Radical Empiricism: William James and Gilles Deleuze

Both William James and Gilles Deleuze labeled their philosophies "radical empiricism." In this context, this essay explores the similarities and differences between James's radical empiricism (particularly as it is present early inches Principles of Psychology) and Deleuze's "transcendental empiricism" (particularly as set forth in The Logic of Sense). These accounts then inform a view of philosophy understood as a creative art. This art demands flexible habits--what James termed "genius"--in a changing world. Accordingly, radically empirical accounts of creativity and genius are sketched.

Paradoxes of Pure Experience: From the Radical to the Transcendental with James and Deleuze

This paper investigates the relationship between James’ radical empiricism and Deleuze’s study of the genesis of sense without a transcendental subject as necessary condition. It shows that James’ concept of pure experience changes the form of relation between mind and world. Considering how to conceptualize experience without a fixed metaphysical or transcendental subject destabilizes ontological identity, leads to a founding conceptual divergence from traditional phenomenology, and motivates Deleuze’s efforts towards transcendental empiricism. The paper reads Deleuze’s work on the genesis of sense in this context, arguing that one important result is an ontological pluralism. Such pluralism is crucial in considering how meaning can be made between and across differences and is in keeping with radical empiricism’s openness to life’s complexity.

James and Deleuze: Trains and Planes

This essay examines the relationship between William James’s radical empiricism and Gilles Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism by considering how dominant technologies of locomotion and travel in their respective historical times influenced their thinking and the style of their prose. Highlighting the imagery of trains and ground movement in James and planes and flight in Deleuze, I suggest that each constructs an empiricism that resonates with and reacts to the emerging forms of mass movement in his own time. The essay serves as an invitation to read James and Deleuze together with attention to the aesthetic qualities of their writing and as united in an ongoing project of honing philosophy to the pace of its time.

Absent Blue Wax: On the Mingling of Methodological Exceptions

Chapter 1 theorizes the production of methodological exceptions by philosophical systems. I bring into relation an empiricist exception to Descartes’s rationalist method (the wax experiment) and a rationalist exception to Hume’s empiricist method (his missing shade of blue). The chapter develops a critique of Michel Henry’s phenomenological reading of Descartes’s Second Meditation and contrasts my theory of rationalist empiricism with Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism. It concludes by positioning my reading of Descartes and Hume in relation to Meillassoux’s concept of “the paradox of manifestation.”

Transcendental Empiricism

Deleuze’s philosophy is an empiricism because like Epicurus and Locke he begins with sensibility as a response to shock from outside, and because like James and Dewey, relations are empirical and discovered by affect. Deleuze proposes to establish empiricism “transcendentally,” that is, immanently, without introducing anything beyond experience and what can be deduced of its empirical genesis. Transcendental empiricism is a more consistently empirical empiricism. It is also James’s radical empiricism reinterpreted through the eyes of a uniquely acute student of European philosophy. He presents an alternative to classical ideas of identity and difference. Reversing Plato, difference is original, positive, and aboriginally multiple, a virtual pre-individuality from which empirical distinctions emerge. Overcoming original identity is a boon to a more consistent empiricism because all experience arises from relational features of milieus, where the tenor of experience is difference and relation, not the same and self-identical.

Principle: Transcendental Empiricism

If one is to give Deleuzian philosophy a name, this name would be ‘transcendental empiricism’. As the name suggests, this philosophy can be understood as a crossing of Hume and Kant. If Kant opened the possibility in philosophy for an investigation into the transcendental domain, he nevertheless assumed the existence of a transcendental subject of apperception, whose genesis he would not question. Through Hume, it becomes possible to question this genesis, and prior to the genesis of the subject Deleuze discovers the Other (through Michel Tournier), and singularities/events (through Leibniz). These events correspond to the local egos of psychoanalysis, not yet integrated into a global ego, or subject. This chapter shows that Deleuze took Freudian psychoanalysis very seriously and sought to complete it, taking Freud to task for arresting his thinking prematurely. For the maxim of transcendental empiricism is that ‘we cannot break off thinking when we please’.

Practice: Thinking and Subjectivity

This chapter investigates the practical implications of Deleuze’s philosophy of ‘transcendental empiricism’. For Deleuze it is thinking that constitutes the most authentic form of practice, and this because thinking is always invoked by an encounter with the ‘sign’. However it is not the case that we innately know how to read the sign; its reading must be learnt through an apprenticeship. Spontaneously we do not stumble at the sign, we simply bypass it, and Deleuze explains this through Bergson’s distinction between successful and failed (attentive) acts of perception. Only in the latter is there a genuine encounter with the sign, through which we can begin to see the world differently. And yet this practical philosophy, it is argued, was doomed to reach an impasse because its ultimate practical exhortation is to ‘wait to fail’, which is strictly impossible. The stage has been set for Deleuze to encounter Guattari.

The Problem of Method: Deleuze and Simondon

This paper examines the relationship between Simondon's theory of individuation and Deleuze's transcendental empiricism. Deleuze credits Simondon with inventing a new conception of the transcendental – a claim that might have taken Simondon by surprise, as this term does not play any significant role in his oeuvre. The aim of this paper is to show both that Simondon's philosophy contributed to the construction of Deleuze's transcendental philosophy in an essential way and that the nature of his own project is radically different from Deleuze's. The most important divergence between the two thinkers lies arguably in their respective methods. What this difference brings to the fore is Deleuze's adherence to the philosophical traditions of idealism and structuralism at this stage of his thought.