Yet how can we not think of Kant’s attack in §27 against the skeptical argument of pre-established harmony according to which “the categories were neither self-thought a priori first principles of our knowledge nor drawn from experience, but were rather subjective predispositions for thinking, implanted in us along with our existence [. . .]”?40 Doesn’t pre-established harmony, “a kind of preformation-system of pure reason,” amount to destroying the necessity of the pure elements of knowledge? Against this “system,” Kant also writes that the “decisive” objection is “that in such a case the categories would lack the necessity that is essential to their concept.”41 Indeed, if the categories were based only “on a subjective necessity, arbitrarily implanted in us,” they, along with the order of nature of which they are the form, would be entirely contingent.
But, however minimal, however atheist it might be to emphasize Kant’s preformationism – as do Zöller and Zammito – is this not to claim, one way or another, the contingency of transcendental necessity? Isn’t drawing from the germs of a more ancient past than spontaneity a paradoxical manner of relinquishing this necessity?
Notes
1. It is nevertheless worth mentioning that Kant refers to Blumenbach in a note in his response to Forster in On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy, published in 1788 and written in the fall of 1787, in Anthropology, History, and Education, eds Robert B. Louden and Günter Zöller, trans. Mary Gregor et al., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 192–218, p. 214. The note refers to Blumenbach’s 1779 Handbuch der Naturgeschichte (Handbook of Natural History), of which Kant had a copy.
2. Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, Berlin: Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1902–97, Vol. XVII, p. 416 (Note 4104); p. 92 (Note 4275); p. 554 (Note 4446); Vol. XVIII, p. 8 (Note 4851); p. 12 (Note 4859); Vol. XXVIII, p. 684, p. 760. See Notes and Fragments.
3. Immanuel Kant, The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God, in Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770, ed. and trans. David Walford, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 107–201, AK (II:68).
4. Immanuel Kant, Review of J.G. Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity, in Anthropology, History, and Education, pp. 121–42. Johann Godfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, in Herders Sämtliche Werke, ed. V.B. Suphan, Vol. 13, Berlin: Weidmann, 1887, republished Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, Vol. I, 1965.
5. Zöller translates Anlagen as “dispositions.”
6. CPJ, §81, p. 291.
7. “Kant on the Generation of Metaphysical Knowledge,” p. 77.
8. Since Blumenbach was against the idea of “germs,” Kant removed all references to them in CPJ.
9. On this topic, see Robert J. Richards The Romantic Concept of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 225.
10. Blumenbach, Manual of the Elements of Natural History, p. 10. Here I use the retranslation of this passage by Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, p. 98. The conclusion of the passage is slightly different in the second edition (Göttingen: Dietrich, 1789). An English translation of this second edition (which was the one which Kant owned) is available as J. Blumenbach, An Essay on Generation, trans. Alexander Crichton, London: Cadell, 1792. On general relations between Kant and Blumenbach, see Sloan, “Performing the Categories,” and Timothy Lenoir, “Kant, Blumenbach, and Vital Materialism in German Biology,” Isis, vol. 71, no. 256, 1980, pp. 77–108.
11. “Review of J.G. Herder’s Ideas,” p. 127. Kant cites Herder here: “Just as the plant itself is organic life, so the polyp is also organic life. There are therefore many organic forces, those of vegetation, of the muscular stimuli of sensation [. . .]. The animal soul is the sum of all the effective forces in one organization,” p. 127.
12. Johann Godfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, p. 50, cited by Zöller, “Kant on the Generation of Metaphysical Knowledge,” p. 81.
13. “Review of J.G. Herder’s Ideas,” p. 139.
14. “Review of J.G. Herder’s Ideas,” p. 140. Note that “self-forming faculty” has also been translated as “self-structuring capacity.” Cf. Sloan “Performing the Categories,” p. 244.
15. “Review of J.G. Herder’s Ideas,” p. 139.
16. “Review of J.G. Herder’s Ideas,” p. 139.
17. Zammito, ‘Kant’s Persistent Ambivalence toward Epigenesis,” p. 58.
18. ‘Kant’s Persistent Ambivalence toward Epigenesis,” p. 59.
19. “Review of J.G. Herder’s Ideas,” pp. 132–3.
20. Zammito, “Kant’s Persistent Ambivalence toward Epigenesis,” pp. 59–60.
21. Immanuel Kant, Of the Different Races of Human Beings, in Anthropology, History, and Education, pp. 82–97, pp. 85, 89. On this point, see Raphaël Lagier, Les Races humaines selon Kant, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004.
22. Of the Different Races of Human Beings, p. 90.
23. Immanuel Kant, Determination of the Concept of a Human Race, in Anthropology, History, and Education, pp. 145–59, p. 152.
24. Kant, On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy, p. 201.
25. On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy, p. 214.
26. Zöller, “Kant on the Generation of Metaphysical Knowledge,” p. 82.
27. Cf. “Kant on the Generation of Metaphysical Knowledge,” pp. 83–4.
28. See p. 42 above.
29. Note 4851, Notes and Fragments, p. 194, AK (XIII:8).
30. Note 4859, AK (XIII:12), not included in Notes and Fragments. My translation. See Alexander Baumgarten, Metaphysics: A Critical Translation with Kant’s Elucidations, Selected Notes, and Related Materials, ed. and trans. Courtney D. Fugate and John Hymers, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, p. 45.
31. CPJ, p. 291.
32. CPJ, p. 292.
33. CPJ, p. 292.
34. CPJ, p. 292.
35. CPJ, p. 292.
36. Cf. “Kant on the Generation of Metaphysical Knowledge,” p. 89.
37. Zammito, “Kant’s Persistent Ambivalence toward Epigenesis,” p. 57. Zammito is referring to the passage from the Analytic mentioned above: “We will therefore pursue the pure concepts into their first germs and predispositions in the human understanding, where they lie ready [. . .],” CPR, p. 203, A66/B91.
38. “Kant’s Persistent Ambivalence toward Epigenesis,” p. 65.
39. “Kant’s Persistent Ambivalence toward Epigenesis,” p. 51.
40. CPR, p. 265, B167.
41. CPR, p. 265, B168.
6
THE “NEO-SKEPTICAL” THESIS AND ITS EVOLUTION
Genova’s argument, which Zöller read too hastily and judged too severely, comes to mind again at this point. Genova argues that to imprison Kant in preformationism is to hold him captive to an unacknowledged theological prejudice. He writes:
Without a clear understanding of the role of epigenesis as an organizing principle of Kant’s transcendental arguments, it is all too easy to construe Kant’s theory of knowledge as a sophisticated version of the preformationist alternative. What is typically done is to treat the preformation hypothesis as unacceptable to Kant because of its dependence on theological presuppositions and its association with philosophers like Leibniz [. . .]. But then, Kant’s critics, paradoxically enough, often proceed to interpret his epistemology precisely in terms of a working model which is isomorphic with the logical structure of the preformationist theory but devoid of the overt, theological content.1
To take Kant for a preformationist is to attribute to him arguments that he rejects explicitly, notably the “implantation” of the categories of thought in us by God. This is a clear misinterpretation, which, in Genova’s view, completely misses the point of §27.
Yet is the neo-Darwinian reading of Kant that Genova develops in his article capable of reconciling the two terms “epigenesis” and “tra
nscendental,” whose contiguity appears to be increasingly difficult to justify? Does substituting an evolutionary and adaptive dynamic for preformationist fixity offer a more satisfying approach to the problem?
Who’s a Skeptic? Role Reversal in §27
It would be a difficult argument to make. Contrary to what Genova claims, neo-Darwinism is not compatible with transcendental idealism. This is what the second reading track reveals, structured as it is around the notion that the transcendental is nothing but a front whose purpose is quite simply to mask innatism. If it is true that the agreement between the categories and the objects of experience is the product of epigenesis – which is to say, well and truly a birth – then this epigenesis must be cut off from any relation to the transcendental, despite what Kant claims. The agreement, which has nothing to do with an a priori structure, is formed via adaptation and evolution. Again, Kant would have described this thesis as skeptical. But who’s the most skeptical? If contingency presides in some way over the agreement of the forms of thought and their objects, wouldn’t it be better to say it openly, rather than trying to conceal the shaky and factitious nature of the transcendental? Have we not just seen that Kant doomed his most faithful readers to borrow from skepticism (by having recourse to preformationism) in his attempt to save the purity of the source? The time has come to then ask: what is an authentically skeptical – anti-transcendental – take on the transcendental?
This is what I intend to examine now by analyzing the adaptive views of the constitution of rationality. It is a matter of seeing whether this new genesis – for again it is a matter of genetic readings – avoids the aporia of the previous reading.
Bouveresse Analyzes Kant’s Innatism
In his interpretation of §27 of the Critique of Pure Reason, Jacques Bouveresse insists that there is no way that the idea of epigenesis is possible in a transcendental economy.2 Rather, epigenesis undermines the transcendental from within by revealing the a priori as an innate cognitive arrangement.
Kant is certainly a skeptic. Hegel always said so, and analytic philosophers confirmed it on other grounds. Moreover, there is indeed an element of preformation in critical philosophy; whether it affects the first focus, the hypocenter – the origin of the a priori – or whether it coincides with the a priori itself is of little importance. The circularity of the a priori and the transcendental, which is as impossible to prove as to found, is only an object of logical belief since the Kantian rejection of pre-established harmony is based on another type of pre-established harmony: the assumed harmony between this belief and reality. However reluctantly, previous attempts to identify the reasons for Kant’s preformationism all produce the same result: in Kant, necessity always proceeds from arbitrariness. Things are as they are; the a priori exists – this one cannot but believe.
Bouveresse writes:
The goal of the transcendental arguments is [. . .] to supply “not only reasons but also good reasons for the defence of some of our most central instinctive beliefs,” such as, for example, our belief in a causal order among appearances that exist outside of experience. [. . .] Clearly the price of this is idealism, which seemed excessive and unacceptable to many philosophers and scientists since the Kantian solution apparently obliges us to accept that transcendental arguments reveal nothing about the nature of the objects of our experience to us a priori, except in so far as this a priori cognition [. . .] is first and foremost knowledge of a contribution made by the mind and not by the objects themselves.3
However much this type of “belief” references the germs and predispositions on which it is based, it will never succeed in its attempt to pass as being objectively necessary that which is no more than a presupposition.
Let us return to the supposed “skeptic” that Kant calls upon in §27, the “preformationist,” who is perhaps none other than his own mirror image. What would the “true” skeptic say in response to the argument developed in this paragraph? Bouveresse demonstrates indisputably his point that true skepticism has nothing to do with preformationism. Rather, and this is precisely the problem, it shares an epigenesist conception of the truth. The positions attributed to the critic and the skeptic in §27 are thus reversed. Kant defends a position that he cannot support (epigenesis) and rejects one that he actually supports (preformation).
From that point on, epigenesis belongs to the skeptical, a-transcendental reality, of which it is simultaneously the image and the process. In having recourse to epigenesis in §27, Kant can be said to have handed over the weapon of his own destruction.
From Pre-Established Harmony to Gradual Harmonization
What does this mean? Bouveresse demonstrates that what Kant calls Hume’s “preformationist” position was actually already laying the ground for a position – developed in the late nineteenth century and later radicalized with the appearance of epigenetics – that reflected a biological evolution of thought. Far from serving preformationism, the so-called Humean thesis of “pre-established harmony” was the forerunner of the thesis of a “gradual harmonization” of the categories and objects of experience, the idea of a continuous epigenetic development as a result of their agreement. This thesis, which Bouveresse terms “neo-skeptical,” thus leads us from Hume to the theory of evolution. Bouveresse explains his approach as follows: “Having examined the Kantian argument, I shall consider a classic type of ‘skeptical’ solution (according to the Kantian criterion), based on the theory of evolution [. . .], which at a certain time enjoyed considerable support among some theorists who were both declared supporters of Darwin and determined adversaries of the unknowable thing in itself.”4 What does this “solution” mean for our problem?
Another Version of the Source, Another Genesis of Epigenesis
Bouveresse begins by presenting the content of §27 and recalling the three options identified by Kant. He starts by returning to the initial problem:
[T]o the question of how the agreement we observe is achieved between the spontaneity of cognition, on the one hand, and what might be called the concurrent spontaneity of the appearances, on the other, that nothing, at first sight, obliges it to align with the former, Kant responds that this agreement is made simultaneously possible and necessary by the fact that the appearances, as objects of a possible experience, draw their formal possibility from the understanding itself and are thereby constitutively obliged to submit themselves to its rules.5
This agreement can only be thought of as necessary, in other words, a priori. For Kant, any point of view other than that of transcendental idealism must be a skeptical viewpoint. The three analogies then follow: equivocal generation, preformationism or innatism, and epigenesis. From the point of view of epigenesis: “the categories of the understanding contain the principles of the possibility of experience”; they contain them by producing them. The only way to ward off skepticism is to admit that “without understanding there would not be any nature at all, i.e. synthetic unity of the manifold of appearances in accordance with rules.”6
Indeed, “the understanding is itself the source of the laws of nature.”7 However, to avoid concluding that the understanding would project simple subjective proprieties onto the real, Kant calls on the epigenesis argument. The a priori is not a predisposition of the mind implanted in us in an arbitrary manner. If the unity of nature is necessary, it is because the agreement of categories with objects is produced spontaneously and depends on nothing other than itself.
Bouveresse argues that the problem is that “many philosophers and scientists” never accepted this argument, which was deemed mystifying. For them, whether or not the understanding is spontaneous, a priori simply means innate. Whatever he may say, the necessity that Kant calls the “necessity of nature” or the “necessity of the agreement between the categories and the objects” is only, and can only be, the result of a transfer of innate proprieties of the mind onto the phenomenal real. Kant’s demonstration is anything but epigenesist. If one wishes to explain the origin of the a
greement, then why not accept again a gradual harmonization rather than a mysterious a priori synthesis (pre-established harmony!) between the categories and objects? Bouveresse explains:
Instead of a harmony established once and for all at the origin, between the laws that govern the functioning of the mind and those that govern the functioning of the laws of nature, we could apparently [. . .] imagine a gradual harmonization made possible and explained by the mechanisms of biological evolution, and that ultimately leads to the correspondence that we observe between the categories of thought and objects. We might say that, in some senses, under the influence of these same laws of nature that we are trying to know, in the end, a being was created whose constitution is adapted to the laws in question.8
The subject of cognition would then not be the producer, but rather the product of evolution.
This is Peirce’s conception, for instance. For him, the a priori actually marks the impossibility of going back to the origin of the agreement between the mind and objects. What Kant calls the “spontaneity of the understanding” is in fact the paradoxical expression of a prohibition against accessing the source or against having a retroactive perspective on the origin of the agreement. Countering Kant, it is incumbent on us to insist that this agreement can only proceed from a natural tendency and result in an evolution. In the “Principles of Philosophy,” Peirce states:
It is certain that the only hope of retroductive reasoning ever reaching the truth is that there may be some natural tendency toward an agreement between the ideas which suggest themselves to the human mind and those which are concerned in the laws of nature.9
Before Tomorrow- Epigenesis and Rationality Page 11