It is not unusual, in discussions about Kant, to hear supporters of Kant emphasize that he is an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist. It is important to understand what Kant has in mind by empirical realism and why it is radically different than realist ontologies. At this late hour I will not do this issue the justice it deserves, but hopefully indicate some pointers that will help to clarify the issue. No one is forgetting that Kant claims to be an empirical realist in these discussions, above all those that advocate realist ontologies. Nor are realist criticisms of Kant based on the idea that somehow he is subjectivist or a subjective idealist. Empirical realism is something radically different than a genuine realist ontology. When Kant describes his position as an empirical realism, he is not asserting a realist ontology, but is making a claim about intersubjectivity. What Kant is saying is that the items that populate experience are “objective” in the sense that what we experience is intersubjectively communicable and universal by virtue of the transcendental structure of subjectivity or mind as outlined by Kant. In other words, for Kant we are entitled to say that when the sun warms the rock (here I’m drawing on his famous distinction between perception and experience in the Prolegomena), we’re entitled to claim that this causal relation is an objective truth, i.e., intersubjectively universal.
Nonetheless, while Kant is an empirical realist and this is a commendable thing (was it ever in dispute that he wanted to establish the objectivity of science and mathematics?), he remains a transcendental idealist. In short, Kant’s empirical realism only extends as far as the subject and humans. He nonetheless remains committed to the thesis that what objects might be independent of humans, and whether objects exist as our empirical claims portray them, is something that we can never know and which must be carefully excluded from philosophical discussion. For Kant, even in his empirical realism, there’s always an “asterisks” containing the qualification “for us and apart from us we can never know”.
read on!
One of the things I’ve learned in my discussions with defenders of Kant is just how extensive and far ranging the impact of Strawson’s reading of Kant in The Bounds of Sense is in Anglo-American circles. In many respects I think Strawson has been a silent interlocutor throughout the famous Kant wars, regardless of whether or not these interlocutors have actually read the text (the influence is still clearly there), and has caused a lot of confusion. Putting my cards on the table, I think Strawson is flat out wrong in his reading of Kant and has caused a tremendous amount of confusion in subsequent Anglo-American scholarship on Kant. Strawson’s reading of Kant is what might be called a “deflationary reading”. Strawson sets out to salvage what can be redeemed in Kant and abandon the rest. He downplays Kant’s idealism or thesis that objects conform to mind, not mind to objects, and emphasizes Kant’s transcendentalism, treating Kant’s thought as merely asking “under what conditions are such and such propositions possible?” Simplifying what Strawson is up to, this translates into the rather modest claims like objects must be situated in space and time, that they have causes, that they must endure (be substances), yadda, yadda, yadda. What falls out in this portrayal of Kant is that mind imposes space and time, the categories, etc., etc., such that we cannot claim that being independent of mind is spatial or temporal, that things-in-themselves are substances or have causes, and so on. When viewed through this lens– and again, I don’t think the interlocutors have to have actually read Strawson to more or less advocate this reading, they could have inherited in their studies and through the secondary lit they’ve mostly engaged with –I can see why these defenders of Kant would be perplexed by realist criticisms of correlationism, anti-realism, and Kantianism. As a matter of textual hermeneutics, however, I do not think this modest reading of Kant and its descendants can be supported. It’s simply not what Kant is claiming.
Now I’ve been criticized for using the language of “objects conforming to mind” on the grounds that “Kant doesn’t say this in these terms”. In my view, this sort of criticism is just plain stupid. On the one hand, it is certainly an entirely valid paraphrase of what Kant is arguing. On the other hand, these very same critics gush all over Lee Braver’s A Thing of This World who uses exactly the same language in discussing Kant’s epistemology. This is yet another example of the double standard and janus faced argumentative techniques of these interlocutors that treat certain forms of argument and thought as admissible in one context, only to turn around and decry them when the same lines of argument and phrasing are employed in another.
There is no resemblance between transcendental realism and empirical realism. Transcendental realism is an ontological thesis, whereas empirical realism is an epistemic thesis. Transcendental realism is a set of claims about what objects are regardless of whether anyone’s around to know them, whereas empirical realism is a thesis about intersubjective universality or what can be communicatively shared among human subjects. Empirical realism is a thesis about our access to beings, whereas transcendental realism is a set of claims about the being of objects regardless of whether we know them or have access to them.
Now for the anti-realist such distinctions cannot but seem perplexing as the anti-realist does not believe we can draw a distinction between theory and the world. Of course, if this is the case, then one wonders why the anti-realist bothers to engage in discussion at all as all philosophical differences become a matter of taste or personal preferences as there’s no independent world, existence, or being that could disconfirm any of these positions. Apparently for the anti-realist the only theory that is prohibited is realist theory, despite the fact that we have no independent criteria for excluding any particular theory. This aside, transcendental realist ontology is based on a series of epistemological considerations. Thus, for example, if the world were not differentiated and structured our empirical inquiry would be impossible because there would be no mind-independent differences to disconfirm theories and hypotheses. Since inquiry is possible, it follows that the world is structured and differentiated independent of minds. This simple point already undermines any holist tripe where being in-itself is portrayed as a holistic continuum that subjects somehow carve apart. There must already be differences and structures at work in the world for inquiry to take place. It cannot all come from subjects. Likewise, it must be possible to form closed systems for inquiry to be possible insofar as it would not be possible to isolate variables were it not possible to form more or less closed systems.
Finally, third, it must be the case that causal mechanisms and objects must be capable of being active and acting without producing any sort of observable effect. Here is one of the major differences between Kant’s empirical realism and transcendental realism. Kant’s empirical realism is a thesis about regularities of sensation. Let us return to his famous distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience in the Prolegomena. A judgment of perception says something like “the sun shines, the rock is warm”. It posits no causal or objective relation between the sun shining and the warmth of the rock. A judgment of experience says “because the sun shines the rock grows warm.” Here the two sense-events (the shining sun, the warmth of the rock) are linked by a causal relation imposed by mind. For Kant causal claims are regularities of sensation or impressions that constantly occur together and that can be experienced by a subject with the same transcendental constitution.
The crucial point however, is his emphasis on regularities of sensation or constant conjunctions of sensation. Not so for the transcendental realist. First, the transcendental realism notes that there are all sorts of situations where causal mechanisms are present without the consequent event being produced. Given that the causal relation is still operative, this is enough to undermine the empiricist thesis that causality consists in regularities of sensation or a constant conjunction of sensations. Second, the transcendental realist notes that there are all sorts of constant conjunctions of sensations that don’t involve a constant conjunction of sense-events. I make my morning coffee every morning and the sun rises. My making of the morning coffee does not cause the sun to rise. Kant however is committed to the thesis that there must be a causal relation here because of the constancy of the conjunction of sensations at the experiential level. He is unable to distinguish between these constant conjunctions and genuine causal relations. Finally, he is unable to explain why it should be necessary to carefully construct experimental closed systems to isolate variables and discover causal mechanisms as all conjunctions of sensations are, for Kant, equal. Kant suffers from the problem of epistemic actualism, basing his epistemology on the actuality of experienced sensations and their conjunctions, and treating this as the sole domain of access. Yet without making a genuinely ontological move, dispensing with questions of access for the moment, all sorts of epistemological issues become entirely unintelligible.
Above all it should be remembered that OOO and transcendental realism are fallibilisms. I get the sense that the anti-realists among us think that us realists are somehow saying that we can sit in our armchairs and just know reality without having to investigate it. This seems to be how, based on a rather superficial reading, they understand the signifier “speculative” in “speculative realism”. Like so many things in this world, the situation is precisely the reverse. The object-oriented ontologists are the ones who are modest in what we can know and can’t know, emphasizing that knowing takes work, that we must actually grapple with the world, and that we only get knowledge in bits and pieces, and that hypotheses about how things are are often mistaken. It is difficult to see how this sort of fallibility is even conceivable or possible within an anti-realist framework. Given the impossible of a disadequation between world and theory is it really a surprise that philosophy has degenerated into discussion of texts and a war among rival aesthetic tastes and normative commitments? Where real being has disappeared as even a possibility all we can do is talk about talk or talk about how people have talked about the world and talked about talk, and engage in struggles over taste and normative commitments. In claiming that the world is differentiated and structured the object-oriented ontologist doesn’t claim to know a priori what structures and differences compose the world. This is something that can only be discovered through long and laborious collective inquiry (the idea that knowledge is a relation between a subject and an object rather than a collective product is one of the biggest bits of nonsense in all of philosophy), it cannot be discovered from the armchair or through “speculation”. All the object-oriented ontologist is committed to is that the world is differentiated and structured and that this differences and structures aren’t merely a product of mind, language, society, etc.
December 2, 2009 at 9:55 pm
hi levi,
Deleuze seems to have already reframed a number of the problems you are finding with appropriations of Kant:
1. “Transcendental realism is a set of claims about what objects are regardless of whether anyone’s around to know them, whereas empirical realism is a thesis about intersubjective universality or what can be communicatively shared among human subjects.”
Trancendental empiricism is defined by relations and the ‘communication’ of affect/s between any element/s of an event. Humans are not privileged and human perception of events is only one way to actualise an event (as human perception). The event of ‘morning’ is actualised in an infinite number of ways as the earth rotates.
2. “For Kant causal claims are regularities of sensation or impressions that constantly occur together and that can be experienced by a subject with the same transcendental constitution.”
In Difference and Repetition Deleuze replaces the concept of ‘regularity’ with that of the ‘problem’. Kantians may seek out regularities of sensation, and these exist for sensing entities, but within the event, as part of the event, those compositions of relations actualised as sensation for sensing entities are first problems of affect. The sun rising as part of the event of morning is again actualised in an infinite number of ways depending on the entities implicated in the event, the singularities that Kant recognised as regular for sensing entities are ontologically problematic.
3. “What falls out in this portrayal of Kant is that mind imposes space and time, the categories, etc., etc., such that we cannot claim that being independent of mind is spatial or temporal, that things-in-themselves are substances or have causes, and so on.”
Yes, this is a very weak reading of Kant. Zizek pointed out a problem in Deleuze’s oeuvre between an idealism and a materiality, what Deleuze and Foucault called an incorporeal materialism. There are two temporal orders in effect here, as Deleuze notes in the Logical of Sense, Chronos and Aion. Chronos being our temporality and Aion being the temporality of singularity, existing as problems, actualised as regularity. What they failed to explicitly account for is the temporality of ontological opportunity for the genesis/emergence/’taking’ (as Althusser put it in his last works) of events. (I think it is possible to read Deleuze’s appropriation of Bergson as a way of trying to address this problem.) Negri does a fine job of isolating this temporality in his essay on Kairos, but unfortunately restricts it to a human-centric appreciation. Chronos, Kairos and Aion. Kairos is a far more precise way of accounting for temporal restlessness of the world, as part of a realist ontology that appreciates events as the emergence of the world, not in human-centric terms, but as an infinite and baroque cascade of events. Of course we ‘contract’ (in both senses of the word) affect into sensation, and locate ourselves in the world through the regularity of these sensations with a rhythmic differentially repeated spatio-temporality.
December 2, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Yep Glen,
There’s definitely a lot of Deleuze lurking in my thinking on these issues. In many respect, my term “object” could easily be replaced by Deleuze’s term “problem”… Especially as interpreted by DeLanda as a set of attractors presiding over a phase space. I’m resistant to the term “problem” because I think it still has too many subjectivist connotations. I would say the two major points where I diverge from Deleuze is that I don’t have any use for the three syntheses of memory as developed in chapter 2 of DR, and I don’t believe the virtual (what I would call objects or generative mechanisms) is a whole out of which discrete cuts are made, but that this domain is composed of discrete and separated entities (the generative mechanisms or objects).
December 5, 2009 at 9:25 pm
I’ve been wondering about how Deleuze fits into your recent fondness for ‘realism’. I followed your blog a lot back in 2006 when you were writing the Deleuze book. We discussed the three syntheses back then a bit, and, as i tried to point out then, I think it is a misreading to read the virtual either a) as a whole, or a totality, or a container, or any sort of reservoir pre-existing its own differentiation/actualization, or b) as separable from the synthesis of envelopment-development that IS the third synthesis, i.e. intensive disjunction. Deleuze states quite clearly that if there is a totality, it is nothing other than that formed by the Caesura between what is enveloped-as-“Distinct-Obscure” and what is developed-as-“Clear-confused”, which is a “totality” or “whole” only as fractured, only as distributive, and immanent to a particular differentiation (i.e. it is finite, and ‘internal’ to the existence in question, not external nor any ‘larger’ than it). The “Whole” of the 2nd synthesis is, he says, an “optical effect” immanent to the operation of the 3rd synthesis, which is intensive.
What does this reading mean for us? When would the notion of a “Whole” become relevant for the empiricist? I would suggest that the Whole, if there is one in Deleuze, is discoverable only when one has an encounter with the world that forces us to think an “Objecticity” qua Problem-Question complex. This is what it means to think the actual as a multiplicity: a sign forces us to think the conditions of the very encounter with the world we are undergoing, or made a patient of. Which is to say from the outset that if Ideas are a condition of the actual, this is a retroactive assertion parasitical on an encounter with the world that has forced us to think it qua condition. Moreover, the “whole” is not ‘in’ what you encounter, it is given as an “Ideational” synthesis [Synthèse idéelle] in thought.
The so-called problem of “Wholism” of Deleuze only emerges when readers of Deleuze reify (and thereby deify as well) what he calls “Ideas”, by acting as if Ideas were a full-fledged dimension of Being from out of which the actual simply falls into existence or whatever. I have tried to argue elsewhere that this is a poor reading of Deleuze’s conception of differentiation, and of serialization. Let me briefly reiterate why here (apologies in advance if what follows isn’t as clear as it could be).
I think it is a confusion of differentiation because it implies that “something” is differentiated “into” something else, i.e. that the Ideas are transformed somehow into the actual, as if Ideas were a substratum of existence. No, differentiation is not from one part of being into another, nor does it begin with a Whole (a pure coexistence of Duration or of all potentiality as a container of reservoir of latent Being) and only later fracture itself into parts by objectivizing itself into extensities. Differentiation is, on the contrary, OF DIMENSIONS AS SUCH [sorry I don’t mean to shout, I just don’t know how to italicize here], and NOT from one pre-existing dimension to another. This is the meaning of the Caesura: to think the existing object as a dimensional multiplicity, not as a “gift” [donnée] or “realization” of Memory.
And this brings us to serialization, because the three syntheses of time are inseparable from the entire story about what intensive difference means for philosophy. The dimensional multiplicity becomes ideational in and through the envelopment of a dimensional difference *in* the actual. What we encounter in the sign is a heterogeneous series that is incompossible with the one I am, and this incompossibility is relative strictly to the encounter between two series, it is not a “de jure” incompossibility guaranteed by a thesis about pure Memory. Deleuze’s “ontology” (if he has one in any traditional sense, which I’m not sure he does…I am sympathetic with Zourabichvili’s cautioning on this point) is not assertoric nor pre-critical. Difference is not a postulate, it is strictly relative to encounters. There is no world but that which emerges through encounters (albeit non-anthropomorphic ones), which is to say beyond serialization.
We think difference on the basis of a sign that pushes us to think, and we think it by virtue of the possible world that is enveloped within the sign, as a heterogeneity that can be occupied only at the expense of our mutating our self, by taking it up as a point of view in divergence with the one we previously were.
So, i would submit to you, in short:
1. There is no way to strip time from this story.
2. Difference in-itself not a pre-existing Whole, and
3.there is no difference (and hence no Deleuzean philosophy) without the intensive synthesis, which I would argue is what is at stake in the 3rd synthesis of time in D&R.
Difference here is immanent to the specific encounter between two series that gives rise to a sign, across a caesura, and this envelops a distance (‘resonance’) that can be conceptualized if we think its Ideational content.
A brief aside, by way of closing: I wonder if you really think this whole “realism” question was honestly ever a question Deleuze would have been interested in, or if it ever presented a real problem for him? I’m not so convinced it ever presents a real issue for his thinking. By this I mean that, since the problem of ‘realism’ seems to me tied to a problem of “knowledge” in the classical sense of ‘correspondence’ or ‘adequation’/recognition – one which the entire critique of the image of thought tried to do away with – what ‘reality’ is thought trying to safeguard for the world here? Is it not rather thought which is in need of explanation, not the reality of the world outside it?
It occurs to me that here a whole longer conversation about the rejection of “interpretation” and semiotic systems [why ‘meaning’ qua knowledge emerges only through Facializing machine of despotic semiotics] would probably be necessary here.
I’ll leave it there.
all the best,
-Kieran