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Throughout, Boucher’s analysis is concise and self-assured. While this

does give engaging tone, pace, and sweep to the book, it also has certain
pitfalls. Occasionally it is a little difficult to identify the nuances of the line of
argument being defended, greater textual evidence (both in terms of quotation
and referencing) would have helped to establish certain claims, and aspects of
Boucher’s case could have been strengthened by explicitly identifying and
rebutting alternative readings in a little greater depth. Yet, such problems
seem almost inevitable with a work of this scale, and given the generally
prohibitive economics of the alternative, multi-volume works. There was a
choice to be made regarding what to include and just as much would have
been lost as gained if Boucher had tried to include more in this already very
long book. Moreover, it is important to note that these problems diminish as
the work progresses and Boucher moves into the modern period. Ultimately,
these concerns are more than offset by the very great strengths of Boucher’s
book. The Limits of Ethics in International Relations is a remarkable book
that develops an ambitious, intelligent, well-informed, and original argument
on a topic of fundamental contemporary importance.
Colin Tyler
University of Hull
email: C.Tyler@hull.ac.uk

Beth Lord, Kant and Spinoza: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from
Jacobi to Deleuze
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
Pp. 214, hbk
ISBN: 978-0-230-55297-5; £55-00
doi:10.1017/S1369415411000264

Immanence, in an ontological context, is the thesis that the cause or ground of

nature and all of its diverse phenomena is (in some sense) internal to nature.
Spinoza’s work is of interest in this context because, through his innovative use
of the substance/mode distinction, it provides the theoretical articulation of a
nontranscendent explanatory relation between the multiplicity of natural phe-
nomena and their ‘immanent’ – that is, internal – cause. In her book, Beth Lord
argues, however, that by examining the theme of ‘immanence’ in the work of
Kant and Spinoza – as reflected in the interpretations of F. H. Jacobi, J. G.
Herder, Salomon Maimon, and Gilles Deleuze – ‘a line of critical self-reflection
concerning transcendental philosophy itself’ is subsequently made explicit (p. 1).
In her Introduction, Lord provides some historical context and a
helpful overview of Spinoza’s ontology. In Spinoza’s monistic ontology there

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is exactly one infinite substance, while the multitude of finite things in nature –
mere ontological extensions of this one substance – is characterized as its
numerous modes. In chapter 1, Lord discusses Jacobi’s reading of Spinoza and
locates his use of the latter’s key substance/mode distinction within the context
of Kant’s transcendental idealism. In this Kant-internal framework, Jacobi’s
interest in a Spinozistic ontology appears to derive mainly from his interest in
closing an epistemic gap opened by Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction,
thereby rescuing Kant’s system from an alleged ‘nihilism’. In chapter 2, Lord
reports on the (largely negative) historical reactions to Spinoza’s dogmatism –
according to which atheism and fatalism are the unavoidable implications of
Spinoza’s ontological monism – and she further elaborates on how Spinoza’s
ontology was viewed as a threat to moral freedom.
In chapters 3 and 4, the predominating issue is how to adequately
explain the phenomenon of natural organisms (natural teleology). In
chapter 3, Lord discusses Herder’s vitalist reading of Spinoza – a reading
which is intended to make Spinoza’s thought compatible with Christian
theism and moral freedom. Under Herder’s reading, Spinoza’s one infinite
substance is retooled as an ‘organic force’ – the efficient cause of nature and
all of its diversity. Here Lord discusses the issue whether a reconceptuali-
zation of the one infinite substance both as a ‘field of forces’ and as the
subject of the traditional magazine of divine attributes (for example,
intelligence, wisdom, intention) is conceptually coherent.
In chapter 4, Lord discusses Herder’s ‘teleological naturalism’ – a view
that incorporates the vitalist reading of Spinoza developed in chapter 3 –
and shows (convincingly, I think) that Kant believed Spinoza’s ontology,
whether under a revisionist interpretation such as Herder’s or under a more
historically accurate reading such as Jacobi’s, to be both theoretically
inadequate to explain natural teleology and incompatible with the physico-
teleology developed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.
Whereas in chapters 1–4 the theme of immanence is pursued largely in an
ontological context, in chapters 5–7 – where the book really picks up steam –
this theme is pursued in a more epistemological context. In chapter 5, Lord
presents her reconstruction of Maimon’s work on Kant. Under Lord’s reading,
‘Maimon’s project is an attempt to push transcendental philosophy further,
until it discovers the rationalist structure within which alone Kantianism is
credible’ (p. 108). Maimon’s aim is to rescue Kant’s transcendental idealism
from certain problems through the use of Spinozism. The resulting doctrine –
‘Spinozistic idealism’ – maps Spinoza’s key distinction between a substance and
its modes over transcendental idealism’s distinction between appearance and
reality. Under this mapping, reality is the one substance – the infinite mind –
while appearance is equivalent to its many finite modes. The one substance is
real; the modes are ideal (here meaning ‘mental’).

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According to Lord, Maimon’s interest in Spinoza’s work is largely

motivated by a concern to defend Kant against sceptical worries directed at
the general structure of Kant’s transcendental deduction.

1) If experience consists in a necessary and lawlike connection

among our representations, then (and only then) are we entitled to
posit a set of a priori ‘conditions of the possibility of experience’.
2) Experience – as a necessary and lawlike connection among our
representations – is a datum.
3) So there must (‘must’ of necessary hypothesis) be a set of
a priori possibility-conditions that determine experience.

According to Lord, Maimon thinks that Kant needs to defend (2) from
sceptical worries. The problem is that Kant never shows that experience is
in fact a series of necessarily connected representations; therefore, Kant is
not entitled to infer a model of the mind’s deep-structure according to
which the (putative) datum of norm-governed experience is to be under-
written by a shortlist of a priori transcendental conditions (the categories of
the understanding). In other words, unless we can shore up sceptical doubts
about (2), we are not inferentially entitled to (3).
How should we link this problem to Maimon’s Kant-internal use of
Spinoza? What is to be gained theoretically by using Spinozistic innovations
in a Kant-internal framework? Specifically, what problem within Kant’s
representational theory of mind could stand to gain anything by importing
Spinoza-like elements into it? Before we can get a better grip on how to
answer that question, we need to have a better grasp of what the problem is.
The source of the trouble, according to Lord, appears to be the formal
(formalist) apparatus of Kant’s epistemology. According to Lord, Maimon’s
criticism of Kant is that ‘there remains a gulf between sense intuitions, which
are disparate and contingent, and pure concepts of the understanding, which
are universal and necessary’ (p. 113). Kant’s modular model of the mind is
one under which there are multiple ‘faculties’ – for example, sensibility and
understanding – that function concurrently in empirical cognition. Kant
distinguishes between concepts and intuitions; concepts are the business of
the understanding; intuitions – or, to borrow Jay Rosenberg’s term, intuiteds1
– are the business of sensibility. And since the relation between concept and
intuited is that of the universal to the particular, the implication is that sen-
sibility’s job is to perform a specificatory function vis-à-vis the understanding’s
general concepts. In the context of empirical cognition the understanding
provides a set of a priori representational norms – the categories – while
sensibility provides the perceptually given exemplars or instances of those
general norms.

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A consistent theme running through chapters 4–7, but centrally in

Lord’s discussions of Maimon and Deleuze, is the problem of discursive
‘contingency’ – that is, the underdetermination that marks (or afflicts) the
relation between concepts and their instances. In spite of its apparently
central importance to Maimon and Deleuze’s readings of Kant, the problem
of discursive contingency is not made explicit in Lord’s discussion. The idea
of conceptual determination seems to contain two operative notions – first,
the idea of necessity and, second, the idea of specification. Conceptual
specification entails the possibility of multiple instantiation, which, in turn,
requires that the members of a concept’s extension be marked by two
characteristics: ‘homogeneity’ and ‘heterogeneity’. All members of a con-
cept’s extension must be homogeneous in that they must be relevantly
similar to – or, ‘the same as’ – the concept of which they are instances. But
for a concept to be multiply instantiable, its members must also be sufficiently
distinct – that is, heterogeneous – from each other if they are to count as
different instances of the same concept.
Now those properties in virtue of which two or more members of a
concept’s extension are distinct from each other cannot be homogeneous with
(or stand in a sameness relation to) the concept of which they are instances. If
this were the case, a concept would evidently have to forfeit its generality. For
if a concept contained (in its intension) the heterogeneous characteristics in
virtue of which one member, x, is distinct from another, y, then its sameness
relation to x would preclude it from also standing in a sameness relation to y.
It may be for this reason that in the Jäsche Logic Kant describes the relation
between a concept’s intension and extension as an inverse relation; the
broader a concept’s extension, the less is included in its intension; alternately,
the more inclusive a concept’s intension, the narrower is its extension.2
Conceptual specification would therefore appear to be at odds with
conceptual determination. If a concept can determine, in the sense of
necessitate, only what can legitimately be analytically specified from it, then
it would appear that sensible objects cannot be conceptually determined.
Invariably it is going to be the case that the members of a concept’s
extension are going to possess subsets of (heterogeneous) features that do
not stand in a sameness relation to the concept of which they are (putative)
instances. So these features will not be conceptually determined. And to the
extent that a thing cannot be ‘what it is’ without this subset of ‘alien’
features, its possibility and existence will (to that extent) fail to be under-
written by its concept. Since every intuited, as a singular thing, must have
heterogeneous properties and since presumably at least some of these
properties will contribute nontrivially to what it is, the inevitable mismatch
between concept and instance would appear to pose a serious problem for
Kant’s epistemology.

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Conceptual underdetermination poses a legitimate threat to Kant’s pro-

ject, since in the framework of transcendental idealism it is a set of a priori
hypergeneral concepts that are supposed to determine our experience of
objects. What (in Maimon’s view) does Kantianism stand to gain from Spi-
nozistic idealism? Answer: a theory of immanence. In the context of dogmatic
metaphysics (as in Herder’s reading of Spinoza), a theory of immanence asserts
that the cause or ground of nature is internal to nature – a Spinozistic thesis
historically construed as pantheism. Under Spinoza’s substance/mode distinc-
tion, finite minds, being merely modes, are ontological extensions of one
infinite mind. In an epistemological context, a theory of immanence seems to
be a theory of the relation between determinable and determinate content; it
co-opts Spinoza’s substance/mode distinction in order to explain (or, at any
rate, explicate) the determinate content of empirical cognition as the expres-
sion of an infinite understanding’s (indeterminate) ideas.
According to Lord, Maimon thinks Kantianism can survive only within
the framework of rationalism (p. 123). What this seems to mean is that
Maimon’s model of the understanding comes equipped with ‘ideas’, ones
that contain (what Maimon calls) ‘differentials’. Lord’s detailed discussion
of Maimon’s notion of differentials cannot be pursued here. Suffice it to say,
Maimon’s differentials appear to have both Leibnizian and Kantian features.
Like Leibniz’s ‘complete concept of a thing’, differentials contain all there is to
know about a given thing – both matter-of-factual and counterfactual prop-
erties. Maimon’s ‘ideas of the understanding’ are Kantian in that, functionally
speaking, the epistemic role they play – in providing a rule for representation –
is similar to that of the categories within the framework of transcendental
psychology. However, Maimon’s ideas (differentials) are not at all hyper-
abstract content-bearing entities in the way the pure categories of the
understanding are. Rather a differential appears to be a fixed yet inten-
sionally rich content-bearer – a rule that determines all possible (sensible)
predicates of a thing, both relational and nonrelational.
Under a Kantian model of empirical cognition, human representational
systems bring to bear certain formal cognitive structures on ‘the deliver-
ances of the senses’. Under this model, sensible content – the perceptually
given – is received from some external source, whereas certain a priori formal
structures, ones that are constitutive of the human mind, are imposed on those
given materials. By contrast, the key Spinozistic innovation of Maimon’s is
this: Instead of the understanding bringing merely a formal cognitive structure
to bear on perceptually given materials, the (finite) understanding, being a
mode of the infinite mind, actually generates the ‘matter’ of sensation – that is,
the determinacy of empirical cognition – from its ideas (or differentials). The
philosophical payoff of using Spinoza to revise Kant is apparently the prospect
of closing the yawning gap between the certain formal cognitive structures

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(as represented by the categories of the understanding) and the actual

sensible content of empirical intuition.
In chapter 6, Lord pursues the theme of immanence in the work of
Gilles Deleuze. Like Maimon, Deleuze is concerned to close the discursive
gap between concept and instance, category and sensible intuition, thought
and being. Lord reads Deleuze’s ‘transcendental empiricism’ as a Maimo-
nian response to Kant’s transcendental idealism. Deleuze co-opts Maimon’s
criticism of (what might be termed) Kant’s epistemological formalism.
Like Maimon, Deleuze also thinks that Kant’s transcendental idealism
is largely responsible for the yawning gap between concept and instance
(category and intuited), thought and being. Kant cannot account for the
‘depth’ of appearances because transcendental idealism captures only the
conditions of possible experience, not the conditions of real experience.
‘Kant cannot account for the being of the sensible’ (p. 131). So a trans-
cendental empiricism is presumably a theory that states the necessary and
sufficient conditions, not for the formal structures characterizing empirical
cognition but rather for the determinate content of discursive representa-
tion – that dimension of empirical cognition that, under transcendental
idealism, is outsourced to our perceptual capacities (sensibility).
According to Deleuze, Kant’s approach is ‘too empirical’. Under an
empiricist model of cognition, data are passively received from a source that is
external to the mind. Within the theoretical framework of Kant’s epistemo-
logical formalism, only an ‘external’ mode of conceptual determination is
available, one whereby certain formal cognitive structures are used as an
explanatory apparatus to ground the identity and individuation of sensible
objects. But neither a set of hypergeneral categorial concepts (for example,
substance, cause, etc.) nor the purely formal properties of geometry (for
example, a bounded region of three-dimensional space) nor a general meta-
physics of extended matter is sufficient to determine a thing’s sortal properties
– that is, the kind of thing it is. And since we encounter a vast multitude of
diverse kinds of thing in empirical cognition, it would seem Kant’s formalism,
whether discursive or intuitional, is explanatorily inadequate. What is appar-
ently needed, then, is a theory of ‘immanent virtual multiplicity’.
Deleuze’s solution – transcendental empiricism – must therefore offer an
internal (not exclusively external) means of object-determination. Here it
appears Deleuze borrows heavily from Maimon in that he co-opts Maimonian
ideas or ‘differentials’, which, functionally speaking, perform much the same
theoretical role for Deleuze as they do for Maimon – namely, that of closing
the discursive gap; however, whereas for Maimon differentials are conceived as
fixed rules for the representation (or actualization) of real objects, Deleuze
conceives ideas in less static terms, namely, as ‘the internally determining
conditions that produce intensive real objects that differ in kind’ (p. 137).

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According to Deleuze, transcendental empiricism qualifies as a

‘superior empiricism’ because, supposing it true, the mind would possess
the internal resources needed to endow its cognitions with determinacy
without having to receive data from a source external to it. However, the
alleged superiority of Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism requires an
ancillary Spinoza-like metaphysics – ‘an alternative model of immanent
self-differentiation’ (p. 153). Under this model, one that Deleuze claims is
implicit in Kant’s theory of the transcendental subject, Being objectifies
itself for the sake of providing – through its expressive activity – its own
determinate intentional object. In doing so, Being creates the difference
between thought and being and ‘in this difference lies its power – its power
to immanently generate the real’ (p. 153).
In chapter 7, Lord pursues the theme of immanence in Kant’s Opus Pos-
tumum, and argues that, while Kant’s conception of ether performs a theoretical
role similar to that of Maimon’s ‘ideas of the understanding’ in that the former,
like the latter, functions as a ‘material principle constitutive of experience’ (p.
159), the conceptual framework of Kant’s transcendental idealism nevertheless
remains non-Spinozistic in several important respects – one being that Kant
upholds the ontological distinctions between God, self, and world.
Although I found her discussion of Deleuze to be (at times) impene-
trably opaque, Lord does a convincing job of showing that a concern with
immanence (although variously articulated) is indeed an identifiable and
philosophically interesting theme in the work of Kant and Spinoza and their
interpreters. Indeed, when reading Lord’s book (especially chapters 4–6),
one may link her historical discussions on the relation between thought and
being to contemporary concerns in the philosophy of language over the
theoretical feasibility of a formalist semantics.3

Michael Fletcher
University of California, Santa Barbara
email: fletcher@nmail.usb.edu

Notes
1
See Rosenberg (2005). One may prefer ‘intuitum’ (sg.) or ‘intuita’ (pl.).
2
y7, first section: Of Concepts, General Doctrine of Elements (Kant 2004).
3
See, for instance, Borg (2007).

References
Borg, Emma (2007) Minimal Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kant, Immanuel (2004) Lectures on Logic (The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Works
of Immanuel Kant). Ed. J. Michael Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rosenberg, Jay F. (2005) Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure
Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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