Thinking the Event. François Raffoul
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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