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49 B e r g s o n i a n I n t u i t i o n a n d I n t e r n a l D i f f e r e n c e Bergsonian Intuition and Internal Difference Internal Difference From the foregoing, we are able to determine why Deleuze paradoxically characterizes his position as both a transcendental empiricism and a transcendental empiricism. On the one hand, it is necessary that his position be a transcendental empiricism insofar as we cannot methodologically begin with the assumption of a supremely individuated world, of a world already given whether in the form of the subject or the object, without falling into all the difficulties of external difference and mere conditioning on the part of the understanding. Overcoming such a perspective requires education, inquiry, learning, and thus constitutes a sort of empiricism. As Deleuze puts it, Nothing can be said in advance, one cannot prejudge the outcome of research: it may be that some well-known faculties—too well known— turn out to have no proper limit, no verbal adjective, because they are imposed and have an exercise only under the form of common sense. It may turn out, on the other hand, that new faculties arise, faculties which were repressed by that form of common sense. For a doctrine in general, there is nothing regrettable in this uncertainty about the outcome of research , this complexity in the study of the particular case of each faculty: on the contrary, transcendental empiricism is the only way to avoid tracing the transcendental from the outlines of the empirical. (DR 143–44) If we are to avoid merely repeating a set of subjective presuppositions underlying the constitution of our own personhood and relation to objectivity, then it is necessary that we adopt some sort of empiricism which avoids judging the outcome of research and inquiry in advance. What, according to Deleuze, are these subjective presuppositions ? How can we recognize them? What is a subjective or implicit presupposition: it has the form of “Everybody knows . . .”. Everybody knows, in a pre-philosophical and pre2 49 50 D i f f e r e n c e a n d g i v e n n e s s conceptual manner . . . everybody knows what it means to think and to be . . . As a result, when the philosopher says “I think therefore I am,” he can assume that the universality of his premisses—namely, what it means to be and to think—will be implicitly understood, and that no one can deny that to doubt is to think, and to think is to be . . . Everybody knows, no one can deny, is the form of representation and the discourse of the representative. When philosophy rests its beginning upon such implicit or subjective presuppositions, it can claim innocence, since it has kept nothing back—except, of course, the essential—namely the form of discourse . (DR 129–30) It is not a question of truth or falsity, but, as Deleuze says, the form of discourse. The presuppositions may be true or they may be false; we do not know, because such claims are not yet grounded in their essential being. And this lack of knowing, this not knowing, is the essential point. As Deleuze will say elsewhere, “What a profound and intelligent man says has value in itself, by its manifest content, by its explicit, objective, and elaborated signification; but we shall derive little enough from it, nothing but abstract possibilities, if we have not been able to reach other truths by other paths” (PS 21). Such truths have value because they are clear and explicit, and thus easily make sense. But they make sense, they are explicit, they are easily recognized, precisely because they are based on subjective presuppositions or what “everyone knows.” In other words, these claims are only clear and explicit because they reflect a form of discourse, because they repeat a form of discourse. As a result, far from being based on some sign of truth, they are instead based on recognition. “The ideas of the intelligence are valid only because of their explicit, hence conventional, signification” (PS 16; my italics). Only the practice of a sort of empiricism can protect us from such subjective presuppositions, because only empiricism assumes that it does not know in advance. This, of course, does not mean that empiricism does not itself fall prey to subjective presuppositions. But empiricism , at least, fosters an attitude which...

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