In the second Critique, Kant demonstrates that the coincidence between the source of objectivity and subjective arising is the specificity of practical spontaneity. The Critique of Practical Reason also explicitly abandons all innatism and all preformationism when it brings to light the engendering point – epigenesis – for the objective reference of practical causality. A single a priori generative link is at work within thought and freedom. In the Transcendental Deduction of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant returns to the discussion with Hume about “pre-established harmony.” He says that Hume would again deprive causality of all objective necessity, this time in the practical field:
If, with Hume, I had removed the objective reality from the concept of causality in its theoretical use not only with regard to things in themselves (the suprasensible) but also with regard to objects of the senses, then the concept would have lost all signification and, as a theoretically impossible concept, would have been declared entirely unusable; and since one also can make no use of nothing, the practical use of a theoretically null concept would have been entirely absurd.25
As already posited in §27 of the first Critique, to establish both the theoretical and practical validity of causality thus requires proof that its origin is not an innate predisposition. Returning to the link between the two works in the Dialectic of Pure Practical Reason, Kant states:
By these reminders the reader of the critique of pure speculative reason will completely convince himself how extremely necessary, how profitable for theology and morality, was that laborious deduction of the categories. For if one posits the categories in pure understanding, only that deduction can keep one from considering them, with Plato, to be innate and from basing on them extravagant pretensions of theories of the suprasensible [. . .].26
There is, therefore, a “relation of equality” between speculative and practical reason, which is the epigenetic source of the objective validity of the categories.27
Epigenesis thus loses any connection to preformation and innateness definitively. A real morphological inventiveness of the transcendental must be recognized. Not in the sense that it would be possible to invent any category whatsoever, but in the sense in which this very restriction engages the subject in the invention of themself.
“Between disorder and deliberation, there is a third way,”28 writes Lebrun. Between the chaos of equivocal generation and the divine decree of preformation lies the space of just such an invention.
What invention? Lebrun also expands on the book metaphor:
Would not a traveler have lost his mind, writes Leibniz in the Theodicy, if, arriving at an uninhabited land and finding books and clocks there, he thought he had found himself in a land “where the books write themselves”? Consequently, he concludes, “there is a moral certainty that it is Providence that governs things.” Kantian purposiveness and epigenesis refuse this alternative between insanity and piety: life is this land where books do not write themselves, but nor are they written under dictation there.29
The land where books do not write themselves, but where they are not mere copies of an original text either, is the land where the only writing possible resides: previously oriented, but without being programmed. A writing that, even as it develops itself from a structural outline, is not predestined. An interpretation.
The spontaneity of the understanding cannot reach itself substantially, and it is precisely due to this that it is impossible to think it as predetermined or pregiven. This is also why explanation and comprehension yield to exegesis. Lebrun then veers off towards a dimension of the problem of categorial epigenesis that distances it from strictly biological and epistemological lines to open up the problem of meaning, or, rather, meaning as an absence of preformed meaning. There is an epigenesis of reason because the a priori has no meaning. Rationality engenders itself – invents its forms – out of this necessary lack.
On this point, Lebrun calls on §666 of the Will to Power, in which Nietzsche writes, “‘Nothing has any meaning’ – this melancholy sentence means ‘All meaning lies in intention, and if intention is altogether lacking, then meaning is altogether lacking, too.’”30 The interest in associating the formative vital force and the formative transcendental force ultimately consists in the revelation of the fundamentally senseless nature of the origin. Categorial spontaneity does not respond to an intention any more than does the life stem. Again, critique thus slips away from the problem of cognition to the question of interpretation, and from the problem of interpretation to the question of history.
History exists precisely because meaning is not given. History thus appears as the subtext of critique. Foucault demonstrated this magisterially. The identification between the opening of interpretation and the beginning of history signals a certain age or certain moment in reading Kant. According to this reading, meaning constructs itself, engenders itself – through epigenesis – it becomes what it is, starting from a blank.
Epigenesis is thus the origin born of the lack of origin, the lack of meaning of the origin, the spontaneity of its silence. And if this origin is indeed the place where history is engendered, then it is possible to assert that the agreement of the categories with the objects is a historical meeting.
At this point in the analysis, we see that the questioning of the existence of a Kantian preformationism does not, for all that, lead to an eclipse of the transcendental or its disappearance in favor of an evolutionary and adaptive biological schema. If the analysis leads to taking the living being and the formative drive into account, it does not lead to the reduction of reason to brain epigenesis and appears to cut short the presumed instability of its founding validity. It is clear that, from one metaphor of the book to the next, from the image of reading employed by Jenuwein to the image of writing called on here, the question of meaning changes the game. This question eludes proponents of mental Darwinism entirely. More generally, no biologist examines the relation between genetics and epigenetics in terms of meaning.31 Yet isn’t meaning what makes it possible to reassert the resistance of the transcendental to its biologization?
Notes
1. “Kant on the Generation of Metaphysical Knowledge,” p. 72.
2. Cf. Catherine Malabou, “Pour une critique de la raison neurobiologique,” La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 984, January 2009, pp. 4–6.
3. Germs are more explicitly responsible for the development of the parts, while dispositions are at work in relations between the parts.
4. Duchesneau, “Épigenèse de la raison pure et analogies biologiques,” p. 244. Phillip R. Sloan adopts a similar approach when he says that in the third Critique, Kant’s preformationism “is of a novel kind. It is a preformationism of Anlagen, now conceived as dynamic, purposive predispositions that function in relation to the Bildungstrieb.” “Preforming the Categories,” p. 249.
5. Duchesneau, “Épigenèse de la raison pure et analogies biologiques,” p. 245.
6. Kant (AK [II:435]) cited in Duchesneau, “Épigenèse de la raison pure et analogies biologiques,” p. 246.
7. “Épigenèse de la raison pure et analogies biologiques,” p. 247.
8. CPJ, §65, p. 245.
9. CPJ, §81, p. 292.
10. “Épigenèse de la raison pure et analogies biologiques,” p. 248.
11. “Épigenèse de la raison pure et analogies biologiques,” p. 237. See pp. 236–7 on the topic of Wolff and Haller’s influence on Blumenbach.
12. “Épigenèse de la raison pure et analogies biologiques,” p. 251.
13. Lebrun, Kant et la fin de la métaphysique, p. 716.
14. Kant et la fin de la métaphysique, p. 708.
15. Kant et la fin de la métaphysique, p. 704.
16. Kant et la fin de la métaphysique, p. 704.
17. Kant et la fin de la métaphysique, p. 708.
18. Kant et la fin de la métaphysique, p. 713.
19. Kant et la fin de la métaphysique, p. 705.
20. Kant et la fin de la métaphys
ique, p. 707.
21. Kant et la fin de la métaphysique, p. 708.
22. Kant et la fin de la métaphysique, p. 707.
23. On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy, p. 198.
24. Kant et la fin de la métaphysique, p. 708.
25. CPR, p. 76, AK (V:56).
26. CPR, p. 178, AK (V:141).
27. CPR, p. 179, AK (V:141).
28. Lebrun, Kant et la fin de la métaphysique, p. 706.
29. Kant et la fin de la métaphysique, p. 706.
30. Kant et la fin de la métaphysique, p. 717, citing Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage, 1967, p. 351.
31. Except perhaps Evelyn Fox Keller, in “Rethinking the Meaning of Genetic Determinism,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values 15, pp. 113–39, University of Utah, February 18, 1993. http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/k/keller94.pdf.
9
IRREDUCIBLE FOUCAULT
What Is Enlightenment?
With the encounter between transcendental philosophy and history, we arrive at a turning point on the critical reading track when we discover the place towards which Foucault – in the brief but unbelievably rich “What Is Enlightenment?” – displaces the a priori by deliberately opening the structure of the transcendental to transformation. Adopting an entirely different approach to the perspectives of neo-Darwinism, mental evolutionism, or brain epigenesis, in a line of continuity with Kant and never against him, Foucault asserts that there is an experimental modifiability of the transcendental structure. What are the consequences for the relation between categories and objects? How is our understanding of the expression “system of the epigenesis of pure reason” refreshed by this approach?
There are several versions of this text in French, spread over a period of twenty years – proof that the relation of the transcendental to change is a key question for Foucault, one that he develops throughout his work. The first version, from 1965, is called “What Is Critique?”1 Two other versions appeared in 1984 under the definitive title “What Is Enlightenment?”2
Foucault’s text clearly echoes Kant’s earlier text with the same title – “Was ist Aufklärung?” (What Is Enlightenment?) – published in 1784 in the Berlinische Monatschrift.3 In December 1784, the Berlin periodical ran a competition in which it asked its readers this question and promised to publish the best response. Kant was the prize winner. Two hundred years later, Foucault repeats the exercise, asking:
Let us imagine that the Berlinische Monatschrift still exists and that it is asking its readers the question: What is modern philosophy? Perhaps we could respond with an echo: modern philosophy is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the question raised so imprudently two centuries ago: Was ist Aufklärung?4
By reiterating the question, Foucault simultaneously repeats and displaces the argument. The guiding ideas in Kant’s text are still just as powerful and relevant today. However, it is important to radicalize them by asserting no less than the historicity of the transcendental. How can such a reading be justified? Foucault argues that in his text, Kant reveals the determining nature of the notion of the present in philosophy for the first time. Kant takes the question “What is Enlightenment?” to mean “what is happening to thought today?”5 It not only signals the relevance of an idea but also constitutes the present as the condition of possibility of philosophy. Since thought always arises at a given moment, its very modernity is constitutive of its object. From this, Foucault concludes that there is most certainly a contextuality of the transcendental, which is linked not only to the factuality of its emergence here and now but also to the form that thought gives this factuality. From this perspective, the other name for this contextual formation is categorial epigenesis.
In the decision to bring to light the intimate relation between critique and history, Foucault’s interpretation is certainly one of the most profound and audacious readings ever proposed. While the motif of epigenesis is not explicitly present in it, nonetheless, everything seems destined to illuminate and explain it.
Foucault demonstrates that in the 1784 text Kant himself asserts the possibility of linking the question of the agreement between categories and objects to the question of the transformation of a natural subject, a subject “as he is,”6 as a subject of truth.7 The relation of the subject to objects is possible only on the basis of this transformation. The modification of the subject – which can be called its epigenesis – occurs at the foundation of this “critical ontology of ourselves”8 that Foucault suggests is another name for Kantian philosophy. The transcendental structures of rationality thus coincide with the rules for the constitution of the subject, its relation to objects, and thus, in a sense, to objects themselves.
For Kant, the critique of reason is necessarily dependent on a moment, an age of rationality – one which marks the Enlightenment specifically. In this context, the word “historical” has a different status than in other texts by Kant. It refers to the question of the passage, transition, and decisive moment of the entry into rationality. The “historical” transformation of the subject into the subject of truth is both a chronological process and a biological development. This transformation is actually defined as the departure from a state of immaturity. The motif of epigenesis is read here in the two senses, both biological and temporal, the passage from minority to majority, a differentiated development, the prelude to a second birth. “Kant indicates right away that the ‘way out’ that characterizes Enlightenment is a process that releases us from the status of ‘immaturity.’”9 Foucault adds: “The critique is, in a sense, the handbook of reason that has grown up in Enlightenment; and, conversely, the Enlightenment is the age of the critique.”10 This intrication of reason and age again situates epigenesis at the articulation point of the rational and the physiological, giving history the dimension of a process of growth here and transcending the simple paradigm of events.
The Elaboration of the Subject and Access to Truth: Prelude to Agreement
The idea that access to truth requires a transformation of the subject is central to Foucault and appears in different texts and lectures from the period 1980–5. This motif, which is considered in The Hermeneutics of the Subject in particular, describes epigenesis precisely as a process during which the subject becomes truly autonomous and “capable of truth.”11 This becoming is central to Kant’s text, as Foucault writes: “From the very first paragraph, he [Kant] notes that man himself is responsible for his immature status. Thus it has to be supposed that he will be able to escape from it only by a change that he himself will bring about in himself.”12
The joint reading of the Critique of Pure Reason and “What Is Enlightenment?” allows us to assert that here again the problem of the agreement of the categories to objects is not separable from the problem of the way in which the subject makes themself a subject, that is, becomes the subject of the relation. Since the subject cannot account for their own spontaneity, it is received and must be appropriated. This need for the appropriation of self is confounded with the entry into rationality and “majority” that implies the use of enlightenment as the “principle of a critique and a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy.”13
The subject of truth is both “element and actor”14 in the transcendental economy. The subject is an “element” insofar as they are preceded by the a priori necessity of the synthesis that they absolutely do not determine; the subject is an “actor” because they must selfinterpret, deduce, this position. During this hermeneutic, the subject assumes themself as “the one who speaks as a thinker.”15 On the horizon of this epigenesis of rational responsibility lies the belonging of the subject to “a certain us.”16 This “us” thus becomes the primary question. To identify the “us” in its singularity and historical moment is a fundamental task that is constitutive of critical philosophy. Foucault writes, “No philosopher can go without examining his own participation in this us wh
ich is becoming the object of the philosopher’s own reflection.”17
Contrary to appearances, this type of questioning does not reduce transcendental idealism solely to an inquiry by subjectivity into itself. Rather, within a reflection on “us,” transcendental philosophy explores the interval between subject and object that is the space of its own deployment and that situates the transcendental deduction at the crossroads of what is neither absolutely objective nor entirely subjective. This space, a site of self-interpretation and meaning, breaks with the vision of a neutral, atemporal, and ahistorical encounter of subject and object. Each time, this type of encounter is enabled by certain material conditions that engage truth in its adventure.
Indeed, to become a subject capable of truth is to understand that the agreement of our categories to objects depends also on the way in which we recognize ourselves as subjects. The “forms of rationality” are inseparable from the “ways of doing things”18 that “define objects,” and thus reveal, behind “questions of general import,” contexts and historically singular identities.19
The historical understanding of the transcendental opens up the practical dimension of the problem. The question raised by the way in which the subject receives and in return interprets their own spontaneity manages only to establish the perfect convertibility of spontaneity and autonomy one within the other. The theoretical epigenesis of the subject corresponds to the theme of progress in the practical domain. In that context, the difference between preformation and epigenesis becomes the difference between obedience to the authority of the other and the assertion of “an instruction that one gives oneself” – an instruction that Kant summarizes in the form of the Enlightenment dictum, “Aude sapere: ‘dare to know,’ ‘have the courage, the audacity, to know.’”20
Before Tomorrow- Epigenesis and Rationality Page 16