Picking over the Bones

Picking Over the bones of David Hume

My aim in this paper is at least simple to state. One of Deleuze’s repeated strategies for thought, is to set up a complex series of exchanges between two thinkers or between two sets of ideas in which they are at once explained and transformed. Perhaps these exchanges are at their richest when they are set up between two philosophers who are said to be rivalling one another in some way; Hence Nietzsche becomes Kant’s rival and is enriched in the process. Nor is this simply a case in these exchanges, that it is always Deleuze who is pulling the strings. One has to only think of the highly complex Spinoza-Leibniz axis to see this. While the dynamic of this relationship is clear enough, Deleuze repeatedly makes his Spinoza answer to Leibnizian problems. What exactly those problems themselves are, undergoes continual reworking, all the way up to The Fold, as Leibniz constantly eludes Deleuze’s grasp. However the Hume-Kant axis is unique in three respects: Firstly it is very early. Deleuze’s first book in 1953 - Empiricism and Subjectivity - attempted to construct a Hume to answer a Kant. Hence the history of this relationship, is caught up in the history of Deleuze’s development as a thinker. Secondly there is far more genuine equality in this relationship than in many of the others. For example in the aforementioned Spinoza-Leibniz axis, Deleuze is very clear who he sides with, and even The Fold, with its alleged assertion of Leibniz’s independence merely proves to be only a moment in his critique, as Spinoza is once again allowed in What is Philosophy? to provide the answers to Leibniz’s problems. However with the Kant and Hume axis there is no dominant partner. The relationship is therefore free to evolve, with each side being allowed to comment upon the other. Thirdly and perhaps most curiously of all, the exchange only has a limited presence within Deleuze’s writings. After Difference and Repetition, Kant is drawn off into other formations, while Hume remains on the sidelines, and is scarcely mentioned in written works until What is Philosophy? where he, and his empiricism are once again pitched against Kant, but this time with Leibniz as their mighty ally (however one needs care here as it is no doubt significant that Hume does have a presence in the ‘conversation’ books, Dialogues 2 and Negotiations, indicating that he had not simply slipped out of Deleuze’s thought). Whence, my aim here is to examine certPicking over the Bonesain critical aspects in this relationship, from its initial inception in the 1953 book Empiricism and Subjectivity, through Kant’s Critical Philosophy to Difference and Repetition and to attempt to show how in the course of this ongoing exchange, many of the contours of the mature Deleuze start to emerge.

Moreover the overall ‘plot line’ is also simple to state. Deleuze in the 1953 book presents an initial formation of empiricism, that can only allow it to answer Kant if it on the one hand ignores the means by which a ‘given is given’, and on the other, has recourse to a moral system. Deleuze in the Kant book returns to this theme, and successfully identifies not only the genesis by which a given comes to be given in difference, but also how attempting to marginalize that difference necessarily leads to one towards moral systems. And yet, it is certainly not simply the case that Deleuze changes his mind, and progresses from a Humean to a Kantian period but rather that certain aspects which were present (if hidden) in the Hume book, are pulled into centre stage in the Kant book, a move which then in turn allows yet other aspects in the Hume book to spring forth, and open out new ways to critique Kant (a move carried out in Difference and Repetition). Hence each book becomes for the subsequent books a highly volatile surface, which the later books both enfold and are enfolded by. In order to identify something of the nature of this volatility, I will here concentrate on three separate strands or series, across which these involutions may be traced; purposiveness, the self and the different.

Purposiveness;

The Hume of the young Deleuze, is a Hume pitched into a deep problem – the problem of how one builds a self within a mind which is already replete with givens. This is a problem that Deleuze directly pitches against Kantianism. Kant had suggested, in the first critique, that Hume’s model for knowledge implied that it was ‘like a great plain, extended in all directions’. Kant then contrasted this with critical knowledge which was said to be more like a globe, whose surface was ‘the field of experience itself, beyond which it cannot go’ (B790-792). Deleuze takes up this suggestion and turns it into the very problem of empiricism itself, which he argues resolves around how a subject can be constructed within what is already given in the world. Such a subject is not related to a pre-delimited globe in which possible experiences have been caught, but rather to an immanent plane of givens within which it must found itself (Hu87). From such a perspective, Deleuze suggests, perception has to be atomic because the mind must initially contain elements which were simply pre-given for it, and thence which it cannot participate in (Hu 90 and 29). The subject creates itself by transcending these givens through establishing certain relations between them, These relations themselves are always based upon the three principles of association (causality, resemblance and contiguity). However the ideas formed by these relations remain problematic, as they can never be given within the world itself, and remain merely a natural artifice of the self-constructing subject (25). Nor are the principles themselves transcendental agencies by which a subject’s nature is simply pre-given, as the subject itself only comes into existence as it can ensure its own production within these relations. Nothing is therefore simply predetermined, and every subject must pitch for its own existence within that which it already finds (24). From this perspective Hume’s apparent attack on complex ideas such as God or the world or even the self is very creatively transformed. A subject only exists by transcending its givens, courtesy of principles which are nevertheless never simply its own. Hence the very problematic status of complex ideas which exist only as they are composed in relations, allow a subject who possess such ideas, to own as its own nature, the very relations by which these ideas are being thought. Each mind is therefore initially given as something passive, and must within that passivity construct the ability to be active. Deleuze says (claiming here to speak like Bergson), ‘the subject is an imprint…left by principles, that it progressively turns into a machine capable of using this impression’. (113).

However at this point a deep, indeed abyssal problem opens out. On the one hand, the importance of habits in creating such subjects is easy enough to establish. Each habit is composed of a repetition which has no import in relation to the givens of experience themselves, and yet will, as it is related to the human subject, in a belief, propel the mind from the consideration of particular past cases to an anticipation of some generalized future (Hu68). Moreover it is clear enough that each habit is at once both a construction across time, and a principle of a certain subject’s nature (66). And yet on the other hand at this point, a new problem arises. Deleuze takes it as a given that associations themselves are never enough to build a mind, here citing Bergson’s argument that as every impression can theoretically be associated with every other impression, a mind created by association alone would an inchoate anarchy of shifting images (Hu 102). There needs therefore to be some other principle in the mind which is capable of selecting which impressions need associating with which, and therefore warding off the abyss that is otherwise threatened. This power of selection rests upon the passions (120). It is the role of passions not only to favour certain relations over others, but also to give sense to the relations themselves which thereby become an object of experience in their own right, a point I will return to later (Hu 103-104), Additionally, for this Hume, there exists a critical difference between passions and relations. While it is the case that all associations amongst impressions are open ended and infinite, the same is not true of passions. Passions form a whole system (even if that system is itself an artifice), such that as one acts according to that system, one provokes both new impressions, and further passions that are concordant with this whole (129-130). A mind therefore which acts according to moral principles will find itself unified, with each of its actions resonating across all of the rest (132). What is more, as the subject (as transcended mind) acts across this whole, it will come to believe, that nature itself, although still hidden, is likewise formed into a unity which will naturally and necessarily support all its endeavours; Deleuze calls this agreement purposiveness (Hu 133).

It is this argument that the young Deleuze hopes will allow Hume to escape from the clutches of Kantian criticism. In this regard young-Deleuze takes Kant’s criticism to amount to the charge that Hume needed to assert an arbitrary harmony between the subject and nature. Deleuze hopes that he has demonstrated that far from this accord being arbitrary, it is in fact necessary to the construction of a human subject as an active agent. One is only a subject if one is able to act according to a moral system and therefore as each passion naturally resonates across all the others (Hu 112). And such actions in turn only become possible if one forms an idea of a nature which ‘naturally supports them’. Hence it appears that only morality can ward off the dangers of difference. It hardly of course needs to be said that Deleuze old or young seems unlikely to have been happy with this conclusion. He seems therefore to have hit a deep impasse. On the one hand he is aware that there is clearly something in Hume, some facet of empiricism, which he feels will allow him to move beyond Kant, and the imposition of the transcendental subject. And moreover that this move is somehow linked to the rejection of the idea that empiricism is purely about deriving knowledge from experience (Hu 107). And yet he could only apparently move beyond Kant in the interests of empiricism if he encased ideas within a moral system, which had the effect of constraining thought within a Good Sense that was quite as restrictive as anything which Kant could have created. Empiricism at this point appears riven, - on one side is the explosive world of habit contained within the delirium of thought, while on the other is the all too ordered world of morality. His problem is then how to bridge this chasm.

It is at this point that the Kant book more or less intervenes. Deleuze discovers within the Critique of Judgement (which is interestingly never cited in the Hume book) quite a different account of Purposiveness. Kant claims that purposiveness could be understood in either of two ways. On the one hand, one might assume that it relates to something in nature, which harmonises with our judgements; on the other, one allows for the possibility that the purposive harmony in nature (that is the free accord of faculties) is itself produced by spontaneous laws, which are themselves without purpose (CJ58). This argument clearly has much to say both to and of the younger Deleuze’s early formation of purposiveness. Three points are clearly critical here. Firstly the accord between the faculties in Kant is never simply assumed or even imposed, but must rather itself be engendered, either in the sublime or the beautiful. Moreover in neither move is it the case that this difference in itself is simply a given of experience. On the contrary, its giving catches one up in the very process by which a given is itself given. In this regard, the case of the sublime is clearly critical. While it is perhaps possible to understand beauty in terms of transcending imagination, the same is clearly not the case with the sublime. The sublime only makes sense as the imagination comes up against the world of the supra-sensible, in which the normal accord of the senses is suspended, and imagination is forced beyond its own natural limit, and made to represent that which it can only think in disruption and violent metamorphosis (K51). So that, it is not sufficient to understand nature as the force in which a given is given in itself and to us, but one also needs to comprehend how that force is transcendental to what is already transcending experience. That is, one must also grasp how that force remains external to us, even as we are metamorphosized through it. What is more, it is this paradigm of difference which then allows one to comprehend not only the beautiful, in which the difference is drawn up into an accord, but also understanding, which cannot be thought without such an accord. Here the contrast with the Hume book is very direct and compelling. In that book Deleuze had sought to restrict Kant’s critique of Hume to the invention of the subject; it was apperception that transcended transcending imagination (Hu 111). Now however something quite different is said; it is not apperception that transcends, but difference, without which that self itself would never be able to understand in the first place.

Secondly, Kant allows one to considerably clarify what was wrapped up within the young-Deleuze-Hume’s conception of purposiveness. ‘They’ had been right in thinking that there was something in that notion which critiqued the Kant of the Hume book and yet had failed to precisely locate what it was. Contra Hume, it was not the union of the passions (and therefore a moral system) which itself created the accord of nature and humans. It was rather the case that humans could only act morally if some accord had already been engendered within their minds (K53-54). Thirdly, and building on from this last point, Kant also showed that once this jump to accord has been made, the mind necessarily becomes entangled in morality, as its consequence. The connection with the moral, this Kant-Deleuze argues, necessarily arises when understanding looks upon the beautiful and grasps at an imagination, which nonetheless endlessly eludes it, even though both remain still in harmonious accord. In such circumstances the understanding will gradually become aware across these exchanges of ‘quite a different concept which does not have an object of intuition of its own account’ and is in fact an idea of practical reason itself, to which these movements can be symbolically related (K54-55). The interest of the beautiful, therefore not only underpins all other representations, by animating the free accord that they must assume; But also as it does so, it naturally takes the suprasensible as the focal point for this unity, and thereby open the mind up to the moral sphere (K55). The demand for an harmonious accord is not then to be separated from the desire to act morally. Moreover in the cosmology that then opens out, humans must play the determining role, as it is only humans who are able to act according to a system of final ends and so have the ability to organize as ‘rational beings under the moral law’ (K 72). Thence the final relationship between man and nature was for Kant, just as much as for Hume, ‘given in human practical activity ‘(K69).

Hence the doctrine of Hume and purposivness apparently becomes merely an adjunct in Kant. Where Hume-Deleuze rushes to draw a single conclusion, Kant-Deleuze makes a careful and threefold distinction, between, the difference as it is engendered in the sublime, the accord in which that difference is then drawn off in the interest of the beautiful, and finally the morality which itself accords to that beautiful. However one needs not to be too quick in closing the Deleuze-Hume book. Firstly, it is clearly very plausible to argue that Deleuze only makes the move that he does in Kant’s Critical Philosophy because he knows how he had previously read Kant, and so what problems followed his attempt to counter that reading. The young Deleuze, and his Hume was clearly not simply wrong, just muddle headed. This then leaves one to then wonder what a new Deleuze-Hume endowed with a greater clarity of vision might see. Secondly, and more profoundly it is very clear that Deleuze simply does not accept that harmonious accords are of themselves enough take Kant beyond the assertion of parallelism which he had maintained was Kant’s main concern in all three critiques (K 22-23 and 69). A point re-stressed in Difference and Repetition, where he argues that the ‘suprasensible focal point’, given in a free accord, needs to be related not to harmony but to ‘difference qua difference’ (Dr 216-217). Moreover in the same work, Deleuze argues the assertion that an accord must be harmonious in nature, is ultimately founded on morality. This being the case, Hume, the thinker who very explicitly founds accords on good moral sense, clearly has a role to play in defining both why one might make such a move, but also what might follow from it. All the more so if Hume in some senses offered one the tools that allowed one to understand how a communication between facets in the mind might be given not by common sense, but by delirium.

The series of the Self

This move takes us on to the second series identified above, that of the Self. In Difference and Repetition, the idea of common sense, of an accord between the faculties (ultimately founded on the beautiful), is severely critiqued. Deleuze argues, that Kant doesn’t fully realize the radicalness of what he has discovered. He has found a transcendental domain, from which empirical experience is meant to originate (and therefore is of itself other than experience), and yet can only understand that domain in terms of the empirical relations that are more properly understood as its consequence. The transcendental deduction was therefore merely the transfiguration of empirical psychological processes, from which transcendental processes are ‘induced’ (DR171). This critique of Kant goes right back to the far earlier Hume book, although the terms here are slightly different. In the earlier work, a transcendental critique is said to situate itself on a ‘methodologically reduced’ plane, on which certain certainties are to be guaranteed. One asks of such a plane questions such as ‘how can there be a given?…and how can there be a subject given to itself?’. This move is then contrasted with the empirical endeavour, which is always constructionist, and seeks to understand how the self is constituted within what is given to it (Hu 87). In Hume therefore, unlike in Kant, the making of the self is a fundamental problem (and with it how perceptions can be mine), and cannot therefore be simply asserted of itself, and a critique then built up to account for that assertion (B133-134).

In making this move, Deleuze is effectively attempting to reverse Kant’s reversal of Hume. Hume had argued that the idea of personal identity was a habit, which the mind acquired in order to articulate the relation between the disparate elements it found within itself. Such an idea is then synonymous with a republic or commonwealth, which could not only change who governed it, but also the very constitution by which it was run (Tr 261). The self therefore lacked any content of its own beyond this easy transition of ideas (Tr 262). Kant’s move involves reversing this last point; the very ease of our transition itself is taken to bear testimony to the simplicity of transcendental consciousness. Deleuze in contrast, in his Hume book, accepts Hume at his world, and therefore argues that the central paradox of Hume is to understand how the self is created from within the disparate collection of ideas that make up the subject (Hu 31).

For Hume, and therefore for Deleuze, the problem revolves around how a feeling of the self is engendered. Hume in the Treatise argued that this feeling comes about when the mind associates itself with objects that give it joy, and therefore provoke in it a feeling of pride, through which it comes to experience itself (Tr 287). Deleuze understands this as implying a key difference between passion and mere relations (a move which is not, it is fair to say, altogether explicit in Hume’s text). Relations are merely a set of free flowing reciprocal associations; while the passions give these relations meaning and value. So that, to have passions is to have certain relations matter more or less than others. A mind thereby acquires tendencies to call its own (Hu 63). A subject is naturally constituted in this rendering ‘partial’, of certain relations. Each such subject involves neither being a thing or a representation, but is rather a rule of construction or a schema, a manner of favouring certain relations, while rendering others problematic (Hu 64).

This move is itself only possible because of two prior moves. On the one hand, it is the role of culture to splice together one’s passions and one’s relations. In this move, taste itself has a key part to play. Deleuze’s Hume argues, that as one looks on a work of art, one’s imagination takes up passions into itself, and reflects upon them in an infinity of ways, producing new thoughts and feelings: a sadness is turned to joy and back to sadness again, as imagination itself becomes passionate (Hu 58). However Hume suggests at this point that a necessary fancy intervenes. Each human, as they experience this interweaving of associations and their passions, will come to imagine something beyond themselves, which can produce this effect. Each mind will therefore necessarily imagine power, as some pre-personal agency, (a move which Hume dismisses as a mere fancy, Hu59). On the other hand, this still leaves open the deep problem of exactly how the clearly disparate principles of the mind can come together to produce a unity in the subject. It is at this point (as we saw above) Deleuze argues, in the context of the Hume book, that passions in fact hold the whip hand in deciding which habits are formed and when (Hu 120).

And yet it was of course this precise point that led the young Deleuze to argue for the purposivity both within one’s mind, and within nature as a whole, and therefore it is again at this point that the Kant book surely intervenes. The early Hume had hit an impasse, which could not move beyond morality. However from Kant the jump to morality, while it is itself original, is only possible because there had been established a free accord amongst the faculties. This free accord is both endlessly productive but also communicatable and the pleasures it involves a-personal (K49). Additionally it critically avoids the jump into schemata, and therefore the move which the Hume book had made of constructing the subject as a schema. It is then very tempting to claim that this accord functions within us in a way akin to Humean power. It is after all the case that both produce an endless ability to reflect and also a feeling that one is caught up in something greater that oneself, something ‘suprasensible’. And yet however, one needs care here, as both philosophers add a different dimension to the same basic idea. On the one hand, Kant’s free accord was never to be simply assumed but rather was ‘synthetically linked’, by the interest of beauty, to a material aptitude in nature, according to which it is engendered (K64). On the other hand, the free play of Humean imagination is the play of ‘being under the category of possibility or power’, in which the mind becomes fascinated by discord and disjunction quite as much as harmony. Hence, a young man, in prison for life, becomes an object of aesthetic interest because of the discrepancy between his situation, and what his body could achieve, and so endlessly fascinates the imagination (Hu57). Moreover, this process, could only be in the mind as a delirium, in which common sense must be abandoned, and from which the individual good sense of particular habits would have to be said to emerge. Perhaps one might say, that if Kant defined the circumstances in which a free accords is enlivened within nature, and thereby allowed it to be something more than a fancy, then, by contrast, Hume described its agency: That it was naturally discordant and suspended all possible common sense. And yet, what is lacking so far is any idea of how such a disjunctive agency can hook into the circumstances that animate it. That is, what is lacking at this point is an explication of difference in-itself, which I will return to in the third of these series.

However before this move is considered, another move needs to be fully explored. - Namely how morality and theories of good and common sense might be thought to have a genesis of their own in the oscillations which one can set up between these two versions of the accord. In the Hume book, Deleuze had investigated the hypothesis that power was a delirium, and that reality was ultimately only guaranteed by pleasure. But then in the Kant book, he had countered this argument with the hypothesis that pleasures were themselves the product of a free-accord, as it produced a harmony in the absence of either an active self or a concept (K46-47). However this opens up the possibility, from a Humean perspective once again, that if the reality of power was now allowed, not only must the free accord be thought as distinct from individual harmonies, but that those harmonies are themselves constructed, and that that construction is of itself pleasurable. This synthesis leads to two further possible arguments. Firstly, it clearly allows Deleuze to articulate the distinction made in Difference and Repetition between good sense and common sense. From the Hume book onwards, it has been clear that each habit must operate according to a rule of good sense, which carried thought from a past to the future, ‘as though from the particular to the general’ (DR 284) and to which was associated a certain pleasure (and therefore an ’empirical’ self). On one side is then the chaos of a past, where what one has selected itself appears random, problematic and partial; on the other side, a future that appears predictable, generalized and stable. It is therefore the role of good sense to ensure that one moves from disorder to order, and so from a free accord to a harmony. By contrast, common sense assumes the harmony to be present, which it then naturalizes by asserting both a self and a universal object which taken together can be said to ‘account’ for this harmony. These senses are then said to imply each other, as common sense can never directly experience its universals, and must have recourse to good sense to produce specific experiences; while good sense, draws upon the common sense’s universals to naturalize the generalities which it produces (DR 285). The Kantian move by which one seeks to ground habits in understanding, and which must assume an accord of the faculties, is thereby reversed. Common sense needs to be related not to a pre-established harmony, but to a good sense, by whose habitual action, particular harmonies come to be constituted.

Secondly, there is clearly a radical move now opened up within the way in which one can, from a Humean perspective, understand the construction of a self. Each empirical self is no longer the product of a pleasure principle. On the contrary, they produce within themselves a narcissistic pleasure, as they are constituted within a habit, and so as they become capable of taking certain experiences for their own (DR 121). That is, to be within a habit is to be within a harmony, and therefore to experience pleasure. Moreover it is clear that Deleuze in making this move, doesn’t simply abandon his purposive argument. In Difference and Repetition, he argues that while the move from integrated (global) passions to actions was natural in itself, it was not enough to understand where those passions came from (DR 122). That is essentially, Deleuze is reversing his own argument at this point. Where before he had argued that to allow Hume to rival Kant, all one needed to explain was how the passive self could become active, he now argues that this move misses the real problem, which is to account for the passivity itself. In this vein, when Deleuze therefore in Difference and Repetition repeatedly repudiates Kant’s attempt to produce an active synthesis that is capable of being globalized (DR 109,122), he is effectively attempting to neutralize Kant within the inadequacies of his own previous argument.

The juxtaposing of Humean-power and Kantian-engendered free accord allows one to grasp exactly how the self must become moral as it is globalized. This globalization is the product of both good and common sense, a Humean, and a Kantian perspective. On the side of good sense, each empirical self involves its own particular accord (and associated pleasures), whose harmony it can only generalize through an appeal to a wider morality (that is, it needs to become purposive). On the side of common sense, morality can assert its globalization, and can even claim to be necessarily coeval with a harmony, and yet all the same needs that harmony (and associated pleasure) to be somehow engendered elsewhere. Hence the apparent superiority of Kant’s explication of the link between morality and free accords over Hume’s is qualified. Kant certainly deserves the honour of thinking that the free accord between the faculties is the product of a special genesis, which operates according to an interest of reason, and pertains only to finite humanity and is not preordained by some God (K69). But then Kant felt that this accord was necessarily harmonic and so in the service of morality and ultimately humans, as its suprasensible final end. Hume in contrast deserves the credit not only for arguing that the genesis of a feeling of selfhood is naturally associated both with a habit and a pleasure, which is associated with it, but also for demonstrating how the appeal to morality represented the universalizing of this selfhood, and therefore depended upon it, and so could not be simply presumed. Kant might have posed the free harmony as a problem, but it is Hume who allows that within this freedom, the harmony itself is problematic. And between these two moves, it becomes possible to transfix philosophies of identity, which simply naturalize the harmony within the self, and thereby globalize morality and the practical activities associated with it. If the globalization of morality cannot account for the genesis of a discordant accord, then one clearly needs to look otherwise, and to the difference itself which inhabits both genesis and discord.

The series of the Different.

In the Hume book, Deleuze explicitly rules out that empiricism can have anything to do with genesis. Ideas have nothing to do with either how the relations are created or directly with the givens (Hu 108). Ideas are therefore exclusively related to how an individual transcends what is given to it, to become a subject. Empiricism is not simply about knowledge therefore, (and Kant is said to be asking a false question when he implies that it is, Hu 109). From the last point, it follows that empiricism must be dualistic. It must involve both a given and subject to whom it is given, and Deleuze argues that any philosopher who breaks that dualism, stops being an empiricist (HU 110). In this vein faculties do not simply articulate anything beyond this duality. Hence to ask ‘how does imagination become a faculty’ is synonymous with the problem of how a subject comes to transcend the given, and is answerable by a consideration of how the principles are able to transform what is perceived (Hu 110). From this perspective, Deleuze takes Kant’s substantive criticism of Hume to revolve around how a subject is given, and this is the argument which he counters.

However this answer is only half of the problem, as it is clearly not enough to ask whether Hume can or cannot escape Kant’s critiques, one also needs to know both why Kant himself might have made them, and how that reflects Kant’s own innovation in the nature of faculties. In the latter problem what matters is that contra to the earlier Kant of the Hume book, the Kant of the Kant book now uses faculties in two distinct senses. On the one hand it refers to the quest to find higher principles for knowledge or for desire, while on the other hand it relates to a specific source for a representation (K4 and 7). Hence the word ‘faculty’ does not simply relate to a certain principle, and with it certain ways that givens are being transcended, but also necessarily pitches a question about how different faculties are caught up by one another, as they effect that transcendence. So that contra Hume, what a principle does, and what it achieves are distinctly different elements. What it does is framed by the second use of faculty, each principle is therefore its own source for a certain representation, but what it achieves will depend upon the first use, and the sense that each faculty is caught up in the others, and made, at times to serve their interest rather than its own. Thence Kant’s break with Hume does not concern the needs of the subject, but rather reflects the interest of knowledge. It is now knowledge which itself precludes the possibility that a given is ever simply given (K8).

However one needs caution here to locate the exact nature of this break. It is clearly no longer situated, as it was in the Hume book, on the needs of the subject, but rather on the rigours of difference. In the Hume book, difference had been allowed to be internal to each principle, and passions did not challenge that difference, but rather made it make sense. Kantian faculties in contrast, clearly operate somewhat differently. For example, as imagination acts in the interest of knowledge, it is caught up in a unity which is never its own, but to which it must constantly respond and express though its own distinct actions. Hence imagination is forced to act not in its own interests but according to the laws of another, through whom it comes to be differed. A deep divide is thereby opened up between synthesis and schematics. A synthesis is the means by which diversity is caught up in a ‘certain space and a certain time’, and required to conform to what it is not (which in Kant’s formation is an object in general). Schematics operates in the opposing direction, and defines the relations which across all space and time embody the conceptual category (K 18). Perhaps one might then say, in the terminology of Difference and Repetition that synthesis represents the ‘differential and repeating element along with the simultaneous engendering of its action’ in the faculty of imagination, while schematics gives the sense that it ‘comes into the world already repeating’ (DR 180). Thus far, Deleuze and Kant agree about the nature Hume’s mistake. Hume remains firmly located inside schematics, and inside time, and never directly confronts the differential processes through which that time is given.

However Kant and Deleuze part company over how this difference is to be thought. For Deleuze, the first sense of Kant’s use of faculty has negative, as well as positive connotations. It not only articulates relations of difference between faculties, but also, and at the same time, defines an interest whereby the process can be understood in terms of the overall product. The ‘I think’ (and the transcendental object), therefore represent the interest of knowledge in producing via the categories, a certain end product (K15-16). That is, as mentioned earlier, Kant’s error confused the action of transcendental causes with their eventual effect. Moreover Deleuze goes on to effectively contend, in Difference and Repetition that his younger formation of empiricism was accurate, and yet facile and should have included Kant. Empiricism’s mistake he claims, was that it traditionally understood differences to involve fixed, separate and external terms. Givens were therefore simply assumed to be both different and external both to one another, and to the subject. Kant is then repeating this move, when instead of attempting to grasp at the ‘critical’ difference he had discovered, the difference operating within a faculty (in the first sense) and between faculties (in the second sense), he simply instead understood that difference in terms of the separate products, concepts and intuitions, which it produces (Dr 216). Hence of course the critical status of the free accord for Deleuze’s Kant. It is only in free accords, that the difference between faculties is allowed to stand apart from an eventual result (and is so, even though Kant must allow that accord to be harmonious, and therefore moral K61).

Hence Kant and Hume are condemned in the same breadth, both at some level or other to accept a world of given relations, and never articulate the differences which endlessly resonate in between such givens. If anything, Deleuze’s Kant appears to have the clear advantage over his Hume. This Kant, not only uncovered the fact that there was a genesis to the communication of difference between the faculties; but was also allowed to develop in ideas, a methodology by which that difference could be articulated; as well as, was in the sublime, allowed to create a perfect example of what it meant to be caught up by a supra-sensible difference. So Kant, even though he himself never peeked out from the viewpoint of the genesis that he himself had created, seems to cut the deeper of the two (DR 220-221). However, one needs not to dismiss Hume too lightly for three reasons. Firstly, Deleuze is very careful in the Kant book to frame ideas as the answer to the problem he had first defined in the Hume book; the problem of cogency amongst concepts. Deleuze in his first book, explored this problem by Hume’s contention that passions form a total system which was nonetheless problematic and pre-individual. The problem of this system was that it could only think this totality in terms of morality, and therefore it illicitly presumed the very human subjects it should create. This problem is then taken up in the Kant book, where in the theory of Ideas, Deleuze finds both new tools to navigate the seemingly impossible landscape of delirium, and also to explain why the denial of that territory might lead one back to morality. And so, once again Deleuze’s Hume is seen not as wrong, but merely as unable to theorize adequately the totalities whose problematic status he had developed so well. Secondly, as discussed in the previous series, Kant may have defined the circumstances in which differences were engendered, but was then unable to grasp their disruptive nature, and so confused them with harmony (K55). Hume by contrast, although he lacks the former argument, certainly understood that differences need to be understood as implying something more problematic than a simple harmony. Thence it is Hume, and not Kant who allows individuals to navigate the constantly shifting fields of given differences. Thirdly, and perhaps most speculatively one might say, that at the heart of the young Deleuze’s theory of purposivity, there lay an attempt to think how a subject could affirm the totality of a system, in which they found themselves situated, whose origin was at once beyond them, and yet not simply external from them. - And whose very thought appeared to imply a delirium and madness. But then how else, might one ask, would the first synthesis of time view the other two syntheses but as a ground of echoing madness and shifting fates, which it nonetheless must affirm?

At the root of the complexity of the Kant-Hume axis in Deleuze’s thought perhaps, there lies the fact that there appears no simple resolution or formula. Deleuze neither simply breaks with Hume in favour of Kant, nor breaks with Kant in favour of Hume. On the contrary a far more complex move is affected. Right from his first book on Hume all the way up to Difference and Repetition, Deleuze is aware of two things. Firstly, that in some sense, there was pitched between Hume and Kant a philosophy he agreed with if only he could find it. Thence his mode of thinking, is very much reminiscent of how he himself described the fifth book of Spinoza’s Ethics; he is like a dog after a bone, looking and re-looking for something he is sure is there, and yet which he cannot easily find. Secondly straddling this quest is another quite distinct task. It is not enough to find his own philosophy, but he must also explain where others differ from it. Here again the Hume-Kant axis allows him to transfix other thinkers, and to then define their problems as a mere sideshow in his own concerns. To trace the weird conjunctions, and constantly precluded moves, is therefore to trace a Deleuzian mind in action, and to follow some of the tangled web of philosophical histories, that was being compressed into the felt of Difference and Repetiton.

Back to Deleuze welcome

Picking Over the bones of David Hume

My aim in this paper is at least simple to state. One of Deleuze’s repeated strategies for thought, is to set up a complex series of exchanges between two thinkers or between two sets of ideas in which they are at once explained and transformed. Perhaps these exchanges are at their richest when they are set up between two philosophers who are said to be rivalling one another in some way; Hence Nietzsche becomes Kant’s rival and is enriched in the process. Nor is this simply a case in these exchanges, that it is always Deleuze who is pulling the strings. One has to only think of the highly complex Spinoza-Leibniz axis to see this. While the dynamic of this relationship is clear enough, Deleuze repeatedly makes his Spinoza answer to Leibnizian problems. What exactly those problems themselves are, undergoes continual reworking, all the way up to The Fold, as Leibniz constantly eludes Deleuze’s grasp. However the Hume-Kant axis is unique in three respects: Firstly it is very early. Deleuze’s first book in 1953 - Empiricism and Subjectivity - attempted to construct a Hume to answer a Kant. Hence the history of this relationship, is caught up in the history of Deleuze’s development as a thinker. Secondly there is far more genuine equality in this relationship than in many of the others. For example in the aforementioned Spinoza-Leibniz axis, Deleuze is very clear who he sides with, and even The Fold, with its alleged assertion of Leibniz’s independence merely proves to be only a moment in his critique, as Spinoza is once again allowed in What is Philosophy? to provide the answers to Leibniz’s problems. However with the Kant and Hume axis there is no dominant partner. The relationship is therefore free to evolve, with each side being allowed to comment upon the other. Thirdly and perhaps most curiously of all, the exchange only has a limited presence within Deleuze’s writings. After Difference and Repetition, Kant is drawn off into other formations, while Hume remains on the sidelines, and is scarcely mentioned in written works until What is Philosophy? where he, and his empiricism are once again pitched against Kant, but this time with Leibniz as their mighty ally (however one needs care here as it is no doubt significant that Hume does have a presence in the ‘conversation’ books, Dialogues 2 and Negotiations, indicating that he had not simply slipped out of Deleuze’s thought). Whence, my aim here is to examine certain critical aspects in this relationship, from its initial inception in the 1953 book Empiricism and Subjectivity, through Kant’s Critical Philosophy to Difference and Repetition and to attempt to show how in the course of this ongoing exchange, many of the contours of the mature Deleuze start to emerge.