The involuntary character of thought contrasts sharply with the classical conception of thought’s autonomy. Just as Merleau-Ponty criticizes Descartes for having reduced the outside world to an idea of the outside world and thus for having minimized its exteriority and maximized thought’s autonomy, Deleuze is convinced that the history of philosophy seems to defend only the idea that thought depends on anything extrinsic to it. According to Deleuze, one of the central presuppositions of classical philosophy is that we have a natural capacity for thought and that denying this is simply to act in bad faith. By nature, we have a will to think, the so-called “good will of the thinker” (DR, 166). Moreover, thought is not only considered the natural exercise of a faculty, it is also said to have a natural affinity with truth (DR, 166). The truth, in other words, is not the exterior “object of a revelation, but the precise content corresponding to what must be said or thought” (Zourabichvili 2012, 44). And what must be said or thought is what must be said or thought according to the nature of thought. The truth, in sum, is regarded as the natural correlate of thought. It is that which thought is spontaneously—that is, according to its own nature—led to.
We should note that thought’s natural affinity with the truth does not mean that it already possesses the truth in all its details. On the contrary, thought has an impression of the truth, in the sense that it already possesses the form of it, though it is still missing its material content (DR, 167). And so, even if thought does not yet know what is true, it is naturally endowed to find it. The search for truth constitutes the original and constitutive orientation of thought. Thought has an upright or upstanding nature (DR, 166). We should note, further, that this natural affinity with truth does not mean that thought cannot make mistakes. In practice, thought often produces false knowledge; indeed, it is sometimes even incapable of thinking. But this does not alter the inner disposition of thought. The false and the inability to think need to be situated at the level of the empirical, whereas thought’s upright nature belongs to the transcendental level; it is a characteristic that belongs to thought in principle (DR, 168). Actual thought is always an attempt to act upon the natural disposition of thought and to ward off diverting influences—that is what Descartes tries to do, quite explicitly, with his methodic doubt, for example.
The first postulate of representational thought, which Deleuze calls the postulate of the Cogitatio natura universalis, combines these two elements: the goodwill of the thinker, and the natural affinity with the truth. Illustrations of this postulate include Plato’s theory of the forgotten truth or Descartes’s notion of innate ideas. This postulate runs counter to the idea of involuntary thought because it indicates how thought is its own instigator (goodwill) and how its “object” is already present in thought itself (upright nature). According to this first postulate, thought is not involuntary but voluntary, because it is not prompted by something or somebody else, and because it is both strong- and self-willed.
As already mentioned, and as indicated by the word postulate, the voluntary nature of thought is presupposed, defined a priori, which explains why Deleuze calls representational thought dogmatic. For his part, Deleuze does not want to make any presuppositions with regard to thought. Indeed, thought for Deleuze does not have a natural inclination but is, on the contrary, always provoked by something that is absolutely exterior to it. If thought has no natural orientation, then it is also impossible to continue asserting the universality supposedly implied by this natural orientation, namely, that everyone possesses a goodwill and a natural affinity for the truth. In Deleuze’s view, thought is always characterized by the singularity of the meeting or the event; no one thinks in the same way. Clearly, then, Deleuze does not think that thought has a natural inclination to the truth. In fact, it has no natural inclination whatsoever. Still, thought is about something. Deleuze calls the “object” of thought “sense” (NP, 104; LS, 120). We will see now how “sense” differs from “truth.” Throughout the discussion, I follow Mark Lester and Hugh Tomlinson, who render the French sens with “sense,” and not Richard Howard, who prefers “meaning” instead in his translation of Proust and Signs.
The Sense of a Sign Is Not Situated in the Object or the Subject, but in the Essence as Absolute Difference (Fourth and Third Postulates)
The signs that confront thought are like enigmas or hieroglyphs: They cannot simply be deciphered. They simultaneously reveal and hide themselves, for their content or sense can never be univocally grasped. Still, thought cannot but try to explicate or unfold the sense(s) implied in the sign: “Sense is like the other side [l’envers] of the sign: the explication of what it implicates” (Zourabichvili 2012, 68). Thought has no choice but to try to analyze (and simplify) the secret of the sign in explicit and determinate significations. Explication, however, does not mean that the sense is given. The explication of sense fundamentally influences the development of the sign and the sense it implies. The sign also develops itself in a parallel movement, and the self-unfolding of the sign affects the sense and its unfolding. As a consequence, the sense of a sign is always temporal, it is always affected by the singular and accidental nature of the sign.
But what is the sense of a sign? In line with Proust, Deleuze argues that the sense (or “truth”) of a sign has nothing to do with the object that emits it. The object is just the carrier, and hence it does not contain the secret, or content, of the sign. This idea contradicts what is presupposed in perception, love, and thought. Perception spontaneously attributes the qualities of the sign to the object from which they issue forth; for example, we transpose the timidity suggested by lowered eyes to the person who lowers his eyes. Love, and more specifically the tendency to want to possess the loved one, is based on a confusion of the attractiveness of the signs emitted by the loved one with the attractiveness of the loved one himself. And, finally, the fact that thought tends toward objectivity (PS, 20) is inscribed in the premise that the truth needs to be articulated and communicated. Thought searches for objective contents and for explicit and univocal significations (PS, 20) because it confuses the sign’s significance with its referent. In Deleuze (PS, 19), conversely, the sign designates an object but signifies something different. Hence, the sense of a sign cannot be grasped in words and assignable phenomena. In order to detect the sense of a sign, we need to concentrate on the multitude of signs that accompany the concerned sign. The sense of a sign becomes clear only from within the field wherein the sign is situated.
A second misconception of sense is the subjectivist one. Unlike the objectivist view described above, subjectivists confuse the sense of a sign with the associations a sign evokes in the thinker. According to Deleuze, sense cannot result from subjective association because the latter does not allow one to distinguish the sense of one sign from that of another, since everything “is permitted in the exercise of associations” (PS, 24). Two different signs can evoke the same arbitrary and ephemeral associations. Moreover, subjectivism of this sort makes the content of a sign inaccessible to others: the sense remains strictly personal and idiosyncratic.
Hence, the sense of a sign is “beyond designated objects, beyond intelligible and formulated truths, but also beyond subjective chains of association” (PS, 25). It is situated in alogical or supralogical essences or Ideas (PS, 25). Just like Platonic Ideas, Deleuze’s supralogical essence refers to the origin or ground of things and concepts: it is what unites the things and concepts that fall under the same heading; it is that from which they are generated. However, Deleuze’s essences are not general and identical, like Plato’s Ideas, but singular and differential. And they are not transcendent, but immanent. Moreover, Deleuzean essences need to be produced, whereas Platonic Ideas are to be remembered. As we will see in chapter 3, Deleuze develops his account of “Ideas” more in dialogue with Kant than with Plato. As the origin of things and concepts, as that in which specific things and concepts are not yet distinguished, the essence is that which “constitutes the true unity of sign and sense” (PS, 25),11 that which unites sign and sense in a perfect adequation (PS, 33). Deleuze uses the Neoplatonic term “complication” to “designate the original state that precedes any development,