that philosophy is born out of an event that it does not control is “a shock to reason” in its quest for ultimate foundations. For “how is it supposed to find a foundation [assise] in that which defeats it, in the inexplicable or the aleatory?” The logic of foundation of the principle of reason leads to its very ungrounding, its “collapse” in the abyss. Thought then “stands on a movable ground that it does not control, and thereby wins its necessity.” In the end, what transpires is that “we cannot give the reason for an event” (POE, 57).
When thought assumes its eventful origin, when it engages in “an authentic relation to the outside,” it then gains its authentic vocation and “affirms the unforeseeable or the unexpected” (POE, 57). There lies the fundamental aporia (and secret resource) of thought: it must think and account for what happens outside of it. Because the origin of thought is an event that lies outside of it, thinking will always fail in appropriating such beginning: “If thinking necessarily fails to grasp its beginning, perhaps it is because the beginning does not depend upon thought.”19 It is in this sense that in her 1946 essay, Hannah Arendt speaks of the failure of thought, as if such failure was its most authentic vocation. Arendt refers to Jaspers’s “border situations”: whether death, guilt, fate, or chance, these events provoke thought and “drive us to philosophize,” not because they can be thought, but precisely because they cannot. Arendt adds that “in all these experiences we find we cannot escape reality or solve its mysteries by thought” (WEP, 167, emphasis mine). Philosophy, she concludes, can “never get around the fact that reality cannot be resolved into what can be thought. Therefore, the very purpose of philosophic thought is to ‘heighten . . . the intellectually irresolvable’” (WEP, 185). As Derrida would put it, it is a matter of thinking “according to the aporia.”20 This is what makes us think: the fact that we cannot appropriate what we think. In the famed words of Martin Heidegger, the “most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.”21 The event is then both the end and the origin of thought: it ends it in its claims to mastery while opening it to the infinite work of interpretation.
Arendt first describes the shock of the event of existence in terms of the resistance of singularity to conceptual generality. In its singularity, the event does not belong to a constituted whole, such as the world. It happens, and as it happens it interrupts any context that could include it. It remains outside, exterior, inappropriable, even while it happens “in” the world: “The functional context of the world in which I too am included can always 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.,
