Thinking the Event - François Raffoul Studies in Continental Thought

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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

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