Rationalist Empiricism. Nathan Brown
system. Rather, it is to ask how we can think such a capacity, such an idea, not as the rule of a subject or a system, but quite precisely as an exception.
Before returning to this question, let me take up our other exemplary exception: Descartes’s wax experiment. In the wax experiment, Descartes breaks with the order of reasons guiding his Meditations, as Martial Gueroult argues, in order to “deliver a verification” of the priority of the intellect by provisionally situating it “in the opponent’s point of view.”13 For Gueroult, the wax experiment “constitutes an anticipation of the general verification that the success of physics will bring to the entire set of metaphysical conclusions” arrived at in the Meditations.14 These conclusions are buttressed by the methodological devia tion of the wax experiment, since it is here that “common sense is … beaten on its own ground.”15 Via the anomalous empiricism of the wax experiment, “we rediscover here, by another means”—through indirection—”the conclusion obtained directly by following the genetic order of reasons.”16
So as to refute empiricism, we enter into it by way of immanent critique: “Let us take, for example, this piece of wax.”17 And as soon as we attempt to return to the order of reasons—as soon as we reenter rationalism by way of empiricism—we do so through an experience anticipating (in miniature) the default of synthetic imagination theorized by Kant as the sublime. “Let us concentrate,” writes Descartes,
take away everything which does not belong to the wax, and see what is left: merely something extended, flexible and changeable. But what is meant here by “flexible” and “changeable”? Is it what I picture in my imagination: that this piece of wax is capable of changing from a round shape to a square shape, or from a square shape to a triangular shape? Not at all; for I can grasp that the wax is capable of countless changes of this kind, yet I am unable to run through this immeasurable number of changes in my imagination, from which it follows that it is not the faculty of imagination that gives me my grasp of the wax as flexible and changeable. And what is meant by “extended”? Is the extension of the wax also unknown? For it increases if the wax melts, increases again if it boils, and is greater still if the heat is increased. I would not be making a correct judgment about the nature of wax unless I believed it capable of being extended in many more different ways than I will ever encompass in my imagination. I must therefore admit that the nature of this piece of wax is in no way revealed by my imagination, but is perceived by the mind alone.18
Following a subtractive method, itself following from an empirical demonstration, we arrive at the insufficiency of the imagination to grasp “an immeasurable number of changes” in their temporal unfolding, and we thereby accede to the power of the intellect to determine the supersensible identity of the wax, its nature, as a real idea. “That is sublime,” reads the decisive sentence of Kant’s analysis in the Third Critique, “which even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses.”19
Already, then, just beneath the apparently placid surface of Descartes’s Second Meditation and his domestic piece of wax, we are implicitly embroiled in “the terrible struggle between imagination and reason,” the “tempest in the depths of a chasm opened up in the subject” that Deleuze locates in Kant’s Analytic of the Sublime.20 Already we have the “Cogito for a dissolved self” evoked by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition: an “I” fractured by the form of time as the imagination, spurred by a sensible experience of quotidian alteration, filters through an immeasurable number of changes before the mind recovers itself in the stability of the intellect.21 “Time,” writes Deleuze, “signifies a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental.”22
Deleuze attributes this discovery to Kant, stating that Descartes could determine the thinking subject “only by expelling time, by reducing the Cogito to an instant and entrusting time to the operation of a continuous creation carried out by God.”23 Kant, on the other hand, established through his critique of the Cartesian cogito that “my undetermined existence can be determined only within time as the existence of a phenomenon, of a passive, receptive, phenomenal subject appearing within time.”24 But in the Cartesian wax experiment we already encounter such a subject. Via the rationalist empiricism of Descartes’s exemplary exception, we encounter a retroactive genesis of the cogito irreducible to its initial formulation. We attain clear and distinct knowledge of our essence as res cogitans not through the punctual assertion of an act of thinking, but through a temporal experience of the imagination’s insufficiency and a concomitant re-emergence of the priority of the intellect. “I see that without any effort I have now finally got back to where I wanted,” writes Descartes as the meditation concludes.25 But in the interim, we have quietly plunged into the “chasm opened up in the subject” that Kant will explore some one hundred and forty years after Descartes, and that Deleuze will excavate nearly two hundred years after Kant.
THE OUTSIDE OF PHENOMENOLOGY
Now, why does it matter that this retroactive, temporal genesis of the cogito occurs through an exemplary exception, during the sequence of his Meditations in which Descartes veers from the order of reasons through an empiricist deviation? It matters because the passive genesis of the cogito that unfolds through the wax experiment transpires as an encounter for which nothing in the order of reasons can account. This is what transcendental phenomenology is constitutively unable to grasp, unable to accommodate within its own Cartesian meditations. If the wax experiment is to perform an immanent critique of empiricism, it must really be empirical. And since it must be properly empirical—a true deviation from the order of reasons—it cannot operate within the purview of the phenomenological epoché. The phenomenological bracketing of experience is precisely what is itself bracketed by the “free rein” of Descartes’s exemplary exception. It is the fundamental incapacity of phenomenology to think the encounter that is betrayed by Michel Henry’s treatment of the wax experiment in his nevertheless extraordinary essay on Descartes, “Videre Videor”:
The entire analysis of the piece of wax or the people passing in the street with their hats circumscribes, characterizes, and elucidates precisely this “knowledge of the body” (as having its foundation in the ek-stasis of seeing as pure seeing, “inspection of the spirit,” the essence of videre): such an analysis, as we know, is precisely not that of the body, of this or that body, of extension, but that of knowledge of the body, that is, precisely of the understanding.26
“As we know,” Henry assures us. According to an uneasy rhetoric of presumed assent, we have already agreed upon a methodological doxa that will guide our reading the text: Despite Descartes’s empirical procedure, the wax experiment does not really involve analysis of a body, but only inspection of the spirit. By the lights of Henry’s rhetoric, we should already have agreed that the phenomeno-logical epoché will secure us against a supposedly naive approach to the analysis of the piece of wax as an empirical experiment.
Certainly, as Henry argues, Descartes emphasizes the reduction of perception to thought, insofar as we can only truly affirm that we seem to perceive: “I certainly seem to see [videre videor], to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called ‘having a sensory perception’ is strictly just this, and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply thinking.”27 But to follow Henry we have to ignore the equally clear establishment of the wax experiment as an exception to the circumscription of experience by this “restricted sense.” We have to ignore Descartes’s admission that the mind will “not yet submit to being restrained within the bounds of truth.” We have to forget that he thus posits the wax experiment as a temporary exception, “just this once,” to those limits, and that he explicitly declares a suspension of the epoché during which the mind will be given “a completely free rein,” so that “after a while, when it is time to tighten the reins, it may more readily submit to being curbed.” Regardless of such details, for Henry “the Second Meditation’s problematic develops entirely in an attitude of reduction.”28 Never mind that Descartes emphasizes his consideration “not of bodies in general, but