This, then, is the main idea directing this work, a dual project that involves returning to, and closely exploring, the difference described above between the innate, the acquired, and a priori. The dialogue between Kant and his posterity will draw its strength precisely from the resources of this difference.
Long before Jean-Pierre Changeux, the difference between the innate and acquired a priori led Kant to speak about an epigenesis of reason, as early as in the Critique of Pure Reason, and, as Kant is perfectly well aware, this difference is what puts the transcendental on shaky ground right from the start.
On the “System of the Epigenesis of Pure Reason”
“System of the epigenesis of pure reason.”52 This phrase, which appears in §27 of the Critique of Pure Reason and thus belongs to the second edition, succinctly expresses, before the phrase “original acquisition,” and in a more striking and provocative manner, the problems described above.
In this paragraph in the Transcendental Deduction, Kant exposes the question of the origin of “correlation,” that is, as he says, the necessity of the agreement (Übereinstimmung) that connects the categories to the objects of experience a priori. The questions I discussed earlier lie at the center of his analysis. Kant claims that this agreement cannot be innate, which forces us to consider that categories are “implanted [eingepflanzte] in us along with our existence.”53 But nor can the agreement come from experience and derive from an empirical source. We must therefore opt for another approach: a pure production of the categories. This is the point where Kant has recourse to an analogy: the analogy of the biological process of epigenesis. He declares that, if correctly understood, the a priori agreement between the categories and experience opens what amounts to “as it were a system of the epigenesis of pure reason [gleichsam ein System der Epigenesis der reinen Vernunft].”54
From the Greek epi, which means “above,” and genesis, “genesis” or “constitution,” epigenesis refers to a mode of embryonic development through the successive addition of parts that are born from one another. Aristotle uses the term “epigenesis” for the first time in Generation of Animals to refer to the formation of the living being.55 He writes:
In the early stages the parts [of the body] are all traced out in outline; later on they get their various colours and softnesses and hardnesses, for all the world as if a painter were at work on them, the painter being Nature. Painters, as we know, first of all sketch in the figure of the animal in outline, and after that go on to apply the colours.56
Modern usage of the term begins in 1650 with William Harvey, who, in his 1651 book Observations on the Generation of Animals, presents epigenesis as characteristic of an organism in which “all parts are not fashioned simultaneously, but emerge in their due succession and order.” In fact, Harvey continues, “the formative faculty [. . .] acquires and prepares its own material for itself.”57 Later, in the early eighteenth century, Maupertuis and Buffon argued for the superiority of epigenetism over preformationism, thereby instigating the conflict that became central to the midcentury.58 The theory of growth through epigenesis – embryonic formation by progressively becoming more complex – is opposed to the preformationist theory that claims that the embryo is a fully constituted being, a miniature individual whose growth, which is only quantitative, consists solely in the unveiling of organs and already-formed parts.
Clearly Kant is referring to this conflict in §27, taking the side of the epigenetic conception of “agreement.” In fact, he contrasts epigenesis with “a kind of preformation-system of pure reason,” which assumes the existence of a “pre-established harmony” between our cognitive structures and their objects and defines categories as innate “subjective predispositions.” Countering this view, Kant claims that the relation of the categories to objects develops through self-differentiation, as do all embryos. Epigenesis, the concept that finally achieved widespread favor at the end of the eighteenth century, then becomes the privileged biological figure of the spontaneity of the understanding: there is therefore a transcendental formation of the elements of thinking. This assertion cuts short both innatism and the fabrication argument: transcendental formation develops as a living individual and is not produced artificially.
However, §27 does not settle the difficulties raised previously with regard to the question of origin. In fact, it appears even to exacerbate them. How is it possible to argue for the existence of a priori epigenesis without contradiction? Are we not back at the strange idea of a “pure” labor, a labor before labor, an acquisition without a process? These are the alternatives: either a priori epigenesis is nothing but a certain kind of preformation that requires a return to innate predispositions – but again, how can we think a pure development without annulling the very idea of development? – or epigenesis is not pure and includes experience, that is, adventure and surprise, in its process.
Yet Kant is adamant: the relation of the categories to the objects of experience is not innate, nor can it take anything whatsoever from experience. He points to the coincidence between differential growth and the a priori: this is the vertiginous problem presented by the transcendental deduction. In spite of everything, does Kant eventually manage to resolve it to reveal a founding transformability in the transcendental?
By following the thread of epigenesis, focusing on all the investigations to which it gives rise, and facing up to all the contradictions and even logical impossibilities it produces, I take on the task of answering this question. The intrication of epigenesis – biological life – and the transcendental is my topic. I shall demonstrate that this intrication, which starts as an analogy, ultimately becomes an intimate relation at the heart of the critical project. Is this still to read Kant against himself? Perhaps, but it is also my way of showing that we cannot do without him, especially when it is a matter of relinquishing him.
Methodological Principles
Starting from the Critique of Pure Reason and the problem of the origin of pure concepts of the understanding – their spontaneity – I shall continue with the historical-practical meaning of epigenesis and end with the immense question that the teleological critique of judgment presents the transcendental.
My argument adopts the rhythm of growth of epigenesis itself. I start therefore with a textual embryo – the body of §27 – in order to follow the morphological development of the problem to other places in the Kantian corpus where different occurrences of the motif of epigenesis appear in a process of increasing conceptual complexity.
My second methodological decision involves not starting directly with Heidegger, Meillassoux, or neurobiological analyses, but rather ending up there. In order to do so, I shall start with several important readings of §27, which already question the foundational stability of the transcendental. The interpretative trajectory is therefore also epigenetic, starting with specific readings in order to progress on to more general interpretations, so as to establish both a cartography and a diagnosis of Kant’s reception today.
The decision to read Kant through these interpretations may appear to be provocative, but remember that it is from the point of view of Kant’s critical posterity, from his a posteriori development, that I set about treating epigenesis a priori! This approach is motivated by the fact that these interpretations all cause the pendulum to swing one way or another between innatism and preformationism, on the one hand, and experience and the a posteriori, on the other. Concertinaed time, the indecision of necessity, the biologization of reason, the slit of contingency, these obstacles, oscillations, and impossibilities to deciding one way or another will thus all appear and reappear continuously during this exploration. Should we therefore conclude that epigenesis is a symptom of the ultimately unstable nature of a priori necessity? Is this the ferment of an inevitable dislocation of critical philosophy that must lead us to “relinquishing” it to its contingency today? Or will we discover, through the figure of transcendental epigenesis, a new dimension of time, an unexpected anticipation
of brain epigenesis, and another logic of foundation?
Will the enigma opened within the transcendental tissue by epigenesis prove the lack of unity and coherence of Kantian thought, or will it reveal a failure of perspective by contemporary philosophy, which, while believing that it is reading Kant, in fact is reading nothing but itself?
Notes
1. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper and Row, 1972, p. 22. Translation modified.
2. Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricœur, What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 47. My emphasis.
3. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier, London: Continuum, 2008.
4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 137, B4. Hereafter CPR.
5. After Finitude, p. 5.
6. After Finitude, p. 5.
7. After Finitude, p. 27. While “relinquishing of transcendentalism” is the published translation of “abandon du transcendantal,” we have modified this translation by referring to “relinquishing the transcendental.”
8. Cf. After Finitude, p. 28: “break with the transcendental tradition.”
9. On the many different meanings of “transcendental,” see Roger Verneaux’s article, “La notion kantienne d’analyse transcendantale,” Revue philosophique de Louvain, Année 52, vol. 50, no. 27, pp. 394–428.
10. CPR, p. 137, B3.
11. CPR, p. 149, A11–12.
12. CPR, p. 196, A56/B81.
13. After Finitude, p. 38.
14. Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavy, Jr and Richard Rand, Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986, p. 162.
15. Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation of 1770, trans. William J. Eckoff, New York: Columbia College, 1894, section II, §8, p. 54, AK (II:345). Translation modified.
16. Immanuel Kant, On a Discovery According to Which Any New Critique of Pure Reason Has Been Made Superfluous by an Earlier One, trans. Henry E. Allison, Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973, p. 135. This text is also known as the Response to Eberhard, AK (VIII:221–3).
17. Kant, On a Discovery, p. 135. AK (VIII:221–3). Translation modified.
18. CPJ §75, p. 268.
19. J.G. Schlosser, Plato’s Briefe nebst einer historischen Einleitung und Anmerkungen, Königsberg, 1795, p. 182.
20. Immanuel Kant, On a Recently Prominent Tone of Superiority in Philosophy, in Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, eds Henry Allison and Peter Heath, trans. Gary Hatfield et al., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 444, AK (VIII:404). On these comments by Schlosser and Kant’s response, see Roger Verneaux, Le Vocabulaire de Kant, Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1967, p. 103.
21. On Kantian philosophy as the foundation of the identity of continental philosophy, see Tom Rockmore, In Kant’s Wake: Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, 2006 and Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007.
22. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
23. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 99.
24. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 99.
25. Cf. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 58 and 90.
26. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 99.
27. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 97.
28. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 95.
29. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 46.
30. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 116.
31. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 137.
32. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 114.
33. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 113.
34. Jean-Pierre Changeux, Du vrai, du beau, du bien: Une nouvelle approche neuronale, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008. While an English version exists, translated and revised by Laurence Garey, The Good, the True and the Beautiful: A Neuronal Approach, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012, my translation here and below is directly from the French since the English version is a reworking of the French text.
35. Changeux, Du Vrai, du beau, du bien, pp. 422–3. René Descartes, Philosophical Essays: Discourse on Method; Meditations; Rules for the Direction of the Mind, trans. Laurence J. Lafleur, Indianapolis/New York/Kansas City: Bobbs-Merrill Company Inc., 1964, p. 119.
36. Du Vrai, du beau, du bien, p. 423.
37. Du Vrai, du beau, du bien, p. 7.
38. Du Vrai, du beau, du bien, p. 7.
39. Du Vrai, du beau, du bien, p. 77.
40. Du Vrai, du beau, du bien, p. 472.
41. Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 39.
42. After Finitude, p. 40.
43. Cf. “break with the transcendental tradition,” After Finitude, p. 28.
44. After Finitude, p. 26.
45. After Finitude, p. 62.
46. After Finitude, p. 29.
47. Cf. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, AK (IV:452).
48. CPR, p. 533, A533/B561.
49. CPR, p. 533, A533/B561.
50. After Finitude, p. 26.
51. CPR, p. 205, B93.
52. CPR, p. 265, B167.
53. CPR, p. 265, B167. Translation modified.
54. CPR, p. 265, B167.
55. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck, London: Heinemann, 1943.
56. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, Book II, chap. 6, 743 b, p. 225.
57. William Harvey, Observations on the Generation of Animals (Exercitationes de generatione animalium), London, 1651, Ex. 46. Republished: Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards, 1943, p. 366. Quoted by John Zammito in “Kant’s Persistent Ambivalence toward Epigenesis, 1764–1790,” in Philippe Huneman, ed., Understanding Purpose: Collected Essays on Kant and Philosophy of Biology (North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy, Vol. VIII), Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007, pp. 51–74, p. 54.
58. Buffon develops the theory of the “inner mold,” which is a reformulation of Harvey’s “formative faculty”: Œuvres complètes, Histoire des animaux, Paris: F.-D. Pillot, 1830, Vol. 11, “Expériences au sujet de la génération,” pp. 7–8. See Maupertuis’ book: Essai sur la formation des corps organisés, Paris/Berlin, 1754.
1
PARAGRAPH 27 OF THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON
Presentation of the Initial Problem: The Origin of the Categories
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant makes reference to two specific tropes to depict the coincidence between the constitution of cognition and the systematic organization of reason, namely architecture and generation (Erzeugung): the edifice under construction and the engendering of the living being. The “system” thus draws its unity simultaneously from an architectonic coherence and from “grow[ing] internally,” thereby allying the solidity of foundations with the intrinsic solidarity of the parts of an organism.1 The figure of “epigenesis” enables Kant to account for the fact that the engendering of the categories and the engendering of the system are not separable and that the whole that they form develops “like an animal body.”2 Epigenesis makes manifest both the a priori productivity of the understanding and the architectonic tendency of reason. Thus the Transcendental Deduction and the Architectonic of Pure Reason complement one another perfectly.
Kant introduces the figure of epigenesis in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in order to respond to objections the work received from the time of its publication in 1781. These objections were already concerned with the stability of the transcendental ground. In Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786), Kant mentions these objections, all of
which relate to the status of the deduction. In a note, he mentions the existence of a “review” in which “Prof. Ulrich” expresses doubts about the value of the “principal basis” granted to the deduction. Kant acknowledges that these doubts are legitimate and states that “without an entirely clear and sufficient deduction of the categories the system of the Critique of Pure Reason totters on its foundation.”3 Indeed,
all use of pure reason can never extend to anything other than objects of experience, and, since nothing empirical can be the condition of a priori principles, the latter can be nothing more than principles of the possibility of experience in general. This alone is the true and sufficient basis for the determination of the limits of pure reason, but not the solution to the problem how experience is now possible by means of these categories, and only through these categories alone.4
The initial question is therefore the legitimation of the a priori agreement between the categories and the objects of experience.
Paragraph 27 of the Critique of Pure Reason responds to this specific challenge and illuminates the interdependence of two primary structures: first, the a priori origin of the pure concepts of the under-standing; second, the a priori origin of the relation of these concepts to objects of experience. The epigenesis analogy allows Kant to prove and explain that the categories, which contain the principles of the possibility of all experience in general, apply to appearances a priori, meet them, and are well and truly their form. The analogy must therefore supply the adequate representation of their objective reference. Kant argues that this reference can come only from a generative production, the work of the spontaneity of the understanding. The validity of the system of rationality as a whole depends on the nature and solidity of this relation. It must be neither innate nor constructed.
Before Tomorrow- Epigenesis and Rationality Page 4