We've finally made it to the third film in the trilogy. The ending is predictable Deleuze -- the forces of chaos triumph and everything you thought you understood comes undone. The pattern of the three passive syntheses of time is pretty clear. The first constitutes all of time as the ever mobile passing present -- a time composed of atomic elements. The second synthesizes all of time as the whole of the past -- a time composed as a monolithic fractal whole. The third, and in some sense the deepest, constitutes all of time as the future -- as the form of change that merely defines a before and an after but that is otherwise completely empty, composed of nothing more than this distinction itself.
If the first two syntheses are defined by different types of contraction, the third will be associated with a sort of contraction that actually blows everything apart. If the first two states show us different types of repetition, the third will be based on a strange type of repetition that produces absolute novelty. And if the first two syntheses shows us different forms of difference itself, the third will show us a pure and transcendental difference-in-itself that is simultaneously the most common thing in the universe (existence in time). The third synthesis is pure paradox, time as the unchanging form of change itself, time as the concept of change, some paradoxical point where difference and repetition touch.
Let's try to go through in detail what all this poetry means.
This section (broken into two pieces on pg. 85-96) begins with a contrast between the Cartesian and the Kantian conceptions of the cogito, the I or self in "I think therefore I am". Kant makes short work of the self-evident certainty of Descartes' formulation. Descartes is right; there's no doubt that some thinking is happening, existing right now, as I have the experience of thinking about this question. What's not obvious at all is that this thinking is "mine". Does my thinking at now1 belong to the same "me" as my thinking at now2? If so, where did the continuity of this me come from? Without this presumed continuity of my self-identical being, does the fact of my current thinking experience prove anything more than "there exists some thinking" right now? It certainly doesn't seem to prove that any sort of stable, solid, continuous I exists. But you just can't get famous for tweeting: "I think therefore ... there is some thinking going on".
Deleuze phrases this critique as an objection to the way Descartes' slight-of-hand magically converts a bare undetermined existence (mere existence or naked Being, if you will) into a solid thing or substance that can have properties like thinking. In other words, he has smuggled in the assumption that the I that's doing the being here will have the same form as the familiar I that (we assume) does our thinking. But is the I that thinks really the same as the I that is? Or does thinking require being without really telling us very much about it?
It is as though Descartes's Cogito operated with two logical values: determination and undetermined existence. The determination (I think) implies an undetermined existence (I am, because 'in order to think one must exist') - and determines it precisely as the existence of a thinking subject: I think therefore I am, I am a thing which thinks. The entire Kantian critique amounts to objecting against Descartes that it is impossible for determination to bear directly upon the undetermined. The determination ('I think') obviously implies something undetermined ('I am'), but nothing so far tells us how it is that this undetermined is determinable by the 'I think': "in the consciousness of myself in mere thought I am the being itself, although nothing in myself is thereby given for thought." Kant therefore adds a third logical value: the determinable, or rather the form in which the undetermined is determinable (by the determination). This third value suffices to make logic a transcendental instance.
The emphasis here on the form in which being can appear to us (rather than focusing on the being in itself) seems to be the essence of the Kantian transcendental. I don't know enough about Kant to say much of anything interesting, but I did review Louis White Beck's introduction to my copy of Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics, which contains this helpful footnote:
It is important to distinguish between "transcendent" and "transcendental." The former means "transcending the limits of experience," and hence metaphysical in the usual sense of the word; the latter means "lying at the base of experience," and hence epistemological in the ordinary sense.
Perhaps there are a whole set of transcendental forms that do not "... signify something passing beyond all experience but something that indeed precedes it a priori, but that is intended simply to make knowledge of experience possible" (as Kant himself puts it). The one we're interested in now though is Time. We experience out thoughts as happening in time. All of our experience is experience-in-time. This is the only form in which we can experience either our thinking or our being.
Kant's answer is well known: the form under which undetermined existence is determinable by the 'I think' is that of time ... The consequences of this are extreme: my undetermined existence can be determined only within time as the existence of a phenomenon, of a passive, receptive phenomenal subject appearing within time.
If the only way we can get at our existence is though time, then Descartes' existential equation no longer shows us what he claims. My thinking doesn't reveal the presence and activity of a substantial underlying self that exists continuously. In fact, since I can't get at the being of this self except through thinking, what this being is like in itself remains a mystery. All I can know is that this being appears within time, because my knowledge is limited to how my experience of thinking works. For this being to be consistent across time, for it to be my being or thinking in the sense of a "property of underlying me", we need to add another assumption. For Descartes, that assumption was God.
Descartes could draw his conclusion only by expelling time, by reducing the Cogito to an instant and entrusting time to the operation of continuous creation carried out by God. More generally, the supposed identity of the I has no other guarantee than the unity of God himself. For this reason, the substitution of the point of view of the 'I' for the point of view of 'God' has much less importance than is commonly supposed, so long as the former retains an identity that it owes precisely to the latter. God survives as long as the I enjoys a subsistence, a simplicity and an identity which express the entirety of its resemblance to the divine.
Recall that Descrates' God played a very prominent and unusual role in a philosophy that was supposed to doubt everything that could be doubted. He guarantees the unity of the world, safeguards our senses from deceptions by evil geniuses who want to farm out our brains to vats, and, of course, implicitly gives us a model for the substantial and enduring self. In practice, like we observed at the outset, the logic probably moves in the opposite direction -- Descartes assumes that God is a continuous unified substance because he experiences his own self that way (as so many of us do). In any case, whatever unity we posit that holds across time -- whether God, Self, or World -- is not a unity we can actually experience, since all of our experience arises and passes within time.
Without recourse to Descartes' God, how will Kant guarantee to us that the I that appears in my thoughts is the same from moment to moment? And if each flickering thought -- even if the contents of that thought are an image of a persistent self -- can only appear as a thing within time, then how will Kant guarantee that we exist as stable thinking entities? Finally, if we take apart one side of the equation (our unity as thinker) and take apart the other (our unity as exister), then what's left of the equation?
For Deleuze, the answer is basically nothing. He thinks that Kant has opened up a real can of worms here. He has created an unbridgeable gulf between thinking and being. He has killed God and dissolved the self. "My" thinking can no longer prove my existence. There is thinking, which means there is existence, but this existence isn't the property or activity of a substantial me. It (thinking or being) seems to "just happen"; I'm not the subject or author of it.
Kant's answer is well known: the form under which undetermined existence is determinable by the 'I think' is that of time ... The consequences of this are extreme: my undetermined existence can be determined only within time as the existence of a phenomenon, of a passive, receptive phenomenal subject appearing within time. As a result, the spontaneity of which I am conscious in the 'I think' cannot be understood as the attribute of a substantial and spontaneous being, but only as the affection of a passive self which experiences its own thought - its own intelligence, that by virtue of which it can say I - being exercised in it and upon it but not by it. Here begins a long and inexhaustible story: I is an other, or the paradox of inner sense. The activity of thought applies to a receptive being, to a passive subject which represents that activity to itself rather than enacts it, which experiences its effect rather than initiates it, and which lives it like an Other within itself. To 'I think' and 'I am' must be added the self - that is, the passive position (what Kant calls the receptivity of intuition); to the determination and the undetermined must be added the form of the determinable, namely time.
In fact, the only tenuous thread left connecting anything is the meta-level form in which all things appear -- time. Since this form must apply to any contents, we might characterize it as "empty". Yet this exact same transcendental form of time that connects all contents, perpetually separates undetermined being-in-itself from any more concrete determination of it (say, as a thinking type of being). As a result, we might call it a "fracture" or a "fault" through our very core, something that separates us from ourselves. The empty form of time separates thinking from being, even as it relates them a priori.
It is as though the I were fractured from one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time. In this form it is the correlate of the passive self which appears in time. Time signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution.
We'll come back to this concept of the fractured I and its relationship to the form of time in many posts, I'm sure. It's a strange and paradoxical one, because the fracture holds the pieces together by the thinnest of threads even as it separates them. It represents Difference in itself, a difference that has been made internal to ... something which is not exactly a unity, namely, difference itself. "... time is the most radical form of change, but the form of change does not change".
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