Thinking the Event. François Raffoul
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”