Felix Ó Murchadha: The Formation of the Modern Self, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

The Formation of the Modern Self: Reason, Happiness and the Passions from Montaigne to Kant Book Cover The Formation of the Modern Self: Reason, Happiness and the Passions from Montaigne to Kant
Felix Ó Murchadha
Bloomsbury Academic
2022
Hardback $103.50
264

Gilles Deleuze: Letters and Other Texts

Gilles Deleuze: Letters and Other Texts Book Cover Gilles Deleuze: Letters and Other Texts
Gilles Deleuze. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Ames Hodges
Semiotext(e)
2020
Paperback $19.95
312

Reviewed by: Ralf Gisinger (University of Vienna)

“Don’t think I am a compulsive letter writer or that I have a sense of dialogue. I hate it.”/ „Denken Sie nicht, ich sei ein gewissenhafter Briefeschreiber oder dass ich einen Sinn für Dialog habe. Ich hasse es.“ (72, an Gherasim Luca; Übers. RG)[1]

 

Die lange erwartete englische Übersetzung des 2015 im französischen Original erschienen Buchs Letters and Other Texts ist der dritte und letzte von David Lapoujade zusammengestellte bzw. herausgegebene Band mit posthum erschienen Sammlungen von Deleuze-Texten nach Die einsame Insel (2002) und Schizophrenie und Gesellschaft (2003).[2] Daneben existieren noch die zu Lebzeiten Deleuzes (1925-1995) von ihm selbst arrangierten Textkompilationen Unterhandlungen (1990) sowie Kritik und Klinik (1993).

Zum 20. Todesjahr Deleuzes publiziert, bietet der Band neben den Briefen vor allem schwer erhältliche sowie einzelne noch nicht erschienene Texte, aber auch ein längeres Interview (zusammen mit Félix Guattari) und 5 Zeichnungen von Deleuze. Während die beiden vorhergehenden Anthologien chronologisch und zeitbezogen strukturiert sind, kommt dem vorliegenden Band mehr die Rolle eines „Restbestands“ von noch unveröffentlichten (oder lange nicht verfügbaren) Schriften zu, wenngleich dies die Lektüre abwechslungsreich und immer wieder spannend gestaltet. Trotz der ausführlichen und gelehrsamen Einordnungen von Lapoujade (besonders in den Briefen) ist eine Kenntnis der Werkgeschichte von Deleuze eine Voraussetzung, um die tour de force an Zeitsprüngen und Textgenrewechseln inhaltlich mitzuvollziehen. Und doch liegen die Vorteile der kurzen Texte, wie schon in Die einsame Insel sowie Schizophrenie und Gesellschaft auf der Hand: in Briefen, Interviews oder Essays wird den schwierig verständlichen philosophischen Konzepten manchmal mehr Leben eingehaucht indem beispielhaft erklärt, pointiert zusammengefasst oder fast schon entstellend verkürzt wird. Sollten Die einsame Insel und Schizophrenie und Gesellschaft (aber auch Unterhandlungen), die damit schon seit über 15 Jahren fester Bestandteil des Forschungskorpus rund um Deleuze (und Guattari) sind, demensprechende Erwartungen an Letters and Other Texts geweckt haben, lässt sich dieser Anspruch natürlich nicht gänzlich erfüllen. Jedoch gibt es, neben tatsächlich eher belanglosen Briefen, immer wieder interessante Korrespondenzen (vor allem mit Guattari, Villani, Klossowski, Foucault oder Voeffray), die sowohl philosophische als auch allgemeine Einblicke in die Lebenswelt von Deleuze und seinen Adressaten über eine Zeitspanne von nahezu vier Jahrzehnten geben. Das Highlight des Buches ist sicher ein erstmals publiziertes gemeinsames Interview mit Guattari (geführt von Raymond Bellour im Frühjahr 1973) über den Anti-Ödipus (1972), aber auch die Unterlagen für einen „Course on Hume (1957-1958)“, der Einblicke in Deleuzes pädagogische Herangehensweise in Bezug auf Hume erlaubt, oder das zwar schon länger kursierende, aber erstmals seit 1946 wieder abgedruckte „From Christ to the Bourgeoisie“ empfehlen sich für eine durchaus lohnende Lektüre.

Der Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit der Edition von Deleuzes Schriften sowie die damit einhergehende Nachvollziehbarkeit, Auffindbarkeit und Übersetzung ist ein hoch zu schätzender Verdienst Lapoujades. Aus diesem Grund wird das „Patchwork“ bzw. der mangelnde rote Faden des Buchs nicht nur in Kauf genommen, sondern bildet sogar dessen notwendiges Grundgerüst, wird es eben als Ergänzung zu den bisher erschienenen Sammelbänden verstanden. Gleichzeitig muss konzediert werden, dass viele dieser Texte ohne den starken Aufschwung und die zunehmende Popularität von Deleuze in den letzten Jahren – insbesondere im englischsprachigen Raum – sonst wohl nicht nochmal abgedruckt worden wären

So reicht Letters in Bezug auf die Erschließung des Gesamtwerks (sowohl für die Deleuze-Forschung als auch zur allgemeinen Verständlichkeit von Deleuze und Guattari) nicht an die vorhergehenden Sammelsurien heran, die deutlich reichhaltigere Quellen an kurzen Texten in der Form von zumeist autorisierten Interviews, Zeitschriftenartikel, Gesprächen und Briefen, beinhalten, welche sich vor allem um zusätzliche Erläuterungen, konzise Zuspitzungen, konkrete Anwendungen oder Verteidigungen der eigenen Theorien drehen. Damit sind sie von herausragender Bedeutung, um die Intentionen, Abläufe und Prozesse von Deleuzes Denken und Schaffen nachzuvollziehen. Dafür wird mit dem Fokus auf Briefe eine persönlichere, ja geradezu private Ebene erschlossen (wobei stets in einem professionellen Rahmen verbleibend), die eine gewisse theoretische Kraft entfalten kann, auch wenn dies kritisch betrachtet werden sollte.

Das Buch ist in drei Teile gegliedert:

Der erste Teil beinhaltet Briefe an Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, François Châtelet, Pierre Klossowski, Jean-Clet Martin, aber auch an außerhalb Frankreichs weniger bekannte Personen wie Jean Piel, Arnaud Villani, Alain Vinson, Clément Rosset, Elias Sanbar, André Bernold, Joseph Emmanuel Voeffray und Gherasim Luca. Dabei wurden einzig einige der Briefe an Arnaud Villani und Gherasim Luca sowie der erste an Alain Vinson vorher schon veröffentlicht.

Wie schon in den vorangegangen Textsammlungen bettet Lapoujade zu Beginn jeden der chronologisch geordneten Briefe in die jeweilige Zeit ein und gibt anderweitigen Kontext zu den Adressaten sowie zu Ereignissen, Umständen, Texten oder Personen, auf die in den Zuschriften referiert wird. Auch ein Namensindex am Ende des Buches leistet Hilfe bei Einordnung und Recherche. Leider befinden sich in der vorliegenden auf Englisch übersetzten Ausgabe in den Fußnoten einige kleine Fehler (z.B. 27; 29; 69 oder 97), die im französischen Original so nicht vorkommen.

Auch für langjährige Deleuze-Leser:innen dürften die 5 Zeichnungen überraschend anmuten (101ff.), die von Karl Flinker 1973 in einem Heft zu Foucault und Deleuze unter dem Titel „Faces et Surfaces“ [Seiten/Gesichter und Oberflächen] veröffentlicht wurden. Diesen Illustrationen folgen im zweiten Teil des Buches die „Other Texts“, diverse Texte, die entweder lange nicht verfügbar waren, zu unterschiedlichen Zeiten in Zeitungen beziehungsweise als Rezensionen oder noch gar nicht erschienen sind, was auf den „Course on Hume (1957-58)“ (119ff.) sowie ein Interview von Deleuze und Guattari mit Raymond Bellour (auf Vorschlag Foucaults) über den Anti-Ödipus (195ff.) zutrifft.

Des Weiteren sind im dritten Teil des Bandes fünf als „Jugendwerke“ deklarierte Schriften enthalten, die Deleuze zwischen seinem 20. und 22. Lebensjahr verfasst, allerdings später wieder zurückgezogen hat.

Wie im Titel programmatisch angekündigt, liegt das Hauptaugenmerk von Letters and Other Texts auf von Deleuze gesendeten Briefen, die zwar nach Personen chronologisch angeordnet sind, jedoch keine Antworten inkludieren, weshalb auch nicht von vollständigen Briefwechseln gesprochen werden kann. Dementsprechend erscheinen die Briefe trotz der ausgezeichneten Kontextualisierung Lapoujades teilweise zusammenhangslos beziehungsweise mit vielen Jahren Abstand. Gemäß dem Titel werde ich mich auch in folgender Rezension primär auf die Briefe konzentrieren.

Dass die im Buch versammelten Briefe keinen Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit erheben können, ist zwar evident, wird aber auch nicht explizit erwähnt. Lapoujade gesteht in der Einführung zu, dass die Briefe im Œuvre Deleuzes keine zentrale Rolle einnehmen, da Deleuze diesen keine Wichtigkeit einräumte und sie nicht als Teil oder Erläuterung seines Werks ansah (7). In dem Band sind ausschließlich von Deleuze geschriebene Briefe, nicht aber von den jeweiligen Adressaten enthalten – begründet wird dies damit, dass er keine Korrespondenzen aufbewahrte, wobei nicht ganz klar wird, ob vom Herausgeber eine solche Rekonstruktion von Briefwechseln überhaupt angestrebt wurde.

Es ist davon auszugehen, dass Deleuze außerdem die vollständige Veröffentlichung seiner Briefe nicht vorsah und wahrscheinlich auch nicht erwartet hätte, da er bei der Autorisierung (so etwa bei der auszugsweisen Publikation seines Briefs über Kant an Alain Vinson (17f.)) äußerste Zurückhaltung an den Tag legte. Die Diskussion um Deleuzes Verhältnis zu Briefen flammte posthum schon mit dem Nachruf Clameur de l’être (1997; Geschrei des Seins) von Alain Badiou (*1937) auf, in dem dieser nicht nur seine eigenwillige Interpretation von Deleuze niederschrieb („Metaphysik des Einen“), sondern freimütig sein (Nicht-)Verhältnis zu Deleuze aus seiner Sicht schildert, welches sich jedoch ausschließlich anhand des Narrativs von Badiou nachvollziehen und einschätzen lässt. Nach einer jahrzehntelangen Distanz und offenen (vornehmlich politisch induzierten) Kontroversen begannen die beiden Anfang der 1990er-Jahre einen kurzen, aber intensiven Briefwechsel über ihre theoretischen Divergenzen. Nach Badious Darstellung brach Deleuze, schon in seinen letzten Lebensjahren und durch Krankheit geschwächt, die Korrespondenz 1994 abrupt ab, teilte Badiou die Vernichtung der Briefe mit und verbat sich eine Veröffentlichung ebendieser (Badiou 2003, 14).

So interessant dieser Austausch für Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit wäre, wird Deleuzes Wunsch natürlich entsprochen und es finden sich keine Briefe an Badiou in Letters and Other Texts. Die beschriebene Episode wirft allerdings die Frage auf, nach welchen Kriterien die Briefe in Letters zusammengestellt wurden, was in dem Buch leider nicht ausgeführt wird: anhand der Verfügbarkeit und Zugänglichkeit oder des Ausbleibens eines dezidierten Veröffentlichungsverbot? Das editorische Problem, über keine Antworten der Empfänger zu verfügen, wird zwar in der Einleitung angesprochen, das moralische Problem der Veröffentlichung jedoch nur auf Deleuzes Frühwerke bezogen. Wenn Lapoujade in der Vorbemerkung Deleuzes allgemeines Verhältnis zu Briefen thematisiert, erkennt er zwar eine Ambivalenz an, lässt die Leser:innen aber nicht an weiteren Überlegungen zu diesem grundsätzlichen Dilemma teilhaben.

Ein ähnlich gelagertes Problem wie die Briefe betrifft die frühen Texte „Description of Women“ (1945), „From Christ to the Bourgeoisie“ (1946), „Words and Profiles“ (1946), „Mathesis, Science, and Philosophy“ (1946) sowie „Introduction to Diderot’s La Religieuse“ (1946), die vor 1953 erschienen sind, von Deleuze allerdings wie schon erwähnt später zurückgezogen wurden. Argumentiert wird dies durchaus überzeugend damit, dass diese (teilweise in veränderter/verfälschter Form) schon in Deleuze-Zirkeln kursiert seien und deshalb auf dieses Faktum nur mehr mit der Edition reagiert werden könne. Somit geht es Lapoujade und den Rechteinhaber:innen Fanny, Émilie Deleuze sowie Irène Lindon darum, eine autorisierte sowie originale Form dieser Texte zu gewährleisten. Die vorangestellte provisorische Bibliographie (11ff.) – von Deleuze wahrscheinlich 1989 erstellt – beginnt mit Empirismus und Subjektivität, seinem Hume-Buch 1953, was nicht einer gewissen Ironie entbehrt, wird somit die in Letters and Other Texts vollzogene Unterminierung der bewussten Auslassung seiner Frühschriften gleich von Anfang an ins Werk gesetzt.

Die Warnung, die Deleuze an Arnaud Villani 1981 ausspricht – „Don’t let me become an object of fascination or headache for you.” (80) – kann jedenfalls für die akademische Auseinandersetzung schon lange (zurecht) als überholt gelten. Mit dem vorliegenden Band dringt die Faszination in noch deutlich weitere Bereiche vor, die Deleuze selbst wahrscheinlich besagte Kopfschmerzen bereitet hätten. Obwohl Deleuze jungen Doktoranden in einer Mischung aus Bescheidenheit und Sorge um ihre universitäre Karriere rät, den Fokus ihrer Thesis nicht hauptsächlich auf ihn zu richten (an Villani, 80; an Voeffray, 91; an Martin, 94), nimmt er spätestens mit diesem Band einen Platz im historisierten Kanon ein, wo jedes jemals geschriebene (sowie gesprochene) Wort seziert und akademisch verwertet wird, was selbstredend auch auf den Autor dieser Zeilen zutrifft. Gerade die (immer auch, aber nicht nur) privaten Briefwechsel legen Zeugnis davon ab, wie sich die Deleuze-Rezeption diesbezüglich intensiviert und auch historisiert hat, sodass Letters nicht nur inhaltlich, sondern auch in der Form über die vorhergehenden Die einsame Insel und Schizophrenie und Gesellschaft hinausgeht. Deleuze formuliert in diesem Sinne an Joseph Emmanuel Voeffray reuevoll: “I should never have read a book on me at all.” (91).

Wie bereits ausgeführt, sah Deleuze das Medium „Brief“ einerseits nicht als übermäßig bedeutsam an, weshalb auch keine seiner empfangenen Zuschriften erhalten sind (denken wir an die vorher geschilderte Episode mit Badiou), andererseits auch nicht als eine Erweiterung seiner im Entstehen begriffenen Arbeiten, sondern entkoppelt von seinen Publikationen. Direkte, wenn auch kokettierende Verweise auf sein Verhältnis zu Briefen aus Letters and Other Texts sind etwa das eingangs zitierte: “Don’t think I am a compulsive letter writer or that I have a sense of dialogue. I hate it.” (72, an Gherasim Luca) oder an Pierre Klossowski: “I can no longer write a letter, it’s terrible. Effect of the solitude I nonetheless love.” (66)

Dies spiegelt sich zum Großteil auch in den Briefen selbst wider, die zwar spannende Einblicke in das Leben von Deleuze geben, so etwa in seine Lektüren, Aufenthaltsorte oder auch seinen Gesundheitszustand – dabei stets mehr beruflich als privat. Allerdings geht Deleuze in den Schreiben kaum philosophisch in die Tiefe oder gibt Erläuterungen für sein Werk bzw. seine Konzepte – mit faszinierenden Ausnahmen, auf die ich zurückkommen werde. Nur folgerichtig, wenn man bedenkt, was er Clément Rosset 1981 als Entschuldigung, Villani nicht in Paris getroffen zu haben, mitteilt: „[…] philosophical conversations are a pain” (23).

Begeben wir uns jedoch auf die Ebene der Entstehungskontexte, so ergeben sich interessante Zusammenhänge, von denen wiederum Rückschlüsse für andere Werke gezogen werden können.

So schreibt er im April 1968 an Jean Piel, dass ein Artikel zu Lewis Carroll derart den Rahmen von Umfang und Fragestellung sprenge, so dass es sich zu einem Buch entwickle (33). Betrachtet man das daraus entstandene Logik des Sinns (1969) unter dieser Voraussetzung als aus einem Text zu Carroll entstanden, lädt dies zu einer dementsprechend gewichteten Re-Lektüre durch diese Brille ein.

Der allgemeine Duktus der Schriften orientiert sich an einem Vorsatz, den er an François Châtelet im Jahr 1966 so formulierte: man benötige eine gewisse Wertschätzung um über etwas zu schreiben. So sei es ihm (Deleuze) lieber, gar nicht zu schreiben anstatt eines Verrisses (27). Diese Haltung scheint über weite Strecken auch in den Briefen durch, die geprägt von Höflichkeit, Anerkennung, Wertschätzung und Zuneigung sind, auch wenn dies sicherlich einer stilistischen Komponente geschuldet ist.

In den vorhergehenden Textsammlungen erschienen bereits Briefe, die in Letters nicht mehr aufgenommen wurden, so etwa an Jean-Clet Martin, Kuniichi Uno, Dionys Mascolo (Schizophrenie und Gesellschaft) sowie der „Brief an einen strengen Kritiker“/Michel Cressole  (Unterhandlungen), wobei insbesondere der Brief an Cressole (aber auch an Martin) durchaus eine Öffentlichkeit über den eigentlichen Empfänger hinaus adressiert – siehe auch den Verweis auf Cressole im Schreiben an Villani (77). Die Briefe ermöglichen einerseits die Erläuterung von schwer zu fassenden Begriffen [concepts] seiner Philosophie in einem einfacheren Stil, andererseits geben sie Innenansichten über Enstehungskontexte, Arbeitsweisen oder Methoden. In der Polemik gegen Cressole findet sich neben den Hinweisen auf seine philosophische Evolution etwa die berühmte Stelle über Deleuzes eigenes philosophisches Lesen und Produzieren, nämlich klassische Philosophen „von hinten zu nehmen“ und ihnen ein monströses Kind zu machen, das trotzdem ihres sei (Deleuze 1993, 15f.). Aber auch die Darstellung der ödipalen und repressiven Funktion der Philosophiegeschichte für das Denken stammt aus dem Schreiben an Cressole. Dagegen beleuchtet Deleuze in der Korrespondenz mit Uno besonders das Kennenlernen sowie die Zusammenarbeit mit Guattari in einer detaillierten Ausführlichkeit, wie sie sonst nicht bekannt wäre (Deleuze 2005, 223ff.). Und in dem Brief an Martin beschreibt er konzise die philosophische Operation der Begriffsschaffung [création], die sich stets am Konkreten zu orientieren habe, um erst von diesem zu Abstrakta vorzudringen (Deleuze 2005, 345).

Es ließe sich jedoch vermuten, dass die schon publizierten Briefe (in Unterhandlungen und Schizophrenie und Gesellschaft) inhaltlich begründet, d.h. aufgrund ihrer theoretischen Relevanz bereits in diesen Bänden erschienen sind, weshalb Letters and Other Texts ein wenig wie ein Residuum anmutet, wenngleich auch daraus wichtige und interessante Passagen für die Deleuze-Forschung zu extrahieren sind. Neben den bereits erwähnten Exzerpten sind dies vor allem:

  • Nachträgliche Werkeinordnungen, wie zum Beispiel in einem Brief an Arnaud Villani 1981, in dem Deleuze die Wichtigkeit seines Textes über den Strukturalismus (Deleuze 2005, 248ff.) sowie Teilen von Logik des Sinns relativiert, welche noch zu sehr der Psychoanalyse verhaftet bzw. in Bezug auf die Serien zu strukturalistisch gedacht seien (79).
  • Ein Schreiben an Joseph Emmanuel Voeffray 1982 primär über transzendentalen Empirismus (88f.), in dem Deleuze einen Bogen von den Problemen seiner Hauptwerke Ende der 1960er (Differenz und Wiederholung; Logik des Sinns) zu seiner aktuellen Beschäftigung (kurz nach Tausend Plateaus) spannt und besonders auf die stattgefundene Verschiebung zum Komplex „Abstrakte Maschine—Konkretes Gefüge“ verweist. Gleichzeitig deutet sich schon die Wiederaufnahme des transzendentalen Empirismus im Spätwerk an (89).
  • Die Selbstbezeichnung „pure metaphysician“ (78) aus einer Beantwortung von Fragen an Arnaud Villani 1980, die sich bereits zur Chiffre in der Deleuze-Forschung verselbständigt hat. Der Kontext dieser Charakterisierung liegt darin, den Schluss von Tausend Plateaus als Kategorientafel im Sinne Whiteheads (nicht Kants) zu verstehen (Deleuze/Guattari 1992, 695ff.). Im Anschluss an Bergson gehe es darum, den modernen Wissenschaften eine Metaphysik zu geben (78). Etwa in der Interpretation von Bonta/Protevi gelingt Deleuze (und Guattari) dies mit der Geophilosophie, allerdings beschreiben sie es als Deleuzes Ontologie, nicht als Metaphysik (Bonta/Protevi, 2006, viii).
  • Besagter Fragebogen von Villani, welcher allerdings zuvor schon in dessen Buch La Guêpe et l’orchidée (1999) erschienen ist, bietet auch sonst interessante Gesichtspunkte, so etwa die Philosophie als Wissenschaft zu klassifizieren, wenn sie die Bedingungen der Problematisierung bestimme (78).
  • Ausgesprochen informativ ist ein Verweis auf von Deleuze selbst ausgewählte kurze Textauszüge seiner Schriften (nur 2-10 Seiten) in einem Brief an Elias Sanbar im Jahre 1985 für eine Anthologie auf Arabisch (92f.). Ohne diese Selektion zu einem „Best-of“ erklären zu wollen, wirft sie ein Schlaglicht auf Passagen, die Deleuze selber (aus der Sicht von 1985) als essentiell oder paradigmatisch für sein Werk einstuft.

Besonders hervorzuheben ist ferner der Austausch mit Félix Guattari (1930-1992), Deleuzes langjährigem Freund („I also feel that we were friends before meeting“, 35) und Ko-Autor: „Es gibt nur ein Rhizom zwischen Félix und mir.“ (78; Übers. RG) Die beiden lernten sich im Frühjahr 1969 in der Region Limousin kennen und kurze Zeit später begann der erste Briefwechsel, welcher recht schnell den Beginn der Zusammenarbeit für den Anti-Ödipus (1972) einleitete. Die Briefe geben Einblicke in die erste Phase des Entstehungsprozesses des Anti-Ödipus, allerdings maximal als Ergänzung zu dem bereits 2006 erschienen, hauptsächlich auf Guattaris Beiträge fokussierten Buch The Anti-Œdipus Papers (hg. von Stéphane Nadaud), wo vornehmlich die Textentwicklung des Anti-Ödipus aufbereitet und dargestellt wird. Die in Letters gesammelten Briefe an Guattari (sicher nur ein Bruchteil der tatsächlichen Korrespondenz) zeigen jedoch darüber hinaus den Duktus und Ton der Kommunikation von Deleuze gegenüber Guattari – wie genau er dessen Texte ab ihrer ersten Begegnung 1969 liest und dessen Thesen (zum Beispiel den Maschinenbegriff) aufnimmt bzw. verarbeitet. Auch zwei Briefe im Rahmen der Vorbereitung für Tausend Plateaus sind im Buch enthalten, wozu bislang im Vergleich zum Anti-Ödipus deutlich weniger Quellenmaterial veröffentlicht wurde. Grenzwertig private Aufschlüsse ergeben sich aus einem dieser Briefe außerdem über die Art und Weise, wie bzw. über welches Medium die Auseinandersetzung mit den so genannten „Neuen Philosophen“ um Bernard-Henri Lévy Ende der 1970er Jahre am besten stattzufinden habe (51ff.).

Auch in anderen Briefen wird Guattari natürlich immer wieder Thema, so etwa im wiederholten Insistieren von Deleuze gegenüber Villani (immerhin im Abstand von drei Jahren), in dessen Texten bzw. Buch über Deleuze der Rolle von Guattari für die gemeinsamen Schriften zu seinem Recht zu verhelfen und diesem eine größere Relevanz für ihre gemeinsam erarbeiteten Konzepte einzuräumen (82; 84ff.). Deleuze stößt sich insbesondere an Villanis (verfehlter) Interpretation, Tausend Plateaus beruhe vornehmlich auf seiner Philosophie bzw. sei hauptsächlich von Deleuze verfasst.

Dies ist selbstredend eine der zentralen Fragen, die sich für die Deleuze&Guattari-Forschung in Bezug auf das rhizomatisch verflochtene Tandem stellt und die nach wie vor extensiv untersucht wird. Diesbezüglich ist wiederum eine Stelle aus dem Villani-Fragebogen von Interesse, in dem Deleuze bemerkt, dass die Mikro-Makro-Unterscheidung in Tausend Plateaus mehr von Guattari komme, wobei Deleuze die Unterscheidung zwischen zwei Typen von Mannigfaltigkeiten (die sich von seinem Bergson-Buch bis zu Tausend Plateaus mehr oder weniger durchzieht) dieser vorgelagert sieht und den Begriff der Mannigfaltigkeit [multiplicité] für wichtiger als die Mikrophysik (mehr ein Konzept Foucaults als Guattaris im Gegensatz zur Mikropolitik, Anm.) erachtet (79). Tausend Plateaus zeigt, wie diese verschiedenen Aspekte nebeneinander als Plateaus ko-existieren können, da einerseits die Mikro-Makro-Unterscheidung in diesem Werk ihre höchste Wichtigkeit erlangt (vor allem im 9. und 10. Plateau: „1933 — Mikropolitik und Segmentarität“ sowie „1730 — Intensiv-Werden, Tier-Werden, Unwahrnehmbar-Werden…“) und andererseits Deleuze/Guattari das gesamte Buch als „Theorie der Mannigfaltigkeiten“ (Deleuze/Guattari 1992, II) zusammenfassen.

Daran anschließend passt dazu das (neben den Briefen) meiner Ansicht nach zentrale Element des Buches – ein sehr ausführliches, aber auch aufschlussreiches Interview über den Anti-Ödipus mit Raymond Bellour, welches aber nie publiziert wurde, da es in der eigentlich angedachten Zeitschrift Les Temps modernes auf Intervention Guattaris aus politischen Gründen (wahrscheinlich die maoistische Prägung der Zeitschrift Anfang der 1970er) nicht erschien. Das Interview ist aus mehreren Gründen lesenswert sowie lehrreich:

1. Die Atmosphäre des Interviews schwankt zwischen locker-belustigt und angespannt. Besonders Guattari scheint von Bellours Fragen eher genervt zu sein („your question is lousy“, 200; „he’s going to say something stupid”, 205), was allerdings sowohl Guattari als auch Deleuze viele Erklärungen, Umschreibungen und Beispiele ihrer Thesen entlockt, die insbesondere für das Verständnis von Strömen [flux] oder ihrer Kritik an der familialen, reduktionistischen, ödipalen Psychoanalyse zugunsten eines sozialen und politischen Feldes gewinnbringend sind.

2. Wirft es ein Schlaglicht auf das Verhältnis von Deleuze und Guattari, ihrer (humorvollen) Kommunikation, gegenseitigen Vorlieben, aber auch Differenzen. So betritt Deleuze nach einem Telefongespräch wieder den Raum, worauf Guattari ihm mitteilt: „I said the opposite of what you said.“ Deleuze antwortet lapidar: “Good. Very good.” (231) Im Speziellen sticht der Fokus auf die politische Dimension hervor, die insbesondere Guattari immer wieder einbringt. Eine oft vorgetragene These, dass Guattari das Politische, wenn er es doch nicht in Deleuze hineintrage, so doch mehr zum Vorschein bringe und einfordere, zeigt sich in diesem Interview paradigmatisch.

3. Die starke bzw. umfassende Beschäftigung und Auseinandersetzung mit der Psychoanalyse, die Ende der 1960er/Anfang der 1970er noch eine viel breitere gesellschaftliche Rolle spielte. Noch vor dem Erscheinen über den Anti-Ödipus richtete Deleuze an Klossowski die Prognose: „either silence or war with psychoanalysts” (61) Auch in besagtem Interview vertreten Deleuze/Guattari ihre zentralen Thesen, wie etwa, dass das Begehren/der Wunsch [désir] nicht auf die Erfüllung eines Mangels zu reduzieren, sondern Produktion sei. Durch die beharrlichen Nachfragen Bellours entstehen bemerkenswerte (aber auch zugängliche) Passagen, beispielsweise die Forderung (sowie auch praktische Anwendung), konsequent in Strömen [flux], Intensitäten und Mannigfaltigkeiten zu denken und nicht einfach von präexistenten Fixpunkten (Subjekt/Objekt) auszugehen (200f.).

Zu guter Letzt geht es mir passenderweise um die Frage nach der Wirkung eines Buchs. Beklagt Deleuze im Interview 1973 noch den akademischen Aspekt des Anti-Ödipus als Ärgernis, wenn auch damit kokettierend (Guattari: „Exactly, it’s Gilles‘ fault.“ (208)), so klingt dies im Brief an Villani 1986, also 13 Jahre später, deutlich anders, man möchte sagen (wieder) deutlich akademischer. Deleuze nennt dem jungen Freund drei Aspekte, die ein existierenswertes Buch ausmachen sollten: In bisherigen Studien zum jeweiligen Thema 1. einen Fehler zu korrigieren (polemische Funktion), 2. etwas Übersehenes zum Vorschein bringen (erfinderische Funktion) sowie 3. einen Begriff [concept] zu schaffen (schöpferische Funktion). Interessanterweise steht dies in einem Spannungsverhältnis dazu, was Deleuze und Guattari im Anschluss an den Anti-Ödipus nicht müde werden zu betonen und auch im in Letters enthaltenen Interview immer wieder ansprechen (198f.; 207f.). So werden sie nicht müde zu betonen, das Buch nicht als Buch zu verstehen, sondern vornehmlich auf die (politischen) Effekte außerhalb und transversale Verbindungslinien abzuzielen sowie Äußerungsgefüge und Gefüge des Begehrens zu schaffen. Funktion des Buches sei dabei, nicht zu überzeugen, sondern abzuholen, wer die Psychoanalyse, aber auch das Subjekt, das Ego satthabe (207). Dass sich diese Hoffnung nicht erfüllen sollte, zeigt sich insbesondere in der Einschätzung im Vorwort zur italienischen Ausgabe von Tausend Plateaus. In einer seltenen Rückschau über die unterschiedliche Rezeption der zwei Bände ihres Opus magnum zu Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie ziehen sie Jahre später (1987) ein gänzlich anderes Fazit  noch im Interview 1973, weshalb ich ausführlicher zitiere: „Tausend Plateaus (1980) war die Fortsetzung des Anti-Ödipus (1972). Aber beide Bücher hatten objektiv ganz verschiedene Schicksale. Das lag sicherlich an den Umständen: die bewegte Zeit des einen, die noch unter dem Einfluß von 68 stand, und die Zeit der seichten flaute, der Gleichgültigkeit, in der das andere erschien. Tausend Plateaus ist von all unseren Büchern am schlechtesten aufgenommen worden. Wenn wir es dennoch besonders mögen, dann nicht so, wie eine Mutter ihr mißratenes Kind liebt. Der Anti-Ödipus war sehr erfolgreich, aber dieser Erfolg wurde von einem noch größeren Scheitern begleitet. Der Anti-Ödipus wollte auf die Verwüstungen Hinweisen, die Ödipus, das ‚Mama-Papa‘, in der Psychoanalyse, in der Psychiatrie und selbst in der Anti-Psychiatrie, in der Literaturkritik und im allgemeinen Bild, das man sich vom Denken macht, anrichtet. Wir haben davon geträumt, Ödipus den Garaus zu machen. Aber diese Aufgabe war zu groß für uns. Die Reaktion auf 68 hat gezeigt, wie stark Ödipus noch in der Familie war und wie er weiterhin in der Psychoanalyse, in der Literatur und überall im Denken sein Regime der kindlichen Weinerlichkeit ausübte. So blieb Ödipus für uns eine schwere Belastung. Tausend Plateaus hat uns dagegen, zumindest uns, trotz seines scheinbaren Mißerfolgs, einen Schritt weitergebracht und uns unbekannte und von Ödipus unberührte Gebiete entdecken lassen, die der Anti-Ödipus nur von ferne sehen konnte, ohne in sie vorzudringen.“ (Deleuze/Guattari 1992, I)

Auch in Letters reflektiert und resümiert Deleuze in einzelnen Passagen über intendierte, aber auch unerwünschte Effekte seiner Bücher. So bemerkt er in einem Brief an Voeffray (1983), dass die Schriften über Proust und Kafka keine Wirkung in seinem Sinne entfalteten (im Gegensatz zu dem Buch über Masoch). Indes waren Konzepte wie „Tier-Werden“ oder „Rhizom“ umgekehrt so erfolgreich, dass sie in einer Weise bar jeder Logik (!) verwendet wurden, die Guattari und ihn abstoße: „I sometimes feel like I’m being roasted by idiotic parasites.“ (91) – eine im Vergleich zum allgemeinen Duktus der Briefe seltene sprachliche Schärfe. Bei aller Kritik am vorliegenden Band könnte die nun vollständig vorliegende Edition der Schriften und Briefe im besten Falle einen Beitrag zum Schutz gegen idiotische Instrumentalisierungen von Deleuze liefern.

Wer darauf hofft, in Letters and Other Texts neue Theoriebausteine oder Verbindungslinien zu finden, welche fundamental andersartige Perspektiven auf und in Deleuzes Philosophie erschließen, muss enttäuscht werden. Das Buch beinhaltet jedoch wertvolle neu publizierte Texte und eröffnet in seiner Gesamtheit neue Ebenen, auf denen die Mannigfaltigkeit an deleuzianischen Strömen [flux] ineinander übergehen und sich verknüpfen lassen.

Bibliographie:

Badiou, Alain. 2003. Deleuze. »Das Geschrei des Seins«. Diaphanes: Zürich/Berlin [Deleuze. »La clameur de l’Etre«, 1997].

Bonta, Mark/ Protevi, Jon. 2006. Deleuze and Geophilosophy. A Guide and Glossary. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh [2004].

Deleuze, Gilles. 2020. Letters and Other Texts, hg. von David Lapoujade. Semiotext(e): South Pasadena [Lettres et autres textes, 2015].

Deleuze, Gilles/Guattari, Félix. 1977. Anti-Ödipus. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie I. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main [L’Anti-Œdipe, 1972].

Deleuze, Gilles/Guattari, Félix. 1992. Kapitalismus und Schizophrenie. Tausend Plateaus. Merve Verlag: Berlin [Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 1980].

Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. Logik des Sinns. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main [Logique du sens, 1969].

Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. Unterhandlungen 1972-1990. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main [Pourparlers 1972-1990, 1990].

Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. David Hume. Campus Verlag: Frankfurt am Main/New York [Empirisme et Subjectivité. Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume, 1953].

Deleuze, Gilles. 2003. Die einsame Insel. Texte und Gespräche von 1953 bis 1974, hg. von David Lapoujade. Frankfurt am Main [L’ile déserte et autres textes. Textes et entretiens 1953-1974, 2002].

Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Schizophrenie und Gesellschaft. Texte und Gespräche von 1975 bis 1995, hg. von David Lapoujade. Frankfurt am Main [Deux régimes de fous et autres textes (1975-1995), 2003].

Guattari, Félix. 2006. The Anti-Œdipus Papers, hg. von Stéphane Nadaud. New York [Écrits pour l‘Anti-Œdipe, 2005].


[1] Seitenzahlen ohne weitere Angabe referieren auf Letters and Other Texts (Deleuze 2020).

[2] Ich verwende in dieser Rezension, wenn vorhanden, die deutschen Übersetzungen, allerdings das jeweilige Ersterscheinungsjahr im Original.

Gilles Deleuze: Letters and Other Texts

Letters and Other Texts Book Cover Letters and Other Texts
Gilles Deleuze. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Ames Hodges
Semiotext(e)
2020
Paperback $19.95
312

Reviewed by: James Cartlidge (Central European University, Budapest/Vienna)

It is hard to overstate the effect Gilles Deleuze had (and continues to have) on academia. For someone who defined philosophy as the creation of concepts and devoted himself to the task so prolifically, it would surely be pleasing to him that people working in every corner of the human sciences have engaged with his creations. Deleuze’s philosophy is multi-faceted and complicated, but had a constant emphasis on thinking reality in its flux and becoming – and concepts are no exception. As Daniel Smith points out: “concepts are not eternal and timeless (true in all times and all places), but are created, invented, produced in response to shifting problematics”[i], and subject to change. Deleuze’s concepts have been given countless applications, developments, revisions, interpretations and reinterpretations, and they continue to resonate with many, philosophers and non-philosophers alike. Alas, Deleuze is no longer around to develop them himself, but the hive of activity around his work and the fascination it elicits for many shows no sign of abating. Two posthumous volumes of his work have appeared so far: Desert Islands and Other Texts and Two Regimes of Madness. Collected in them are numerous essays, interviews, conferences and other texts published in French between 1953 and 1995, which do not appear in any of Deleuze’s books. Letters and Other Texts is the third and final volume of this project. While it may not be as substantial as the previous two, the letters offer us a fascinating glimpse into Deleuze’s personality as a friend and academic, and there are some very interesting additions among the ‘other texts’. Academically speaking, those familiar with Deleuze’s work will find valuable resources for chronicling the development of some of his ideas, and the uninitiated will find useful texts to read alongside some of his major works – especially the long, hitherto-unpublished interview (with Guattari and Raymond Bellour) about Anti-Oedipus.

The book is structured into three parts, as David Lapoujade clarifies in his brief introduction:

  1. A set of letters addressed to different correspondents out of friendship or circumstance;
  2. A series of texts published or circulated during Deleuze’s life that were not included in the two previous volumes of posthumous texts;
  3. The four texts published before 1953 that Deleuze renounced although their publication can no longer be avoided. (7)

The book comes with some warnings. Many of these texts were either published but renounced later by Deleuze, or unintended for publication. Some of them he was thinking about publishing, but did not necessarily prepare them for it. There are texts here that are only being published at the wishes of his family, since they are being circulated containing errors and without authorization, and the letters (with one exception) were never intended for publication. Deleuze considered them to be private and not part of his work, even though he discusses his work in them. There are also significant gaps because Deleuze did not keep his mail – we do not have the responses of his correspondents, and many of the letters are not dated (though helpful approximations are made by Lapoujade). But these are only factors to bear in mind, and should not deter anyone from engaging with this valuable collection. From the perspective of studying his work and being interested in him as a human being, there are some brilliant pieces in here. Anyone familiar with the L’Abécédaire interview with Claire Parnet will know first-hand what an engaging and articulate speaker Deleuze was, and this also comes out in the letters (and the Anti-Oedipus interview). L’Abécédaire is essential viewing for those studying Deleuze because of its depth, breadth and brilliance, but also its relative straightforwardness compared to his published works. In Deleuze’s published work there is a commitment to the idea that a philosophical concept should not necessarily be easy to grasp, and must be wrestled with, thought about, thought about again, struggled to be comprehended. This is much less obvious in his interviews and letters, which are exceptionally clear and engaging, and nowhere near as much of a struggle to understand.

Let’s begin with the letters, and especially on the point of what they tell us about Deleuze as a person and professional. They are a very pleasant read, revealing Deleuze’s amiability at every turn and his deep admiration for his correspondents, especially Pierre Klossowski, Michel Foucault and the poet Gherasim Luca. From the perspective of his philosophical work and his intimate, most personal thoughts, they do not reveal too much – but there are some notable exceptions. Most of these correspondences are of a professional nature, and the minutiae of academic life found in them are charming. Apparently his course on cinema was his most worrying and difficult, which was a surprise to  him. (81) He didn’t seem to be a big fan of conferences or speaking at them – not entirely a surprise coming from someone who “insist[ed] that the activity of thought took place primarily in writing, and not in dialogue and discussion.”[ii] His two favourite parts of A Thousand Plateaus were the intimately-connected ‘Becoming-animal’ and ‘Refrain’ plateaus, which deal primarily with music and territorialization. (84) Dryly, he claimed (probably in 1970) that he’d “rather have another tuberculosis cavity than start over at Lyon.” (29) “This thesis pursues me as much as I pursue it” (31) he wrote to Jean Piel. To Guattari: “as usual, after my enthusiasm, doubt sets in.” (51) (Who hasn’t felt this way when writing a thesis at some point?) There are refreshing sections where Deleuze imparts advice on those that ask for it, like when Clement Rosset asks about writing his thesis (20-21), or Arnaud Villani considers writing about Deleuze.

Don’t let me become an object of fascination or a headache for you. I have seen cases of people who wanted to become the ‘disciple’ of someone and who definitely had as much talent as the ‘master’ but who ended up sterilized. It’s awful. […] You deserve much more than just being my commentator. (80)

There is one tension of significance to be found in the letters, and it also comes in the correspondence with Villani. The latter published a review of one of Deleuze and Guattari’s texts that substantially downplays Guattari’s role, much to Deleuze’s annoyance. Deleuze vehemently sticks up for Guattari in multiple letters: “remember that you have often taken my defence without me asking for it and here I am defending Felix who is not asking for it either.” (85) Many of these letters seem to show Deleuze to be self-effacing, often eschewing recognition and downplaying his achievements in favour of those he writes to, always giving credit where credit is due. Nevertheless, when the spotlight is directly on him, he takes it with grace: it is hard not to smile at his veritable elation at getting a positive review from Foucault, and how genuinely pleased he is with how he engages with his work: “I have both the impression that you understand me fully and that at the same time you have surpassed me. It’s a dream.” (68)

But what do the letters have to tell us about Deleuze’s philosophy? There are a few exchanges to look out for here. In a letter to Alain Vinson, for instance, Deleuze answers questions about Kant’s critical philosophy and his book on the subject. In the only portion of the letters that was published, Deleuze answers a questionnaire about his work sent by Arnaud Villani, where Deleuze’s well-known characterization of himself as “a pure metaphysician” (78) appears. Villani also asks Deleuze to summarise his disparate texts at some point, leading him to wonder if there is any kind of unity between them. His answer describes what he takes to be the three principal characteristics of any useful book, which might provide some readers with some guidance:

a book, if it deserves to exist, can be presented in three quick aspects: you do not write a “worthy” book unless: 1) you think that the books on the same subject or on a neighbouring subject fall into a type of overall error (polemical function of the book); 2) you think that something essential has been forgotten in relation to the subject (inventive function); 3) you believe yourself capable of creating a new concept (creative function). (86)

These aspects of his texts are exemplified later with some references to his books on Proust and Sacher-Masoch. (An essay on Sacher-Masoch is also included in the diverse texts.) Elsewhere, the letters to Jean Piel include some descriptions of the development of The Logic of Sense, and there is a very helpful and clear discussion of ‘transcendental empiricism’ in the letters to Joseph Emmanuel Voeffray.

But perhaps most important is the correspondence between Deleuze and Guattari, which mostly consists of discussions about the development of what would become their most well-known and well-read work: the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Of especial interest are the letters about Anti-Oedipus, which contain early attempts to work out the exact direction and questions of their inquiry, and to formulate their concepts, such as ‘machine’. I would emphasize that seasoned students of Deleuze and Guattari may not find anything new or surprising here, but those struggling with the undeniable difficulty of reading Anti-Oedipus for the first time may find helpful the more concise and clear propositions about the aim of the text that appear in these letters. For instance:

as long as we think that economic structures only reach the unconscious through the intermediary of the family and Oedipus, we can’t even understand the problem […] what are the socioeconomic mechanisms capable of bearing directly on the unconscious? (37, 39)

In fact, Anti-Oedipus is probably the text that comes to the fore more than any other in Letters and Other Texts, owing not just to this correspondence, but the long interview conducted with Deleuze and Guattari by Raymond Bellour, which I will come to later.

I will not go into too much detail about the ‘writings of youth’, not only because Deleuze renounced them later on, but because they are not of as much interest as the letters and ‘diverse texts’. Suffice it to say that there are some early essays and book introductions here, including the first essay Deleuze published: ‘description of women’. It is understandable, given Deleuze’s later writings, why he distanced himself from work like this. Not to say that the essay is bad, or uninteresting, but it is of a completely different style and orientation than his mature philosophy. It clearly bears influence from Sartre and phenomenology, and is of a decidedly existentialist bent both in style and content, as passages like this show:

Major principle: things did not wait for me to have their meaning. Or at least, which comes to the same from a descriptive standpoint, I am not aware that they waited for me. Meaning is objectively inscribed in the thing: there is something tiring, and that is all. This big, round sun, this climbing road, this fatigue in the lower back. I do not have anything to do with it. I am not the one who is tired. I do not invent anything, I do not project anything, I do not bring anything into the world, I am nothing, not even a nothing, especially not: nothing more than an expression. I do not attach my little meanings onto things. The object does not have a meaning, it is its meaning. (254)

Again, this is by no means a poor essay, but the kind of work Deleuze would go on to do and the philosophers he would later most associate himself with are completely different. He goes on to criticise phenomenology and place importance on philosophers that were at the time not studied that much in France. Deleuze was working in a time where ‘the three Hs’ – Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger – were prevalent in French philosophy education. Deleuze eschewed this tradition and the major philosophy of the day (existentialism, Marxism, phenomenology) in favour of what he sometimes called the ‘minor’ history of philosophy, which he found more productive: Hume, Spinoza, Proust, Nietzsche, Bergson. Deleuze’s mature work would amount to a criticism of the movements, styles and philosophers he shows more allegiance to in his early essays  – but they are nonetheless of interest for the topics he discusses.

Philosophically and academically speaking, the ‘diverse texts’ are the best in this collection. Of interest are the two texts on Hume: a course Deleuze was thinking about publishing, and an essay submitted as part of his agrégation exam on the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion – “undoubtedly the only example of real ‘dialogues’ in philosophy.” (183) Hume was a particularly important philosopher for Deleuze – his first book, Empiricism and Subjectivity, is devoted to the interpretation of his work, and anyone interested in tracing this aspect of Deleuze’s career will find much worth in these two texts. The course is excellent, but consists of notes that Deleuze would presumably have expanded on at length in class, so it reads very densely and can be difficult to connect the dots at times. The Dialogues text is much more polished, contains brief summarizations of some of the text’s key arguments and offers reflections on the significance of the Dialogues and their correct interpretation. Deleuze explains nicely how the problem of religious belief becomes a problem for Hume because of the consequences of his wider theory of knowledge:

Hume finds belief at the foundation of knowledge. At the base of knowledge, there is belief […] The problem of religious belief then takes on greater urgency because one can no longer appeal to the heterogeneity of the two domains, knowledge and faith. […] Since everything is belief, the question is knowing under what conditions a belief is legitimate and forms true knowledge. (184)

And he is absolutely strident on which character represents Hume (which is Philo):

There is […] a common interpretation that says Hume put some of his thought into each of the characters: it is an untenable interpretation because it neglects both the originality and the essential of the Dialogues, that they go entirely against the idea of natural religion. (184)

Also in the diverse texts is a short, remarkably positive book review of an ethnographic text by Pierre Clastres, a French anthropologist Deleuze admired greatly and whose importance in relation to Deleuze and Guattari is perhaps underappreciated. Clastres is cited approvingly a couple of times in Anti-Oedipus but referenced more often and substantially in A Thousand Plateaus, which appeared three years after his untimely death in 1977. Part of the ‘war machine’ plateau is written as a tribute to his memory and makes use of his fascinating work on the Guayaki Indians, and his anti-evolutionary theory of so-called ‘primitive societies’, expressed by Deleuze and Guattari as follows:

Societies termed primitive are not societies without a State, in the sense that they failed to reach a certain stage, but are counter-State societies organizing mechanisms that ward off the State-form, which make its crystallization impossible.[iii]

The reason so-called primitive societies don’t have a state, on Clastres’ account, is because they put mechanisms in place to make sure it never arises, as though they unconsciously ‘saw’ ahead of time that this would be necessary. Given the power that Clastres’ ideas seemed to have for Deleuze and Guattari, it is interesting to see Deleuze engage with Clastres’ ethnographic text. He describes his style as one which “attains an ever-increasing sobriety that intensifies its effect and turns this book, page after page, into a masterpiece. […] In truth, it is a new ethnography, with love, humour, and procedures formed on location.” (192-193) Though the review was published in 1972, there are parts which arguably seem to anticipate the language of ‘lines of flight’ and ‘rhizomatic connections’ that would feature more heavily in A Thousand Plateaus, such as when Deleuze is describing Clastres’ method:

He enters his tribe from any direction. And there he follows the first line of conjunction that presents itself to him: what beings and what things do the Guayaki place in conjunction? He follows this line to the point where, precisely, these beings or things diverge, even if they form other conjunctions…etc. Example: there is a first line “manhunter-forest-bow-animal killed”; then a disjunction woman-bow (the woman should not touch the bow); from which a new conjunction “woman-basket-campsite…” starts; another disjunction “hunters-produce” (the hunter should not consume his products himself, in other words the animals he has killed); then another conjunction (hunter alliance-food prohibition, matrimonial alliance-incest prohibition). (193)

Clastres was clearly an influence on Deleuze and Guattari to some extent, though exactly how influential is unclear. But Deleuze’s review of Clastres, despite its brevity, is a welcome addition to the English translations of his work because it highlights an interesting (and perhaps underappreciated) intellectual, and his connection with Deleuze’s philosophy.

But the most substantial text to be found in this collection, from a scholarly viewpoint, is the Anti-Oedipus interview with Deleuze and Guattari, conducted by Raymond Bellour. Anti-Oedipus is the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (arguably Deleuze and Guattari’s most important text), so reading it is essential for anyone wanting to get to grips with their work. But reading it is a challenge for anyone: it is dense, bizarre and erudite in equal measure. The number of psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists and artists it refers to is dizzying. Concepts are often deployed without their meaning being explained – either until later or not at all. It seems determined to overwhelm the reader, confuse them and shatter their expectations of what an academic book on psychoanalysis is supposed to be. It is often ironic, makes plentiful use of foul language and takes delight in mocking its targets. It’s a brilliant text, but one that requires a lot of hard work on the part of the reader.

Some of the initial difficult to understand the main points of the book, and its arguments, can be lessened by reading this interview. It covers some of the book’s main points, the motivation behind it, the response it received, and includes some helpful questions from Bellour[iv] about the books central concept that provoke clarificatory responses from Deleuze and Guattari. They explain that the point of the book was to help a certain class of people for whom psychoanalysis, as traditionally practised, does not work.

There is a whole generation of young people in analysis, who are more or less stuck in analysis, who continue to go, who take it like a drug, a habit, a schedule and, at the same time, they have the feeling that it is not working, that there is a whole load of psychoanalytic bullshit. They have enough resistance to psychoanalysis to think against it, but at the same time, their thinking against it in terms that are still psychoanalytical. (195-196)

Deleuze and Guattari want to criticise and rethink psychoanalysis and the practise of therapy from the ground up. But doing this requires overcoming the psychoanalytic language and categories we are used to, which the authors attempt by deploying a cornucopia of new concepts. But their biggest targets, by far, are the dominant psychoanalytic conceptions of the unconscious and desire. They contend not only that these conceptions are wrong, but that they have been used to repress people and reinforce the capitalist hegemony. Desire and the unconscious contain great revolutionary potential which psychoanalysis, as usually practised, suppresses. The Bellour interview focusses more on desire, but the gist of their argument about the unconscious can be well illustrated by a quote they cite from D. H. Lawrence:

the unconscious contains nothing ideal, nothing in the least conceptual, and hence nothing in the least personal, since personality, like the ego, belongs to the conscious or mental-subjective self. So the first analyses are, or should be, so impersonal that the so-called human relations are not involved.[v]

Psychoanalysis mistreats the unconscious and obscures it because it conceives of it as ‘slightly-less-conscious’ rather than un-conscious and as a mere passive receptacle for repressed thoughts and drives. The crucial idea that motivates Anti-Oedipus –  as Foucault explains in the preface – is that we have been made to desire our own repression. The key to overcoming this is unlocking the potential of the unconscious as an active, productive machine through which desire flows.[vi] The flow of desire has been perverted such that people actually want to be oppressed, but if we could better understand the mechanisms by which this is possible, we can reprogram ourselves and begin to get out of this lamentable condition. Desire is suppressed when we treat it as a lack of something that one wants, it is rather an active force that flows through everything we do and produces our thoughts, behaviour and society itself.

One of Bellour’s strengths as an interviewer is that he, as Deleuze puts it, concertedly ‘plays the role of the simpleton’ (200). His questions and comments about desire are the sort that anyone would have on first hearing Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire, especially: why would we call this desire, when we always understand it in terms of lack? This provokes some helpful clarificatory responses from both authors. I have largely focussed on Deleuze here, but Guattari, though usually harder to understand, has moments of  exceptional clarity, such as when he expresses one of the key conceptions of  ourselves (that we have clear, well-defined identities) he and Deleuze are seeking to overturn.

It is an incredible illusion to think that people have an identity, are stuck to their professional function, father, mother, all that… They are completely lost and distressed. They flow. They put some shit on television, they look transfixed, caught in a constellation, but they are adjacent to a bunch of systems of intensity that run through them. You really must have a completely rationalist intellectual view to believe that there are well-built people who preserve their identity in a field. That’s a joke. All people are wanderers, nomads. (204-205)

Letters and Other Texts is the final part in a trilogy, the conclusion of an admirable project to bring the remainder of Deleuze’s texts to publication. It should be understood in context and read alongside Desert Islands and Two Regimes of Madness. Compared to the previous two volumes, Letters is much less substantial from an academic point of view, but there are still texts in here that will be of interest to Deleuzians of all stripes. In many ways, Letters is a fitting conclusion to the oeuvre of one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers – in the letters, we see not just Deleuze the philosopher, but some of Deleuze the person: friendly, helpful, self-effacing, sincere, funny. Seasoned scholars probably won’t find much here that will be new to them, but students wanting to become familiar with Deleuze’s more difficult texts – especially Anti-Oedipus – will have a lot to go on here. Taken together as a unified project, Desert Islands, Two Regimes and Letters stand out as essential reading for anyone interested in Deleuze’s thought – and each has its place.


[i] Daniel W. Smith. 2020. “The Deleuzian Revolution: Ten Innovations in ‘Difference and Repetition.’” Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 14, Issue 1: pp. 34-49; p. 36.

[ii] Daniel Smith and John Protevi. 2020. “Gilles Deleuze.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/deleuze/>

[iii] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 2019. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (‘Apparatus of Capture’ plateau). Translated by Brian Massumi. Bloomsbury Academic: London/New York, p. 499.

[iv] Although Guattari certainly didn’t think they were helpful, and sometimes calls Bellour’s interventions ‘stupid’ and ‘lousy’.

[v] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 2019. Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Bloomsbury Academic: London/New York, p. 139.

[vi] Deleuze and Guattari suggest that we see a glimpse of what a completely unfettered unconscious would look like in schizophrenia.

Abraham Anderson: Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber

Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber Book Cover Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber
Abraham Anderson
Oxford University Press
2020
Hardback £47.99
216

Reviewed by: Adam Andreotta (Curtin University)

Kant famously wrote in the Preface to his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (released two years after the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason) that: “I freely confess: it was the objection of David Hume which first, many years ago, interrupted my dogmatic slumber” (4:260). In Kant, Hume, and the Interruption of Dogmatic Slumber, Abraham Anderson attempts to understand what Kant meant by this locution. Amongst the central theses that Anderson defends in the book include: [i] the contention that it was Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber, and not Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature; and [ii] the claim that is was Hume’s challenge to the principle of sufficient reason which awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber, not a denial of the causal principle governing experience—the thesis that every event has a cause.

In what follows, I will present a summary, and commentary, of Abraham’s defence of these two theses which take place over the course of 5 main chapters, and a lengthy introductory chapter. Before doing so, it is important to clarify some key concepts. First, how does Anderson construe the term ‘principle of sufficient reason’? Anderson tells us that he:

shall use [the term] to refer to the causal principle not restricted to experience, which was supposed to be known by reason, and which Hume led Kant to reject (xii).

Abraham claims (xiv) that Kant was awoken from his dogmatic slumber because he accepted Hume’s criticism of this principle—Hume’s point being that we cannot know causal relations by pure reason. Why is the principle important in the first place? The rationalist principle of sufficient reason is important because without it we cannot know any causal claim that goes beyond experience, such as the claim that something cannot come from nothing. We may be more explicit about this key principle by looking at how it differs from the causal principle—a thesis which Anderson is also concerned with in the book.

The Causal Principle [Hereafter, ‘CP’]: “the principle that every event has a cause” (xi).

We can see how this differs from the former by considering the following:

Principle of Sufficient Reason [Hereafter, ‘PSR’]: “the causal principle extending beyond experience” (xi).

What is the key difference between these two theses?  PSR is concerned with what we are justified in believing—that is, it limits our knowledge of causes to experience. Whereas CP is making a definitive claim (albeit one that is negative). PSR claims that we are entitled to hold causal beliefs only insofar as they cohere to experience. If a claim about a matter of fact goes beyond experience, then we are not justified in believing it, even if doing so is natural or useful. CP, on the other hand, is making a negative metaphysical claim—namely, that it is false that every event has a cause. Anderson claims that PSR more accurately allows us to see Hume’s attack as one about metaphysics—the term ‘metaphysics’ in this context referring to the science of objects “beyond experience” (xi). Hume, according to Anderson, is not attacking the causal principle: what he is doing is presenting the limits of our grounds of justification—which is of course limited to experience for Hume. This dispute is an important one to solve, Anderson claims, because it gives us a “clue to the meaning of the Critique” (xi). Anderson point outs (xv) that since Hume is not explicit about his rejection of PSR in either the Treatise or Enquiry, his own proposal is controversial.

In the introductory chapter, titled the ‘The State of the Question’, Anderson provides a survey of the secondary literature which focuses on the issue of how to interpret Kant’s claim in the Prolegomena that, “I freely confess: it was the objection of David Hume that first, many years ago, interrupted my dogmatic slumber” (4:260).  The introduction is the longest chapter of the book (42 pages). In it, Anderson considers several different answers to the question of what Kant meant by “the objection of David Hume”, and how such an objection awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber. Given there is no scholarly consensus about how to understand what Kant meant by the “objection of David Hume”, or how the objection interrupted Kant from his “dogmatic slumber”, Anderson summarises the different perspectives that have been taken on the issue. Anderson also points out that the issue is not only about how to interpret Kant’s famous locution, but also whether Kant should be taken at his word. Anderson states that some think Kant’s claim about being awoken by Hume is a “confusion and misremembering” (1) and should not be taken literally.  Anderson thinks that Kant should be understood literally, but he also considers reasons for thinking he should not be. These include Kant’s 1798 letter to Christian Garve, where Kant states that it was the Antinomy that awoke him from his dogmatic slumber—thus apparently contradicting what Kant himself says in the Preface to the Prolegomena. Given that Hume is not mentioned by name in the first edition of the Critique until the very last part, Anderson considers views which propose that this letter lends support to the claim that Kant was not awoken by Hume.

One of the most important views considered in the introduction is Norman Kemp Smith’s, which comes from his 1923 Commentary to Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”. Kemp Smith claims that Kant was awoken by Hume’s attack on the ‘causal axiom’ (referred to as ‘CP’ above)—the thesis that every event has a cause. This is a view Anderson returns to throughout the book. It represents an important rival to Anderson’s own view. The view is considered by Hume in the Treatise as follows.

’Tis a general maxim in philosophy, that whatever begins to exist, must have a cause of existence (T 1.3.3.1; SBN 78-9).

Kemp Smith’s claim that Kant was awoken by the Treatise, and his claim that Hume denied CP, are controversial because, as Anderson points out, the Treatise was not translated into German until the Critique of Pure Reason was already published. This is a problem because it is commonly understood that Kant could not read English. Anderson gives several other reasons for doubting Kemp Smith’s proposal. One of the examples he cites comes from Hume’s 1754 letter to John Stewart, which says the following:

I never asserted so absurd a Proposition as that any thing might arise without a Cause: I only maintain’d, that our Certainty of the Falshood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition nor Demonstration; but from another Source (Hume, 1754).

This passage seems to support Anderson’s reading, as Hume is quite upfront here about the nature of his scepticism about causation.  Anderson, further, quotes Kant who says in the Prolegomena that Hume’s question “was not, whether the concept of cause is correct, usable, and indispensable for the whole knowledge of nature, for this Hume never doubted”  (4:258). Hume’s passage, and Kant’s own admission, seem to go against Kemp Smith’s view, as Anderson suggests.

The rest of the introduction is concerned with several other controversial topics and summaries of scholarly views. For example, Anderson considers the remarks of Manfred Kuehn, Günter Gawlick and Lothar Kreimendah, who argue that it was Treatise 1.4.7. (The conclusion to Book 1) that awakened Kant from his slumber. He considers Lorne Falkenstein’s view, which says that the seeming contradiction between the letter to Garve and Kant’s Preface can be reconciled by accepting that Kant had a gradual awakening. And also, Eric Watkins’s view, which says that Kant is trying to refute Hume’s sceptical challenge to the idea of having any causal knowledge.

In chapter one, Anderson begins to address the book’s central question about what Kant meant by the ‘objection of David Hume’ in the Preface to his Prolegomena. Further, Anderson seeks to understand what Kant meant by being awoken from a ‘dogmatic slumber’. Anderson’s contention, which is further developed in subsequent chapters, is that the objection of David Hume equates to Hume’s attack on Metaphysics (Anderson call this “another name for the objection of David Hume” p. 44). This attack, Anderson tells us, is seen by Kant as a contribution to the Enlightenment because of its implications for the liberation of the human mind—one of which includes a challenge to theological authority.

The chapter touches upon many important issues.  One is the directness of Kant’s writing style. Anderson notes that it was dangerous at the time to make attacks on metaphysics too openly (50), since the battle over metaphysics had significant implications for certain religious and political matters. Another issue has to do with Kant’s actual references to Hume. If it was really the objection of David Hume which awoke Kant, then why isn’t Hume mentioned by name in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason until late in the work (until the Discipline of Pure Reason)? Might this be a reason to doubt the veracity of Kant’s claim? Anderson thinks not, given the way Hume’s work had been received at the time. He notes of the hostile reception that Hume’s Dialogues of Natural Religion received upon its release. Anderson (53) references a 1779 review of Dialogues featured in the Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, which was quite critical of the work. The review charged the text of corrupting the youth. This is an interesting reason for why Kant may have been relucent to refer to Hume explicitly initially, and Anderson does a good job of exploring it. It is interesting to note that Hume himself was also conscious of the reception of his own work, which affected the way it was written. In Hume’s December 1737 letter to Henry Home, he says: “I am at present castrating my work, that is, cutting off its nobler parts: that is, endeavouring it shall give as little offence as possible” (Hume, 1737).

To make sense of Kant’s defence of Hume, Anderson also discusses what Kant said about Hume’s critics. These include Thomas Reid, James Oswald, James Beattie, who appealed to common sense to overcome Hume’s concerns about the causal principle. Kant rejects these kinds of appeals to common sense, and Anderson shows why Kant takes Hume’s objections seriously, and how they were misconstrued by others. On page 62, for example, he looks at Priestley’s claim that Hume actually doubted the concept of cause and that the concept was useful. But as Anderson points out, Hume did not think the notion of causation was useless; and neither did he cease to believe in it. Such discussions help to show why Kant found Hume so troubling and help to understand the nature of Hume’s scepticism.

Another interesting puzzle has to do with why Kant is so explicit about Hume’s influence in the Prolegomena. If Kant wanted to avoid the controversies associated with the Dialogues, as Anderson proposes, then why is Kant so open about his debt to Hume in the Prolegomena—two years later after the release of the first edition of the Critique, where he is not so explicit? Anderson’s claim is that Kant’s avowal of his debt to Hume in the Prolegomena is a response to the Göttingische Anzeigen review of the Critique, which came out 2 years after it was released. It may have been that Kant wanted to make his point more explicit since, as Anderson notes (55), Kant regarded the review as a radical misunderstanding of the text. By that point Kant may have felt he had nothing to lose. Anderson offers a second reason for why Kant is more ready to acknowledge his debt to Hume in the Prolegomena. Also published in 1781 was the edition of the works of Sulzer, published by Blanckenburg. Anderson notes that in the Preface to the work, Blanckenburg evoked Sulzer’s Preface to Hume’s Enquiry, which was also included in the work (originally published 26 years earlier), that Hume’s writings would “pull German philosophers by the sleeve and rouse them from their peaceful rest” (cited in Anderson’s text on p. 64). It is hard to know for certain that Kant is responding directly to this passage, but it certainly looks very similar to what Kant writes in his Preface as Anderson points out (p.65).

In the second chapter, Anderson attempts to define the “Objection of David Hume.” After claiming that the objection of David Hume is really attack on metaphysics, Anderson attempts to be more specific about what this attack amounts to. According to Anderson, this attack on metaphysics has three steps, which are divided up further in the chapter. These include:

[1] “no one can know from pure concepts a priori that because one thing is, another must necessarily exist also.” (72)

[1] leads, in Anderson’s view, to two implications. The first is:

[C1] “cause is not a legitimate child of reason but a bastard of the imagination, and that all the other purportedly a-priori-subsisting cognitions of reason are mere falsely reminted common experiences.” (72)

And the second is,

[C2] “That there is no metaphysics and cannot be any” (72). (Here Anderson takes metaphysics to be reasoning beyond experience.)

Anderson suggests that Kant located this attack on metaphysics (what Anderson calls ‘Hume’s Objection) in the Enquiry and not in the Treatise, as some commentators such as Kemp Smith have suggested.  This attack, Anderson tell us, is substantial because it undermines Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, and the causal principles of Descartes and Locke. This is consequential, as such arguments were employed to prove God’s existence (76). So [1] is clearly a significant result.

Anderson is right, in my view, to characterise Hume’s attack on the “rational origin of the concept of cause” (77–78). This seems to cohere more succinctly with Hume’s radical empiricism, rather than a denial of the causal principle, as Kemp Smith maintains. Further it also seems to cohere with what Kant himself says in his Preface to the Prolegomena. Kant claims Hume’s question:

was not whether the concept of cause is correct, useful, and indispensable for the whole knowledge of nature, for this Hume had never doubted; but whether it is thought by reason a priori (4:258–59).

Next, Anderson engages with the question of whether it was the Treatise or Enquiry that was the key source which awoke Kant from his slumber. Anderson describes the view of Kemp Smith, who follows Vaihinger and Erdmann, in thinking that it was Treatise 1.3.3 that awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber. Anderson rehearses points made in previous chapters, noting that the Enquiry was published in German in 1755; but the Treatise was not published until 1790, putting it after the 1781 edition of the First Critique. And given that Kant did not know English, this timeline is problematic.  This is not a knock down argument, of course, as there were parts of the Treatise translated and Kant knew people who could have read it. For example, Treatise 1.4.7—where Hume advanced a series of sceptical claims—was translated. Yet Anderson claims (89) that the Treatise was less well known in relevant circles.

So where in the Enquiry, then, does Anderson claim Kant located Hume’s attack? There are various places he cites—not all of them are discussed in this chapter. One claim Anderson makes is that [C1] is stated in parts 1 and 2 of Enquiry 7, “Of the Idea of Necessary Connexion.” (90). This is where Hume argues that we have no idea of necessary connection beyond constant conjunction. Another is Anderson’s discussion of [C2], which says that there cannot be any metaphysics, by looking at section 8, 9, 10 and 11 of the Enquiry. For example, he focuses on Hume’s claim at 11.30 which says that, since the idea of necessary connection is grounded in constant conjunction, there is a problem of determining a unique cause. This has implications for the concept of a divine cause.  Anderson suggests that the first step, [1], is to be found in Section 4, part 1 and at 12.29 note (d) of the Enquiry. Such a position is defended in later chapters.

In chapter 3, Anderson attempts to locate where in the Enquiry Hume’s first step in Hume’s attack on Metaphysics is (recall this is the thesis that we cannot have knowledge of causation independent of experience). Anderson also attempts to defend the thesis that the Enquiry supports his own proposal that Hume’s first step is really an attack on the principle of sufficient reason.

Anderson begins by focusing on section 4.11 of the Enquiry, and its debt to 4.2, where Hume talks about our knowledge of matters of fact—namely that, when it comes to matter of fact it is always possible to imagine things being different to the way they, are or what we are used to. While it would be odd, we can easily imagine that a rolling white billiard ball will float up when it hits the black or stop completely. This is because no contradiction materialises: as long as we reason a priori, anything can cause anything. It follows from this, Anderson claims (102), that we cannot know a causal necessity a priori. And further, Anderson states: this “implies a denial of the principle of sufficient reason” (102). This is because we could not say of a cause that it was a sufficient reason of its effect.  To put things more precisely, Anderson claims this means that we cannot know a priori, of anything at all, that it must have cause (102). This is drawn from what Hume says at 4.13 of the Enquiry:

When we reason a priori, and consider merely any object or cause, as it appears to the mind, independent of all observation, it never could suggest to us the notion of any distinct object, such as its effect; much less, show us the inseparable and inviolable connection between them  (EHU 4.13; SBN 31-32).

Does Anderson’s suggestion do a better job of explaining such a passage compared to the one put forward by Kemp Smith—namely, that Hume denies that every event has a cause? I think so. Anderson’s account—that Hume is rejecting the principle of sufficient reason—seems to capture the spirit of this passage in a more adequate way than Kemp Smith’s.

The chapter also features an interesting discussion about Hume’s disavowal of a thesis that Lucretius called ‘Ex nihilo, nihil’ (119)—nothing comes from nothing. This idea is important because it was taken by some to prove the existence God (as Locke and Clarke tried to do.) Anderson claims that Kant would have seen Hume’s rejection of this the principle as a rejection of the principle of sufficient reason. Anderson claims that

In rejecting Ex nihilo, nihil fit, then, Hume is not rejecting the principle that every event has a cause, which he emphatically accepts. Rather, he is rejecting the principle that Descartes, Locke, and Clarke had used to prove the existence of a divine Cause (109).

It is important, Anderson points out, that this principle does not disprove god; only that it cannot be used to prove god.  Again, I think this does a good job of capturing the spirit of Hume’s sceptical empiricism, which is to draw the limits of what we can be justified in believing—namely, to experience.

In chapter 4, Anderson supports his reading of Kant’s interpretation of Hume by examining the Treatise. His main contention is that Treatise 1.3.3 is not, as Kemp Smith supposed, an attack on the causal principle governing experience. He investigates Treatise 1.3.3 in order to undermine Kemp Smith’s claim.

It is important for Anderson to consider Treatise 1.3.3. because, as he states, Hume does not say explicitly in the Enquiry that he is attacking the principle of sufficient reason “in so many words” (123). In addition to arguing against Kemp Smith’s interpretation of 1.3.3, Anderson also draws upon Hume’s letter to Henry Home: the ‘Letter from a Gentleman.’ This letter is important for several reason. First, because it features a candid remark by Hume about the construction of his text—namely, that he went about “castrating” the Treatise, meaning that he cut “off its noblest parts.”  Anderson notes that this is most likely because of its implications for theology.  What this means is that some interpretive work is needed to determine what Hume is claiming. And second, and more importantly for the content of his argument, Anderson notes of Hume’s reply to critics of the Treatise. Hume claims:

The Author is charged with Opinions leading to downright atheism, chiefly by denying this principle, that whatever begins to exist must have a cause of existence (cited on p. 135 of Anderson’s text).

This is the causal principle listed above—the one which Kemp Smith claims Hume is denying. Hume’s response to this charge is interesting, however. He claims that he is not denying the principle, but rather disputing that the principle was “founded on demonstrative or intuitive Certainty”. This passage supports Anderson’s reading because it shows Hume’s focus is on justification, not on whether the causal principle is false.

Later in the chapter Anderson considers why readers have failed to see the Enquiry as the source of Kant’s awakening. He considers the claim that the causal principle is attacked in Treatise 1.3.3. Anderson disputes this on two grounds because he thinks that:

a) “The causal principle is attacked in the Enquiry too” (139)

b) “The causal principle [Hume] attacks is not the [CP] but the [PSR]” (139)

Anderson considers why Erdmann, Vaihinger, and Kemp Smith failed to see this. One reason he suggests is that while Hume in Enquiry 12.29 note (d) is direct in his rejection of the causal principle Ex nihilo nihil fit, he is indirect in his rejection of the PSR. Another reason he offers is that, while the Treatise is long and detailed in its steps, the Enquiry is “brief and elliptical” (140).

In the final chapter, titled ‘Hume’s Attack on the “Impious Maxim” as the Hidden Spine of the Critique’, Anderson attempts to locate several places in Kant’s Critique which support his contention about the PSR.  He does so by examining four places in the Critique that recall Hume’s rejection of the impious maxim (Ex nihilo, nihil fit) at 12.29 note (d). Recall this is the claim that Anderson says is the most direct attack on the PSR. The four places include: the Transcendental Ideal, the Postulates, the Analogies and the Antinomy.

One example that Anderson cites is from the ‘Postulates of Empirical Thought’, in the ‘General Note on the System of the Principles.’  There Kant says that by beginning with mere categories, “We can easily think the non-existence of matter. From this the ancients did not, however, infer its contingency” (B290n). Anderson notes that Kant discusses this matter not to argue that matter is necessary, or contingent, but to suggest that we cannot prove that it is contingent or necessary.  Anderson notes that this resembles a discussion Hume makes at 12.28-29 note (d), where Hume rejects the Ex nihilo, nihil fit maxim. The two sections are as Anderson suggests, quite similar. It is one example of the interesting connections Anderson makes between the two works.

In closing, we can ask: is the central claim that Anderson defends in the book plausible? Recall that this is:

Hume interrupted Kant’s dogmatic slumber…by attacking the rationalist principle of sufficient reason, and showing that we are not entitled to it, since we cannot conceive effects as logically necessary given causes, or vice versa, and since we cannot know, either intuitively or demonstratively, that there can be nothing without a reason why it is thus and not otherwise (159).

To my mind, Anderson’s contention does better than some of his rivals—which are, it should be noted, charitably considered in the book. Anderson is, further, careful in his analysis and does not draw any hasty conclusions when advancing his own views. Where there is speculation, it is supported with passages from Kant’s and Hume’s texts, historical documents, and possible counter interpretations. This careful nature of proceeding is one of the virtues of the book.

The book will obviously be of interest to Hume and Kant scholars who seek to understand how Hume’s ideas influenced Kant’s. But it will also be of interest to those seeking to understand the nature of Hume’s scepticism. Given this, I did wonder why Anderson did not discuss how Hume’s radical scepticism affected Kant. As Kevin Meeker (2013, 2) points out, many early readers of Hume—he includes Kant here—interpreted Hume as a radical sceptic. (An interpretation that goes against the scholarly consensus today.) Thinkers like Thomas Reid, for example, thought that if we accept Hume’s system, then we would have to say that we lack rational grounds for holding our everyday common sensical beliefs. It would have been interesting to see whether Anderson thought this radical scepticism played an integral part in Kant’s awakening.

I have only been able to touch upon a few of the issues of the book in this review. It is my hope that I conveyed the great interest of it. I found the book to offer a thorough and convincing account of the influence Hume had on Kant’s thought.

Works Cited

Hume, David. [1737] 1932/2011. “Hume to Henry Home, December 2, 1737, Letter 6.” In The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols, 1:23– 25. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hume, David. 1739-40 [2000 ]. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hume, David. 1748 [2000]. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Hume, David. [1754] 1932/2011. “David Hume to John Stewart, February 1754.” In The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols, 1:187. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Meeker, Kevin. 2013. Hume’s Radical Scepticism and the Fate of Naturalized Epistemology. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kant, Immanuel. [1781] 2003. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. With a new introduction by Howard Caygill. 2nd ed. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kant, Immanuel. [1783] 2004. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Ed. Gary Hatfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Edmund Husserl: Introducción a la ética, Editorial Trotta, 2020

Introducción a la ética Book Cover Introducción a la ética
Edmund Husserl. Edición de Mariana Chu, Mariano Crespo, Luis R. Rabanaque
Editorial Trotta
2020
Paperback 29,00 €
368

Wayne Waxman: A Guide to Kant’s Psychologism – via Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Wittgenstein

A Guide to Kant’s Psychologism via Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Wittgenstein Book Cover A Guide to Kant’s Psychologism via Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Wittgenstein
Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Philosophy
Wayne Waxman
Routledge
2019
Hardback £96.00
340

Reviewed by: Alma Buholzer (University College Dublin)

A Guide to Kant’s Psychologism (2019) is presented as a more accessible and to-the-point delivery of the interpretive theses Waxman lays out in Kant’s Model of the Mind (1991), Kant and the Empiricists: Understanding Understanding (2005), and Kant’s Anatomy of the Intelligent Mind (2014). This comparatively compact 351-page book promises a unique angle on Kant’s theoretical philosophy for a range of philosophical and scientific audiences. The work is original both in its iconoclastic style and its thesis, which defends Kant’s ‘psychologism’ and interprets the titular empiricist philosophers as precursors thereof. Kant’s account of objective representation in terms of the interrelations between sensation, pure intuition, logic and concepts is argued to be firmly rooted in problems brought into the spotlight by the empiricists, such as animal consciousness and multimodal sensory perception. The book thus combines a historical sensitivity to the genealogy of Kant’s philosophy with the systematic ambition of a new interpretation, not merely of one isolated aspect of Kantian theory of mind but of the way its various doctrines fit together, from pure intuition to apperception to judgment.

The book is organized into two parts. After an introductory chapter preparing the reader for a radical departure from what Waxman presents as an anti-psychologistic consensus in Kant interpretation, Chapters 2-4 chronologically introduce key thinkers from the empiricist tradition and their contributions to the book’s central concept of psychologism. In chapter 5, Waxman uses Wittgenstein to illustrate Hume’s conventionalism, which in Waxman’s view Kant targets no less than rationalist platonism. Chapters 6-10 guide the reader through Kant’s theoretical philosophy. The sequence of chapters, “The Kantian Cogito” (6), “The Logical I” (7), “The Aesthetic I” (8), “The Objective I” (9), and “The I of Nature” (10) is prescribed less by the text of the Critique of Pure Reason than by the conceptual layers of Waxman’s reconstruction. While regularly referring Kant’s insights back to their empiricist lineage, the progression from the ‘I think’ to the objectivity of physical nature also points to Cartesian and Leibnizian influences in Kant’s treatment of logical universality. The chapters on Kant additionally argue that the doctrines of pure intuition and logical form, interpreted as elements of an ‘a priori psychologism’, can accommodate post-Kantian scientific developments in logic, geometry, mathematics and physics. The concluding chapter assesses platonism and conventionalism as the only possible routes of refutation of Kant’s psychologism, as well as indicating how Waxman’s interpretation may be illuminating for contemporary study of the mind.

One of the most original features of the book is that it makes the compatibility of Kantian doctrines with subsequent scientific advances a matter of first importance: “naturalistic theories like Kant’s and those developed by his British empiricist forebears were intentionally crafted to leave open a place for future science on which philosophy can never impinge” (12). The scope of the book is not only to radically overhaul received opinion on Kant’s methodology, and the relation of his ideas to the sciences, but to defend a biologically plausible version of Kant’s account of logical form. In the remainder of this review I will address in turn: (1) Waxman’s definition of ‘psychologism’ and how his use of this concept situates him with regard to other interpreters; (2) his reading of Kant, with a focus on the logical forms of judgment according to the psychologistic approach; and (3) some questions emerging at the interface of Waxman’s naturalistic reading of Kant and the sciences, especially neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

(1)

Waxman stresses that Kant’s ability to resolve skepticism about the objective purport of (some of) our representations is rooted in his radicalization of the British empiricists’ methods to accommodate logical universality, modality, and relational concepts. Thus, the book’s overarching thesis about the relationship between its titular figures is that Kant continues what Locke, Berkeley and Hume started, expressed as their common adherence to psychologism. Waxman has in mind a quite specific interpretation of this term:

[T]he task of psychologism is to explicate meanings, with special emphasis on identifying psychological ingredients essential to notions that, in language, are free of any tincture of psychological content. There can therefore be no expectation that the psychological contents adduced as essential to the meaning of familiar notions will themselves be familiar. (147)

Waxman’s compelling take on the psychologistic philosopher’s undermining of rationalist metaphysics is thus that psychologistic elucidation makes us distrust the appearances of the natural language of metaphysics, thereby overturning realist intuitions that the qualities we discern in appearances are properties of mind-independent objects (33f). Psychologism in this sense, Waxman is clear, is not to be confused with the fallacy of explicating the non-psychological psychologically (305). According to Waxman’s use of the term, psychologism means giving contents which are in fact psychological their due explication in terms of mental representations. Kant’s account of how we are capable of “cognitive representation of sense-divide transcending external objects” (264) equips empirical psychologism with the resources to explicate the objectivity and logical universality of our representations, where this is possible. Hence, “any representational content that neither empirical psychologism nor conventionalism can explicate, a priori psychologism can, and what the latter cannot explicate, nothing can” (147).

Waxman introduces his interpretation as a novel defence of Kant’s theoretical philosophy which rejects two pervasive trends in its reception: an anti-psychologistic consensus, and a more general obsolescence consensus that due to revolutions in logic, geometry, and physics, Kant’s philosophy is “a once formidable structure long since reduced to ruin, fit only for piecemeal salvage” (24ff). The latter engenders attempts to clear the respectable theory behind Kant’s project of its psychologistic methods, resulting in a range of approaches to ‘updating Kant’ e.g. by explaining conscious representation using anything from post-Fregean mathematical logic to Chomskyian linguistics, or Roger Penrose’s quantum theory of consciousness (15). Against these kinds of salvage attempts, Waxman argues that a properly psychologistic account of Kant’s theory of objective representation reveals its compatibility with subsequent developments in logic, geometry, physics, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

Kant scholars may suspect that the anti-psychologistic consensus is by no means universal: for instance, Andrew Brook’s Kant and the Mind (1994), and Patricia Kitcher’s Kant’s Transcendental Psychology (1990) (see also Falkenstein and Easton 1997) make similar critical points about the anachronism of understanding Kantian theory of cognition ‘anti-psychologistically’. For example, “Kant clearly held that his ‘logic’ of the mind is part of what we would now call psychology” (Brook 1994, 6). Waxman takes note of these authors in a footnote, nonetheless signalling his substantive interpretive differences from Kitcher and Brook as well as Lorne Falkenstein and Scott Edgar. The problem, Waxman explains, is that these authors refer to ‘psychology’, which is concerned with “whether and how a representation comes to be in us (empirically, innately, etc.)” rather than ‘psychologism’, which is concerned with “how the representation itself comes to be” (17n). This distinction, in my view, is not as straightforward as Waxman needs it to be in order to distance himself from other interpreters as far as he claims to.

Waxman himself says in the aforementioned footnote that he agrees with Beatrice Longuenesse’s (1998) work on Kant in its essentials, despite her not using the term psychologism (16). This fosters doubts about exactly what defines Waxman’s psychologism as an interpretive approach. If we stipulate that an anti-psychologistic reading foregoes any reference to mental activity in explicating the meanings of objective representations, psychologistic approaches still come in stronger and weaker flavours, which come down to how the genesis of “the representation itself” is construed.

If ‘psychological’ is interpreted weakly, any view that endorses Kant’s references to mental activities such as synthesis and apperception as non-negotiable parts of the story about objective representation, not wholly translatable into an analytic argument, is “identifying psychological ingredients” (147) in discourse which does not overtly suggest them. I believe most interpreters today would uphold this kind of psychological account. Any particular view on what informs Kant’s psychology need not be empiricist in orientation, as one may instead emphasize the scholastic heritage of Kant’s references to mental acts (e.g. Sellars 1967). On stronger versions, e.g. Kitcher (1990), Kant’s ‘psychologism’ qua account of the genesis of objective representations is a ‘proto-cognitivist’ theory which can be re-formulated in light of contemporary experimental methods and results. Waxman’s qualifies as a weakly psychologistic interpretation, in my view, since nowhere in the book does ‘psychologism’ imply ‘experimental psychology’. In the first chapter and the conclusion, Waxman seems to reject mainly Neo-Kantian attempts to place Kant in the service of twentieth century analytic semantics, philosophy of mind and epistemology—explicitly confronting Strawson (1966) in the conclusion (306), but probably also thinking of authors such as Evans (1982) McDowell (1994), and Cassam (1997). However, they present their work as critical reconstructions and selective adaptations of Kantian ideas. Given that Waxman accuses Strawson’s interpretation of Kant of reverting to a kind of platonism, it would have been interesting to hear more about where Waxman agrees and disagrees with existing criticisms of these Neo-Kantian projects, including McDowell’s (1994) ‘naturalized platonism’.

Let us consider the specifics of Waxman’s use of the term ‘psychologism’. Psychologism is presented as a mode of conceptual explication concerned with the psychological content of the meanings of traditionally metaphysical notions, rather than the psychological mechanisms underlying conceptual meanings. Consciousness turns out to be the key ‘psychological ingredient’ reference to which constitutes a psychologistic account. Waxman stresses that all representation requires some degree of consciousness, but that for Kant and his predecessors consciousness is graded from ‘dark’ to ‘bright’ to ‘clear’ (41) and is hence ubiquitous, reaching down to the sensory representations of basic organisms such as molluscs. Another notable feature of Waxman’s psychologism is its gloss on the normative dimension of Kant’s inquiry into our transcendental justification for applying concepts:

instead of proceeding by defining notions in terms of other notions without regard to whether there is, or even can be, any corresponding conscious representation, psychologism [has] the express aim of seeking out such representations. If the search reveals that a notion owes none of the contents indispensable to its meaning to consciousness, then its scope of application is nowhere limited by it (10).

Conversely, if the notion “can be shown to be beholden to consciousness for any of the ingredients essential to its meaning—ingredients at least implicit, but often explicit, in definitions—then its scope of application is limited accordingly” (10).

In general, the distinctiveness of Waxman’s approach lies in his wholesale engagement with Kant’s more unwieldy terms and concepts, and readiness to endorse Kant’s claims as literally about psychological reality—rather than about concepts, the brain/organism, or the objective world. Despite his psychologistic approach having a foot in psychology and a foot in explication, Waxman is content neither with purely conceptual or exegetical arguments, nor ‘proto-cognitivist’ claims that Kant anticipated cognitive science on this or that front. But he ultimately agrees with many other interpreters that any staunchly ‘anti-psychologistic’ reading is a non-starter, as well as joining Kitcher (1990) and Brook (1994) in thinking that a naturalistic perspective on Kant may be able to contribute to contemporary (experimental) psychology and theory of mind.

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I now turn to Waxman’s reading of Kant and his empiricist forerunners. Chapter 2 argues that Locke sets the stage for the psychologistic approach by conceiving consciousness on a scale starting with primitive animals: “Since in the entire absence of sensation no consciousness of any kind seems possible … its terrestrial advent would presumably have coincided with the appearance of the first sensation” (54). In Chapter 3, Berkeley is credited with “extending imagination into the cognitive sphere, thereby for the first time crossing the line separating reality from fiction (where Hume and Kant would follow). This is because the ability to represent space as transcending the divide between sight and touch is indispensable to all cognition of the physical” (85). For Kant, this consideration leads to the thesis that there is nothing in sensation (visual or tactual) that is intrinsically spatial, so the representation of space must be constructed in pure intuition (201). Chapter 4 links the foregoing to Hume’s well-known skeptical challenges to relational concepts:

By shifting the basis of belief in relations from objective experience to subjective feeling, Hume moved the topic from epistemology to psychology where, instead of needing to be justified by evidence and to follow as a conclusion from premises, belief is determined purely affectively, by association-constituting feeling, and nothing else (96).

For Waxman, Hume was the first to psychologistically attribute fully general concepts such as the uniformity of nature and the general causal maxim to humans and non-human animals alike (114). Waxman illustrates the theoretical development from associationism to Kantian a priori psychologism in terms of a speculative evolutionary development from a creature

capable of the kind of highly sophisticated, behaviourally efficacious conscious mentation that Berkeley and Hume devised their associationist psychology to explain. Thanks to some fortuitous mutation or other alteration in its genome, its progeny included creatures capable of the representation ‘I think.’ Having no evident selective advantage by itself, this neural capacity presumably could have established itself in the population only as a spandrel piggy-backing on some genetically connected trait that earned its evolutionary keep. (177)

Eventually enabling complex propositions and inferences, Waxman contends, the ‘I-think’ representation would have enabled behaviours with adaptive value. This evolutionary story complements Waxman’s interpretation of Kant’s logical forms of judgment as more basic than language and indeed making language possible:

The ability of linguistic propositions to blend with non-linguistic is, in its way, no less amazing than the mathematizability of nature. But isn’t this exactly what we should expect if language was originally crafted by creatures already fully conversant in the use of non-linguistic propositional representation, transcendental judgments included? (315).

The chapters of Part II centre around Kant’s psychologization of logic in relation to sensory and propositional representation. Waxman details how Kant adapts from Descartes the contentless representation ‘I think’, which “in and of itself, has no content [and hence] cannot be suspected of having borrowed any, whether from language or anywhere else” (158). Being non-linguistic, it is not attributable to convention and thus provides a purely psychological basis for logical generality that synthetically unifies all possible representable contents (174). According to this notion of pure apperception, Waxman argues that Kantian logic is based in a universal self-consciousness which includes “the totality of logical structures universals enable us to form—propositions, inferences, narratives, et al.” (149). Unfortunately, Waxman doesn’t elaborate on whether self-consciousness is for Kant always a form of ‘bright consciousness’, or could exist in ‘darker’ shades as he argues it does for Hume (120).

Kant brings what Waxman calls “intelligence”—which amounts to consciousness of universality and modality—to Humean representations of general relational concepts which lack any awareness of the “logical universe of possible representations” (171). Kantian concepts “enable us to consciously represent each and every associative combination as a grouping of denizens of the logical universe that are thereafter sortable not only by their sensible/imaginable properties but by their logical ones as well” (171). According to Waxman, Kant’s logical forms of judgment are what “make any ‘I think’-generated concept combinable with any other such concept in a single act of thought, or propositional representation” (167). Conceptual representation is thus explicated as the gradual elimination of degrees of “logical freedom” (150) by restricting the space of logical possibilities to what is representable given the content supplied by sensation and association.

According to Kant’s psychologization of logic, fixing the position of a term as subject or as predicate in a categorical judgment is a psychological act starting with the bifurcation of the logical universe (170). However, such a “logical form by itself cannot guarantee that a proposition will result. In particular, even if a would-be proposition is logically well formed, it would still fail to be a genuine proposition if, for other than strictly formal logical reasons, it cannot be thought without generating not just falsehood but one or another species of impossibility, e.g. … ‘water is not always H2O’” (175). For Waxman’s Kant, categorical form permits the unification of concepts in a single consciousness, but it does not allow a unified representation of the resulting propositions (175). In addition to the assertoric modality, then, we need Kant’s problematic modality, which asserts merely the relation between two propositions, suspending judgment on the propositions themselves. The logical form this assumes in us, hypothetical judgment, relates problematic propositions as ground to consequent in the assertoric modality. Together, hypothetical and categorical forms enable any combination of the totality of possible propositions to be unified in a single conscious act (175f).

Waxman mobilizes this account to show that Kant (1) does not restrict intelligence to language-using organisms, nor (2) does he impose our parochial linguistic structures on his model of the basic “building blocks of propositional thought” (22). Waxman takes his elucidation of Kant’s transcendental logic to counter both misconceptions:

Intelligence can be accorded to any creature, actual or possible, that is capable of pure apperception … even including beings so asocial as to be devoid of anything remotely analogous to language or socially grounded symbolic communication of any kind. This is not to deny that Kant regarded all non-human animals known to him as incapable of apperception and therefore unintelligent. (172)

But, Waxman adds, “that does not mean he would have persisted in that view had he known what we know today” (172). This is an interesting speculation, implying that animals have some form of awareness of universality and modality—not in Hume’s sense, but in Waxman’s more demanding Kantian sense of apperception—“an a priori logical universe that quite literally encompasses all possible conscious representations” (169). I fully agree that Kant’s logic is non-linguistic, but I want to know more exactly how Waxman understands our present knowledge of animal intelligence such that it could make Kant change his mind on this controversial topic.

Waxman regularly refers to his lengthier engagements with Kant’s first Critique in footnotes. These references will be necessary for scholars seeking to determine Waxman’s position on exegetical debates. Part II succeeds in presenting Kant’s account of logical forms and concepts as centrally relying on consciousness, and hence psychologistic, while emphasizing that propositional representation need not be construed as an evolutionary leap separating humans from other animals. The combination of these theses makes for an original, stimulating addition to works on Kant’s first Critique.

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I now have some remarks on the book’s intriguing but somewhat ambivalent references to the sciences. Waxman’s general stance that the insights of Kantian psychologism extend beyond their own scientific and philosophical context is very ambitious, and I’m not sure his case is equally strong for each of the sciences he addresses. Waxman makes a convincing case that non-Euclidean geometries cannot falsify any of Kant’s statements about pure intuition, as the latter pertain to the necessary features of any representation of space, rather than any particular geometry:

the formal intuition of space is not only neither Euclidean nor non-Euclidean but completely indeterminate as regards number, limit, distance, metric, part-whole relationships, and everything else that makes space suitable for properly mathematical representation or objective representation of any kind (208-9).

When it comes to the life sciences, however, Waxman’s perspective is (perhaps inevitably) more in tension with the scientific context Kant was writing in.

Waxman is clearly not neutral on matters of philosophy of consciousness, stating at the outset that consciousness is for his purposes identical in existence to its neural correlates (13-14), but that there is nonetheless a distinct psychological reality (14, 57, 159, 162, 177f). As this commitment is not compared to any alternatives, I am curious as to why he has opted for this particular form of identity theory to defend the biological plausibility of Kant’s psychologism, rather than functionalism or some form of emergentism. Polák and Marvan (2018), for example, defend the view preferred by Waxman that neural correlates are not in a causal relation to conscious states but an identity relation—a position which philosophers of mind might like to see defended more explicitly in connection with Kant’s views. Also, they may ask whether there is a specifically Kantian motivation for understanding the “mystery of consciousness” as Waxman does, that is, “a purely physical existence that is at the same time irreducible to physical reality” (14). Waxman clearly wants a naturalistic position to complement his psychologistic interpretation, but he also does not want to impose too much recent theory on the historical theories. Given this concern, psychophysical parallelism—an early form of identity theory espoused in different (including Neo-Kantian) versions by German philosophers from Fechner to Feigl via Riehl and Schlick—could illuminate Kantian psychologism from this side of Darwin and experimental psychology (see Heidelberger 2004, Ch. 5). Of course, it would be possible for most Kant scholars to profess neutrality with respect to these debates, but Waxman has—to his credit—set different standards.

Waxman’s decision to adhere to Kant’s original terminology and to steer clear of issues of translation in one sense makes the book smoother. The book conveniently contains a glossary, and tailor-made terms such as ‘AUA [analytic unity of apperception] concepts’, and ‘dark consciousness’ helpfully remind us that a term is not being used in its familiar sense. Waxman’s capacious use of ‘consciousness’ clearly works in his favour insofar as Modern and Kantian philosophy become much more relatable simply by lowering the threshold (as we understand it) on what sensory and cognitive states count as conscious. Yet it would have helped for Waxman to illustrate the general features of (what Descartes, Locke and Kant viewed as) ‘dark consciousness’ in more descriptive neural or psychophysical terms—not simply because readers may have difficulty forgetting the current meanings of such terms and the controversies attached to them, but because it would improve the book’s case for making psychologism compatible with contemporary biology.

One of the book’s most interesting features is its rapprochement between Kant and Darwin. Frequent references to phylogeny and the evolutionary plausibility of psychologism (as contrasted with platonism and conventionalism) evidence Waxman’s eagerness to integrate Kant’s insights into a post-Darwinian landscape, which I take to be a very important, relatively neglected project:

[N]ot only is Kant’s psychologism consistent with evolution, it actually spotlights suitably primitive forms of empirical consciousness that would gain adaptational advantages from a priori consciousness. Most basically, formal intuitions can easily be conceived to be of use to minds grappling with the challenge of combining external sensations into a single, unified external sense capable of providing immediate access to sense-divide transcending objects. (306)

This illumination does not go both ways, however, since Waxman also says that transcendental consciousness is entirely outside the scope of scientific explanation (295)—“because the subjectivity constituted by apperception … becomes part of the explanation of the physical, it cannot itself be explained physically on pain of circularity” (23). This claim recalls circularity charges against naturalized epistemology and logic, which in my view can be convincingly refuted by pragmatic and holistic considerations. It also blatantly contradicts the book’s initial claim that “[t]he mental is causally and in every other way fully determined by its physical underpinnings, and so is in principle fully explicable by science” (21). This is surprising, after seeing Waxman go to great lengths to argue that although a priori, the most innovative aspects of Kantian philosophy are features of our natural constitution, different in complexity but not radically different in kind from the sensory sensitivity of an oyster. Placing a priori elements of Kantian psychologism beyond the reach of current and future biological explanation strikes me as a missed opportunity, and again makes me doubt what is meant by psychologism. Empirical research in animals can indicate how consciousness might have arisen, and in a footnote Waxman considers but then discards a few such accounts based on their comparatively restrictive definition of consciousness (63n). The reader may suspect that casting the net more widely would reveal theories more congenial to Waxman’s evolutionary take on subjectivity, such as Godfrey-Smith (2016).

The following passage is a good example of Waxman’s ambivalence towards his own naturalistic outlook:

The connection between the subjective psychological reality of consciousness and the objective physical reality of neurophysiology is a complete mystery in both directions, today and quite possibly for some time to come. Thus, Kantian logical forms of judgment pose no special mystery but instead are best regarded as simply an additional species of phylogeny-dependent neuro-psychological reality in addition to sensations, emotions, dreams, and the rest. (178)

Because Waxman has not restricted himself to purely exegetical argument, or the Kitcherian ‘proto-cognitivist’ angle described earlier, the reader may wonder how literally such claims are to be taken. One cannot but agree that (something similar to) Kantian a priori capacities such as the logical forms of judgment must have evolved somehow, just as there must be some neural correlates for the empiricists’ associative psychologies, as indicated in Part I. But the empirically-minded reader will want to know in more detail how forms of judgment (or their successors in contemporary science of mind) could be modelled and studied, if they are on a par with sensations and emotions.

A Guide to Kant’s Psychologism is bound to appeal to diverse philosophical audiences for its fresh take on Kant’s theoretical philosophy as a priori psychologism. It is also a lively, articulate instance of philosophical storytelling. Waxman avoids approaching Kant through the lens of contemporary philosophical problems where semantics, epistemology and metaphysics are concerned. When it comes to the sciences, however, the book makes us acutely aware of pieces of the puzzle of the mind in nature that Kant simply cannot have anticipated. Kant’s understanding of his current science needs to be confronted with today’s sciences in order to address all of the questions raised by an interpretation of Kantian philosophy as naturalistic a priori psychologism. Over the course of Waxman’s book, frequent references to neural correlates and phylogeny habituate the reader to seeing our biological reality in the same conceptual space as Kantian doctrines, which is surely a step in the right direction. As is perhaps Waxman’s intention, it is left to the reader to ponder the convergences and divergences between Kant’s account of the mind and current scientific knowledge, perhaps especially the life sciences. The book offers its non-Kantian readers a challenging, raw encounter with Kant’s theoretical philosophy, and will leave Kant scholars much to think about both on the old problem of psychologism and new ones arising from Waxman’s brand of naturalism.

References: 

Brook, Andrew. 1994. Kant and the Mind. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

Cassam, Quassim. 1997. Self and World. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Evans, Gareth. 1982. The Varieties of Reference. Edited by John McDowell. Oxford: Clarendon Press and New York: Oxford University Press.

Falkenstein, Lorne and Easton, Patricia, eds. 1997. Logic and the Workings of the Mind: The Logic of Ideas and Faculty Psychology in Early Modern Philosophy. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview.

Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2016. “Mind, Matter and Metabolism.” Journal of Philosophy 113 (10):481-506.

Heidelberger, Michael. 2004. Nature from Within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and his Psychophysical Worldview. Translated by Cynthia Klohr. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 1998 [1781/1787]. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kitcher, Patricia. 1990. Kant’s Transcendental Psychology. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Longuenesse, Béatrice. 1998. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Charles T. Wolfe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

Polák, Michal and Marvan, Tomáž. 2018. “Neural Correlates of Consciousness Meet the Theory of Identity.” Frontiers in Psychology 24:1269. DOI https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01269.

Sellars, Wilfrid. 1967. “Some Remarks on Kant’s Theory of Experience.” The Journal of Philosophy 64 (20), Sixty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division (Oct. 26, 1967): 633-47.

Strawson, Peter F. 1966. The Bounds of Sense. London: Methuen.

Rafael Winkler (Ed.): Phenomenology and Naturalism

Phenomenology and Naturalism Book Cover Phenomenology and Naturalism
Rafael Winkler (Ed.)
Routledge
2017
Hardback £115.00
152

Reviewed by: Andrei Simionescu-Panait (Romanian Society for Phenomenology)

Phenomenology and Naturalism is a collection of original philosophical essays dealing with the complicated relationship between various strands of naturalism and Husserlian-oriented phenomenology. These essays were delivered in their inceptive form at the 2014 Johannesburg conference on the same topic. There are two types of texts here. One analyzes the relation between phenomenology and naturalistic positions. Some defend phenomenology. Texts by Dan Zahavi, David Papineau, David Cerbone and Jack Reynolds fit this description. The rest showcase some philosopher’s hidden phenomenologies or focus on correlated topics. Benedict Smith, John Sallis, Paul Patton and Bernhard Weiss fit this bill.

The volume is edited by Raphael Winkler. He introduces readers to a contemporary frame dominated by two opposing forces. On the one side, there are Anglo-American philosophers that justify the concept of nature with mathematical instruments, or by importing results from physics and biology. The main characteristics are precision and a broad focus on thinghood. On the other side, there are European philosophers that build on materialism and phenomenology. Their arguments rely on nuance and depth. The tension between these two philosophical orientations competing towards a new and innovative concept of nature takes the limelight in Phenomenology and Naturalism.

Dan Zahavi’s essay opens this volume with a defense of phenomenology against speculative realism. This direction has recently gained popularity and has attacked Husserlian phenomenology in various ways. Zahavi takes a stand in this context and shows that the problem in naturalizing phenomenology arises from naturalism’s commitment to some form of metaphysical realism. These philosophies support the idea that consciousness is a mere object in the world. Speculative realism enters the scene as the latest supporter of this idea. Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, Ray Brassier and Tom Sparrow all reject the Kantian Revolution and its correlationism; they all reject the idea that subjectivity and objectivity cannot be understood apart from each other. Harman wants to bypass Kantianism by proposing equality in all relations. For him, consciousness must not be prioritized. Meillassoux attacks Kantianism from a different angle: he thinks the scientific statements are not taken at face value (Meillassoux 2008, 17) and correlationism is to blame for this. If they would, then the mathematical sciences will again have enough of a commanding appearance to describe the in itself and touch on what Meillassoux calls the ancestral. Another speculative realist—Brassier—stands at the nihilistic opposite of what Meillassoux hopes to find. Unlike an interest for the thing in itself, Brassier proposes the concept of extinction. “Philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction.” (Brassier 2007, 239) Last, Sparrow rejects Kantianism and phenomenology because they never delivered what they promised, namely “a wholehearted endorsement of realism.” (Sparrow 2014, xi)

Dan Zahavi identifies three main issues in what speculative realists try to argue. First, he considers that their account of phenomenology is superficial. Classical texts in phenomenology are highly misinterpreted by speculative realists. Zahavi then shows how philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty or Husserl hold views that are opposite to or different from what speculative realists think they are. Last, speculative realists lack novelty (p. 19). All encountered criticism was already raised in the last century by philosophers arriving from the analytic tradition, by empirical researchers or even by other phenomenologists. Zahavi’s text leaves us to wonder whether speculative realism is now able to deliver a counter-criticism or not.

David Papineau shifts focus on representationalism. He argues against the idea that sensory experience is representational and proposes his own phenomenological version of representationalism. He identifies two motivations for representationalism—cognitive science and phenomenologically inspired introspection—and claims that these two are often interconnected in representationalist writers. He is interested in focusing only on the second motivation because he explicitly takes the first for granted.

Papineau first argues that the concept of representation is broad. Representational broadness occurs when two intrinsically identical subjects have corresponding mental states with different representational contents (p. 41). On the one hand, intrinsic aspects of subjectivity are rigidly connected to mental states. On the other hand, both subjectivity and mental states are loosely connected to representational contents. Because of having a dual appearance of precision and flexibility, representation-driven arguments can be used for both sides of the story: similar individuals can view the world in the same way (same mental states and similar representations), or they can view the world in a different way (same mental states and different representations). Papineau admits that this is problematic because representation ends up as either an overdefined or an underdefined concept.

Then Papineau proposes his own version of representationalism. He forwards an analogy between typographical properties of a text and its representational content: the former are contingent to the latter. In a similar fashion, consciousness is related to representational content. The benefit of such a move, Papineau says, is that it eliminates the broadness problem. On the other hand, his phenomenologically-inspired representationalist account separates properties as part of experience from thing properties. For instance, it separates perceived redness from redness in itself. Papineau’s account almost becomes a case of phenomenological realism akin to those of the first wave of Husserl pupils from the Logical Investigations era. Unlike Husserl, Papineau denies that sensory experiences are intentional (p. 57). Papineau ends his paper with a discussion on whether his non-relationist account is worth pursuing against the double background of representationalist arguments and intuitions about consciousness.

Cerbone argues that the opposition between phenomenology and Quinean naturalism is not obvious, because naturalism’s rejection of transcendental philosophy places naturalism in a similar position. Cerbone calls this position an exile. Such an exile is prompted by the phenomenological reduction because it places the phenomenologist in a position that transcends results offered by the natural sciences. This exile is facilitated by Husserl’s distinction between phenomena and objects, between what is immanent to consciousness and what is foreign to it (p. 86). It is a transcendental exile. This contrasts with the Quinean “exile from within” that characterizes naturalized epistemology. Against Husserl, naturalized epistemology denies that fundamental epistemological questions are outside natural attitude. On the contrary, they lie at the heart of evident facts. When attempting to explain visual perception, a naturalized epistemologist would most likely make use of scientific data and try to build up a picture of how some processes work, despite those processes transcending experiential evidence (e.g. I do not see photons as such). Cerbone criticizes this position by saying that, if there are no specific data to be taken into account, the distinction between true and false belief would collapse. Such an epistemology would thus fail to explain how knowledge is possible in general.

Cerbone concludes his article with an exposition of his alternative that aims to create a phenomenology without epistemology. He relies on Merleau-Ponty. Both Quine and Husserl are committed to the idea of objective thought; both philosophers are engaged in a reconstructive effort and both are aware of two directions, explaining the subjective with objective instruments and vice versa. Merleau-Ponty rejects this design and insists that reality must be described, not constructed. Phenomenologists should not pretend they discover a constituting power within the depths of consciousness (p. 93). The focus on description would allow the phenomenologist, on Merleau-Ponty’s account, to avoid exile and remain in the homeland of thoughts, the human world.

Reynolds writes about the compatibility between a minimal phenomenology and the ontology in naturalism. His account of a minimal phenomenology is not compatible with scientific naturalism. Reynolds’ first claim is that transcendental phenomenology’s autonomy regarding the natural sciences is insufficiently justified. His second claim is that a neutral scientific method discarding the first-person perspective is also an insufficiently justified idea. Reynolds hopes to find a middle solution between these two problems. He admits this is hard to achieve because Husserl’s principle of principles, which states that every intuition is a legitimate source of cognition, flies in the face of empirical science and its way of investigating nature. The separation between transcendental phenomenology and science prohibits the former to be able to learn from the latter. A sort of quarantine (an exile) is self-imposed by rigorous phenomenology. Reynolds reminds us that even Zahavi and Gallagher, who generally work towards a truce between phenomenology and science, will proceed and distinguish between transcendental phenomenology and phenomenological psychology. The first will remain intact, Husserlian, proper; the latter will safely mingle with naturalism. Reynolds thinks otherwise.

He devises a three-pronged argument: the first is historical and appeals to authority, the second deconstructs the phenomenological quarantine, and the third shows the downsides of the present separation. Merleau-Ponty’s idea that the phenomenological reduction is by definition incomplete opens Reynolds’ main move: to deconstruct the purity of method that phenomenology promotes. He asks himself whether phenomenology can accept itself without its presuppositionless character. He argues that phenomenology should appreciate the ground that the natural attitude provides for phenomenological endeavors. Then, Reynolds says that transcendental arguments use a category of first-person experiences, such as shame, to spell out the conditions for that category to arise altogether. But if pathological cases deny the original phenomenological account, then the phenomenologist should be prepared to revise. Transcendental phenomenology does not benefit from resting on itself only. Reynolds thus proposes a minimal phenomenology that abandons the transcendental self-sufficiency (p. 118). This minimal phenomenology appears to be compatible with a liberal naturalism. It rejects scientific naturalism but respects the findings and methods of science. Such a compromise on sides highlight that phenomenology and naturalism actually need each other (p. 125).

Zahavi, Papineau, Cerbone and Reynolds have defended or adapted phenomenology in relation to naturalism. The other four texts proceed differently. They unearth phenomenological ideas from well-known philosophers. Or, they use some of the concepts pertaining to the phenomenology vs. naturalism debate for proving something else.

Benedict Smith shows that Hume’s concept of science of man is closer to phenomenology than it is to naturalism. Hume’s interpersonal aspect of experience is a fundamental and irreducible element of his science of man. Smith argues that the interpersonal concept can be linked to the Husserlian concept of intersubjectivity. Hume further claims that he can rely on the only solid ground he has: experience. Therefore, Hume’s aspiration is not to formulate a disenchanted version of the world, as if he were a metaphysician whose worldview is conclusive. Instead, he looks for essences in interpersonal experience.

In the second part of the chapter, Smith illustrates Todes’ reading of Hume. Todes thinks that Hume is a disembodied visualist philosopher when thinking about human experience, because he dissects experience into instances. Smith defends the phenomenological Hume by saying that Todes primarily views Hume as a skeptic who has metaphysical aspirations. This appears to be a straw man for Smith. Let’s have an example. Phenomenologists usually criticize metaphysicians by default. Todes takes himself to be a phenomenologist. Therefore, Todes criticizes a metaphysical Hume he forges with his own reading. This strategy is shared by Smith. Nevertheless, Smith works in opposition to Todes. Smith’s overall position promotes a David Hume without metaphysical commitments and defends a study of human nature that relies on a continuous input from human experience.

Patton’s text explores the reasons why Deleuze’s philosophy is incompatible with scientific naturalism. He focuses on Deleuze’s concept of pure event and shows that it is more inclined to work in a more pluralist –so to say, a more philosophical—naturalistic frame. Patton traces Deleuze’s position all the way back to Lucretius’ philosophy and to Epicurean naturalism. Their main trait, according to Deleuze and his Nietzschean reading, is to banish negativity from investigations pertaining to Nature and grasp the affirmation that dwells at its heart (Deleuze 1990, 279). This idea is reflected in Deleuze’s pragmatic conception about what philosophy is: the invention of concepts. The concept of doing is more important to Deleuze that the concept of givenness. Yet, philosophy is a special kind of doing. While science produces mathematical or propositional functions, philosophy deals with the production of concepts. Both are affirmative, yet they take different paths of affirmation: the role of concepts is to describe pure, non-empirical events. Deleuze’s position, Patton claims, is reinforced by the concept of pure event which relies on the distinction between being and becoming. Philosophy, in Deleuze’s signature naturalism, is conceived as a process, a becoming, rather than substance or being. As process, philosophy should address pure events that are either finished or envisioned and conceptualize their core meaning. This idea paves the way for Deleuze’s naturalist ethics. Action should be coherent with the succession of events that leads to it. The will to coherent action takes form as the philosophical activity of concept production. Patton’s conclusion suggests that Deleuze’s conception about philosophy is complementary to science.

John Sallis reviews the most important philosophers that have supported the call of returning to nature. He begins with Chrysippus’ idea that choice should be exercised in accordance with nature. This includes the choice of seeing nature as an end and not only as a means. This idea infiltrates Rousseau’s project about the original nature of man: the state of nature. Rousseau promotes the return to nature because this return enriches any theoretical description of the initial conditions that led to human civilization. Rousseau’s project is genealogical. Kant’s transcendental project, on the other hand, is concerned with the conditions that lie in the cognizing subject. Kant’s own return to nature, Sallis explains, takes the form of contemplating the beauty of natural things and provokes an attunement to moral feelings. The Kantian return to nature is not methodological or epistemological, but related to moral subjectivity. Thoreau fully embraces this connection between nature and morality and underlines its existential character. He supports the idea that one should practice a life surrounded by nature because the confrontation with nature is the primary way of knowing oneself. Nietzsche expands on this by promoting the concept of life-affirming values. The most important sensibility a human can develop is a sensibility for nature. The will to power is a will to harvest one’s own inclination towards nature. Sallis’ text ultimately suggests that the philosophical problem about the concept of nature transcends the phenomenology-naturalism debate.

Weiss’ text is connected to the book’s topic because of using the concept of representation. He starts by distinguishing between two facets of belief. Belief is a reaction to evidence; but beliefs represent the world. One facet is directed from the world to the subject. The other proceeds in reverse. The former is called the Threshold view, while the latter the Representational view. They are opposites. Weiss argues for the Representationalist view because it defuses what Weiss refers to as the Preface Paradox. The Preface Paradox is that even though a person has a set of beliefs, not all facts can be believed to the same of degree of intensity and still maintain Logical Coherence. In light of this, the advantage of Representationalism over Thresholdism is that Representationalism endorses Logical Coherence, while Thresholdism does not. The Thresholdist resolves the Paradox by saying that it depends on the threshold of beliefs that is taken into consideration, so the paradox does not necessarily appear. Weiss criticizes this position by saying that levels of credence shaped by thresholds are too broad. The introduction of levels of credence does not develop any visible relation to coherence. Thus, any level of coherence can claim to be coherent by default. Thresholdists can always argue that coherence exists because of threshold’s design. Weiss argues for the existence of three ways to deal with the Paradox without becoming a Thresholdist: (1) is to find fault in the inferential steps that lead to the paradox, (2) is to absolve the subject from committing to one of the sentences that leads to the paradox and (3) is to accept a paradoxical appearance of an otherwise plausible situation. Weiss goes for (3). He supports Representationalism via Logical Coherence by thinking that the Preface Paradox is not actually a Paradox from the viewpoint of its relation to Coherence.

The volume is an important step for the discussion about adapting phenomenology to naturalism, or vice-versa. It joins another Phenomenology and Naturalism (2013) volume that was edited by Havi Carel and Darian Meacham. The book should be of interest to anyone who studies embodiment, the philosophical aspects of empirical science, but also to phenomenologists and epistemologists. The book’s strongest point arrives from the novelty its texts bring; the weakest, a partially disparate character. The volume now provokes discussions about the irreconcilable relation between Husserlian phenomenology and scientific naturalism. The problem in bringing transcendental philosophy and empiricism together does not appear to have a convincing resolution in some compromise-driven middle ground between the two.

Bibliography:

Brassier, R. (2007). Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, Palgrave Macmillan.

Deleuze, G. (1990). The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, (ed.) Constantin Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press.

Harman, G. (2005). Guerilla Metaphysics: phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, Chicago: Open Court.

Meillassoux, Q. (2008). After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, London: Continuum.

Sparrow, T. (2014). The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.