There is no pure nor true philosophical start. This concern drives Gilles Deleuze to articulate the ‘dogmatic Image of thought’ in chapter three of Difference and Repetition. He finds that this Image contains a pedigree back to the first instance of philosophical thought, thinking has contained within it an image that formulates itself in the confines of a given. Philosophical thinking has rarely begun without reference to a pattern already in operation. Thinking has seldom been pure; thinking has hardly been thinking per se. The consequence is that what is taken as philosophical thought is not what it means to truly think.
Deleuze wants to redefine ‘philosophy’ and contends that it requires a pure beginning not indebted to a presupposition. There is a difference between true philosophical thinking and an Image of thought. Thinking is movement, creation, it is the real as in real experience and is the participle of individuation. The Image of thought is representational, it involves an act of recognition and constructs identity. Deleuze argues that the majority of philosophers participating in so-called philosophical thought have done nothing but promote an Image through subjective presuppositions that direct the thinker towards a recognition of an object and furthermore into a predetermined representational field. Deleuze demands philosophy to start unbeholden to any presuppositions in order to witness true thinking—a movement alongside the real.
This paper will first explicate how philosophers fail to start without presuppositions. In the process of attempting to jettison objective presuppositions, they install subjective presuppositions thus fabricating subjectivity and identity—philosophers construct a posture that begins thinking. It will then present the eight postulates that solidify the Image of thought. The postulates conspire beneath recognition, representation, and knowledge. Lastly, it will undermine the Image of thought to demonstrate how thinking without an Image appears as the movement of true creation—true philosophical thinking. The preponderance of philosophers have considered only a single subject that operates the thinking procedure. Deleuze sets the stage for the possibility of a second subject, an individual not unified in their faculties, not devoted to an Image in thought, but a second subject (a subject besides) that thinks without an Image, thinks creatively, thinks per se.
Philosophers attempt to rid their projects of objective presuppositions to start from the beginning. Objective presuppositions are “concepts explicitly presupposed by a given concept,” they do not deal with the creation of concepts but rather with their use and their implementation.[1] An objective presupposition is one that might claim: “man is a rational animal,” presupposing both the concepts of “rationality” and of “animality.”[2] Objective presuppositions can be determined systematically by breaking down the syntax of the proposition into particular concepts, where each can be broken down further, and further until the genetic element of influence is clear. The concept does not hide itself nor does it make an effort to claim that it busy with an act of creation. A proposition that contains the objective does not concern itself with the new.
Deleuze observed in the process of eliminating the objective, philosophers will instead begin their projects with “subjective or implicit presupposition[s]” that remain hidden.[3] A pure beginning is imitated by disregarding the recognition of a particular “this or that,” and instead what philosophers claim is “everybody knows” to the “the form of representation or recognition in general” proposing a universal recognition of “thinking, being, and self.”[4] The everybody knows gestures away from implementing concepts, where concepts are seen the inherited aspect of thinking.
Descartes’ “Cogito” is a clear example of the everybody knows. In order to stray from the concepts of “rationality” and “animality” and he presents “the Cogito as a definition [and…] therefore claims to avoid all the objective presuppositions which encumber those procedures that operate by genus and difference.”[5] In turn, he formulates a supposed “pure self of [the] ‘I think’” and simulates a rupture with previous concepts of self by referring “all its presuppositions back to the empirical self.”[6] He creates the notion of a pure self as an I think in a transcendental fashion and latches it onto the empirical evidence of having body while also having a mind that can perform the formulated thinking function. When Descartes claims ‘I think therefore I am’ he shifts focus away from the skeptical world of the objective and supersedes to the subjective operation, claiming existence to be innate to the thinking faculty. Identity becomes a false ground of existence—identity becomes the ground of existence. The Cogito organizes thought towards an empirical understanding, it unifies thought beneath itself. If thinking—this metaphysical operation claimed to be the authoritative proof for the operation of the self—exists then so do I. Here, the I becomes a false ground and the subjective presupposition upon which the entire proof of thinking hinges. The Cogito—the I—mediates experience (meditates, even). If thinking is the confirmation of existence, and if I am a thinking thing first and foremost, then all experience is organized by the identity of the I. Descartes subjectively presupposes the entire stance a thinker ought to have in relation to their self and their thinking.
Subjective presuppositions do as they say, they presuppose the subject. Philosophical presuppositions are “contained in opinions rather than concepts.”[7] Opinions, doxa, are less rigidly genetic and are more dependent on symbolic hearsay, pointing a tacit judgement that signifies how one is supposed to relate to a supposed and common metaphysical understanding. Promptly, opinions concern a majority belief and a majority belief is generally held by the sway of morality. Nietzsche declares “the most general presuppositions of philosophy […] are essentially moral.”[8]
Perhaps it is fair to claim that subjective presuppositions instead create subjective concepts for a concept “only ever designates possibilities.”[9] The philosopher’s maneuver to disguise a presupposition reveals itself as insidious upon further consideration, “it can claim innocence, since it has kept nothing back – except, of course, the essential – namely, the form of this discourse,” being “the discourse of the representative,” which is: “everybody knows, no one can deny.”[10]
Subjective presuppositions take as fact the unification of the subject beneath forms of thinking, being, and self. The dogmatic Image is a command. Obey! Enjoy your Image! It is also the moral interrogation of: are you plugged into the correct representation? Surely,
The conditions of a philosophy which would be without any kind of presuppositions appear all the more clearly: instead of being supported by the moral Image of thought, it would take as its point of departure a radical critique of the Image and the ‘postulates’ it implies. [11]
A true beginning is the new without supplication to or signification from the Image of thought. To achieve a true starting point is to rid oneself of presuppositions—subjective and objective. It is to begin without an Image that shepherds the thinker towards a given. A true beginning commences in an act of refusal, a departure and a critique, belonging to the thinker who declares that “he does not wish to be so represented, and that he denies or does not recognize those who speak in his name.”[12]
For “it is futile to claim to reformulate the doctrine of truth without first taking stock of the postulates which project this distorting Image of thought.”[13]“Truth is a matter of production,” not of recognition or representation, implying that truth exits as a movement rather than a static comparative practice that domesticates phenomena.[14] Deleuze maintains that “thought [can] begin to think, and continually begin again, only when liberated from the Image and its postulates.”[15] The free play of interacting with phenomena is what is at stake in thinking without an Image.
Each postulate functions naturally and philosophically, empirically and transcendentally respectively.[16] The empirical orients the subject towards the object where the transcendent orients the subject towards the operation upon the object within the mind. Postulates are “propositional themes which remain implicit and are understood in a pre-philosophical manner.”[17] The postulate is not to be attested but to be acknowledged as factual, yet in practice it is nothing more than an opinion elevated to the status of philosophy.[18]
The Postulates of the Dogmatic Image of Thought
The first postulate is “the postulate of the principle, or the cogitatio natura universalis (good will of the thinker and good nature of the thought).”[19] The postulates begin by establishing common sense, “the most general form of representation.”[20] It is crucial to note the first postulate communicates a moral undertone that pervades the entire Image of thought. The everybody knows is termed “common sense,” and is the universal recognition of the ‘this or that.’[21] It is not an explicit, declarative instruction, but an implicit tone of how one ought to think simply because it is deemed universally understood. Common sense is the ground on which ‘philosophy’ can begin. It begins with a metaphysical posture essentially void of knowledge and enforces a behavioral approach towards considering objects and object relations.
Common sense promotes morality as it is the theoretical form that permeates the thinker’s relationship to the empirical and transcendental, providing the format for an authority to declare what the Good is. Accordingly,
Morality alone is capable of persuading us that thought has a good nature and the thinker a good will, and that only the good can ground the supposed affinity between thought and the True. Who else, in effect, but Morality, and this Good which gives thought to the true and true to thought?[22]
Descartes implied that “good sense (the capacity for thought) is of all things in the world most equally distributed.” In doing so he constructed an “in principle” Image of thought that correlated a “good nature” and “an affinity with the true”—common sense becomes the “[determination] of pure thought.[23] Pure thought identifies thinking with an overall Good to suggest that the thinker must approach thinking from the vantage point of the Good, and that thought will be in accordance with the true if it is in accordance with a good nature. Of course there are no ambiguities here. Good, pure thinking requires “an explicit method” that nonetheless accounts for the difficulties of thinking but proclaims the project of thinking to be one of ease if the thinker could only “apply the mind so endowed.”[24] This ease is the “poison of the whole of Cartesianism.”[25] The critique of thought no longer relies on whether or not thinking is true thinking, but whether or not it can apply itself to the in principle method of the Image. This method “presupposes a certain distribution of the empirical and the transcendental and it is this distribution or transcendental model implied by the image that must be judged.”[26]
Goodness equates with doxa as it does not seek to harm nor disturb but to comply and further develop thought into communion with a harmonious whole. When the faculties are unified each will mesh to support the Image as each works towards producing a given truth, and will only strive towards such truth. Truth is considered in agreement with the Good and the recognition of the Good is considered the mark of proper philosophical thought.[27] Truth becomes a ready-made concept to be discovered not produced. Therefore every act of assimilating thinking with the truth is one of equivalence or agreement—not creation. Morality protects the thinker from a disagreement with a codified everybody knows.
The second postulate is “the postulate of the ideal, or common sense (common sense as the concordia facultatum and good sense as the distribution which guarantees this concord).”[28] The first postulate distributes the coordinates of common sense: a good will of the thinker and a good nature of thought, and the second postulate determines its implementation—its distribution. Common sense is “the norm of the identity from the point of view of the pure Self and the form of the unspecified object which corresponds to it.”[29] The norm is the element of doxa that posits identity as a synthetic procedure coordinating a permitted pure Self to an object—an object that is no longer unspecified is thus a signified object after the contribution of common sense. The Ideal element in the second postulate is the applicative idealities of a subjective presupposition. The identity: the I, the pure self, the homogenizing factor, coordinates the faculties to recognize the object beneath the Same.
The distributive element of common sense is its “good sense” defined as “the norm of the distribution from the point of view of the empirical selves.”[30] “Good sense determines the contribution of the faculties in each case, while common sense contributes the form of the Same.”[31] Good sense coordinates the faculties towards the Image predetermined by common sense. The faculties are unified to perform their transcendent functions that discover the same object in experience. The empirical selves are the everybody knows no one can deny in unison, it is the mutual agreement of each faculty locating the object. When the unified subject validates the recognition of an object, it signals to the faculties that they are distributing and communicating the representative nature of the object according to the Same—that the faculties are functioning accordingly. Coordination confirms the good nature of thought through the harmony of the faculties.
Thus, “natural good sense or common sense are thus taken to be determinations of pure thought.”[32] The capacity for thought is properly distributed in all subjects. Thought functions with perpetual ease insofar as it corresponds to the moral and dogmatic Image. The second postulate conforms the unspecified object to a determined ideal that subordinates the object to a specific interpretation. Thinking, seized by the ideal, directs all activity of the faculties towards the Same; the faculties contemplate the ideal Image. The Same does not require the subject to deliberate further, the object is proposed as true in its symbolic field and is utilized as is it were the personal property of the subject.
An apparent commonality between common sense and good sense is sense. Sense is “what is expressed by a proposition” and sense is “the genesis or production of the true, and truth is only the empirical result of sense.”[33] Deleuze defines sense as the expression that germinates from the proposition, where a proposition per se is an interpretation through real experience, not a determined representation.[34] When “common” or “good” bind to sense they orient it. If pure sense is the true and is production, then common sense and good sense are “two halves of the doxa,” they do not produce but follow the procedure of the Image.[35]
The third postulate is “the postulate of the model or of recognition (recognition inviting all the faculties to exercise themselves upon an object supposedly the same, and the consequent possibility of error in the distribution when one faculty confuses one of its objects with a different object of another faculty).”[36] It is the model supported by the good will of the thinker and the good nature of the thought.[37] Recognition is “the harmonious exercise of all the faculties upon a supposed same object: the same object may be seen, touched, remembered, imagined or conceived.”[38] The faculties–such as “perception, memory, imagination, understanding”–are the processes within the mind that have their own “particular given,” “particular style,” and their own “peculiar ways of acting upon the given.”[39] Instead of allowing the faculties to process the object in a manner unique to each, recognition determines a same object, an object with a solidified identity. Stated otherwise, “an object is recognized, however, when one faculty locates it as identical to that of another, or rather when all the faculties together relate their given and relate themselves to a form of identity in the object.”[40] Identity is that which unifies, it is a contract and an accumulation of significations applied to an object. It harmonizes the faculties beneath the implementation of a Same instead of permitting each faculty to discordantly expand on the object in a free play. This coordination occurs when the common sense of everybody knows delivers unto the thinker what ought to be recognized.
Identity grounds within the thinker a “unity of a thinking subject,” and takes the faculties to be “modalities” of this unity.[41] This is Descartes’ Cogito “as a beginning: it expresses the unity of all the faculties in the subject [and] thereby expresses the possibility that all the faculties will relate to a form of object which reflects the subjective identity […] it is common sense become philosophical.”[42] It becomes apparent that so long as the thinker is a unified subject there will be no encounter with an “unspecified object.”[43] The ‘I’ in the ‘I think’ becomes that upon which matter is mediated. When identity is performed correctly, the thinker is judged a moral subject.
It becomes clear that the postulates build upon each other: “the image of a naturally upright thought, which knows what it means to think; the pure element of common sense which follows from this ‘in principle’; and the model of recognition – or rather the form of recognition.”[44] Stated otherwise, recognition has a good posture towards thinking, a method that coordinates faculties in harmony upon the object, and a supposed Same in which the faculties must coordinate in order to recognize the object. This model is a “hinderance to philosophy as it orients the thinker in regards to what it means to think,” measuring and limiting “the quality by relating it to something, thereby interrupting the mad-becoming.”[45] The mad-becoming heeds the genesis of the true in sense, a perpetual movement and not a static, recognized object.[46]
Recognition is at stake in the everyday: “this is a table, this is an apple, this is the piece of wax, Good morning Theaetetus.”[47] The object exists to the subject because it is premediated. In the object being recognized and is given a role. At most times, if not at all times, the acts of recognition are mere banalities as the thinker becomes the unified subject assimilating to a representational code. The subject coasts along, does not think per se. Here conspires the epiphany that matter of the everyday has the possibility of opening new paths to object relations. Private life is colonized just as much as the public under the sanctions of representation, thinking is not unscathed in the likes of its own company. Deleuze raises the concern, “who can believe that the destiny of thought is at stake in these acts, and that when we recognize we are thinking?”[48]
Recognition does not allow for anything new, but will continuously conform to common sense and will only sanction “the recognizable and the recognized.”[49] It is not so much that the object itself is perpetually discovered, but that the values attached to it are such as “honours, wealth, power.”[50] Established values are the ultimate designation of recognition to which the Image of thought conforms.[51] Object-relations by means of recognition will only “rediscover” the State and the Church and “all the current values that [are] subtly presented in the pure form of an eternally blessed unspecified eternal object.”[52] There is no relief from qualifying an object according to the values of common sense. Pure recognition and representation become a contest that awards the subject a trophy for their voluntary struggles of compliance.[53] The object has no possibility to be anything other than its designation within the symbolic field. This designation is not taken up with the thinker, but perpetuates under the guise of morality and truth—established values—and is maintained within the unification of the faculties of the subject.
Values inform how the object will take shape in a milieu. Sense itself is captured by a system of values. The expression of sense is distributed by good sense to perpetually equate the object with a value; “values play a crucial role in the distributions undertaken by good sense.”[54] Good sense and common sense, doxa, form a pattern that adheres to all experience and object relations.
However, so long as one only abstracts form the empirical content of doxa, while maintaining the operation of the faculties which corresponds to it and implicitly retains the essential aspect of the content one remains imprisoned by it [the Image of thought]. We may well discover a supra-temporal form or even a sub-temporal primary matter, an underground Ur-doxa […we] remain imprisoned to the same cave or ideas of the times which we only flatter ourselves having ‘rediscovered’, by blessing them with the sign of philosophy.[55]
The sub-forms are the patterns upon which values perform. It is made apparent that the process of recognition becomes more complex as it is not just the object per se, but the values that bring the object into being. The object is the empirical incarnation of the value: the value is the true parasite that remains and reembodies itself to support the Same, to keep the subject unified and dependent on a representational paradigm. Good sense distributes, common sense solidifies. It is not to claim to create a universal a-temporal system of object significations, but to establish a “complacency” and a “finality,” there is no clearing for the thinker to create.[56] If the thinker creates they act in bad faith and are hostile to the representational system.
Error is attached to the third postulate and works alongside recognition, particularly under the sway of established values. Kant, in discovering the transcendental, nonetheless subordinates this three syntheses to the “‘I think’, to which all the faculties are related.”[57] In place of error Kant used the concept of illusion.[58] Illusion transpires internal to reason and not as a product of an external malfunction of, say, the body.[59] Kant does not forgo common sense: “a collaboration of the faculties upon a form of the Same or a model of recognition,” as he creates a “logical common sense” where the modalities of the synthesis “ imagination, reason, and the understanding collaborate in the case of knowledge.”[60] Each model has an a priori and transcendent systematic that translates the manifold—what the subject will experience is determined by the transcendental structure that has decided what constitutes reality, the transcendental structure has intrinsic knowledge of the true.
The faculties collaborate and recognize a general common sense, for Kant “the formulae of that collaboration differ according to the nature of that which is to be recognized: the object of knowledge, moral value, aesthetic effect…”–he does not negate common sense, but multiplies it and each faculty has its own ‘Image’ specified by a value.[61] This procedure is witness to a Ur-doxa as Kant is respectful to the values such as “knowledge, morality, reflection, and faith” that are “never themselves called into question: only the use of the faculties is declared legitimate or not in relation to one or other of these interests.”[62] It is not the object per se that is disputed, but whether or not the faculties within the mind can correlate to an object and accord it to a supposed truth that falls in line with a system of values. Recognition is still at play in Kant’s modalities as it “fixes good usage in the form of a harmony between the faculties determined by a dominant faculty under a given common sense.” It is an internal—and according to Kant a priori—schema that coordinates the good usage of the faculties and the legitimate method of mediating the manifold. Illusion is described as thought “in its natural state [that] confuses its interests and allows its various domains to encroach upon one another.”[63] The appointed interest of thought is in accord with a given value and is the expected functioning of what it means to think.
The fourth postulate is “the postulate of the element, or of representation (when difference is subordinated to the complementary dimensions of the Same and the Similar, the Analogous and the Opposed).”[64] The object is pinned down to four possible determinates: same, similar, analogous, or opposed. Every object-possibility is categorized for or against the homogenizing Image that dominates thought. Difference—the new, a possibility of another expression—is encountered but is nonetheless obstructed by the Image and categorized according to Representation. Representation is defined by “identity with regard to concepts, opposition with regard to the determination of concepts, analogy with regard to judgement, [and] resemblance with regard to objects.”[65] Philosophy subjected to Representation does not contain a pure beginning; every object or concept is previously qualified so it “matters little whether philosophy begins with the object or the subject […] as long as thought remains subject to this Image which already prejudges everything: the distribution of the object and the subject.”[66] Representation accounts for the possible, it sets out to determine what can be possible and codifies the real into an algorithm, a recognition, that believes it can account for all experience.
Representation is teleological, it demands an end, a signification, a designation of the object at hand. Whatever is presented must be placed in a system of objects, there can be no loose ends. Representative thinking operates within the majority, it is the discourse of the Master, the Same. Think without thinking. Representative thinking is substitution within thought—the simulacra, the copy—it is not the new and will never be new so long as it remains bound to recognition and Representation. It is not just object Representation but the form of object Representation, that by which the means of Representation functions. It is the form on which the thinker mediates not just objects, but more rudimentary—matter. The Image of thought is not of various Images, “but of a single Image in general which constitutes the subjective presupposition of philosophy as a whole.”[67] The Image is Representation per se, as that which pollutes the faculties of the mind and organizes them towards an artificial unification.
The “I think” is the fundamental principle of Representation. It is the unity on which all faculties converge within the subject: “I conceive, I judge, I imagine, I remember and I perceive.”[68] The ‘I’ forces itself into each faculty, supplanting a single Image that initiates the functioning of the faculty—each faculty does not operate with its own style, but cooperates with the I. The I is a unifying posture. Representation can only grasp “by means of recognition, distribution, reproduction and resemblance,” it cannot not operate with a unspecified object.[69] If any new is disclosed it is immediately crucified to the four branches of representation: the Same, Similar, Analogous, and Opposed. The new or “difference becomes an object of representation always in relation to a conceived identity, a judged analogy, an imagined opposition or a perceived similitude,” these figures form the principium comparationis, the comparative principle.[70]
The fifth postulate is “the postulate of the negative, or of error (in which error expresses everything which can go wrong in thought, but only as the product of external mechanisms).”[71] Error is taken as a “misadventure of thought” that is nonetheless subjected to common sense as it still attests to a good will on the part of the thinker.[72] Error is a comparative measure to the supposed true Image, its deviation or plight is its misadventure: the incorrect account of the Image. It is the only “negative” of the Image, but still gives form to the truth of the Image by evaluating it with what is false.[73] Every interaction that does not produce the true Image falls under the category of error.[74] It demonstrates a “failure of good sense within the form of common sense which remains integral and intact.”[75]
The difference from the Kantian form of error (illusion) is that illusion for Kant is an internal malfunction. This internal rupture could have been considered a possible break from the Image since the transcendent faculties each create in their own way. Instead, Kant subordinated his discovery to the element of common sense as the transcendent faculties nonetheless have a directive to locate a determined value. The faculties are still required to produce a desired end: a recognized object. Illusion occurs when the faculties malfunction and do not locate the correct object.
The error of the fifth postulate arises from external means. The Image and its postulates are still required to act out a determined collaboration of the faculties that will establish and maintain the Image itself. Error arises from “a false distribution of elements of representation, from a false evaluation of opposition, analogy, resemblance and identity.”[76] The misadventure of thought is decreed “ineffectual” regardless of the thinking experience that breaks from the Image, the dogmatic functioning of the postulates remain so long as what is experienced is determined an error by the Image.[77]
Plato demonstrates “a positive model of recognition or common sense, and a negative model of error.”[78] Plato’s model of the Forms collaborates an empirical object with its transcendent idea, “according to Plato, therefore, the essence is defined by the form of the real Identity (the Same understood as auto kath’ hauto).”[79] Auto: self, automatic; kath’ hauto: in themselves—the object transmits itself in itself. Every object is an imitation of its identity, all empirical objects are simulacra. The identity of the object is emanated from its identity in its transcendent Form. The material object is contemplated and equated with its Form. Every object imitates the ideal to the best of its ability, its virtue is its striving for the highest resemblance that takes part in that “Good.”[80] The Form is recognized in reminiscence and it becomes the responsibility of the thinker to understand the object in accordance to its idea. The material object will never have the perfection of the ideal object. Representation is beyond human achievement—it is not in the real but is a system of relentless recognition. The idea of the object is its most complete configuration and exists only within the mind. Every object is accounted for in a “mythical present” indicating that the representational system exists prior to material experience.[81] Reminiscence of a mythical past points to the assumption that the correct recognition is already within the subject, that the subject must contemplate the object and must reminisce upon its essence in order for the idea or the object to be accurately understood. It implies that there is only one system of Representation enmeshed to the subject and the subject must employ reminiscence of an always present past in order to recognize the object.[82] The Platonic forms strive to be in accord with Representation to the point where all other object possibilities fall to the wayside
As thought applies itself to an ideal model and as common sense locates the object in either “identity, similitude, analogy, or opposition,” error transmits a “transcendence of a common sense with regard to sensations.”[83] Something in the external experience confuses the coordination of the faculties so that good sense cannot participate in harmonizing the faculties. This transgression does not shake loose the Image from thought and in fact “testifies to the transcendence of the Cogitatio natura.”[84] Despite the temporary disorganization of good sense, common sense of the Same is beyond disintegration. The Image in noted as the truth regardless if it is experienced in the present.
Error is effectuated when two faculties are not coordinated by the Image, “for I cannot confuse two things that I perceive or conceive, I can always confuse something I see with something I conceive or remember.”[85] The Representational system is not a system in the real, in pure experience, but is an implementation on experience that coins signs into significations. It will always involve a double aspect of locating the object—be it perception and conception, conception and remembrance, perception and reminiscence. The sense of error is like a “radio quiz,” it grasps at the fact of the object by consulting common sense in a eliminatory fashion.[86] Error as a possibility of thought indicates that the thinker is not in pure experience. Error is the negative of thought because it is the incorrect application of the signification to the sign.
There are other misadventures noted by the Image, the “negatives much more difficult to unravel.”[87] The Image cannot discount “terrible Trinity of madness, stupidity and malevolence” that are “regarded as facts occasioned by external causes, which bring into play external forces capable of subverting the honest character of thought from without.”[88] This protects thought from not being regarded as anything but thought in accordance with the Good. Instead, the external, the empirical, is condemned for misguiding the thinker. What is questioned in recognition is “the legitimacy of the distribution of the empirical and the transcendental carried out by the dogmatic image,” not the operation of thought according to the thinker.[89] What is questioned is whether or not the puzzle pieces fit together in order to create the totalizing Image.
Verily, “the correctives can thus only appear as ‘repentances,’” there is no possibility of formulating the new or confronting the object without the object being included in the Same.[90] All thought is in supplication to the Image. Error is not acknowledged as a break nor perceived as something that points to an opportunity for thought to not be coordinated by the Image. Error is a transgression that ultimately can be atoned.
The sixth postulate is “the postulate of the logical function, or the proposition (designation is taken to be the locus of truth, sense being no more than the neutralized double or the infinite doubling of the proposition).”[91] The sixth postulate introduces the language function by asserting true or false propositions. A proposition contains the “element of sense” defined as the “condition of the true, but since it is supposed that the condition must retain an extension larger than that which is conditioned, sense does not ground truth without also allowing the possibility of error,” indicating truth and falsity to be of declarable designation.[92] A proposition confirmed true—regardless its content—insinuates that the proposition is not one that is created but is one that is discovered based on its merit of locating among the Same, Similar, Analogous, or Opposed. Truth per se must be produced, not designated.
A proposition has two components: expression “in which a proposition says or expresses some idea”—“the dimension of sense”— and designation “in which it indicates or designates the objects to which what is said or expressed applies”—“the dimension of truth and falsity.”[93] The expression of a proposition captures sense beneath common sense and conceptualizes it. The designation is “the only logical form of recognition” that specifies the correct correlative synthesis of the object to what is expressed as true or false.[94] The relationship between the proposition and its designation is corroborated with sense.[95] What is taken as true or false is considered within the sense that appropriates it to the object.[96] In a ‘true’ proposition, designation is grounded as the limit of the “genetic series or the ideal connections which constitute sense.”[97] The object becomes the limit of sense in a double movement of the unity of sense that in turn compels the object to recognize its signified unity.[98] Sense is expressed, thwarted by common sense, applied to the object that then in turn must correspond to the given.
Sense is the expression of the proposition, and in the boundary of the proposition it becomes a signification.[99] A signification “refers only to concepts and the manner in which they relate to the objects conditioned by a given field of representation.”[100] Sense per se is the “genesis or the production of the true, and truth is only the empirical result of sense.”[101] Sense beyond the Image does not conform its expression to a given but remains as production not stratified to a signification. Sense without designation has no term. The logical function of sense, sense subordinated to common sense, delegates to the transcendental faculty that then designates it as true or false according to its signification—its statement in language.
What the proposition designates is “constituted within the unity of sense, along with the object which realizes this unity.”[102] Sense is unified to an object that terminates the expression as something verifiable. Furthermore, “the relation between a proposition and what it designates must be established within sense itself: the nature of ideal sense is to point beyond itself towards the object designated.”[103] Ideal sense references beyond the object, it must be taken as a groundless enterprise. For “to ground is to metamorphose” and when a proposition replaces sense, the subject is left with “as much truth as [they] deserve according to its sense of what [is said].”[104]
Sense cannot be uttered or established as an empirical fact until the transcendent operation transforms and signifies it. Common sense—Representation—takes sense per se and translates the object of sense into the everybody knows; it gives sense a mimetic Image. The transcendent operation of sense coordinates a designation that symbolizes it as a term; this transcendent operation is necessarily the function of language and “the inability of the empirical consciousness here corresponds to the ‘nth’ power of the language and its transcendent repetition to be able to speak infinitely about words themselves.”[105] Sense can be transcendently articulated as any kind of signification, but common sense coordinates the proposition and declares it as true (or false), forever siphoning sense to a recognition rather than leaving it in empirical ambiguity, not corresponding to a language statement. The expression and the designation are not to be taken as truth but as the grappling formulation of what cannot be expressed, and “as a result, if we call each proposition of consciousness a ‘name’, it is caught in a nominal regress, each name referring to another name which designates the sense of the preceding.”[106]
Language is another degree of recognizing an object but at a procedure twice removed, further virtualizing the object in the realm of the Image. The nominal procedure domesticates the world. Language builds a chain of signifiers and significations that fence in the subject and light the world in an understanding. Moreover,
Thought is betrayed by the dogmatic image and by the postulate of propositions according to which philosophy would find a beginning in a first proposition of consciousness: Cogito. But perhaps the Cogito is the name which has no sense and no object other than the power of reiteration in indefinite regress (I think that I think that I think…) Every proposition of consciousness implies an unconscious of pure thought which constitutes the sphere of sense in which there is infinite regress.[107]
Names permit a lack of creativity. The concept is ready at hand to use and awaits application. Here is the first instance of the term ‘unconscious’ in chapter three. The pivot appears to be the difference between an indefinite regress and an infinite regress. The unconscious is infinite, it is the drive and the pattern beneath every thinking possibility constituting pure thought. The Image is the law in thought, it ordains what ought to be recognized in representation. The concept of the Cogito grants an indefinite chain of propositions that are designated accordingly. The professed beginning of the Cogito is already circular for it cannot create beyond its own limit. The Cogito is a nominal procedure that exists indefinitely, it is not obvious to how long and winding the signification chain is. The ‘I think’ emerges from pure thought, the ‘I think’ is both an expression and a designation of sense. In the unconscious, sense points beyond the object, in the conscious and articulated world it points only to the object that ought to be recognized by the Representative Image. Beyond the Image, propositions still collaborate expression and designation to articulate an object, but that articulation does not become the law of the object.
The seventh postulate is “the postulate of modality, or solutions (problems being materially traced from propositions or, indeed, formally defined by the possibility by their being solved).”[108] It is the postulate of the response and its solutions, “according to which truth and falsehood only begin with solutions or only qualify responses,” taken in accordance with the prior postulate, that the rejoinder to a proposition has the same designatory and given similar to that the truth and falsehood of a proposition.[109] Beyond individual investment with common sense, a solution involves a communal framework where the representation of an object is further agreed upon, further established. When a problem is traced materially it demonstrates a nominated pathway that has assigned the limit of its solvability, its end. It sets the problem in the material, in time, and fortifies it as the solution, it does not leave open possibilities: the problem has a true solution—one that is first set forth in accordance to the Image and secondly, solidified by nth degree of agreement within the community. The subject operating in the modality of problems and solutions has something to prove rather than something to experience or encounter for “all the orator’s art goes into constructing questions in accordance with the responses he wishes to evoke of the propositions of which he wants to convince us.”[110]
Interrogation is a function of the community and it consorts common sense alongside good sense and a distribution of knowledge and the given “with respect to empirical consciousness.”[111] The empirical consciousness is
in accordance to their [the community’s] situations, their points of view, their positions and their skills, in such a way that a given consciousness is supposed to know already what the other does not (What time is it? – You who have a watch or are close to a clock. When was Caesar born? – You who know Roman history).[112]
Within the communal framework there are no gaps of thought, every possible problem is accounted for and has a solution. The thinker cannot think for themselves as every problem is met with a solution. Good sense operates on a more grand scale within the network of harmonizing subjects. Interrogation is the agent of the dogmatic illusion.[113] It transpires “within the framework of the community” that “dismembers problems and questions, and reconstitutes them in accordance with the propositions of the common empirical consciousness – in other words, according to the probable truths of a simple doxa.”[114] The “interrogative formula” poses a “problem to a problem” where each “problem is dismembered, cashed out and revealed, in experience and for consciousness, according to its diversely apprehended cases of solution.”[115] Problems exist in a qualified complex beneath the Image. It becomes a moral question for the thinker: are they to convey good will and participate in the community, discovering a solution to the problem or are they to convey an ill will, experiment with the problem, and create?
The modality of solutions is the “great logical dream of a combinatory calculus.”[116] Every proposition has a solution that awaits it in a “dialectic.”[117] Beneath the Image, the dialectic traces its problems from propositions, classifying the problem as a negative.[118] It is taken as common sense that problems are “ready-made, and that they disappear in the responses of the solutions […] We are led to believe that the activity of thinking, along with truth and falsehood in relation to that activity, begins only with the search for solutions.”[119] This results to the subject remaining in an “infantile state” at the mercy of an authority who ordains the moral and correct solution.[120] There is a “social prejudice” that sustains the subject in this state by calling upon the subject “to solve problems that come from elsewhere, consoling or distracting us by telling us that we have won by simply being able to respond […] Such is the origin of the grotesque image of culture.”[121] Culture is a law of the Image, the Image is projected at the macro-level and beyond the thinking capacity of the one subject. It is the Image fortified to the nth degree—virtual and swarming. In culture does the Image additionally fortify itself as a moral stance upon Representation by having all other subjects comply without thinking by holding each other accountable to a proper Representation. Problems must be “invested in their proper symbolic fields” according to a “master text.”[122] That “the truth of a problem consists only in the possibility that it receive a solution” supports the illusion of the problem in the dogmatic Image.[123] Only within a master text, within a signifying culture, does the problem proceed to locate a respectable solution.
Aristotle’s Dialectics is “the art of problems and questions” yet he subverted his project to the Image by having it need to locate a solution.[124] Aristotle maintains a common sense through the use of “common places” where for “every problem the corresponding proposition of which contains a logical fault in regard to accident, genus, property or definition will be considered a false proposition,” indicating that the proposition must be sound and ‘true’ in order for his art to proceed.[125] Likewise, Descartes’s Cartesian method “(the search for the clear and distinct) is a method for solving supposedly given problems, not a method of invention appropriate to the constitution of problems or the understanding of questions.”[126] Propositions must be ‘clear and distinct’—logical and in a certain light of truth—there can be no obscurity that allows other forces to surface. His method allots only “a calculus of problems and questions” that are “inferred from a calculus of supposedly prior ‘simple propositions.’”[127] Lastly, Kant defined the “truth of a problem in terms of the possibility of finding a solution.”[128]
The eighth postulate is “the postulate of the end, or result, the postulate of knowledge (the subordination of learning to knowledge, and of culture to method).”[129] Knowledge designates “the generality of concepts or the calm possession of a rule enabling solutions.”[130] Knowledge is a contract taken up with the real that ordains what will be experienced.
Knowledge concerns the “apprentice,” one who “constitutes and occupies practical or speculative problems as such.”[131] The practical and speculative problems are the banal examples the Image of thought employs in order to assemble the anatomy of Representation. The practical and the speculative are not involved in real experience as it unfolds, but are erected prior to experience to serve as recognizable steppingstones for the apprentice to detect on the way to the Image. An apprenticeship obeys a method: “the means of that knowledge which regulates the collaboration of all the faculties. It is therefore the manifestation of a common sense or the realization of a Cogitatio natura, and presupposes a good will as though this were a ‘premediated decision.’”[132] The method subordinates the faculties for the completion of knowledge.
An apprentice “falls rather on the side of the rat in the maze, while the philosopher outside the cave carries off only the result – knowledge – in order to discover its transcendental principles.”[133] The apprentice is stuck in the maze of knowledge created by the philosopher. Truly, the limits of what can be created are bound by an apprenticeship to the dogmatic system. The transcendental principles, the way the mind operates upon experience, are limited prior to experience through knowledge. Plato introduces the apprentice in the form of Socrates’ interlocutor. Socrates is the Master and the guide, he who holds the correct path to knowledge. The Socratic dialogue depends on reminiscence, finding “proper object […] in the specific material of apprenticeship – in other words, in questions and problems as such, in the urgency of problems independently of their solutions, in the realm of the Idea.”[134] Socrates’ dialectic steers the interlocutor towards the Idea through the realm of reminiscence—knowledge of the Form is already within the interlocutor, all that is needed for it to surface is aid from the Master who maieutically delivers it.
[1] Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 129.
[2] Ibid, 129.
[3] Ibid, 131
[4] Ibid, 131.
[5] Ibid, 129.
[6] Ibid, 129.
[7] Ibid, 129.
[8] Ibid, 132.
[9] Ibid, 139.
[10] Ibid, 130.
[11] Ibid, 132.
[12] Ibid, 131.
[13] Ibid, 132.
[14] Ibid, 154.
[15] Ibid, 132.
[16] Ibid, 167.
[17] Ibid, 131.
[18] Ibid, 134.
[19] Ibid, 167.
[20] Ibid, 131.
[21] Ibid, 131.
[22] Ibid, 132.
[23] Ibid, 132.
[24] Ibid, 133.
[25] Ibid, 133.
[26] Ibid, 133.
[27] According to Plato.
[28] Ibid, 167.
[29] Ibid, 133.
[30] Ibid, 133
[31] Ibid, 134
[32] Ibid, 132.
[33] Ibid, 154.
[34] Ibid, 153.
[35] Ibid, 134.
[36] Ibid, 167.
[37] Ibid, 133.
[38] Ibid, 133.
[39] Ibid, 133.
[40] Ibid, 133.
[41] Ibid, 133.
[42] Ibid, 133.
[43] Ibid, 133.
[44] Ibid, 134.
[45] Ibid, 134; 141.
[46] As will be demonstrated later.
[47] Ibid, 135.
[48] Ibid, 135.
[49] Ibid, 134.
[50] Ibid, 136.
[51] Ibid, 135.
[52] Ibid, 136.
[53] Ibid, 136.
[54] Ibid, 135.
[55] Ibid, 134.
[56] Ibid, 136.
[57] Ibid, 136.
[58] Ibid, 136.
[59] Ibid, 136.
[60] Ibid, 137.
[61] Ibid, 137.
[62] Ibid, 137.
[63] Ibid, 137.
[64] Ibid, 167.
[65] Ibid, 137.
[66] Ibid, 131.
[67] Ibid, 132.
[68] Ibid, 138
[69] Ibid, 138
[70] Ibid, 137
[71] Ibid, 167.
[72] Ibid, 148.
[73] Ibid, 148.
[74] Ibid 148.
[75] Ibid, 149.
[76] Ibid, 148.
[77] Ibid, 149.
[78] Ibid, 142.
[79] Ibid, 142.
[80] Ibid, 143.
[81] Ibid, 142.
[82] Ibid, 142.
[83] Ibid, 148.
[84] Ibid, 149.
[85] Ibid, 148.
[86] Ibid 150.
[87] Ibid, 149.
[88] Ibid, 149.
[89] Ibid, 149-150.
[90] Ibid, 150.
[91] Ibid, 167.
[92] Ibid, 153.
[93] Ibid, 153.
[94] Ibid, 154.
[95] Ibid, 154.
[96] Ibid, 154.
[97] Ibid, 154.
[98] Ibid, 154.
[99] Ibid, 154-155.
[100] Ibid, 155.
[101] Ibid, 154.
[102] Ibid, 154.
[103] Ibid, 154.
[104] Ibid, 154.
[105] Ibid, 155.
[106] Ibid, 155.
[107] Ibid, 155.
[108] Ibid, 167.
[109] Ibid, 158.
[110] Ibid, 156.
[111]Ibid, 157.
[112] Ibid, 157.
[113] Ibid, 157.
[114] Ibid, 157.
[115] Ibid, 157.
[116] Ibid, 157.
[117] Ibid, 157.
[118] Ibid, 157.
[119] Ibid, 158.
[120] Ibid, 158.
[121] Ibid, 158.
[122] Ibid, 159.
[123] Ibid, 159.
[124] Ibid, 160.
[125] Ibid, 160.
[126] Ibid, 161.
[127] Ibid, 161.
[128] Ibid, 161.
[129] Ibid, 167.
[130] Ibid, 165.
[131] Ibid, 165.
[132] Ibid, 165.
[133] Ibid, 167.
[134] Ibid, 166.
bbkafka 