Date: Thu, 30 Apr 1998 10:32:12 -0700 (PDT)
From: Alexander Glage <glage-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Deleuze and Phenomenology






Thanks for the references, Paul!  I'm very much looking forward to
reading up on thinkers from what you (aptly, I think) termed the
"premodern black hole."  Too many of us leap from ancient Greece to
the Enlightenment, knowing far too little of the centuries in between.

However, I feel your reduction of Kant's work to some outlandish
idealism to be not only inadequate, but very un-rigorous in itself:

> Kant is the master demon of modern idealism/phenomenology by making
the mind
> know only the products of its own making and in not recognising the
> existence of something that is not changed by thinking about it. 

I defy you to produce a single line in Kant where he makes so
ridiculous a claim.  Kant never made the argument, that is so commonly
and foolishly attributed to him today, that the mind can know ONLY
what it "makes" (as you have suggested), as though we were all born
with an innate view of the world and just went around projecting it
onto things.  That would be a highly preposterous claim, and Kant was
a little too smart to make it.  

As any careful reading of Kant will show, Kant was concerned to
demonstrate the mental preconditions, or "conditions of possibility,"
which MUST be in place in order for ANY conscious experience to occur
at all.  And so, to take the barest of all Kant's claims, the mental
operation of "synthesis," which he defines very simply as the act of
putting together different representations (vorstellungen), is not
only a fundamental feat of cognition, it is, according to Kant, a
condition of consciousness itself.  Bergson was perhaps the one
philosopher who really followed this idea to its fullest implications,
with his notion of duration (which I think is implicit in Kant's
argument that time is the "form" of inner sense).  That is, in order
for me to think, to know, even to be conscious at all, my mind MUST
always already be synthesizing: synthesizing the immediate past with
the present, synthesizing different kinds of perception--in a word,
producing some kind of "unity" within experience.  Without that unity,
without those syntheses, that is, without any form of retention or
memory (i.e., without any ability to recall that what I am looking at
now is the same object I was looking at a second ago), I cannot be
capable of conscious experience (since conscious experience
presupposes duration, or at least a trace of continuity).  I think
Kant (and, following him, Bergson) is pretty much right on this
point--but more importantly, we must recognize that this has NOTHING
to do with some absurd idealism which would have the subject creating
the world ex-nihilo, as Paul seems to argue.  Kant was, to be sure,
concerned to give a picture of what the mind does "a priori," but
these are usually what he would call "formal" descriptions, that is,
descriptions of the most fundamental and basic and, indeed, necessary
structures of consciousness.  And here I am just following Henry
Allison, who insists that the term "a priori" is just Kant's clumsy
way of describing something which "must be the case" in order for
something else (say, knowledge, thought, consciousness) to exist.  The
mental operations which Kant was writing about in the first half of
the first Critique are for the most part "passive," that is, we have
no authority over them.  They take place regardless of our will.  They
are, to be sure, "passive syntheses," and as such they "precede" or
"make possible" conscious experience as we know it.  Does this mean
that we are unaffected by the world?  That we just go around
"creating" it from the depths of our minds?  Certainly not.  That
would be a very un-rigorous reading.

Some may argue that Kant is not as rigorous as Deleuze, but he at
least deserves the respect of a careful reading.  He is deservedly a
monument of philosophy, and should not be so casually turned into a
straw target of idealist nonsense.  And in fact, I would recommend to
Paul not only that he go back and reread Kant, but also go take a look
at Deleuze's short work on Kant, where he writes the following:

"It would seem that the problem of a subjection of the object could be
easily resolved by a subjective idealism.  But no solution could be
further from Kantianism.  Empirical Realism is a constant feature of
the critical philosophy.  Phenomena are not appearances, but no more
are they products of our activity.  They affect us in so far as we are
passive and receptive subjects.  They can be subject to us, precisely
because they are not things in themselves."

As any good reading of Kant would yield, and as Deleuze here points
out, for Kant the relation between subject and object is by no means
unilateral in either direciton.  There is clearly a rich
back-and-forth movement, which excludes the possibility of an absolute
idealism (as Paul seems to see it).

Alexander Glage
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