by Daniel Smith
First, someone intervenes in our analysis before we even get to the third critique: namely, the Lithuanian-born philosopher Salomon Maimon (1753–1800). Though largely unknown in the English-speaking world, Maimon is a crucial figure in the history of post-Kantianism.12 It was Maimon who posed the essential problems that animated the post-Kant heritage, and he is an important figure in Deleuze's own philosophical development. In 1790—a full year before the publication of the Critique of Judgment—Maimon published a book on Kant's thought entitled Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, whose importance Kant himself recognized (“None of my critics understand me and the main questions as well as Mr. Maimon does”).13 Maimon's primary objection was that Kant had ignored the demands of a genetic method, by which Maimon means two things. One the one hand, Kant simply assumes that there are a priori “facts” of reason (the “fact” of knowledge, or the “fact” of morality) and then seeks the “condition of possibility” of these facts in the transcendental. Against Kant, Maimon argues that it is illegitimate to assume these supposed “facts” of knowledge or morality; instead, one must show how they are engendered immanently from reason alone as the necessary modes of its manifestation. In short, a method of genesis has to replace the Kantian method of conditioning. On the other hand, Maimon says, such a genetic method requires the positing of a principle of difference in order to function: whereas identity is the condition of possibility of thought in general, 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 experience (and not merely the conditions of possible experience), and the positing of a principle of difference as the fulfillment of this condition—reappear in almost every one of Deleuze's books up to Difference and Repetition (1968).
Second, Deleuze presumes that Kant, having read Maimon and declared him to be his most astute reader, effectively tried to respond to him in the Critique of Judgment. The Critique of Judgment is the only one of Kant's critiques to adopt a genetic viewpoint, and not merely the viewpoint of conditioning. This is why Deleuze finds the Critique of Judgment to be such an astounding book, “an unrestrained work of old age, which his successors have still not caught up with: all the mind's faculties overcome their limits, the very limits that Kant had so carefully laid down in the works of his prime” (WP 2). What plays the genetic role in the Critique of Judgment? Unsurprisingly, it is the Ideas of reason. The third critique famously begins with an analysis of aesthetic judgments of taste, in which the imagination as free enters into a spontaneous accord with the understanding as indeterminate—which is what Kant calls the “free play” of the faculties. In a judgment of knowledge (“This is a white lily”), the activity of the imagination (synthesizing and schematizing) is not free, since it is determined in conformity with concepts of the understanding. In an aesthetic judgment (“This white lily is beautiful”), by contrast, the imagination displays its freedom by no longer schematizing, but by reflecting on the form or composition of the object. Since it does not come into being under a determinate concept, this free play cannot be known intellectually, but can only be felt as a pleasure, which we presume can be communicated to others (aesthetic common sense). On the basis of this initial analysis, Kant puts forward the more profound argument that every determinate accord of the faculties—that is, every type of judgment—finds the ground of its possibility in the free and indeterminate accord of the faculties presented in “reflective” judgments (that is, in judgments made without a concept). This is the problem that animates the third critique: if this free accord of the faculties (or “powers” of the mind) grounds every act of judgment, from where does it come? Aesthetic judgment simply posits this free accord, but it does not explain how it is engendered in the subject. This is where the Ideas of reason intervene. If reflective judgments are made without a concept, they always have an operative relationship to Ideas, and the aim of the Critique of Judgment is to analyze the genetic role of four specific Ideas: the sublime, the symbol, genius, and the teleological Idea (purpose in Nature). The first three (aesthetic) moments are particularly illustrative for our purposes.14
In the first moment, Kant turns to the sublime as a model. In the feeling of the sublime, the imagination confronts something immense in nature, something infinite and formless, and it tries to comprehend this immensity in its totality—but it fails, and reaches the limit of its power. But what is it that constrains the imagination in this way? It is only in appearance, Kant tells us, that the sublime is related to sensible nature. In reality, it is nothing other than reason—an Idea of reason—that obliges us to try to unite the infinity of the sensible world into a whole or a totality. Whereas taste entails a relation between the imagination and the understanding, the sublime entails a relation between the imagination and reason. Reason can easily think immense magnitudes, but the imagination can scarcely retain seven or eight parts of a series at a time. Faced with something immense, reason says “Totalize!” and the imagination responds “I can't!” There is a discord between the faculties, a dissension, a pain. Yet at the same time, it gives rise to a pleasure. Just when the imagination thinks it has lost its freedom, through the violence of reason, it discovers its supersensible destination: that is, the fact that it can represent to itself the inaccessibility of a rational Idea—a kind of negative presentation of the Infinite that prepares us for the advent of the moral law. The important point, for Deleuze, is that the sublime is the object of a veritable genesis; it is generated by the conflict of these two faculties in the subject—the imagination and reason—and it is the Idea of reason that lies at the genesis of the feeling of the sublime.
The second moment—symbolization—goes even further, while utilizing the model furnished by the sublime. If I see a flower in front of me, I can make several different types of judgment about it: I can make a judgment of knowledge, using the concepts of the understanding (“This is a white lily”), or I can make a judgment of beauty, in the “free play” of the imagination and the understanding (“This white lily is beautiful”). But reason, looking over the shoulder of both the imagination and the understanding, can make a third type of judgment. It can “symbolize”: that is, it can relate the concepts of color and flower, no longer to the white lily as such, but to something else—to an Idea, for instance, the Idea of pure innocence (“This white lily is a ‘symbol’ of innocence”). In this way we transfer “the reflection upon an object of intuition to quite a new concept, and one with which perhaps no intuition could ever directly correspond.”15 In symbolization, the contents or materials of nature (colors, sounds …), and not merely its forms, overwhelm the determinate concepts of the understanding; they “give food for thought,” much more than is contained in the concept. The concepts of whiteness and lily are here enlarged beyond their usual use, and made to symbolize an Idea (innocence) that, though never given directly, is a reflexive analogue of the whiteness in the lily. In symbolization, in short, the Ideas of reason become the object of an indirect presentation in the free materials of nature.
Symbolization, in turn, provides the key to Kant's “deduction” of aesthetic judgments. It gives us a clue for explaining what the mere “analytic of the beautiful” could not explain—namely, how the imagination became free and the understanding became indeterminate in an aesthetic judgment. Although aesthetic pleasure is disinterested (it is not concerned with the existence of objects), Kant says that it can none the less be united synthetically with an interest of reason. This rational interest bears exclusively on the aptitude that nature possesses to produce beautiful forms that can be reflected in the imagination. This interest does not bear directly upon the beautiful form as such, but on the content used by nature to produce objects capable of being reflected formally. Nature, to be sure, produces both its contents and forms mechanistically, and in an aesthetic judgment, there is no necessary subjection of nature to our feeling of pleasure. None the less, reason itself has a “meta-aesthetic
” interest in the contingent accord of the productions of nature with our aesthetic pleasure.
It is of interest to reason that Ideas should have an objective reality … that nature should at least indicate by a trace or sign that it encloses within itself a principle that allows us to admit a legitimate accord of its productions with our satisfaction.16
This is what appears in symbolization: when the free materials of nature contingently symbolize Ideas of reason, they allow the understanding to expand (its concepts are enlarged) and the imagination to become free (it no longer needs to schematize, under the legislation of the understanding, but becomes capable of reflecting form freely). The accord between imagination as free and the understanding as indeterminate is no longer merely assumed, but is shown to have been engendered by the interest of reason in the contingent accord of nature with our faculties. In Kant's deduction of aesthetic judgments, it is the Ideas of reason—and the interest of reason—that provide the principle of a transcendental genesis of the feeling of the beautiful.
The third moment, finally, complements the second: what symbolization does for the beautiful in nature, the principle of genius does for the beautiful in art. Genius is an innate disposition of a subject by means of which nature creates another nature (art) whose phenomena would be true events of the mind, which likewise “give food for thought” and force one to think. Kant defines genius as the faculty of aesthetic Ideas, but an aesthetic Idea is really the same thing as rational Idea: the former expresses what is inexpressible in the latter, turning a phenomenon of Nature (death, love …) into a spiritual event. Genius is thus close to symbolization (the genius extends the understanding and liberates the imagination), but instead of presenting the Idea indirectly in nature, the genius expresses it secondarily through the creation of a work of art. Kant's theory of genius thus sustains a tenuous equilibrium between a mature classicism and a nascent Romanticism (KCP 57): art is the incarnation of the Idea in the work of art, and the genius is the means by which nature gives to art a synthetic rule and a rich material. The move away from Romanticism in twentieth-century art would entail a break with both these Kantian themes: a de-consecration of the work of art (in favor, for instance, of Duchamp's ready-mades, temporary installations, happenings, improvisations) and a dis-investiture of the powers of the artist (in favor of a dispersal of the artistic act within everyday life).17 Each of these three moments, however, exemplifies the Kantian theme that Ideas of reason can be presented in sensible nature. The sublime is a direct presentation of Ideas, which is produced by projection but remains negative, bearing upon the inaccessibility of the Idea; in symbolization, the presentation is positive but indirect, and is achieved by reflection; in genius or artistic symbolization, the presentation is positive but secondary, and is achieved through the creation of an “other” nature. (A fourth mode, analyzed in the second half of the Critique of Judgment, is teleological: a positive presentation of Ideas, primary and direct, which is produced in nature conceived as a system of ends.)
The first part of the Critique of Judgment thus presents us with three parallel geneses—from the sublime, the genesis of the reason–imagination accord; from the rational interest connected with the beautiful, the genesis of the imagination–understanding accord with regard to the beautiful in nature (symbolization); from genius, the genesis of the imagination–understanding accord with regard to the beautiful in art—all of which have their origin in the theory of Ideas. This is where Deleuze's reading of Kant differs sharply from Heidegger's: the secret of Kant's thought does not lie in the imagination, as Heidegger proposed, since the imagination always points beyond itself toward a theory of Ideas.18 In the first two critiques, the faculties enter into harmonic relations under the regulation of a legislating faculty; but in the third critique, Kant shows that they are capable of entering into free and unregulated exercises, in which each faculty is pushed to its own limit, forming dissonant accords with each other, “a pathos that lets them evolve freely in order to form strange combinations as sources of time” (ECC 34). For Deleuze, it is in the theory of Ideas that the secrets of space, of temporality, of ethics, of sensibility, of thought, are to be found—even in Kant himself.
Third, Deleuze argues that, ultimately, Kant did not go far enough, even in the third critique (though Kant did go so far as to introduce the method of genesis). When Deleuze attempts to develop his own theory of Ideas in Difference and Repetition, he turns, not to Kant—who receives only a couple of pages of analysis at the beginning of the chapter on Ideas—but to Leibniz. In this, he takes his cue from Maimon himself, who argued that Kantianism could only be revised (into a “transcendental empiricism” rather than a “transcendental idealism”) by means of a return to Hume, Leibniz, and Spinoza. In this sense, Maimon functions as a true precursor to Deleuze, who wrote monographs on all three of these thinkers. Deleuze himself is explicit on this point. “Doing this [that is, developing an immanent theory of Ideas] means returning to Leibniz,” he remarked in one his seminars, “but on bases other than Leibniz's. All the elements to create a genesis, as demanded by the post-Kantians, are virtually present in Leibniz” (20 May 1980). This might seem somewhat surprising: Deleuze, the self-proclaimed empiricist, deriving his most important concepts from Leibniz, the arch-rationalist (and who himself never actually proposes a theory of Ideas, in this Kantian sense)? But it is not entirely difficult to see why Deleuze turns to Leibniz. There are two ways of overcoming the concept–intuition duality in Kant: either concepts are sensible things, as in Locke; or sensibility itself is intelligible, as in Leibniz (there are Ideas in sensibility itself). In effect, Deleuze takes this latter path.
Deleuze's readings of Leibniz, not only in The Fold, but even more so in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, are decidedly critical and post-Kantian appropriations of Leibniz. Many, if not most, of the fundamental criteria Deleuze uses to define immanent Ideas are derived from Leibniz, or from the subsequent history of the calculus: differential relations, singular points, ordinary points, fluxes or flows, the virtual, multiplicities or manifolds, and so on, which are themselves subject to a deduction in Deleuze's writings. The differential relation, for instance, is a relation that persists even when the terms of the relation have vanished. It is thus a “pure” relation; it is what Deleuze means by “difference-in-itself.” Moreover, not only is the differential relation external to its terms, but it is also constitutive of its terms. The terms of the relation are completely undetermined (or virtual) until they enter into the differential relation; on their own, these elements remain purely determinable. Once such elements enter a differential relation, in turn, their reciprocal determination determines a singularity, a singular point. Every multiplicity (that is, every thing) is characterized by a combination of singular and ordinary points. In geometry, for instance, a square has four singular points—its corners—which are prolonged in an infinity of ordinary points that connect them. A cube, similarly, has eight singular points. The case of curves is more complicated: the differential relation determines a singular point in a curve, which continues over a series of ordinary points until it reaches another singularity, at which point the curve changes direction—it increases or decreases—and continues along another series of ordinary points, until it reaches another singularity, and so on.
For Deleuze, this is exactly how a life is composed or constructed—from singularity to singularity. The point where someone breaks down in tears or boils over in anger, for example, is a singular point in someone's psychic multiplicity, surrounded by a swarm of ordinary points—just as, in physics, the point where water boils (or freezes) is a singularity within that physical system. The question, What is singular and what is ordinary? is one of the fundamental questions posed by Deleuze's theory of multiplicities or Ideas. An acquaintance suddenly gets cross with me, and his unexpected anger may seem to mark a critical point, a phase transition, a singularity in his psychic being—but then someone leans over to me and whis
pers: “Don't worry, he does that all the time, it's completely ordinary.” When water boils or freezes, it is a phase transition, a singularity, but at the same time, it is a completely ordinary event. One could say that these are the two poles of Deleuze's philosophy: “Everything is ordinary!” and “Everything is singular!”19 Your reading of a book, in the here and now, is a singular moment; but at the same time it is a completely ordinary event. Yet Ideas are marked by a complex temporality: reading the book may be ordinary, yet in retrospect it may appear singular because, perhaps, it changes the way you think, or sparks an unrelated idea in you. We can never know such effects (or “actualizations”) in advance, of course. In effect, Deleuze's theory of Ideas is an attempt to answer Plato's question: what is a thing, what is its essence? His answer, put briefly, is that every thing is a multiplicity, which unfolds and becomes within its own spatio-temporal coordinates (its own “internal metrics”), in perpetual relation with other multiplicities. Deleuze argues that Socrates’ fundamental question “What is …?” set the theory of Ideas on the wrong track from the start, even though it was none the less this very question that opened up the domain of the Idea for philosophy. But the fundamental questions Deleuze links with Ideas are questions such as: How? Where? When? How many? From what viewpoint? and so on—which are no longer questions of essence, in the old sense, but questions of becoming, of the event, of temporality (although Deleuze himself does not hesitate to use the term “essence” in these contexts).20
In a technical sense, what Deleuze gets from Leibniz—following the lead of both Maimon and Kant's Critique of Judgment—is a purely immanent determination of Ideas (whereas in Kant, two of the three components of Ideas are defined extrinsically). First, the elements of an Idea are completely undetermined (or virtual); second, these elements are none the less determinable reciprocally in a differential relation (dx/dy); and third, to this reciprocal determination there corresponds the complete determination of a set of singularities (values of dx/dy), which defines a multiplicity (along with their prolongation in a series of ordinary points). It is these three coexistent moments—the undetermined, the determinable, and the determined—that give Ideas their genetic power.
