by Daniel Smith
Second, from the viewpoint of immanence, Maimon's primary objection to Kant was that he had ignored the demands of a genetic method. This means two things. Kant assumes that there are a priori “facts” of reason (the “fact” of knowledge in the first Critique, and the “fact” of morality in the second Critique) and simply seeks the “condition of possibility” of these facts in the transcendental—a vicious circle that makes the condition (the possible) refer to the conditioned (the real) while reproducing its image. Maimon argues that Kant cannot simply assume these facts, but has to show that they can be deduced or engendered immanently from reason alone as the necessary modes of its manifestation. The critical philosophy cannot be content with a method of conditioning, but must be transformed into a method of genesis. An important consequence follows from this. Maimon argues that even if the categories, in Kant, are applicable to possible experience, they can never specify what objects they apply to in real experience. Causality may be a necessary concept for any possible experience, for example, but the concept itself gives us no means of distinguishing, within real experience, between what are necessary and universal connections and what are merely contingent constant conjunctions. Hume's skepticism remains unanswered, and Kant's famous duality between concept and intuition remains unbridgeable. Maimon was the first to say that this duality could only be overcome through the formulation of a principle of difference: whereas identity is the condition of possibility of thought in general, he argued, it is difference that constitutes the genetic condition of real thought.
These two exigencies laid down by Maimon—the search for the genetic elements of real thought (and not merely the conditions of possible thought), and the positing of a principle of difference as the fulfillment of this condition—reappear like a leitmotif in almost every one of Deleuze's books up through 1969, even if Maimon's name is not always explicitly mentioned. (Indeed, these are the two primary components of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism).24 The post-Kantian philosophers, starting with Fichte, had themselves taken up Maimon's challenge, but in some fashion each of them still subordinated the principle of difference to the principle of identity. In Fichte, for example, identity is posited as the property of the thinking subject, with difference appearing only as an extrinsic limitation imposed from without (the non-self). Hegel, against Fichte, attempted to give a certain autonomy to the principle of difference by placing difference and identity in dialectical opposition; but even in Hegel, contradiction always resolves itself, and in resolving itself, it resolves difference by relating it to a ground. (This is the movement one finds in Hegel's Logic: identity, difference, differentiation, opposition, contradiction, ground.)25 Deleuze returns to Maimon, it seems, in order to take up the option that was not pursued as such by post-Kantian philosophy (though its closest precursor is no doubt Schelling). In Deleuze, the principle of “difference-in-itself” is made to function as the genetic element of real experience; difference is the principle from which all other relations (identity, analogy, resemblance, opposition, contradiction, negation) are derived.26
Third, in pursuing these immanent aims, Maimon produced a revised transcendental philosophy of his own which he described as a Koalitionssystem, a “coalition system” that reached back to the pre-Kantians and incorporated elements of Hume, Spinoza, and Leibniz: a Kantian philosophy that begins with Humean skepticism and winds up with the rationalism of Leibniz and Spinoza.27 In this sense, Maimon functions as a true precursor to Deleuze, who himself—not coincidentally—made use of Hume, Spinoza, and Leibniz in formulating his own coalition system. (Even in The Fold, a late work, several aspects of Deleuze's reading of Leibniz are explicitly derived from Maimon.)28 But Deleuze does more than simply adopt Maimon's pre-Kantian trio. Perhaps more importantly, in his early work, Deleuze begins to trace out an alternate post-Kantian tradition that will ultimately link up Maimon with later philosophers such as Nietzsche and Bergson, thereby constructing, as it were, his own subterranean or “minor” post-Kantian tradition. For the post-Kantian tradition of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, in other words, Deleuze will substitute his own trio of Maimon, Nietzsche, and Bergson.
This is the reason that Deleuze's writings on Bergson and Nietzsche are infused with Maimonian themes, even if they are not always explicitly identified as such.29 Consider, for example, the following text from Nietzsche and Philosophy.30 Deleuze notes that it was the post-Kantians who “demanded a principle which was not merely conditioning in relation to objects, but which was also truly genetic and productive (a principle of internal difference or determination).” That is a statement of Maimon's critiques, though Maimon's name only appears in the footnote. “If Nietzsche belongs to the history of Kantianism,” Deleuze continues, “it is because of the original way he deals with these post-Kantian [i.e., Maimonian] demands.” How does Nietzsche satisfy these demands? On the one hand, Nietzsche, using his own “genealogical” method, was able to give a genetic account of knowledge and morality that was missing in Kant: not a critique of false knowledge or false morality, but a critique of true knowledge and true morality, and indeed of the value of truth itself.31 On the other hand, the genealogical method itself led Nietzsche back to a principle of difference as the condition of the real: that is, the difference between active and reactive modes of existence that serve as the principle of all value. “Nietzsche,” Deleuze concludes, “seems to have sought a radical transformation of Kantianism, a re-invention of the critique which Kant betrayed at the same time as he conceived it.” The central theme of Nietzsche and Philosophy is that Nietzsche was the first philosopher to have truly managed to fulfill Maimon's post-Kantian demands. (The central chapter of the book is entitled, precisely, “Critique.”) Nietzsche and Philosophy, in other words, wears its anti-Hegelianism on its sleeve, but its more profound theses are derived from Maimon and are aimed at a wholesale revision of the post-Kantian tradition. It is not difficult to trace out the same Maimonian influences in Deleuze's work on Bergson.32
HEGEL AND THE DIALECTIC
Maimon, in short, influenced the early Deleuze in at least these three areas: the adherence to the position of immanence; the posing of the problem of the genetic method and the principle of difference; and the construction of a coalition system integrating elements of Hume, Spinoza, and Leibniz. These themes provide an important context in which to place—and to assess—Deleuze's relation to Hegel and the post-Kantian tradition. Certain commentators have contended that the portrait of Hegel presented in Nietzsche and Philosophy is simplistic, and to a certain degree this is no doubt true.33 But if Deleuze never wrote directly on Hegel, and if his characterizations of Hegel are largely made in passing, it is because these criticisms were relevant only in relation to Deleuze's larger project, which was primarily indexed on Kant, and not Hegel (transcendental empiricism). From this viewpoint, Deleuze's persistent criticism is that Hegel provides an inadequate solution to Maimon's primary post-Kantian problematic: the search for the conditions of real experience and not merely possible experience.
Put schematically, Deleuze's critiques are directed against several essential components of the Hegelian dialectic. First, Hegel's dialectic begins with concepts as generalities, “in this type of dialectical method, one begins with concepts that, like baggy clothes, are much too big: the One in general, the multiple in general, nonbeing in general … In such cases, the real is recomposed with abstractions” and generalities (B 44). Second, in order to compensate for the generality of the concept, Hegel appeals to a method of contradiction. But “of what use is a dialectic that believes itself to be reunited with the real, when it compensates for the inadequacy of a concept that is too broad by invoking the opposite concept, which is no less broad and general?” (B 44). The analytic of concepts developed in What is Philosophy? should be assessed in light of this critique. Finally, the movement of contradiction is driven by means of the labor of the negative; in Hegel, the sign of difference is “not-X.” The principle of identity “X is X”
can be reformulated as “X is not not-X,” which means that a thing includes in its being the non-being that it is not; the being of a thing is inseparable from the negation of the negation (is not … not) (14 Mar 1978). Summarizing these critiques, Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition that the “objection to Hegel is that he does not go beyond false movement—in other words, the abstract logical movement of ‘mediation’” (DR 8).
However, these explicit criticisms of Hegel—against contradiction, against negation, against mediation—find their force and validity only in the alternate vision of “dialectics” that Deleuze himself provides. True to his conception of philosophy as the creation of concepts, Difference and Repetition (particularly in its fifth chapter, “Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference”) attempts to develop a new concept of dialectics, which is more or less synonymous with the concept of “problematics”: dialectics is the art of posing or constructing problems, expressed in the form of Ideas (which Deleuze, like Kant, distinguishes from concepts). Indeed, according to Deleuze's biographer, François Dosse, Difference and Repetition was originally intended to be a thesis on “the Idea of the problem.”34 In this manner, Deleuze places himself squarely within the heritage of his so-called “enemies”—the great philosophers of dialectics: Plato and Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel—and develops his concept of dialectics through them, but also beyond them.
Aristotle, for instance, defined dialectics as the art of posing problems as the subject of a syllogism, while analytics gives us the means of resolving the problem by leading the syllogism to its necessary conclusion. But Aristotle was content to derive his problems from the propositions of common sense (for instance, “Is rational animal the definition of man or not?”), and to assess their legitimacy by considering “the opinions accepted by … the majority” in order to relate problems to general points of view, which thereby form the places (the topoi) that allow problems “to be established or refuted in discussion.”35 (In its most simplistic form, this is the kind of dialectics of opinion one finds on TV news shows, where the representatives of opposing viewpoints or propositions argue out their respective pro-and-con positions.) For Deleuze, this is a fundamental perversion of dialectics.
Whenever the dialectic “forgets” its intimate relation with Ideas in the form of problems [he writes] it loses its true power and falls under the sway of the power of the negative, necessarily substituting for the ideal objectivity of the problematic a simple confrontation between opposing, contrary, or contradictory propositions. This long perversion begins with the dialectic itself [that is, with Plato], and attains its extreme form in Hegelianism. (DR 164)
Plato, for his part, recognized the profound link between Ideas and problems; but if he posited Ideas as transcendent essences, it was because he saw them as responses to a particular problem, or rather, a particular form of question: namely, the question “What is …?” Kant's genius, in the “Transcendental Dialectic,” was to assign a new status to Ideas: lacking any determinate object, he argued, Ideas are necessarily “problematic,” which means that the true object of an Idea is the problem as such.36 Kant, however, was still willing to preserve the transcendent status of Ideas as “foci” or “horizons” that transcend any possible experience, and it was on this point that Maimon proposed his fundamental inversion of Kant. Maimon insisted that Ideas are immanent to experience: that is, they are present in sensible nature and can be comprehended by the understanding. It is this immanent conception of dialectics that Deleuze attempts to push to its limit in Difference and Repetition. “Problems do not exist only in our heads,” he writes, “but occur here and there in the production of an actual historical world” (DR 190). For this reason, a purely immanent dialectic must be derived from questions such as Who?, Where?, When?, How?, How much?, How many?, In which cases?—which are no longer questions of essence, but rather “those of the accident, of the event, of multiplicity—of difference” (DR 188).
This, then, is the context in which Deleuze's relation to Hegel should be understood. Deleuze is certainly not anti-dialectical, since he explicitly places himself in a long tradition of dialectical thought. At one level, he is not entirely anti-Hegelian, in so far as he is attempting to work out and respond to a similar set of post-Kantian problems; but at another level, he is anti-Hegelian in that he pursues these problems in a different manner than Hegel. In this sense, the Deleuze–Hegel relation needs to be assessed less in terms of Deleuze's explicit comments “against” Hegel than in terms of the alternate conception of dialectics he develops throughout his œuvre: a dialectic in which an affirmative conception of the “problematic” is substituted for the “labor of the negative,” and a principle of difference is substituted for the movement of contradiction.
ESSAY 5
Pre- and Post-Kantianism
Logic and Existence: Deleuze on the Conditions of the Real
H
ere is a philosophical problem that lies at the core of Deleuze's interest in the rationalists, and particularly Leibniz.1 By itself, thought has no means of distinguishing between the possible and the real. I can have a concept of 100 dollars in my mind, and while it may be important to me practically whether or not I actually have 100 dollars in my pocket, the existence of 100 dollars in reality changes nothing from the point of view of the concept: that is, from the viewpoint of pure thought. The position of the real is outside the concept; the existing thing is external to the concept. (This was Kant's argument against the ontological argument: existence is not a predicate; from the viewpoint of the concept, an existing God is no more perfect than a non-existing God.) Even though I know that unicorns do not exist, I can still form a concept or a representation of a unicorn, or define the essence of a unicorn.
For Deleuze, this is one of the fundamental problems of a theory of thought: How can thought leave this meager sphere of the possible in order to think the real: that is, to think existence itself, to think existing things. Pre-Kantians like Leibniz approached this problem in terms of the distinction between truths of essence (“A triangle has three sides”) and truths of existence (“Caesar crossed the Rubicon”), while post-Kantians like Maimon approached the problem in terms of the distinction between the conditions of possible experience and the conditions of real experience. I would like to approach this logical problem from a semi-cinematic perspective. “Theoretically,” Deleuze once mused, “Jean-Luc Godard would be capable of filming Kant's Critique or Spinoza's Ethics” (DI 141). In the 1990s, Godard did a multi-part film entitled Histoire(s) du cinéma; following Deleuze's suggestion, I am imagining Godard undertaking a similar project entitled Histoire(s) de la philosophie. I have no idea, of course, what Godard might have done in such a film, but none the less I am presenting the first part of this essay as a possible scenario for a single sequence of that multi-part film, which has as its title Logic and Existence, which I am borrowing from a well-known book by Jean Hyppolite.2
Here's the first shot: a radiant sphere hovering in the middle of nowhere. Nothing is written on it, but we know it is the sphere of logic. The film begins here for an obvious reason: if thought, on its own, is only capable of thinking the possible, it does so on the basis of what can be called logical principles. Classical logic famously identified three such principles. These are the principle of identity (which says that “A is A,” or “A thing is what it is”), and then two smaller principles which seem to be specifications of the principle of identity: the principle of non-contradiction (which says that “A is not non-A,” or “A thing is not what it is not”) and the principle of the excluded middle (which says “either A or not-A,” that is, between A or not-A, there is no middle term). Taken together, these three principles determine what is impossible—that is to say, what is unthinkable without contradiction: something that would not be what it is (which would contradict the principle of identity); something that would be what it is not (which would contradict the principle of non-contradiction); and something that would be both what it is an
d what it is not (which would contradict the principle of the excluded middle). This sphere of logic would seem to enclose us within the domain of the possible, or what classical philosophy called the domain of essences. But this opening shot sets up the problem with a visual image: Is there any way in which these three classical principles can be used to exit the sphere of logic and penetrate existence itself?
The response to this question will take us through three scenes, which correspond to three broad sequences in the history of philosophy, three attempts to resolve this problem using one of these logical principles. Scene one focuses on the pre-Kantians, the rationalists; its star is Leibniz, since it was he who attempted to extend the principle of identity to the whole of existence. Scene two focuses on the post-Kantians, primarily the German Idealists; its story culminates in Hegel, since it was he who attempted to extend the principle of non-contradiction to the whole of existence. Scene three, finally, looks at that loosely related group of thinkers that often tend to be called, precisely, “existentialists,” since it is they who attempted to extend the principle of the excluded middle to existence. The screenplay reaches its climax with Deleuze: at the end, it briefly examines the reasons why Deleuze is at once fascinated with all three of these philosophical attempts to “think existence,” but none the less thinks they fail, and why he ultimately charts out his own response to the problem. The ending, alas, is somewhat truncated, since the production went over budget, which meant that entire scenes wound up being consigned to the editing room floor.
