NOTES ON THE
CONCEPTUAL BASIS OF SCIENCE
Looking for the idea of mediation, and its
tradition.
A. LAGACHE
Philosophe
75017 Paris - France
"The science of
Nature is not the thinking impulse which gets straight away at the world of
objects, but also the environment in the midst of which mind gains knowledge
of himself."
Ernst Cassirer, 1951.
1 - The Two Monisms
2 - What would a Real Dualism Consist of ?
3 - The Balance of Life
4 - The Paradigm of Signifiers
5 - Revisiting History
6 - Beginning with the Seventeenth Century: an Open Paradigm
7 - Descartes and the Link between Body and Mind
8 - Spinoza: Body and Soul Share the Order of Reason
9 - The Aesthetic Knowledge: the Baroque
10 - An Open Paradigm of Science
11 - The Eighteen Century: the Touchstone of Science
12 - Kant: the "Transcendendal scheme of Imagination"
provides a Mediation
13 - The Problem of Molyneux
14- Lessing and the Aesthetic Signifiers
15 - The Fractured Culture16 - The Dissident Tradition
16 - The Dissident Tradition
17 - Conclusion
18 - References
During the second part of the Twentieth Century, some scientists have lost the habit of thinking about the
conceptual basis of science : experimental methods, as an evidence, seemed to fill in every need of understanding phenomena ; and if some points remained dark, more experiments by themselves would provide with progress. So much that the deep epistemological questioning of the first part of the century looked like intellectual games for many people.
But Science needs always a conceptual basis ; and there is no knowledge without any actual paradigm, any conceptual set which makes it able to work. We notice it when a dominant paradigm reaches its conceptual limits : as for example a biology lacking a theory of life. Arising paradoxes is the sign that we reach logical boundaries, with regard to a previous way of thinking. Like, for example, the previous situation of homeopathy, and the contrast between its positive curative effect and the lack of interpretation.
The current situation of science is more peculiar than it seems. It is, in fact, much stranger than we care to think. We inherited the methods of physics and chemistry, which are good in themselves as methods, and have taught us a lot about regulated use of reasoning and experimenting.
Nevertheless, in the same batch lied the overpowering arrogance of positivism : everything is matter, according to the very restricted definition of matter provided by the mechanistic paradigm. Consequently, it was thought that every problem was solvable by reducing its terms into simple material elements. Matter rules over everything : that is the narrow materialism claimed by positivism.
On the other hand, many phenomena actually escape from the explicative capacities of a mechanistic paradigm. Human sciences in general are based on the concept of an isolated mind, according to the reigning myth of an independant awareness and will.
Mind and matter are two isolated kings, each within its own kingdom. They ignore each other so as to be certain of being the only true king, each controlling its own totalitarian state. This fact is also maintained and hidden by means of the academic division between disciplines, which protects from a fatal confronting! Therefore, the current conceptual basis of science is not a dualism, but a contradictory juxtaposition of two monisms, each one in its own camp.
For example, the way we deal with insanity can represent this situation of unconnected monisms. For about a hundred and fifty years, two notions of insanity have been fighting each other, each one with its own piece of truth, in endless and vain quarrelling. We can spend centuries wondering whether insanity is a somatic disease or a psychological problem : the reality of insanity is outside this split. Thus we can also spend centuries combining chemical and psychological treatments (which is of course better than nothing, and a duty of emergency), making very little progress, unless we find out a third way. The place from where someone is led to distort the relationship between mind and body, between the being and reality, is a mediation : something like a meaningful sensitivity or a corporal sense.
Anyway, the juxtaposition of these two monisms, having probably been fruitful in some period of science, leads now to a dead end and to infertile arguments between sets.
2. What Would a Real Dualism Consist of ?
It is hard to conceive... History, habits of thinking and language resist... Four centuries of science and some millenia of philosophy have forged our tools, our words and our concepts ; always seeming to prove that the prevailing restricted materialism is right, in the same way as any almighty-minded idealism.
Let us not forget that there are a lot of people looking for another way, looking for a conceptual basis that will describe human - or at least living - reality. This reality not being a tragic and irreducible opposition between physical and semantic facts, but actually the dynamic linkage between them.
Yet we can understand that a real dualism, a dynamic one, is different from a simple juxtaposition of two terms.
Two logical pitfalls must be avoided there :
- The whole working of a two-level system cannot be a juxtaposition or a sum. It must be combinatory. Something more than analytical.
- We often keep mistaking the two terms of a contradiction for a dualism. But the aristotelian contradiction asserts only one thing, and the other term is only the negation of the former one, that is an empty category.
For example, if we say that matter is everything which is not mind, and mind everything which is not matter, we don't assert their coexisting but each one separately as non-coexisting. Then, the irreducible difference between mind and matter behaviours remains this unaknowledged and unfortunate defect of human nature that we were told about...
A real dualism means that the different levels of reality are an integral part of nature, working together in the dynamic process of life. The one cannot be reduced to the other, without missing the very aim of understanding life. Thus, why do we need to evolve a real dualism ? We need something which links mind and body, or in general physical and semantic facts, whereas maintaining the distance and difference between them : that is a mediation..
The notion of mediation suffers from being neglected. It is always considered like a kind of second-ranked term, facing the magnificent firmness of substance. However the only way to understand a real living dualism is to consider that mediation creates links, movements and ways between the different things, wherefore providing each one with its own identity.
Where it is dualism, there are things which have to deal with each other, without loosing one's own nature. We can find a metaphor of this logical form in anthropology. Let us remind of a piece of the American Indian mythology, as related by Levi-Strauss, (1991) : how have the Earth and the Sky been created ? Because of the mist.. Fogs, hazes and mists are the very facts which lead to conceive Earth and Sky with the difference and the bond between them. Consequently, we must think that mist creates Earth and Sky, within their dynamic contact and distance.
Let us take another nearer example : music is a genuine and creative mediation between body and mind. It does not belong neither to the body alone, nor to the mind on its own. But it binds them with satisfaction, while it requires specific skillness from each one. Since it provides the best way to enlighten on the "good-distance-of-communication" between mind and body, you can, one step further, understand that music creates mind and body within a negotiable relationship.
This general scheme of thinking is to be tried. The mediation supplies not only bonds between different things, but also deals with distance and difference between them and maintains it. Then, the mediation is not a kind of average or an intermediate mixed up element, but it has the double function of linking and separating.
Anthropology can again give us an
example : in the traditional culture of Australian people, a walkabout song defines the individual identity, and is the person's own
property. The walkabout song describes also an itinerary : the piece
of route that a man is able to travel up and to create around him ; his own
symbolic existence is linked with this ability to understand the land. He can
go all over the continent by exchanging information about a further route with
other walkabout people. So this
symbolic knowledge gives the world its existence and warrants its permanence.
This walkabout song creates the landscape and sets up
terrestrial elements on its sides.The consistency of the internal world and the
link with environment share the same signifier.
Therefore, mediation must be taken as the creative element which makes possible that different levels of reality exist according to their own identity, while working together in nature. The mediation logically takes place before the objects which arise on its sides. It is a way to understand creative organisations and temporal regulations.
In this prospect, we can look for two types of mediation, according to the side we start from. Some psychological facts find their concrete expression through the body ; it belongs to psychoanalysis and freudian concepts to give an account of it. On the other hand, some concrete events can be directly meaningful for the body, as we observe it usually for example in aesthetics.
Then my assumption has been : the living being is an informed-informing structure, a network of relationship between the internal set and the surroundings. Consequently, some biological elements have to be managed not as material things, but as semantic objects. A semantic object fulfills the conditions of a mediation : it is a concrete element, far away from any linguistic or symbolic term; but it is treated by the body as a piece of information.
Then, logic of exchanging information can fit ; unlike exchanging objects, where one loses and gains, the exchange of information creates a new situation, different from a sum. It is a dynamic process, through which the partners change and build themselves by dealing with information : the very mediation creates what it mediatizes. Reasoning in terms of mechanistic elements is not enough to understand life, but if we assume that :
- first, living structures imply mechanical organization combined with semantic facts ;
- second, mediations are the dynamic elements which make living structures working as a whole, then we might go ahead.
Let us take an example about the evolution of species. There is a former animal organization with an external skeleton, like sea urchins ; this external skeleton is a mechanical filter and protection against environment, at least a part of it ; it implies a radial shape, refered to one axis in space. When we look at the evolution towards vertebrates , a different solution is set up : the internal skeleton has two axis, it introduces new motions in space and laterality ; at the same time the first form of an immune system appears ; it seems that the mechanical function of self-protecting had transfered its part to a semantic one, creating a new balance.
In the same way, the genetic code could be considered as a semantic system ; not as a language, because it is not symbolic, but concrete. Actually, reading a poem, nobody is surprised that the poem chooses some words and doesn't use the whole possible words of the dictionary ; but the efficiency of this poem depends up on the wider possibilities of the whole language. The "useless" part of grammar and dictionary makes possible the viability of this useful poem. Is it a coincidence that the "non-coding" part of the genetic code seems to be in the same relation regarding the coding part ? Some specific expression normally requires a wider register of expressive possibilities.
Furthermore, each word of the poem is related with every other, within a general and mutual system of meaningful compatibility. As showed Jakobson (1963), the effective combination is linked to an upper contextual unity. At the end, it defines a style. The same idea arises from the notion of "Bauplan" suggested by Ernst Mayer : for example, "flesh-eating animals never have horns". There is no utilitarian justification of that, except that it can be the expression of the consistency of carnivorous general genetic organization. Yet the dogma is : one gene, one protein. But nobody would deny that, although each word in the poem has its own meaning as isolated, the very understanding of the text overtakes this first level. So one gene codes for one protein...but it doesn't exclude that they might do something else together, when we don't stare at them. Likewise, the wedding feather's finery of the bird of paradise is useless in terms of adaptation, as long as we consider adaptation in terms of struggling for energy. But who knows with what it is compatible, at the level of the "Bauplan" ? The "unmotivated" or "gratuitous" character of life's creativity disappears when we consider a semantic order binding elements. Utilitarianism always prefers short cuts. But at each level, limited means of life realize a maximum of combination, so as to constitue a whole coherence of individuals, and it implies some digressions. Hence the genetic code seems to integrate complex mechanical systems into semantic management. There is not so much an evolution of species (although it has a chronology) than a variation on the same semantic theme of organization.
So the hypothesis of semantic
functions can enlight some questions in this kind of topics.
Homeopathy and immunology provided a beautiful experimental area for this hypothesis, and, with Madeleine Bastide, since 1988, we have settled the Paradigm of signifiers : if some elements of the immune system, or of the homeopathic remedy, are taken as pieces of information, we can describe the process of communication according to the logic of concrete signifiers. (Designation by analogy, paradoxical negation and dynamic analogy are the main operations ; theory of passive mimesis and active mimesis provides the explanation of the different possible ways of information in the receiver)(Lagache, 1988).
The paradigm of signifiers is an epistemological device, based on the logic of analogical communication. It supplies a possibility to understand in what ways the body deals with information, and, to a certain extend, to predict some features of experiment. The work of Madeleine Bastide has given firm experimental basis to this logic of communication, as applied to biological phenomena.(Bastide et al., 1995).
Yet, when we evolved and proposed the paradigm of signifiers, it seemed to be an entirely new and unusual idea, a devilishly new idea from nowhere! And I am afraid it still looks like it! Nevertheless, seeing that experimental work, I must rely on my own idea.
And if it is a good idea, it is not so new as it seems ; because I am convinced that we never invent something out of nowhere. There is no thought without a tradition. Beyond the chasm between materialistic positivism and abstract idealism, there is a tradition in which we can recognize the research of humanism : a view in which living beings can appear diverse and complete, individual and connected with others and environment, temporal and changing to remain the same. According to Spinoza, it is the tradition in which
"We are part of the fullness of Nature, whose measure we share."(Spinoza, 1677).
But what interest in searching about this tradition ? The very progress of sciences has delivered many pieces of truth, which now lie like a disordered jigsaw. We still don't know what makes a being live, evolve, carry on with following its own finality. We need synthesis.
We need also to end in all kinds of reducing thoughts : it has shown its limits. At last we need to connect our scientific knowledge with our ethical concerns : this cultural gap between them cannot last for ever. If there is an order of life, linking matter with sense in a natural way, then ethic begins with the cell.
The tradition of a meaningful sensitivity and a corporal sense has been hidden, or put on the fringe, because we often conceive history from a present point of view ; or furthermore from the angle of winners in history : those who are right for the moment. Therefore, history can be told like a long road leading to the present successful materialism, throwing away every sideways idea in the dust-bin of man's awkwardness.
Nevertheless, we can find again the thin wire of a philosophy which takes into account the whole human being facts in their combination, and with their meditations. Through that, I would not pretend to rewrite history : it would be presomptuous to pretend to be exhaustive, and many ways are passable in the wide fields of past. I will just suggest another course, marking it out with some milestones. Then we should realize that the advance of science has no fatality.
6. Beginning with the Seventeenth Century: an Open Paradigm
Yet it is arbitrary to choose a beginning, because you still can find some forerunners...But the Seventeenth Century has given to the word "science" the meaning it has, more or less, for us : Galileo Galilei formulated the main points of experimental method, and Descartes the rules of a rational use of mind ; then science as a method took about the consistency it has now.
But the aim and interests of scientists were not the same as ours.
It seemed obvious that this fantastic new intellectual set might be used to understand mankind concerns ; most certainly dealing with a right concept of nature and natural determinism, but including the very facts of sensitivity, life and thought, as natural too.
7. Descartes and the Link between Body and
Mind
Descartes was, on some way, not so much cartesian than we are used to being! At least, we are mistaking when we consider him as the mere example of a mechanistic, and we forget, there, both his metaphysics and his focusing preoccupation : that is the real dualism of the two substances, and consequently the problem of linking body and soul. His conception of a matter - extent substance - which was understandable by means of mechanics, never reduced nor overshadowed the position of the thinking substance ; they were both actual, both parts of nature, both to be scrutinized. Both are ruled by regular and intelligible causes, although still unknown.
That is the reason for Descartes's focusing on the question of relationship between body and soul : he understood clearly that, if we want to have a real enlightenment about nature, we might answer this question. And he dedicated many time and many texts to deal with this question. Let us take some sample of it:"Since it is made of its own stuff, the soul is not accomodated in the body like a pilot in his ship. On the contrary, their union builds up a "being in itself", a third substance."(Descartes, 1637).
The body itself can be taken as an automaton, in a methodical way, to study it in its parts. But it is a whole :"It is one and, in some way, indivisible, because of the layout of its organs ; they so much relate each to the other that, when each one is taken away, the whole body becomes faulty"(Descartes, 1649). Indeed the sensible soul cannot be deduced from matter. But it is "joined and united" with body, "in order to have feelings and thirsts like ours, and consequently to make up a true human"(Descartes, 1637).
Therefore no knowledge of nature could be possible without practising a real dualism. Body or soul are "unfulfilled and incomplete substances"(Descartes, 1642), if separately applied to human being. From then on, imagination, sensation and "dark thought" of the body are providing with mediations. However these mediations never mix up the terms of dualism, but combine them and make them work together.
For example, about the sensation of burning pain when touching an ember : "There is no reason to convince myself that there is, into the fire, something looking like this heat, or like this pain ; but I am right in thinking that there is something in the fire - whatever it is - which causes for me these feelings of heat and pain"(Descartes, 1642). This argument defeats any monism : levels of body and soul are different, but not strangers : reality is their very acting each on other.
Then we can have a glance at this open paradigm of the Seventeenth Century."By saying "nature", in a general meaning, I don't imply anything else than God himself, or rather the measure and arrangement that God established in created things"(Descartes, 1642).
Yet it is expressed with the religious vocabulary, which was in this time the only available one. But we can understand that for Descartes, the open paradigm of science might involve a set of coherent and compatible views of nature. The strength of the cartesian philosophy consists of this operating dualism, assuming distributions, joints and mediations. Once everything was still possible, and especially a concrete but human knowledge.
8. Spinoza: Body and Soul Share the Order of Reason
It would be very long to recall the whole theory of relationship between mind and matter, in the works of Spinoza : it is a cornerstone and involves his whole philosophy. Let us just take a small testimony of it.
" As far as we are not racked by
ailments which were contrary to our nature, so far we have the power of
arranging and stringing the ailments of body according to the measure of
reason.
Demonstration
:
Bad ailments, that are contrary to our nature, are injurious only when they prevent the soul from understanding. "(Spinoza, 1677).
This shared measure between body and mind actually looks like an anticipation of psychoanalysis or homeopathy : body and mind share their darkness and their light. Disease is this breaking in the agreement between reason's order in body and reason's order in soul. Health is their mutual lighting. Thus, it would be illogical that body remained an unknown and darkened piece of matter :
" There is a way for the soul, and it
belongs to its nature to be able to conceive the essence of the body, from an
eternal point of view."(Spinoza, 1677). It belongs to human cleverness
to discover the unity and diversity of nature, and it is essentially able to do
it.
9. The Aesthetic Knowledge: the Baroque
During the same period but under the sweet light of Italy, the same knowledge about unity, that is mediation within diversity, had been represented by baroque architecture and sculpture. It conveys the same idea of reality : when stones were quivering with life. There the representation of nature and men is concrete, but its materialism is not based on what we intend by matter ; matter is going to move, to include time and to be meaningful for our perceptions. Let us ask Wölfflin to illustrate it : "The widened form, as treated by the Baroque, is related to a new conception of matter. I mean : the idea-like-matter whose life and internal behaviour let the constructive elements express themselves."(Wölfflin, 1888).
Each period has the architecture it deserves! We can notice that the message of Baroque remains ambiguous in our culture ; it has given rise to many and many contradictory interpretations and comments until now; it shows that we still don't have the real ability to think in terms of connected multiplicity.
10. An Open Paradigm of Science
That is what had been the concern of the very rationalist Seventeenth Century. They certainly did not rely very much on body's influences, because it remained the access to passion and sin ; but although mistrusting it, they subtly describe the mediation between physical and mental events : it is the very power of imagination to surprise the mind with concrete images. Yet imagination was considered as the "master of error and falseness"(Pascal, 1670) ; but by the same way, it began to win interest.
The power of images, in fact, is the shady power of idols, which are meaningful for mind as well as for body, through the same signifiers.
Even in the most clear part of science, that is in the works of Newton, we have overshadowed some details. Newton himself noticed, about the gravitation, that attraction could not be "a real physical force" : the mechanical postulate of matter implies that two material elements only interact by external and negative ways ; that is contradictory with any kind of action from a distance. It is "incompatible with the absolute reality of space and the property of place."(Koyré, 1957). Newton noticed the "foreign element", extraneous to the mechanistic paradigm and called the universal gravitation "a spiritual force", because at that time it was the only available word for it. It was at least an honest admission of ignorance, and the clue to a logical limit, that we forgot to realize.
This problem of interpretation will arise again in the Twentieth Century, when confronting quantum mechanics with general relativity : which one is to be taken first, thing or interaction ? And then, what is the nature of interaction ?
All these elements, chosen here and there in the Seventeenth Century, are the signs of an open paradigm : from different places and various points of view, they evolved science as a complete purpose of enlightening nature by means of reason ; and each delicate point of junction between different levels of reality had been holding attention, as requiring the best of awareness, and the most steady reasoning. But there is a point to emphasize : the aim of unity doesn't reduce diversity (to understand that, we must stop to conceive unity as based on identity) ; unity must arise from the right mediations between real and sound differences.
Then, considering their teachings, we can ask the question in their own words : why would "gods or nature" have settled up their laws and organisation over a chasm ?
11. The Eighteen Century: the Touchstone of Science
So the challenge was a wide-ranging rationality, encompassing life and matter. Of course the Age of Enlightenment took it up, and probably deserves its name because of this prospect. The new methods of observation focused the reflection on living beings; it conveyed new interests, creating "natural history" and what will soon be called "psychology".
The first clear idea of a determinism ruling man's behaviour as well as natural phenomena was formulated ; but if it was an order of life to find, obviously it had something to do with ethical order. And the scientific knowledge would have looked absurd if not involving an ethical progress for mankind. Otherwise, the "historical method", applied in natural sciences, plainly implied evolving and changing objects all along time.
It can be shown, for example, by the interest holded on the question of "sensitivity" (that is what the previous Century called "soul"): this ability of the body to feel, which is necessarily linked with the ability of the mind to know. Philosophers and scientists fervently looked for the doorway between the two levels.
12. Kant: the "Transcendental Scheme of Imagination"provides
a Mediation
Kant is known, of course, for the part he gives to the "pure reason" : intellect and sensitivity are two separated and different levels. But a rather neglected part of his philosophy is devoted to explaining what imagination and sensitivity bring to mental abilities. Imagination becomes active. The image gives a synthesis and creates unity with the diverse determinations of sensitivity.
Then, how to jump over the gap, towards a pure and intellectual meaning of ideas ? The "transcendental scheme of imagination"(Kant, 1781) is especially forged in order to explain in what way mind uses images : it is a go-between, a kind of vessel, not sensible nor sensitive, which allows mind to give meaning to images. From image to scheme, we go from a passive alteration of sensitivity (which can be explained in terms of material effects) to an active understanding which builds sense.
Anyway, it remains a gap ; a very thin and accute dividing line, a jump over a nothingness that Kant doesn't fill in, and which afterwards will become an ocean. But Kant asked the question, and tried to establish the continuity that philosophy of Nature, before him, had made essential.
However, this theory of Kant is an answer to the very famous, old and forgotten "problem of Molyneux". "In spite of its abundance and diversity, the detailed research forever leads to a theoretical and basic problem, where all its lines converge. It concerns this question, first asked in the Optics by Molyneux, which straight away aroused the greatest philosophical interest"(Cassirer, 1951).
The question concerns perception : if we want to define an empirical perception from a scientific point of view, we must say that a perception is the material modification of a somatic device.
Then, where are the springs of sense ?
How can we enlight the conjunction between somatic facts and mind's activity ?
"Are the experiences, that we had in one of our sensorial areas, able to set up another area, qualitatively different and with another specific structure ?"(Cassirer, 1951).
The question is not as ambiguous as it seems : we know that visible and tactile perceptions are quite different stuffs. So the problem is: the combination, the junction of two perceptions makes something else than a perception plus a perception. Something new is created, in the convergence of perception, which is the irreversible spring of sense: it comes into a meaning.
In fact, the very passage between passive modification of somatic devices and recognizing meaning is a typical mediation : if one isolated perception can be reduced to material events, the meeting, the confrontation between two perceptions produces a new source, a qualitatively new event : the spring of significance. Perceptions are in themselves different : they don't mix up, they maintain the distance. But they deal with difference : the organisation of brain arouses a new kind of facts from their confrontation, that is the primitive form of thought.
By analogy, we can recognize in the problem of Molyneux a typical form of asking that we meet nowadays in science. For example : how does the organism discriminate between self and self-difference, by means of the same presentation of the Major Histocompatibility Complex?
This inspiration of the Eighteenth Century forever goes round this intuition : life is something else than an addition of material elements. Its most simple manifestations show constantly this special ability : "the connection between two living molecules is quite different from the contiguity of two inert masses"(Diderot, 1830), and this new level of organisation is the source of semantic facts.
So work the mediations : the upper level of organisation is always provided by the confrontation of elements in a previous level ; regulation or criticism work in this way : dealing with differences, they mediatize them.
14. Lessing and the Aesthetic Signifiers
Significance can be rooted deeper : in the perception itself, which is a genuine experience of sensitivity and contributes to form the meaning of the event. In his beautiful Laocoon (1766), about aesthetics, Lessing answered in an original way to the problem of Molyneux. At this time, the influence of poetry implies that painting must be "a lyrical poetry", and not an art on itself.
No, says Lessing : the own means of each art, the concrete vehicle is a part of significance. We see paintings, and react to colours and forms; we read poetry, or listen to it. Each artistic effect is linked with its means. (As a common fact, we can notice that if a novel is screened, it must be created again, afresh, according to the proper demandings of cinema, and if not, it is a failure!)
It means that the corporal experience of art is constitutive of the meaning and cannot be removed from the sense. Besides, up to my opinion, the difference between an "aesthetic" experience and a "normal" one is totally artificial : which experience is totally free from reacting to beauty or ugliness ? All these works show that, to understand life, we must combinate material organization with semantic order. The very living reaction of a living being is always something more than mechanical.
What Kant, Molyneux and Lessing demonstrated about internal world and perception is also true and relevant about dealing with environment. They explained to us that the internal power of organization links the material function (to be modified by perception) with the semantic one (to give meaning to this modification).
In the same way, Diderot gave a complete definition of evolution of species, according to the double motion of constraint and creativity :
" A primitive conformation is altered
or improved both by necessity and by usual
functionning."(Diderot, 1830).
So it is possible at this time to evolve together positive and negative interactions of living beings with their environment : negative interactions as darwinian ones, the constraint of necessity which leads to natural selection ; and on the other hand, ability of living structures to learn from experience, the positive interactions or lamarckian ones.
The quarrelling between Darwin and Lamarck theories will split this balance between the two notions. The break, the exclusion arose because we excluded information from real phenomena, by choosing a reduced matter as the only criterion of reality. For a mind of the Eighteenth Century, the balance of life is obviously an original synthesis between constraint and creativity.
It seems that they had everything in order to understand life and settle up another kind of technique. Why does the goal move away when we approach ?
Of course it
is impossible to accuretely date when, where and why it began to seem
"normal" to refer exclusively reality to matter. Anyhow, it went so
far as to denying any semantic fact, or any psychological reality. These
soft-focus things have been left to
poets and dreamers... We were educated within a fractured culture, splited up
according to the two mentioned monisms. At the beginning of the Twentieth
Century, Bergson (1907) stated this dismaying fact : " Human cleverness feels at home as long as we keep it among inert
objects, especially among solids... Experiment at the end can show us how life
sets about obtaining some result ; then, more often, we think that its way of
doing is precisely the one we wouldn't ever have thought."
What role does the fracture play in the progress of science ? It would be a topic in itself, and I will just suggest some points. Is materialism required by experimental method ? Not plainly. The method requires a relevant scale of repetability, and possible measurement ; but it doesn't foresee the nature of phenomenon. The requirement of a proof cannot be confused with requiring a material object. The rigour of method cannot be mixed up with a thinning of reality. No method can require to think only in terms of matter, excluding functions, properties of organization, creative contributions of structures and interactions.
More than a methodological use (which would anyway be limited to the strict moment of method), mechanistic materialism runs over and appears as an ideology ; it finds its reasons elsewhere.
Was it a necessary stage of science, in order to clean mind of any old anthropomorphic or religious arguments ? If it is, may be the remedy has been worse than the disease. Clarifying methods was useful. But on purifying from anthropomorphism, we lost humanity and life. On separating from religion, we let spiritualism take away on its side any kind of semantic or symbolic fact that we are concerned about. As Koyré remarked, gods withdrew from a world where they had nothing anymore to do. Space and time, instead of being the place of presence of everything, became the general frame of absence.
"Eternal matter...inherited all the ontological attributes of deity. But only these ones : as regarding the others, God, when leaving the world, took them away with him."(Koyré, 1957)
The real foundations of materialism are to be found in an ideology, and in the fantasies which underlies it. It forms a "complex", in a freudian meaning. I will call it "the complex of Gilgamesh"(Bottéro, 1992), because of this mesopotamian ancester, who the first went in quest of immortality.
Consuming ernergy might give us the homeostasis of isolated and never troubled gods, and medicine might make us become immortals. "Then you will be like a god"(Lucretius) : a piece of matter, never divided off in yourself by difference, never removed from your own consistency, never disturbed, an immortal dead. It is an old story in Western history, and it regularly re-emerges in our civilization. It is a very remote mesopotamian root ; it has been the spring of Pharaonic Egypt ; it reappears with the Roman emperors, whose declared ambition was to be immortal and to imput immortality to whom they wished ; it is the idolatrous side of christianism (without prejudging the others), which reaches a highest point for example in the Counter-Reformation. Everything takes place as if the political or religious purpose had been transfered to science and technique when the old monarchical system felt down.
To be almighty and immortal : never to be confronted with something different, that is to use the logic of the Same ; never to confront representation with its limits, with a refuting reality. To assimilate thought into substance, and science into being. If everything is a piece of matter, then you can believe that there is nothing different from what you master ; you can imagine you have a total knowledge and a complete power on things and beings ; there is the tragic bond between mechanism and totalitarism.
Only gods have final solutions. Technology might make gods of us. A part of science serves it.
On the contrary, to meet with the reality of information and semantic facts, implies to deal with difference and plurality ; it implies to introduce time in our reasoning, that is evolution, limitation, losings and meetings. It pulverizes any omnipotence. It involves the fact to be mortal, and prevents from a narcissic representation of the world. If we are really able to understand that ...
Over this
fracture of culture, a dissident tradition carried on with the frame of mind of
the Enlightenment.
Although working in quite different fields, psychoanalysis and homeopathy share some features of the same worldly wisdom. Hahnemann and Freud first were both released from conformism by their criticizing the established medical practices : they thought to ask the question, whether the violence of medical intervention was vindicated by some scientific reasons. And they were brave enough to answer no, and search for something else.
Their inspiration also followed similar ways : the very invention was in getting meaning at what had been scorned as meaningless.
In the two cases, a sensitivity to significance worked : for Hahnemann, the meaning that a clinical picture could be able to get in front of a toxic one ; for Freud, the meaning that a mad talking could be able to get in front of assuming an unconscious thought. Between these levels they both found a relevant system of mediations. They both renounced almightiness : Hahnemann modestly went back to the fact that the most part of curing belonged to the patient himself ; so did Freud, when he abandonned hypnosis ; by the way, they didn't imply to trust "good nature", but right information.
They recognized the abilities of human beings as being informed, and as dealing with somatic or psychological information. And they gathered beautiful thesaurus of signifiers, even if not in the same register.
So they were "men of Enlightenment", as Thomas Mann said about Freud. They bear witness to "this human and ethical tendancy to heal human being by drawing him out from confusion and morbid perversion."(Thomas Mann, 1929). They maintained the tradition and demand of reason, to enlight nature in its whole. In front of the prevailing ideology, they naturally were both misunderstood and blacklisted. But at the end, though dissident and minority, the tradition is not broken off.
A living structure is material ; from one point of view, it has to be handled as a mechanical device. A human being is cognizant ; from this point of view, it has to be talked and listened to as a mindful being.
But to the question :"What is to be living ? ", Tellenbach answered :"It is to be searching for a rhythm to agree with ."(1961) That is the third dimension of mediations. Now, I think we have the means to overtake the split of our representations of the world : the only condition is to overtake the analytic point of view, which reduces phenomena to mechanical composition. Science has shown us a lot of phenomena where the organization of elements provides new and not reducible possibilities and creative synthesis.
At least, the old positivism does not arise really from science : it is more an ideology, an aristotelian and pre-scientific idea of matter. This conception is moreover conveyed by social power of techniques, by scientific pomps and appearances, than by real knowledge. The lesser experiment of physics can display the charm and diversity of matter's behaviour.
We should now be able to match our soul with our real learning. Then, at the end, reason could play in tune. May be it is time to revive this tradition and to evolve new objects of science, beyond this illusion of security provided by mechanism.
"This one who would deny the thing because it is not palpable or visible would come to deny his own substance and his own existence."(Giordano Bruno, 1584)
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