by Daniel Smith
It is here that perhaps the most famous episode in the attempt to reconcile logic and existence commences. The post-Kantian philosophers are precisely those philosophers who take Kant as their fantastic starting point, and who pursue the question: What is synthetic identity? What does the synthetic identity of the self consist of? The post-Kantian philosophers maintained that Kant had not adequately responded to the question he himself had posed. In order to give an account of synthetic identity, Kant had to invoke something other, something irreducible both to thought and to the Self: namely, sensibility, or the a priori forms of space and time. The post-Kantians, by contrast, wanted to ground synthetic identity in the Ego itself, and they therefore posited a new principle that was derived, no longer from the principle of identity, but from the principle of non-contradiction. For them, the Ego cannot posit itself as identical to itself except by opposing itself to a non-Ego, to that which is outside the Ego. As Fichte would show, synthetic identity can be expressed in the formula: “The I is not the not-I.” Here again, this is another astonishing philosophical formula—almost like a chemical formula—that marked a prodigious discovery in philosophy. It means that the “I” can be posited as identical to itself only by being opposed to a not-I: that is, through a negation of the not-I (17 May 1983).
This line of thought would find its ultimate outcome in Hegel, who was the first philosopher to think that, when he said “things do not contradict themselves,” he was saying something about things—that is, something about existence, and not merely about the possible. Not only was he saying something about things, but he was also saying something about how they are born and develop: they are born and develop by not contradicting each other. The Hegelian dialectic does not consist in denying the principle of non-contradiction, but rather in pushing it to its limit, and developing the principle of non-contradiction at the level of existence. If the principle of analytic identity is the empty principle of essences, with which one can only think what Hegel calls abstract essentiality, the principle of non-contradiction is the principle through which thought and the real are engendered and develop simultaneously—to the point where Hegel can say that “the real is the concept and the concept is the real.”
THE EXISTENTIALISTS AND THE PRINCIPLE OF THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE
This brings us to a truncated scene three, whose stars are a race of thinkers who sought to reconcile thought and existence, no longer at the level of the principle of identity (whether analytic or synthetic), or even at the level of the principle of non-contradiction (as in Hegel), but rather at the level of the principle of the excluded middle (A or not-A, but not both). This is the thought of the “either … or,” and no longer the thought of contradiction; it is the mode of the alternative and no longer the negative. If thought can join existence in the excluded middle, it is because it implies that to think is to choose, that the nature of my existence is determined by my choice. It is this means of conquering existence that came to be known, broadly, as “existentialism.” It is a line of thought that has its own cast of characters: it begins with Pascal (a Catholic), would be continued in Kierkegaard (a product of the Reformation) and Sartre (an atheist), and is taken up in a modified form in Badiou (the militant activist). What was at stake in Pascal's wager, for instance, was not the existence or non-existence of a transcendent God, but rather the immanent modes of existence of those who must choose between his existence or non-existence. The result is a complex typology of different modes of existence: there are the devout, for whom there is no question of choosing; skeptics, who do not know how or are unable to choose; the creatures of evil, who are free to choose, but whose first choice places them in a situation where they can no longer repeat their choice, like Goethe's Mephistopheles; and finally, the men of belief or grace who, conscious of choice, make an “authentic” choice that is capable of being repeated in a steadfast spiritual determination.12 Kierkegaard drew out the necessary consequences of this line of thinking: decision or choice covers as great an area as thought itself.
But this also means, secondly, that there are choices that I make only on the condition of saying, “I have no choice,” like the woman who gives herself to a man on the condition of saying she is simply submitting to his choice, and not making a choice of her own—this is what Sartre called “bad faith.” When Sartre wrote, after World War II, “We have never been more free than under the Occupation,” he was speaking precisely of those shameful choices one makes on the condition of saying, “I had no choice!” In other words, in the end, we choose between choice and non-choice—the non-choice itself being itself a choice, since it is the form of choice that one appeals to when one believes that one has no choice. More recently, Alain Badiou has explicitly placed himself in the lineage of Pascal and Sartre when he locates the condition of the subject in its choice to maintain its fidelity to an event, thereby elevating the militant activist to the highest mode of existence (and no longer the person of belief or the “knight of faith”). In all these cases, one can see that there is a genuine displacement of the principle of the excluded middle: choice is no longer between two terms (A or not-A), but between two modes of existence; and ultimately, it is a choice between choice and non-choice. In this way, the principle of excluded middle—the last of our three logical principles—is now made to bear upon existence itself, but in a fundamentally new manner.
DELEUZE AND THE PRINCIPLE OF DIFFERENCE
We arrive now at the climax of the film, or perhaps its anticlimax. Unlike Leibniz or Descartes, Deleuze does not seem to lend himself to movie stardom. He read, he wrote, and he taught (when he was not ill), and outwardly, that sums up most of his life; the real drama took place in his thinking. So our final image is a shot of Deleuze sitting at a desk, writing—and we hold the shot for several minutes, to give a sense of the passing of time, à la Tarkovsky. Where does Deleuze fit into this story of Logic and Existence that we have just screened? In a sense, the answer is: nowhere. He writes about all three of these options, he is fascinated by them, and he is interested in the exact same problem: How can thought think existence? One of Deleuze's early lecture courses from 1956 has recently surfaced, and in it we can see Deleuze working through these same three traditions (in a different manner than I have done here), twelve years before he would finally publish his own “solution” to the problem, so to speak, in Difference and Repetition (1968).13 For Deleuze, the fulfillment of this project of Logic and Existence, which animated much of modern philosophy, can only occur through the substitution of the principle of difference for the principle of identity (in all its variations: identity, contradiction, the excluded middle). The final scene can do little more than provide a sketch of the way in which Deleuze approaches the project of Logic and Existence in his own manner.
The story we have just examined—a particular sequence in the history of modern thought—can be said to oscillate between two poles: God and the Self, infinite substance and finite subject. Pre-Kantian thought found its principle in the analytic identity of the divine substance, while post-Kantian thought found its principle in the synthetic identity of the finite subject. For Deleuze, this supposed transformation no longer has any sense: God or Self, analytic identity or synthetic identity—it is one and the same thing, since the identity of the one finds its condition in the identity of the other. As Deleuze writes in Difference and Repetition, “the oneness and identity of the divine substance are in truth the only guarantee of a unique and identical self, and God is retained so long as the self is preserved” (DR 58). Nietzsche had already seen that the death of God becomes effective only with the death of the self, and both Foucault and Klossowski would develop this theme in their works.
As a result, the movement from the “A is A” to the “I is I” in post-Kantian philosophy—the move from God to the Self—did little more than to seal the form of what Deleuze calls “common sense,” which is the form under which identity has been preserved in philosophical thought. Subjectively, it is the sa
me self that perceives, knows, imagines, and remembers; it is the same self that breathes, sleeps, walks, and eats; and objectively, it is the same object that is seen, remembered, imagined, and conceived by this self; and as I move from one object to another, it is in the same world that I perceive, breathe, and walk in (LS 78). This is why Kant could present the “object = x” or the object in general as the objective correlate of the “I think” or the subjective unity of consciousness. Even Kierkegaard dreamed of a God and a self rediscovered in a theatre of faith. Taken together, these can be seen to constitute the two poles of what Deleuze calls the dogmatic image of thought: the subjective identity of the self and its faculties, and the objective identity of the thing (and of the world) to which these faculties refer. This seals the alliance between the self, the world, and God as the three great terminal points of metaphysics; difference—or the diverse—is related to the form of a subject's identity, the form of an object's or a world's permanence, with God being the supreme principle of identities.
More important than what happens before or after Kant, then, is what happens within Kant, in the first Critique, when he criticizes the Self, the World, and God as transcendent illusions, and thus invokes a mysterious coherence that excludes the coherence of the Self, the coherence of the world, and the coherence of God (as well as the coherence of language, which is capable of “denoting” everything else). If Deleuze can consider himself to be a “pure metaphysician,” if he rejects the Heideggerian idea of “the end of metaphysics,” it is because he believes it is possible to construct a metaphysics freed from the coordinates of the Self, the World, and God. “What is then revealed,” he writes in Difference and Repetition, “is being, which is said of differences which are neither in substance nor in a subject” (DR 58). This is why Deleuze's metaphysics will focus on impersonal individuations that are no longer enclosed in a Self, and pre-individual singularities that are no longer enclosed in a God. This is the Dionysian world that Deleuze describes in Difference and Repetition, in which, as he puts it,
the divergence of affirmed series forms a “chaosmos” and no longer a world; the aleatory point that traverses them forms a counter-self and no longer a self; and disjunction posited as a synthesis exchanges its theological principle for a diabolical principle … the Grand Canyon of the World, the “crack” of the self, and the dismembering of God.14
It is not that Deleuze denies subjects and objects have identities—it is simply that these identities are secondary; they are the effect of more profound relations of difference. As Deleuze says, just as there is no “pure” reason but only historically variable processes of “rationalization,” so there is no universal or transcendental subject, but only diverse and historically variable forms of “subjectivation,” and no object in general, but only variable forms of “objectivation,” and so on. With this move, however, it becomes impossible for Deleuze to follow any of the paths we saw above, in our Godardian film, since they each utilize a variant of the principle of identity to think existence, whereas in Deleuze the identities of the Self, the World, and God have been dissolved.
But how, then, can one think the existence of a purely differential world? Clearly thought has to think difference directly, but Deleuze is fully aware of the paradox of such an enterprise; like Leibniz's project, it seems absurd. The image we began with—the sphere of logic—illustrated the problem that thought, on its own, can only think the possible, but it cannot think the real directly because the concept is blocked—and it is blocked precisely because the real is what is different from thought, it is difference itself. What is it that blocks the concept? For Aristotle, it was the accidents of matter; for Kant, it was the irreducibly spatio-temporal dimension of intuition—neither of which is conceptual. Deleuze himself states the problem clearly: “With the identical, we think with all our strength, but without producing the least thought: with the different, by contrast, do we not have the highest thought, but also that which cannot be thought?” (DR 226). This is the paradox that lies at the heart of Deleuze's project: difference is the highest thought, but also that which cannot be thought. This is why Deleuze's precursors adopted the strategy of utilizing the principles of thought itself—identity, non-contradiction, the excluded middle—and then attempted to think difference (or existence) through them. Deleuze in effect attempts the opposite strategy. For him, what blocks the concept is neither matter (Aristotle) nor sensibility (Kant). “What blocks the concept,” he asks in Difference and Repetition, “if not the Idea? What remains outside the concept refers more profoundly to what is inside the Idea” (DR 220). The theory of Ideas takes us to the crux of the matter: what does it mean for Deleuze to say that difference can be grasped, not in a concept, but in an Idea? This is obviously a complex question, which the ending of our film presents in three interrelated images.
First, at the conclusion of the scene one, we saw that Leibniz's philosophy of sufficient reason was blocked, since it seemed that an infinite analysis of concepts could only be undertaken by God, with his infinite understanding, leaving us finite human beings mired in obscurity and confusion. But this is where Leibniz overcame his explicit intentions (in the Nietzschean sense of “self-overcoming”), since he wound up providing us finite humans with an artifice capable of undertaking a well-founded approximation of what happens in God's understanding, and this artifice is the technique of the infinitesimal calculus or differential analysis. We as humans can undertake an infinite analysis thanks to the symbolism of the differential calculus. In the calculus, the differential relation can be said to be a pure relation; it is a relation that persists even when its terms disappear, and it thus provides Deleuze with an example of what he calls the concept of difference-in-itself. Normally, we think of difference as a relation between two things that have a prior identity (“x is different from y”). With the notion of the differential relation, Deleuze takes the concept of difference to a properly transcendental level; the differential relation is not only external to its terms (Bertrand Russell's empiricist dictum), but it also determines its terms. In other words, difference here becomes constitutive of identity: that is, it becomes productive and genetic. This is what Deleuze means, in Difference and Repetition, when he says that relations such as identity, analogy, opposition, and resemblance are all secondary effects or results of prior relations of difference. Deleuze, in other words, approaches the problem of existence not through logic, which takes identity as its model, but through mathematics, which—in certain of its domains—developed a symbolism capable of thinking difference.15 If Plato found in Euclidean geometry a model of static and unchanging essences, Deleuze finds in the calculus a model of pure change (and thus a transformation in the corresponding theory of Ideas). The calculus is a symbolism for the exploration of existence. It is not by chance that the “mathematicization” of Nature, which lies at the heart of the so-called scientific revolution, took place through the calculus; “laws of nature” are expressed in the form of differential equations (Nietzsche railed against speaking of laws of Nature, since the “law” is a social concept).16 This is why, in the nineteenth century, philosophies of Nature—from Maimon to Novalis—often took the form of explorations in the metaphysics of the calculus, and Deleuze is certainly a heritor of this tradition, although he prefers to speak of a dialectic of the calculus, rather than a metaphysics.
Second, while it is true that the sensibility of the diverse is outside the concept (in Kant, intuitions are spatio-temporal; concepts are not), it is in Ideas that thought can think difference as the sufficient reason of the diverse. Deleuze will argue that intensity (intensive magnitude) is the sufficient reason of the sensible.
Intensity is never given in the diversity of experience, since it cancels itself out when it is explicated, but thought can none the less think it in the form of an Idea. The phenomenon of lightning, for instance, is the result of a difference of potential in a cloud, a difference in charge, but the condition under which the lightning appear
s is the resolution of this charge, the cancellation of the difference. Deleuze will therefore draw a sharp distinction between diversity and difference: “Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse. Difference is not the phenomenon but the noumenon closest to the phenomenon” (DR 222). Difference, in other words, is the sufficient reason of the diverse, which is not given in a concept but in an Idea—and an Idea that can become actualized in various manners. This is Deleuze's response to Leibniz's problem of sufficient reason: there is an Idea of sensibility, just as there is an Idea of matter, and thought itself is capable of penetrating this Idea. Consider two further examples. The concept “mountain” might allow us to recognize Mt. Everest, but it says nothing about the fact that Everest is the ongoing actualization of a complex process, which includes the pressure of the India tectonic plate slamming into Asia, the folding of the earth's crust, the weathering and erosion of the Himalayan range, and so on. The concept “lion” might allow us to recognize an animal in front of us, but it says nothing about the lion's territories, the paths its takes, the times it hunts and rests. The latter are spatio-temporal dynamisms that cannot be derived from the concept, but are the actualization of a differential Idea. “There is nothing which does not lose its identity as this is constituted by concepts,” Deleuze writes, “when the dynamic space and time of its actual constitution is discovered” (DR 218–19).
Third, and perhaps more importantly, what is the condition under which thought is capable of thinking difference as the sufficient reason of the sensible? Deleuze's response is that Ideas are always given to thought under the form of problems; if difference is that which cannot be thought, then thought is capable of thinking difference only under a problematic form—in other words, as something that provokes thought, which engenders thought, which problematizes thought (which is why, in the calculus, the differential exists in the problem, but must disappear in the solution). This is Deleuze's great theme against what he calls the dogmatic image of thought: thinking is not the result of a prior disposition, but the result of forces that act upon thought from the outside, of encounters that do violence to us, that force us to think, and what engenders thinking is always an encounter with a problem. Who is it that in fact searches for the truth? The best model is found, not in Plato's model of friends in dialogue, but Proust's model of the jealous lover, who finds himself living within a problem, and constrained, involuntarily, to explore its conditions. Such is the paradoxical status that Deleuze assigns to metaphysics: metaphysics can indeed tell us what the ultimate components of reality are, but these components turn out to be problems, of which we can have no “knowledge” per se (they are “obscure”), although they provoke us to think. Being always presents itself to us under a problematic form. This paradox is similar to the one expressed in the doctrine of univocity. Being has a single, univocal sense—but this single sense is difference: that is, a disguising and displaced difference that is “neither in substance nor subject,” and is “no less capable of dissolving and destroying individuals than constituting them temporarily” (DR 38).