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II             Critique

‘Copernicus said:

“When you have once seen the chaos, you must make some thing to set between yourself and that terrible sight: and so you make a mirror, thinking that in it shall be reflected the reality of the world; but then you understand that the mirror reflects only appearances, and that reality is somewhere else, off behind the mirror; and then you remember that behind the mirror there is only the chaos.”

Dark dark dark.’[xii]

Kant effected a revolution in philosophy, through the introduction of time into the subject and the consequent division of the world into a temporal network of empirical appearances and an underlying inaccessible reality; through his theorization of production, under the title synthesis, and through his insistence that metaphysics be legitimated without appeal to transcendent entities. A revolution of Copernican dimensions. His work covers a huge range; science - including physics, biology and chemistry, the latter two first emerging as sciences at the close of the eighteenth century -, aesthetics, history, politics, morality, anthropology, logic, mathematics, geography and pedagogy and more. Despite this vast spread of interests, however, a single problem might be said to drive both the direction of his thought and its immediate reception -the problem of critique, as a demand for immanence of criteria. ‘Our age is, in especial degree, the age of critique, and to critique everything must submit’, he writes in the Critique of Pure Reason, the first of the three critical works.[xiii] A critical tribunal, in which reason functions as both subject and judge, was to legitimate all claims to knowledge, and its necessity for Kant was paramount: in the absence of such a legitimation, he argues, reason lapses into its natural state, a state of war. 

Response to the critical challenge was swift: why must everything so submit, from where does the authority of reason come? On what does it base the privilege of its first principles? That it was no longer God was recognized immediately: indeed, there was an injunction against the teaching of Kant’s work at Marburg, pending a report on the dangers of its scepticism - epistemological as well as theological. It was lifted, however, on the basis that even if his work was sceptical, ‘undermin[ing] the certainty of human knowledge’ it was so obscure as to be largely unintelligible, and thus of no danger.[xiv] But the response to the implications of critique were swift. As Beiser writes in The Fate of Reason, post-Kantian philosophy begins with the meta-critical question of the authority of reason, and ‘looked critically at the possibility of criticism itself’.[xv]

Schopenhauer, a philosopher who titles himself the first Kantian, dismisses the post-Kantians, (mostly through polemic, seldom with argument): ‘serious philosophy still stands where Kant left it’, he declares, ‘I therefore take my departure from him’.[xvi] Schopenhauer sets off in a direction very different to that of the meta-critical challenge. He is disinterested in the arguments over reason and responds to the practical philosophy with the comment:

‘[W]hen Kant demolished old and revered errors, and knew the danger of the business, he had only wanted to substitute here and there through moral theology a few weak props, so that the ruin would not fall on top of him, and he would have time to get away’.[xvii]

Instead, Schopenhauer privileges the Transcendental Aesthetic, calling it the diamond in Kant’s crown; the thing-in-itself - Kant’s underlying reality - which he calls will to life; and Ideas, which he calls Platonic, but which are more Kantian than this suggest, since they are rather problematics, abstract diagrams whose solution is materialized through the will. He collapses the elaborate architecture of the Analytic through the Aesthetic, and the conjunction emerges as a single principle of sufficient reason comprising time, space and causality, the three formal elements of the world as representation.  The material element of the will or thing-in-itself is the brain, and its intellectual functions, which structure the world as representation are secondary control and guidance mechanisms. It is this physiological aspect of the will which he chides Kant for neglecting, and which Nietzsche, first as student then as critic of Schopenhauer, develops more fully, taking it further from its Kantian source, and re-formulating critique in terms of the will to  power.

Deleuze’s second book, written in 1962, nine years after a slim volume on Hume, is Nietzsche et la Philosophie. In this book critique is addressed as a problem concerning the quality and relatons of forces: ‘tout le reste est symptôme (everything else is symptom)’.[xviii] The will gives, Deleuze writes: ‘elle n’aspire pas, elle ne recherche pas, elle ne désire pas, surtout elle ne désire pas la puissance. Elle donne (it does not aspire, it does not seek, it does not desire, above all it does not desire power. It gives)’.[xix] The genetic or critical principle of the will gives sense and value - quality - to the relations of forces immanent to the will. It also destroys. Critique becomes something new in Nietzsche, and something which, in conjunction with the typology of forces, turns back on the questions raised by the post-Kantians, with results which would confirm their misgivings about its implicit atheism. The division of the world into the real and the apparent is attacked, the subject becomes an effect of the will, and critique becomes immanent, not to reason, but to the will, a genetic principle which thinks against reason, against itself, against conditioning principles and against the image of thought; against truth, error and method.

The problem of the critical relations of forces, as quantitative degrees of the will to power which effect a particular quality, that quality which is willed, is one which remains with Deleuze throughout his writing, and which finds its consummate destructive force in L’anti-oedipe, the first volume of Capitalisme et Schizophrenie, as the machinic or desiring unconscious, and its most positive and creative expression in the second volume, as the machinic phylum. It is this latter book that Deleuze describes as philosophy, in the traditional sense of the word, as the creation of concepts; which does not interpret, nor call for interpretation, and  which works, without labour, and plays, with all seriousness.

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