The Essence of Empiricism

Deleuze begins his Empiricism and Subjectivity with Hume’s proposal to create a “science of humanity,” anchored not in the abstract idea of the “mind” but rather in the concrete rules of the “affections.”¹ This science must be a moral science and a sociology before ever becoming a psychology, because the “mind” has neither the “constancy” nor the “universality” required to be the basis of a science.²

Purposiveness, sensibility, the substance of anything we might call “mind,” begins in “pure imagination and mere fancy.”³ Purposiveness is a flutter, a glance; it happens in the blink of an eye.⁴ The human being touches the world, is in touch with the world: moment of sense, brush of contact, infinitesimal grasp, and then again, and again, and again. Every moment a beginning, a repetition of sense in the sensible that is always already going on.⁵

To speak of this original touch is to speak of the human being as necessarily hyphenated, a being-with.⁶ Purposiveness is the mechanism whereby this hyphenation, sign of primordial distance and relation, is taken as a rule, the base case for a recursive operation whereby the singular case (the unrepeatable, the unique) becomes the corrective program for the repetition of appearances, becomes the very law of causation.⁷ This law is a “fiction,” but an effective one; its subjects are possessed of a practical reason, a praktognosia; they know how to make do.⁸ The science of this making do is morality and sociology, no theoretical “minds” required.

The science of humanity must, therefore, begin with a “science of the sensible,” starting in the middle with sense as the absolute hiatus, the blink of nothingness between things that is, nevertheless, the possibility of sense as such.⁹ The human being is mobilized by sense, becomes a subject by way of this manifold exteriority in its radical difference, its constant repetition. The void is a plenum, a supersaturated field of associations, of “transitions, passages, ‘tendencies,’ which circulate from one to another.”¹⁰ Caught up in this field, adrift in the flow, the human being finds itself moved by the eddies of association, and in a blink the easy passage of this movement becomes a tendency, the tendency a habit, the habit a subject.¹¹ Not mind, but affection; not unity, but partiality.

So this is where we find ourselves with Deleuze’s empirical project, and where Deleuze, in turn, takes a moment to reflect on “the essence of empiricism” that he set out to examine.¹² As Deleuze begins Chapter 5, he reminds his readers that an empirical philosophy cannot be elaborated without first addressing the “problem of subjectivity,” which is to say the rather paradoxical idea that the subject “is that which develops itself.”¹³ This has been the focus of the preceding chapters, and so too of this series of essays.

To say that the subject is that which develops itself is to say that the “content” of subjectivity (content that we described last time as a vacuous diagram, an empty form) is “mediation and transcendence,” a double movement.¹⁴ The subject is an operation, the movement of which we have spent the above paragraphs recapitulating. Essential to Deleuze’s argument is that this operation comes from outside; not by the subject but in the imagination as subject—the subject is not cause but effect.¹⁵ The double movement of subjectivation, then, is at once the “self-development” of this movement and its “becoming-other,” which can also be described as the subject’s “fundamental characteristics” of “belief” and “invention.”¹⁶

The subject believes itself to be more than a delirium of sense (dimension of determination, the extensive rule, the subject’s self-development or transcendence); the subject then invents itself as subject (dimension of correction, the corrective rule, the subject’s becoming-other or mediation).¹⁷ The subject transcends the given, then twists about and declares its subjectivity as given.¹⁸ “I affirm more than I know”; I invent, I give names to the various repetitions of appearance, I posit nature as the unity of this appearance, I develop theoretical sciences and bodies of knowledge; in sum, I go about conducting all the activities of the project of human civilization—and all of this on the basis of a fiction: the concept of cause.¹⁹ “By what right” do we depend upon such “an unknown connection” for the basis of our knowledge?²⁰ Deleuze contends that the “problem of truth” is, therefore, shown to be the “critical problem of subjectivity itself.”²¹

The mechanism of subjectivation is the mechanism whereby a being “extracts from that which affects it in general a power independent of the actual exercise … a pure function.”²² This function is the diagram of purposiveness, generic thought, vacuity that takes itself as its own law. In the schematism of belief and invention, in the “secret powers” of sense, we encounter the genesis of the rule for the “presuppos[ition] [of] abstract or distinct powers.”²³ This is a restatement of Deleuze’s discussion of polytheism and theism in the previous chapter. Here, Deleuze writes:

nothing escapes our knowledge as radically as the powers of Nature, and nothing is more futile for our understanding than the distinction between powers and their exercise. How can we assume or distinguish them? To believe is to infer one part of nature from another, which is not given. To invent is to distinguish powers and to constitute functional totalities or totalities that are not given in nature.²⁴

In the terms of the previous chapter, polytheism posits the “continuous existence” of the passions as the activity of the gods and theism posits the “distinct existence” of objects and the world as the “Unique” as such.²⁵ Together, these confusions of causality disclose the fundamental confusion of the imagination that Deleuze, in the present chapter, names a “pure function.” Polytheism, then, is the rule of belief that “infer[s] one part of nature from another,” and theism the rule of invention that “distinguish[es] powers” and “constitute[s] functional totalities”—a “dual system of extensive rules” that is indeed the “dual power of subjectivity.”²⁶

Herein lies the problem of truth. On its surface, this situation points us toward a nihilistic destruction of all sense and meaning. Knowledge is simply groundless belief and fanciful invention, a figment of the pure function of subjectivation, humanity as “the measure of all things.”²⁷ But insofar as our science of humanity always begins within a world that precedes us, a world that includes all the practices and knowledge of humanity applied and at work within it, we encounter a given that, we might say, is more than the sum of its parts, a given that is both support and field for any and all empirical study.²⁸ Permit me to quote Deleuze at length:

Undoubtedly, the subject itself is given. Undoubtedly, that which transcends the given is also given, in another way and in another sense. This subject who invents and believes is constituted inside the given in such a way that it makes the given itself a synthesis and a system. This is what we must explain. In this formulation of the problem, we discover the absolute essence of empiricism.

We could say that philosophy in general has always sought a plane of analysis in order to undertake and conduct the examination of the structures of consciousness (critique), and to justify the totality of experience. Initially, it is a difference in plan that opposes critical philosophies. We embark upon a transcendental critique when, having situated ourselves on a methodologically reduced plane that provides an essential certainty—a certainty of essence—we ask: how can there be a given, how can something be given to a subject, and how can the subject give something to itself? Here, the critical requirement is that of a constructivist logic which finds its model in mathematics.

The critique is empirical when, having situated ourselves in a purely immanent point of view, which makes possible a description whose rule is found in determinable hypotheses and whose model is found in physics, we ask: how is the subject constituted in the given? The construction of the given makes room for the constitution of the subject. The given is no longer given to a subject; rather, the subject constitutes itself in the given. Hume’s merit lies in the singling out of this empirical problem in its pure state and its separation from the transcendental and the psychological.²⁹

The mind must be referred to nature, not nature to the mind.³⁰ This is the rule of empiricism. Quoting Hume, Deleuze characterizes this rule as “blind submission,” and yet only in this blindness can we properly demonstrate our “sceptical disposition.”³¹ This is the beginning of a thought that is always “coming and going,” a thought of the “middle,” a thought that is, originally and irreducibly, a given-thought.³²

Notes