Rationalist Empiricism. Nathan Brown

that body.”²⁹ Never mind that Descartes concedes, just this once, to “consider the things which people commonly think they understand most distinctly of all”; “that is, the bodies which we touch and see.” According to Henry, it is only “knowledge of the body”³⁰ that is analyzed, and thus only the understanding itself. Henry obviates the structure of the wax experiment, its unfolding in time as an alternation between empirical observations and epistemological statements, and he overlooks the particular order of reasons interior to this deviation from the order of reasons: First, we are offered a series of empirical observations (concerning the taste, scent, color, shape, size, consistency, and temperature of a particular body). These empirical observations are followed by a provisional summation of sensory data as possible grounds for distinct knowledge of a body (“In short, it has everything which appears necessary to enable a body to be known as distinctly as possible”). During this summation we descend back into empirical observation (“But even as I speak, I put the wax by the fire, and look …”), and then we question the grounds of our understanding (“So what was it in the wax that I understood with such distinctness?”). It is through the complex temporal unfolding of this alternating structure that we arrive at a subtraction of the empirical given (“Perhaps the answer lies in the thought which now comes to my mind; namely, the wax was not after all the sweetness of the honey”). And finally, it is after we have traversed this alternating structure, and following this process of subtraction, that we turn entirely inward toward our “knowledge of the body,”³¹ comparing the relative capacity of the imagination and the intellect to grasp the essence of extension, and thus understanding that we perceive the wax “by the mind alone.” But, according to Henry, we should ignore the dense structural articulation of the inductive process by which we arrive at such knowledge, working back and forth between empirical observations of a body and epistemological questions concerning those observations. “As we know,” after all, the Second Meditation “completely ignores the body and its supposed action on the soul.”³²

      For Henry, in short, there is no exception. And for phenomenology there cannot be. So long as we abide within Henry’s “as we know”—so long as we do not depart the province of the phenomenological—we cannot follow the complex process through which the Meditations reenter rationalism by way of empiricism. Because phenomenology cannot sanction the encounter of thought and sensation, always-already folding them together, Henry has to fold the imagination and the understanding into a single unremitting “phenomenality” which, in turn, gives way to its essence as primordial auto-affectivity.³³ For Henry, nothing happens via the wax experiment, because (“as we know”) “this ‘knowledge of the body’ … originally and untiringly refers back to ‘knowledge of the soul,’ whose more original essence was exhibited in the cogito.”³⁴ It matters not at all that we are thus referred back to the cogito by way of an encounter with a particular body, and that it is through this encounter that a retroactive temporal genesis of the cogito unfolds. What phenomenology cannot encounter is the encounter itself, which always takes place outside its primary methodological imperative: not in the deepest recesses of the phenomenological epoché, but within its exterior.

      RATIONALIST VS. TRANSCENDENTAL EMPIRICISM

      “Something in the world forces us to think,” writes Deleuze in his chapter on “The Image of Thought.”³⁵ Descartes: “Let us take, for example, this piece of wax.” Hume: “’tis plain, that he will perceive a blank, where that shade is wanting.” Something, wax or blank, forces us to think, and according to the theory of transcendental empiricism, this “something in the world” is “an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.”³⁶ Contra phenomenology, Deleuze offers an empiricism insofar as the encounter transpires through an experience of the sensible. But it is a transcendental empiricism insofar as what is encountered by way of the sensible is itself insensible: “not a sensible being but the being of the sensible.”³⁷ Spurred by the sensible mutability of a particular piece of wax, the imagination tests itself against the insensible essence of physical bodies and thereby gives way to the intellect. Activated by a sensible blank between proximate shades, the imagination raises up to the mind the insensible “idea” of Absent Blue.

      But if the theory of the encounter we find in Difference and Repetition (unlike the theory of primordial auto-affection offered by Henry) enables us to grasp what happens in the case of our two exemplary exceptions, Deleuze himself seems to have failed to encounter their significance as exceptions. Hume’s missing shade of blue goes unmentioned in Empiricism and Subjectivity, wherein the metaphysical concept of ideas as virtual multiplicities is not yet fully operative in Deleuze’s philosophical itinerary.³⁸ In Difference and Repetition, just as Descartes’s expulsion of time from the constitution of the subject marks the subsumption of his philosophy by the figure of identity, his presumption of the identity of the wax over the course of his experiment (“It is of course the same wax which I see, which I touch, which I picture in my imagination, in short the same wax which I thought it to be from the start”)³⁹ marks the domination of his thought by the model of recognition. Just as Deleuze does not yet (in 1953) locate a transcendental empiricism in the philosophy of Hume, he does not register, in his discussion of Descartes’s Second Meditation, the manner in which the empiricist deviation of the wax experiment gives way to a retroactive temporal genesis of the cogito. Rewriting the First Critique in the wake of Nietzsche, Bergson, and Heidegger, Difference and Repetition recasts Kant’s transcendental idealism as transcendental empiricism. But what Deleuze misses—insofar as he misses Absent Blue Wax—is the opportunity to grasp the pre-Kantian exception to both rationalism and empiricism, a strange exteriority of these traditions that is not yet the exteriority of the transcendental subject. Absent Blue Wax, encountered through the chiasmus of our exemplary exceptions, incarnates the disavowed specters of an empiricist Descartes and a rationalist Hume within a single insensible idea. Unthinkable within phenomenology, and prior to the program of transcendental idealism, Absent Blue Wax delivers the outside of rationalism to the outside of empiricism and lets them mingle in their mutual exteriority. This exteriority is that of an encounter which never took place, and which has to be constructed. And the exteriority of this encounter to rationalism, to empiricism, and to transcendental critique is also the exteriority of philosophical systematicity itself.

      We can thus answer, on our own terms, the scholar’s question regarding the mystery of Hume’s motives. Why does Hume include the missing shade of blue as a “contradictory phenomenon” within his theory of perceptions? He does so because the idea of Absent Blue indexes a profound intuition of the future of philosophy: not only a future that passes through Kant, but one that circles back behind him—through the work of such thinkers as Deleuze and Meillassoux—to the pages of Hume’s Treatise itself. And why does Descartes permit the mind “free rein” outside the ambit of his impeccably ordered method? He does so because the wax experiment expresses the radical capacity of the mind—in excess of Cartesian doctrine—to encounter the temporal genesis of the cogito even as it grasps the idea of substance. By including the outside of their philosophical systems within those systems—and thereby rigorously determining the conditions under which that outside is an outside—both Descartes and Hume unknowingly accede to the explosive vocation of philosophy, which perpetually redeploys the power of thought to think beyond its own conditions.

      But what difference does it make to explore the possibility of a rationalist empiricism through these exemplary exceptions, and thus on the outside of both rationalism and empiricism, rather than through a direct invocation of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism? It enables us, for one thing, to explicate certain problems within Deleuze’s system while remaining outside of it. Take, for example, the theme of “overturning Platonism.” How is it possible for an idea to be a simulacrum? Absent Blue provides us with a precise answer. For Plato, the idea is the model, while the impression is the copy; for Hume, of course, the impression is the model, while the idea is the copy. But, considered at once within and outside of Hume’s system, Absent Blue is an idea without a corresponding impression, and thus a copy without a model. In other words it is at once a simulacrum and a pure idea. If Hume thus anticipates an “overturning” of Platonism before Nietzsche or Deleuze, it is not through the copy principle