Browsing by Subject "objectal thinking"

In my Master’s thesis, I offer a novel interpretation of Gilles Deleuze’s (1925-1995) conception of transcendent thinking. As a first approximation, transcendent thinking is an unconscious disruption of quotidian thinking (i.e. empirical thinking). Deleuze’s conception is an important attempt at explaining the emergence of thought from material reality. Additionally, it offers insights into the conditions of creating something new in thinking. In Deleuze’s account, these two are closely connected. My interpretation is mainly based on Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), but I also draw from Deleuze’s other works and philosophers he discusses. Deleuze’s reading of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is important for my interpretation. I proceed by close readings of Deleuze and compare my interpretations to others from secondary literature. My thesis is divided into five chapters and I begin by introducing my reading of the relevant features of Deleuze’s overall project in Difference and Repetition. In chapter one, I introduce Deleuze’s novel philosophy of difference. According to Deleuze, all continuity we experience is constituted by the interplay of internal difference and hidden repetition. In chapter two, I introduce the relevant features of Deleuze’s ontological scheme in Difference and Repetition. According to it, actual objects are constituted through the process of different/ciation; two figures of internal difference, the differential relations of virtual Ideas and intensive differences, produce the actual objects we perceive in our experience. Situating Deleuze’s transcendent thinking into his overall project is necessary to interpret it correctly and to grasp its significance. Next, I interpret what Deleuze means by thinking. In chapter three, I read Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) determining judgment (e.g. “This is a dog”) as providing a case of Deleuze’s empirical thinking. This kind of thinking is what human subjects experience in the quotidian. However, transcendent thinking goes beyond empirical thinking. In chapter four, I show how transcendent thinking is comprised of a series of encounters where the different faculties (i.e. cognitive capabilities) of the thinker are elevated to their transcendent exercise. This series starts as sensibility encounters sensible intensity and it continues as subsequent faculties are traversed by a virtual Idea. In these encounters, the faculties confront their internal differences, which reveal their limits and what is most singular to them. However, intermediary encounters do not correspond to any conscious empirical experiences, nor does the whole of transcendent thinking either. In the final chapter of my Master’s thesis, I begin by arguing that my interpretation ameliorates on previous readings. First, it reveals that transcendent thinking is a case of different/ciation unravelling through the faculties of a psychic system. Second, my reading distinguishes between empirical thinking and transcendent thinking—both being kinds of thinking, for Deleuze. Third, it clarifies that learning is an instance of transcendent thinking (not vaguely thinking in general). Next, I discuss how transcendent thinking reveals the possibility of creation in thinking. Empirical thinking is incapable of change because in it, the faculties function according to the model of recognition: the thinker only recognizes what is already known using pregiven concepts. Transcendent thinking, as a case of different/ciation progressing through the faculties, changes the faculties and, in doing so, transforms the composition of the psychic system. This process is carried out on the level of being and results in something new emerging in thinking. However, transcendent thinking is involuntary and unconscious, leaving the conception of creative agency in Difference and Repetition restricted.