Before Tomorrow- Epigenesis and Rationality
Page 21
For Heidegger, to dismiss the ontological question of the opening (Erschlossenheit) of truth by associating it roughly with correlationism is a move whose tremendous naïvety he would have flagged. Not thinking the opening leaves no other option than to situate oneself quite simply in “a domain of truth that has already been opened,” and thus to lack originality in every sense of the term.7 This domain “that has already been opened” is the one that Heidegger frequently associates with modern “science,” with its presuppositions (read lack of foundation) about “that which shows itself to be possible and necessarily correct”8 and which obscure the question of the provenance of truth. And as just such a provenance, the ontological economy of the opening goes far beyond the simple encounter of subject and object or the frame of “correlation.”
Heidegger would therefore have criticized Meillassoux for his misconception of anteriority, whether or not it is originarily co-implicated in the existence of Dasein. On this point, Heidegger remains adamant to the end: that anteriority and posteriority are originarily held together in a structure, in other words, in a synthesis, does not imply that this synthesis is necessarily related to a psyche, a subject or an “I think.” As Kant is the first to show, synthesis is a neutral event, anonymous, authorless.
It is not enough to refer to the fact that some statements by “empirical science” relate to “events anterior to the advent of life as well as consciousness,” when such events “consist in the dating of ‘objects’ that are sometimes older than any form of life on earth,”9 to reach the idea of an ancientness outside of correlation. Again, all dating assumes an originary synthesis without which figures such as “13.5 billion years ago” or “4.45 billion years ago” can have no meaning and place in what Aristotle described as the before and after.
It is not by chance that Aristotle is mentioned here. Heidegger would certainly have drawn attention to the error that comes of the constant confusion between correlation and articulation in After Finitude, a confusion that the reading of Aristotle prohibits specifically. A confusion between articulation – the neutral synthesis that holds together the moments of time – and correlation – the synthesis that holds together subjectivity (or psychè) and time. The fact that the two syntheses are themselves linked does not mean that they are reducible to one another. What the play of their engagement reveals is that dating is never intrinsically mathematical.
Let us recall the famous definition of time in Book IV of Physics: “For this is what time is: a number of change in respect of before and after.”10 Time allows us to distinguish before and after as we establish the distance from point A to point B on a trajectory, for example. It is thus clearly “a type of number.” The challenge of passage 219b 2–9 is that of knowing how to interpret “number.”11 As Rémi Brague comments in his admirable analysis of Physics, Book IV, “[T]his passage is unintelligible if we do not see” that what is referred to here by the word number (arithmos) “is not what we habitually understand by the concept of number.”12
The term arithmos also has a pre-arithmetic meaning, in which it refers to a structure, an assembly. In this sense, it is very close to harmonia. Thus, arithmos refers less to a number than to a structure organized by numbers. Brague continues by explaining that this is why it is better instead to translate it as “articulation.” He therefore proposes the following translation of passage 219b: “This is what time is, the before and after articulation of movement.” Arithmos is hence not what enables counting, but rather what a collection must have to be a collection. Not an aggregate, but again, rather, an order and a structure of conjuncture (“like pearls on a necklace”). That which is numbered in time is thus articulation, in other words, the difference and juncture of the before and the after.13
The fact that there is movement, and therefore time, in the soul does not mean that time is essentially psychic.14 Certainly, the adjoining of the before and the after matches the correlation between time and psychè. But this point of synthesis between two syntheses allows us to ask Meillassoux a question a posteriori. He says that only the “absolutizing”15 reach of mathematics makes it possible to access the concept of non-human time, one that is not dependent on our relation to the world. But the problem raised by Aristotle’s very specific usage of “number” in Book IV of Physics is that the numbering of time reveals the non-mathematicity of number. And this is true even when one “takes counting techniques seriously.”16 That is to say that antecedence, the fundamental structure of the before and after, should be understood as that which Heidegger, in “Anaximander’s Saying,” calls the originary “usage (Brauch)” of the moments of time with one another.17 There is clearly a deep affinity between usage in its original sense of “holding together,” as conceived by Aristotle, and Kantian synthesis – an affinity that Derrida brought to light extensively in his seminal text “Ousia and Grammè.”18
In reality, time is “four-dimensional.” Its “fourth” dimension is actually that of the articulation that holds its moments originarily united and “holds them apart thus opened and so holds them toward one another in the nearness by which the three dimensions remain near one another.”19 Remarkably, writes Heidegger on the same page, we owe this idea of the proximity – “nearing”, “nearness” – of moments of time to Kant himself, who uses the old word “nearhood” (Nahheit).20 Heidegger could have shown that epigenesis also depicts this same proximity, through the type of organized unity it refers to and assumes.
In its own way, the figure of epigenesis has the same effectiveness as the Aristotelian image of pearls on a necklace. It is the sensible presentation of an articulation. Unlike preformation or equivocal generation, it assumes the co-implication of all the moments of time, without granting any privilege to either the past or the sudden emergence of a present. It is entirely possible to read epigenesis as a figure in this movement – “Reichen,” which, as Heidegger writes in On Time and Being, means the “mutually giving to one another of future, past and present.”21 A synthetic approach, which, once again, does not begin with correlation. It is not, therefore, legitimate to equate synthesis and correlation.
As we have seen, Meillassoux claims that in the correlationist logic the “past” always means a past for the present of thinking. He writes:
Consider the following ancestral statement: “Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.” The correlationist philosopher will in no way intervene in the content of this statement: he will not contest the claim that it is in fact event Y that occurred, nor will he contest the dating of this event. No – he will simply add – perhaps only to himself, but add it he will – [. . .]: event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans – for humans [. . .].22
And so, contrary to what Meillassoux’s remarks suggest, the elucidation of the structure of the before and after is precisely what makes it possible to identify right from the outset the independence – which Heidegger also calls “freedom” – of time in relation to thinking. On Time and Being states this clearly: “[W]hat do they [the moments of time] offer to one another? Nothing other than themselves – which means: [. . .] there opens up what we call time-space.”23 This “opening up of time-space” is free of the presence of any subject. It has nothing to do either with the calculation of years and does not mean, as it continues to do in Meillassoux, “the distance between two now-points of calculated time, such as we have in mind when we note, for instance: this or that occurred within a time-span of fifty years [we could say several millions of years].”24
Heidegger would most certainly have pointed to the ontological ambiguity of the term “arche-fossil,” which describes the ancestral past for Meillassoux.25 To speak of the arche-fossil is obviously to continue speaking about the archè. And this lexicon is somewhat incompatible with the terminology of dates and measurements used in After Finitude to talk about the age of the earth. Doesn’t any archè refer back to the primordial, incalculable, and undatable articulation of the be
fore and after? Does it ever mean anything but the pure synthesis of the before and after? A synthesis without which the before and after would have no existence in nature itself? Again, synthesis and correlation are not systematically reducible to one another.
First and second finitude
Another significant objection to Meillassoux’s argument is that, long before him, Heidegger also developed a critique of correlation.
There are actually two distinct moments in Heidegger’s thinking about the transcendental. In the two books that are often considered his most important, Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, he retains the terminology of the transcendental for the benefit of his own thought. In Being and Time, indeed, he describes the ecstatic structure of temporality as “transcendental.” Moreover, many commentators have been quick to emphasize the proximity of this “analytic” to Kant’s analytic. It is a “reelaborated” transcendental, renamed “existential,” freed of its ontological uncertainty, a post-Kantian transcendental, but one that continues to inscribe the name Kant gave it throughout Being and Time. We recall that the first task of the book is to develop “The Necessity, Structure, and Priority of the Question of Being.”26 Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics resonate with and echo one another. In both instances, the temporality at their core is the temporality of horizonal schemata. Some paragraphs in the later work sometimes even leave readers unsure about whether it is Kant or Heidegger who is speaking. Heidegger emphasized the need for a thinking “retrieval (Wiederholung)” of the project of the Critique of Pure Reason, one that simultaneously displaces it and fulfills it.
It is true that this reworking is based on bringing to light the “connection” – a synonym of correlation – that exists in Kant between the “I think” and time. Heidegger writes that in Kant “the decisive connection (Zusammenhang) between time and the ‘I think’ remains shrouded in complete obscurity. It did not even become a problem.”27 It is precisely this “connection” that must be illuminated, a connection that is now based on the understanding that Dasein has of its being.
Without going into the complexities of the evolution of Heidegger’s thought, it is important to emphasize that the very meaning of the Turning (Kehre) is that Heidegger himself questions this “connectionist” perspective and vows to no longer use the term “transcendental.” From that point on, the a priori is stored away along with all the traditional metaphysical principles.28 In the 1927 lectures, he pronounces the “fundamental untruth” of the schematico-horizonal approach to both time and being.29 Being and Time, he acknowledges, runs the risk of anthropologizing the question of being precisely because it is based on the “connection” of Dasein and time. The existential analytic is still governed by a thought of the subject. In Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), Heidegger writes: “By this approach beyng itself is apparently still made into an object, and the most decisive opposite of that is attained which the course of the question of beyng has already opened up for itself.”30 It is therefore necessary to well and truly relinquish the transcendental and the associated concept of horizon. In a handwritten note in the margin of his personal copy of Being and Time, at §8, Heidegger announces “the surpassing of the horizon as such.”31
From that point on, it is the refusal of being, its resistance and indifference to any approach, that forms the starting point of the philosophical determination of being and time from the perspective of a history that is one of withdrawal and forgetting. The distinction between authentic and vulgar time is thereby dropped, since time ceases to be a horizon of intelligibility for Dasein. The “connection” is thus abandoned en route. By the same token, the Turning challenges the entire transcendental structure. In his own way, Heidegger completes the first critique of correlationism with the Kehre.
Thus, in Heidegger, there is a non-correlational thinking of finitude, that of the finitude of being, which comes to replace the theme of the finitude of Dasein.32 Certainly, the finitude of being clearly means that for Dasein being is still the fundamental question. But to think finitude for itself, in a precisely non-correlated manner, amounts to thinking the withdrawal of being and no longer only being-towardsdeath. The event that names the question of being from this point on is then Ereignis.
Meillassoux does not bother to distinguish between these decisive stages in the Heideggerian process and continues to view the dominance of correlationism through the problematic of Ereignis. As he writes:
The notion of Ereignis, which is central in the later Heidegger, remains faithful to the correlationist exigency inherited from Kant [. . .] for the “co-propriation” which constitutes Ereignis means that neither being nor man can be posited as subsisting “in-themselves,” and subsequently entering into relation – on the contrary, both terms of the appropriation are originally constituted through their reciprocal relation: “The appropriation appropriates man and Being to their essential togetherness.”33
In so doing, Meillassoux says nothing about the fact that there are two finitudes in Heidegger. In On Time and Being, Heidegger could not be more explicit on this matter, stating:
The finitude of Being was first spoken of in the book on Kant. The finitude of Appropriation (Ereignis), of Being, of the fourfold (Gevier) [. . .] is nevertheless different from the finitude spoken of in the book on Kant, in that it is no longer thought in terms of the relation to infinity, but rather as finitude in itself [. . .].34
What then does “after” finitude mean? After the first, or after the second?
Despite it all
Despite it all, and this is the reason why I did not follow Heidegger right to the end – I am returning here to my question that was left unanswered – we have to recognize that the question of time did not survive the disappearance of the “first finitude” in Heidegger’s work. After the incredible Turning of On Time and Being, which definitively splits apart temporality and subjectivity and subordinates the presence of time to the “there is”35 of its givenness, time quite simply vacates the philosophical scene. The time of the “second” finitude remains henceforth an enigma. Who has ever taken up this question thematically since then?
We can propose two opposing hypotheses to explain this disappearance. It could be that time cannot survive the relinquishing of the transcendental and has no future beyond Being and Time. In this sense, Meillassoux is right to suspect that correlation (understood as the reduction of the synthesis to the subject–object relation) remains ontologically significant in some manner from Kant to Heidegger. Alternatively, the Heideggerian relinquishing of the transcendental after the Turning is not really a relinquishing but instead paradoxically coincides with the search for a surplus transcendental, for an over-determination or an exaggeration of its purity. An excessive move that drives the thinking of time into the dead end.
Let me explain what I mean. The main problem that the reading of Kant presents between Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics derives from the illegitimacy of a chiasmus. Responding to the Kantian split between the transcendental and the empirical, Heidegger offers the corresponding divide between authentic temporality and leveled-down or vulgar temporality. In other words, he equates the transcendental with the authentic.
In theory, the need to relinquish the elucidation of temporality as the horizon of the question of being, the project of Being and Time that still guides Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, officially leads Heidegger to relinquish this temporal difference after the Turning. Analyzing this transformation in “Ousia and Grammè,” Derrida states that in the last instance, “perhaps there is no ‘vulgar concept of time,’”36 which, of course, means that there is perhaps no primordial time either. Relinquishing the transcendental and relinquishing this distinction of times thus appear to go hand in hand.
And yet, we can but note that the later development of Heideggerian thinking on temporality did not lead to the bringing to light of a renewed concept of time. Nor did it enable a true surpas
sing of the difference of the primordial and the derived or give the aftermetaphysics, or “other thinking,” its own chronological pulse. On the contrary, the disappearance of the question of time appears to be an exacerbation of the difference between authentic temporality and leveled-down temporality. Thus, as the approach taken by French phenomenology at the end of the twentieth century indicates, the givenness and the “es gibt” were quite simply understood as a new version of primordial temporality – one that is still more primordial than the one identified in Being and Time.37 Givenness has become a super transcendental. If these readings are possible, it is only because something in the Heideggerian thinking of the “second” finitude authorizes them.
Superseding the divide between the primordial and the derived should have caused Heidegger to reconsider the conclusions of his reading of Kant. It should have caused him to revise, for example, and more than anything else, his assertion regarding the existence of a break between the two editions – and of a break, therefore, between two versions of the origin, the formative power of the imagination, on the one hand, and the logical spontaneity of the understanding, on the other. Finally, it should have caused him to reconsider the difference between time understood as ontological horizon and the objective time of appearances. The destruction-deconstruction of the transcendental as Heidegger construes it in Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics should have led to the bringing to light of a new, post-metaphysical unity between the ideality and naturality of time. However, instead of this, the thinking of the second finitude and of the “there is” never really clearly rid itself of the difference between the authentic and the inauthentic. It merely prolonged it.