Deleuze on Hume

Deleuze on Hume

from Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature

Preface to the English edition

WE DREAM SOMETIMES of a history of philosophy that would list only the new concepts created by a great philosopher – his most essential and creative contribution. The case of Hume could begin to be made with the following list:

– He established the concept of belief and put it in the place of knowledge. He laicized belief, turning knowledge into a legitimate belief. He asked about the conditions which legitimate belief, and on the basis of this invesetigation sketched out a theory of probabilities. The consequences are important: if the act of thinking is belief, thought has fewer reasons to defend itself against error than against illusion. Illegitimate beliefs perhaps inevitably surround thought like a cloud of illusions. In this respect, Hume anticipates Kant. An entire art and all sorts of rules will be required in order to distinguish between legitimate beliefs and the illusions which accompany them.

– He gave the association of ideas its real meaning, making it a practice of cultural and conventional formulations (conventional instead of contractual), rather than a theory of the human mind. Hence, the association of ideas exists for the sake of law, political economy, aesthetics, and so on. People ask, for example, whether it is enough to shoot an arrow at a site in order to become its owner, or whether one should touch the spot with one's own hand. This is a question about the correct association between a person and a thing, for the person to become the owner of the thing.

– He created the first great logic of relations, showing in it that all relations (not only "matters of fact" but also relations among ideas) are external to their terms. As a result, he constituted a multifarious world of experience based upon the principle of the exteriority of relations. We start with atomic parts, but these atomic parts have transitions, passages, "tendencies," which circulate from one to another. These tendencies give rise to habits. Isn't this the answer to the question "what are we?" We are habits, nothing but habits – the habit of saying "I." Perhaps, there is no more striking answer to the problem of the Self.

We could certainly prolong the list, which already testifies to the genius of Hume.

Gilles Deleuze 1989

Comments

[John S. Ransom]

Kind of weird to comment on your own post? At least to be the first one to do it. But hey it's almost fat thursday or something! everything upside down! Keeping in mind Deleuze's comment on Hume above, now look at this line from Thousand Plateaus:

“The two of us wrote AntiOedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit."

Notice the similarity of the repetition of habit in the two works. That's what habits are: repetition of the same.

[Jon]

"That's what habits are: repetition of the same."

Well, Deleuze argues at length in Difference and Repetition that this is not so. I wrote up some notes about habit in that book here.

[John S. Ransom]

May I please ask Jon: In what sense, according to you, are habits not a repetition of the same? And: how do you reconcile that with Deleuze's comments about the 'I'?

Let's take one of the quotations from Deleuze that you provide at the link:

"This living present, and with it the whole of organic and psychic life, rests upon habit. [. . .] We must regard habit as the foundation from which all other psychic phenomena derive. [. . .] These thousands of habits of which we are composed--these contractions, contemplations, pretensions, presumptions, satisfactions, fatigues; these variable presents--thus form the basic domain of passive syntheses. [. . .] Selves are larval subjects; the world of passive syntheses constitutes the system of the self, under conditions yet to be determined, but it is the system of a dissolved self." (78)

First let me say: what a great quotation!

Now, if we want to say that there is a difference between following habit at time 'x' and time 'y', even if 'y' is five minutes later than 'x', then on a certain level I would have to agree. Is that what you or Deleuze mean? I can see that point. I might do the very same thing at time 'y', but it might mean something different from what I did at time 'x' despite its superficial similarity. Let's say I "judge someone to be a legitimate leader" from the fact that said leader has emerged from such-and-such womb. And then I judge someone else to be leader, later in time, because that person has emerged from some other womb that is taken to be a legitimate source of leadership. (I'm talking about the legitimatory process in monarchies, for discussion sake.) In a certain sense, the legitimatory logic of the first leader is the same as that of the second leader, even though there's real differences between the two cases -- that is, the womb in the first instance is not the same womb as in the second.

Or am I completely and laughably missing your point? I am open to all possibilites!

[Jon]

John, I have to be quick, and in any case am currently without my copy of Difference and Repetition. But the whole argument of that book, as I understand it, is to show how constructs such as the "I" (and identity and representation more broadly) are subtended by, or, better, the epiphenomenal products of, processes such as habit whose basis is a repetition that is difference (in) itself.

I.e. rather than a repetition of the same (which would presuppose and be grounded upon identity etc.), always a repetition of the different.

Now, time is very much at issue, but it is habit that constitutes time, not vice versa (as per your suggestion). Habit, for Deleuze, it what constitutes the present, and then by implication precisely the present as a series of units of time passing. Though as soon as we start talking of the past, then we are already beyond habit.

Anyhow, I know that this is not development or explication, but rather the repetition of Deleuzian dogma. I can try to say more later, when reunited with my copy of Deleuze's book. But my point is briefly and basically that the same dogma underwrites the book on Hume--and that dogma states that habit is not repetition of the same.

[Keith]

Apropos Deleuze's reading of Nietzche: it's the return of the same inasmuch as that same is different.

Relatedly, I'm wondering what there might be to say regarding this when encountering the work of Badiou et all where the claim is made that "the highest task of thought lies in the production of sameness" - given that difference is just simply "what there is".

[Thomas McDonald]

In Deleuze, I believe, the Same, strictly speaking, is an epiphenomena, the illusion of the identical created out of habitual repetition, whereas Difference is in every case the ontological, the real beneath (beyond?) our perceptual habits.