Just Say No to Drugs

So, we saw that for Plato, the thinking that philosophy involves is the movement through time we usually call remembering.  We remember that we knew about the realm of Platonic Ideas in a past life.  Or, put more accurately, we remember a time before we were born, when we were just a soul without a body, floating in Platonic heaven.  This is the myth Plato offers us of what it means to think.  It contrasts with Descartes' myth of instantaneous thinking that just spontaneously happens every time 'I think'. 

But the main point Deleuze wants to make in this paragraph (pg. 87-88) is that neither of these myths really satisfy Kant's transcendental criteria that thinking must happen as a change within time.  With Descartes, this is pretty obvious.  His thinking arises on the spot, as the instant activity of our existing being.  This mathematical point of thought, as it were, might be later located along some line of time.  However, that doesn't make it thinking within time, in these sense of thinking that happens through time, as a process that inherently involves time or "takes time".  With Plato, the situation is more subtle.  His thinking does involve movement and change, the movement between forgetting and remembering.  But the type of time that this movement implies is a completely closed circle, whose revolutions are marked by our passing through the same transcendent heaven of the Ideas between births.  Thinking is the process of tracing this circular time line.  Plato's time is defined by the fall from and rise back towards the fixed point of these Ideas.  

But the question is: In what form does reminiscence introduce time? Even for the soul, it is a matter of physical time, of a periodic or circular time which is that of the Physis and is subordinate to events which occur within it, to movements which it measures or to events which punctuate it. This time undoubtedly finds its ground in an in-itself - that is, in the pure past of the Ideas which arranges the order of presents in a circle according to their decreasing or increasing resemblances to the ideal

This kind of time does involve movement, but it doesn't really produce any truly novel qualitative change.  We forget and remember, forget and remember, ad infinitum, just alternating between these two states.  The whole space of this time is defined by our distance from the Platonic Ideas -- a time defined by its contents.

That's not what Deleuze has in mind when he says that thinking happens within time.  Plato is describing thinking as a vehicle that moves us through a pre-established space of time, one defined and measured by landmarks within that space.  Deleuze is talking about thinking as a synthesis of time, a passive synthesis that creates the space of time as it goes.  Kant's transcendental condition means that thinking is always a process that happens through an unfolding of time, as a true process of change.  Plato's circular Madame Psychosis is not going to be enough to let us see this because, "it introduces movement into the soul rather than time into thought".  

There's a number of ways to try and restate this distinction between Plato's time and the time Deleuze has in mind (and partially attributed to Kant) in this section of the third passive synthesis. We'll revisit a bunch of them I'm sure.  But the way he first puts it in this paragraph may be the simplest.  The Platonic Ideas are like the pure past of the second synthesis of memory.  It is precisely a "past that never was present".  Remember that this pure past was meant to be the ground that supported the foundation of any particular present (as defined by the first synthesis) even though, since it was a synthesis of the whole of time, it went beyond any present and caused each one to pass.  Unfortunately, this pure past was still conceived as a whole, as a unit that embraced all presents.  

The Ideas none the less remain the ground on which the successive presents are organised into the circle of time, so that the pure past which defines them is itself still necessarily expressed in terms of a present, as an ancient mythical present. This equivocation, all the ambiguity of Mnemosyne, was already implicit in the second synthesis of time. For the latter, from the height of its pure past, surpassed and dominated the world of representation: it is the ground, the in-itself, noumenon and Form. However, it still remains relative to the representation that it grounds. It elevates the principles of representation - namely, identity, which it treats as an immemorial model, and resemblance, which it treats as a present image: the Same and the Similar.

In other words, the pure past of the second synthesis is just the ancient mythical present of Platonic heaven or the dreamlike  reminiscence of an immemorial childhood in Combray.  And its unity as a whole is secretly modeled on the only unity directly available to us -- our present experience.  So the synthesis of the pure past doesn't escape the problem of treating identity as primary and relegating difference to secondary status.  It doesn't synthesize time as the repetition of a concrete particular instance of a thing (first synthesis).  Instead it synthesizes time as the Nth copy or instantiation of some abstract model.  Time is still subordinated to the repetition of a fixed identity.  Which means that time is merely a circulation through the appearance of various essences which stand eternally outside time.  This time is not the actual development and emergence and change of those forms.  

Stay tuned next time for a closer look at the time of the third synthesis.  Unpulsed time, which defines a repetition rather than being defined by it.  Time as the pure and empty form of change.

Madame Psychosis

Let's revisit Proust's opening via another translation

For a long time I went to bed early.  Sometimes, my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself: "I'm falling asleep."  And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to try and sleep would wake me; I wanted to put down the book I thought I still had in my hands and blow out my light; I had not ceased while sleeping to form reflections on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V.  This belief lived on for a few seconds after my waking; it did not shock my reason but lay heavy like scales on my eyes and kept them from realizing that the candlestick was no longer lit.  Then it began to grow unintelligible to me, as after metempsychosis do the thoughts of an earlier existence; the subject of the book detached itself from me, I was free to apply myself to it or not; immediately I recovered my sight and I was amazed to find a darkness around me soft and restful for my eyes, but perhaps even more so for my mind, to which it appeared a thing without cause, incomprehensible, a thing truly dark.

Compare this to what Deleuze says about the way each present always replays the whole past, which really includes all of time, suggesting that this life, "my" life has already been lived before in some sense.

Moreover, what we say of a life may be said of several lives. Since each is a passing present, one life may replay another at a different level, as if the philosopher and the pig, the criminal and the saint, played out the same past at different levels of a gigantic cone. This is what we call metempsychosis. Each chooses his pitch or his tone, perhaps even his lyrics, but the tune remains the same, and underneath all the lyrics the same tra-la-la, in all possible tones and all pitches.

I'm hardly saying this idea of the transmigration of souls is easy to understand or makes complete sense to me.  But if we're in the business of investigating how identity is constructed, rather than given, if we're willing to entertain some flexibility in our definition of ourselves, if, at the limit, we're willing to wonder what an eternal life outside of time might mean -- well, then maybe the idea of reincarnation starts to make more sense.  Maybe my eternal life isn't mine after all.