Before Tomorrow- Epigenesis and Rationality

by Catherine Malabou

  Once again, transcendental epigenesis is indeed brought back by one side to the problem of auto-affection (Zöller), to a certain power of invention and a priori improvisation (Lebrun), in a word, to temporalization. Foucault’s claim that there cannot be any a priori without history, nor any transcendental without a present, is clearly an attempt to take into account the temporality of the transcendental.

  Nevertheless, Heidegger would certainly have asked whether the time of “minimal preformationism” defined by Zöller – this prior time – was, truly, time. If so, wouldn’t it unfold ecstatically, rather than remaining fixed to its prior or antecedent dimension, without any future, without development or formation? By dint of seeking to dispel the contamination of the transcendental by experience, it is deprived of posterity. We might therefore fear that “the before” that Zöller defends might also be nothing but a moment of leveled-down time. As for Foucault, what does he call “history” then? What is the nature of the separation that he introduces between the historical a priori and the formal a priori? Is this separation itself temporal, or does it appear, rather, devoid of any ontological status, detemporalized once again like the irreducibility that supports it? By what grace can it then be given in a “present”?

  As for the skeptical track, it has allowed us to explore the dynamic of epigenesis as the evolution and gradual adaptation of thinking to its objects. This examination has opened up a confrontation between modern epigenesis and contemporary epigenetics and has led to an exploration of the equating of reason and the brain. Now, this type of equating also proceeds, in its own way, from a reflection on time. From the first moment of embryonic life, the brain prepares the synchronization of bodily movements. And this synchronization, as the motor program for planning of postures, constitutes the primitive notion of time and thus appears as the basis of the temporal form of consciousness. This first form is indispensable for the emergence of the categories. As Edelman argues, “[C]ategorization depends on smooth gestures and postures as much as it does on sensory sheets.”16 In fact, the “smooth movements” of postures are first categorized by perception, then logically redeveloped to give rise to categorization and conceptuality, strictly speaking.17 The rejection of any transcendental dimension in the genesis of rationality is thus also based on a determinate concept of temporality.

  Obviously, Heidegger would have objected that temporality can never derive from a natural given, nor from its redevelopment by consciousness. The psychological genesis of time is not time. The “biologizing” interpretation thus only takes into account derived time and entirely lacks the ontological reach of epigenesis. This is why it fails to understand what the transcendental dimension of thinking can mean.

  It would then have been simple, rapid, and effective to systematically follow the two tracks of critical and skeptical readings back to the internal articulation of temporality as Heidegger explains it – an ontological ambiguity between authentic temporality and vulgar time. The motif of epigenesis in §27 could have been illuminated right from the start from this articulation, and analyzed as its symptom.

  Why Didn’t I Take Heidegger’s Lead?

  If I did not do so, it is because it is not certain that Heidegger, who is no doubt the deepest of all of Kant’s readers, himself escapes the genetic reading, even if he argues that he never had recourse to the concept of genesis. It is not certain that the difference between the two times – primordial and leveled-down – is not a new hierarchy, once again introducing a slope that situates the source as an overlook. Nor is it certain, finally, that this inequality is not the secret reason for the disappearance of the question of time.

  Notes

  1. Zammito, “Kant’s Persistent Ambivalence toward Epigenesis,” p. 65.

  2. “Kant’s Persistent Ambivalence toward Epigenesis,” p. 65.

  3. On this point, see also Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

  4. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 78.

  5. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 78.

  6. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 74.

  7. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 74.

  8. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 74.

  9. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 74.

  10. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 54.

  11. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 102.

  12. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 134.

  13. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 141.

  14. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 139.

  15. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 137–8.

  16. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, p. 105. See the entire section on “Memory” in chapter 10: “Memory and Concepts: Building a Bridge to Consciousness.”

  17. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, p. 105.

  11

  NO AGREEMENT

  Before I demonstrate this, I should pause to allow Meillassoux to intervene. According to Meillassoux, Heidegger remains prisoner to the conception of time that he criticizes in every instance. Heidegger’s time is no more “authentic” than the time of metaphysics. Indeed, without exception, all the correlationist philosophers – Heidegger included – who start from the principle of the agreement or synthesis between thought and objects as the indisputable origin of truth end up missing precisely the first time, what one might call the primitive time of the “ancestral.” They fail to situate the very antecedence of the origin, its past, how exactly it comes “before.”

  Meillassoux explains that starting from correlation in effect amounts to always starting from a now, a present, in order to subsequently make projections towards the past or future, in a “countersensical temporality.”1 The correlationist proceeds “from the present to the past, following a logical order, rather than from the past to the present, following a chronological order.”2 The term a priori should not mislead us. In Kant, “before” is a logical present, the present of the agreement between thought and objectivity. It is this primacy of the logical over the chronological that has remained unshaken since then. The Heideggerian determination of transcendence, which grants the value of an origin, an ontological precondition, to the encounter between thought and the world, still signals this obedience. Thus we note “Heidegger’s strict observance of the correlationist ‘two-step.’”3 For him, “there is a deeper level of temporality, within which what came before the relation-to-the-world is itself but a modality of that relation-to-the-world.”4 This temporality, which starts from the correlational present, is a “becoming – in which what came before no longer comes before, and what comes after no longer comes after [. . .].”5

  The correlationist never takes into account the past understood as that which is prior to the relation, prior to life, and hence also indifferent to our existence, as well as to the fact of being thought. The transcendental is thus not the other name of time, as Heidegger claims, but instead is precisely that which inverts its course and, as such, denies it. No concept of time can be authentic in a philosophy that starts from synthesis as the primordial fact and thus accomplishes “a retrojection of the past on the basis of the present.”6 The main question “after Kant and since Kant” is thus not, as Heidegger argues, “what is the foundation of metaphysics?” but rather “which is the proper correlate?”7 And this implies knowing how to determine the correlate: is it a pre-established harmony, a preformed whole, an instance of epigenetic development? Is it a production of transcendental imagination? While responses vary, the question is always the same. In the end, it is still and always in starting from the correlational present that the transcendental is questioned, critiqued, or deconstructed – and that we fail to relinquish it.

  The discourses that could have, or should have, developed the post-critical succession of philosophy (destruction, deconstruction, genealogy or arche
ology) did not do so because they themselves were versions of correlationism. Correlationism is thus seen to encompass all philosophers from Kant to the present day. The list Meillassoux draws up is impressive: Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Deleuze . . . Correlationist metaphysics

  may select from among various forms of subjectivity, but it is invariably characterized by the fact that it hypostatizes some mental, sentient, or vital term [of course, this evokes the brain]: representation in the Leibnizian monad; Schelling’s Nature, or the objective subject-object; Hegelian Mind; Schopenhauer’s Will; the Will [. . .] to Power in Nietzsche, perception loaded with memory in Bergson; Deleuze’s Life, etc. [. . .]. Nothing can be unless it is some form of relation-to-the-world.8

  Return to §27: The Impotence of the Transcendental Deduction

  And so it turns out that in fact the direction that Kantian critique gave to the history of philosophy – including the destruction of metaphysics – is not impassible, as it was thought to be. The questioning of the primordial nature of correlation plunges us once again deep into the heart of the Deduction, to the same place as that of our problem, the “agreement” between thought and appearances, and, as a consequence, the legitimization of “the application of the categories to experience.”9 None of the readings of Kant discussed up to this point, including the anti-Kantian ones, question the fact that all truth, all objectivity, all stability, result entirely from the “agreement” between thought and objects, whether this agreement be declared logically transformable, biologically malleable, historically becoming, or ontologically ecstatic. Contemporary epigenetics itself does not for a moment question this state of affairs. Even derived, the agreement between brain and the external world remains the starting point of rationality.

  Meillassoux argues that so long as the causal order of the world is examined in the light of the relation between the categories and experience, so long as this causal order constitutes the basis of any inquiry into the necessity of the laws of nature and the regularity of the world, the skeptical thesis and the critical thesis can but amount to the same. The vicious circle that traps all the previous approaches – which end up appearing identical even though they are opposed most of the time – is produced by the insufficiencies of a shared starting point.

  It is the principle of the agreement that is problematic, not its modality. According to Meillassoux, it is in fact never possible to justify the agreement other than factually. We saw this at the start: the agreement is observed and cannot be deduced. The dimension of self-interpretation which, in Kant, consists in the reception and appropriation by the subject of its own spontaneity only serves to fill in the gap of the absent proof. The fact that the agreement proceeds from the dynamic of an epigenesis, from the logic of a genesis, or from the fixity of a preformation, whether situated at the epicenter or in the underground depths of the focus, changes absolutely nothing. The contingency that the transcendental can never dispel, which thereby escapes it and demands a total conceptual re-elaboration, is the contingency revealed by its own facticity.

  The categorial agreement and the necessity that ought to flow from it can thus never be deduced in any case: they “can only be described, not founded.”10 The existence of a formative transcendental force remains a derived problem in this regard. Whether or not the transcendental is transformable is of little importance. It will never be plastic enough to explode its correlational origin.

  We must face the facts: the transcendental is contingent. The problem is that it is not contingent the way Foucault says it is. Its contingency cannot be assimilated to its possible historical mutability, to the changing nature of its structures, to the factual and circumstantial genealogy of the a priori that might hide behind a supposed ahistoricity. Still more remarkable, the contingency analyzed here is not the contingency of the skeptics either.

  Hume beyond Himself

  Let us return briefly to Hume, the principal adversary addressed in §27. The “problem of Hume,” which is at the core of the transcendental deduction, cannot be resolved by Kant, but nor is it resolved by Hume either. Its treatment can therefore be neither critical nor skeptical. Meillassoux asks:

  What is this problem? In its traditional version it can be formulated as follows: is it possible to demonstrate that the same effects will always follow from the same causes ceteris paribus, i.e. all other things being equal? In other words, can one establish that in identical circumstances, future successions of appearances will always be identical to previous successions? The question raised by Hume concerns our capacity to prove that the laws of physics will remain tomorrow what they are today, or still yet to demonstrate the necessity of the causal connection.11

  Why must this problem be “reformulated” after Hume and after Kant? The answer is as follows: although Hume asserts that reason is incapable of proving causal necessity, he never for one minute questions this necessity itself. Hume and Kant thus “share a common assumption.” Neither of them

  ever calls into question the truth of the causal necessity. [. . .] [T]he question is never whether causal necessity actually exists or not but rather whether or not it is possible to furnish a reason for its necessity. [. . .] Hume [. . .] never really doubts causal necessity – he merely doubts our capacity to ground the latter through reasoning. [. . .] [P]hysical processes are indeed possessed of ultimate necessity. And it is precisely because Hume concedes this that he can characterize his own position as skeptical – for to be a skeptic is to concede that reason is incapable of providing a basis for our adherence to a necessity we assume to be real.12

  He goes on to write:

  [T]he skeptical position is the most paradoxical, for on the one hand it seeks to show how the principle of reason is incapable of founding its ontological pretensions, yet on the other, it continues to believe in the necessity – the real, physical necessity – that this principle has injected into the world.13

  The thesis of “pre-established harmony,” as the thesis of a “system of the epigenesis of pure reason,” thus starts from the indubitable nature of agreement.

  As for the “neo-skeptical” argument that determines the truth of the adaptive processes of the mind and defends mental Darwinism, it certainly questions any notion of an a priori, but it also remains attached to the correlational structure. Evolutionists may well assert the contingent nature of truth, but this contingency does not put into question the process of joint development of mind and nature. A posteriori synthesis it may be, but agreement it is nonetheless.

  It is therefore no surprise to see again the constant circularity of the critical and skeptical positions. They both recognize the indubitable nature of causal necessity and the agreement of categories with objects – whether the agreement be a priori or empirically derived. The pair of opposites that they form is thus not really one and offers thought nothing but a false alternative.

  The Wholly Other World

  Since correlation is the acknowledgment of a contingency that it cannot hide, let’s put aside correlation to think through contingency. A radical contingency that is so radical that it becomes absolutely necessary as a result. This type of contingency leads thinking to recognize another origin of truth. Until now, we have only examined one type of possible transformation: the content of laws, according to the hypothesis of an adaptive changeability (mental evolutionism) or historical changeability (Foucauldian critique) of the agreement of the mind with objects. We have not yet envisaged the possibility that change may concern the synthetic structure itself, the first co-implication of subject and object.

  Now, so long as correlation is not in question, the transcendental is safe. Its experimental becoming or evolutionary fluidification can always be invoked. So long as these hypotheses do not touch the subject–object relation, nothing changes. At the same time, because this permanence is paradoxically unstable, shaky due to its facticity, the correlational structure cannot protect itself against what it is ne
vertheless supposed to prevent: the thesis of another possible world. A world in which it would not exist. Reading Meillassoux, it becomes apparent that the only real, serious possibility of a changeability of the transcendental would be the one implied by the revelation of its nature as a screen, and, consequently also, its real ability to disappear.

  That the world could change, that it could become wholly other, absolutely other, without synthesis or agreement, is indeed the hypothesis that criticism completely rejects. And yet, as a result of its inability to show the reason for this rejection – the necessary nature of a priori synthesis and the causal connections between appearances – critical philosophy is a negative avowal of recognition of that which it disavows. Once again, the transcendental origin fails to self-deduce. Hence, it self-destructs.

  Clearly this is not to aim at a “fault” in the Kantian argument, but rather to denounce a presupposition and to assert that whatever the origin and type of validity it confers upon it, the correlational structure can only ever reveal its precariousness. There is nothing but contingency. Better yet, “contingency alone is necessary.”14 We might as well accept then that “from now on, we will use the term ‘factuality’ to describe the speculative essence of facticity,”15 in other words, the absoluteness of contingency. We also might as well accept that, contrary to what Kant claims in his refutation of Hume, the world can change form. Again, this does not mean that the transcendental may or may not modify, vary, evolve, but that it does not exist at all. The order of things “could actually change at any moment” and exceeds our “categories,” on which it does not depend.16