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 reduced to what reason demands of them: predictability, repeatability, and foundation in causality. Marion writes that “the analogies of experience concern only a fringe of phenomenality—phenomena of the type of objects constituted by the sciences, poor in intuition, foreseeable, exhaustively knowable, reproducible—while other levels (and first of all historical phenomena) would make an exception” (BG, 207). The events of the analogies of experience are not properly events but intraworldly facts that are subject to causality. “Eventful” events, as will be covered in the following, are not subject to causal determinations; rather, in their original happening, they indeed do not follow but constitute new causal networks and thereby reconfigure if not create a new world. Kant, however, thinks in the perspective of the demands of the principle of reason. This is why he reduces events to the law of causality and then attempts to establish a perfect symmetry, or reversibility, between event and causality: “If, therefore, we experience that something happens, then we always presuppose that something else precedes it, which it follows in accordance with a rule” (CPR, A 195/B 240, 308). Conversely, as soon as I perceive in a sequence “a relation to the preceding state, from which the representation follows in accordance with a rule, I represent something as an occurrence, or as something that happens” (CPR, A 198/B 243, 309–310).
Kant explains in the second analogy that it is a formal condition of our sensibility that all phenomena must happen successively (“The apprehension of the manifold of appearance is always successive,” CPR, A 189/B 234, 305) and that “every apprehension of an occurrence is therefore a perception that follows another one” (CPR, A 192/B 237, 306). The possibility of experience also requires that this succession be ordered causally, that it happens “according to a rule”: “Now if it is a necessary law of our sensibility, thus a formal condition of all perceptions, that the preceding time necessarily determines the following time (in that I cannot arrive at the following time except by passing through the preceding one), then it is also an indispensable law of the empirical representation of the temporal series that the appearances of the past time determine every existence in the following time, and that these, as occurrences, do not take place except insofar as the former determines their existence in time, i.e., establish it in accordance with a rule” (CPR, A 199/B 244, 310, emphasis in the original). Such a rule is, of course, the causal rule, itself expressive of the principle of sufficient reason: “This rule for determining something with respect to its temporal sequence, however, is that in what precedes, the condition is to be encountered under which the occurrence always (i.e., necessarily) follows. Thus the principle of sufficient reason is the ground of possible experience” (CPR, A 201/B 246, 311). The law of causality, or law of nature, which states that all events and occurrences are determined, itself falls under the authority of the principle of sufficient reason, which states that everything must have a reason that accounts for it thoroughly and completely—that is, “sufficiently.” This is why the law of causality, or law of nature, “consists just in this, that nothing happens without a cause sufficiently determined a priori” (CPR, A 446/B 474, 484).
There lies the aporia of natural causality as presented in the third antinomy: if one assumes there is only the causality of nature, then the consequence is that “everything that happens presupposes a previous state, upon which it follows without exception according to a rule” (CPR, A 444/B 472, 484). Now 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”). In other words, the prior cause for the event must also be caused by a prior or antecedent cause. There is no way to interrupt or escape the ineluctability of this infinite regress, which makes it impossible to reach the beginning of the series, the “first” beginning and cause that would secure the exhaustive accounting of nature according to the requirement of the principle of sufficient reason. Kant continues by stating, “If, therefore, everything happens according to mere laws of nature, then at every time there is only a subordinate but never a first beginning” (CPR, A 444/B 472, 484). For the impossibility of finding a first cause would signify that no completeness of causes can be reached, which would contradict the principle of sufficient reason, which precisely demands such a completeness. “But now the law of nature consists just in this, that nothing happens without a cause sufficiently determined a priori” (CPR, A 446/B 474, 484), and therefore a first absolute beginning provided by a first cause. The notion of a “cause sufficiently determined a priori” is the equivalent of the Leibnizian principle of sufficient reason. This principle of sufficient reason states that no event can take place without a cause, a reason, or a ground. Such is “the principle of sufficient reason, namely, that nothing happens without a reason why it should be so rather than otherwise.”7 The principle of sufficient reason, which is the foundation for “contingent truths,” Leibniz explains further, “is the principle for the need for a sufficient reason for anything to exist, for any event to happen, for any truth to take place.”8 Every event occurs following a causal rule, and “everything that happens (begins to be) presupposes something which it follows in accordance with a rule” (CPR, A 189/B 232, 304).
This structuring effectively accomplishes what Leibniz had posited, namely that events must conform to the principle of sufficient reason and that no event can occur without a reason or a ground: in fact, every event must be as it were prepared beforehand to be the event that it is, conditioned by a determinant reason: “For the nature of things requires that every event should have beforehand its proper conditions, requirements and dispositions, the existence of which makes the sufficient reason of such an event.”9 This principle of sufficient reason merges with a principle of causality, which states that every event is caused to be the event that it is, giving the event its grounding. As Heidegger puts it, the principle of reason, which affirms that every being has a reason, also posits the cause. Indeed, Leibniz had conflated the principle of reason with a principle of causality: “Nothing is without reason, or no effect is without a cause.”10 The statement
