stankovic, sasa thesis.pdf - Atrium - University of Guelph

“The entire Kantian critique amounts to objecting against Descartes that it is impossible
for determination to bear directly upon the undetermined. The determination (‘I think’)
obviously implies something undetermined (‘I am’), but nothing so far tells us how it is that this
undetermined is determinable by the ‘I think’” (DR 85-6). Thought does not imply the existence
of the Cogito. However, it does imply the existence of some kind of self. In the Critique of Pure
Reason Kant argues that “the I think expresses the act of determining my existence. The
existence is thereby already given, but the way in which I am to determine it, i.e., the manifold
that I am to posit in myself as belong to it, is not yet thereby given” (CPR B157). This point is
fundamental. What this self is, depends on what form the relationship between it and thought
takes. In other words, we can only recognize what kind of self lies at the bottom of thought if we
recognize the form that its relationship takes to thought. What is this relationship? Deleuze
argues that there has to be a way in which thought relates to the self. “Kant therefore adds a third
logical value: the determinable or rather the form in which the undetermined is determinable (by
the determination)” (DR 86). If there was no way that thought related to the self, Kant would
have to fall back into talking about the Cogito, in other words, about the identity of thought and
self. Deleuze would have to fall back into talking about thinking as the demonstration of
spontaneity. On the other hand, Deleuze argues, for Kant thought relates to the self in terms of
something determinable. This is an interesting point. Even though Kant does not begin with
Cogito, he does begin with thought. And it is this thought that relates to the self in terms of
something determinable. Deleuze argues that this determinable for Kant is time. “Kant’s answer
is well known: the form under which undetermined existence is determinable by the ‘I think’ is
that of time...” (DR 86). Deleuze claims that for Kant thought relates to the self in terms of time.
What does this mean? There is thought; there is time; and there is the self. That the determination
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