The Virtual and the Ether: Transcendental Empiricism in Kant's Opus Postumum

References

• Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, tr. Paul Patton, London: Athlone 1997, 58. Hereafter DR. See also G. Deleuze, “On Four Poetic Formulas that might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy”, Essays Critical and Clinical, tr. D. W. Smith and M. A. Grew, London: Verso 1998, pp. 27–35.
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• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. N. Kemp Smith, London: Macmillan 1929, B155–9. Hereafter CPR, with references to the A and B editions.
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• On Maimon, see D. W. Smith, “Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas”, in C. V. Boundas (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 2006, pp. 43–61. See also G. Deleuze, “The Idea of Genesis in Kant's Aesthetics”, tr. D. W. Smith, Angelaki 5:3 (2000), pp. 57–70, and Kant's Critical Philosophy, tr. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Athlone 1995.
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• See, e.g., C. V. Boundas, “Deleuze-Bergson: An Ontology of the Virtual”, in P. Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell 1996, pp. 81–106; B. Baugh, “Transcendental empiricism: Deleuze's response to Hegel”, Man and World 25 (1992), pp. 133–48; P. Hallward, “To have done with justification: a reply to Christian Kerslake”, Radical Philosophy 114 (2002), pp. 29–31.
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• See Smith, “Immanent Ideas“; James Williams, The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze: Encounters and Influence, Manchester: Clinamen 2005; Christian Kerslake, “Deleuze, Kant, and the Question of Metacritique”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy XLII:4 (2004), pp. 481–508, “The Vertigo of Philosophy”, Radical Philosophy 113 (2002) pp. 10–28, and “Copernican Deleuzeanism”, Radical Philosophy 114 (2002), pp. 32–3; D. Beddoes, “Deleuze, Kant, and Indifference”, in K. Ansell Pearson (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy: the Difference Engineer, London: Routledge 1997, pp. 25–43.
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• One example is S. Crocker, “Into the interval: on Deleuze's reversal of time and movement”, Continental Philosophy Review 34 (2001), pp. 45–67. His article, however, ascribes to Kant proto-Deleuzian positions that cannot be made consistent with Kant's texts.
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• D. W. Smith, “Deleuze's Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality“, in Patton (ed.), pp. 29–56, p. 29.
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• Henry Bergson, Time and Free Will, tr. F.L. Pogson, Minneola: Dover 2001, p. 87. Hereafter TFW.
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• Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, tr. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, New York: Zone Books 1988, pp. 38–9. Hereafter Ber. See also Boundas, p. 83.
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• See also H. Bergson, “The Possible and the Real,” tr. M. L. Andison, in K. Ansell Pearson and J. Mullarkey (eds.), Key Writings, London: Continuum 2002, pp. 233–47. Hereafter KW.
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• As Bergson explains, Kant does not appear to have a conception of continuous multiplicity (TFW pp. 232–40). Even when Kant speaks of space and time as “continuous magnitudes”, they remain at the level of discrete multiplicities, divisible into ever-smaller units that differ only in degree (CPR A169–70/B211–2).
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• Deleuze, Second Lecture on Kant, Cours Vincennes 21/03/1978, from www.webdeleuze.com.
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• See the Preface to I. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, tr. J. W. Ellington, Philosophy of Material Nature, ed. Ellington, Indianapolis: Hackett 1985. Hereafter MFNS, with references to the Akademie pagination.
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• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, tr. W. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987, Ak. 226. Hereafter CJ, with references to the Akademie pagination. To distinguish it from feeling (subjective sensation), Kant refers to the type of sensation discussed in the Anticipations of Perception as objective sensation (CJ 206).
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• Deleuze discusses this passage in “Idea of Genesis”, p. 61.
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• Emphasis added and translation modified. Pluhar translates Vorstellung as “presentation” rather than the more common “representation”. For the sake of consistency I have used “representation”.
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• For more detail on Kant's reception of Euler's theory of light in this passage, see E. Förster, Kant's Final Synthesis: An Essay on the Opus Postumum, London: Harvard UP 2000, pp. 24–47. I have drawn extensively on Förster's interpretation of this passage and on its relation to the development of the Opus Postumum. For a longer study of Kant's relation to the sciences in these texts, see Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1992.
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• For further discussion of the reasons behind Kant's change of mind, see M. Friedman, “Eckart Förster and Kant's Opus Postumum”, Inquiry 46 (2003), pp. 215–27.
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• Letter to J.S. Beck, 16 Oct. 1792, in Kant, Correspondence, trans. and ed. A. Zweig Cambridge: CUP 1999, Ak. 11:375–7. See also MFNS pp. 533–4.
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• Kant, Opus Postumum, ed. E. Förster, tr. Förster and M. Rosen, Cambridge: CUP 1993, Ak. 21:378–9, tr. p. 12. Hereafter OP, with references to both the Akademie and CUP page numbers. By this stage Kant's ether can no longer be identified with Euler's; see J. Edwards, Substance, Force, and the Possibility of Knowledge: On Kant's Philosophy of Material Nature, Berkeley: University of California Press 2000.
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• See, in particular, Immanuel Kant, The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God, in Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, tr. and ed. D. Walford with R. Meerbote, Cambridge: CUP 1992, pp. 107–201.
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• On the relation between the Kantian Idea the Deleuzian Idea as “problem-setting imperatives”, see Boundas 88–9 and Williams pp. 27–31.
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• In claiming this I depart from the interpretations of both Förster (who claims that ether is transcendentally ideal, in the critical sense) and Edwards (who claims that ether is transcendentally real).
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• Spinoza, Ethics, tr. and ed. E. Curley, A Spinoza Reader, Princeton: Princeton UP 1994, IP18.
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• See, e.g., OP 22:340–2, 110–1; 22:358–9, 116–7.
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• See Förster pp. 101–16, and P. Guyer, “Beauty, Systematicity, and the Highest Good”, Inquiry 46 (2003) pp. 195–214.
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