SECOND POSTULATE: THE IDEAL OF COMMON SENSE

(Selected Texts)

‘Proust sets up an image of thought in opposition to that of philosophy. He attacks what is most essential
in a classical philosophy of the rationalist type: the presuppositions of this philosophy. The philosopher
readily presupposes that the mind as mind, the thinker as thinker, wants the truth, loves or desires the
truth, naturally seeks the truth. He assumes in advance the goodwill of thinking; all his investigation is
based on a “premeditated decision.” From this comes the method of philosophy: from a certain viewpoint,
the search for truth would be the most natural and the easiest; the decision to undertake it and the
possession of a method capable of overcoming the external influences that distract the mind from its
vocation and cause it to take the false for the true would suffice. It would be a matter of discovering and
organizing ideas according to an order of thought’.
G. Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000
[1964], p. 94.

‘RULE FIVE: The whole method consists entirely in the ordering and arranging of the objects on which we
must concentrate our mind’s eye if we are to discover some truth. We shall be following this method
exactly if we first reduce complicated and obscure propositions step y step to simpler ones, and then,
starting with the intuition of the simplest ones of all, try to ascend through the same steps to a knowledge
of all the rest’.
R. Descartes, ‘Rules for the Direction of the Mind’, trans. Dugald Murdoch, in The Philosophical
Writings of Descartes, Vol. I, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 20.

THIRD POSTULATE: THE MODEL OF RECOGNITION

‘Let us take, for example, this piece of wax. It has just been taken from the honeycomb; it has not quite
yet lost the taste of honey; it retains some of the scent of the flowers from which it was gathered; its
colour, shape and size are plain to see; it is hard, cold, and can be handled without difficulty; if you rap it
with your knuckles, it makes a sound. In short, it has everything which appears necessary for a body to be
known as distinctly as possible. But even as I speak, I put the wax by the fire, and look: the residual taste
is eliminated, the smell goes away, the colour changes, the shape is lost, and the size increases; it
becomes liquid and hot; you can hardly touch it, and if you strike it, it no longer makes a sound. But does
the same wax remain? It must be admitted that it does; no one denies it, no one thinks otherwise. So what
was it in the wax that I understood with such distinctness? Evidently none of the features which I arrived
at by means of the senses; for whatever came under taste, smell, touch or hearing has now altered – yet
the wax remains’.
R. Descartes, ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’, trans. John Cottingham, in The Philosophical Writings
of Descartes, Vol. II, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 20.

‘But when we try to get to know our nature more distinctly we can see that our soul, in so far as it is a
substance which is distinct from the body, is known to us merely through the fact that it thinks, that is to
say, understands, wills, imagines, remembers and has sensory perceptions; for all these functions are
kinds of thought’.
R. Descartes, ‘Description of the Human Body’, trans. Dugald Murdoch, in The Philosophical Writings
of Descartes, Vol. I, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 314.

‘Bergson distinguishes two kinds of ‘recognition’. Automatic or habitual recognition (the cow recognizes
grass, I recognize my friend Peter) works by extension: perception extends itself into the usual
movements; the movements extend perception so as to draw on its useful effects. It is a sensory-motor
recognition that comes about above all through movements: motor mechanisms which the sight of the
object is enough to trigger are constituted and accumulated. In a certain sense we constantly distance
ourselves from the first object: we pass from one object to another one, according to a movement that is
horizontal or of associations of images, but remaining on one and the same plane (the cow moves from
one clump of grass to another, and, with my friend Peter, I move from one subject of conversation to
another). The second mode of recognition, attentive recognition, is very different. Here, I abandon the
extending of my perception, I cannot extend it. My movements – which are more subtle and of another
kind – revert to the object, return to the object, so as to emphasize certain contours and take ‘a few
characteristic features’ from it. And we begin all over again when we want to identify different features
and contours, but each time we have to start from scratch. In this case, instead of an addition of distinct
objects on the same plane, we see the object remaining the same, but passing through different planes. In
the first case, we had, we perceived, a sensory-motor image from the thing. In the other case, we
constitute a pure optical (and sound) image of the thing, we make a description’.
G. Deleuze, Cinema 2, London, Continuum, 2005 [1985], p. 42.

‘If each representation were completely foreign to every other, standing apart in isolation, no such thing
as knowledge would ever arise. For knowledge is [essentially] a whole in which representations stand
compared and connected. As sense contains a manifold in its intuition, I ascribe to it a synopsis. But to
such synopsis a synthesis must always correspond; receptivity can make knowledge possible only when
combined with spontaneity. Now this spontaneity is the ground of a threefold synthesis which must
necessarily be found in all knowledge; namely, the apprehension of representations as modifications of
the mind in intuition, their reproduction in imagination, and their recognition in a concept. These point to
three subjective sources of knowledge which make possible the understanding itself –and consequently all
experience as its empirical product’.
I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London, Macmillan, 1929, A 97.

‘If we were not conscious that what we think is the same as what we thought a moment before, all
reproduction in the series of representations would be useless. For it would in its present state be a new
representation’.
Ibidem, A 103.

‘The necessary unit of the object can be nothing else than the formal unity of consciousness in the
synthesis of the manifold of representations. It is only when we have thus produced synthetic unity in the
manifold of intuition that we are in a position to say that we know the object’.
Ibidem, A 105 (translation modified).

In the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proclaims ‘a call to reason to undertake anew the most
difficult of all its tasks, namely, that of self-knowledge, and to institute a tribunal which will institute to
reason its lawful claims, and dismiss all groundless pretensions, not by despotic decrees, but in
accordance with its own eternal and unalterable laws’.
Ibidem, A xi-xii.

‘The object in general is the correlate of the ‘I think’ or of the unity of consciousness; it is the expression
of the cogito, its formal objectivation. Therefore the real (synthetic) formula of the cogito is: I think
myself and in thinking myself, I think the object in general to which I relate a represented diversity’.
G. Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London, The
Athlone Press, 1984 [1963], pp. 15-16.

‘When someone asks “what’s the use of philosophy?” the reply must be aggressive, since the question
tries to be ironic and caustic. Philosophy does not serve the State or the Church, who have other concerns.
It serves no established power. The use of philosophy is to sadden. A philosophy that saddens no one,
that annoys no one, is not a philosophy. It is useful for harming stupidity, for turning stupidity into
something shameful. Its only use is the exposure of all forms of baseness of thought. Is there any
discipline apart from philosophy that sets out to criticise all mystifications, whatever their source and aim,
to expose all the fictions without which reactive forces would not prevail? Exposing as a mystification the
mixture of baseness and stupidity that creates the astonishing complicity of both victims and perpetrators.
Finally, turning thought into something aggressive, active and affirmative. Creating free men, that is to
say men who do not confuse the aims of culture with the benefit of the State, morality or religion [...].
Philosophy is at its most positive as critique, as an enterprise of demystification. And we should not be
too hasty in proclaiming philosophy’s failure in this respect. Great as they are, stupidity and baseness
would be still greater if there did not remain some philosophy which always prevents them from going as
far as they would wish [...].
There exists, of course, a properly philosophical mystification: the dogmatic image of thought and the
caricature of critique illustrate this. Philosophy’s mystification begins, however, from the moment it
renounces its role as demystifier and takes the established powers into consideration: when it gives up the
harming of stupidity and the denunciation of baseness’.
G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, London, Continuum, 1986 [1962], p. 106.

‘Truth, as a concept, is entirely undetermined. Everything depends on the value and sense of what we
think. We always have the truths we deserve as a function of the sense of what we conceive, of the value
of what we believe. Any thinkable or thought sense is only brought into effect insofar as the forces that
correspond to it in thought also take hold of something, appropriate something, outside thought. Clearly
thought cannot think by itself, any more than it can find truth by itself. The truth of a thought must be
interpreted and evaluated according to the forces or power that determine it to think and to think this
rather than that. When we speak of “plain truth”, of truth “in itself”, “for itself” or even “for us”, we must
ask what forces are hiding themselves in the thought of this truth, and therefore what its sense and value
is. It is disturbing that truth conceived as an abstract universal, thought conceived as pure science, has
never hurt anyone. In fact the established order and current values constantly find their best support in
truth conceived in this way. “The ‘truth’ ... is an easy-going and pleasant creature” [Schopenhauer] [...].
This is what the dogmatic image of thought conceals: the work of established powers that are ideally
expressed in truth in itself. Leibniz’s strange statement still burdens philosophy: produce new truths, but
above all “without overthrowing established feelings”. And from Kant to Hegel we see the philosopher
remaining, in the last resort, a thoroughly civil and pious character, loving to blend the aims of culture
with the good religion, morality or the State’.
Ibidem, p. 104.

‘Again, is this not what Foucault called the Actual? But how could the concept now be called the actual
when Nietzsche called it the inactual? Because, for Foucault, what matters is the difference between the
present and the actual. The actual is not what we are but, rather, what we become, what we are in the
process of becoming –that is to say, the Other, our becoming-other. The present, on the contrary, is what
we are and, thereby, what already we are ceasing to be. We must distinguish not only the share that
belongs to the past and the one that belongs to the present but, more profoundly, the share that belongs to
the present and that belonging to the actual. It is not that the actual is the utopian prefiguration of a future
that is still part of our history. Rather, it is the now of our becoming. When Foucault admires Kant for
posing the problem of philosophy in relation not to the eternal but to the Now, he means that the object of
philosophy is not to contemplate the eternal or to reflect history but to diagnose our actual becomings’.
G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York,
Columbia University Press, 1994 [1991], p. 112.

‘Kant’s genius, in the Critique of Pure Reason, was to conceive of an immanent critique. Critique must
not be a critique of reason by feeling, by experiencing or by any kind of external instance. And what is
criticised is no longer external to reason: we should not seek, in reason, errors which have come from
elsewhere – from body, senses or passions – but illusions coming from reason as such. Now, caught
between these two demands, Kant concludes that critique must be a critique of reason by reason itself. It
is not the Kantian contradiction, making reason both the tribunal and the accused; constituting it as judge
and plaintiff, judging and judged? (VP 1185). Kant lacked a method which permitted reason to be judged
from the inside without giving it the task of being its own judge. And, in fact, Kant does not realise his
project of immanent critique. Transcendental philosophy discovers conditions which still remain external
to the conditioned. Transcendental principles are principles of conditioning and not of internal genesis.
We require a genesis of reason itself, and also a genesis of the understanding and its categories: what are
the forces of reason and of the understanding? What is the will which hides and expresses itself in reason?
What stands behind reason, in reason itself? In the will to power and the method which derives from it
Nietzsche has at his disposal a principle of internal genesis [...]. Only the will to power as genetic and
genealogical principle, as legislative principle, is capable of realising internal critique. In Nietzsche the
philosopher-legislator appears as the philosopher of the future; to legislate means to create values’.
G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 91.

‘The idea that philosophy legislates as philosophy makes the idea that critique as critique is internal
complete: together they form Kantianism’s principal achievement, its liberating achievement. But in what
way did Kant understand his idea of philosophy-legislation? Why does Nietzsche, at the very moment
when he seems to revive and develop the Kantian idea, rank Kant among the “philosophical labourers”,
those who are content to make inventories of current values, the opposite of the philosophers of the
future? (BGE 211 p. 123). For Kant, what legislates (in a domain) is always one of our faculties:
understanding, reason. We are legislators ourselves only insofar as we make proper use of this faculty and
allot our other faculties tasks which conform to it. We are legislators only insofar as we submit to one of
our faculties, as it were the whole of ourselves. But to what do we submit in such a faculty, to what
forces? Understanding and reason have a long history: they are instances which still make us obey when
we no longer want to obey anymore. When we stop obeying God, the State, our parents, reason appears
and persuades us to continue being docile because it says to us: it is you who are giving the orders.
Reason represents our slavery and our subjection as something superior which make us reasonable beings
[...]. And, finally, what is concealed in the famous Kantian unity of legislator and subject? Nothing but a
renovated theology, theology with a protestant flavour: we are burdened with the double task of priest and
believer, legislator and subject. Kant’s dream was not to abolish the distinction between two worlds
(sensible and super-sensible) but to secure the unity of the personal in the two worlds. The same person as
legislator and subject, as subject and object, as noumenon and phenomenon, as priest and believer [...].
Can we really believe that by installing the priest and the legislator in us we stop being primarily
believers and subjects? The legislators and the priests practise the ministry, the legislation and the
representation of established values: all they do is internalise current values. Kant’s “proper usage of the
faculties” mysteriously coincides with these established values: true knowledge, true morality, true
religion...’.
Ibidem, pp. 92-93.