Rationalist Empiricism. Nathan Brown
would involve not an inversion of rationalism by empiricism, but rather a real transformation of both empiricism and rationalism introduced by the torque of their exceptional encounter.
But more important, rationalist empiricism differs from Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism insofar as it is not primarily concerned with the conditions of experience, whether understood as conditions of possible experience (Kant) or conditions of real experience (Deleuze). It is the interruption of experience by reason, and the extrapolation of reason from and yet beyond experience, that is at issue in the rationalist methodological pole, while it is the experience of reason and also the exposure, by empirical science, of what cannot be experienced that is at issue in our empiricism. Deleuze gives us a theory of the encounter—of what breaks with the synthesis of past and future—and this crucially informs our own thinking. But our account of rationalist empiricism is not oriented toward the construction of conditions as ground, but rather toward the groundless manner in which reason and experience propel one another without achieving synthesis. Deleuze’s theory of “asymmetrical synthesis” produces a concept of disparity as sufficient reason, and thus as the Urground that is deeper [profond] than the ground: disparity is the groundless ground breaking with the figure/ground distinction, and it constitutes a sufficient reason that rejects the principle of non-contradiction. We are interested, on the contrary, in pursuing an account of the relation between reason and experience that sustains the principle of non-contradiction while rejecting the principle of sufficient reason. Thus, we do not seek an account of the Urground that would be a condition of real experience, but rather the unconditional consequences of non-contradiction as that which overthrows, rather than sustains, the principle of sufficient reason. One works outside the transcendental by removing groundlessness even as condition and pursuing instead a thinking of how any rule of experience or reason, any condition, must be thought according to a displacement of sufficient reason itself. This coordination of the derivation of the principle of non-contradiction from groundlessness, and the displacement of the principle of sufficient reason by the principle of non-contradiction, is the burden of Quentin Meillassoux’s philosophical enterprise, addressed in detail in Chapters 2 and 4. For the moment we can say that Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism draws the outside of rationalism and empiricism back into the transcendental, as an account of conditions. Rationalist empiricism is concerned with sustaining the relational disjunction of rationalism and empiricism without drawing them back into the purview of the transcendental, without a sufficient reason that conditions both their disjunction and their relation.
THE PARADOX OF MANIFESTATION
Perhaps we could situate Absent Blue Wax within the “glacial world” evoked by Meillassoux in After Finitude, a world accessed by empirical science, yet refractory to any phenomenal experience, and thus explored through the rational formalization of technically registered indices.40 For Meillassoux, the true Copernican revolution proper to the relation between modern science and modern philosophy resides in the power of mathematical formalization to determine the object as indifferent to givenness: the power to think what there would be if there were no thought. And “it is this capacity,” Meillassoux argues, “whereby mathematized science is able to deploy a world that is separable from man … that Descartes theorized in all its power.”41 Descartes’s wax experiment gives way, through the empirical, to that which can only be thought. What Meillassoux calls “the paradox of manifestation”42 is this operation, through which the given makes manifest that which is refractory to givenness, that which could never have been and has never been given to manifestation, though its very subtraction from manifestation has been made manifest. Thus the paradox of manifestation is also the recessed paradox of Descartes’s Second Meditation: to know a thing by the mind alone is also to know that its existence does not depend upon the mind. We can say that the wax experiment makes an exception, that it deviates from the order of reasons, so as to explore this paradox of manifestation, moving through empirical knowledge toward a pure res extensa that is thought by the mind as independent substance. The empiricist deviation within Descartes’s rationalist project matters because it registers the paradoxical nature of manifestation itself. In the wax experiment, givenness gives way to a world without givenness, to the “glacial world” that Meillassoux aligns with “the world of Cartesian extension”:
a world wherein bodies as well as their movements can be described independently of their sensible qualities, such as flavor, smell, heat, etc…. a world that acquires the independence of substance, a world that we can henceforth conceive as indifferent to everything in it that corresponds to the concrete, organic connection that we forge with it—it is this glacial world that is revealed to the moderns, a world in which there is no longer any up or down, center or periphery, nor anything else that might make of it a world designed for humans. For the first time, the world manifests itself as capable of subsisting without any of those aspects that constitute its concreteness for us.43
The glacial world is a world that makes manifest its own subtraction from manifestation, but not from rational determination. This is the world into which Descartes’s wax leads us, but do we also enter into it through Hume’s Absent Blue?
Here we encounter the paradoxical idea of a secondary quality, the production, by the imagination, of an idea of an insensible shade, one that is not encountered through the senses and thus has to be thought. Perhaps the missing shade we call Absent Blue has a place in the world of Cartesian extension purely as the trace of our capacity to think it, as the trace of its subtraction from the given. Neither exactly a primary quality nor a secondary quality, but an exception—an insensible shade born of an encounter with the lacuna of the sensible—Absent Blue manifests the power of the mind to think the idea of an impression without deriving it from experience. Thus, if Absent Blue participates in the world of Cartesian extension, into which the wax experiment leads us, it does so only as the exposure of primary qualities, those of independent substance, to the hue of thought, to the shade of their subtraction from the given.
Absent Blue Wax, this compound exception mingling rationalism and empiricism within the space of its methodological exteriority, discovered disjunctively by Descartes and by Hume, is the curiously tinted substance of the glacial world, encountered at the crux of the paradox of manifestation.
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