Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage Solomon Maimon Graham Jones WHO WAS MAIMON?1 Shlomo ben joshua (1753–1800) was a Polish-Russian rabbi from a humble, poverty-stricken background. Never having been to university he learnt philosophy through the Talmudic tradition and his own eclectic reading, and took the name Maimon in homage to the Spanish, Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides whom he greatly admired. Exiled from his Polish community because of his heretical views, Maimon travelled throughout Europe before fi nally settling in Germany where, socially inept, uncouth and evil-tempered, it is said he would recount, in the taverns where he wrote most of his works, his disgrace for the price of a drink. There, fi lled with ambition, he immersed himself in various intellectual debates whilst working his way through the history of philosophy. After reading Kant, who claimed to have resolved the dispute between rationalism and empiricism, Maimon set out to write a commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which would also outline the general principles of his own philosophy (which he referred to as a ‘Koalition-system’), an ingenious attempt at synthesising and reconciling the differing and seemingly incompatible positions of Leibniz, Hume and Kant. This document, called the ‘Essay on Transcendental Philosophy’,2 both mammoth in size and written in idiosyncratic German, was eventually passed on to the ageing Kant who grudgingly acknowledged ‘that none of my opponents had understood me so well, but that very few could claim so much penetration and subtlety of mind in profound inquiries of this sort’.3 THE KANTIAN CONTEXT Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ in his Critique of Pure Reason was to claim that the ‘world’ conforms to our thoughts rather than the reverse. For something (an object) to be determined it must beTHE KANTIAN ‘thought’, as it is cognition which provides object-ivity and thus produces objects. In elaborating his account of such determination Kant introduced several key innovations. First, he placed synthesis at the centre of his account, inasmuch as for something to be an ‘object’ it must be the result or product of a synthesis of some kind (of a ‘joining’ or ‘uniting’ of elements). The notion of synthesis was not unique to Kant’s philosophy however. Indeed it was commonplace within empiricism. Kant’s innovation was to place synthesis at a transcendental level, as a priori – as independent of experience and as the condition of the possibility of experience in general. Kant’s second innovation was to claim that a thought without a corresponding sensible component (to which it is linked through the intermediary of the Imagination), is merely empty and formal – for only sensation denotes something as ‘actual’, making of such a synthesis a real occurrence or event in respect to the object’s ‘appearing’. Thus although determining an object means that we must ‘think’ it, we can only ‘know’ it on the condition that it is a possible object of experience (i.e., there must fi rst be a received intuition or sensible contribution, linked to the forms of time and space, that is then subsumed under a set of a priori rules provided by the faculty of understanding). Without the contribution of sensibility an object of thought is but a metaphysical speculation, a potentially misleading fi ction. This suggests Kant’s third innovation: the distinction he draws between phenomena (objects of experience) and things in themselves. The latter are the independent entities that provoke or stimulate our senses (those mysterious things which ‘affect’ us). We have no direct or unmediated grasp of these entities, nor can we have such a grasp – that is, we cannot know them as they truly are in themselves, only in respect to how our cognitive apparatus makes its own sense of them, according to its own form and nature. The fourth innovation was to claim that the efforts of the faculties of sensibility, imagination and understanding converge ‘upon’ the empirical object of cognition such that collectively they identify the object in an act of recognition (it is the same chair before me that I see, remember, understand, etc.), and correspondingly that their efforts converge in the opposite direction on a centre or locus that co-ordinates and unifi es their efforts – the transcendental unity of apperception or transcendental subject. The fi fth innovation was to split thought in two – dividing its powers (and concepts) between two faculties, understanding and reason. Theformer can produce possible objects of experience. But the latter, reason, is the faculty of pure thought as such and has no direct relationship with sensibility. Its own concepts, the Ideas, pose problems in their most general form. These Ideas have no empirical equivalent (no corresponding element in experience): instead the Ideas concern the problematic or perplexing aspects of experience – from whence does experience ultimately arise? from what it is ultimately made? what is its true nature? why does it exist at all? why does it take the form that it does? and so on. In short, Ideas concern the problem of the underlying conditions that provide or support the unity, consistency, conformity and necessity of nature in general. Such Ideas include the Soul, God, the totality of the cosmos, things in themselves, freedom and so forth – they are the ‘unconditioned conditions’ (i.e., causes that are themselves seemingly uncaused or self-causing) that we fall back on in order to explain the ultimate nature of things. According to Kant, such Ideas are ideals or themes: hypothetical or speculatively inferential concepts that empirically we can neither prove nor disprove, yet which function as helpful foci in respect to organising and systematising the various, disparate pieces of knowledge that objective experience provides. They are, then, necessary means of making sense of, or providing a broader unity and arrangement to, the ‘world’. However, in this sense, they are not constitutive things or real causes, merely regulative guidelines for further research. Maimon will critique and revise each of these inter-related notions (as, in turn, will Deleuze). However, what is remarkable about Maimon’s account, as will become evident, is that he overcomes the defi ciencies of Kant’s account through a return to the rationalist legacy of Leibniz and Spinoza, reintroducing several of the same (or modifi ed) metaphysical features that Kant had been so careful to expunge from his own work. MAIMON’S CRITIQUE Maimon directs his initial attentions towards the inadequacies of Kant’s ‘Transcendental Deduction’ in the Critique of Pure Reason, wherein Kant argued that transcendental, a priori concepts called ‘categories’, provided by the faculty of understanding (and acting in accordance with transcendental principles), extrinsically condition or subsume sensory impressions provided by the faculty of sensibility. In doing so the categories determine or provide the continuity, objectivity and order of such impressions. Against this Maimon argues that there is no convincing evidence that the synthetic a priori principles or concepts proposed by Kant necessarily apply to a posteriori sense intuitions – necessity and universality being the two preconditions that Kant insists ground the objectivity of experience and derive from thought.4 He insists that Kant is unable to fi nd a justifi able criterion with which to determine when synthetic a priori concepts apply, for he has no way of distinguishing those cases in which these concepts do apply in experience from those in which they do not, and as such all ‘the evidence of our senses, as Hume argued, shows us only a constant conjunction between distinct events but never any universal and necessary connections’.5 From these sceptical beginnings Maimon extends his critique of Kant’s philosophy, focusing on the insuffi ciency of Kant’s dualism. He questions how the two fundamentally distinct, heterogeneous faculties of sensibility and understanding – one passive and receptive and the other active and spontaneous – can genuinely interact. Maimon’s solution is to reject the dualism of the Transcendental Deduction. He observes that none of these diffi culties concerning the application of a priori concepts to sensible intuitions would exist if both were merely different yet related aspects of the same thing, arising from a common source or constituting a continuum in which they represent opposing tendencies – that is, if either the understanding created intuitions as well as concepts according to its own laws or, alternatively, sensibility also created concepts as well as intuitions. In short, either ‘sensualised’ concepts or ‘intellectualised’ intuitions.6 But rather than a sensualised intellect as the empiricists proposed (for Maimon asks, how can something intelligible be made from the unintelligible?), he instead embraces the more satisfactory Leibnizian alternative of intellectualising the senses – that is, by assuming that the understanding is the source of both the form and the content of experience, and that sensibility is not itself a separate source of knowledge but rather a confused form of thought.7 In this fashion, Maimon turns the qualitative difference between sensibility and understanding into a quantitative one such that they differ only in degree, where a decrease in the former can be said to refl ect a proportional increase in the latter.8 Thus, the indistinctness, confusion and obscurity that characterises the intuition gives way to the clarity and distinctness of the concept – for the more we truly know ‘the less we are affected’.9 Maimon’s solution to Kant’s dilemma, however, raises potential diffi culties of its own concerning the nature of our perceptions and how we experience them. We would be justifi ed in asking how
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 16:14:18 +0000
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