledge.’[170] And again, a principle of continuity is implicated, this time of possession.

Parallel and complementary to the reductive formulation of substance as that in relation to which actions have juridical weight, and count as justification towards a claim - the subject has a de facto case -are interests of reason. As affective constituents are defined out, an empty space opens into which interests of reason are defined, transferring the ground of law from nature to reason, shifting right from nature to law and defining what is outside the law, in the sense of not being a recognized action, negatively. The same series of moves which constitute a body as a mechanically movable inert  substance in space, define the subject as similarly movable, no longer in relation to a theory defined in terms of force, but in terms of a practice defined in terms of power.