Before Tomorrow- Epigenesis and Rationality
Page 26
The perplexity of commentators of §27 is thus in one sense entirely legitimate. The difficulty returns constantly: epigenesis is unthinkable without some contingency. Yet, in the Critique of Pure Reason, contingency is totally excluded. A priori means universal and necessary (again, this explains the meaning of the discussion with Hume). At the level of reason, the architectonic tendency is entirely opposed to the contingent tendency of the “aggregate.” Kant states this clearly:
If among the appearances offering themselves to us there were such a great variety – I will not say of form (for they might be similar to one another in that) but of content, i.e., regarding the manifoldness of existing beings – that even the most acute human understanding, through comparison of one with another, could not detect the least similarity (a case which can at least be thought), then the logical law of genera would not obtain at all [. . .].30
This “manifoldness,” which was to form one of the sensitive spots of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, is declared here to be unimaginable, entirely outside the system. Furthermore, it is to be noted that Kant describes the principles that rule the relation between genera and species as logical, not biological.
The analogy in §27 is thus misleading if one seeks to contain it within the strict framework of the Critique of Pure Reason. Insofar as purposiveness does not question the structure of necessity, where the mode of organic growth does not contravene the mechanism and categories only serve determining judgments, it is difficult to see what transcendental role the figure of embryonic development by self-differentiation plays. It is difficult to contest the ambiguity of the image of the formation of the system mentioned here. As noted above, Kant describes how it may “grow internally” like a body “whose growth does not add a limb but rather makes each limb stronger and fitter for its end without any alteration of proportion.” As we have seen, growth by epigenesis is exactly what changes relations of proportion. How then can we not see the unfolding of a preformed structure returning in this image? And where is self-differentiation if the constitution of systems is only the “unfolding (Auswicklung)” of a germ that is originarily present? We have already discussed the meaning to be attributed to the Kantian use of concepts of “germs” and “predispositions.” Nothing indicates that they point entirely to preformationism. But despite it all, we have to admit that in the first Critique transcendental productivity has very little freedom, very little place to express its creativity. It’s as if experience serves only to develop the envelope. Hindsight offers nothing but a confirmation. It is therefore practically inevitable that we conclude that the transcendental is invalid in the epigenetic analogy, an invalidity that at the same time justifies its immediate confiscation by the skeptical argument.
The Return Effect of the Third Critique on the First
It will be objected that I am getting caught up again in the disadvantages of the genetic approach. In fact, am I not in the process of retracing the genesis of the critique of judgment? Indeed, I could simply emphasize that in the first Critique it is not yet a question of the reflecting power of judging, but a “hypothetical” use of reason when the universal is “problematic,” and leave it at that:
If reason is the faculty of deriving the particular from the universal, then: Either the universal is in itself certain and given, and only judgment is required for subsuming, and the particular is necessarily determined through it. This I call the “apodictic” use of reason. Or the universal is assumed only problematically, and it is a mere idea, the particular being certain while the universality of the rule for this consequent is still a problem; then several particular cases, which are all certain, are tested by the rule, to see if they flow from it [. . .]. This I will call the “hypothetical” use of reason.31
I could limit myself to pointing out again that the reflecting power of judgment that is prefigured in “the amphibology of concepts of reflection” is not yet considered or developed. I could just say that reflection is presented as a dual logical act, composed of the formation of concepts and the locating of the source of knowledge from which the representations derive. Or that the connection with the reflecting function of judgment is not yet brought to light there.
I could settle for merely stressing that the Critique of Pure Reason does not take up the fundamental idea of a “contingent order” developed in 1764 in The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. In this text, Kant states that there are “accidental harmonies” in nature next to the necessary systematic orders that constitute the mechanism as a whole. That if “it is inorganic nature, in particular, which furnished numberless proofs of a necessary unity,”32 “the creatures of the plant- and animal-kingdoms everywhere offer the most admirable examples of a unity which is at once contingent [. . .].”33 The unity of a “contingent order” is not in the purview of determinist necessity. It appears as “a unified and perfect whole [. . .] artificially devised,” like the artful work of an artisan.34 The first Critique also underscores the difference between systematic and technical unity. Nevertheless, in the 1764 text, the two unities are both presented as harmonious totalities (the second being in no way the result of an aggregate) that are not ruled by the same kind of causality. We still do not come across the idea of natural purposiveness or the “as if” of intentional purposiveness; however, the idea of a causality that rules non-necessary orders is present.
I might therefore conclude that in the course of a long genesis that prompted Kant to rethink “the contingent order,” epigenesis did not find its place until the third Critique, where the thought of life and purposiveness come to fruition.
But what I intend to propose and elaborate is another reading. A reading that asks about the retroactive effect of the third Critique on the transcendental arrangement set up in the first and that considers that from one Critique to the next, it is in fact reason that is interpreted and transformed. This reading requires a different definition of the relation between reason and epigenesis from the solely linear and unilateral one that leads, like a one-way ticket, from §27 in the Critique of Pure Reason to §81 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment.
Life and Factual Rationality
Let us return specifically to the question that the first Critique does not ask and that becomes the leading question of the third. As I said earlier, “organized beings” immediately appear stateless in the natural order. Only the recognition of difference in causality (the difference between necessity and teleology) allows them to be identified. Kant writes: “[W]ithout this kind of causality organized beings, as ends of nature, would not be natural products.”35 The question presented by life – a question that is not developed as such in the Critique of Pure Reason – relates to the transgressive status of organization. The notion of an organized being eludes mechanical necessity and thereby forces reason to identify another nature for nature – purposeful nature – whose articulation it fails to understand: “[O]ur reason does not comprehend (begreift unsere Vernunft nicht) the possibility of a unification of two entirely different kinds of causality.”36
The bringing to light of the reflecting aspect of teleological judgment and, consequently, the regulative aspect of the concept of “natural end” makes it possible to recognize, without understanding, that is to say, paradoxically without leading back to their cause, both the singularity and the regularity of the status of the living being among appearances. “The concept of a thing as in itself a natural end is therefore not a constitutive concept of the understanding or of reason, but it can still be a regulative concept for the reflecting power of judgment.”37
The familiar, all too familiar, nature of these conclusions still does not mask the acuity of the rational test that they resolve. The “compatibility” of the mechanical and the teleological, which Kant wrestled to achieve, in no way erases the irruption of the enigma that life presents to philosophy.
The first formulation of this is the first part of the Critique of the Power
of Judgment, namely the critique of the power of aesthetic judgment. There are appearances which, while also subject to natural determinism, have their own form, a form that is irregular as a consequence of obeying only themselves. In this way they come to lodge themselves in all sorts of logical gaps that the categories are incapable of defining. The manifold of forms in nature is such, says Kant, that some of them remain “undetermined by those laws that the pure understanding gives a priori [. . .].”38 The principle of the unity of the manifoldness that presides over these forms remains unknown to us. “The reflecting power of judgment, which is under the obligation of ascending from the particular in nature to the universal, therefore requires a principle that it cannot borrow from experience [. . .]. The reflecting power of judgment, therefore, can only give itself such a transcendental principle as a law [. . .].”39
What do “forms” and “manifoldness of forms” mean here? The productions of nature that enable the faculty of judgment to present as universal are specific inasmuch as they in some sense appear to categorize themselves, as if they were self-sufficient, somehow their own judges, rendering thought useless through their independence and, at the same time, thereby soliciting thought to the highest degree. If nature and freedom are reconciled with each other in the very space of this categorial desert, discovered through the use of reflective judgment, it is also, and primarily, because certain natural objects appear simultaneously naturally free and necessarily autonomous. Their “form” derives from their independence. Kant will show that natural beauty, first, then life, present reason with the enigma of factual rationality, a rationality that appears to be able to do without reason. These appearances actually appear closed in on themselves, self-formed, self-normed, dismissing our jurisdictions immediately. Factual rationality is the unique rationality in which meaning is given without us, in the chance alliance of nature and freedom.
Before its time, Kant thus discovered the power that certain appearances have to decorrelate thought. Once again, life organizes itself very well without us and is indifferent to the fact of being judged. But after all, one might ask, what’s the problem? The problem is that indifference is the lining of meaning. It’s a problem that Meillassoux never considers. That which is indifferent makes meaning all alone. This is just what life prompts us to think. It makes meaning in order to stand for itself alone.
In his remarkable article “Sens et fait” (meaning and fact), Eric Weil claims that the third critique is a critique of contingency, a feature that he attributes precisely to the chancy nature of meaning:
The Critique of the Power of Judgment [. . .] seeks to understand meaningful facts, not only the meaningless facts that are organized by science, not just at the level of practical reason, a meaning that is always postulated and eternally separated from the facts [. . .]; now, meaning is a fact, facts have a meaning, this then is the fundamental position of the last Critique.40
Weil goes on to add: “We do not understand beauty, we do not understand life, we observe them.”41 Purposiveness appears precisely as the “meaning of the fortuitous existence of meaning.”42
The Other Contingency and the Other Necessity
The reach of epigenesis thus goes far beyond a mere sensible translation of the categorial production in the Critique of Pure Reason. It also goes far beyond its thematic biological treatment in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. In the end, epigenesis defines the transformation of the transcendental that was prepared from the start and accomplished ultimately by the test of biological judgment.43
What does this mean? Eric Weil continues:
The new critique emerges because Kant ran up against a new problem, which was no longer that of a priori judgments [. . .]. The expectation, the requirement for a coherent world, the necessary condition of all theoretical, practical, theoretical-practical orientations, is certainly a priori, but it is the facts that respond to it and that thereby give rise to a new fundamental problem.44
The “fundamental problem” is the factual response of the world – life – to transcendental necessity. Kant “emphasized over and over the non-necessary, non-deductible aspect of the presence of meaning.”45 Purposiveness, which Kant presents as “the lawfulness of the contingent,”46 exceeds the framework of any transcendental deduction in general. The third Critique puts the transcendental deduction to the test of the non-deducible. Meillassoux is therefore wrong when he states that Kant does not take into account the factuality of the transcendental. He does nothing but! The rational path towards purposiveness is inseparable from the rational path towards the actual factuality of rationality.
A transcendental formative force does therefore indeed exist. The categories are not immutable. The proof of this lies in the transformation of the category of necessity that takes place in the third Critique. As we have seen, this is prepared for by the specification – and thus already the modification – of causality as purposiveness (intentional causality). At the same time, this specification reveals another meaning of purposiveness itself. According to the transcendental definitions offered in the two first Critiques, purposiveness simply refers to “the causality of a concept in regard to its object,” the way that the object is thought as the possible effect of a concept.47 Thus understood, purposiveness requires no specification of causality, of which it is only a representation. On the other hand, the possibility of a thing such as a “natural end” assumes that this thing in itself is an end, without the causality of concepts intervening in any way. “As a natural product, [it] is nevertheless to contain in itself and its internal possibility a relation to ends [. . .].”48 Self-organization, according to which “its parts be combined into a whole,”49 is not a law of the mind. It is factual, self-sufficient, and has no need to be thought.
The specification of causality and the increasing complexity of purposiveness prompt the taking into account of another necessity. The third Critique confronts the thought of the existence of different types of lawfulness in nature, beginning with a new structure of the concept of necessity. A passage in §66 demonstrates clearly the coexistence of the two necessities:
It might always be possible that in, e.g., an animal body, many parts could be conceived as consequences of merely mechanical laws (such as skin, hair and bones). Yet the cause that provides the appropriate material, modifies it, forms it, and deposits it in its appropriate place must always be judged teleologically, so that everything in it must be considered as organized, and everything is also, in a certain relation to the thing itself, an organ in turn.50
Traditionally, the necessary is that whose opposite is impossible, while the contingent is that whose opposite is possible. These definitions are valid only for mechanical causality. They are in no way operative in defining organization. As Weil also wrote quite rightly: “[T]he necessary is that which cannot be denied without contradiction, [yet] the beautiful and the living being are not such that their negation, their real negation, their absence, would introduce a contradiction to natural science.”51 This passage is key. What we will call the other necessity has no opposite. To deny it would not lead to any contradiction, any logical threat, any risk of instability or irregularity in the laws. And yet it changes everything since its discovery is that which prompts the modification of the transcendental. The question that life asks thought is about necessity defined as transcendental contingency. Kant says as much clearly: “[T]here is such a manifold of forms in nature, as it were so many modifications of the universal transcendental concepts of nature (so viele Modificationen der allgemeinen transzendentalen Naturbegriffe) [. . .].”52 It is the manifold of forms that modifies the transcendental!
Clearly, this categorial change is not therefore simply epistemological, which would only be attached to the move, from one critique to the next, of mechanism to teleology or from physics to biology. According to Kant, it is not about the biological adaptability of the categories, their gradual evolution. It is about the fact that reason encounters itself as a fact in
nature and discovers a meaning of necessity that is no longer tied to determinism.
Indeed, reason discovers that the other necessity is its own contingency. The structure of our mind is such that it is “neither necessary, nor understandable starting from itself alone.”53 The distinction between contingency and necessity is only meaningful in relation to the contingency of our thinking. Paragraph 70 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment asserts the “contingent unity of particular laws.”54 But this is clearly not separable from “a certain contingency in the constitution (eine gewisse Zufälligkeit der Beschaffenheit)” of our understanding and our mind in general.55 Kant explains that this contingency results from the discursive nature of our understanding, forced to start from concepts to go towards the particular, whose diversity it in no way determines.56 An intuitive understanding would grasp the whole and the linkages of the parts to the whole, the unity and the manifold of forms, in a single necessity. By contrast, our understanding cannot reduce the diversity of appearances to the unity of knowledge except “through the correspondence of natural characteristics (Naturmerkmale) with our faculty of concepts, which is quite contingent (sehr zufällig) [. . .].”57
And here the agreement between categories and objects, the Übereinstimmung that we started with in §27, which appeared to Kant as the very structure of a priori necessity, the very one whose opposite is impossible and that therefore allows for no contradiction, here this agreement, in its very necessity, is said to be quite contingent! Subject, if you like, to the other contingency, that is to say, again, the other necessity. The necessity of its factuality. Kant allows us, from finitude, to discover a meaning of contingency that is more innovative and radical than the one that Meillassoux proposes when he believes himself to be announcing his after. The epigenetic transformation of necessity and causality, starting from reason itself, reveals that contingency derives less from a possible modification of the laws of physics than from the existence of different levels of necessity or lawfulness in which physical necessity is but one dimension.