Some Notes on Deleuze’s General Doctrine of the Faculties

Now, if we are to demarcate faculties in terms of their having a ‘something’ corresponding to a ‘suprasensible beyond’, so a ‘supralinguistic’ beyond, or a ‘suprasociable’ beyond, we face here a potential ambiguity. The suprasensible beyond sensibility is not an object for sensibility in a straightforward way, precisely because it’s ‘suprasensible’: it’s what is translated, or encoded, or articulated into that which is properly thought of as sensible. When we turn to other faculties, exploring them in terms of these ‘supras’, what then allows us to identify their presence, insofar as they are necessarily ungraspable? This problem is exacerbated, the waters muddied significantly, by the long standing methodological assumption that Deleuze refers to as common sense. In short, when examining cognition, thought, perception, what have you (all those dimensions which are never far from the talk of faculties) the ‘paradigmatic case’ explored has always been one of a simple recognition: I see an apple on a table, I see Theodorus coming up the road. In this paradigm case, the faculties are supposed to work in unison, each contributing their part to the act of recognition: I see the apple clearly, I think the concept of an apple, an object, I remember the field of previously experienced empirical associations concerning apples and objects, and so on. The ‘apple’ is recognized by every faculty, and they share and constitute the object in common, hence common sense.

Taking this simple, clean act of cognition as paradigmatic seems an innocent enough methodological step: we often want to dust away erratic or singular variables, and concentrate on the simple cases, extrapolating what we learn there to the messier and more complex ones. But in this simple case, of recognition, we also have the counter-case, an equally innocent seeming misrecognition, where the faculties come apart and contradict (indeed, this step is often essential for the argument that there is a distinction between the faculties to begin with). Thus, as we’ve seen, Plato looks at the case of contradictory perceptual properties being assigned to a single object, and Descartes had his empirically transforming wax. Here the ‘common sense’ is broken: perception says one thing, reason another. Since our paradigm case is their agreement, someone needs to back down to restore us to it. In both Plato and Descartes’ case, it’s perception that needs to back down: insofar as perception reveals the world as containing contradictory properties (at the same time, or over time) then it loses its right as ‘epistemic director’ and reason, which does not, nay can not, represent the world as containing contradictions, earns the role. This then gives us what Deleuze refers to as good sense: generally reason in charge, perception (or any other faculty, desire for example) as assistant. In Plato’s Kallipolis, the philosopher-guardians, as correlates of reason, must rule absolutely and unquestioned. This seems inevitable if the paradigm case, which we’re trying to reconstruct and restore, is for the agreement of perception and reason. On their own, reason can no more admit contradiction within itself than perception can dispel the seeming contradictions it finds in experience. It seems the ‘good’ way to resolve this conflict is by experience backing down and accepting reason’s conclusion. After all, reason and knowledge share their intimate links, and reason can formulate the arguments for its case, where perception is mute.1placeholder So, given this, it is difficult to determine what is a genuine case of a faculty hard at work on something that it cannot directly grasp, but nonetheless structuring it through a unique formal frame, and what is a case of a faculty merely confused (in the opinion of another, ‘superior’ faculty), and having its contents mapped by this external faculty (for example, reason swooping in to ‘remap’ the contradiction it sees in what is presented by perception).

This is why Deleuze argues, in his book on Kant, that it is in the Critique of Judgment that the essential key is to be found for Kant’s entire doctrine of the faculties: in the experience of the sublime. Here is the point re-rehearsed in a footnote of D&R:

“The case of the imagination: this is the only case in which Kant considers a faculty liberated from the form of a common sense, and discovers for it a truly legitimate ‘transcendent’ exercise. … [W]ith the sublime, according to Kant, the imagination is forced or constrained to confront its own limit, its phantasteon, its maximum which is equally the unimaginable, the unformed or the deformed in nature (Critique of Judgment, s. 26). Moreover, it transmits this constraint to thought itself, which in turn is forced to think the supra-sensible as foundation of both nature and the faculty of thought: thought and imagination here enter into an essential discordance, a reciprocal violence which conditions a new type of accord (s. 27). As a result, in the case of the sublime, the recognition model and the form of common sense are found wanting in favour of a quite different conception of thought (s. 29).” (Deleuze, 2011, p.180 )

In the experience of the sublime, that which sensibility cannot grasp directly, but can translate through a formal frame, presses in and overloads sensibility (or here, the ‘imagination’). This is purely a problem for sensibility and its aims, trying to encode or articulate this extreme sensory experience. But when it reaches its limit, this causes a catastrophic ripple on effect that stupefies the understanding and reason, and presses them into a new way of relating, other than that given by ‘good sense’ derived from ‘common sense’. In Kant’s doctrine, ‘good sense’ is sensibility providing the ground, and the understanding thinking through this ground as given with its concepts. But in the experience of the sublime, the ground rises up, topples the hierarchy, and inaugurates a new set of relations between faculties on the basis of what is, at its origin, a purely sensible problem pushed to its limits.

This, then, is to be the ‘test’. A faculty is differentiated by it having its ‘something’ that it cannot grasp directly, but can translate into a unique formal frame in its ordinary empirical exercise. But this ordinary empirical exercise, in which all of the faculties are governed by the regulative norm of their accord (common sense) and their productive and ‘proper’ relations (good sense) can obscure the uniqueness of these frames, where certain ‘results’ produced within them can be written off as mere errors by the ‘inter-faculty’ court of appeal (perception’s articulation of the visual field as happily combining contrary properties is overturned by reason). But, in the ‘transcendent exercise’ of a faculty, the court of appeal is over-turned, a single faculty rises up and reorganizes the others, offering a counter-constitution to the one spelled out in the ‘good sense’. On the basis of this possibility, and its potential actualization, we can thus feel out the differentiations between faculties, through empirical investigations. Furthermore, insofar as we’ve framed things here in analogy to sensibility, and this transcendent exercise in terms of the sublime, this ‘rising up’ occurs when the faculty reaches its limits of translation, or encoding, thus the ‘shock’ delivered to the other faculties is precisely ‘energized’ by the ‘something’, which the initial faculty concerns, overwhelming it. Thus, in the temporary reordering of the faculties, the kind of anarchic formation they are pressed into, the ‘noise of the thing-in-itself’ is acutely felt. That is, it’s in this experience where we should look for the closest possible contacts to the metaphysically ‘most’ real (or foundational); that which each faculty treats as ‘supra’ ground or ‘outside’.

This ‘general doctrine of the faculties’ that Deleuze is offering here, the ‘superior conditions’ for their identification and differentiation, takes as basic the initial absence of the common sense. In this initial moment of investigation there is no pre-judged ‘natural accord’ between the faculties conceived of as distinct, yet they are able to communicate ‘noise’ and upsets to each other when they are pushed to their limits. In this moment of free anarchic mixing, we can thus give an account of ‘good sense’ emerging as one possible ‘solution’ to this meta-problem of inter-faculty conflict. It doesn’t presuppose good sense in advance, whereby we’d merely be generating the terms from the result, but shows the wider space in which good sense would strike anyone as making ‘good sense’ in the first place, as one form of constitution governing inter-faculty relating and dispute. I’ll discuss this more below [writes promissory note], how Deleuze’s account doesn’t presuppose reason’s primacy while at the same time explains why reason’s conclusion that “the stick immersed in water is not really bent” makes good sense (‘good sense’ being good sense, under certain conditions), but to get there we need to dig deeper into this ‘general structure of a faculty’.

The ‘general structure of a faculty’ is, then, determined by a relation to a ‘something’ outside it (transcendent object) which cannot be directly grasped by the faculty but is always and everywhere rather ‘translated’ through  a formal frame.2placeholder The presence of this structure can be verified or evidenced by its ability to rise to a ‘transcendent exercise’: where its ‘something’, translated into its terms, can break both the regulative norms of common and good sense, and communicate a violence, shock or upset to the other faculties, transforming their previously established relations. In the case of the sensibility, in Kant’s doctrine, all of the terms here are given: the transcendent object is the thing in itself, the formal frame is that of space and time, the elements the faculty developes to work with are sensations, or representations generally, the relation of the faculty to the others is of empirical ground, or raw material, the transcendent exercise is whatever is going on in the experience of the sublime. But what happens to all of these when we generalize this structure, especially considering the potential novel faculties that Deleuze gestures towards (for example, language, or sociability)? The ‘formal frame’ of the faculty of language cannot be a spatio-temporal ordering, because that belongs to sensibility. It would need to have a unique frame, in order to be a unique faculty, and thus have its own a priori, and thus its own science corresponding to geometry, and its own transcendent exercise corresponding to the sublime. How to make sense of this?

Deleuze, Problem-Ideas, Evolution

In the opening of the following chapter of Difference of Repetition, Deleuze immediately articulates for us how to think of these ‘transcendent objects’ that the faculties are directed towards: Ideas-Problems (or ‘problematic Ideas’, though this more grammatical formulation implies there are non-problematic Ideas in addition, whereas Deleuze stresses the identity of Ideas and Problems). I have written previously on Deleuze’s notion of the problem-idea, so I will skip over how and why and to what ends he makes the identification of Ideas and problems, and speak exclusively of problems. This means we can say something like this: a catalogue of transcendent objects is also thereby a catalogue of a) faculties oriented towards these objects (one for each) and b) a catalogue of fundamental problems. Such a catalogue would not list all of the possible fundamental problems, but it would list all of our ways of grasping and articulating fundamental problems. In fact, if we speak of fundamental problems in the plural, it is perhaps only because we are always dealing with a multi-faculty situation, where for example the fundamental problem of language, from the point of view of language, differs from the fundamental problem of perception, from the point of view of perception. In fact, these may just be two ‘orders’ of a problem. Or perhaps not. We would need to pay attention to specific cases, nothing judged in advance.

I mention the ‘fundamental problem of perception’, and this is something we can review at once if we identify the ‘something’ that sensibility cannot grasp but can translate into its formal frame as closely tied to this ‘fundamental problem of perception’. But we need a high degree of precision here to locate the position of the problem in the Kantian notion of sensibility (which will also be true for all of the other faculties we may want to identify). As we’ve said before, the ‘something’ that sensibility senses is supra-sensible; it is not composed of sensation, nor is it organized spatio-temporally – sensibility provides both of these things. But, it is also true that it can be organized in the terms of sensation, when these sensations are themselves organized spatio-temporally – this is because, for example, how the central nervous system works, but also perhaps why there are central nervous systems to begin with (i.e., a system developed within organisms that responds to that within the ‘something’ that is amenable to being translated into the kinds of spatio-temporal orderings developed by this system). That is, the world can appear as a spatio-temporal organization of sensations to beings like us, because, if we wish to put it this way, of how the central-nervous system is structured, how it works. But also: that there are central nervous systems structured and working in this way speaks to how the world can be successfully thought of as a spatio-temporal ordering of sensations. That’s one way it can be encoded or articulated or translated. Thus, because of our work before going through the Kantian structure, we can say that the fundamental problem of perception is how to organize this ‘something’ into a spatio-temporally organized field of sensation.

Notice here in this phrasing that the spatio-temporal organization (the ‘formal frame of the faculty’) is seemingly already given, but only half-so. Once we have central nervous systems, they constantly solve this fundamental problem of perception (how to interpret, encode, etc, the world into a spatio-temporally organized series of perceptions). On the one hand this faculty, this system, constitutes the ‘solution space’ in which the problem is posed (how to organize the ‘something’ into sensations under these constraints/within this (spatio-temporal) system of organization) yet on the other hand the deployment of this solution space, the significance of the problems we can pose within it, and the coherence of the ongoing series of solutions (empirical experience) answers to the ‘something’, in particular that ‘part’ of it that can be organized in such a way. This itself resembles a response or solution, to a something within this something. This is all to say that, to continue our talk in terms of central nervous systems (which is admittedly only semi-accurate), that this system itself is a solution to a problem, prior to the problems and solutions that its existence makes possible to entertain. Thus we are dealing with two moments or levels: the evolution of a faculty answers to a fundamental problem (how to encode that ‘something’ into a useful frame, composed of useful terms), but, now, that faculty being given, we can now talk of new problems that can be phrased in the frame and the terms of that faculty. Specific empirical problems and solutions working off a transcendental solution to a transcendent problem.

The story is like this: the organism poses a problem: how to think this world? The evolution of a central nervous system provides a solution: as a spatio-temporally organized series of sensations! That solution being in place, new problems are now thinkable and poseable: “Wtf is that over there?”, “how to move faster than that thing?”, “how to remain hidden in this space?” etc. Again, this talk of central nervous systems is only semi-accurate, for complicated reasons (if you know you know3placeholder), but it does make tractable this important interplay between the transcendental solution to fundamental problems (build a faculty), and how this new faculty allows the posing and solving of new, empirical problems that can not even exist prior to the faculty, and the forms and terms it inaugurates. Whether or not the empirical problems and solutions have any significance (in our current example, significant in assisting the organism) is wholly a function of the initial solution to the fundamental problem; the establishment of a faculty, and the transcendental construction of a ‘world’ from the ‘something’ that lies beyond the faculty. This initial, fundamental, problem-solution couplet is not thinkable from the point of view of a given faculty. For example, we can think here of how we can’t ‘see’ why vision is a fine way to interpret the world, because vision itself, and the seeing it makes possible, is a solution to the problem, here posed for the evolving organism, ‘what fine ways are there to interpret the world?’

This might lead us to a dangerous arbitrariness regarding the fundamental problems: it doesn’t matter how we interpret the world, through what frame and terms we inaugurate for this purpose. All that matters is how we resolve the problems we are now given, given the frames and terms of the faculties we find. Any combination will do. So, for Kant, the issue is if all of our empirical knowledge is just relative to our sensibility, then potentially we have nothing to offer in regards to knowledge to some alien species we might encounter. The spatio-temporal ordering is just an arbitrary human construction, good for humans, but not for beings who initially answered that fundamental problem (how to interpret, encode, translate, articulate, etc, the world) in a different way. This is to say, these fundamental problems risk becoming deeply irrelevant; devoid of significance, and, as Kant warned us, unthinkable, because they concern necessarily what happens prior to or outside of a given faculty.

But, to return to our point above concerning computers, it’s just not true that the spatio-temporal translation of the thing-in-itself is an arbitrary hallucination on our part, while at the same time it’s not true that it’s not a mere hallucination because there are some spatio-temporal ‘grains’ within the thing in itself. Neither are true. The 1s and 0s of a computer do answer to potentials within flows of electrons, but there are no 1s and 0s in a stream of electrons. A stream of 1s and 0s is instead a ‘fine way of interpreting’ a stream of electrons given the abstract structure of a computer. Likewise, the spatio-temporal translation of the thing-in-itself is a fine solution to the problem of the thing-in-itself for a subject.

But it’s not the only one. For example, reason also represents a general solution, a set of terms and a ‘space’ in which  specific (to it) problems can be posed and solved. We’ve known this since Plato: the argument concerning the ‘summoners’, the contradictory perceptions affirms it: perception gives one solution (the skyscraper on the horizon is both big and small) and reason gives another (it is a determinate size) in line with its formal frame (one that will include, or have as a fundamental derivation from this frame, the principle of the excluded middle). Inter-faculty conflict then becomes a product of the incommensurability of solutions, owing to the incommensurability of even the most general solutions to the most general problem posed by the world for the subject: what forms can be related together to provide a general framework of translation of the something within which we are embedded, how to ‘think’ the world? Looking, then, at these general solution spaces, their emergence in a history that may even precede temporal organization, we, in our case, are turned over to evolution. The twist is that we need to consider evolution not as a process acting on organisms distributed as so much matter in a space-time manifold, because that is merely how the world appears to some of these organisms, owing to the forces of evolution. Instead we need to think the evolution of these organisms as being co-present with an ongoing articulation of the world in this or that frame, composed of these or those elements. A proto-spatio-temporal organization carves out a view onto the world, in which organisms can live out their fates, and develop ever more detailed, robust, interpretations in terms of spaces and times. Space and time, and all of the other formal frames of the faculties that constitute the human subject, evolve in degrees in an ongoing negotiation/resolution/articulation of the ‘something’ that lies beyond every faculty…

To pull away from this reflexive abyss, we can just extract the point that the existence of a faculty is already a solution to a problem, and, then, that problem receiving its solution by the existence of the faculty is an ongoing affair. The faculty, now there, then inaugurates a new space within which problems can be posed and solved. We can characterize the initial solution as being ‘transcendent’, with the ability of this faculty to now pose problems in its terms and develop solutions in those terms, we can characterize as ‘empirical’. But these two ‘levels’ of solution are always inter-related. The poverty of a solution space is determined by how well the problems and empirical solutions poseable within it answer to the more fundamental problem the transcendental solution space was developed in response to, but this is not easy to see in the moment. If the problem posed by the thing-in-itself to the subject, which we can loosely characterize as the problem posed by the environment to the organism, was poorly solved by conceiving of the world as a spatio-temporally organized system within which sensations were arranged, allowing these organisms to thus, then, pose problems like “wtf is that?” or “why does this happen over there after every time this happens over here?” then the notion of the spatio-temporal organization of the world would be on the shaky footing: the empirical problems may well be solvable, but be devoid of significance. Organisms solving space-time problems when what they are immersed in is poorly thought of as being spatial or temporal are destined for the dust bin of history. We sit here, in time and space, because it’s not the case that conceiving of what we are immersed in is poorly thought of in terms of a spatio-temporal translation, encoding, or articulation.

Exploring the Faculty of Sociability

Let’s make this all a bit clearer by exploring an example beyond sensibility. Deleuze a number of times considers a faculty of ‘sociability’. In line with above, this would mean that our sociability has a formal frame, which allows for the posing of unique problems, in unique terms. Furthermore, given the way this frame translates the ‘something’ beyond it, its own transcendent object, it is possible for it to be pushed to a limit in trying to grasp it, and thereby communicate a violence across the faculties, instigating a new order.  First let’s consider the formal frame: from the point of view of the faculty of sociability, the world can be translated into a ‘social space’, this is, apparently, a fine way of translating the ‘something’, just the same as sensibility’s translation in terms of geometrical space and time. But here this social space is not geometrical, and it is not populated by clusters of sensations or empirical intuitions, but instead would be populated by persons. The space within which these persons are represented by the faculty is thus constituted by their relating together (in all the possible forms we can think of humans relating, whence the ‘social space’ as derived or structured by these relations). This would make the faculty of sociability articulate or encode the world in a manner correlative to Heidegger’s being-with as core structure of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Accordingly, as subjects, it’s not just the case that the world is presented to us as a spatio-temporal manifold populated by empirical objects, it’s also that simultaneously the world is presented to us as a series of relations with and between persons.4placeholder It hopefully doesn’t need too much work here to see that the world presented in this way, with these terms (and everything we can derive from them) is a rich space for the endless posing of myriad problems. From the interpersonal to the widespread social-political, that we inhabit a world that, on one level, is translated into a ‘space’ populated not by bits of matter but by persons, provides endless problematics. The faculty of sociability solves them in an ongoing manner, though; each solution being a social, political or interpersonal constellation: the empirical solutions being a “here, here is way of relating all of these persons in a stable-enough manner”. There is a common and good sense here too. Talk of the relations between persons is never far from these problematics being handed over to faculties who translate them to their own terms: reason, thought, experience, memory, language. In fact it is what I am doing right now when I speak of a ‘space constituted by the relations between persons’: this is a markedly rational, atomized, and geometric way of characterizing this faculty (not to mention liberal-democratic!), and should not be taken as entirely accurate. It’s how the empirical solutions of the faculty are surveyed by (perhaps historically contingent) reason once it has taken it up as material. A system of laws, an economy, the accumulated customs and mores of a culture; so much good sense. But, for the faculty to constitute a veritable faculty, it would need to be possible that it could transmit its transcendental limits as a shock to reason, habit, memory, language, and so on. Deleuze identifies this limit of the faculty of sociability as anarchy or freedom.

“Sociability, the transcendent object of which would include anarchy…” (Deleuze, 2011, p.181)

“Take the social multiplicity: it determines sociability as a faculty, but also the transcendent object of sociability which cannot be lived within actual societies in which the multiplicity is incarnate but must be and can be lived only in the element of social upheaval (in other words, freedom, which is always hidden among the remains of an old order and the first fruits of a new).” (ibid, p.242-243)

Why anarchy? The point seems to be this: under the regime of good sense, the problem of how we are to relate to one another is made tractable and resolved largely under the direction of other faculties, for whom this problem is non-critical insofar as for them, and their terms, it is seemingly tractable. We develop an ethics, an etiquette, a system of rules, mores, regularities of habit, that ‘resolves’ the problematic edge of the problem of sociability itself. But such rational (or memory-habitual, or linguistic, etc) solutions don’t answer to the problems posed by sociability, considered from its own perspective. Instead, the problem raised to its highest degree is how for us to relate directly as ‘persons’, these entities that the formal frame of sociability makes possible, not as citizens, or moral agents, or members of an explicit association (or whatever terms the other faculties coat the elements of sociability in to make its problem more tractable). That is, under the guidance of other faculties, in a pre-established inter-faculty collaboration, the problems posed by sociability can receive empirical solutions, but it’s as though sociability wonders if these problems can be solved spontaneously and immediately, right where they are. This would be an image of our relating together that follows no rational law, ethic, code, or custom; a pure spontaneous association, and one that doesn’t avail itself of the rational concept of identity across persons (the way ‘citizen’ is said of everyone at once), but, rather, captures them as sociability presents them: as always being unique, and singular. That is, a pure anarchy of relating, where every social bond is inherently singular and novel, and overarching rational considerations are all suspended, even habit and memory. This is the limit point of the faculty of sociability, that which only it can grasp, but is ungraspable from the point of view of its empirical exercise: the spontaneous, anarchic form of relating is not a form of relating at all, it’s not a stable solution, but exists as transcendental horizon of all possible stable empirical solutions. From the point of view of common sense (the requirements of all the faculties being taken into account) it is worse than empirically impossible, it is unthinkable: ‘how can I relate to a specific other directly, without the contribution of at least memory, the habits formed from our past relating? Sure, it would be a spontaneous, immediate and free relating, but it’s not a meaningful solution to the problem of how I am to relate to this other in a meaningful, that is common sense, way.’ Thus it’s telling that Deleuze identifies the corresponding transcendental exercise therefore as operating within social upheaval, but I don’t see the reason why we can’t also see this transcendent exercise of the faculty at its limits (that corresponds to sensibility’s experience of the sublime) as the madness of intense love for an other. At the risk of sounding overly sentimental, isn’t it right there in the madness of new love where law, custom, memory, and potentially even desire, are all suspended for a moment, lost in the gaze of this other; that which poets and song-writers have developed entire libraries attempting to articulate? And, if not, then, sorry, but what are you doing?

Thus, to return, when we think of the social body, we can conceive of it as a system of laws and institutions, and these laws and institutions can then be seen as constitutive of citizens. If this was all there was, human society would be as peaceful, and tractable, and manipulable as SimCity. Everything would be explicit, rationally intelligible, and coded multiple times over. If we had no faculty of sociability, if it wasn’t the case that the world presented itself fundamentally as being populated by persons distributed in a ‘social space’, then we could probably accept the notion that, when it came to our relating, we were merely citizens, constituted by laws and institutions. Chances are, without the faculty, constituting a society would be senseless (‘society’ as an object would be unthinkable, a term without a home or metric), but, nevertheless, seeing ourselves as citizens constituted by legal codes and institutions represents one ‘good sense’ ongoing solution to a problem. What problem? The one that is only originally poseable within the formal frame of sociability, where persons are constituted by this frame, and the problem concerns how are they to relate: to wit ‘how are we to live together?’ But, again, we should be wary of this formulation of the problem as ‘how are we to live together?’ because the formulation has already made the problem appear tractable through other means than the ones open to sociability from its own perspective: the problem of sociability is, instead, solved only through living together and relating, not by providing a rational or linguistic formulation of the problem, and resolving it from there, come what may. Within the paradigm of good sense we can’t do much else (that is, we seemingly can’t begin to think about the problem without first conceptualizing it into rationally tractable terms), but any linguistic, rational, poetic, economic, or legal or so on solution to this problem is going to be ever so slightly orthogonal, ever so slightly out of joint, or ever so slightly poorly posed. We fall back to this or that good sense, this or that established way of trading problems between faculties, making them more or less tractable in the terms and spaces constituted by those differing faculties. However, the problem persists right where it is, hence the endless problematization that our attempted rational formulations can receive,5placeholder and the problem reserves the potential, when conditions are right, to press its native faculty, sociability, to its transcendent exercise, inaugurating new forms of relating between the faculties, new constitutions, new adventures of thought, and, here, new values, politics, new forms of friendship and enmity.

On The Emergence of ‘Good Sense’

Now, to cash out the promissory note above, this ‘persistence in the origin of a genuine fundamental problem which is resolved merely by translating it into the terms and space of another faculty’ needs to be distinguished from those misrecognition cases which were marshalled to demonstrate good sense in the first place. When perception, say, reveals the world as having contrary empirical properties instantiated in a single object, and reason rises up in outrage to assert its superior rights in the epistemic project of understanding the world, the dynamic of the ‘summoner’ described by Plato, we should pay attention to where the problem is here. Evidently, contrary empirical properties do not constitute a problem for perception, because it happily makes use of them in its particular solutions to the ongoing perceptual problem. That is, there is no perceptual contradiction with the skyscraper on the horizon appearing both big and small. That’s a perfectly fine way to resolve its size.6placeholder It’s when this perceptual object, the big-small building, is delivered over to reason (in line with the common sense, the sharing of objects between faculties and their mutual collaboration) it runs afoul of the ‘space’ of concepts governed by the excluded middle. ‘Big’ and ‘small’ are perceptual properties, reason has no stock with them specifically, but to think the building as an object in general, bearing properties in general, these perceptual properties are translated into just ‘contradictory properties in general’. Reason chokes on this, and in line with the collaboration outlined by common sense asserts a ‘good sense’ in which it is to dominate. But, we can reply to Plato here, Descartes as well, that this outcome seems prejudged in advance. How else does it become so ‘intuitive’ that in the case of contrary perceptions, reason is judged as superior? After all, it is reason that fails here. We can point to perception’s ability to negotiate and integrate contradiction seamlessly as justification for its being given the superior position. That is to say, when two faculties produce two solutions that contradict, more is needed to tip the scales if we want to establish a ‘good sense’ that would have us favour one’s formal frame and terms and ways of working over the other by principle.

And perhaps we’re now in a position to explore how this scale tipping might work. The fundamental problems of perception and reason are different, if they are to be two distinct faculties at all. Both develop themselves in terms of a frame or framework which itself is a response, or solution, posed by the world, or the ‘something’ that lies beyond them. The world can be perceived as a space-time manifold, populated with sensations, it can also be thought of as a rational structure approximated by the play of concepts, as well as lived through a cluster of relations between persons, and so on. This heterogenous structuration forms a series of solutions, evolved, developed, and ongoing. There is an affinity between these broad, transcendental solutions, insofar as they represent ‘local’ solutions to a global or universal problem, or set of problems (at this ‘level’, individuation becomes hopelessly difficult, because individuation always brings us back to the terms and space of this or that faculty). These affinities form the condition of possibility for there to be a common sense in the first place, for a single object to be recognized across the fields established by different faculties. A word is a sound too, a person is an object as well. Good sense, the ‘proper’ forms of collaboration between the faculties, answers to more specific problems: problems posed by this or that faculty. If reason, in its aims and projects, resolving the problems it poses within itself with its terms within its framework, is offended by contradictory properties, it asserts its rights in relation to its problem in this instance: it asks perception to take another look to help it out with something it is working on, that interest it. This makes sense, and mirrors somewhat the transcendent exercise: here, what presses thought to think, as Plato hoped to articulate. But we shouldn’t thereby fall into the trap of believing in a universal ‘good sense’, like Plato and Descartes, where reason’s problems and requirements on its solutions always and everywhere gain primacy. This is not a healthy constitution. Relative to the faculties and their problems, we would have myriad good senses, and many in which reason needs to play a subordinate role, or perhaps even ideally sit out entirely. But to determine where these instances are, which adaptation of the collaboration between faculties is required, is something that can only be established on a problem by problem basis, tracing their development as they are translated between faculties. Often we think a solution to a problem may need us to alternate the terms it is posed in, and often this is true, but there are more radical alterations we can make: by tracing the origins of a problem as it has moved through the faculties, we move between radically different solution-spaces, ruled over by different transcendental horizons, translating perhaps the same arc of the world now conceived as fundamentally a problem, one which is given a unique solution by each veritable (verified through the possibility of its transcendent exercise) faculty…