Sad Mondays #7.6
Author: Magda Wisniowska - June, 2020.
Usually I start with the one quote—today I divide this up, in true Kantian fashion, into three.
Part one:
It is an aesthetic of the Beautiful and the Sublime, in which the sensible takes on an autonomous value for itself and is deployed in a pathos beyond all logic, and which will grasp time as it bursts forth [dans son jailIissement], at the very origin of its thread and its vertigo. (Deleuze, “Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy,” Essays Critical and Clinical, 34)
Pathos. Not poignancy, or pity, or sadness, but an appeal to feeling. This is the feeling of pleasure that is the consequence of the free and indeterminate agreement of the faculties in aesthetic judgment. In aesthetic judgment there is no other determination, only this feeling of pleasure. On this Kant is clear, we become conscious of the reciprocal harmony between the faculties, not intellectually through concepts, but “aesthetically, through inner sense and sensation” (Critique of Judgment, 218).
This we already know (see also Sad Mondays 5, part one and a href="/post/616570652054405120/sadmondays005appendix">Sad Mondays 5, appendix). What is new in this late introductory text by Deleuze, is that this feeling of pleasure is supposed to grasp time as it erupts, spurting forward, gushing out vertiginously. But if in the excitement of this new discovery we try to look for time’s breakthrough in the Critique of Judgment, we will leave empty handed. Simply put, there is no investigation of time to be found here. Instead, this belongs to the earlier Critique of Pure Reason, where time is defined as the form of inner sense. As Kant explains, we are in possession of two senses. By means of an outer sense we present objects outside of us—by means of an inner sense, we have the sense of the mind within. Outer sense occurs in space, inner sense occurs in time. According to Kant, time is the form under which we “intuit the soul’s inner state” (Critique of Pure Reason, A23).
And so everything determined by our inner sense is presented in a relation to time, with one crucial exception. Time itself cannot be intuited. It is only the way we feel things, a subjective characteristic of the mind.
Part two:
This is no longer the Affect of the Critique of Pure Reason, which linked the Self to the I in a relationship that was still regulated by the order of time; it is a Pathos that lets them evolve freely in order to form strange combinations as sources of time, "arbitrary forms of possible intuitions.” (Deleuze, “Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy,” Essays Critical and Clinical, 34)
The key terms are affect, the self and the I, as well as the play between the two, which covers a significant part of the Transcendental Aesthetic’s concern with sensibility and the Transcendental Logic's examination of how the understanding works with sensibility.
Why the self and the I? Why both? If everything determined by our inner state is presented in relation to time, this includes any sense we have of ourselves. Accordingly, we do not intuit ourselves as we are, but as we appear to ourselves in time. Yes, there is an I that thinks, which would be for Kant a consciousness of the fact that I am, but this is not an intuition, only an act of thought. Nevertheless, because this thought of the I occurs in the mind, it affects the mind, to produce an intuition. Which means, that the thought of the I is always also present in time as the intuition of the Self. (see also see Sad Mondays 7.5)
Thus for Kant, the power of understanding affects our inner sense. The combinations of intuitions that give meaning to our surrounding world, are not found in intuition, but are produced by understanding. In affecting intuition, understanding determines it.
However, the affect we are speaking of now is not feeling. When we think in this way, we do not experience the pleasure of thought. The pleasure of thought occurs when understanding forgoes determination and allows for these combinations of intuition to come about freely—as it does with the aesthetic judgment of taste. No longer determined, in aesthetic judgment these combinations can now be arbitrary and strange. The form of time, as the form of inner sense, is found in these combinations; they give birth to it. So it would seem, that in aesthetic judgment we feel the pleasures of giving birth to time.
Part three:
It is no longer the determination of an I, which must be joined to the determinability of the Self in order to constitute knowledge; it is now the undetermined unity of all the faculties (the Soul), which makes us enter the unknown. (Deleuze, “Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarise the Kantian Philosophy,” Essays Critical and Clinical, 34)
The I that thinks, affects inner sense, the Self that is intuited. Our faculty of understanding determines inner sense in accordance with the concepts understanding thinks. It can do so, because the inner sense takes on the appropriate form to be determined by understanding. The combination of the two, the determination of understanding and the determinability of intuition, produces cognition to constitute knowledge.
But not in the case of beauty, not in the aesthetic judgment of taste. Here, understanding no longer determines inner sense, and inner sense, while determinable, is not longer determined. There is a unity of the two, but this is now undeterminable, and this Deleuze christens the Soul. We cannot know the soul, precisely because the understanding cannot put a concept to it, determining its form in intuition. The soul is the unknown. So we must enter it unknowingly, with feeling, in pleasure.