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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Is contemporary continental philosophy making a break with Kant? The structures of knowledge, taken for granted since Kant�s Critique of Pure Reason, are now being called into question: the finitude of the subject, the phenomenal given, a priori synthesis. Relinquish the transcendental: such is the imperative of postcritical thinking in the 21st century.
Questions that we no longer thought it possible to ask now reemerge with renewed vigor: can Kant really maintain the difference between a priori and innate? Can he deduce, rather than impose, the categories, or justify the necessity of nature? Recent research into brain development aggravates these suspicions, which measure transcendental idealism against the thesis of a biological origin for cognitive processes.
In her important new book Catherine Malabou lays out Kant�s response to his posterity. True to its subject, the book evolves as an epigenesis the differentiated growth of the embryo for, as those who know how to read critical philosophy affirm, this is the very life of the transcendental and contains the promise of its transformation.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Translator’s Foreword: Epigenesis of Her Texts
Notes
Epigraphs
Notes
Preface
Notes
Introduction
Assessment: An Unstable Kant
On the “System of the Epigenesis of Pure Reason”
Methodological Principles
Notes
1 Paragraph 27 of the Critique of Pure Reason
Presentation of the Initial Problem: The Origin of the Categories
Equivocal Generation, Preformation, and Epigenesis
Hume and Pre-established Harmony
The Third Way
Notes
2 Caught between Skeptical Readings
Predispositions
“Formation without Preformation”
Embryonic Development is Necessarily Unpredictable
Readings and Contradictions
Further Methodological Details
Notes
3 The Difference between Genesis and Epigenesis
Epigenesis and Epicenter
Localization and Surface
Notes
4 Kant’s “Minimal Preformationism”
The “Pure” Readings of §27
The “System of the Epigenesis of Pure Reason”: The Objective Genitive Hypothesis
The Reductive Division of the Source
Rejecting “Empiricist” Readings
Some Reminders about Metaphysical Knowledge
The Metaphysical Deduction and the Transcendental Deduction
Preformed Epigenesis
Notes
5 Germs, Races, Seeds
Four Main Exploratory Tracks
Kant to Herder: The Limits of the Formative Drive
Epigenesis and Anthropological Variety
On Human Races
“Intellectual” Epigenesis
The Critique of the Power of Judgment---62
A “Maximal” Preformationism?
Notes
6 The “Neo-Skeptical” Thesis and Its Evolution
Who’s a Skeptic? Role Reversal in §27
Bouveresse Analyzes Kant’s Innatism
From Pre-Established Harmony to Gradual Harmonization
Another Version of the Source, Another Genesis of Epigenesis
Against “Nativism”: Helmholtz and Boltzmann
Transcendental Idealism Disappears from the Debate: Frege versus Darwin
Notes
7 From Epigenesis to Epigenetics
Defining Epigenetics
To be Done, Once and for All, with “Everything’s Genetic”
The Importance of Environment
“Neural Darwinism” and Brain Epigenesis
Synaptic Mechanisms
Selection Levels
The Example of Mathematics
Edelman’s Theory of Systems of Recognition
From Methylation to Hermeneutics
Notes
8 From Code to Book
The Problem of History
Epigenesis and Teleology
“Life and History Are Fields Not of Explanation, But Rather of Interpretation”
Notes
9 Irreducible Foucault
What Is Enlightenment?
The Elaboration of the Subject and Access to Truth: Prelude to Agreement
Genealogy and Archeology
The End of the Order of Genetic Derivation?
The Two A Priori
The Transcendental as a Residuum
Notes
10 Time in Question
Stem and Root
Taking Stock
Schematism and Objectivity
The Second Edition
What We Might Have Understood
Why Didn’t I Take Heidegger’s Lead?
Notes
11 No Agreement
Return to §27: The Impotence of the Transcendental Deduction
Hume beyond Himself
The Wholly Other World
Notes
12 The Dead End
Between Censure and License
Heidegger to Meillassoux: What Finitude?
Meillassoux to Heidegger: Alterity and the Critique of Property
Towards a Critique of Neurobiological Reason
To Conclude
Notes
13 Towards and Epigenetic Paradigm of Rationality
Why a New Paradigm?
Genesis, Epigenesis, Hermeneutics: Ricœur’s Contribution
From the First to the Third Critique: The Intrication of the Transcendental and the Biological
Difference in Causality
The Order of Nature and Systematic Order: Examining Purposiveness
The Return Effect of the Third Critique on the First
Life and Factual Rationality
The Other Contingency and the Other Necessity
Structure and Evolution
Notes
14 Can We Relinquish the Transcendental?
The End of the Divorce between Primordial Temporality and Leveled-Down Time
Regarding the Possible Non-World
Biological Reason
The Thorny Problem of Analogy
Invariance and Reorganization
Kant Tomorrow
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Before Tomorrow
Epigenesis and Rationality
Catherine Malabou
Translated by Carolyn Shread
polity
First published in French as Avant demain. Épigenèse et rationalité© Presses Universitaires de France, 2014
This English edition © Polity Press, 2016
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9154-1
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TRANSLATOR’S FOREWORD
Epigenesis of Her Texts
Tomorrow, the order of precedence between program and its translation will be inverted.
Catherine Malabou
With every new Malabou translation comes a fresh understanding of my practice and another translation manifesto. Working with her – especially this time, where for over a year the author has been the translator’s partner in transforming her text – translation has assumed its plasticity, its change, its accident, and, now, its epigenetic function. As Malabou analyzes the epigenesis of Kant’s notion of rationality in Before Tomorrow, I am led to consider how, in translation, her own texts undergo a process of epigenesis: that is, the biological process of cellular differentiation. Which parts are sloughed off and which undergo maturation? How does Malabou develop in her arrival in English? Does the move into the Anglophone context allow for a development of that which is premature or impeded in French? Where else is she going? Who will retranslate her work tomorrow?
In the sinews of her rigorous and unrelenting tracking of Kantian philosophy, Malabou proposes that “critique itself, from the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of the Power of Judgment,” is subject to “epigenetic development” (156). Drawing again on the sciences that other continental philosophers have turned their backs on, she finds the most exciting movements of our era and brings to life biology. She confronts the moment when Kant is to be relinquished by speculative realists by uncovering in his work the resources she needs to open “the chink of a farewell” (xiii). She will bring in the life force of new frontiers in biology, for “the time has come to say it: transcendental epigenesis is epigenesis of the transcendental itself” (158). That which we thought was set in stone will be rocked by a new focus, shattered, then regrounded, differently: “The transcendental is subject to epigenesis – not to foundation” (158).
Beyond all the trying genetic investigations, always in search of a lost, inaccessible, founding origin, Malabou’s book on Kant acknowledges frankly that “epigenesis can produce” (50), even if it builds on moving grounds. For our part, as translation theorists, we have been thinking translation in genetic terms and therefore failing to account for, or recognize, epigenetic productivity. Yet translation is epigenesis. After the afterlife and after survival, the plastic life of the text. As translators, “we now all have a new word”1 for our art, something to help us explain how it is that texts are not complete until they are translated. How it is that texts bear the program to translate, the need to develop their parts in translation. That translation is generative, not as “a succession or connection of events taking place in a linear fashion starting from a given, identifiable point” (175), but rather, more holistically, as “the temporality of a synthetic continuum within which all of the parts are presented together in a movement of growth whereby the whole is formed through self-differentiation” (178). Translation is that process in which the text self-differentiates and thereby grows, develops, matures.
Malabou deploys new biological paradigms to read Kant, and in turn, reading her, I propose that we adopt epigenesis in translation studies to better describe the plasticity of the translating process. But is this any different from the multiplicity of metaphors that the discipline has already developed? The proposal and contestation of metaphors is integral to our field, from Lori Chamberlain’s foundational “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation” (1988) to James St André’s recent essay collection, Thinking through Translation with Metaphors (2014).2 Analogical thinking seemingly corresponds to our relational practices. But epigenesis is different. Just as Malabou is sensitive to the fact that her argument rides on being more than a “rhetorical artifice,” that her parsing of Kant’s phrase in paragraph 27 of the Critique of Pure Reason, “as it were a system of epigenesis of pure reason,” must be more, for “if it turns out that epigenesis is only an image with nothing other than an exoteric, pedagogic, or illustrative role, then my entire elaboration is meaningless” (181). Indeed. To say what is goes far beyond as it were, and at this point, translation studies, too, must go beyond analogy to talk mechanics, life systems.
The slow seismic shifting or the shock of the quake. The moment in a translation when words slip, leap, echo, fly. Epigenesis: is that what translation is? Is that how we rid ourselves of the genetic paradigm that has shackled us to the original? Is it here, again, translating Malabou, that I find an answer to my questions about how to frame translation? It is – and I don’t think it’s just a translator’s conceit. Even as the authors’ closest readers, we, translators, work at the surface, determined to achieve the moment where “their difference disappears right into their contact” (157). We translate and retranslate, conscious that “epigenesis marks the current valency of the meeting point between the old and the new, the space where they reciprocally interfere with and transform one another” (158). Epigenetics describes how specific genes are activated or deactivated in response to environmental variants – the gene expression that is the transcription and translation of genetic code. The epigenesis of translation is about how texts turn off and on to speak to their audience, to react to their specific contact point. And so here, with a translation that is at once biological and textual, I find that epigenesis, then, is the meaning in translation.
Carolyn Shread
Notes
1.
Peter Connor, conversation, “Translation in Transition” conference, Barnard College, May 2015.
2.
Lori Chamberlain, “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
, vol. 13, 1988, pp. 454–72; James St André, ed.,
Thinking through Translation with Metaphors
, New York: Routledge, 2014.
Epigignomai: (1) to be born after (oi epigignomenoi, the descendants); (2) to arise, to take place; (3) to add.
All evolution is epigenetic.
Georges Canguilhem1
Hence natural things which we find possible only as ends constitute the best proof of the contingency of the world-whole.
Immanuel Kant2
Notes
1.
Georges Canguilhem, Georges Lapassade, Jacques Piquemal, and Jacques Ulmann,
Du Développement à l’évolution au XIXe siècle
, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, coll. “Pratiques Théoriques,” 1962, p. 26. My translation.
2.
Immanuel Kant,
Critique of the Power of Judgment
, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, §75, p. 269. Hereafter
CPJ.
PREFACE
Why write another book on Kant? Why add to the already extensive list of dissertations, monographs, and articles written on him even today?
Quite simply, because, working behind the screen of all this recognition and celebration, my plan is to trace out the opposite, namely the chink of a farewell. A break with Kant is in the works in contemporary continental philosophy. Under the banner of “speculative realism,” a new approach to the world, thinking, and time puts into question a number of postulates considered untouchable since the Critique of Pure Reason: the finitude of knowledge, the phenomenal given, the a priori synthesis as the originary relation between subject and object, the entire structural apparatus said to guarantee the universality and necessity of the laws of both nature and thought, in a word, the “transcendental.” And the rallying cry of new post-critical thought is relinquish the transcendental.
This relinquishing has been on the cards for some time. Initiated by Hegel, it marched on unrelenting until we reached the destruction and deconstruction of metaphysics. From Hegel to Heidegger, then from Heidegger to Derrida and Foucault, the transcendental was interrogated on the grounds of its rigidity, its permanence, its purported role as the condition sine qua non of thinking. To bring time, as did Heidegger, or history, as did Foucault, into the transcendental was already a way of relinquishing it. But that’s not all. The neurobiological revolution of the late 1980s, which must at last be acknowledged, and which brought to light a set of questions that are not entirely germane to the analytic tradition, also undermined any notion of the transcendental. Recent discoveries about how the brain functions have, in their own way, challenged the supposed invariability of laws of thought.
How, then, should we situate speculative realism, given that it views itself as even more radical than the deconstruction of metaphysics and cognitivism? And amidst all these upheavals, what happens to Kantian philosophy, or, for that matter, philosophy itself?
I believe that it is important to formulate a response to these questions by presenting a panorama of the ultra-contemporary philosophical landscape, where several major readings of Kant are being staged in terms of three questions: time; the relation between thinking and the brain; and the contingency of the world.
Of course, the indispensable counterweight to this exploration is the response of Kant himself to his own posterity.
I have constructed this response here around epigenesis, a figure that Kant summons in the Critique of Pure Reason in reference to the gestation of the categories. In biology, epigenesis designates the growth of the embryo through the gradual differentiation of cells – as opposed to preformation, which assumes that the embryo is fully constituted from the start. I develop the thesis that, far from being simply a rhetorical artifice, epigenesis applies to the transcendental itself. The transcendental grows, develops, transforms, and evolves. This evolution is such as to ensure that it spans the centuries separating the epigenetism of the eighteenth century from contemporary epigenetics.
Thus, the transcendental begins life anew.
After The Future of Hegel, 1 the time has come to write on Kant’s future. The next task will be to return to the relation between epigenesis and dialectic.
*
I wish to thank Monique Labrune and John Thompson, my publishers in France and the UK, for their patience and confidence. I also thank Øystein Brekke for his invaluable aid, both philosophical and bibliographic; this book owes much to our exchanges between Paris and Oslo. Étienne Balibar also provided me with books that were nowhere to be found, and I would like to express my gratitude and enduring friendship to him here. Lastly, I am deeply grateful to my translator and friend Carolyn Shread, and to Steve Howard, from Kingston University, who so generously reread the translation. Without their scrutiny and expertise, this project would not have come to light.
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 undertakes 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 prior 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
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 apriori. 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
