Furtive Contemplations: Self, Time, and Affect in Deleuze

Il y a moi dès que s'établit quelque part une contemplation furtive …

With a remarkable and perhaps unparalleled longevity, contemplation stretches from the first chapter of Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953) to the last chapter of What Is Philosophy? (1991).¹ This contemplation, of course, is not the contemplation readily recognized by the tradition. This contemplation is not Plato's contemplation of Ideas. For Deleuze, on the contrary, the Platonic Idea prepares the regime of representation, which constitutes one of the most general and sustained targets of his writings. This contemplation, rather, is empirical; it comes from Hume. But it does not therefore escape scrutiny. Hume himself signals a fundamental impasse in the work of contemplation with regard to the pervasive but evasive idea of the self. This impasse will translate into a profound ambivalence that Deleuze will reflect, displace, and redistribute but never entirely overcome. It is legible everywhere contemplation surges. Which is to say, perhaps, everywhere. The generalization, in any case, will not be unjustified. In attempting to appreciate the forceofcontemplation,myaimhereistobringthisambivalencetolightasitbears upon some of the fundamental stakes of Deleuze's work both early and late.

Extra Interiority

At its most poignant, the impasse of contemplation will concern the unity of the mind, but it unfolds from the most original point of Hume's philosophy. At the end of the abstract, published anonymously in 1740 and meant to clarify the basic argument of A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume anticipates his contribution to the history of philosophy.

Thro' this whole book, there are great pretensions to new discoveries in philosophy; but if anything can entitle the author to so glorious a name as that of an inventor, 'tis the use he makes of the principle of the association of ideas, which enters into most of his philosophy.

(Hume 2000, 416)

Hume does not invent the association of ideas but, rather, a certain use of it. The association of which Hume makes the most is causality. Its ground is contemplation.

According to a fundamental maxim that Hume proposes in the opening section of the Treatise, all ideas are derived from impressions, that is, from perceptions or sensations as they first appear in the mind; ideas are nothing but fainter images of impressions deployed in thinking. But the idea of causality hinders the maxim. Because Hume also posits that perceptions remain atomic, discrete, a causal relation between terms is never perceived as such. Perceiving B follow A in what we would habitually take as a causal relation, the mind observes the succession of B immediately after A, but it never observes the causation itself. There thus seems to be no prior impression from which the idea of causality as a necessary connection between terms could be derived. The effort to overcome this hindrance propels Hume's analyses.

In the end, rather than deny causality, Hume shifts its ground. Ideas derive from impressions, but ideas can impress the mind again in turn, and from this secondary impression, from this "impression of reflection," Hume derives the idea of causality (Hume 2000, 112). The mind receives an impression of object A and then an impression of object B, contiguous and in succession. When the sequence repeats, the repetition makes no difference in the objects themselves and, as an isolated instance, no impression in the mind that was not already present in the first occurrence. Yet, by contemplating the constant contiguity and succession of the same two objects or other pairs resembling them, by reflecting upon a multiplicity of instances of one object immediately following another, the mind begins to feel that they are connected; it feels forced to think of B whenever A. From this vague feeling the idea arises that B always follows A, that B necessarily follows A, that A thus causes B. Hume, of course, recognizes the scandal from the beginning.

What! the efficacy of causes lie in the determination of the mind! As if causes did not operate entirely independent of the mind, and wou'd not continue their operation, even tho' there was no mind...