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Notes
1. André Cresson and Gilles Deleuze, David Hume, sa vie, son œuvre, avec un exposé de sa philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1952) 45–70. All endnotes have been provided by the translator.
2. Because of Deleuze's importance, it cannot be helped that one downgrades Cresson's contribution. However, this should not be taken as lessening his importance as an educator. A close friend of Leon Brunschvicg, Cresson taught a generation of important philosophers and thinkers at the level of the lycée, among them Levi-Strauss and Leopold Senghor. Cresson is also remembered for writing an astonishing number of brief introductions intended for a general audience, and covering a wide range of philosophical and scientific subjects and figures, from Marcus Aurelius to Pascal to Bergson to Darwin. David Hume, sa vie, son œuvre, avec un exposé de sa philosophie is but one volume in that series.
3. For example, one should compare this “Supplement” with numerous passages in chapter IV, Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1991); idem, Empirisme et subjectivité: Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume (Paris: PUF, 1953) 73–89.
4. Dominque Séglard, “Bibliographie, L’Œuvre de Deleuze,” Magazine Littéraire Sept. 1988: 64.
5. Because Cresson died in 1950 it is very likely that Deleuze was invited to complete Cresson's work, including choosing the specific extracts from Hume's work by Émile Bréhier, the editor of the series Philosophes, which published the David Hume, sa vie, son œuvre. Bréhier was himself formerly a professor at the Sorbonne, while Deleuze attended. Interestingly, Bréhier's analysis of the Stoic theory of the incorporeal would later prove a major influence on Deleuze's Logic of Sense (1969). Even so, at this juncture Deleuze undoubtedly completed this work on Hume without Cresson's input, merely appending his “Supplement” to Cresson's text. All of this might explain why, despite the substantial overlap, Deleuze's contribution does not amplify Cresson's text so much as it completely rethinks Cresson's more traditional presentation of Hume's thought. The two philosophers seem not to have worked closely together. In truth, Cresson, the more senior philosopher, was not in the habit of sharing authorship. Deleuze, for his part, never refers to any personal or professional relationship between Cresson and himself.
6. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970) sections 24–25; idem, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phämenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Nijoff, 1954) sections 24–25.
7. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia UP, 1995) 135; idem, Pourparlers, 1972–1990 (Paris: Minuit, 2003) 185. Translation slightly modified. Hereafter cited as Neg.
8. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia UP, 2007) vii; Gilles Deleuze, Deux régimes de fous: Textes et entretiens 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit, 2003) 284.
9. Jean Wahl, The Pluralist Philosophers of England and America, trans. Fred Rothwell (London: Open Court, 1925); Les Philosophies pluralistes d’Angleterre et d’Amérique (Paris: Empêcheurs, 2005). It is in this work and Vers le concret: Étude d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine, William James, Whitehead, Gabriel Marcel that Wahl opened a direct engagement between the Bergsonian strains of French thought, German phenomenology, and the empiricist and pragmatist traditions of America and Great Britain. In France, Wahl is perhaps more well known for his lectures and writings on Heidegger's work, prior to its gaining greater popularity, existentialism, as well as his poetry. His important friendship with Emmanuel Levinas has been much discussed. Nonetheless, Wahl remains an unjustly neglected thinker, who can be seen to be an important missing link at the many cross-roads marking French intellectual life.
10. Wahl's own interpretation (as was Bergson's to some extent) both of Hume and empiricism more generally is greatly influenced by William James:
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Radical empiricism and pluralism stand out for the legitimacy of the notion of some: each part of the world is in some ways connected, in some other ways not connected with its other parts, and the ways can be discriminated, for many of them are obvious, and their differences are obvious to view […] This is the great question as to whether “external” relations can exist. They seem to, undoubtedly […] Pragmatically interpreted, pluralism or the doctrine that it is many means only that the sundry parts of reality may be externally related. Everything you can think of, however vast or inclusive, has on the pluralistic view a genuinely “external” environment of some sort or amount. Things are “with” one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word “and” trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes. “Ever not quite” has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness. The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom. However much may be collected, however much may report itself as present at any effective centre of consciousness or action, something else is self-governed and absent and unreduced to unity. (William James, Writings 1902–1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: Library of America, 1987) 666, 776)
11. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Adison (New York: Citadel, 2002) 149; idem, La Pensée et le mouvant: Essai et conférences (Paris: PUF, 1999) 166.
12. Bergson 168/189.
13.
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It asserts both the diverse character and the temporal character of things, and it asserts that both these characters imply each other, without indeed any prejudgment that they will always remain real, without necessarily denying its rights to the unity towards which the world may appear to be tending, and which, at this moment, is already, it may be, immanent in its diversity. (Wahl 275/313)
14. “Pluralism, in a general way, springs from the disposition to see the world in all its flux and diversity, to see things in their state of disorderly struggle and in their free harmony” (ibid. 275/313).
15. Ibid. 153/187.
16. Bergson 175/196.
17. Wahl 110/138.
18. Deleuze's reading of the imagination can be taken to be a direct answering of Heidegger's own foregrounding of the imagination in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that it is Heidegger's text, perhaps more than any other, which stands behind Deleuze's distancing of his own thought from that of phenomenology more generally. This is perhaps even more obvious in Deleuze's later work, especially Difference and Repetition.
19. Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade; trans. Michael Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004) 141–42; L’Ile déserte et autre textes: Textes et entretiens 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade (Paris: Minuit, 2002) 196.
20. Neg. 146/200.
21. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988) 125; idem, Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Paris: Minuit, 2003) 168.
22. “Assuming that everything is becoming,” Nietzsche writes, “knowledge is only possible on the basis of belief in being” (Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdinger Bittner; trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003) 77). Elsewhere, he continues:
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We simply have no organ for knowing, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) exactly as much as is useful to the human herd, to the species: and even what is here called “usefulness” is finally also just a belief, a fiction, and perhaps just that supremely fatal stupidity of which we some day will perish. (The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams; trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 214)