Before Tomorrow- Epigenesis and Rationality

by Catherine Malabou

  And indeed, one unavoidable consequence of the principle of factuality is that it asserts the actual contingency of the laws of nature. If we are seriously maintaining that everything seems to us to have no reason to be the way it is, is actually devoid of any necessary reason to be the way it is, and could actually change for no reason, then we must seriously maintain that the laws of nature could change [. . .] for no cause or reason whatsoever.17

  I repeat that despite what we might initially think, this statement does not amount to the “classical” skeptical thesis. It is not to simply return to Hume by developing at new expense a critique of transcendental idealism based on the ultimately unsurpassable nature of the arguments developed in the Treatise and the Enquiry.

  As we have seen, for Hume only a pre-established harmony between our understanding and the laws of the nature can explain the validity of our adherence – and it never amounts to anything more than a belief – to the principle according to which the same causes always engender the same effects, starting from the stability of nature and the possibility of physics. Yet, once again, Hume is not up to solving his own problem. He is not the one who can respond a posteriori to Kant, which makes the possibility of physics one of the fundamental questions of the Critique of Pure Reason.18 Paragraph 27 emphasizes the fact that the Humean presupposition of pre-established harmony is incapable of demonstrating the solidity and stability of causal connections. According to Kant, the relation of our pure concepts to the objects of experience proceeds from an a priori necessity recognized by consciousness, upon which representations are based. Cinnabar must always be red and heavy in order to be constituted as an object for my representation. Indeed, for Kant,

  the very idea of consciousness and experience requires a structuring of representation capable of making our world into something other than a purely arbitrary sequence of disconnected impressions. This is the central thesis of the so-called “objective” deduction of the categories, the aim of which is to legitimate the application of the categories to experience (the categories being understood as those universal connections presupposed by physics in particular).19

  Against Kant, Hume would have had nothing but his concept of chance as defense. But Meillassoux argues that chance is not the expression of radical contingency. While chance is commonly associated with the traditional concept of contingency, it is linked to the calculation of odds and probabilities. Yet the probabilistic conception of contingency – the famous example of the billiard balls – conceals absolute contingency. This is why Meillassoux invites us to rigorously distinguish absolute contingency from chance.20 Indeed, “the effectuation of [chance] already presupposes a pre-existing set of laws.”21 In this sense, it does not question the order of the world, but rather confirms it in its own way.

  This is precisely what the example of the dice-throw shows: an aleatory sequence can only be generated on condition that the dice preserve their structure from one throw to the next, and that the laws allowing the throw to be carried out not change from one cast to the next. If from one throw to the next the dice imploded, or became flat or spherical, multiplied its sides by a thousand [. . .] then there would be no aleatory sequence, and it would be impossible to establish a calculus of probabilities. Thus chance always presupposes some form of physical invariance – far from permitting us to think the contingency of physical laws, chance itself is nothing other than a certain type of physical law – one that is “indeterministic.”22

  To take on the task of countering Kant’s “necessitarian” argument solely with Hume’s arguments, by claiming that “the continuing existence of our world can in fact be explained by chance alone,”23 would not therefore have the scope on which it depends and would not allow the definitive relinquishing of the transcendental without reprieve. Chance, as we have just seen, does not impinge on the necessity of the laws of physics.

  In other words, chance is never sufficiently chancy to put into question the concept of possibilities. Probabilities are possibilities. Chance in no way unsettles the stability of the concepts of the possible and the necessary. Rather, it presupposes them. Thus, the assimilation of contingency to chance, which allows for the calculus of probabilities,

  assumes that there does indeed exist a totality of non-contradictory conceivable possibilities. [. . .] It is necessary to assume that a set of possible worlds [. . .] is actually conceivable, if not intuitable [. . .]. Thus, probabilistic reasoning is conceivable on condition that it be possible to conceive a totality of cases within which one can then calculate frequencies by determining the ratio of the number of favourable cases to the number of possible cases. [. . .] Aleatory reasoning – which is to say, the very idea of chance insofar as the latter is subject to a calculus of frequency – presupposes the notion of numerical totality.24

  This kind of idea of totality bears witness precisely to the adhesion of “skeptical” thought – the one that ventures into the game, throws the dice, or the billiard ball – to causal necessity. There is a whole set of possibilities. All the possibilities are possible, except the disappearance of possibility as the totality of possibilities.

  It is therefore necessary to take Hume’s problem beyond Kant, of course, but also beyond Hume himself, in order to look for the solution in a certain type of mathematical reasoning. According to Meillassoux, another thought of possibility is found in the notion of “transfinite,” “progressively elaborated during the first half of the twentieth century on the basis of Cantor’s work, [and which consists in] its unencompassable pluralization of infinite quantities.”25 The mathematical impossibility of totalizing possibilities frees up the way to a concept of contingency that is perfectly distinct from that of chance, a concept that requires a break with the logic of calculating probabilities and the random reasoning that is traditionally assigned to the topic of the contingent. The “transfinite,” more infinite than infinity, reveals the invalidity of any attempt to totalize the possible under the name of the infinite. “The (quantifiable) totality of the thinkable is unthinkable.”26

  Radical contingency must be thought well and truly as the possibility of a world “devoid of any physical necessity,” without this possibility being probable or therefore quantifiable in any way.27 An irrecoverable contingency therefore. Without an idea, if, following Kant, one is willing to define an idea as a totality of conditions. Radical contingency cannot give rise to any positive knowledge of the possible insofar as the possible that it is will perhaps never come to pass. To separate the possible from all totality – from all the possibles (Hume) and from all the conditions of possibility (Kant) – is the work of the philosophy to come, which marks its rediscovered affinity with mathematics.

  Indeed, the relation between philosophy and science must be reconsidered in depth. This question is more urgent than ever. This relation can no longer depend on a critique of pure reason and assumes a renewed access to the absolute understood as the reality of a world devoid of all anthropological priority – including when this priority is hidden behind a deconstruction of what belongs to the human. Relinquishing the transcendental involves a far more radical move than the mere assertion of its biological or historical modifiability. It is no longer a matter of questioning the relation between the a priori and the a posteriori, between categories and appearances, but of thinking a world foreign to experience, to our experience. A possibility that even the destruction of metaphysics never envisaged. In the end,

  we must grasp how the ultimate absence of reason, which we will refer to as “unreason,” is an absolute ontological property, and not the mark of the finitude of our knowledge [. . .]. The failure of the principle of reason follows, quite simply, from the falsity (and even from the absolute falsity) of such a principle – for the truth is that there is no reason for anything to be or to remain thus and so rather than otherwise, and this applies as much to the laws that govern the world as to the things of the world. Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from sta
rs to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing.28

  If everything can ultimately collapse, then why didn’t I follow Meillassoux earlier as well? Isn’t the answer to my original questions contained in After Finitude, in a manner that is even more radical than Heidegger?

  Notes

  1. Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 123.

  2. After Finitude, p. 16.

  3. After Finitude, p. 8.

  4. After Finitude, p. 123.

  5. After Finitude, p. 123.

  6. After Finitude, p. 16. It would therefore be necessary to renounce the philosophical position that consists in speaking about time from the position of a retrojected present, in other words, in fact, a future anterior. It will be necessary to stop thinking from the “retrojection of the diachronic past on the basis of the living present in which it is given” (After Finitude, p. 122).

  7. After Finitude, p. 6.

  8. After Finitude, p. 37.

  9. After Finitude, p. 127.

  10. After Finitude, p. 39.

  11. After Finitude, p. 85.

  12. After Finitude, p. 90.

  13. After Finitude, p. 91.

  14. After Finitude, p. 80.

  15. After Finitude, p. 79.

  16. After Finitude, p. 83.

  17. After Finitude, p. 83.

  18. After Finitude, p. 89.

  19. After Finitude, p. 93. The reference to cinnabar comes from note 13, pp. 135–6.

  20. After Finitude, p. 100.

  21. After Finitude, p. 101.

  22. After Finitude, p. 99.

  23. After Finitude, p. 99.

  24. After Finitude, pp. 102–3.

  25. After Finitude, p. 104.

  26. After Finitude, p. 104.

  27. After Finitude, p. 99.

  28. After Finitude, p. 53.

  12

  THE DEAD END

  Between Censure and License

  Kant would no doubt have been amused to hear that two hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason there are claims that the question of the agreement between categories and objects bars the way to scientific and philosophical truth. That the concept of a priori synthesis diverts the deep meaning of the Copernican Revolution by subjectivizing that which in reality is a decentering outside of all subjectivity.1 That this error in orientation, or this set-up, this “catastrophe,” ultimately brought about the defeat of speculative thinking. That one day someone argued that it was necessary to reformulate the question of how “a mathematized science of nature is possible”. . .2

  Yet, these statements must be taken seriously insofar as they reveal the profound transformation that continental philosophy is currently undergoing. Meillassoux’s intervention bursts the abscess that has gradually formed around Kantianism and brings into broad daylight the symptomatic hesitation that the status of the transcendental continues to elicit.

  I have deliberately sought to amass points of view, accumulate conclusions, juxtapose readings of §27, and present ways of understanding the transcendental, beginning with its supposed lack of foundation, so as to highlight the doubt whose acuteness is aggravated in contemporary thought. The transcendental: ought we to save it or deconstruct it, transform it or derive it, temporalize it or destroy it? As we have seen, more often than not, the moves to conserve and relinquish the transcendental overlap.

  The question of how we should understand a priori epigenesis led me to present and evaluate theoretical interventions with serious consequences. Kant is not just any philosopher since, as I noted, he acts as the guarantor of the identity of continental or “European” philosophy. Doesn’t this philosophy, whose visibility and institutional power are constantly shrinking all over the world, owe its specificity precisely to his claim that something like the transcendental exists? Something that Kant presents as the form of thought and whose theoretical and practical reality exist for thought alone? Undoubtably, adherence or opposition to the transcendental, more than any other criteria, marks the fracture line between the continental and analytic traditions, that is, between two ways of understanding rationality.

  As I have tried to show, the problem is that acceptance of the transcendental, far from being univocal, is often already, in itself, an opposition to it. Any post-Kantian attempt to save the transcendental always turns out to be, one way or another, an attack on it. Indeed, as the critical track in the readings of §27 allowed us to demonstrate, Kant’s heirs are forever divided between two views of the transcendental: the hyper-normative and the hypo-normative.

  According to the hyper-normative view, the transcendental represents a sort of censure that absolutely prohibits any mixing with experience, and consequently all becoming and all transformation of logical forms. Assertions about Kant’s preformationism, for example, proceed from just such a conception, from a policed, or even policing, transcendental, which causes its representatives to constantly purify their readings of critical philosophy.

  According to the logic of the second, hypo-normative view, the transcendental is certainly a constraint – of form and structure – but, paradoxically, this is synonymous with freedom. In fact, it is supposed to guarantee the autonomy of thinking from all determinisms or reductionisms. The transcendental is defined then as irreducibility,pure symbolic latitude. This “freedom,” this irreducibility, is what Ricœur, for instance, defends against Changeux when, as we saw in the introduction, he invokes the impossibility of assimilating the activities of thinking to brain processes. In this case, the transcendental becomes a safety barrier whose paradoxical value lies in its license: an exemption from defining exactly what in thinking cannot come from simple material determinations, especially biological ones, and that prevents this kind of assimilation. The transcendental appears simply as that which resists embodiment in principle. These minimal definitions give rise to the term’s veritable polysemia. As I have just explained, in the twentieth century “transcendental” was replaced by “irreducible,” but it was also replaced by “structural,” “quasi-transcendental”. . .3 Anything is possible so long as the transcendental resists its complete materialization, so long as it continues to designate that indefinable space of non-determinism.

  Today, this constant ambiguity, or even contradiction, in views of the transcendental – as policing or permissive – is clear as day. It is no longer possible to conceal it under the supposedly unsurpassable name of Kantianism. On the one hand, because the censure is being lifted, it turns out that it is possible to break the lock of the transcendental and to reach into its ancestral past without, however, regressing to the pre-critical stage. On the other hand, the permissiveness of the transcendental comes to an end. Once again, materialism seeks to make itself heard.4 The border between “thought” and cerebrality, for instance, is becoming increasingly difficult to define. To maintain its existence whatever the cost in the name of anti-reductionism is associated more often than not with a reactive and reactionary position that has run out of explanations.

  The problem is that of knowing what philosophy might become if it forgoes the transcendental entirely. What happens if it truly “relinquishes” the transcendental? We still have no idea since the new theoretical orientations that are emerging fail to outline clearly the contours of a definitively post-Kantian landscape for continental philosophy. There is veritable disarray within Kantianism as it survives the destruction of metaphysics, the claims of speculative realism, and the early babbling of a philosophy of the brain that has not managed to free itself from the narrow cognitivism in which it is hopelessly ensnared. Before showing how Kant alone can still guide us – including towards an exit from Kantianism – let’s put Heidegger, Meillassoux, and the neurobiologists into conversation. We shall also see how all the readings of §27 and the discussions of epigenesis ultima
tely bring us back to time, radical contingency, and the biologization of reason – and how they all rush headlong into the dead end.

  Heidegger to Meillassoux: What Finitude?

  Dating and mathematics

  Inasmuch as it ended with a question, or more exactly the expression of a doubt, my examination of Heidegger’s reading of Kant in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics remained unresolved. I asked whether defining the transcendental as primordial temporality enables us to bring together the different readings of the critical track and to propose a satisfactory understanding of a priori epigenesis. Or, then again, is the Heideggerian difference between primordial and derived, authentic and inauthentic, just another way to do away with time?

  In an apparent detour, let us imagine how Heidegger might have responded to Meillassoux. No doubt he would have relegated the argument developed in After Finitude to a poorly handled defense of vulgar time, caught between the dating of different “nows” (their “ancestral” character fails to mask their traditional determination) and the persistent, barely disguised, expression of a metaphysics of eternity. The dual support for the privilege of leveled-down time would have inspired some doubt about the move to “post-Kantianism” for which the work is supposed to prepare the way.

  How, indeed, are we to respond to these “numbers” dating events “anterior to the advent of life as consciousness” that Meillassoux proposes in the name of fossil time: “date of the origin of the universe (13.5 billion years ago), the date of the accretion of the earth (4.45 billion years ago), the date of the origin of life on earth (3.5 billion years ago), the date of the origin of humankind (Homo habilis, 2 million years ago)”?5 Far from being the marks of a dislocation of “that which is given in the present,”6 are they not simply expressions of the present of succession, intact, unrecognized, and unquestioned?