Before Tomorrow- Epigenesis and Rationality Page 2
Notes
1. Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During, London: Routledge, 2004.
INTRODUCTION
Assessment: An Unstable Kant
Three questions
Three questions lie at the origin of this book, three addresses to contemporary continental philosophy that seek to reveal in it, as their negative or paradoxical echo, the outlines of three areas of incomprehensible silence.
The first question concerns time. Why has the question of time lost its status as the leading question of philosophy? Why did it simply disappear after Being and Time, and why did Heidegger himself go so far as to confirm, in his late work, the need to leave behind the question of time as such? In On Time and Being, he even asserted that “time” ends up “vanishing (verschwinden)” as a question.1 Indeed, no one asks this question anymore, no one has taken up the problem by trying to develop afresh a decisive concept of temporality, be it with or against Heidegger.
The second question concerns the relation between reason and the brain: why does philosophy continue to ignore recent neurobiological discoveries that suggest a profoundly transformed view of brain development and that now make it difficult, if not unacceptable, to maintain the existence of an impassable abyss between the logical and the biological origin of thinking? Can we continue to claim, without further examination, as Paul Ricœur does in his interviews with Jean-Pierre Changeux, that “the brain is [nothing but] the substrate of thought [. . .] and that thought is the indication of an underlying neuronal structure”?2 How should we understand this intractable and systematic resistance to a possible reformulation of rational activity as the dispositions of the brain? Isn’t it urgent to face the question today, rather than allowing it to slip entirely out of the field of philosophy?
The third question concerns Kant’s status. This is the first time that the authority of Kant – the guarantor, if not the founder, of the identity of continental philosophy – has been so clearly up for discussion, from within this same philosophical tradition. The a priori character of causal necessity, on which Kant builds the principle of the validity of knowledge and the stability of nature, is openly in question today. Quentin Meillassoux’s book After Finitude – which might be better read as “after Kant” – was a thunderbolt that toppled the statue of “correlation.”3 “Correlation” is what Meillassoux terms the a priori synthesis in critical philosophy, that is, a structure of originary co-implication of subject and object that ensures the strict equivalence of the laws of the understanding and the laws of nature and thereby guarantees their “necessity and strict universality.”4 Meillassoux states that “correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another.”5 He explains: “[T]he central notion of modern philosophy since Kant seems to be that of correlation. By ‘correlation,’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” We can therefore describe as correlationist “any current of thought which maintains the unsurpassable character of the correlation so defined.”6 In a move explicitly defined as post-critical, After Finitude asserts the urgency of thinking antecedence, the “prior,” before and beyond the a priori, before the synthesis that would impose its form as the only possible form of the world.
Since the world started well before “us,” it could, in fact, be entirely indifferent to “us,” to “our” structures of cognition and thinking. Likewise, it could be indifferent to its own necessity and could therefore prove to be absolutely contingent. This radical contingency calls for the development of a new philosophical thought. While Kant calls the study of the possibility of a priori knowledge “transcendental,” the thinking to come must proceed purely and simply via “the relinquishing of transcendentalism.”7
Meillassoux’s book enjoyed a very rapid international uptake. The term “speculative realism,” which, rightly or wrongly, is now attached to the philosophical position presented in his work, is all the rage, on the tip of every student’s, every researcher’s, tongue. Yet no one has undertaken the task of discussing or assessing the implications of the immense provocation involved in the proposal that we relinquish the transcendental. No one has yet thought to ask what continental philosophy might become after this “break.”8
Break with what? According to Meillassoux, synthesis – or “correlation” – cannot, in the last instance, be legitimized, nor can it legitimate anything whatsoever, contrary to what Kant claims to have proven with the transcendental deduction. From that point on, causal necessity remains without any true grounding, in other words, without necessity. To break with the transcendental thus implies no less than to break in two the deductive solidarity between synthesis and natural order.
The a priori and the condition of possibility
However innovative and surprising it may be, Meillassoux’s intervention in fact serves to confirm what can only be called a tradition of reading, even as it claims to be taking its leave from this tradition. His greatest contribution, his true innovation, is to give a lost edge back to this tradition. It serves to return us to the question of what to do with Kant, how to inherit from him, thereby making this a defining issue for philosophical contemporaneity.
What tradition are we referring to? Initiated by Hegel, reworked and reoriented in the twentieth century, across the range of its instances, this tradition comprises all the interpretations of Kant that observe a fundamental instability of the transcendental. This observation inevitably leads if not to relinquishing Kant, then at least to reading him against himself, paradoxically, in order to secure the deductive force of the critique. We have to recognize that any serious reading of transcendental idealism in fact always tends, thematically or otherwise, to point to and indeed run the risk of exacerbating, what may appear as its lack of foundation.
“Unstable” means both off-balance and changeable. Immediate objections arise: is it really possible to apply this term to the “transcendental,” which, according to Kant, is precisely what confers on the rational edifice the solidity of its foundations? The multiple meanings of “transcendental” in the Kantian lexicon, some of which are contradictory, do not obscure the fact that Kant offers some very simple and entirely unambiguous definitions in the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason.9 He writes that the transcendental can be understood either as a pure and simple synonym of a priori, “absolutely independent of all experience,”10 or – if one wishes to distinguish it from the a priori – as the characteristic not of all a priori cognition, but of that which “is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition of objects insofar as this is to be possible a priori.”11 “Transcendental” thus refers to the “possibility of cognition or its use a priori.”12 The lexicon of the transcendental is therefore one and the same as the condition of possibility. These definitions are unequivocal.
If relinquish the transcendental we must, it is nevertheless, as Meillassoux demonstrates, less because of definitional than foundational problems. The pure forms of thought, categories, judgments, principles, in fact appear to be simply established by decree:
Kant maintains that it is impossible to derive the forms of thought from a principle or system capable of endowing them with absolute necessity. These forms constitute a “primary fact” which is only susceptible to description and not to deduction (in the genetic sense). And if the realm of the in-itself can be distinguished from the phenomenon, this is precisely because of the facticity of these forms, the fact that they can only be described, for if they were deducible, as is the case with Hegel, theirs would be an unconditional necessity that abolishes the possibility of there being an in-itself that could differ from them.13
Relinquishing the transcendental thus implies also relinquishing the a priori itself, weighing the doubt regarding the manner in which Kant underta
kes the deduction of the a priori character of the structures of thinking and cognition – categories, judgments, principles – by taking them precisely as “conditions of possibility.”
Here again, Meillassoux radicalizes a problem frequently raised in the past, regarding the fact that while the transcendental is defined as an originary condition, it cannot explain its origin. Kant simply asserts that it is a priori, that there is the a priori. A true deduction would have to show how the transcendental forms itself, how it constitutes itself as the condition of the forms of thought. Yet, paradoxically, this act of self-positing, self-formation, or self-legitimation is lacking in the transcendental deduction. The synthesis is a fact. Derrida had already commented on this: in Glas we read: “[T]he transcendental has always been, strictly, a transcategorial, what could be received, formed, terminated, in none of the categories intrinsic to the system.”14 It “assures the system’s space of possibility” without this overhanging position being able to itself account for its own possibility. The transcendental, Derrida also says, is thus “excluded” from the system, which appears to be imposed on it from the outside.
This type of questioning also affects the nature of antecedence contained in the term a priori. “Independent of all experience” means prior to all experience. But what exactly is the meaning of this anteriority? What legitimacy, what value, does its primacy hold? In other words, how is the a priori founded, if indeed it founds itself? These questions have been raised on numerous occasions. The idea proposed in After Finitude of another possible world, one that is indifferent to “us,” does not come out of nowhere. It reinforces a set of suspicions regarding the circularity of the a priori and the transcendental.
Is the transcendental innate or fabricated?
Let’s take this thought a little further. One way or another these difficulties have always been related to what appeared to be a lack of clarity at the border between the innate and acquired a priori in Kant’s thought. This phenomenon is all the more paradoxical in that the outline of this boundary is one of the touchstones of critical philosophy. Kant himself says as much: while they are given before all experience, the a priori forms of cognition are not exactly innate. In Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 we read that the categories find their source “in the very nature of the pure understanding,” but certainly not “as innate notions.”15
We should instead understand that a priori elements are acquired. But since they are also not derived from experience, they must be considered more precisely as originarily acquired. Subsequently, Kant stated in 1790 that
The Critique [of Pure Reason] admits absolutely no divinely implanted (anerschaffene) or innate (angeborene) representations. It regards them all, whether they belong to intuition or to concepts of the understanding, as acquired. There is, however, an original acquisition (Erwerbung) (as the teachers of the natural right formulate it), consequently also of that which previously did not exist, and therefore did not pertain to anything before the act. Such is, as the Critique shows, first of all, the form of things in space and time, secondly, the synthetic unity of the manifold in concepts; for neither of these is derived by our faculty of knowledge from the objects given to it as they are in themselves, but rather it brings them out of itself a priori.16
We must, of course, return to the idea of original acquisition (acquisitio originaria). For the moment, we’ll focus on the logical problem it both contains and attempts to resolve. Original acquisition relates to the in-between of experience and the given of birth. Kant states clearly that there is no antecedence without this logical intermediary space where the circular structure of the a priori sits along with the transcendental. The original acquisition contradicts innatism precisely because it is an acquisition. It takes place and takes time while also having neither space nor time because it is originary.
Can this paradoxical legal case really come to the rescue of the possibility of the condition of possibility? It seems that for many readers it cannot: transcendental instability and ambiguity result directly in the poorly defined character of just such an in-between. Some claim that Kant is more “innatist” than he admits. Moreover, the statement that follows the passage cited above appears to justify their suspicion, for he goes on to say: “There must, however, be a ground in the subject which makes it possible for these representations to originate in this and no other manner, and which enables them to be related to objects which are not yet given. And it is this ground, at the very least, that is innate.”17 He says it. The constitution of our cognitive power is thus and not otherwise. The “peculiar constitution of [our] cognitive faculties”18 is innate.
Meanwhile, other scholars firmly assert that, on the contrary, in critical philosophy one must acknowledge the work of a type of “genesis” of the a priori. If the a priori does not mean innate, then it must be that the a priori constitutes itself – and thus, in that case, borrows from experience! The idea had already occurred to Kant’s contemporaries: perhaps what Kant did was to hide a productive power of manufacture behind the notion of the a priori. The suspicion of a form of labor inherent in the a priori was articulated by Schlosser in 1795 when he described the Kantian system as a “manufacturing industry for the production of mere forms (Formgebungsmanufaktur).”19 But Kant defended himself against this interpretation straight away, responding that for the a priori “it is not an arbitrary form-giving undertaken by design, or even machine-made (on behalf of the state), but [. . . an] industrious and careful work of the subject, his own faculty (of reason).”20 This work before “machine-made” manufacture, this industry before the handling, and this designing before the shaping, immediately reintroduce the risk of innatism. How do we defend the idea of “pure labor” without assimilating it, quite simply, to a lack of labor, to mystery, to a gift, once more?
The question arises again: how can this “before” that Kant names the a priori – neither innate nor shaped – find its foundation within itself without leaning constantly in one direction or another? Isn’t the validity of the transcendental secretly threatened again by the disequilibrium of such an in-between, always fated to borrow something from the two extremes it rejects?
Definitive or in default?
The link between our three initial areas of investigation – time; taking the brain into account in thinking; the fate of a philosophy of radical contingency – appears in a surprising manner here, at the site of a similar problem. With the transcendental, Kant brings to light a specific mode of identification of rationality that, through the logic of an incredible coincidence, is at once definitive and in default. It is definitive, for this mode of identification confers its specificity on continental philosophy.21 At the same time, it is in default, for this same philosophy constantly observes the founding insufficiency and must therefore, in order to continue to exist, either attempt to reinforce the transcendental, or reject it so as to find its own origin elsewhere – which, as we shall see, in a sense amounts to one and the same. Today, time, the biology of thinking, and contingency appear as the three most meaningful expressions of this complex relation to Kantian reason, a relation of simultaneous debt and separation. The three initial questions correspond to three different ways of relinquishing the transcendental: a conservative relinquishing (time); a relinquishing that does not recognize the debt (the brain); a relinquishing as an awareness of legacy (contingency).
Time
Let me explain. Reading Kant against himself in order to better find him again is Heidegger’s declared intent in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, where he goes so far as to slice Kant in half by separating the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason.22 Heidegger claims that in the first edition, Kant justifies the founding formation of the a priori by bringing to light its temporal structure. This perspective suggests perfectly that the transcendental refers to all the structures of “transcendence,” by which thinking departs from itself in order to “meet” what it encounters. This type of “ecstasy” assumes a pri
or orientation towards the object, a “before” that is none other than the mark of primordial temporality. Temporality thus saves the Critique from the assault of an artificial foundation.
And how does temporality enable Kant to elude the dual trap of innatism and manufactured production, a trap that differs in its expression, but is identical in its effect? Heidegger argues that in the first edition, temporality is unfolded in the in-between that is the playing field of the transcendental imagination. The imagination is truly the formative instance of the transcendental, which produces the “pure view” of everything that comes to meet it as the horizon of transcendence itself. The imagination is effectively defined as “the formative self-giving of that which gives itself,”23 but without this act proceeding from a “doing,” and at the same time without the act being annulled in the already done of an innate giving. The imagination produces images, yet these images are not artifacts for once again we are outside the alternative of innate or fabricated. Such images are in fact not beings, the register in which this alternative holds us captive. Insofar as they are pure images of time, “the pure intuitions in their representing cannot allow any beings to spring forth.”24 Instead they cause time to appear as the ontological ground of objectivity, the unity of what is, what occurs, and what is coming as the originary condition of any encounter with the object.
We have seen that Kant asserts the innate nature of the constitution of our cognitive power, in other words, the partitioning of this constitution into the two “stems” of sensibility and the understanding. But now the intermediary role of the imagination, which simultaneously ensures the “original unification” of sensibility and the understanding, opens the slit of an ontological formation into the artificial obscurity of their innateness.25