#critiqueofpurereason

Author: Berthold Reiß, 2014.

The original text (in German) appears in the collected writings of Berthold Reiß – Antinomia. Gesammelte Schriften 1989-2019. Published by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Daniela Stöppel (Kunstraum München, 2020).

Speech. Türkenstraße, Munich, January 23, 2014.

The press release for my current exhibition mentions at the end a "trace that leads not from life into death, but from death into life." In 1998, an announcement began with the sentence: "In order for something to be able to be moved, that which is to be moved must be completely dead." (See in this volume Berthold Reiß, 1998, p. 34f.) One can certainly imagine a movement that does not take place only relative to its opposite. This, if you will, absolute movement is what we call 'life.' We can only imagine this if we do not imagine it only relative to its opposite. Life itself, or that which appears according to the relative meaning of the word, is therefore called eternal life, in the New Testament Greek 'zoe aionios.'

The aeon or the age of the world means duration, but also eternity. The aeon is a form that includes movement and rest, life and death. But does this form exist? It is logically not graspable. And it is aesthetically not tangible. Time does not begin, does not stand still and does not end. And it is impossible to survey as a whole a series that does not begin, does not stop and does not end. Wherever one turns to the Critique of Pure Reason, one finds this impossibility and this intangibility demonstrated. And yet, and presumably precisely because of this, this introduction of an impossible formlessness decides whether we can do anything at all with the Critique of Pure Reason.

The first book of Transcendental Analytic is comprised of the Analytic of Concepts. The second book contains the Analytic of Principles. Kant calls the Analytic of Principles, "a canon solely for the power of judgment, teaching it to apply to appearances the concepts of understanding, which contain the condition for a priori rules." The application of concepts to appearances consists in the ability to "to distinguish whether something does or does not fall under a given rule (is or is not a casus datae legis)." This ability is called power of judgment [Urteilskraft]. Kant notes that "the power of judgment is a particular talent that cannot be taught at all but can only be practiced." In the footnote he writes "A lack in power of judgment is in fact what we call stupidity, and for such a handicap there is no remedy." (Kant, Werke, vol. 3, p. 183ff., ed.)

The application of concepts to appearances or the determination of appearances by concepts, the ability to find cases that fit rules or to name the rule appropriate to the particular case always applies when, for example, we try to say what that, what we mean implies to the example. But with the exception of mathematics, this hardly ever happens. No matter whether the connection of a concept with an appearance succeeds or fails, whether it is right or wrong; an example of this kind of application is always a judgment. But above all, this judgment testifies, even if it is stupid, that concepts can be applied to appearances. And certainly, there is a rule for this application. The Analytic of Principles adds this rule to the Analytic of Concepts. It is therefore also called the Doctrine of the Power of Judgment. The second chapter of the Transcendental Doctrine of the Power of Judgment deals with "the principles of pure understanding." The first chapter, however, deals with "the sensible condition under which alone pure concepts of understanding can be used." I maintain that we can only make use of the Critique of Pure Reason if we understand what is meant by it.

This sensible condition is different from an object, an intuition, an appearance, which are likewise sensible. The difference consists in the fact that in a single thing we find nothing of a pure concept of understanding, that is, of a category. And no one has ever encountered a category. But the sensible condition for connecting such fundamentally different things is called the possibility of this connection. Therefore, while the category of possibility and the condition of sensibility are not the same, they are related. An egg can appear in a picture. Is this how possibility appears? Even if it is meant, it is still not correct that the possible gives rise to the egg, or that the egg gives rise to the possible. Instead, it is absolutely correct to say: according to the category of reality, an 'Egg-and-Dart'* appeared "in a certain time," in antiquity. According to the category of possibility it can appear "at some time," in the future.

The sensible condition under which the categories can be applied to the appearances seems to be time. The connection of all ideas in the "I think" corresponds to the one series; as all presentations of external things affect inner sense.**—This also and especially applies when thinking is called spontaneous and sensuality [is called] receptive. The conscious and the unconscious live side by side, if you will. Of course, they spend the same time together. In a time that is empty because it separates everything from one another, we*** can read the Critique of Pure Reason as a document of a blind practice.—Only this blind practice allows us to apply categories to appearances, to try, against all analysis, what is called connection, synthesis. "Synthesis as such," it is said in the Analytic of Concepts, "as we shall see hereafter, is the mere effect produced by the imagination, which is a blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we would have no cognition whatsoever, but of which we are conscious only very rarely." Thus "the sensible condition under which alone pure concepts of understanding can be used," is by no means simply time, but the determination of the time in which this application is possible. This determination of time Kant calls schematism, and when he explains it, he speaks of "a universal procedure of the imagination for providing a concept with its image." One can imagine commonplace things and tremendous things. It is commonplace to say, "The schema of necessity is the existence of an object at all times." But an abyss appears when this schema is presented in Latin and Greek: "aeternitas (,) necessitas phaenomenon": eternity, necessity as appearance. Eternity is the necessity, when it appears. The question of the aeon is thus answered. The aeon exists as a schema of pure understanding.

Ultimately, because necessity is "at all times" at work, it can be called blind. When the condition of the sensible is what allows for the application of the categories, the condition is what one calls reliability and the sensible, the sealed ground on which the applied sciences have free rein. The schematism of pure understanding, insofar as it is dominated by pure understanding, is a trail leading from life to death. Kant calls the question of application, of course in the sense that the gaze moves from the table of categories to the window, simply a "natural and important question." And after answering quite simply that there must be a third between concept and appearance, and that this can only be the determination of time, which he calls schema and attributes to the imagination, he goes on through the examples of five points, a triangle and a dog, to suddenly find himself in the language of the sublime: "This schematism of our understanding, i.e., its schematism regarding appearances and their mere form, is a secret art residing in the depths of the human soul, an art whose true stratagems we shall hardly ever divine from nature and lay bare before ourselves." The schema is called "a product and, as it were, a monogram of the pure a priori imagination through which, and according to which, images become possible in the first place." (Kant, Werke, vol. 3, p. 190, ed.).

This talk of how images become possible, presents itself in time as condition and possibility. According to its brief outline, this talk is the condition of the possibility of a second one. Which will be about the "hidden art" and about how it comes to light.

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Published and translated with the permission of the author. This text is part of an ongoing series on the writings of Berthold Reiß which porcile.org wishes to make accessible to a non-German speaking audience. The text is translated by porcile.org in exchange with Berthold Reiß, who is an artist that lives and works in Munich, Germany.

For the English equivalent of the quotes from Kant this translation refers to Werner S. Pluhar’s translation of Critique of Pure Reason (Unified Edition) (Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, 1996).

Magda’s notes

*The 'Egg-and-Dart' is a type of molding in which egg shapes alternate with V-shapes. It is one of the most widely used classical moldings. The literal german translation of ‘Eierstab’ would be 'egg-stick.'

**This would be Kant’s phrasing in the Pluhar translation of how inner and outer sense relate.

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.

Author: Magda Wisniowska - Munich, April, 2020.

What underlies this whole difficulty is this: how can a subject inwardly intuit himself? …The consciousness of oneself (apperception) is the simple presentation of the I; and if through this consciousness by itself all the manifold in the subject were given self-actively, then the inner intuition would be intellectual. But in man this consciousness requires also inner perception of the manifold given in the subject beforehand; and the way in which this manifold is given in the mind …must, for the sake of marking this distinction, be called sensibility. (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 68)

Kant’s first mention of ‘apperception’—the consciousness of oneself as an I—appears in the ‘General Comments’ section at the end of the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic.’ At this point in his argument he had already established our ability to sense our surroundings as a condition of knowledge, and worked through some of the consequences of his thesis. We know things as they appear to us, mediated through our senses. Our senses give them the character of objects and their relations in space and time. If we somehow managed to ‘annul ourselves as subject’ then, ‘this entire character of objects and all their relations in space and time-indeed, even space and time themselves would vanish’ (B 59). For appearances ‘only exist in us’ (ibid.).

What this means, however, is we too are subject to the same principle. Our knowledge of ourselves is equally mediated by the dictates of our sensory perception. We know ourselves not as we are, but the way we appear to our senses.

Following Lawson (see Sad Mondays #5, part one), I like to think of apperception as the voice in my head, vocalising my thoughts. I am conscious of myself, when ‘I’ think, all the time, with every thought that I might have. But I do not simply think this ‘I’—I also hear it, constantly, as an internal monologue. I think, but I also hear myself thinking, and I would not know that I thought if I did not hear it happen.

In Difference and Repetition Deleuze describes this as a moment of ‘schizophrenia’, an ‘alienation in principle’ when ‘subject can henceforth represent its own spontaneity only as that of an Other’ (58) and as such, the problem of schizophrenic or ‘dissolved’ subjectivity reoccurs in many guises in Deleuze’s early work. I would argue however that Deleuze returns to the problem of apperception again later in life, not only in the description of the ‘crack’ he borrows from Fitzgerald, but also more rigorously in the short essay, 'On Four Poetic Formulas That Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy’ (Essays Critical and Clinical) in the section, ‘I is an Other.’ In this later text, Deleuze combines a historical account with an analysis of literature to demonstrate the extent to which Kant’s philosophy is deeply unKantian, its rationality completely immersed in a deep, all-prevailing madness.

Historically, Kant’s critique follows from the cartesian cogito. If Descartes established that the ‘I think’ determines the undetermined existence of the ‘I am’ as being of a thinking subject, then Kant questions how this kind of determination can be applied to undetermined being in the first place. Surely, our existence must be such that it can be determined—it must first fall under the form of determinability if this is to happen. For Deleuze, the form of determinability is time, in that our indeterminable existence is only determinable in time. The ‘I think’ can determine my existence but it can only determine it in time and then only as that of a ‘passive receptive, changing self’ (29).