Before Tomorrow- Epigenesis and Rationality Read online

  Heidegger explains that “originality” should not be understood in ontic or psychological terms, and that it does not refer to given presence, or even to the innateness of these images. The original can only be understood as that which does “spring forth.”26 There may be an innateness to stems, but for the root there is neither innateness nor fabrication. In fact, if it were not thus, transcendental philosophy would offer nothing but a fake version of grounding. Heidegger acknowledges this point:

  If the established ground (der gelegte Grund) does not have the character of a floor or base which is at hand (ein vorhandener Boden), but if instead it has the character of a root (Wurzel), then it must be ground in such a way that it lets the stems out from itself, lending them support and stability. With that, however, we have already attained the direction we sought, by means of which the originality of the Kantian ground-laying can be discussed within its own particular problematic. This ground-laying becomes more original if it does not simply take the already-laid ground in stride, but if instead it unveils how this root is the root for both stems. But this means nothing less than that pure intuition and pure thinking lead back to the transcendental power of imagination.27

  If we follow the reasoning of the first edition, the questions of the priority of the innate or the acquired would then be nothing but quarrels about ontic or “anthropological” priority, incapable of masking the ontological primacy of the temporalization of time, figured in and through pure images of the productive imagination. Time is the root that thereby proves to be the “essential unity” of thinking.28 Time is not then the “nature” of thinking, but rather its “essence” and hence its true source, which brings it to light “in its springing forth.”29 Time is thus the root that makes it possible to avoid reducing the transcendental to the stem.

  As we know, Heidegger nevertheless considered that in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, the productive and temporalizing imagination loses its status as the root of transcendence. It no longer sits between sensibility and the understanding. The a priori synthesis thereby loses its time. The act of connection is now attributed to the understanding alone. Kant “shrank back” before the overly bold conception that represented the grounding of objectivity in an act that formed images.30 “The transcendental power of the imagination is deleted as a particular grounding faculty and [. . .] its function is taken over by the understanding as mere spontaneity [. . .].”31 Later he writes: “While in the first edition, all synthesis, i.e. synthesis as such, sprang forth from the power of imagination as a faculty which is not reducible to sensibility or the understanding, in the second edition the understanding alone now assumes the role of origin for all synthesis.”32

  The discourse of logic and science in the second edition consequently obscures the ontological audacity of the first. With the elimination of the prime role of the imagination, the formative power of the transcendental thus also disappears. The question of an unstable and arbitrary ground re-emerges. If, at the origin, there is no longer any forming of images of the origin, doesn’t the origin then become a mere presupposition? A given without a formative act, or, conversely, the result of manufacture? Kant certainly continues to accord the imagination a role in the second edition, but a diminished one. Heidegger explains that for Kant, “if the entire ground-laying is not thereby to collapse into itself, then certainly the accomplishments of its transcendental grounding according to the first edition must still be maintained.”33 Yet does this ground-laying, maintained “by the force of things,” remain a ground-laying? Instability and ambiguity are back. It is thus a matter, after Kant and for Kant, of taking up the question of time again in order to take it still further; this reconsideration also implies a removal of the instability and ambiguity of the transcendental. And, in the end, this amounts to relinquishing it.

  The brain

  It might be surprising to find the neurobiological approach to rationality dealt with here as a philosophical approach from the outset and given the same status as the other interpretations. But I wish to emphasize the point that even negatively, even as a rejection, this approach contains resources for a genuine rereading of Kant. Continental philosophers are wrong to ignore it, or to simply relegate this reading to the analytic tradition.

  From the perspective of contemporary neurobiologists, there is no shadow of a doubt that what Kant calls “transcendental” is just the generic name for a set of predetermined cognitive processes, whatever he might say about it and whatever philosophers such as Heidegger may claim. The Kantian a priori is quite simply innate. Kant could never prove otherwise, nor could he go beyond this conception.

  But, contrary to what is too often assumed, contemporary neurobiologists claim that the elements of cognition are not in fact innate. These elements develop and appear as a result of the constant interaction between the internal milieu and the environment. This type of interaction fundamentally defines rationality as adaptability – an adaptive power that the transcendental, without a formative force and without the ability to be formed, can neither account for nor describe.

  In The Good, the True and the Beautiful, Jean-Pierre Changeux claims that the two “stems” of cognition, sensibility and the understanding, have been opposed to one another throughout the history of philosophy and hence gave rise to the quarrel of empiricism and rationalism.34 Changeux argues that rationalism corresponds to the most current form of philosophical “innatism.” He claims that the “rationalist or innatist point of view” finds its most extreme expression in “Descartes, who writes: ‘I find in myself an infinity of ideas of certain things’ and also ‘it does not seem [to me] as though I were learning anything new, but rather as though I were remembering what I had previously known – that is, that I am perceiving things which were already in my mind.’”35 Meanwhile, according to Changeux, Kant “adopts a similar attitude” and pushes it to its extreme.36 Critical rationalism is, without doubt, an extreme form of innatism.

  Indeed, the transcendental is not an internal generator of variety. Without evolution, without the ability to form and transform, it is fixed – as if the pure elements of thought and cognition came readypackaged in the mind. To understand Changeux’s reasoning, it is important to see that for him the logical antecedence of the a priori is the philosophical equivalent of genetic determinism in biology. The circularity of the a priori and the transcendental seems analogous to a program – an analogy that prohibits and condemns the neurobiological view of rationality. In fact, synaptic development is never the mere implementation of a program or code. On the contrary, it “includ[es] the spontaneous activity in the nervous system in addition to activity provoked by interaction with the environment.”37 One of the fundamental issues in contemporary neurobiology is “the elucidation of the still poorly understood relationship between the human genome and the phenotype of the brain,”38 between program and individuation. This relation opens the playing field of epigenesis, the differentiated development that takes the middle ground between genetic determinism and the “environmental selective imprint” on the individual.39 The origin of thinking flows from this relation, rather than from the program itself, as would still be the case in Kant. Only an epigenetic view of the “shaping of neural connections”40 enables a break with innatism: this, then, is the unexpected consequence of a neurobiologization of the a priori. Once again, the transcendental is relinquished.

  Contingency

  According to Meillassoux, any dispute about the origin of the subject of correlation or synthesis is pointless. Whether innate or acquired, synthesis cannot mask or limit the contingency that presides over its establishment. Once again, in the end transcendental structures appear as facts and therefore cannot explain their own formation. The invariants of reason have no reason. This is why, according to Meillassoux, “if contingency consists in knowing that worldly things could be otherwise, facticity just consists in not knowing why the correlational structure has to be thus.”41 The problem is that �
�in insisting upon the facticity of correlational forms, the correlationist is not saying that these forms could actually change; he is merely claiming that we cannot think why it should be impossible for them to change, nor why a reality wholly other than the one that is given to us should be proscribed a priori.”42 Thus transcendental philosophy, which ought to think its own facticity and open itself to the new concept of an a priori contingency, implying the transformability as much of the laws of nature as of the principles of reasoning, ultimately closes itself off to this outcome and supports the stability of forms without proof. The inquiry into the true nature of stems and roots, and the determination of their origin – ontological or biological – changes nothing in terms of the problem of their factuality.

  We must therefore instigate the “break”43 so as to expose thinking to “the Great Outdoors” of radical contingency, an outdoors to which it can no longer “correlate.”44 The philosophy to come discovers “everything’s capacity-to-be-other or capacity-not-to-be.”45 It finds the form of its discourse in mathematics. Indeed, in the twentieth century, mathematics initiated an overhaul of classic concepts of quantity and necessity, illuminating the impossibility of totalizing the possible and of thereby assigning a stability, along with a universal and permanent invariability, to the order of the world. Mathematics thus exploded the structure of synthetic a priori judgments more effectively than could any philosophical deconstruction. At the same time, mathematics allowed the articulation of an entirely different concept of the possible from the one contained in the notion of “condition of possibility.” The de-transcendentalization of mathematics, in other words, its post-Kantian future, thus presents as the future of philosophy. This is in no way a denial of the legacy of Kantianism, for as Meillassoux acknowledges, “we cannot but be heirs of Kantianism.”46 But again this recognition coincides with a relinquishing.

  Suspect spontaneity

  Ontology and temporality, the biology of reason, the mathematics of contingency: these three directions of thinking all emphasize the opacity of the Kantian concept of spontaneity.

  Kantian spontaneity is unable to support itself, maintain its role as initiative, or exhibit the autonomy of its formation. It will always be paradoxically derived. Rooted in time, biologically determined, or quite simply contingent.

  To question spontaneity – which is just another way of expressing the relinquishing of the transcendental – clearly amounts to aiming for the heart of Kantian philosophy as a whole. In fact, spontaneity characterizes not only the activity of the understanding for Kant, but also that of reason. The spontaneity of the understanding gives birth to the categories, while ideas are born of a pure spontaneity of reason.47 Now, this spontaneity of reason is both theoretical and practical. In Kant, “reason creates the idea of a spontaneity, which could start to act from itself, without needing to be preceded by any other cause that in turn determines it to action according to the law of causal connection.”48 This spontaneity brings us back to “freedom in the cosmological sense,” to the “faculty of beginning a state from itself, the causality of which does not in turn stand under another cause determining it in time in accordance with the law of nature.”49 In the end, spontaneity characterizes life, the organizing force of the living being, which is the object of teleological judgment in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.

  To suggest that spontaneity might be impure is thus to threaten the entire critical philosophy and deprive it of its most powerful weapon: the reduction of the origin, the very concept of origin, to a series of structures – the “I think,” the categorical imperative, and the architecture of judgment, so many pure forms that are without any substantiality, property, or particular characteristic. Kantian spontaneity presents itself as this springing forth which, in its purity and suddenness, without duration or attributable date, cuts short the regression towards a full, essential origin, and carves out the space of its autonomy in an ontological flesh that consequently explodes. This type of space is precisely the space of the transcendental, the space of a formal reduction of beginnings.

  To bring the transcendental back to a fundamental ambiguity by assigning it the value of an artificial base – innate or fabricated – therefore amounts to challenging this reduction. It implies that it could, in fact, retain certain metaphysical commitments from which it claims, however, to free itself, namely innatism or a priori manufacture. It undermines the purity of the link that is established in the system of the three Critiques between thinking, freedom, and life. We know that reconsideration of these principles is tantamount to a radical dismantling of Kantianism. In Kant there is certainly a logic of facts, but what contemporary readings are aiming at is a sort of accidental facticity due to the unsteady nature of the foundation. The fact that the foundation is poorly constructed. In very different, often incompatible, ways, the approaches discussed nevertheless all result in the decision to drown spontaneity in a more ancient past than subjectivity. For Heidegger, it is an ontological past with no beginning; for the neuroscientists, it is the night of a biological and evolutionary past; meanwhile, Meillassoux evokes ancestrality without human ancestors.

  Indeed, Meillassoux argues that we should stop asking ourselves what antecedence the a priori names and consider that the appearance of thinking, the will, and even life are nothing more than events like any other in the long succession of ages in the formation of the Earth. A series of upheavals that arise without privilege against the background of a non-human “ancestral” past, prior to both reason and life. A past without the value of an origin and without any transcendental ambition, the past of all synthesis, more ancient than the a priori. This past, then, frees the philosophy to come from the impossible task of foundation and simultaneously opens the possibility “to discourse about a past where both humanity and life are absent.”50

  Ontology, neurobiology, mathematics: the aporia

  Clearly, the three avenues that we have just opened up all converge on the elaboration of another rationality. This rationality goes beyond the critique of reason and refuses to legitimate thinking simply on the grounds of the exposition of its intrinsic conditions of possibility: philosophical discourse can no longer result from the consciousness of laws, nor can concepts or judgments be founded on the “spontaneity of thinking.”51 Instead, it is a matter of understanding from which non-conscious, not necessarily human and not programmed, formative instances thinking derives. The philosophical turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century is thus notable for the in-depth search for the origin of thinking outside of consciousness and will. This is what all the attempts to break with the Kantian transcendental have in common.

  At the same time, we have to admit – and this is the key point – that all these attempts to relinquish the transcendental are at a dead end. The temporalization, biologization, and mathematization of the transcendental relinquish their object as they relinquish the transcendental, in other words, time, the scientific perspective on the life of thinking, and contingency, respectively. We shall see that the concept of time has not survived its non-transcendental future. Destruction-deconstruction has become bogged down in the infinite poetization of a dreary messianic temporality. The idea of a gradual development of reason leads only to an acritical reductionism and positivism that can but repel the continental philosopher who entertains the idea of exploring it. As for “speculative realism,” it is ultimately incapable of offering the slightest content – be it theoretical or practical – to the idea of radical contingency.

  A new dialectical arena has arisen in which the destructive-deconstructive line of thought and the demand of the “real” inherent in the new injunction calling for a return to science confront each other, but without really meeting. This injunction itself conveys the conflict between mathematics and biology.

  Negotiating with Kant

  Given these observations, it will not be a matter here of attempting to “reconstruct” the transcendental or of “returning” to Kant.
I do not seek to assert the intransgressible nature of his philosophy without discussion. Why would I? No, I do not seek to prove that the transcendental is intact or that it must be restored. What I am saying is that the relinquishing of Kant must be negotiated with him, not against him. Indeed, as I shall attempt to show, in Kant himself we find, at the heart of the Critique, the orchestration of an encounter between the transcendental and that which resists it. This encounter is not about the divide between the transcendental and the empirical; instead it is the confrontation of the transcendental and that which organizes itself without it. This is the theme of the third Critique, specifically in its second part: the confrontation with life.

  The living being has no transcendental status. The Critique of the Power of Judgment considers the consequences of this intrusion of the non-transcendental into critical rationality. The connection between thinking, freedom, and life is a connection that undergoes transformation as a result of the confrontation between the transcendental and that which is indifferent to it. The encounter with life – the contact point between the transcendental and this indifference to the transcendental – also reveals a modifiability in the structure of categories within Kantianism, one that enables the opening of another way between innatism and fabrication.

  I suggest that it is only by initiating a discussion with a certain evolution of the transcendental in Kant’s philosophy that the three questions of time, a natural origin of reason, and the radicalness of contingency have a future.

  Rereading Kant through his posterity and challenging him in this way, my goal is to ascertain whether or not he can allow philosophy to reorient itself in thinking the origin, reformulating antecedence, and understanding what is at stake in contemporary ontology, mathematics, and neurobiology. Once again, we have no choice but to acknowledge that neither fundamental ontology, nor biological reductionism, nor “speculative realism” manages to successfully answer the current demand for a rigorous post-critical philosophical rationality. This post-critical crisis of reason must therefore be brought back to the dialogue with Kant and, in return, we must force Kantian thought to speak about its own founding validity, to measure the force of its “before” in terms of the demands of its tomorrows.