i is for idea maimon, kant, and deleuze’s ontology of difference

8/13/2019 I is for Idea Maimon, Kant, and Deleuzes ontology of difference

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I is for Idea: Maimon, Kant, and Deleuzes ontology of difference

Beth Lord [email protected]

Draft conference paper. Please do not cite or circulate without authors permission.

In chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition , Deleuze says that the fundamental

reformulation of Kants Critique, and the overcoming of the Kantian duality

between concept and intuition, are accomplished by the post-Kantian philosopher

Solomon Maimon. 1 In order to understand Deleuzes complex relation to Kant, we

must look at how Deleuze draws on Maimon. I will argue that Deleuzes

transcendental empiricism, in attempting to overcome the failure of transcendental

idealism to account for the genesis of beings, draws extensively on Maimon.

However, Deleuze finds insufficient resources in Maimon to account for the

generation of beings from difference . Curiously, it is in Kant that Deleuze finds these

resources, and finds a source for an ontology of difference.

Maimon was an outsider to Enlightenment circles, a self-taught philosopher

without academic or social credentials. An eastern European Jew from an

impoverished background, he read Spinoza, Hume, and Kant, and, against enormous

odds, became a respected contributor to philosophical debates. His major work, the

Versuch ber Transcendentalphilosophie , he sent to Kant in 1789, whereupon Kant

declared that Maimon was his best and most profound critic. Maimons Versuch is a

long and obscure criticism of Kants Critique of Pure Reason . Among other things,

Maimon argues that given Kants strict separation of understanding from sensibility,

the conceptual products of understanding cannot be directly applied to passively

received intuitions. The understanding, trapped amongst its concepts, accesses only

the object in general which it itself constructs, while the material that is given to


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intuition is produced mysteriously. So on Kants account, there are two forces

producing being one stemming from understanding, the other mysteriously

emanating from nature that can find no way of meeting. Maimon concludes that a

Kantian cannot account for real being. The only solution, on Maimons view, is to

merge these two streams of production, such that the productivity of understanding is

identical with the productivity of the given. In other words, given objects are not just

received by the subject, but actively produced by it.

Maimon is an idealist in a much stronger sense than Kant is. But Maimon also

claims to be a transcendental philosopher in a stronger sense than Kant, because of his

concern to go beyond conditions of possible experience to get at the conditions of

the being of intuitions. Maimon finds these conditions in the human understanding,

which he takes to be a finite mode of an infinite understanding. Briefly, Maimon

accounts for the generation of objects of intuition by positing that the infinite

understanding contains rules for the generation of qualities. These rules are

differentials: the relations of difference that a specific qualitative tendency has to all

the others. So the rule for producing this specific redness is its differential relation

to every other quality. The finite understanding integrates, or generates, qualities

from differentials, not as objects, but as intensities that exist as ideas of

understanding. That is, ideas of understanding are spun out from differentials, as

infinitely flowing intensities that cannot be experienced or conceptually thought. It is

up to the imagination to delimit and fix these intensities, and to represent them in

sensibility. In sensibility we have a partial view of the intensities of the idea, of which

sensible intuitions are contractions. This is how sensible intuitions are generated

from differentials. Maimon accuses Kant of ignoring the question of the generation of

the sensible, and looking only at how sensible objects can be related to concepts that


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are entirely external to them. Where Kant accounts only for what can be represented

in the sensible, Maimon accounts for the being of the sensible. 2

Deleuzes transcendental empiricism draws on Maimons genetic account of

being. Like Maimon, Deleuze holds that if transcendental philosophy concerns itself

with the conditions of possible experience, it remains on the level of conceptual

representation and does not reach real being. Kant cuts his investigations off from the

conditions of being, since those conditions are not objects of possible experience. In

seeking the real being that gives rise to experience, Deleuze wants to recover a

noumenon that does not have an external, transcendent relation to phenomena. He

seeks the noumenon closest to the phenomenon which is internal to it and produces

it immanently. 3 This is not the indeterminate thought of an intelligible ground, but the

being of the sensible which can only be sensed. The distinction between the sensible

and that which can only be sensed is between the recognizable given, and something

that can only be encountered, that by which the given is given. 4 This transcendental

condition is insensible in terms of representation, and unthinkable in terms of

concepts, but it is internal to thought and must be thought.

The question of the genesis of the given is closely related to the question of its

determination. For Kant, determination takes place externally to the given, between

the concepts of understanding and the object of intuition. External determination

yields objects in general that differ in degree, the mass of possible experience.

Deleuze, like Maimon, wants to find the internally -determining conditions that

produce real experience (i.e. encounters that differ in kind). Deleuzes transcendental

empiricism looks into the depth, interior, or being of experience. Transcendental

empiricism is not concerned with the empirically real, but with the real immanent to

the empirical; it is not concerned with the transcendentally ideal, but with what is


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transcendental in the Idea. The real transcendental conditions of the given are in the

Idea.

Kant, too, locates the conditions of the given in ideas: the ideas of soul,

cosmos and God are conditions that cannot be experienced, but force themselves upon

our thought. But Kants ideas are legitimately conceived only as the conditions of our

thinking of the genesis of being, insofar as they regulate conceptual thinking, not as its

real conditions. Kants transcendental ideas are important but frustrating for Deleuze:

they are undetermined problems concerning the genesis of being, but they are

solved only in relation to representations and concepts. The constitutive power of

the idea to determine and even generate being is distrusted and suppressed, leaving it

only a regulative power to determine thinking. The model for an idea with genetic

power, Deleuze finds in Maimon.

Deleuze follows Maimon in arguing that the being of the sensible is in the

Idea, and that intuition is produced from differentials. Chapter 4 of Difference and

Repetition is, broadly, a Maimonian theory of onto-hetero-genesis, 5 in which a basic

distinction is posited between productivity from differences in kind in the Idea, and

produced, sensible things that differ in degree. But these realms are not external to

one another: virtual differential productivity is immanent to its actual product, and the

sensible is the surface contraction of the flows and intensities of the idea. Deleuzes

Idea is far more Maimonian than it is Kantian: it is an unfinished, unfixed process

of actualizing and expressing the differential relations that constitute it.

Deleuze draws on Maimon in his criticism of Kants account of determination.

For Kant, the determinant concept is applied to the determinable given from the

outside, such that the transcendental moment is one of conditioning rather than

genesis. The question of the internal constructability of the given is suppressed in his


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focus on the surface construction of the object of experience. For Kant, therefore,

difference is spoken of only in terms of this surface: the object in general is a

blanket identity that is the basis for mere empirical diversity. For Maimon, on the

other hand, determination is between determinant and determinable elements in the

idea. The relation is not one of conditioning the intuition with a concept, but of

generating the object from within. Determination is conceived not in terms of a one-

way conditioning from the outside, but as reciprocal determination within the idea. 6

For Maimon, determination takes place within the idea, according to

reciprocal determination rather than negative determination. 7 For Maimon, a real

object is determined by its differential positively generating its predicates. The

predicates of a thing are new, and different in kind from others, because they are

generated specifically with it. There is no sum-total of pre-existing possible predicates

(greenness, blueness, etc) that a red thing is negatively determined to be. Instead, a

red thing is reciprocally determined to be this instance of red: its differential

determines its relation to all other qualities, and at the same time gains its own

determination from its relation to all other qualities. This is what Deleuze, following

Martial Gueroult, calls reciprocal determination as the reason for the emergence of

qualities. When the differential is thought through all its relations of difference, both

sides become determined: the differential becomes a determinate instance of redness,

and all reality becomes more determined in its differential relations to that redness.

This basic structure of the Idea Deleuze adapts from Maimon. Ideas appear

[as ] a system of differential relations between reciprocally determined genetic

elements. 8 The Idea produces determinate objects from differences, because of an

ideal synthesis of differentials that gives determination to intensities and to the whole

of the virtual. But Deleuze finds Maimon lacking in an important respect. For


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Maimon, the differential is a fixed relation between qualities. For Deleuze, the

differential relation varies, so that what is integrated from it is not a fixed quality, but

rather the qualitys continuous multiplicity . Maimons differential is a rule for

producing a fixed quality of variable size, but the rule itself does not vary. In this,

Deleuze suggests, Maimon makes the same mistake as Leibniz: he fixes the

differential relation such that it corresponds to the discrete multiplicity of a self-

identical quality. 9 Deleuze sees this as a kind of atomism in which the differential is a

fixed essence that resembles the objects generated from it. For Deleuze, the

differential is not a fixed formula that produces a number of shades of red, but pure

and varying difference from which flows a continuity of reds that cannot be divided

into identifiable elements.

So, even Maimon retains the image of thought through which the production

of reality is taken to rest on the resemblance of the actual to the possible. Maimon

ultimately grounds differential production in the identity of rules and qualities.

Surprisingly, Deleuze finds a more profound thinking of difference in Kant. He refers

to a precise moment within Kantianism, a furtive and explosive moment which is not

even continued by Kant, much less by post-Kantianism. 10 The moment in question is

one that makes the spontaneous self an other to itself in section 25 of the

Transcendental Deduction (B). 11 Kants thinking of the determination of the I is

crucial for Deleuzes ontology of difference in the Idea.

Briefly, the I think, in determining its own being, cannot determine its own

thinking activity, which can only be represented to it as an other. A gap therefore

opens within the self, between its being and its thinking, or between the I am and

the I think. While my existence is already given with the I think that determines

it, my existence cannot be immediately determined. For the mode in which I am to


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determine my existence that is, the manifold to be combined by the I think is not

immediately given. It must be intuited in time, which makes my indeterminate

existence determinable. But the I think thereby determines something different from

itself: it determines its existence as it is given in time . Thus I cannot determine my

existence as that of a self-active being; all that I can do is to represent to myself the

spontaneity of my thought, that is, of the determination. 12

The I think, in the act of determining its existence, prevents the

determination of its own activity. The determination of my existence is a movement

of self-differing. Determination is not here a matter of subsuming some given being in

general under an external concept that would determine it as my being, but of

producing my being by internally differentiating it from my thinking. This is a

moment of Maimonian onto-hetero-genesis: the I think generates itself from its own

differential relation to itself. The difference means there is no possibility of

adequately thinking my spontaneity; it can only be represented insofar as receptivity

experiences the spontaneity of my thought being exercised upon it, as if from outside

it. The self cannot enact or be its own thinking activity. For this reason, Deleuze

characterizes this moment with Rimbauds phrase I is an other. 13 Here, Deleuze

finds, Kant adopts transcendental empiricism and discovers the pure difference

internal to the relation of determination.

It amounts to the discovery of Difference no longer in the form of an

empirical difference between two determinations, but in the form of a

transcendental Difference between the Determination as such as what

it determines; no longer in the form of an external difference which

separates, but in the form of an internal Difference which establishes

an a priori relation between thought and being.14


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Kants fractured I has three moments of determinable being, determinant

thinking, and time as the form of determination. This is important for Deleuze for

several reasons. It indicates the priority of time as a genetic condition for experience;

it indicates that the self is generated from its own differential; and it grounds

determination in an original difference of being and thinking. These factors make

Kants fractured I the prototype of Deleuzes Idea, with the same problematic unity.

The Idea performs like the I in that in determining its own being, its own activity

must remain undetermined. As the Idea determines its actual solutions in the realm of

the sensible, its virtual object, the problem, must be represented without being able

to be directly determined. 15 The problem becomes determined by analogy with the

objects of experience it relates to. So the Idea is its differing from itself. It produces

itself as the determinate solutions (singularities and events) that make its problematic

being fundamentally undeterminable and thinkable only in terms of representation. As

a result, problems can indeed be represented in terms of experience and concepts, but

their true being cannot be thought in this way. The true, problematic being of the Idea

is fundamentally undetermined and unrepresentable. It is the being of the sensible

that can only be sensed; the unthinkable that must be thought. Kants passive self

receives the activity of [its] own thought as an other, and Deleuzes actualized Idea

receives the activity of the problem as an other; this powerful other must be sensed

and must be thought. 16

Kants fractured I is therefore closely bound up with the discovery of the

problematic and the Idea. Structurally, the Idea repeats its relation of determination

and the difference internal to being and thought. Ideas are exactly the thoughts of the

fractured Cogito 17 because they enact the activity of thinking determining its own

being as the unfolding of time. Time is not simply the form of intuition, or the form of


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actualized solutions, but the form of the determinability of being by thought. For

Kant, it is the form internal to the I that continually produces the I as differing from

itself. For Deleuze, time is internal to the Idea: its unfolding is the activity of the Idea

determining itself and preserving its own indeterminacy. It is not that thinking

determines being in time as a container. Rather, time is the difference internal to the

fractured I and the Idea: thought determining being is the unfolding of time and the

operation of difference. This indicates an original and irreducible relation that does

not merely condition but generates experience: the relation of the difference of

thinking and being that can be formulated thinking-time-being or determinant-

determinable-undetermined. Ideas contain [these] dismembered moments as an

internal problematic objective unity. 18

The thinking and being that we speak of here does not refer to a determinative

judgment between a concept and an actual being, but to an ontological relation that

forms the internal structure of Kants transcendental unity of apperception, and of

Deleuzes virtual, pre-individual Idea. This is the original relation of the

determination and genesis of the actual. It is the relation of being and thinking

differentiated by time. Deleuze thinks that Kant is mistaken to locate this differential

relation in a subject, for this difference and its generative power too easily become

covered over. The fracture in the I is quickly filled by a new form of identity and an

external difference between spontaneity and receptivity. 19 Kant is too empirical in

holding thinking and being in external opposition, whereas the post-Kantians are too

dogmatic in filling the gap between them. But in this moment of the Transcendental

Deduction, Kant discovers pure difference. For a brief moment we enter into that

schizophrenia in principle which characterises the highest power of thought, and


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opens Being directly onto difference, despite all the mediations, all the

reconciliations, of the concept. 20

The fractured, self-differing I is therefore the essence of Kants Copernican

revolution and constitutes the discovery of the transcendental. 21 Kant discovers the

genetic conditions of real experience in the pure difference of being and thinking.

Without the difference of being and thinking internal to the fractured I, experience

and determination are inevitably founded in identity: the identity of a finite or infinite

self for whom there is no being that cannot be thought . In this kind of system, actual

experience will be nothing more than a copy of a possible reality determined in

advance. This is ultimately the problem with Maimon. Where experience is grounded

in the difference between being and thinking, however (in Kants fractured I, in

Deleuzes Idea, or paradigmatically, in Spinozas substance), the sensible is

determined as it is generated . Differentials produce experience as surprising and

unforeseeable, the encounters that shock us into thinking.

1 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition , trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994), 173. HereafterDR.2 DR 56-7.3 DR 222.4 DR 139-40.5 Miguel de Beistegui, Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology (Indianapolis: IndianaUniversity Press, 2004).6 DR 173.7 Martial Guroult, La philosophie transcendentale de Salomon Maimon (Paris: Librairie Flix Alcan,1929), 54, 76.8 DR 173-4.9 DR 172.10 DR 58.11 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929),B157-9. Hereafter CPR.12 CPR B158n..13 Gilles Deleuze, Kants Critical Philosophy , trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam(London: Athlone, 1995) viii.14 DR 86.15 DR 169.16 Gilles Deleuze, On Four Poetic Formulas that might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy, EssaysCritical and Clinical , trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Grew (London: Verso, 1998), 30; DR199-200.


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17 DR 169.18 DR 170.19 DR 87.20 DR 58.21 DR 86.

i is for idea maimon, kant, and deleuze’s ontology of difference

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