Читать книгу Thinking the Event - François Raffoul - Страница 11
ОглавлениеThe Neutralization of the Event
In her 1946 essay “What Is Existential Philosophy?,”1 returning to the roots of existential philosophy, Hannah Arendt makes the radical claim that the event of existence is a phenomenon that takes place outside of thought. With that insight, which posits the exteriority of existence with respect to thought, a genuine thinking of the event in its eventfulness is made possible. This possibility is born out of a break with reason’s claims to encapsulate or enframe the real, which has been the dream of the entire philosophical tradition culminating with Hegel. Precisely commenting on Hegel’s system as an attempt to encompass the whole of reality in thought, Arendt writes: “With a comprehensiveness never achieved before him, Hegel provided a philosophical explanation for all the phenomena of nature and history and brought them together in a strangely unified whole.” In so doing, she continues, thought became a “prison for reality” (WEP, 164). The eventfulness of the event is thereby reduced to the demands of reason. Such attempt to reduce events to what thought can grasp is best represented, according to Arendt, in Hegel’s work, “the last word of all Western philosophy,” in the sense that it accomplishes the ancient identification of being and thought. In Hegel’s well-known expression in his preface to Elements of the Philosophy of Right, “what is rational is real, and what is real is rational (Was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig).”2 Now, according to Arendt, the origin of existential philosophy is to be situated in the rupture with this postulate of an identity between being and thought. What those existential philosophers “were rebelling against, and despairing of,” she writes, “was philosophy itself, the postulated identity of thought and being” (WEP, 164). Whether in the form of materialisms or idealisms, whether by affirming the primacy of matter or on the contrary the primacy of the mind, all traditional systems of thought agree on this identity, and they all attempt “to re-establish the unity of thought and Being” (WEP, 164). Existential philosophy breaks with that supposed identity, through which the event is neutralized and made to conform to the form of thought.
Never has this neutralization of the event to thought appeared so clearly as in the reduction of events to causality in Kant’s theoretical philosophy. With Kant, one sees how events are conceived in terms of and on the basis of causality, how their independence is reduced or neutralized by a causal order. Kant posits that events happen according to causality. Kant assumes the universal determinism of nature and asserts his commitment to a universal causal determinism for everything that happens, according to which “everything in the world happens solely in accordance with laws of nature.”3 Such universal natural causality is taken by Kant as a given and not in dispute. This is not surprising, if it is the case, as Heidegger states in The Essence of Human Freedom, that “causality, in the traditional sense of the being of beings, in common understanding as in traditional metaphysics, is the fundamental category of being as being-present-at-hand [Vorhandensein].”4 One cannot stress enough the importance of the motif of causality in traditional metaphysics, with Jean-Luc Marion going so far as to claim, “Metaphysics knows nothing but the cause.” Metaphysics knows nothing but the cause, and “knows nothing except through the cause, either as cause or as effect.”5 Causality is the fundamental category. “In metaphysics, cause does not exist merely as one categorical function among others; it is set up as the universal category for all beings. Thus for Suarez: ‘There is no being that is not an effect or a cause’; for Pascal: ‘All things caused and causing;’ or for Kant: ‘Everything of which experience teaches that it happens [geschieht] must have a cause.” ’6 Causality of nature is traditionally the paradigm to think the being of beings, the meaning of being.
Kant posits this paradigm in the second analogy of experience in the Critique of Pure Reason, which states (in the A edition) that “everything that happens presupposes something which it follows in accordance with a rule” and (in the B edition) that “all alterations [Veränderungen] occur in accordance with the law of the connection of cause and effect” (CPR, A 189/B 232, 304). Let me clarify from the outset that for Kant, as he demonstrated in the first analogy, all appearances are alterations, that is, alterations of an enduring substance, as opposed to “an origination out of nothing” (CPR, A 206/B 251, 314). He writes in the second analogy that “all appearances of the temporal sequence are collectively only alterations, i.e., a successive being and not-being of the determination of the substance that persists there,” and: “This could also have been expressed thus: All change (succession) of appearances is only alteration” (CPR, A 189/B 232, 304, emphasis in the original). An alteration “is a way of existing that succeeds another way of existing of the very same object” (CPR, A 187/B 230, 303, emphasis mine). This understanding of appearances as alterations reveals that Kant is assigning to events an underlying substrate, a substance, which by definition does not change and remains the same. The “concept of alteration presupposes one and the same subject as existing with two opposed determinations, and thus as persisting” (CPR, A 189/B 233, 304). In this way, the notion of event discussed in the analogies of experience only presents a neutralized eventfulness, reduced to a substantial principle that itself does not happen.
For Kant, “analogies” refer to the principles that organize and regulate the existence of appearances in time, the various processes of nature. These appearances obey certain rules that are not drawn empirically from a given experience, but rather determine a priori the possibility of experience (the analogies, as rules of the three modes of time that are persistence, succession, and simultaneity, “precede experience and first make it possible,” CPR, A 177/B 220, 296). In fact, for Kant, “it is only because we subject the sequence of the appearances and thus all alteration to the law of causality that experience itself, i.e., empirical cognition of them, is possible” (CRP, A 188/B 234, 305). For Kant, the general principle of all three analogies is that all appearances are subject a priori to rules that affect and determine their relation in time. Such rule is, of course, that of the cause. For what is a cause? The concept of cause is that of “the real upon which, whenever it is posited, something else always follows” (CPR, A 144/B 183, 275). This necessary rule determines a priori the temporal succession of events, the succession of occurrences. As Kant explains in the introduction to the first Critique (CPR, B 5, 138): “The very concept of a cause so obviously contains the concept of a necessity of connection with an effect and a strict universality of rule that it would be entirely lost if one sought, as Hume did, to derive it from a frequent association of that which happens with that which precedes and a habit (thus a merely subjective necessity) of connecting representations arising from that association.” The second analogy is indeed titled “Principle of temporal sequence according to the law of causality” (CPR, A 189/B 232, 304). The rule necessarily determines the relation between two states so that “in order for this to be cognized as determined, the relation between the two states must be thought in such a way that it is thereby necessarily determined which of them must be placed before and which after rather than vice-versa” (CPR, A 189/B 234, 305). In other words, the succession of events must follow a rule, so that, as Kant explains, “I cannot reverse the series and place that which happens prior to that which it follows” (CPR, A 198/B 243, 310). That rule—causality—ensures that when the preceding state is posited, the current event in question “inevitably and necessarily follows.” For instance, to take up the example of the ship going down the river provided by Kant, “it is impossible that in the apprehension of this appearance the ship should first be perceived downstream and afterwards upstream” (CPR, A 192/B 237, 307). The order in the succession of the appearances is here necessary, and “the apprehension is bound to it.” This stands in contrast with the succession of perception of a house, for, although the perceptions are also successive, the order of this succession is subjective and arbitrary. “Thus, e.g., the apprehension of the manifold in the appearance of a house that stands before me is successive;” however, in this particular case, “my perceptions could have begun at its rooftop and ended at the ground, but could also have begun below and ended above; likewise I could have apprehended the manifold of empirical intuition from the right or from the left. In the series of these perceptions there was therefore no determinate order that made it necessary when I had to begin in the apprehension in order to combine the manifold empirically” (CPR, A 193/B 238, 307). Now the difference between the ship going down the river and the house is the following: the house is not an event but an object that “stands before me,” while the ship on the river is an actual occurrence or event. When it comes to occurrences or events, the order of succession is necessary and always happens according to a rule. Hence Kant clarifies: “But this rule is always to be found in the perception of that which happens, and it makes the order of perceptions that follow one another (in the apprehension of this appearance) necessary” (CPR, A 193/B 238, 307, italics emphasis mine, bold emphasis in the original). The issue for Kant is to establish that events occur successively insofar as each event follows necessarily from the previous one. Otherwise, “if I were to posit that which precedes and the occurrence did not follow it necessarily, then I would have to hold it to be only a subjective play of my imaginings, and if I still represented something objective by it I would have to call it a mere dream” (CPR, A 201/B 247, 311–312). What thus guarantees the possibility—and objectivity—of experience is the principle of causality itself: “Hence the principle of the causal relation in the sequence of appearances is valid for all objects of experience (under the conditions of succession), since it is itself the ground of the possibility of such an experience” (CPR, A 202/B 247, 312). Causality structures the occurrence of events thoroughly: “Now every alteration has a cause, which manifests its causality in the entire time during which the alteration proceeds” (CPR, A 208/B 253, 315).
The succession of events thus follows the order of causality, and an event becomes the effect of a prior cause. The event is not something new, an original phenomenon disrupting and breaking the course of time, but the product or the result of a prior process. An event takes place within the order of time as the effect of a prior cause. As Kant put it in the third antinomy (in the proof of the thesis), “everything that happens presupposes a previous state, upon which it follows without exception according to a rule” (CPR, A 444/B 472, 484). The same necessity applies to that previous state as well, which has also arisen from a previous state that caused it (“But now the previous state itself must be something that has happened,” CPR, A 444/B 472, 484). In other words, the prior cause for the event must also, in view of this principle of causality, be caused by a prior or antecedent cause. The notion of a universal causality of nature presupposes this temporal antecedence as “the causality of the cause through which something happens is always something that has happened, which according to the law of nature [nach dem Gesetz der Natur] presupposes once again a previous state and its causality, and this in the same way a still earlier state, and so on” (CPR, A 444/B 472, 484). One notes here the past tense: the event is here approached as that which has happened, and this prior event is approached in terms of a prior cause, in accordance with a conception of temporality that conceives of it as happening from the past. This, it could be argued, is a “leveled down” temporality, reduced to the order of causes, unfolding from the past to the present. Instead of an event that is determined from prior occurrences and causes, I will show how an authentic eventful temporality should be conceived as happening from the future, thus breaking the order of causes as unfolding from the past. Kant remains within this understanding of events as determined from the past, as revealed in this passage from the “Clarification of the cosmological idea of a freedom in combination with the universal natural necessity”:
The law of nature that everything that happens has a cause, that since the causality of this cause, i.e., the action, precedes in time and in respect of an effect that has arisen cannot have been always but must have happened, and so must also have had its cause among appearances, through which it is determined, and consequently that all occurrences are empirically determined in a natural order – this law, through which alone appearances can first constitute one nature and furnish objects of one experience, is a law of the understanding, from which under no pretext can any departure be allowed or any appearance be exempted; because otherwise one would put this appearance outside of all possible experience, thereby distinguishing it from objects of possible experience and making it into a mere thought-entity and a figment of the brain. (CPR, A 542/B 570, 538, emphasis in the original)
The concept of the relation of cause and effect determines events, with “the former of which determines the latter in time, as its consequence” (CRP, A 189/B 234, 305). By becoming enframed in the causal order, events are neutralized within a rational apparatus, as well as within a representation of time as succession, happening from the past (cause) to the present (effect).
Now, as Jean-Luc Marion suggests, the kind of events mobilized by Kant in the second analogy are not properly events, but what he terms impoverished events, that is, events reduced to what reason demands of them: predictability, repeatability, and foundation in causality. Marion writes that “the analogies of experience concern only a fringe of phenomenality—phenomena of the type of objects constituted by the sciences, poor in intuition, foreseeable, exhaustively knowable, reproducible—while other levels (and first of all historical phenomena) would make an exception” (BG, 207). The events of the analogies of experience are not properly events but intraworldly facts that are subject to causality. “Eventful” events, as will be covered in the following, are not subject to causal determinations; rather, in their original happening, they indeed do not follow but constitute new causal networks and thereby reconfigure if not create a new world. Kant, however, thinks in the perspective of the demands of the principle of reason. This is why he reduces events to the law of causality and then attempts to establish a perfect symmetry, or reversibility, between event and causality: “If, therefore, we experience that something happens, then we always presuppose that something else precedes it, which it follows in accordance with a rule” (CPR, A 195/B 240, 308). Conversely, as soon as I perceive in a sequence “a relation to the preceding state, from which the representation follows in accordance with a rule, I represent something as an occurrence, or as something that happens” (CPR, A 198/B 243, 309–310).
Kant explains in the second analogy that it is a formal condition of our sensibility that all phenomena must happen successively (“The apprehension of the manifold of appearance is always successive,” CPR, A 189/B 234, 305) and that “every apprehension of an occurrence is therefore a perception that follows another one” (CPR, A 192/B 237, 306). The possibility of experience also requires that this succession be ordered causally, that it happens “according to a rule”: “Now if it is a necessary law of our sensibility, thus a formal condition of all perceptions, that the preceding time necessarily determines the following time (in that I cannot arrive at the following time except by passing through the preceding one), then it is also an indispensable law of the empirical representation of the temporal series that the appearances of the past time determine every existence in the following time, and that these, as occurrences, do not take place except insofar as the former determines their existence in time, i.e., establish it in accordance with a rule” (CPR, A 199/B 244, 310, emphasis in the original). Such a rule is, of course, the causal rule, itself expressive of the principle of sufficient reason: “This rule for determining something with respect to its temporal sequence, however, is that in what precedes, the condition is to be encountered under which the occurrence always (i.e., necessarily) follows. Thus the principle of sufficient reason is the ground of possible experience” (CPR, A 201/B 246, 311). The law of causality, or law of nature, which states that all events and occurrences are determined, itself falls under the authority of the principle of sufficient reason, which states that everything must have a reason that accounts for it thoroughly and completely—that is, “sufficiently.” This is why the law of causality, or law of nature, “consists just in this, that nothing happens without a cause sufficiently determined a priori” (CPR, A 446/B 474, 484).
There lies the aporia of natural causality as presented in the third antinomy: if one assumes there is only the causality of nature, then the consequence is that “everything that happens presupposes a previous state, upon which it follows without exception according to a rule” (CPR, A 444/B 472, 484). Now the same necessity applies to that previous state as well, which has also arisen from a previous state that caused it (“But now the previous state itself must be something that has happened”). In other words, the prior cause for the event must also be caused by a prior or antecedent cause. There is no way to interrupt or escape the ineluctability of this infinite regress, which makes it impossible to reach the beginning of the series, the “first” beginning and cause that would secure the exhaustive accounting of nature according to the requirement of the principle of sufficient reason. Kant continues by stating, “If, therefore, everything happens according to mere laws of nature, then at every time there is only a subordinate but never a first beginning” (CPR, A 444/B 472, 484). For the impossibility of finding a first cause would signify that no completeness of causes can be reached, which would contradict the principle of sufficient reason, which precisely demands such a completeness. “But now the law of nature consists just in this, that nothing happens without a cause sufficiently determined a priori” (CPR, A 446/B 474, 484), and therefore a first absolute beginning provided by a first cause. The notion of a “cause sufficiently determined a priori” is the equivalent of the Leibnizian principle of sufficient reason. This principle of sufficient reason states that no event can take place without a cause, a reason, or a ground. Such is “the principle of sufficient reason, namely, that nothing happens without a reason why it should be so rather than otherwise.”7 The principle of sufficient reason, which is the foundation for “contingent truths,” Leibniz explains further, “is the principle for the need for a sufficient reason for anything to exist, for any event to happen, for any truth to take place.”8 Every event occurs following a causal rule, and “everything that happens (begins to be) presupposes something which it follows in accordance with a rule” (CPR, A 189/B 232, 304).
This structuring effectively accomplishes what Leibniz had posited, namely that events must conform to the principle of sufficient reason and that no event can occur without a reason or a ground: in fact, every event must be as it were prepared beforehand to be the event that it is, conditioned by a determinant reason: “For the nature of things requires that every event should have beforehand its proper conditions, requirements and dispositions, the existence of which makes the sufficient reason of such an event.”9 This principle of sufficient reason merges with a principle of causality, which states that every event is caused to be the event that it is, giving the event its grounding. As Heidegger puts it, the principle of reason, which affirms that every being has a reason, also posits the cause. Indeed, Leibniz had conflated the principle of reason with a principle of causality: “Nothing is without reason, or no effect is without a cause.”10 The statement that “no effect is without a cause” can be called the principle of causality. Thus, “Leibniz obviously posits the principle of reason and the Principle of causality as being equivalent.” Although not every reason is a cause, nonetheless, “the Principle of causality belongs within the orbit of the principle of reason” (GA 10, 33/PR, 21). We see here how the principle of reason is caught in a quest for foundation, which ultimately, as Heidegger would show in The Principle of Reason, proves self-destructive or self-deconstructive. The principle, which states that “nothing happens without a cause sufficiently determined a priori,” proves impossible to fulfill, and it self-destructs. For, on the one hand, the principle of natural causality contradicts itself since no first cause is attained: the more it seeks to fulfill itself, the more it engages in the infinite regress that will prove its deconstruction; on the other hand, if one posits the first foundation that is causa sui, then one also reveals an abyss beneath it. The ground, in order to be the first ground, cannot itself have a ground and is therefore groundless. The principle of sufficient reason self-deconstructs, which I will return to in chapter 2.
The Event Outside of Thought
In addition to this enframing of events within causality, a further reduction of events to thought occurs by referring them to a constituting subjectivity. Arendt claims that Husserl attempted to reestablish the ancient identity between being and thought through his notion of an intentional consciousness: insofar as the intentionality of consciousness ensures that the transcendental ego always has its object before it, the happening phenomenon has been reduced to what can be apprehended of it. Intentionality ensures the reduction of the event to consciousness, thereby maintaining the identity of being and thought. Arendt writes: “As a conscious being I can conceive of all beings, and as consciousness I am, in my human mode, the Being of the world. (The seen tree, the tree as object of my consciousness, does not have to be the ‘real’ tree; it is in any case the real object of my consciousness.)” (WEP, 164–165). In addition to the rational enframing of the event, there is thus also a reduction of the event to a transcendental consciousness or subject, which keeps mastery of events through its constitutive power. Insofar as the transcendental subject objectifies phenomena under its gaze, events will be reduced to objects for my subjectivity. Thus, for Sartre, everything that happens, happens to me, and what happens to me happens through me. Sartre reduces the alterity and surprise of the event as it is immediately appropriated by the self in its responsible engagement. The event is immediately taken on by the subject. What happens to me happens through me because everything concerns me and because I am the one by whom the world takes on a meaning. When something happens in the world, I am called to respond and to answer for it: I am responsible for it. Any event becomes a call to my responsibility: I am engaged by the event. Even if a war is declared by another, “everything takes place as if I bore the entire responsibility for this war.”11 Everything that happens is mine, says Sartre, and nothing human is foreign to me: “By this we must understand first of all that I am always equal to what happens to me qua man, for what happens to a man through other men and through himself can only be human” (BN, 708). There is no nonhuman state of things, Sartre insists, which means there is no radical alterity in the world and no events I have not chosen. I can decide on the nonhuman, but “this decision is human, and I shall carry the entire responsibility for it” (BN, 708). Sartre posits here a subjectivity as appropriation of all foreignness. Any event is immediately mine and taken over by my freedom, and there are no accidents without my appropriating them and making them my own. “Thus there are no accidents in life,” and “any way you look at it, it is a matter of a choice” (BN, 708). This hyperbolic inflation of appropriating subjectivity implies the reduction, appropriation, and overcoming of everything that seems to haunt and threaten it at every step, the accidents and events that happen to me from without, events of which I am not the cause. At this point, nothing is allowed to escape either the principle of reason or the constitutive powers of subjectivity.
It is at this juncture, where events seem to have been absorbed by reason and an appropriating subjectivity, that Arendt seeks to reawaken what she calls the “philosophical shock” (WEP, 165), the shock by which precisely thought realizes it is not in possession of its objects, but is rather exposed to an event that is irreducible to it: thought is exposed to an alterity that happens to it, which both interrupts it and sets it in motion. In fact, one also recalls here, paradoxically, Sartre’s rebellious cry against the dissolution of reality in consciousness in his short essay, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology.” Rejecting the reduction of “a table, a rock, a house” to the contents of consciousness, rejecting what he calls a “digestive philosophy” that constantly attempts to trap things in its web, Sartre insisted that one cannot “dissolve” things in consciousness: “You see this tree, to be sure. But you see it just where it is: at the side of the road, in the midst of the dust, alone and writhing in the heat, eight miles from the Mediterranean coast. It could not enter into your consciousness, because it is not of the same nature as consciousness.”12 What appears here is the radical exteriority of the event to thought, which places thought in a state of shock. It is the very shock of which Deleuze speaks to account for the origin of thought. “Something must force thought, shocking it and drawing it into a search.”13 Thinking always begins from an event that comes from without: at the origin of thought there is not some rational principle, but an event, an accident, an encounter, a violent shock that calls on thought by its very outsideness. “Something must force thought”: not a “natural disposition” but rather “a fortuitous and contingent incitation derived from an encounter” (POE, 56). This encounter has no necessity, no reason: it is external, an event through which thought enters in relation with what does not depend from it. The relation between thought and its outside is contingent and cannot be derived from the connections it makes. As François Zourabichvili reminds us, for Deleuze it is a matter “of affirming the relation of exteriority that links thought to what it thinks” (POE, 51). The true beginning is an event that is “outside concept” (hors-concept), a concept now placed in relation with an outside that will always remain inappropriable for it. As Nancy explains, thought is not appropriative, not appropriation, not even inscription, but ex-scription,14 expropriated by the event.
This, indeed, is the challenge to reason: thinking is born from a contingent event, from chance, and is always “circumstantial,” dependent on events, that is, on an absolutely unnecessary phenomenon. “Thought is born of chance,” “relative to an event that happens unexpectedly to thought,” and therefore, “Whether it is a question of thinking or of living, it is always a matter of the encounter, the event, and therefore of the relation as exterior to its terms” (POE, 57). Thought is always in a state of crisis, Deleuze stating “that the act of thinking necessarily puts subjectivity into crisis, and that necessity, far from fulfilling the wishes of an already constituted thinking subject, can only be conquered in the state of a thought outside of itself, a thought that is absolutely powerful only at the extreme point of its powerlessness” (POE, 52). One encounters an event outside reason. The event of an encounter is not subject to the principle of sufficient reason: “An encounter is always inexplicable” (POE, 57). To think the event is to think such absolute inexplicability and contingency.15
The well-known paradigm of such encounter outside of reason is the case of friendship, as described by Michel de Montaigne between him and Étienne de La Boétie. “If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed except by answering: because it was he; because it was I” (Si on me presse de dire pourquoi je l’aimais, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer qu’en répondant: parce que c’était lui; parce que c’était moi).16 As Marion comments, the event of this friendship occurs “all at once, without warning or anticipation, according to an arrival without expectation,”17 and without reason. The event of friendship is a fact (it “imposes itself”), a fact and a chance irreducible to reason. Therefore, no reasons will ever measure up to the fact of the encounter, to the chance happening of friendship. As Derrida puts it in The Politics of Friendship, “The analysis of conditions of possibility, even existential ones, will never suffice in giving an account of the act or the event. An analysis of that kind will never measure up to what takes place, the effectivity—actuality—of what comes to pass—for example, a friendship which will never be reduced to the desire or the potentiality of friendship.”18 Now, the notion that philosophy is born out of an event that it does not control is “a shock to reason” in its quest for ultimate foundations. For “how is it supposed to find a foundation [assise] in that which defeats it, in the inexplicable or the aleatory?” The logic of foundation of the principle of reason leads to its very ungrounding, its “collapse” in the abyss. Thought then “stands on a movable ground that it does not control, and thereby wins its necessity.” In the end, what transpires is that “we cannot give the reason for an event” (POE, 57).
When thought assumes its eventful origin, when it engages in “an authentic relation to the outside,” it then gains its authentic vocation and “affirms the unforeseeable or the unexpected” (POE, 57). There lies the fundamental aporia (and secret resource) of thought: it must think and account for what happens outside of it. Because the origin of thought is an event that lies outside of it, thinking will always fail in appropriating such beginning: “If thinking necessarily fails to grasp its beginning, perhaps it is because the beginning does not depend upon thought.”19 It is in this sense that in her 1946 essay, Hannah Arendt speaks of the failure of thought, as if such failure was its most authentic vocation. Arendt refers to Jaspers’s “border situations”: whether death, guilt, fate, or chance, these events provoke thought and “drive us to philosophize,” not because they can be thought, but precisely because they cannot. Arendt adds that “in all these experiences we find we cannot escape reality or solve its mysteries by thought” (WEP, 167, emphasis mine). Philosophy, she concludes, can “never get around the fact that reality cannot be resolved into what can be thought. Therefore, the very purpose of philosophic thought is to ‘heighten . . . the intellectually irresolvable’” (WEP, 185). As Derrida would put it, it is a matter of thinking “according to the aporia.”20 This is what makes us think: the fact that we cannot appropriate what we think. In the famed words of Martin Heidegger, the “most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”21 The event is then both the end and the origin of thought: it ends it in its claims to mastery while opening it to the infinite work of interpretation.
Arendt first describes the shock of the event of existence in terms of the resistance of singularity to conceptual generality. In its singularity, the event does not belong to a constituted whole, such as the world. It happens, and as it happens it interrupts any context that could include it. It remains outside, exterior, inappropriable, even while it happens “in” the world: “The functional context of the world in which I too am included can always explain and justify why, for example, there are tables and chairs at all. But it will never be able to make me understand why this table is. And it is the existence of this table, quite apart from tables in general, that evokes the philosophical shock” (WEP, 165). This passage reveals that singularity belongs to a definition of the event, that an event is each time singular, and that this singularity is irreducible to any conceptual reappropriation. To illustrate the irreducibility of singularity to conceptual generality, Arendt refers to Hoffmansthal’s letter to Stefan George, in which he sides with “the little things” against the “big words” because “it is in those little things that the mystery of reality lies hidden” (WEP, 165). This is how Arendt interprets the motto of phenomenology, “Back to the things themselves!”: it is a matter of returning to those singular things and their happening. When confronted with such singular beings, one is confronted with the fact that reality remains alien to humans and that therefore the human being is not and cannot be “the creator of the world” (WEP, 167). The world in which one would feel at home is interrupted by a certain alien presence of singular things, which, although they take place or occur “in” the world, manifest outside of that world. They occur in the world and yet remain somehow outside, external to it. This occurring inside and outside is the mark of the event. No event would happen if it only belonged to an immanent whole. At the same time, no event would happen if it did not in a certain way manifest itself in the world. It happens in the world from without.
In addition to singularity, the event displays a radical facticity. This is what Schelling saw, according to Arendt, when he opposed to the “philosophy of pure thought” a thinking of existence. “His positive philosophy took as its point of departure ‘existence’ . . . [that] initially it possesses only in the form of the pure That” (WEP, 167). The “That” designates the pure eventfulness of an event before it can be included within a rational or causal order. It is the first happening of that which can then become an object of thought (the “what”) or an intentioned object for a thematizing and objectifying consciousness. However, Arendt insists forcefully and decisively, “the What will never be able to explain the That” (WEP, 167). Why? Because the “that” and the “what” are simply not homogeneous, not on the same plane, irreducibly other to one another. There collapses the ancient Parmenidian dream of a identity of thought and being: being will always remain other to thought. The event of existence cannot be included in what can be thought. What then appears is the sheer fact of an event: modern philosophy “begins with the overpowering and shocking perception of an inherently empty reality. The more empty of all qualities reality appears, the more immediately and nakedly appears the only thing about it that remains of interest: that it is” (WEP, 167). At that point, instead of presenting the features of meaningfulness and order, being begins to appear as an event that is marked by “chance” and that can be described as “uncertain, incomprehensible, and unpredictable” (WEP, 167), indeed alien to human beings.
As Arendt shows, one finds several instances of this breakdown of the dreamed unity of being with thought in Kant’s work, in particular in his account of synthetic judgments and his refutation of the ontological proof of God’s existence. In turn, this twofold break will open onto a further rupture, with natural causality, allowing for the surge of a “transcendental freedom” that will constitute the possibility of eventfulness. With respect to the first point, Arendt argues that the traditional unity of thought and being, which supposed the coincidence between essentia and existentia, and the reciprocity between the rational and the real (the belief that “Everything thinkable also existed” and that “everything extant, because it was knowable, also has to be rational,” WEP, 168), breaks down in Kant’s notion of synthetic judgments. Why? Because “by his analysis of synthetic propositions, he proved that in any proposition that makes a statement about reality, we reach beyond the concept (the essentia) of any given thing” (WEP, 168, emphasis mine). Indeed, as is well-known, in the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explains that for all judgments, the relation of the subject to the predicate is possible in two different ways: “Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A as something that is (covertly) contained in this concept A; or B lies entirely outside the concept A, though to be sure it stands in connection with it” (CPR, A 6/B 10, 130). He calls the latter a synthetic judgment (because it adds to the subject) and the former an analytic judgment (because it merely analyses the a priori content of the concept). The criterion for an analytic judgment is the principle of identity or noncontradiction: the predicate cannot contradict the concept of the subject. “Analytic judgments (affirmative ones) are thus those in which the connection of the predicate is thought through identity” (CPR, A 7/B 11, 130). In contrast, in a synthetic judgment, the predicate is not already contained in the concept but lies outside of it. Kant establishes that in the case of synthetic judgments the concept cannot encompass reality but in fact depends (in sensibility) on the givenness of a phenomenon that lies outside the concept. The basis for synthetic judgments is thus extraconceptual. What distinguishes a synthetic judgment from an analytic judgment is whether the predicate lies outside or inside the concept and whether there is some reality that lies outside the concept. This is indeed how Kant presents the difference: a synthetic judgment, in contrast with an analytic judgment, adds
To the concept of the subject a predicate that was not thought in it at all, and could not have been extracted from it through any analysis; e.g., if I say: “bodies are extended,” then this is an analytic judgment. For I do not need to go outside the concept that I combine with the word “body” in order to find that extension is connected with it, but rather I need only to analyze that concept, i.e., become conscious of the manifold that I always think in it, in order to encounter this predicate therein; it is therefore an analytic judgment. On the contrary, if I say: “All bodies are heavy,” then the predicate is something entirely different from that which I think in the mere concept of a body in general. The addition of such a predicate thus yields a synthetic judgment. (CPR, A 7/B 11, 130)
In this way, Kant destroys the ancient postulate of a strict identity between thought and being: here, being lies outside of thought and does not belong to it.
A further rupture with the alleged identity between being and thought takes place in Kant’s refutation of the ontological proof of the existence of God (a proof, I should stress, that is based strictly on the concept of God and that abstracts “from all experience and infer[s] the existence of a highest cause entirely a priori from mere concepts,” CPR, A 590/B 618, 563, emphasis mine). In this refutation, Kant establishes that no existence can be deduced from a concept; in fact, this critique “destroyed any rational belief in God based on the proposition that anything accessible to reason had to exist” (WEP, 169). This is the case, first, because Kant refuses to engage in metaphysical speculations and considers them illegitimate. As he writes, “I will establish that reason . . . spreads its wings in vain when seeking to rise above the world of sense through the mere might of speculation” (CPR, A 591/B 619, 563). But further, Kant refutes this ontological proof by engaging in a rethinking of existence or being, which, he argues, is not a “real predicate,” that is, not a conceptual content or a predicate that could be included as part of a concept: existence cannot be established from a concept. Rather, existence must be presupposed by any judgment, rather than derived from it.
In the section entitled “On the impossibility of an ontological proof of God’s existence,” Kant begins to introduce a break, a gap, in the assumed identity of thought and being or existence by pointing out that the concept of God in no way implies its existence, as “one easily sees that the concept of an absolutely necessary being is a pure concept of reason, i.e., a mere idea, the objective reality of which is far from being proved by the fact that reason needs it” (CPR, A 592/B 620, 563). Thus, one is left wondering “whether through a concept of an unconditionally necessary being I am still thinking something or perhaps nothing at all” (CPR, A 593/B 621, 564). The error exposed by Kant consists in treating existence as a necessary predicate of the concept of God, just as having three angles is a necessary determination of a triangle. Now this latter proposition, as Kant clarifies, does not mean that “three angles are absolutely necessary,” but instead that “under the condition that a triangle exists (is given),” then three angles “also exist in it necessarily” (CPR, A 594/B 622, 564–565). Existence must first be presupposed, not derived from the content of the concept. Existence is not intraconceptual, for “if you cancel its existence, then you cancel the thing itself with all its predicates” (CPR, A 594/B 622, 564–565). Existence is not a predicate but instead the subject along with all of its predicates. This refers to Kant’s definition of being: “Being is obviously not a real predicate, i.e., a concept of something that could add to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing or of certain determinations in themselves” (CPR, A 596/B 624, 567). The expression “real predicate” requires a clarification, for the term “real” does not convey in Kant’s text the sense that is used nowadays as “actually existing.” “Real” in the context designates the conceptual content that determines a res, a thing; hence “real predicate” designates the conceptual content of a thing. Reality for Kant does not designate actuality but the substantive content of a thing, whether that thing exists or not. This is why in his essay on “Kant’s Thesis about Being,” Heidegger explains that “a real predicate, a determination belonging to a substance, to the substantive content of a thing, is, for example, the predicate ‘heavy’ with respect to the stone, regardless of whether the stone really exists or not.”22 A real predicate is hence the substantive conceptual content of a thing that can then be attributed to it. And that is what being is not. Being is not a real predicate, that is, it is not a conceptual element or part of a thing. Why? Because precisely that thing must first exist. Being is in this sense not a predicate of a thing, but the very positing of the thing with all its predicates, which explains the second part of Kant’s definition: being “is merely the positing of a thing or of certain determinations in themselves.”
One encounters here the distinction highlighted by Hannah Arendt between the “what” and the “that”: what Kant calls “merely” is the pure or sheer positing of being, the pure “that” of an existence apart from any consideration of its “what.” When I say, for instance, that “the stone is,” I am using in a certain sense the predicate “is,” but not as a real predicate, that is, not as a conceptual content. I am only stating that the stone exists, not what it is. Kant is then able to redefine existence in its distinction from conceptuality, and to redefine it no longer as part of a concept but as pure position, the position of a subject along with its predicates, but not itself one of those predicates. This is why in the proposition “God is omnipotent,” in the logical use as a copula of a judgment, the small word “is” is not a predicate of the concept of God, but that which posits the predicate in relation to the subject. “The proposition God is omnipotent contains two concepts that have their objects: God and omnipotence; the little word ‘is’ is not a predicate in it, but only that which posits the predicate in relation to the subject” (CPR, A 596/B 624, 567, emphasis in the original). When I say “God exists” or “God is” (using the word “is” no longer in its logical use as a copula between the subject and the predicate, but as pure positing of existence), I have not added a new predicate to the concept of God, but have only posited the subject itself along with all of its predicates. Being is posited in its existing presence, and no longer within a logical or conceptual frame. With the proposition of existence, I go beyond the concept, not toward another possible predicate of that concept, but toward the very thing that exists as absolute position. There again, what this Kantian refutation shows is that existence lies outside the concept. Kant states it explicitly: “Thus whatever and however much our concept of an object may contain, we have to go out beyond it in order to provide it with existence” (CPR, A 601/B 629, 568). Through this twofold break with conceptuality, Kant frees up the possibility of a thinking of the event of existence that would take place outside the order of reason and causality. This appears in Kant’s third antinomy, in which an excess with respect to natural causality opens the possibility of the event of freedom. Kant opens the way for encountering the event of being as such, no longer mediated by a reason or a concept. Far from the diminished, impoverished sense of the event as presented in the analogies, this opens to a more radical sense of the event, which one actually finds developed in Kant’s philosophy of transcendental freedom, this uncanny capacity to begin absolutely, to initiate a new series of events, a spontaneous surge of the new that inaugurates a radical understanding of the event.
The New, or the Event of Freedom
The twisting free of the event from natural causality can be followed in Kant’s third antinomy. Paradoxically, it by pursuing the logic of natural causality that Kant unveils the possibility of an event occurring outside such causality, namely, the event of freedom. As noted prior, Kant assumes the universal causality of nature by which all events are rigorously ordered. However, this is not the only causality. There are for Kant two causalities, natural causality and a causality by freedom. Kant explains in the “Resolution of the cosmological idea of the totality of the derivation of occurrences in the world from their causes” in the Critique of Pure Reason that “In regard of what happens, one can think of causality in only two ways: either according to nature or from freedom” (CPR, A 532/B 560, 532). Indeed, there are two different ways for things to happen: either by necessity (they could not have happened any other way), following the universal laws of nature by which each thing is as it were “pushed” or determined by a preceding cause, or else from freedom, a kind of spontaneity or free surge that does not follow the universal laws of nature and is therefore not “pushed” by some preceding cause that would determine it. Kant presents such freedom as a sort of originary capacity to begin, absolutely, “from itself,” that is, spontaneously. “By freedom in the cosmological sense, on the contrary [to the causality of nature], I understand the faculty of beginning a state from itself (von selbst), the causality of which does not in turn stand under another cause determining it in time in accordance with the law of nature” (CPR, A 533/B 561, 533). Such causality is the spontaneity of the agent, that is, a power “which could start to act from itself, without needing to be preceded by any other cause that in turn determines it to action according to the law of connection” (CPR, A 533/B 561, 533). This capacity to begin is described by Hannah Arendt as natality, that capacity to initiate a radical break with any antecedent phase or causality: “It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.”23
The distinction between those two causalities is developed in Kant’s crucial developments on “transcendental freedom” in the third antinomy in the Transcendental Dialectic in the Critique of Pure Reason (“Third Conflict of the Transcendental Ideas”), also known as the “cosmological” antinomy (“cosmological” because the reflection takes place within the context of a discussion on causality in nature). Freedom, I should note, is indeed discussed within a general discussion of causality,24 that is, approached in its cosmological sense, in relation to the world in its constitution. The emergence of this radical sense of the event of freedom occurs in a discussion of the opposition between a thesis and an antithesis. “(Thesis) Causality in accordance with laws of nature is not the only one from which all the appearances of the world can be derived. It is also necessary to assume another causality through freedom in order to explain them” (CPR, A 444, B 472, 484), to which the antithesis counters: “There is no freedom, but everything in the world happen solely in accordance with laws of nature” (CPR, A 445, B 473, 485). In dispute is whether it is also necessary, or even permissible, to appeal to another conception of causality, transcendental freedom, defined as the power (Vermögen) of beginning a state spontaneously (von selbst): “By freedom in the cosmological sense, on the contrary, I understand the faculty of beginning a state from itself, the causality of which does not in turn stand under another cause determining it in time in accordance with the law of nature” (CPR, A 533/B 561, 533). The stakes for a thinking of the event are high because it is a question of determining whether events can escape the universal determinism provided by natural causality. Kant begins by developing the aporias involved in the antithesis, which claims that there is no freedom and that everything in the world happens only in accordance with the laws of nature. As we mentioned prior, if one assumes there is only the causality of nature, then it follows that, as noted, “everything that happens presupposes a previous state, upon which it follows without exception according to a rule” (CPR, A 444/B 472, 484). The universal causality of nature supposes a temporal antecedence, as “the causality of the cause through which something happens is always something that has happened” (CPR, A 444/B 472, 484), which in turn requires a previous cause, and so forth. An aporia within natural causality begins to appear: if there is no way to interrupt or escape the ineluctability of this infinite regress, then one could never reach the beginning of the series, the “first” beginning and first cause that alone would satisfy the principle of sufficient reason that demands a completeness of the causes. In other words, it appears that natural causality, through its very principle, excludes the possibility of a satisfaction of its own requirements! The law of causality would then contradict itself, and be thrown into an aporia, which Kant describes in this way:
Among the causes in appearance there can surely be nothing that could begin a series absolutely and from itself. Every action, as appearance, insofar as it produces an occurrence, is itself an occurrence, or event, which presupposes another state in which its cause is found; and thus everything that happens is only a continuation of the series, and no beginning that would take place from itself is possible in it. Thus in the temporal succession all actions of natural causes are themselves in turn effects, which likewise presuppose their causes in the time-series. An original action, through which something happens that previously was not, is not to be expected from the causal connection of appearances. (CPR, A 543/B 571, 538)
In other words, as Kant also concludes: “If, therefore, everything happens according to mere laws of nature, then at every time there is only a subordinate but never a first beginning . . .” (CPR, A 444/B 472, 484).
Now, without such beginning, one could never have arrived at this present state, which is of course an impossibility. The impossibility of finding a first cause would signify that no completeness of causes can be reached, which would contradict the principle of sufficient reason, which precisely demands such a completeness. This is why Kant insists that by following the mere causality of nature one could never attain a “completeness of the series on the side of the causes descending one from another” (CPR, A 446/B 474, 484). This aporia signifies the impossibility of the antithesis (“There is no freedom, but everything in the world happens solely in accordance with laws of nature”), which precisely claimed there was only one causality, the causality of nature: such causality cannot provide the first beginning that would ensure the completeness of causes and satisfy its own requirement. Kant then concludes that “the proposition that all causality is possible only in accordance with laws of nature [nach Gesetzen der Natur], when taken in its unlimited universality, contradicts itself, and therefore this causality cannot be assumed to be the only one” (CPR, A 446/B 474, 484, emphasis mine).
As a consequence, another causality must be admitted, and another sense of the event than the one presented in the second analogy, one that would happen “without its cause being further determined by another previous cause” (CPR, A 446/B 474, 484). Such an event would happen outside the law of cause and effect, and as it were “from itself,” a pure happening as opposed to the neutralized or “impoverished” events of the second analogy of experience. Kant describes this new sense of the event in terms of spontaneity, that is, as that which begins from itself, an “absolute causal spontaneity beginning from itself” that he also names “transcendental freedom,” transcendental insofar as it transcends the course of nature. Such a transcendental freedom must be assumed, although “no insight into it is achieved” (CPR, A 450/B 478, 486), since it is not a part of the phenomenal world, which remains subject to natural deterministic causality. Indeed, it cannot be part of the phenomenal world as it contradicts the fundamental law of causality structuring the unity of the world as nature.
Kant first and provisionally characterizes freedom negatively as foreign to law, as a sort of “lawlessness” (CPR, A 447/B 475, 485) rebel to universal determinism, leaping out of natural causality. Indeed, in one sense (the negative sense), freedom is independence from the laws of nature, a “liberation from coercion” or “from the guidance of all rules.” Freedom in this context is identified with lawlessness: Kant for instance speaks of the “lawless faculty of freedom” (CPR A 451/B 479, 489), and he goes so far as to claim that freedom is “contrary” to causal law: “Thus transcendental freedom is contrary to the causal law” (CPR, A 445/B 473, 485). Freedom seems as antinomical to rules and laws as nature is structured according to them, to such an extent that Kant adds pleasantly: “if freedom were determined according to laws, it would not be freedom, but nothing other than nature” (CPR, A 447/B 475, 485)! With transcendental freedom, we are, as it were, leaping out of causality, that is to say, of nature, if not out of the world. Such faculty of freedom is indeed literally “out of this world” because it cannot appear in the field of appearances as a spatiotemporal given and is for that very reason termed “transcendental.” Kant explains that freedom taken in the cosmological sense, that is, as the faculty of beginning a state from itself, “is a pure transcendental idea, which, first, contains nothing borrowed from experience, and second, the object of which cannot be given determinately in any experience” (CPR, A 533/B 561, 533). Such faculty of freedom is noumenal since it cannot appear in a spatiotemporal causal network. In fact, such freedom is “contrary to the laws of nature,” “to all possible experience” (CPR, A 803/B 831, 676). It can only be assumed as an outside of the world, and yet this outside makes the world possible by securing the completeness of causes. The completeness of the world, and its possibility, rests upon this noumenal, outerworldly freedom. Such is the enigma presented by Kant: the completeness of the world lies outside the world, and yet this outside constitutes the world: it is, as it were, the outsideness of the world.25
Transcendental freedom, Kant explains, is the capacity of a cause to produce a state spontaneously, or “from itself” (von selbst) (CRP, A 533/B 561, 533). A transcendentally free cause would be a “first cause,” that is, without a prior cause. Kant justifies this claim by appealing to a requirement of reason, going back to the ancient tradition of the first mover: “The confirmation of the need of reason to appeal to a first beginning from freedom in the series of natural causes is clearly and visibly evident from the fact that (with the exception of the Epicurean school) all the philosophers of Antiquity saw themselves as obliged to assume a first mover for the explanation of motions in the world, i.e., a freely acting cause, which began this series of states first and from itself” (CPR, A 450/B 478, 488). The first instance of a free-acting cause is thus the first mover, which allows one to conceive of an origin of the world. The origin of the world cannot be in the world. Yet, as mentioned, the world as a totality is only possible on such basis. In fact, nature and freedom are for Kant thoroughly intertwined: absolute spontaneity is said to begin, “from itself,” “a series of appearances that runs according to natural laws” (CPR, A 446/B 474, 484), this already indicating that free causality, although independent from natural causality, is intertwined with it: just as natural necessity rests on transcendental freedom, freedom in turn produces effects in the world.
Kant recognizes that so far he has only established the necessity of a first beginning of a series of appearances from freedom “only to the extent that this is required to make comprehensible an origin of the world” (CPR, A 448/B 476, 486), which clearly for Kant does not apply to us. However, he insists, because “the faculty of beginning a series in time entirely on its own is thereby proved” (while he immediately recognizes, as alluded to prior, that this proof gives us no insight into it since such a faculty is transcendental and never to be observed within a field of appearances), then “we are permitted,” he continues, “also to allow that in the course of the world different series may begin on their own . . . and to ascribe to the substances in those series the faculty of acting from freedom” (CPR, A 450/B 478, 486). Kant thus posits the capacity to begin absolutely, to be a spontaneous free cause, cause of itself, causa sui, while also stating that such power is operating in the world. Further, Kant warns us not to be “stopped here by a misunderstanding, namely, that since a successive series in the world can have only a comparatively first beginning, because a state of the world must always precede it, perhaps no absolutely first beginning of the series is possible during the course of the world” (CPR, A 451/B 479, 488). This is only a misunderstanding, “for here we are talking of an absolute beginning not, as far as time is concerned, but as far as causality is concerned” (CPR, A 451/B 479, 488). There is the origin of the world, and there is also an origin in the world. It will be possible to speak of an absolute beginning in the world.
Kant posits the freedom of the will in terms of the spontaneity of the act, itself resting on the notion of causa sui. Now this concept traditionally only applies to God, and Kant does make explicit reference to the tradition of the prime mover. However, such a first cause only pertained to the origin of the world. The issue here is determining how can there be also an origin in the world and how one can reconcile such a free spontaneity with universal determinism, or causality of nature. How does one begin absolutely when every event must presuppose a prior event that causes it? How can there be an origin within the causal network of nature? Kant himself recognized the difficulty in admitting a free cause that would operate within the world, that is, within a chain of causes, for all that has been established so far was the necessity of a first beginning of a series of appearances from freedom as it pertained to the origin of the world, while “one can take all the subsequent states to be a result of mere natural laws” (CPR, A 448/B 476, 486). This is the antinomy of pure reason, the idea of a free cause or unconditioned causality constituting for Kant “the real stumbling block for philosophy” (CPR, A 448/B 476, 486). Kant attempts to resolve this problem by distinguishing a beginning in time from a beginning in causality, the latter applying to free agency operating in the world. As (transcendentally) free agents, we can never begin in time, but we can begin in causality. Only in the case of divine creation beginning in time and beginning in causality are merged. For our own free actions, the beginning is only in causality (as we are not origins of the world but origins in the world, that is, beginning in causality). In the causality by freedom, in beginning in causality, no antecedent cause determines my actions, which in no way can “be regarded as simple causal consequences of the antecedent state of the agent.” In the midst of the world, and within the world and in the course of time itself, certain events somehow happen as absolute beginnings. To the potential objection that no absolute beginning can happen in the world, Kant replies that there can be a comparatively first beginning, that there can be an absolute beginning (in causality) occurring in medias res. Kant is explicit on this point: namely, that there is an origin of the world, but there are also origins in the world, writing that “we are permitted also to allow that in the course of the world different series may begin on their own as far as their causality is concerned” (CPR, A 450/B 478, 486). Even though freedom can only take place within the causal network of the world, it remains nonetheless absolute and uncaused, Kant insisting that an absolute first beginning of a series is possible during the course of the world.
Thus, on the one hand, the capacity to begin a new series of causes from oneself is absolute (although it is an absolute beginning only in causality and not in time), and on the other hand this capacity affects the fabric of the world and its causal laws. We introduce something new in the world, out of our own spontaneity,26 but what we introduce is something new in the world, which then gets taken up in natural causality. Whatever I decide to do out of this transcendental freedom still has to take place in the world. The new that I introduce is absolute (otherwise it would not be “new”), but that absolute happens in the conditioned world (this is why Kant spoke of a “comparatively first beginning”). All I can do is begin a new series of causes, themselves inscribed in nature. This is why Kant establishes that one must assume a first uncaused beginning, but along with it, “its natural consequences to infinity,” consequences of the free act which follow purely natural laws (CPR, A 450/B 478, 488). In a sense, the act is both free or uncaused and part of natural determinism, according to Kant’s distinction between a beginning in time (natural determinism) and a beginning in causality (freedom). To take Kant’s example: “If (for example), I am now entirely free, and get up from my chair without the necessarily determining influence of natural causes, then in this occurrence, along with its natural consequences to infinity, there begins an absolutely new series, even though as far as time is concerned this occurrence is only the continuation of a previous series” (CPR, A 450/B 478, 488). With respect to the event of freedom, natural causes exercise no determining influence whatsoever. Free action does indeed “follow upon them,” but “does not follow from” them (die zwar auf jene folgt, aber daraus nicht erfolgt).
This break with natural causality opens the possibility of a rethinking of the event, the happening of which is understood on the basis of this absolute causal spontaneity beginning from itself, “absolute spontaneity of an action” or transcendental freedom, which Hannah Arendt attempted to designate under the name of “natality.” As she puts it in The Human Condition, “the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting” (HC, 9). This “natal” power of beginning, this performativity of transcendental freedom (defined by Kant as the power, Vermögen, of beginning a state spontaneously or from oneself, von selbst), as decision to act, outside of natural causality, introduces the new in the world. Hence the importance of the motif of revolution for Arendt, for “the relevance of the problem of beginning to the phenomenon of revolution is obvious”27 Indeed, “revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning” (OR, 21). Now such events are never devoid of violence, Arendt noting that “such a beginning must be must be intimately connected with violence” to the extent that “no beginning could be made without using violence, without violating.” The event always carries the violence of absolute beginnings. The event is here synonymous with an anarchic, violent moment that is outside the law. As Derrida explains with respect to the event of the institution of political authority, “All Nation-States are born and found themselves in violence. I believe that truth to be irrecusable. Without even exhibiting atrocious spectacles on this subject, it suffices to underline a law of structure: the moment of foundation, the instituting moment, is anterior to the law or legitimacy which it founds. It is thus outside the law, and violent by that very fact.”28 The event is originary. As such, it has no ground, a groundlessness that is the focus of the next chapter.
