All my life, I’ve used the word reason without knowing its meaning.

But recently I’ve been taking an interest in Deleuze’s concern with the Kantian notion of interest. Deleuze understands Kant by looking at the interests of the faculties; or, rather, he understands the faculties as innate interests that constitute our human consciousness.

An interest is what enables a kind of pleasure for consciousness. The interest we flippantly call “reason” provides pleasure when all judgments coalesce in a certain way. What way? The way that matches the simple, single-judgment act of cognition. Specifically, it provides the pleasure of truth-saying about the just-posited. This is important enough to warrant a panel:

You can experience this for yourself right now: Make an “X” in your imagination from the rule X and then immediately say This is an X. The interest of reason is the feeling you have when you do this continually—that is, when you volitionally project a presence from rule R that your immediately recognize as a present instance of R. And this, in turn, reduces simply to the act of presentation itself. Making-from R is already recognition-under R. They are two perspectives on the same act. Presentation is incipient truth.

There is pleasure in this flow of positing-recognizing, positing-recognizing. It is the same pleasure we feel from creating-beholding, creating-beholding. The pleasure derives from the fact that all the main elements of the experience—the self-aware subject, the act of making, the presentation/reception of the made, and the act of recognition—are all one and the same. It is the identity of these elements that is the model and origin of rationality.

It is also the basis of Kant’s system—because, finally, his method works because all three elements are taken to be … one and the same. Agent, action, and patient are all immediate modes of one and the same epistemic subject.