Before Tomorrow- Epigenesis and Rationality

by Catherine Malabou

  In other words, Kant does not consider the formative force to be protean. The repertoire of the formation of forms is limited. And while the terms that describe this limitation – germs and original predispositions – are identical to those used by the opposing camp, they do not have the same meaning or the same function. For the proponents of preformationism, they express predetermination, the content of the embryonic envelope that will simply unfold. For the critical philosopher, they refer to the natural boundaries of organic growth, the register of types that the formative drive cannot transgress. They are the limits that this force “imposes on itself.”

  Epigenesis and Anthropological Variety

  After presenting Herder’s theory of epigenesis at length in the first part of the review, in the second part, Kant returns to the concept of “formative drive” and its ability to explain biological adaptability to the variety of external circumstances. Kant addresses this key question in his texts on the races and “the climatic difference of human beings.”15

  Herder considers the “formative drive” to be the principle of anthropological variety, the diversity of the races and types of humans. Kant agrees with him on this point but questions Herder’s conception of the relation between fixity and contextual variability of the drive. For Herder, the “force” is able to modify itself indefinitely depending on climate, thereby adapting itself to any context. Kant explains that Herder “assumes as its cause a principle of life, which appropriately modifies itself internally in accordance with differences of the external circumstances.”16 Hence Herder’s formative drive is not only unlimited in its creative resource, it is also capable of transforming itself by adapting to circumstances. This is the point that Kant takes issue with, for mutability too must have its limits!

  Let us return to the passage cited earlier. Kant says that in this “force” he cannot but see “limitations, not further explicable, of a self-forming faculty, which latter we can just as little explain or make comprehensible.” Yet again these limitations are the “germs” and “original predispositions” that constrain the variability of the type and prevent it from transforming so as to become monstrous or degenerated. Whatever the circumstances, the type of species, especially the human species, remains the same! Kant reacts very strongly against what he views as a sign of an “insupportable hylozoism.”17 The “formative drive” with its unbridled freedom, as conceived by Herder, appears to come from an idea of “radical spontaneity in matter itself.”18 Kant is intransigent when it comes to the fact that the formative drive is not, in itself, its own origin. He states this firmly:

  [T]he unity of the organic force, which, as self-forming in regard to the manifoldness of all organic creatures, and later in accordance with the difference of these organs working through them in different ways, is supposed to constitute the entire distinctiveness of its many genera and species – this is an idea that lies entirely outside the field of the observational doctrine of nature and belongs merely to speculative philosophy: but even there, if it were to find reception, it would wreak great devastation among the accepted concepts.19

  The consequence of the inaccessibility of the source – a source that can only have the status of a question – appears to be that, as John Zammito writes, “even epigenesis implied preformation: at the origin there had to be some ‘inscrutable’ (transcendent) endowment, and with it, in his [Kant’s] view, some determinate restriction in the species variation. Thereafter, the organized principles within the natural world could proceed on adaptive (mechanical) lines.”20

  We always return to the same idea: the genesis of epigenesis leads back to a stem that resists it. The formative drive – spontaneity spontaneously restrained – is limited at the source.

  On Human Races

  In his texts on human races, Kant examines the organic archetypes that lead to the production of intraspecific varieties. Here too we find the idea that the development of organized beings comes from “germs” and “predispositions” that are realized and differentiated through the combining of male and female seeds. Epigenesis thus describes the spontaneous unfolding of the organizing forces at work in this combining. But the content of this unfolding appears to be present already as a predisposition inherent to the generative power (Zeugungskraft), which restricts the fate of occasional developments depending on circumstance. The functional preordination of germs and predispositions depending on specific type cannot be transgressed: the contingent developments that are varieties and organic variations are restricted both in number and in quality.

  The 1776–7 text Of the Different Races of Human Beings presents the idea of a stem common to the species, which differentiate by “subspecies,” “strains,” and “varieties.” All of these are without doubt the fruit of “germs” or “natural [pre]dispositions,”21 that prevent “modifications” from reproducing themselves. Kant writes:

  [W]hat is supposed to propagate itself must have laid previously in the generative power as antecedently determined to an occasional unfolding in accordance with the circumstances in which the creature can find itself and in which it is supposed to persistently preserve itself. For the animal must not be subject to a foreign intrusion into the generative power, which would be capable of gradually removing the creature from its original and essential destiny and of producing true degenerations that would perpetuate themselves.22

  In 1785, Kant repeated his support for the argument of the unique stem:

  [I]n the germs of a single first phylum, so that the latter would be suitable for the gradual population of the different regions of the world, can it be comprehended why, once these predispositions developed on occasion and accordingly also in different ways, different classes of human beings had to arise, which subsequently also had to contribute to their determinate character necessarily to the generation with each other class, because this specific character belonged to the possibility of its own existence, thus also to the possibility of propagating its own kind, and was derived from the necessary first predisposition in the phyletic species.23

  Later, in On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy (1788), we encounter the idea of variation according to an end, which again restricts the extension of the intraspecies mutability. Kant writes:

  [N]ature has to be viewed not as forming in complete freedom but as only developing and as predetermined with respect to those varieties through original [pre]dispositions, just as is the case with the racial characters. For in the variety too, there is to be found purposiveness and corresponding suitability, which cannot be the work of chance.24

  Lastly:

  I myself derive all organization from organic beings (through generation) and all later forms [. . . from] original predispositions, which were to be found in the organization of its phylum. Such development can often be seen in the transplanting of plants. How this phylum itself came about, this problem lies entirely beyond the limits of all physics possible to human beings.25

  The limitation on the variability of the original dispositions contained in the stem (focus or hypocenter) may then be understood as the equivalent, in the field of anthropology, of the limitation of the production of pure forms in the field of knowledge. In both instances, epigenesis is restricted and restrained by a preformationism that prevents uncontrolled proliferation of morphological deviations. The refusal to grant too great a role to experience in intellectual epigenesis can be interpreted, by analogy with the critique of Herder’s vital force, as an unwillingness to consider the transcendental not only as a formative power (of the categories) but also as a malleable instance, susceptible to self-transformation, to varying in its productions according to circumstance and the consequences of its development.

  “Intellectual” Epigenesis

  It is directly in line with the arguments exposed in the Herder review that Zöller is able to return to the problem of the categorial epigenesis and conclude that Kant’s position is unchanging.

  But what are the antecedents
for an epigenesis of the categories? In Kant it is prefigured first by the notion of “psychological” epigenesis, and then by that of “intellectual” epigenesis. Zöller writes: “An examination of Kant’s Reflexionen zur Metaphysik [Notes on Metaphysics], compiled from marginal notes and commentaries on his copy in use of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica and from loose leaves of varying provenance, reveals two distinct applications of the term ‘epigenesis’ for the presentation of metaphysical problems and their suggested solutions.”26

  The first “application” emerges with the commentary on Baumgarten’s meditations on the “origo animae humanae” – origin of the human soul – in rational psychology. In order to describe the material psychological principle according to which the souls of children are engendered by and from those of their parents, Kant uses the phrase “epigenesis psychologica.” In the same way that in biology, epigenesis refers to the entirely separate production of a new being, psychological epigenesis describes the fact that new souls result from reproduction. Kant did not return to this argument, yet it already contains an essential element: the idea of combining a generic model with the independence of the offspring that come of it.

  The second application is concerned precisely with the origin of “transcendental” concepts. In at least four Notes, epigenesis is no longer presented as “epigenesis psychologica” but instead as “epigenesis intellectualis.” The latter term refers to the emergence of a type of knowledge that has its source in finite understanding and is not derived from divine or intuitive understanding.27 We have already mentioned Note 4275, in which Kant situates epigenesis between the three positions of preformationism (Crusius), empiricism (Aristotle/Locke), and intellectual intuition (Plato/Malebranche).28 In Note 4851, he reconsiders the question of determining “whether [pure] concepts are mere educta or producta [. . .] (producta either through physical (empirical) influence or through the consciousness of the formal constitution of our sensibility and understanding on the occasion of experience, hence producta a priori, not a posteriori.)”29 In the same way, in Note 4859, he wonders about the possibility of the “origin of transcendental concepts [. . .] through intellectual epigenesis (per epigenesin intellectualem)”30 – a process of discursive engendering in contrast to the process of intellectual intuition. The response is clearly in the affirmative. Intellectual epigenesis is certainly an a priori production, one that is spontaneous, but it nevertheless cannot be cut off from its seed, which is buried so deep that it is only the echo or outer showing of them.

  Of course, cognition is entirely produced, proceeding from a generative, dynamic synthesis. It is in no way the copy of a pre-existing order and appears instead far more as a production of itself and as the forms of the objects themselves. Indeed, metaphysical knowledge consists in the anticipation of the formal a priori characteristics that will be exhibited by the objects of experience. Nevertheless, just as there are a limited number of variations in the human species and in living species in general, the repertoire of categories is limited in its germinating prefiguration. The agreement with the objects of experience is never modified either. Zöller thus implies that in some senses Kant adds to his use of epigenesis a “critique of epigenetic reason” in order to limit the claims of the formative force in both the biological and the transcendental fields. The genetic inquiry leads epigenesis back to the invariability of its focus.

  The Critique of the Power of Judgment

  Finally, what about the Critique of the Power of Judgment? It appears that there are no remaining difficulties for understanding the phrase “generic preformation” from §81: it means that “the productive capacity of the progenitor is still preformed in accordance with the internally purposive predispositions that were imparted to its stock, and thus the specific form was preformed virtualiter.”31 The same principle is at work here.

  It is the whole design of the specific form that is preformed. Epigenesis, be it intellectual, anthropological, or biological, thus always appears to be the development of pre-existing entities. In §81, as noted in chapter 2 above, Kant states: “No one has done more for the proof of this theory of epigenesis as well as the establishment of the proper principles of its application, partly by limiting an excessively presumptuous use of it, than Privy Councilor Blumenbach.”32 Now, according to Zöller, the end of the sentence (“presumptuous use”) is a reference to Herder. “An excessively presumptuous use” of the theory of epigenesis would, in fact, be Herder’s use of it in the Philosophy of the History of Humanity. We have seen that according to Kant this use bears the mark of hylozoism, rightly or wrongly. And it is precisely this hylozoism that is so strongly rejected in the final lines of the paragraph: “For he [Blumenbach] rightly declares it to be contrary to reason that raw matter should originally have formed itself in accordance with mechanical laws, that life should have arisen from the nature of the lifeless, and that matter should have been able to assemble itself into the form of a self-preserving purposiveness by itself.”33

  Blumenbach distinguishes the “formative drive” from the other vital forces, but especially, as we have seen, from any physical force of the body in general. Kant does not fail to remind us of this: “He [Blumenbach] begins all physical explanation of these formations with organized matter.”34

  Thus, Kant asserts that the “formative drive” cannot be reduced to a “merely mechanical formative force,” as Herder’s anarchic vital force appears, ultimately and paradoxically, to be. Indeed, this force that is capable of everything is a force without reason. A mad mechanism. An uncontrolled automaton. Nevertheless – and in this lies the challenge – Kant declares that in opposition to Herder’s interpretation, we must assume that a mechanical force originally limits the formative drive and thereby protects it from the mechanism, preventing its possible degeneration into an unchained motive power. Kant writes:

  [Blumenbach] leaves natural mechanism an indeterminable but at the same time also unmistakable role under this inscrutable principle of an original organization, on account of which he calls the faculty in the matter in an organized body (in distinction from the merely mechanical formative force that is present in all matter) a formative drive (standing, as it were, under the guidance and direction of that former principle).35

  Life thus borrows from the mechanism so as to avoid becoming mechanical. This is the problem at the source. In any case, it is the same problem that Zöller faces. In biological order, the original organization plays a role similar to that of an innate bedrock, which is the constitution of our cognitive power. The focus refers to some unfathomable mechanical principle. The difference between this “mechanism” and Herder’s hylozoism is that it serves life by restricting its inventive abilities, rather than giving free rein to its monstrosity. Zöller insists that Kant’s concern is to emphasize as much as possible the limits of a self-forming vital force.36 The analogy of the growth of an organic body and the growth of knowledge is based on the same idea of constrained productivity.

  A “Maximal” Preformationism?

  John Zammito is even more explicit in the conclusions he draws. Arguing that the language in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason is “unequivocally [. . .] preformationist”37 in its analogies, he claims that throughout his work, Kant is quite simply unclear when it comes to epigenesis. Referring to the same texts as Zöller, he argues that the idea of a priori epigenesis is contradictory and ultimately indefensible. Understood literally, rather than serving it, pure epigenesis could do nothing but ruin the transcendental edifice: “Epigenesis incites a fundamental erosion of Kant’s boundary between the constitutive and the regulative, between the transcendental and the empirical: a naturalism beyond anything Kant could countenance.”38

  According to this view, Kant never really supported epigenetic theory. Beginning with a reading of §27, Zammito insists again:

  My contention will be that neither before nor after this now somewhat famous analogy was Kant entirely comfortable with the idea. Indeed, I ar
gue that Kant proved resolutely hostile to the idea in both published and unpublished sources from his first mention of it in the 1760s until as late as 1787, making the comment at B167 all the more perplexing. Further, I argue that in the immediately ensuing years leading up to the publication of the Critique of Judgment in 1790, and in particular in relation to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Kant remained more ambivalent than has frequently been contended. It is not altogether clear that Kant and Blumenbach really understood the full implications of their respective positions and consequently may well have overestimated the convergence of their views.39

  The critical legitimacy of the analogy in §27 must therefore be proven against the analogy! Once again, the only way to save Kant from skepticism is to have him accept something skeptical: preformationism, for example, which, as we have seen, is an expression of skepticism. Epigenesis could then be renamed preformation so as to be granted the right to critical philosophy.