On the Contingency of Reason
François Laruelle
In “Descartes, mission terminée, retour impossible,” Pourquoi pas la philosophie? 1 (April 1983), p.42-45.
A Cartesian inhabited by an intemperate skeptic would be shocked that Reason has been understood dogmatically, in confusion with science, as the faculty of the necessary, while Reason is first the faculty of the contingent, the aleatory or the “possible a priori” produced by the imagination. However, what they can at most demonstrate is that Reason is a faculty of the contingent without interrogating themselves on the essence of Reason that they leave undetermined. A Kantian will demonstrate that Reason, if one reduces it to the Cogito, sinks into the contingency of an internal sense, but this already assumes a still very rationalist thesis on the essence of Reason. What neither one nor the other can demonstrate (and it is their dogmatic rationalist residuum) is that Reason is not only a “faculty of the contingent” (Vernes) nor a “transcendental contingency” of experience (Kant), which would be a mixture of empirical contingency (our human sensibility and the forms of our intuition, the necessary condition of our knowledge) and its rationalization that proceeds towards the Aufhebung of the empirical “superseding” it by interiorizing it. Reason is itself from side to side contingent: its essence can be transcendentally determined (what the Cartesian forgets to do, and what the Kantian and Husserlian do, but in the exteriority and transcendence of a logico-physical factum, an eidetic reduction) under the conditions of a rigorously immanent veritas transcendentalis that casts Reason and its works aside onto a contingency or an “exteriority” outside of the One.
Rationalism oscillates between two complementary and vicious solutions: either it leaves the essence of this contingency undetermined, content with taking it within its empirical forms (dogmatism of the empirical contingency of Reason or the Cogito as the internal sense or imagination); or it attempts to determine it but by being content with rationalizing and transferring it from sensible-empirical conditions (or from the finitude of our knowledge) to the Unity of Experience or Reason. Philosophy limits itself ordinarily to a contingency either of representations (which are enchained not to one another according to necessary and reproducible relations) or a part (for example, a sensible part) of Reason, without really posing the problem of its absolutely contingent essence, its heteronomous determination from a wholly other perspective than Reason over itself. That it concerns the succession of representations or their association, the rules of the productive imagination or even the imaginary variations that extricate (in Husserl) the essence of its individual [individuelle] gangue, contingency remains a specific madness of internal sense, an instrument at the service of rational identity, for example an instrument of the objective categorial unity of Reason. And even with the Evil Genius, it is Reason that makes itself contingent, as in Kant, it makes itself finite. There is a sure criterion to recognize for rationalism the use of this argument that is par excellence of violence and bad faith: chaos, Evil Genius or the threat of some other catastrophic hypothesis that one brandishes to make one admit in the “necessity,” in all senses of the word (the internal necessity and application to “subsumed” individuals), of rules, laws and principles.
Between the skeptic folia that threatens a Cogito “from within” that draws from it its so-called unshakable certainty, and the Kantian decision of science as the true self-certain soil for the Cogito itself, a decision that comes from a break to tear it from its madness all by giving pledges to the human nature of the a priori of the metaphysical type, history has given a barring break that is undoubtedly “revolutionary.” However, does this Revolution still suffice for us? Rather than a transcendental Aufhebung of madness, of contingency still and always thought in the margins of madness and as one of its avatars, modes, and risks, we have need to think a contingency, a dispersion where the absence of unity and reason would be positive, a transcendental chaos that does not derive from simple empirical contingency nor would it be its sublation, its interiority/exclusion. There is rather a contingency that is both real (but not empirical) and transcendental (but not rational), and it must be sought in a sphere of unreflected existence that is not only ante-predicative but ante-cogitative. The notion of the “possible a priori” can be torn from its psychologism and skeptical sphere of the imagination. It can be not only brought over to the Kantian power of the metaphysical a priori, but conceived in the way of a nothing-but-transcendental a priori. In the transcendental essence of the imagination itself, indeed the argument of the “Evil Genius” and Husserlian “chaos,” we identify (presupposed and denied by those who are the transcendent avatars of it) a transcendental chaos, a “dispersivity” positively deprived (because of its immanence) of any unifying rule, law or principle. This contingency is given as immanence (to) itself or an immanence that is unreflected, anterior to the Cogito itself.
This essence, as the absolute contingency identical to the One-without-unity, will necessarily convey itself to Being or Reason, so that rational necessity (of science, but also of metaphysics, which is now, measured by the One rigorously, inseparable from it) will detach itself on the grounds of this absolute and non-rationalizable contingency. Therefore, we must not only support that the most “durable” Reason is of the order of the transcendental chaos by its essence at least, but that its necessity appears, qua existent necessity, contingent in a second sense of the word, on the “grounds” of the pre-empirical contingency that is given in an unreflected transcendental experience. What is given on this dispersive ground is rather a certain “facticity” that is not anti-rational or one that limits Reason (a constant theme, from Leibniz to Heidegger), but a facticity of the rational (or the experimental rational) that is itself as such. It is no longer an empirical, indeed ontic contingency that would affect a Reason retained “in-the-middle-of-being,” for example; it is rather Reason that, as a totality and even considered in its “purity” far from experience, manifests a contingency or a facticity of a new style in relation to its dispersive essence itself. It is towards a new distribution of the contingent and the necessary that we attend to: on the one hand, the “dispersive” is the essence of radical contingency that contains the liberation of the possible a priori (still limited and coded by the imagination that is reliant on the perception and imagines what is possible to follow, for example, the actual clash of two billiard balls and their effect); and on the other hand, what the effective real (laws of science, but also the Cogito, the I think, and the whole metaphysical apparatus) uses of its “necessity” to deny this dispersive essence.
The ultimate point of a heteronomous “critique” of Reason is touched upon here. Instead of letting Reason critique itself as in Kant, the point is no longer to derive the Principle of Sufficient Reason from the Cogito and the (“apparent”) contradiction where our Cartesian wants to lock it up to better make it get out, for it leads only to a psychological derivation or a “physiology” (Kant) of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, from the internal sense, and finally from the principle of identity that finds its ordinary lair there. Once more, it is on the part of Reason that serves to criticize another one that has expelled from Reason. This game is interminable like bad faith: it will allow one to still write new “critiques of” to the nth degree…We become indifferent when one delimits the validity of the principle of sufficient reason in the name of the principle of identity or reciprocally. What we need is a simultaneous “critique” of all rational principles, therefore still another thing than one critique and its aleas. However, it is Kantianism that puts us on the rigorous transcendental path: for the principle of identity or sufficient reason, not more than science or metaphysics (“Being”), there is no real transcendental genesis. If we give this thesis the whole of its extension, we will say that they pose and reclaim their autonomy in relation to the One that they deny. Yet henceforth (what changes everything), they do so in relation to this real dispersivity that is their essence, what we will describe as their “determination in the last instance” alone. Hence a new economy of “dualism” and the destruction of its Cartesian form.
en-demic 