Everything happens as if...(the indeterminate accord of the Idea)
Within a transcendental framework, the act of thinking cannot determine existence.
"Thought forms me, I is another": Rimbaud's formula.
On the sub-representative plane, the ends or interests of faculties are determined through their relations both to sensation and other faculties. It is necessary to understand what faculty legislates (and by what right it legislates) and under what conditions faculties may enter into free accords. This is the basis of critique which overcomes "common sense" (determination) in favour of genesis.
Consider the Kantian transcendental Idea, appreciate the beauty of the proposition. Reason, when submitted to the legislation of the understanding, constructs Ideas and forms indeterminate accords with the content of phenomena, the nuomena.
An Idea is thus a singularity, a type of ideal horizon, a coagulation belonging to the speculative interests of reason: a problem, sign or symbol. The idea is indeterminate, an "attractor" towards which the concepts of the understanding infinitely converge. Let us look closer at Kant's transcendental architecture and how it leads to the notion of the Idea as problem.
In the Kantian transcendental critique, the "power of thinking" and the "power of judgement" are one and the same. One thinks when one produces concepts. The Urteil (judgement) is the central cognitive faculty of the human mind. The Urteilskraft (power of judgement) is an immanent cognitive capacity, one that produces empirical knowledge, but not without help from the faculty of reason: "without reason the understanding would not reunite into a whole the set of its moves concerning a concept." (1)
In the act of thinking, the faculty of the understanding legislates over the faculty of reason. Reason's talents (in this case speculative) take on specific powers in this relation in which it must submit to the legislation of the understanding: "understanding judges and reason reasons." (2) Kant follows the Aristotelian doctrine in which reason is defined as being a fundamentally syllogistic apparatus. Pre-Kantian notions of knowledge were founded primarily on the subject-predicate grounded on the faculty of reason. Kant instead ascribes knowledge to judgement, not reason, a move which radically displaces the possibility of a presupposed subject-predicate genus. For Kant a judgement is "a radically" new conception of knowledge as a higher order binding function for different types of lower-order objective representation content." (3)
In order to understand how this binding functions, we must examine the substructure of the relation between the faculties of the understanding and of reason, keeping in mind that in the Critique of Pure Reason it is the understanding which legislates over the faculty of reason in the interests of knowledge.
Reason, as a faculty which has as its "higher ends" a striving for systemic unity, will, given any concept from the understanding, search for a "middle term" which "conditions the attribution of the first concept to an object." (4)
"All men are mortal, Caius is a man, therefore Caius is mortal."
Reason, given the first concept (mortal), searches for a second concept (man) which conditions the first concept and extends its attribution to an indeterminate object (Caius). Reason's interests and unique talents are therefore aimed at bestowing unity on concepts and phenomena. Through its operations, reason confers to the understanding the right to knowledge through its "binding" of a first concept to a second atrributed to an object of experience. The legislative acts of the understanding constitute the "series of conditions" but only reason can confer unity amongst its conditions.
But reason, operating within a framework in which it is submitted to the actions of the understanding, runs into a problem: if the a priori categories (concepts of the understanding) are applicable to all objects of possibile experience, reason cannot look for another concept to act as a middle term in conditioning the attribution of the first concept.
Reason's problem is therefore the existence of a priori concepts. As the categories are "applicable to all objects of possible experience" reason cannot find a middle term amongst the categories in order to attribute a priori categories to all objects.
Reason, in order to attribute categories to all objects, must form Ideas, transcendental Ideas. Here reason is induced by "its own speculative interests." (5) The Idea is therefore a device (singularity, coagulation) of reason which permits reason to continue its speculative search for system unity (application of concepts to all objects) beyond experience. Ideas represent "the totality of conditions under which a category of relation may be attributed to objects of possible experience." (6)
Ideas are therefore unconditioned, and exist in relation to a single concept or category: the Idea of the soul in relation to the concept of substance, the Idea of the "complete series" or world in relation to the concept of causality and the Idea of the "whole of reality" or God in relation to the concept of community.
As reason strives for the unity of categories and objects, the Idea must be considered through both its subjective and objective points of view. From a subjective point of view, Ideas reunite into a complete set of actions the activities of the understanding and intution. Ideas act as "ideal foci outside experience towards which the concepts of the understanding converge." (7) Reason subjectively creates "higher horizons" which reflect the concepts of the understanding.
Objectively, Ideas grant "material opportunity" to the understanding. This is due to the fact that the understanding legislatives over phenomena formally. The content of phenomena (the noumena) are beyond its scope. Without reason, the understanding would loose its legislative power over phenomena which would remain as nothing more than "radical diversity."
Phenomena must therefore submit to the legislation of the understanding not only formally (submitting themselves to the categories alone) but the must submit their content to Ideas: the noumena must "correspond to, or symbolize, the Ideas of reason." (8)
There thus exists a harmony between the noumena and the Idea. Differently from the "pre-established" harmony of Leibniz, however, this harmony is simply "postulated" by Kant. Reason does not and cannot legislate over the content of phenomena, it can only presuppose "a systematic unity of Nature." (9) But this presupposition is a problem or limit, a limit at infinity: all of reason's actions are carried out in relation to this limit.
The Idea and the noumena thus share an indeterminate accord, as the Idea is driven by reason's intrinsic drive for unity in phenomena or Nature. This accord exists on condition that the Idea be indeterminate: unity, as limit, is the Idea as problem.
Reason is the faculty which says: "everything happens as if..." and the Idea is the locus of its indeterminate speculative drive. The Idea cannot ascertain the totality and unity of conditions given in the object, "but only that objects allow us to tend towards this systematic unity as the highest degree of our knowledge." (10)
Let us briefly return to Descartes, Cogito Ergo Sum. Being is indeterminate. Thinking is the act of determination: "I think determines my existence."
On Kant's transcendental ground, the nature of determination itself has radically changed.
The Idea is thus: indeterminate in its relation to its object, determinable by analogy with the objects of experience and possessing an infinite determination in its relation to the concepts of the understanding (this is because the Idea can functions as singularity or ideal focus towards which concepts of the understanding converge, as if it was a horizon).
In Kantian terms, the "I think" can determine an indeterminate existence only under the form of the determinable, only on the condition or "under the form of a passive being in space and time." (12) Thinking is an act, but an act in which "I can only represent to myself in so far as I am a passive being." (13)
Indeterminate in relation to their object, determinable in relation to the noumena by analogy, and of an infinite determination in relation to the concepts of the understanding. These are the terms on which Difference & Repetition will seek true genesis.
(1) Gilles Deleuze. Kant's Critical Philosophy
(2) Ibid
(3) Kant's Theory of Judgement. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(4) Gilles Deleuze. Kant's Critical Philosophy
(5) Ibid
(6) Ibid
(7) Ibid
(8) Ibid
(9) Ibid
(10) Ibid
(11) Ibid
(12) Gilles Deleuze. Cours Vincennes. Kant. 21.03.1978
(13) Ibid
