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 is always something that has happened” (CPR, A 444/B 472, 484), which in turn requires a previous cause, and so forth. An aporia within natural causality begins to appear: if there is no way to interrupt or escape the ineluctability of this infinite regress, then one could never reach the beginning of the series, the “first” beginning and first cause that alone would satisfy the principle of sufficient reason that demands a completeness of the causes. In other words, it appears that natural causality, through its very principle, excludes the possibility of a satisfaction of its own requirements! The law of causality would then contradict itself, and be thrown into an aporia, which Kant describes in this way:
Among the causes in appearance there can surely be nothing that could begin a series absolutely and from itself. Every action, as appearance, insofar as it produces an occurrence, is itself an occurrence, or event, which presupposes another state in which its cause is found; and thus everything that happens is only a continuation of the series, and no beginning that would take place from itself is possible in it. Thus in the temporal succession all actions of natural causes are themselves in turn effects, which likewise presuppose their causes in the time-series. An original action, through which something happens that previously was not, is not to be expected from the causal connection of appearances. (CPR, A 543/B 571, 538)
In other words, as Kant also concludes: “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).
Now, without such beginning, one could never have arrived at this present state, which is of course an impossibility. 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. This is why Kant insists that by following the mere causality of nature one could never attain a “completeness of the series on the side of the causes descending one from another” (CPR, A 446/B 474, 484). This aporia signifies the impossibility of the antithesis (“There is no freedom, but everything in the world happens solely in accordance with laws of nature”), which precisely claimed there was only one causality, the causality of nature: such causality cannot provide the first beginning that would ensure the completeness of causes and satisfy its own requirement. Kant then concludes that “the proposition that all causality is possible only in accordance with laws of nature [nach Gesetzen der Natur], when taken in its unlimited universality, contradicts itself, and therefore this causality cannot be assumed to be the only one” (CPR, A 446/B 474, 484, emphasis mine).
As a consequence, another causality must be admitted, and another sense of the event than the one presented in the second analogy, one that would happen “without its cause being further determined by another previous cause” (CPR, A 446/B 474, 484). Such an event would happen outside the law of cause and effect, and as it were “from itself,” a pure happening as opposed to the neutralized or “impoverished” events of the second analogy of experience. Kant describes this new sense of the event in terms of spontaneity, that is, as that which begins from itself, an “absolute causal spontaneity beginning from itself” that he also names “transcendental freedom,” transcendental insofar as it transcends the course of nature. Such a transcendental freedom must be assumed, although “no insight into it is achieved” (CPR, A 450/B 478, 486), since it is not a part of the phenomenal world, which remains subject to natural deterministic causality. Indeed, it cannot be part of the phenomenal world as it contradicts the fundamental law of causality structuring the unity of the world as nature.
Kant first and provisionally characterizes freedom negatively as foreign to law, as a sort of “lawlessness” (CPR, A 447/B 475, 485) rebel to universal determinism, leaping out of natural causality. Indeed, in one sense (the negative sense), freedom is independence from the laws of nature, a “liberation from coercion” or “from the guidance of all rules.” Freedom in this context is identified with lawlessness: Kant for instance speaks of the “lawless faculty of freedom” (CPR A 451/B 479, 489), and he goes so far as to claim that freedom is “contrary” to causal law: “Thus transcendental freedom is contrary to the causal law” (CPR, A 445/B 473, 485). Freedom seems as antinomical to rules and laws as nature is structured according to them, to such an extent that Kant adds pleasantly: “if freedom were determined according to laws, it would not be freedom, but nothing other than nature” (CPR, A 447/B 475, 485)! With transcendental freedom, we are, as it were, leaping out of causality, that is to say, of nature, if not out of the world. Such faculty of freedom is indeed literally “out of this world” because it cannot appear in the field of appearances as a spatiotemporal given and is for that very reason termed “transcendental.” Kant explains that freedom taken in the cosmological sense, that is, as the faculty of beginning a state from itself, “is a pure transcendental idea, which, first, contains nothing borrowed from experience, and second, the object of which cannot be given determinately in any experience” (CPR, A 533/B 561, 533). Such faculty of freedom is noumenal since it cannot appear in a spatiotemporal causal network. In fact, such freedom is “contrary to the laws of nature,” “to all possible experience” (CPR, A 803/B 831, 676). It can only be assumed as an outside of the world, and yet this outside makes the world possible by securing the completeness of causes. The completeness of the world, and its possibility, rests upon this noumenal, outerworldly freedom. Such is the enigma presented by Kant: the completeness of the world lies outside the world, and yet this outside constitutes the world: it is, as it were, the outsideness
