Date: Thu, 30 Apr 1998 20:35:40 -0700 (PDT)
From: Alexander Glage <glage-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Deleuze and Phenomenology




First let me apologize if my last post seemed a little bitchy--I
certainly didn't mean it to be, even though I do tend to get pretty
perturbed at any hint of straw-targeting (to me it's one of the worst
sins a scholar can be guilty of).  

Having said that, however, I still hold to my original dissatisfaction
with Paul's first response to me: he did in fact write that for Kant
"the mind know[s] only the products of its own making"--this is a
classic description of a solipsism that very few people in the whole
history of the West have ever held, and one that I insist Kant was not
guilty of.  

Having reiterated that, and in order to expand a little on why I think
Paul hasn't successfully answered me, let me take Paul's responses to
me one by one:

Paul writes that Kant doesn't deny the existence of an external
environment, but does "assume that it's impossible to know anything
about it.  We know only our ideas which are like an iron curtain."  He
reemphasizes this point by claiming that the "sphere of
representation" in Kant "is dilated to the size of the manifest
universe."  Thus, according to Paul's reading, there is nothing beyond
representation for Kant--nothing, at least, that can in any way affect
us (if this is not what Paul meant--and to be perfectly honest I think
it can't be--then I need some more clarification).  Paul goes on to
say that Kant's subject presents a "closed subjectivity in which any
reality exterior to thought is progressively exorcised."

Now, in a sense, the problem with Paul's reading of Kant as he
presents it here is that he (Paul) doesn't finish any of his
sentences.  That is, he never tells us from *where* Kant is supposedly
banishing the unknowable, unrepresentable world.  

For example, Paul writes that "We know only our ideas which are like
an iron curtain."  But an iron curtain around what?  Around the mind? 
Well, if that's what Paul means, then in one very banal (and even
tautological) sense he's right: We cannot possibly KNOW something
which exceeds our representations: if you have NO ideas or
representations for/of something, then how can you possibly claim to
"know" it?  Unless Paul is employing some radically new definition of
the word "knowledge," I don't see how we can ever KNOW something other
than what we have ideas for.  (Isn't having an idea precisely what we
call knowledge?)  So in that (obvious) sense, Paul's claim sounds
about right: but then, I don't see how that can possibly be construed
as a critique of Kant.  

Now, on the other hand, if Paul is saying that for Kant, nothing even
ENTERS the mind but its own ideas, that is, that all its
representations, and indeed all mental phenomena in general, are all
just composed of some already-possessed and clearly presented content,
and that nothing else ever comes into play, then he's just downright
wrong.  That would lead us back to the classic solipsism that neither
Kant nor hardly anyone else has ever held as a rigorous philosophical
position (there's that straw-target again).  For in order to hold to
such a position, one would have to assume that there is absolutely
nothing to one's existence but what one consciously represents: and
even if we stuck to the first half of the CPR, we would see that this
position is incompatible with Kant's, since one way of describing his
general project with regard to the mind would be to call it an attempt
to reveal just *how much* is going on in our minds, WITHOUT our being
aware of it (i.e., without our necessarily representing it to
ourselves).

Another example of Paul's unfinished sentences:

"It is a closed subjectivity in which any reality exterior to thought
is progressively exorcised."  

Again: exorcised from what?  From the world?  That's clearly not the
case, in Kant or anywhere else for that matter.  So then, from where? 
>From thought?  Once again: isn't that just a tautology?  If there is
something that is truly "exterior to thought," then how can we
exorcise it from thought?  Isn't it already exorcised?  In other
words, if Paul is trying to criticize Kant for arguing that we can
never be conscious of anything but what our minds have been able to
represent to us, then I don't see the validity of his criticism.  How
can we be conscious of what is not in some fashion represented to us? 
How are we to think what cannot be thought?  Now, this is clearly not
to deny the existence of that whole array of unconscious and passive
and unnoticed things that are going on all the time both within and
without us (and indeed, Kant was one of the first to explore just how
complicated and "busy" even the most mundane mental operation must be,
even at a wholly unconscious level, in order for it to work), or that
such unconscious processes do not deeply affect and condition our
experience.  This is not to deny that there are forces which compose
and constitute our thought which are not themselves objects of
thought.  For if Kant were to argue such a view, his whole picture of
the "transcendental conditions" of thought (i.e., conditions which for
the most part are NOT represented when we think) would fall apart.  

So again, unless I'm terribly mistaken about Paul's criticism of Kant
(and I have to assume I am), he's either attributing things to Kant
that are logically true (e.g., that we cannot have knowledge of what
we cannot in some fashion represent), in which case it's no criticism,
or else he's turning Kant into a tragic and even comic figure of
solipsism, one for whom NOTHING exists if not in conscious thought.  

Can anyone as sophisticated as Kant really be so childish, so
infant-like, as truly to believe that the world vanishes when he
closes his eyes?

AG
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