Before Tomorrow- Epigenesis and Rationality

by Catherine Malabou

  The epigenesis of reason: it is therefore important to understand the genitive in the phrase as a subjective genitive. It is indeed about an epigenesis, that is, about the gestation and embryogenesis of reason itself. Throughout the itinerary of the three Critiques, reason is transformed, and the last stage of the trajectory organizes the reflection of reason on this transformation a posteriori. The transformation does not come from outside, nor is it linked, or no longer only linked, to the type of object examined; it responds to a fundamental internal demand of reason, one that is already present, as a germ in the first Critique, and already manifest in the idea – unacceptable to many, even if it is incontestable – of a certain changeability of the categories.

  Structure and Evolution

  We recall Kant’s comment in the Transcendental Analytic that we took as our starting point:

  We will therefore pursue the pure concepts into their first germs and predispositions in the human understanding, where they lie ready, until with the opportunity of experience they are finally developed and exhibited in their clarity by the very same understanding, liberated from the empirical conditions attaching to them.58

  The discussion continued at length about these “first germs” and “predispositions” that are the entirely “ready” forms of the categories of the understanding. We can now accept that the problem is no longer the source of the source, or knowing what role is played by the innateness of the constitution of cognitive power for this power itself. In the third Critique, Kant effectively answers these questions in his own way. The reason that could never be provided is the reason of life. It is never the thing in itself that is mysterious for Kant, and we have to ask why so many readers stop there. The real difficulty is life. The fact that thought belongs simultaneously to a transcendental subject and to a living being – which is something other than an empirical subject.

  The relation between transcendental subjectivity and empirical subjectivity is examined and settled in the Transcendental Deduction. But the difference between transcendental subjectivity, empirical subjectivity, and living subjectivity is what appears between the lines in the third Critique. It is organization that makes the difference between that which is simply empirical and that which is living. Organization appears to be the reply to thought – Kant speaks of a “mirror” – it orders and organizes itself like it, and similarly its form is systematic. And yet life can do without thought, it has no need to be thought, even if the subject of thought is living and, as the object of thought that is different from others, encounters the factuality of its life. In the last analysis, the innate part of cognitive power thus refers back to the living naturalness of thought.

  We can now say that the epicenter is in some senses stratified, as if it were becoming more complex. The objective reference of the categories no longer concerns only the objects of nature ruled by mechanism, but also organized beings. We see it now: epigenesis unfolds at the very place of this dual objectivity. On the one hand, it refers to the production of the categories and their “correspondence” with the objects (first Critique), but, on the other, it refers to the categorial modification that arises with teleological judgment and brings to light the need for another agreement with other objects (third Critique). From one dimension of epigenesis to the next, it is the entire rational enterprise that matures and finds its definitive form.

  The Kantian critical enterprise combines a structural and an evolutionary view of reason in a whole. There’s no need to choose between the two. The dynamic of transcendental philosophy proceeds both from the formal anteriority of the a priori – the archeological dimension – and from its modifiability through successive corrections – the teleological dimension. The permanence and mobility of form are thus combined in a single economy: the system of the epigenesis of pure reason.

  Notes

  1. Changeux and Ricœur, What Makes Us Think?, p. 217.

  2. Atlan, La Fin du “tout génétique”?, pp. 11–12.

  3. Paul Ricœur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Idhe, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974, pp. 146–47. See also Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denise Savage, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970, especially book III, chapter III: “Dialectic: Archeology and Teleology,” pp. 459ff. Ricœur draws a very clear distinction between genesis and epigenesis: on this point, see in particular The Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 109ff. See also the fine work of Øystein Brekke: “On the Subject of Epigenesis: An Interpretive Figure in Paul Ricœur,” in Marius Timmann Mjaaland, Ulrik Houlind Rasmussen, and Philipp Stoellger, eds, Impossible Time: Past and Future in the Philosophy of Religion, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013, pp. 73–82.

  4. Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy.

  5. In fact, for Ricœur, in both The Conflict of Interpretations and Freud and Philosophy, it is a matter of bringing to light an “epigenesis of religious feeling” (Freud and Philosophy, p. 534), the intermediary between the Freudian approach of the primordial event of the killing of the father, which, inasmuch as it repeats itself without alteration through time, authorizes no evolution, but instead “sempiternal treading” (p. 534), and the Hegelian vision of a constant dialectical transformation of meaning that renders religion nothing but a simple moment of the mind. The unconscious and consciousness pull meaning in two opposing directions. Ricœur sets out to show that there is actually no “antinomy” between the two, and that archeology and teleology share solidarity: all archeology is waiting, and all teleology proceeds from the archeological traces of the past.

  6. The Conflict of Interpretations, p. 113.

  7. Freud and Philosophy, p. 548.

  8. The Conflict of Interpretations, p. 113.

  9. Bernard Bourgeois, L’Idéalisme allemand, Paris: Vrin, 2000, p. 109. Later he writes: “The concept of living being has no place in the doctrine of reason: the Critique of Judgment refuses it any objectivity, any value that is constitutive of the object, and sends it back, as a merely regulative concept, to the explorative subjectivity of objective nature” (p. 109). My translation.

  10. CPJ, §81, p. 291.

  11. CPJ, §81, p. 291.

  12. CPJ, §81, p. 291.

  13. CPJ, §81, p. 291.

  14. CPJ, §81, p. 292.

  15. CPJ, §81, p. 290.

  16. CPJ, §81, p. 290.

  17. CPJ, §81, p. 290.

  18. CPJ, §84, p. 301.

  19. Paragraph 65 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment demonstrates this point explicitly.

  20. CPR, p. 591, A645/B673.

  21. Philippe Huneman, “La place de l’analytique de la biologie dans la philosophie transcendantale,” in Sophie Grapotte, Mai Lequan, and Margit Ruffing, eds, Kant et les Sciences: un dialogue philosophique avec la pluralité des savoirs, Paris: Vrin, 2011, pp. 253–65, p. 257. My translation.

  22. CPR, Architectonic of Pure Reason, p. 691, A832/B860.

  23. CPR, Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, p. 598, A657/B685.

  24. CPR, p. 691, A833/B861.

  25. CPR, p. 692, A835/B863.

  26. Kant also distinguishes the growth of organic life from the “accretion” of minerals that takes place through the addition of successive layers, rather than through internal self-differentiation.

  27. “The inertia of matter is, and means, nothing else than its lifelessness, as matter in itself,” Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, in Theoretical Philosophy after 1781, p. 251, AK (IV:544).

  28. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science is concerned with studying the principles of movement, not those of matter endowed with life, an absurd idea that is the basis of the hylozoism that Kant criticizes harshly.

  29. Huneman, “La place de l’analytique de la biologie, ” p. 257.

  30. CPR, p. 596, A653/B681.

  31. CPR, Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, p. 592, A646/B674.

  32. Kant, The Only Possible Argument, p. 150.

  33. The O
nly Possible Argument, p. 149.

  34. The Only Possible Argument, p. 150.

  35. CPJ, §81, p. 290.

  36. CPJ, §81, p. 290.

  37. CPJ, §65, p. 247.

  38. CPJ, introduction, section IV, p. 67.

  39. CPJ, introduction, section IV, p. 67.

  40. Eric Weil, “Sens et fait,” in Problèmes kantiens, Paris: Vrin, 1970, pp. 57–107, pp. 64–5. My translation here and below.

  41. “Sens et fait,” p. 76.

  42. “Sens et fait,” p. 80.

  43. It is now widely accepted that the critique of teleological judgment is an analytic of biological judgment. Cf. Huneman, “La place de l’analytique de la biologie.”

  44. Weil, “Sens et fait,” p. 64.

  45. “Sens et fait,” p. 67.

  46. CPJ, §76, p. 274.

  47. Cf. CPJ, §10 “On Purposiveness in General,” p. 105.

  48. CPJ, §65, p. 245. My emphasis.

  49. CPJ, §65, p. 245.

  50. CPJ, §66, p. 249.

  51. Weil, “Sens et fait,” p. 104.

  52. CPJ, introduction, section IV, p. 67. My emphasis.

  53. “Sens et fait,” p. 60.

  54. CPJ, p. 258.

  55. CPJ, §77, p. 275.

  56. See CPJ, §77, p. 275.

  57. CPJ, §77, p. 276.

  58. CPR, p. 203, A66/B91.

  14

  CAN WE RELINQUISH THE TRANSCENDENTAL?

  The End of the Divorce between Primordial Temporality and Leveled-Down Time

  Understood as a transcendental formative force, epigenesis allows us to conceive of time in terms of the germinative relation that the understanding and reason each develop with themselves. Another meaning of the before-and-after relation emerges, which, in the constant shift between prospective and retrospective perspectives, reflects the development of rationality from one Critique to the next. Because he was convinced that the eviction of the imagination from the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason amounted to a triumph for the traditional concept of time, Heidegger did not see the deconstructive resource that the motif of epigenesis harbored in Kant’s work. This resource offered no less than a means to be done with the difference between primordial temporality and leveled-down or “vulgar” time. Epigenesis is not a genesis, but nor is it a succession or connection of events taking place in a linear fashion starting from a given, identifiable point. The unique temporality of epigenesis places it “above” or “at the surface” of genesis and is instead the temporality of a synthetic continuum within which all of the parts are presented together in a movement of growth whereby the whole is formed through self-differentiation. Synthesis in Kant must be understood as productive and generative in the strong sense, as a movement to produce its posterity, without which it would remain forever premature.

  Epigenesis can thus be thought as a process of temporalization within which ontological horizon and biological maturation, coming into presence and natural growth, are no longer distinguished from one another. Epigenetic temporality is transcendental without being primordial, natural without being derived. It is impossible to separate epigenetic temporality from the biological process it refers to, from organic growth, from the future of the living being. However, insofar as its movement is also the movement of the reason that thinks it, insofar as there is no rationality without epigenesis, without self-adjustment, without the modification of the old by the new, the natural and objective time of epigenesis may also be considered to be the subjective and pure time of the formation of horizon by and for thought.

  In this way, there would no longer be a difference between primordial temporality and objective temporality. Natural productivity and ontological productivity meet at the site of one and the same moment, without any difficulty arising from the acceptance that primordial temporality might also unfold according to the ages of biologicalarcheological dating. Between an authentic temporality without maturation and a chronological vulgarity without ecstasy, epigenetic temporality unfolds at its own rhythm. Henceforth, all it asks is to be conceptualized.

  Regarding the Possible Non-World

  To limit himself strictly to the first Critique, to restrict the Kantian inquiry into the necessity of the laws of physics – following the specific example of cinnabar – without ever tackling the problem of purposiveness, Meillassoux keeps to the traditional definition of contingency as the hypothesis of the possible wholly other world. We have seen the extent to which this hypothesis was difficult, if not well-nigh impossible, to justify. All the more so since, as Eric Weil comments, “while it is true that concrete science would become inconceivable in a non-organized and non-directed world, it does not follow that a non-structured nature, non-world, non-cosmos, is a contradictory concept (in his cosmogonic hypothesis, Kant himself had imagined just such a nature . . .).”1 Kant therefore never contested the very idea of a wholly other world on its own count. A world that would cease to obey physical necessity is not inconceivable. But for him, the problem of the relation between necessity and contingency occurs elsewhere. Not in the passage through the absurd – the relativization of the laws of physics – but in the recognition of different regimes of necessity, physical necessity being, once again, only one of them.2

  Insofar as he does not take into account the biological question as Kant formulates it, Meillassoux appears not to see that the analytic of the life sciences “replaces the classic metaphysical question of the contingency of that which is.”3 The epigenetic development of reason reveals precisely the different levels of necessity while also bringing about a transformation in the meaning of contingency. Contingency is no longer synonymous solely with a power to be other, but indeed also with an irremissible factuality of being, which is not at all one and the same. The question that the living, organized individual addresses to reason is not then about a possible alternative to the necessary order of nature, but rather about an independence of order in relation to reason. This possibility of decorrelation, which Kant saw very clearly, opens the door not to the thought of a modification in the laws of physics or natural laws in general, but rather to the thought of a factual rationality – which reason alone can somehow “come upon” – namely the self-sufficiency of life. The spontaneity of life is without reason.

  It is true that from this Kant deduces that this contingency echoes the contingency of our mind and, once again, the inexplicable nature of the constitution of our cognitive power. It is certainly because our mind is contingent that it can consider the question of contingency. We have seen that the rational grasp of the contingency of rationality led back to finitude, to which the discursive nature of our understanding must also be attributed. There’s no doubt about this point: contingency and necessity are the categories of our relation to appearances.

  But, as we have shown, finitude does not exist in the singular. The concept of finitude, just like the concepts of necessity and contingency, is plural. We have referred to Heidegger’s distinction between two elaborations of finitude. But the finitude analyzed in the third Critique also has its own, highly specific, meaning.

  Unlike the Critique of Pure Reason, the teleological critique of judgment does not emphasize the notion of finitude understood as a limit. This critique requires that finitude be thought of starting from life. After Kant, the relation between life and finitude is only ever taken up and developed in the twentieth century to the benefit of existential finitude, never life. To be finite, it is necessary not only to live but rather to exist; this is what we were told for a century. Today, what we must undertake is a philosophical thinking of finite life, not finite existence. Epigenesis can help us to do just that.

  Not that Kant grants the living being any special privilege. Unlike Dasein, the living being is not exemplary. The emergence of life can be understood entirely in his work as a banal event that is part of mechanical regularity since it “reigns over all the other creatures,”4 that is, living beings. Human beings can very well be “inc
luded.”5 But despite it all, if the judgment of organized beings in no way prevents consideration of inorganic nature and never contravenes the mechanism, it still makes it possible to consider it in a non-mechanistic manner, as a memory. Thus the earth always appears as a collection of traces. According to Kant, it cannot include any “history of nature,” that is, any “description of nature,” without an “archaeology.” The archeology concerns the “remaining traces of its oldest revolutions” in nature.6

  For Kant, it is not possible to date the past of the earth, which he calls its history, without using the archeological calendar, without which what happens means nothing. What is archeology? It in no way counters objectivity, but it does prohibit the neutrality of the look. Indeed, it makes possible a “representation of the primitive condition of the earth” as a play of signs, a perspective “to which nature itself invites and summons us.”7 However, archeology is not, for all that, a mere anthropologization. It is about petrified “fossils,” rather than “carved stones” made by humans. This is not therefore an anthropologization of the ancestral past, but rather a reckoning of this past as an abundance of clues. In other words, to use a vocabulary that is not his, for Kant the arche-fossil is always an architrace. And the architrace is always a trace of life.8

  Kant would criticize speculative realism for avoiding life and biological judgment entirely just when, as Eric Weil says, it “turns towards the real to address it as its problem,”9 and thereby misses a new meaning of contingency that appears in his thought: (1) the real of a finitude of the living being, (2) factuality as meaning, (3) the archeological link of meaning and the past.