Before Tomorrow- Epigenesis and Rationality Page 5

  Equivocal Generation, Preformation, and Epigenesis

  What type of production is it, then? The problem is clearly articulated in §27: “[T]here are only two ways in which a necessary agreement (Übereinstimmung) of experience with the concepts of its objects can be thought: either the experience makes these concepts possible or these concepts make experience possible.” Only the second conception is valid, and this conception opens “as it were a system of the epigenesis of pure reason.”5

  Let us examine the “two ways” that Kant goes on to further present in the paragraph by adding a “middle way” in-between them. As a result, there are in fact three ways, which correspond analogically to three biological theories of generation: (1) equivocal generation (generatio aequivoca); (2) preformation; (3) epigenesis.

  Of the “two ways [. . .] the first” makes experience the source of concepts. Kant states right away that this path leads nowhere. He says: “The first [way] is not the case with the categories (nor with pure sensible intuition); for they are a priori concepts, hence independent of experience.”6 The biological equivalent of this unacceptable possibility is equivocal generation: “[T]he assertion of an empirical origin [of the categories] would be a sort of generatio aequivoca.”7 This theory, which was already largely superseded in Kant’s day, explains the appearance of life through the spontaneous differentiation of inorganic matter. It assumes that there is a different nature between the origin of generation – inert matter – and the generative principle – the vital initiative. If the transcendental deduction followed this “way,” we would have to accept that the a priori amounts to an inorganic origin out of which the living categories miraculously appear. Like the categories themselves, the agreement between the categories and objects would arise ex nihilo. Obviously, it is impossible for Kant to adopt this “way.” The spontaneity of the understanding is not the same type as the spontaneity of this generation, even if it, too, is called spontaneous. This approach postulates the existence of a birth foreign to its source, offspring born of nothing. By contrast, the categories are well and truly the categories of the understanding, born of it and belonging wholly to it. Equivocal generation, which contradicts the very idea of generation, is a theoretical monstrosity that warrants no further consideration.

  The “middle way” between equivocal generation and epigenesis is preformation. According to this system,

  the categories were neither self-thought (selbtsgedacht) a priori first principles of our cognition nor drawn from experience, but were rather subjective predispositions for thinking (Anlagen zum Denken), implanted in us along with our existence by our author in such a way that their use would agree exactly with the laws of nature along which experience runs (a kind of preformation-system of pure reason).8

  To accept the preformationist “way” amounts to thinking that the pure elements of cognition are innate logical tendencies, placed in us by God and arranged in such a way that their use corresponds exactly to their objects. From this perspective, right from the start the concepts and appearances “to which they apply” match each other thanks to a divine decision, in a relation of perfect coincidence, a relation of “pre-established harmony.” Following this “middle way” produces the assertion that the mind is originally “predisposed,” according to the economy of a relation settled in advance, to apprehend appearances according to certain laws. The laws of nature, like the law of causality, for example, would thus be imposed on our understanding arbitrarily.

  Hume and Pre-established Harmony

  Kant associates the first “way” of equivocal generation with the empiricist position, which corresponds to a first skeptical thesis. The inseparable pair of the first, the “middle way” is a second skeptical thesis. Who represents this second thesis?

  The representative here is the result of a hybrid of two philosophers, Crusius and Hume.9 A note in the Prolegomena (1786) helps identify the first philosopher.10 Paragraph 36 of this text discusses the same problem as §27 of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant states:

  [A]greement, and indeed necessary agreement, between the principles of possible experience and the laws of the possibility of nature, can come about only from one of two causes: either these laws are taken from nature by means of experience, or, conversely, nature is derived from the laws of the possibility of experience in general and is fully identical with the mere universal lawfulness of experience.11

  Kant also adds that the first hypothesis, which is entirely contradictory, is defended by Crusius. His note is as follows:

  Crusius alone knew of a middle way: namely that a spirit who can neither err nor deceive originally implanted these natural laws in us. But, since false principles are often mixed in as well – of which this man’s system itself provides not a few examples – then, with the lack of sure criteria for distinguishing an authentic origin from a spurious one, the use of such a principle looks very precarious, since one can never know for sure what the spirit of truth or the father of lies may have put into us.12

  We cannot go into the certainly very unfair nature of these comments in the present context, but what is interesting is that in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science the figure of Crusius is replaced by Hume. In this work, Kant recognizes that the problem of the validity of the foundation of the “agreement” is one that “has great importance” and that it relates back to an “obscurity that attaches to [his] earlier discussions in this part of the deduction [§27].”13 This is when Hume appears. Contrary to his claim, the solution to this problem is certainly not about “taking refuge in a pre-established harmony to explain the surprising agreement of appearances with the laws of the understanding, despite their having entirely different sources from the former. This remedy would be much worse than the evil it is supposed to cure, and, on the contrary, actually cannot help at all.”14

  The preformationist theory of “implantation” is thus attributed here to Hume, who, in Section V of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in fact develops the hypothesis of a “pre-established harmony” between a priori knowledge and the order of nature.15 He writes: “Here, then, is a kind of pre-established harmony between the course of nature and the succession of our ideas; and though the powers and forces by which the former is governed be wholly unknown to us, yet our thoughts and conceptions have still, we find, gone on in the same train with the other works of nature.”16

  Kant’s response is the same in the Critique of Pure Reason as in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. The thesis of a preformed agreement destroys all the objective necessity of the categories. To follow this path thus amounts to accepting that the link between cause and effect “remains only subjectively necessary.”17 In other words, it is to claim that it is purely “contingent.” Kant goes on to argue that this is what Hume is saying “when he calls this mere illusion from custom.”18

  Pre-established harmony undermines categorial necessity. If the agreement is predetermined, then the understanding can only accept it as a fact, since it does not form it, which also suggests that this agreement is arbitrary, that it might have been entirely other. Kant continues: “[I]n [the case of pre-established harmony], the categories would lack the necessity that is essential to their concept. For, e.g., the concept of cause, which asserts the necessity of a consequent under a presupposed condition, would be false if it rested only on a subjective necessity, arbitrarily implanted in us [. . .].”19 Settled by divine decree, this innate agreement “arbitrarily implanted in us” would kidnap the origin from the spontaneity of the understanding, which would then do nothing more than receive it.

  The Third Way

  This leaves the only possible “way”: epigenesis. If the categories do not come from experience, and if they do not contain the reference to objects “within themselves” either, through some innate virtue, then how can we be sure that they refer to something? How do we legitimate the a priori character of the objective reference?

  The answer is as follows:
the agreement must be thought by analogy with an embryo developing by itself, through the process of gradual cellular differentiation and complexification. Epigenesis presents the two-fold advantage of being able to counter any idea of a “pre-established” harmony, since it concerns autonomous development, and also any idea of empirical derivation, since development must nevertheless conform to the outline offered in advance (a priori) of the specific type to which it defers.

  At the time of Kant, a distinction was still commonly made between the “eductus,” produced by preformation, and the “productus,” the result of epigenesis. The “eduction” is simply the “grown up” development of the individual that is already constituted in the egg. Conversely, the theory of epigenesis assumes that the reality of the “produced” is constituted through self-differentiation and gradual growth starting from an amorphous mix of germs.20 François Duchesneau explains that

  for nearly a century (1672–1759) [. . .] preformationist theories of generation had reigned virtually without contest. These theories excluded any model of self-organization of life and any concept of specific force able to explain the emergence of complex structures since a primordial amorphous state emerged from the mixing of [germs]. In the mideighteenth century, preformationism still existed in extensively modified forms among scholars such as Albrecht von Haller and Charles Bonnet, [even if] Kant appeared to be unaware of these more sophisticated versions, directing his critique rather at the theories belonging to the previous century and to the historical context defined by the speculations of Malebranche and Leibniz during the emergence of preformationism.21

  The triumph of epigenesis, which supplies the indispensable background to the Kantian position, takes off in 1759 with Caspar Friedrich Wolff’s Theoria generationis, followed by Blumenbach’s hypothesis of the “formative drive (Bildungstrieb),” developed in 1780.22

  At a later point, I shall, of course, address the important question of Kant’s relation to the biologists of his time, but for now what is important to emphasize is the fact that epigenesis offers him an escape from the two impasses of equivocal generation and preformationism and thus allows him to bring to light the generative force proper to thought. The agreement between the categories and objects can only be thought as the product of a dynamic, creative, and self-forming relation. It can come neither from a prior accord (preformationism) nor from a magical animation of the inorganic (equivocal generation). The understanding imposes, of itself, a form on the given and thereby constitutes knowledge as the product of its own activity. It is therefore legitimate to argue that “the categories contain (erhalten) the grounds of the possibility of all experience in general from the side of the understanding.”23

  We must, then, understand the term “contain” not as the expression of an already constituted and amassed treasure that asks only to pour out before our eyes, but, quite on the contrary, as the germ of an organism that must develop in order to come into existence. The categories are the pure seeds of experience.

  Notes

  1. CPR, Architectonic of Pure Reason, p. 691, A833/B861.

  2. CPR, Architectonic of Pure Reason, p. 691, A833/B861.

  3. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. Michael Friedman, in Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, pp. 171–270, p. 188.

  4. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, p. 190.

  5. CPR, §27, pp. 264–5, B167.

  6. CPR, §27, p. 264, B167.

  7. CPR, §27, p. 264, B167.

  8. CPR, §27, p. 265, B167.

  9. Not Leibniz, as might have been expected. On this point, see Günter Zöller, “Kant on the Generation of Metaphysical Knowledge,” in Hariolf Oberer and Gerhard Seel, eds, Kant, Analysen – Probleme – Kritik, Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1988, pp. 71–90, p. 76.

  10. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as a Science, trans. Gary Hatfield, in Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, pp. 29–169, AK (4:320).

  11. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, pp. 111–12.

  12. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, p. 112. Christian August Crusius (January 10, 1715–October 18,1775), professor of philosophy and theology at Leipzig, author of Advice for a Rational Life (1744), Sketch of the Necessary Truths of Reason (1745), and The Way to the Certainty and Dependability of Human Knowledge (1747). Crusius played a key role in forming Kant’s system. He was the first to put forward the idea that physical necessity is different to logical necessity. As Cassirer commented: “Crusius [. . .] lays the utmost emphasis on the fact that the principle of contradiction, as a purely formal principle, can of itself alone yield no specific and concrete knowledge, but that a set of original and underivable, but nevertheless certain, ‘material principles’ is unconditionally necessary for that.” Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981, p. 74.

  13. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, p. 190.

  14. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, p. 190.

  15. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, reprinted from the posthumous edition of 1777, third edition, L.A. Selby-Bigge, ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press, section IV “Sceptical Doubts Concerning the Operations of the Understanding,” section V “Sceptical Solution of These Doubts.”

  16. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section V, part II, pp. 54–5.

  17. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, p. 190.

  18. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, p. 190.

  19. CPR, p. 265, B168.

  20. Cf. Hans Werner Ingensiep, “Die biologischen Analogien und die erkenntistheoretischen Alternativen in Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft B§27,” Kant-Studien 85, vol. 85, no. 4, 1994, pp. 381–3, p. 383.

  21. François Duchesneau, “Épigenèse de la raison pure et analogies biologiques,” in François Duchesneau, Guy Lafrance, and Claude Piché, Kant actuel: Hommage à Pierre Laberge, Paris: Bellarmin-Vrin, 2000, pp. 233–56, p. 234. My translation of this article is used throughout.

  22. Caspar Friedrich Wolff, Theoria generationis [1764], Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1966. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: “Über den Bildungstrieb (Nisus formativus) und seinen Einfluß auf die Generation und Reproduction,” in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Georg Forster, eds, Göttingisches Magazin der Wissenschaften und Litteratur, vol. 1, no. 5, 1780, pp. 247–66. The essay then appeared in a monograph (Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugnungsgeschäfte, Göttingen: Dietrich, 1781). The revisions were incorporated in the second and subsequent editions of the Handbuch der Naturgeschichte (first edition: Göttingen: Dietrich, 1779, Manual of the Elements of Natural History [1781], trans. R.T. Gore, London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1825). The term Bildungstrieb is usually translated as “formative force” or “formative impulse” (as in the Cambridge edition of the Critique of the Power of Judgment). We choose to translate it here as “formative drive,” following (among others) Peter McLaughlin, “The Impact of Newton on Biology on the Continent in the Eighteenth Century,” in Scott Mandelbrote and Helmut Pulte, eds, The Reception of Isaac Newton in Europe, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, pp. 1–23; Helmut Müller-Sievers, Self-Generation: Biology, Philosophy, and Literature Around 1800, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997, p. 43; and Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, London: Continuum, 2006, p. 98.

  23. CPR, §27, p. 265, B167S.

  2

  CAUGHT BETWEEN SKEPTICAL READINGS

  Predispositions

  The problem of the purity and transcendental stability of the spontaneously formative origin has still to be resolved. It’s only digging itself in deeper.

  “Contain” is a strange verb. Doesn’t it evoke the idea of predisposition in spite of everything? A passage from the Analytic of Concepts seems to confirm that this is the case. Kant writes:

  We will therefore pursue the pure concepts into their first germs and predispositions
(Keime und Anlagen) in the human understanding, where they lie ready (vorbereitet liegen), until with the opportunity of experience they are finally developed (bis sie endlich bei Gelegenheit der Erfahrung entwickelt . . . werden) and exhibited (dargestellt) in their clarity by the very same understanding, liberated from the empirical conditions attaching to them.1

  If it is true that the categories “lie ready” in the mind, ready to serve experience, waiting to unwrap their germ in a sense, then how can Kant prove that they are not innate and that the true source of their agreement with objects is not a kind of “pre-established harmony”?

  It does seem that the skeptical argument, in its two-fold form, immediately traps the Kantian position. First, it proves to be far more difficult than it appeared to ensure that the epigenetic thesis is truly distinct from the preformationist thesis in the realm of the transcendental. Second, granting experience too great a role in the so-called “pure” generation in an attempt to prove that Kant is not preformationist runs the risk of leaning towards the skeptical argument that asserts the empirical derivation of the objective reference. Readings of §27, including those that seek to defend its logic, constantly oscillate between these two tendencies, thus dragging the “way” opened by Kant into the spiral of skeptical becoming.