Kant’s greatest contribution to thought was the recognition and rigorous articulation of the thesis that thought is creative. When Kant asks the question “how are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” he is asking “how is it possible for thought to generate something new?” To understand this, it’s necessary to understand the difference between synthetic a posteriori judgments, analytic a priori judgments, and synthetic a priori judgments. In a synthetic a posteriori judgment, I am making a judgment of experience that relates to my sensations. If I say “oranges are sweet” I have made a synthetic a posteriori judgment. I synthesize my concept of those substances known as “oranges” with the quality of “sweetness”. The concept of oranges does not, in and of itself, contain the idea of the quality of “sweetness”. For this reason, Kant will say that synthetic a posteriori judgments are “ampliative”. They expand the concept, “orange”, by adding something new, sweetness. In an analytic a priori judgment, by contrast, I think nothing new. If I make the judgment “all bachelors are unmarried men”, I have not amplified my concept of “bachelor” in any way, but am merely thinking what is already contained in the concept of “bachelor”. Yet Kant introduces a third category of judgment: synthetic a priori judgments. If I make, to use Kant’s example, “7 + 5 = 12”, I have made a judgment that is ampliative and that is independent of experience. The concept of “12”, says Kant, is not already contained in my concepts of “7” and “5”, but rather my understanding must engage in a creative act that synthesizes these two concepts, bringing something new into thought.
What is remarkable is that I have done this independently of experience. We can see very well how, in experience, new thoughts are generated as a result of receiving new experiences and then combining or synthesizing them in the mind. There isn’t any great mystery here. What’s remarkable are those modes of thought that do not come from experience, from some alterity that we receive, but from us where some new thought is thought in the thought as a result of the activity of thinking. For in the synthetic a priori judgment, we have an instance of thought transforming the thinker as a result of the thinking. And this is what makes synthetic a priori judgments so bizarre: We are the ones making these judgments, yet in the process of thinking these judgments something that wasn’t already in us is thought or, more importantly, produced. Moreover, it is not only that something new is produced, it is that the thinker herself is transformed in the activity of the thinking in these forms of thought. At the end of such a thinking– as is readily evident in the axiomatic adventures of mathematicians –the thinker becomes something other than she was at the beginning of thinking. Us realists can think what we like about Kant and the way in which he resolved these questions– there’s plenty to criticize him for –but there can be no doubt that he’s hit on something profound in his question of how thought, independent of world, is capable of producing something new. This, I believe, is the concept of freedom or autonomy is groping towards, not the idea that we are already autonomous.
read on!
This, for me, is the mystery of writing. The spontaneous common sense theory of writing is that writing is but a trace of what we have already thought. Here, the theory runs, I expressively externalize what my thought already contained and formulated in my writing. As a consequence, my writing is but a prosthesis where I externalize or “express” what was already in me for someone else. Were we telepathic there would be no need for writing. It is from here that we get “author’s intentions” theories of meaning, where the meaning of a text is what the author intended. The author, the story goes, knows what it means.
Yet this is not how I experience the act of writing at all. Rather, I experience the activity of writing as a transformation. At the beginning of a writing I do not know how I will turn out. Something in the activity takes flight, takes on an agency of its own, that somehow recoils or rebounds on me turning me into something else. Somewhere early in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil he remarks on how we don’t have ideas, as if we were the origin of ideas, but rather how ideas come to us as events, such that we become patients of ideas. In the old Roman-Medieval language, of course, a “patient” is a being that is “acted” by another being. We are, for example, in Spinoza and Lucretius, patients of our passions. This is exactly what it’s like in writing. At the other end of inscription, of writing, of the activity and process of writing, you become something else. You don’t know, in advance, what you’ll become, what you’ll be, at the outer end of a writing.
I do not understand how this works. How is it that something that originates from me can also make me something other than I am? This is something that I’d like to understand. This is also the case in certain classes of action, where the very doing transforms the doer, making the doer something other than he was to begin with. I suspect that this is what Badiou is trying to get at with his “truth-procedures” and Zizek with his “Acts”. The subject of a truth-procedure is both somehow the origin of that truth-procedure and the patient of that procedure. If something like this is true, this, incidentally, is why those critical projects that seek to outline conditions in advance of inquiry and activity are so misguided. They wish to halt the synthetic or creative power of a procedure, activity, or engagement, by delimiting conditions and boundaries before the work is done or the process is undergone.
If it is true that writing, thinking, and acting have these synthetic or creative powers, it follows that all thought, writing, and action are a risk. They aren’t a risk simply because they might fail, but because we become something other in the course of these activities. No doubt this is the reason that all orthodoxies, whether religious or Marxist, have always spurned thought and writing, seeking to transform bodies into what von Foerster called “trivial machines”, where, given a particular input (the indoctrination of the orthodoxy) will produce a particular output. Orthodoxy has always waged war against non-trivial machines, dreaming of perfectly docile bodies that would function as reliable carriers or vehicles of the orthodoxy. And indeed, we can always detect the presence of a “thought” animated by an orthodoxy when it perceives or interprets the forces it fights as attempting to transform beings into carriers of an ideological orthodoxy. Insofar as we interpret the desires of others in light of the desires that we have, the interpretation of our enemies in this light is indicative of our own desires and ambitions. Yet somehow, nontrivial machines or machines that produce something new out of outputs in the process of metabolizing them arise. I would like to understand how this takes place.
Larval Subjects . 
June 6, 2011 at 12:57 am
great piece. just so that the wet blankets also find representation here, i could suggest that either 1) there might not be any such thing as transformation per se, in that what you think is something new is just something you’re only now attending to – a salience effect or outcome bias of sorts, or 2) the creation of something unprecedented might just be the soulless quasi-mechanical unfolding of deterministic chaos, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_30
that being said, i really loved this piece.
June 6, 2011 at 6:23 am
It might be interesting to look at Heidegger’s essay on The Origin of the Work of Art in this connection. There he distinguishes between the work of art as object and the “artwork” as the process of creation (and I think this is similar to Levinas’ distinction between the said and the saying). I’m not sure but I think Heidegger says something like: the artist is open to things as things, i.e. he is “be-thinged” and this implies transformation. In return for his openness to things as things he receives himself as artist. The “artist” exists only retroactively — only insofar as he’s created a work of art. But the art object actually confirms the the underlying process of transformation, which is the condition for its possibility. I don’t know! I’m an undergrad! I read your page from time to time and am not normally so presumptuous as to offer a comment… but this seemed relevant!
-Tom
June 6, 2011 at 9:20 am
Hm, but my issue with this – and by this I mean Kant, so perhaps it’s an issue you share too – is that for all the ‘creative action’ involved with Kant’s synthetic a priori, there is something profoundly passive that underlies it all. It’s a sort of ‘affectless’ creativity that takes place only in relation to the transcendental subject and no where else. Or to put it differently, the ‘ontological status’ of this creative act is somewhat null and void to the extent that what is created exists on a different plane of being than that of the material world, and cannot really affect it as such. I’m not entirely confident in saying this – my Kant is a bit shaky – but this is what the second half of your posts seems to be getting at, especially when you cite Nietzsche in locating thought at the level of being and not, pace Kant, in some untouchable transendental realm. But I do appreciate nevertheless locating a moment of creation in Kant that goes beyond mere synthesis. It’s not something I’ve given a lot of thought to.
Cheers.
June 6, 2011 at 10:19 am
The Freudian slip is a famous example of the risk inherent in performances like writing and speech.
I tend to imagine a circular causality at work in the process of writing, in which the local manifestation of the performer/scribe shares the stage with the Biographical Self who simply MUST read what is being written as it is being written. Which is basically as good as saying I have no idea and find myself utterly confused by the process. Sometimes it comes off quite well, other times not. Most of the time it is such a complex weave of impulses and stop commands and delicate hesitations…
As for Kant’s synthetic a priori. J.S. Mill tried to counter Kant’s assertions about 7+5=12 to no avail. A great classroom exercise in disproving Mill was demonstrated by my Carnap and Quine professor, dr. Richard Creath. Take two measuring cups. Fill one with 1 cup of water. Fill the second with 1 cup of sugar. Pour the sugar into the water and mix. When it’s all dissolved, show the class that 1 + 1 evidently does not equal 2. Since counter examples disprove an initial truth claim, it must be true that 1 plus 1 does not equal two. But this is absurd. So the truths of arithmetic do not originate in experience, as Mill claims. Kant is vindicated.
June 6, 2011 at 11:28 am
June 8, 2011 at 7:33 am
I have always been surprised by the notion people have of writing, namely, that there is an idea “before hand” and then, after one writes for a while, it’s been “put down.” You see this at poetry readings where, before poets read their poems, they say something like, “This poem is about such and such…” or “This poem is about when…” I’ve never really understood that, and it’s never accorded with my experience of writing. More than that, there is the widespread ‘norm’ where people ask themselves, after reading something, “I wonder what the author really meant by this?” That question has also always blown my mind. People often ask, “Well, what did you get out of that reading?” That’s another question I don’t quite understand. The only way to answer, I think, is another reading, or another writing
I’m curious, Levi, what you think about the goal of reading is, in light of what you’ve said here about writing. Is it the same kind of transformation?
What’s most provocative about a post like this, in my view, is that it gave itself to be written. To me, it is less mysterious that writing leads to transformation. I don’t think that this is exclusive to writing– I think of moments with someone I love: beforehand, I have no idea what will transpire or what we will talk about, for a while I am very nervous and anxious, then I am a even more anxious when together, and then, I open my mouth, suddenly, almost violently, and true things start being said, and the connection is made, courage overcomes everything– there it is proven to me that opening oneself to the other in the loving and open relation leads to unexpected sentences, and not just sentences, gestures, embraces, etc. But sentences are gestures too, maybe even embraces. What interests me, and what has long interested me, is writing about writing (I think this post falls in that category)– as a kind of gestures, as a wink even. For all the years I have been seriously engaged with philosophy and literature, it is the writing about writing that has most mystified and most animated me to take up the pen again. Of course, at this point, the surface level of HOW something is articulated matters much more that the “what” that is articulated. In fact, I think for me at least, it all exists on that level of “how”. Jean-Luc Nancy has a wonderful concept of “exscription” to denote “what cannot be read in a writing”: it prioritizes, beyond any idea of communicating a signification or a meaning, the touch or the sense– the embrace, the kiss, even.
In an era where thought and writing seems totally subordinated to signification, I cannot help but voice my appreciation for a text which seems to reach beyond the subordination of language to significance. I think that the idea of “transformation” as you put it here is similar on the register of the self: to think beyond the significant self and toward the resonant self (using Nancy’s terms here). Beyond the notion of an autonomous self that gives itself its own law, and toward an autonomous self that finds its autonomy in its absolute heteronomy with itself (its uncanny, extimate core, etc.).
I think all of this revolves around the attitude one has towards oneself or towards the subject– i.e., whether the subject is given, or whether the subject is only found. I think ethics steps in where the openness requisite on finding the subject becomes the object of a vigorous repetition: continually passing away, one finds in what one subject passes on the evidence of a failure, and thus the evidence of a subject yet to be found.
I think that this self-overflowing of the writing “subject” is linked to community, and I think that you manifest this as a reality with your blog. With a writing that seduces us to the limit where communication can really take place. Of course you cannot take credit for it, no more than I take credit for my own writings. I can’t say “how” it takes place (other than qua openness, qua giving thought or poetry a chance), but I think that I can say it takes place FOR the community, which isn’t yet, and yet which is constantly coming, so to speak. Not a nameable community, nor an unnameable community, but the community that we name in our writing it and sending it “across.” For Nancy (do you read him? there are so many correlates), just as a writing is always TO, so too is presence or/of the self always presence-TO-self. The self is a sending and resending, the writing is a sounding and a resounding, and all there is are these resonances, which can never reach an “end” despite their always reaching for completion (finitude infinitely finishing), and which seem to incomplete (“in the active sense”) themselves. When he writes about “co-appearing,” we can’t just think that it is Larval Subjects appearing alongside Fragilekeys appearing alongside dmf, or whoever, as if we were autonomous subjects entering into intersubjective communication. It’s that I appear alongside myself in reading you, and you alongside yourself when writing your post, and Critchley alongside dmf here, then alongside me with Heidegger, and my reading of Critchley two weeks ago alongside the “me” that didn’t yet exist until I appeared alongside you in writing “we,” and in the end, it doesn’t matter who wrote what or how we wrote it, but THAT we wrote it, that it resonated with us, touched us, and brought us to the limit of what we could sign…
June 8, 2011 at 3:15 pm
Thanks Levi. I suppose this is along the lines of what Deleuze and Guattari say: “writing is traversed by strange becomings that are not becomings-writer, but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc.” I completely agree with the idea that all writing is a risk (and unfortunately much writing pedagogy seeks to eliminate risk and increase the likelihood of predictable outcomes from writing assignments). This connects with some of your earlier posts thinking about distributed cognition, right? Writing is one of the ways cognition is distributed. In fact, one might say such distribution is necessary (though obviously those technologies and practices we typically think of as writing don’t always have to be part of the network).
Perhaps part of this is a danger of becoming other. I suppose with each new thought we risk changing, but there’s little or no freedom in homeostasis. This is where we might venture into thinking about those quasi-causal multiplicities right, passing along affects in non-deterministic ways. Are these part of thought?
June 8, 2011 at 7:24 pm
Your central question seems to be: “How is it that something that originates from me can also make me something other than I am?” Deleuze works on this with the longer Spinoza book. In part, it suggests, following the Ethics, that the body is more than the “I” knows such that writing as bodily production must always be in excess of the self concept even as writing seems the place of deductive form.
June 8, 2011 at 9:22 pm
Cameron,
That seems to me to be a trivial example. It ignores that adding 1 cup of water and 1 cup of sugar is not the same as adding 1 1, because you’re adding quantities with different units. Yet add one cup of water to another, and you’ll get twice as much, so conceivably that mathematical truth could arise from experience. I don’t think this proves or disproves where the truths of math arise.
June 9, 2011 at 1:34 pm
http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/06/continental-connections-thursday-3-kafkas-event-full-night.html#more
September 10, 2013 at 7:31 pm
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