Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France 0810114461, 9780810114463

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Wbrsity Studies in Phenomenology e > Existential Philosophy rN orthiim

Course Notes from the Collège de France

Compiled and with note? by Dominique Séglard I

Translated from the

NATURE

Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

Founding Editor

General Editor

Associate Editor

^JaiTies M. EdiG

Anthony J. Steinbock

John McCumber

NATURE

Course Notes from the Collège de France

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Compiled and with notes by Dominique Séglard Translated from the French by Robert Vallier

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois

r

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois 60208-4210 Originally published in French under the title La Nature: Nates, cours du Collège de France. Course notes and compilation copyright© 1995 by Éditions du Seuil Résume copyright © 1995 by Editions Gallimard. F nglish translation copyright © 2003 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2003 All rights reserved. Printed in the LInited States of America ISBN 0-8101-1445-3 (doth) ISBN 0-8101-1146-1 (paper) Library of Congress Gataloging-in-Publication Data Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-106.1. [Nature. English! The nature / Maurice Merleau-Ponty; compiled and with notes bv Dominique Séglard : translated from the French by Robert Vallicr. p. cm. — (Northwestern University Studies in phenomenology and existential philosophy) ISBN 0-810Id 445-3— ISBN 0-8101-1446-1 • 1. Philosophy of nature—History. I. Séglard, Dominique. II. Title. III. Northwestern University studies in phenomenology & existential phdosophy. BD581.M4413 2003 113—dclff 2003010037 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard lor Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper (or Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Translator's Acknowledgm ents Translator's Introduction

xi xiii

First Course. The Concept of Nature, 1956-1957

3

Part 1. Study of the Variations of the Conceptof Nature

5

1

The "Finalist" Element in Aristotle and the Stoics

7

2

Nature as the Idea of an Entirely Exterior Being, Made of Exterior Parts, Exterior to Man, and to Itself, as a Pure Object

8

A. Origin of This Conception

8

B. The First Idea of Nature in Descartes

9

..

3

C The Second Cartesian Inspiration

20

The Humanist Conception of Nature

21

A The Ideas of Kant

21

1. The Double Meaning of the Copermcan Revolution 2. The Critique o f Judgment B.

4

15

D. Conclusion

The Ideas of Brunschvicg

21 23 27

1 The Notion of Space

27

2. The Notion of Time

28

3. The Concept of Causality

29

The Romantic Conception of Nature

36

A.

36

The Ideas of Schelling 1.

The Notion of the Principle of the World

l.N aturata 3.

The Object of Schilling's Philosophy: The Subjective-Objective

36 39 41

4. The Method of Philosophy: The Intuition of Intuition

44

5. Art and Philosophy

45

6. The Schellingian Circle

46

7. The Value of the Contribution: Schelling and Hegel

48

B The Ideas of Bergson 1. Schelling and Bergson

51

2. Nature as the Aseity of the Thing

53

3 Nature as Life

58

4.

The Ontological Infrastructure of the Concept of Nature in Bergson: The Ideas of Being and Nothingness

Note on Bergson and Sartre C.

The Ideas of Husserl

3

70 70

1 The Role of the Body in the Position of Things

74 75

3. Oriqinary Objects: The Experience of the Earth

76 81

Introduction: Science and Philosophy

83

A. Problems Posed by the Philosophical History of the Idea of Nature

83

B. Science and Philosophy

85

Classical and Modern Physics

88

A Laplace's Conception

88

B.

89

Quantum Mechanics

C The Philosophical Significance of Quantum Mechanics 2

64

2. The Role of the Other

Part 2. Modern Science and Nature

1

51

95

Notions of Soace and Time

101

A. The Notion of Space

101

B. The Notion of Time

106

The Idea of Nature in W hitehead

113

Second Course. The Concept of Nature, 1957-1958: Animality the Human Body, and the Passage to Culture

123

General Introduction: Notes on the Cartesian Conceptions of Nature and Their Relations to Judeo-Christian Ontology

125

A. The Ontology of the Object

125

B. The Ontology of the Existent Being

127

1

C. Relations between These Two Modes of Thought

129

D. How the Oscillation of Cartesian Thought Is Related to the Postulates of Judeo-Christian Thought

131

1. The Concept of Naturalism

135

2. Humanism

136

3 Theism

137

Anim ality: The Tendencies of Modern Biology

139

A. The Notion of Behavior

140

1. The Perception of the Circle

153

2. The Perception of Movement

153

3 The Becoming of a Painting

154

4.

The Perception of Causality in a Living Being

154

B. The Notions of Information and Communication

158

1. Models of Living Being 2. The Problem of Language

160 163

2. Anim ality: The Study of Animal Behavior

167

A. The Descriptions of J. von Uexküll

167

1. The Umwelt of Lower Animals: The Animal-Machines

168

2. Organized Lower Animals

170

3. The Umwelt of Higher Animals

170

4. Philosophical Interpretation of the Notion of Umwelt

173

B The "Oriented Character"of Organic Activities according to E. S. Russell

178

C. The Behavior of the Organism as Physiology in Exterior Circuit

183

1. The Phenomena of Mimicry (Hardouin): Living Beings and Magic

183

2. Portmann's Study of Animal Appearance (Die Tiergestalt)

186

3. Lorenz's Study of Instinct: The Passage from Instinct to Symbolism

190

Third Course. The Concept of Nature, 1959-1960: Nature and Logos: The Human Body

201

Introduction: Resumption of the Studies on Nature

203

A. Place of These Studies in Philosophy: Philosophy and Knowledge of Nature

203

B Place of the Human Body in Our Study of Nature

208

First Sketch

209

Second Sketch

216

A The Animal Body

216

B The Libidinal Body and Intercorporeity

218

C. The Body and Symbolism

219

D. [Ontology]

220

Third Sketch: The Human Body

221

A. The Body as Animal of Perceptions

221

B. The Libidinal Body and Intercorporeity

224

C The Body and Symbolism

226

Fourth Sketch: Two Preliminary Studies

229

A. Ontogenesis: Driesch's Analysis

230

B. Phylogenesis

243

Fifth Sketch

252

A The Renaissance and Metamorphosis of Darwinism

252

B. Idealism

255

Sixth Sketch

259

A. Descriptions of Morphology

259

B. Philosophy: Dacqué's Kantian Position

261

C. Statistical Evolution

262

D. Discussion and Conclusion

264

Seventh Sketch: Man and Evolution: The Human Body

267

Eighth Sketch: The Human Body

274

A. Esthesiology

274

B. The Libidinal Body

276

C Libido

278

Notes

285

Translator's Acknowledgments

jn il lin I cmli mors m ill..nking Madame Merleau-Ponty for having .niiliiii i/ci 1th( I'mliLi on of these courses and for graciously granting m( perm ssinn to tet ess ilu Mi i Irau-Ponty Archive to consult manu scripts both for this translation and for my own research. A (.hateau briand Fellowship from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs made it possible for me to undertake research at the archive; the University of Paris-X (Nanterre) and the Tornatis Center made it possible for me to stay and complete this translation. For this opportunity, I thank them sincerely. My thanks also go to Dan Selcer, Jonathan Derbyshire, PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas, Judith Walz and Bernard Flynn, Ceeillia Sjoholm, Simon Critchley, Paul and Evie Davies, Edward Bullard, Do­ minic Willsdon, Jenny Slatman, Anna Fredlund, Olivia Custer, Ellen Cox, Len Lawlor, Susan Schoenbauin, Ted Toadvine, Duane Davis, Mar­ tin Dillon, Pat Burke, Marguerite and Doug Miller, Chelsea Harry, Matthew Lord, Laura Chiesa, and so many others far their friendship and support; to Alessandro Delco, with whom 1 gave a seminar on Merleau-Ponty at the Internauonal College of Philosophy in 1997-98 and 1998-99; to my colleagues at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum; and to my professors Françoise Dastur, Renaud Barbaras, EJiane Escoubas, and David Farrell Kref, who offered generous advice, constant encouragement, unwavering assistance, and exemplary scholarship, and who taught me how to read philosophically and cultivated in me a pas­ sion for phenomenology. I would he remiss if I did not single out for spe­ cial acknowledgment Ronald Bruz.na, whose sharp eye and incredible persistence brought this project to fruition; without his kind and gener­ ous help, this translation would never have seen the light of day. [Finally, and most especially, 1 would like to thank my parents, dont le soutien est sans mesure.

I

Translator's Introduction

Status of the Texts The publication of Maurice Merleau-Ponty',s /_,« nature: Notes, cours da Collige th / n/iiii jctn.il w\ 11 s ago testified to the i cue wed and 10111 inning interest in liis work, which was cut short by his uiilimeli dtal.li in I9bl. Pul 11shed In Editions de Senti in I(if) > ibis text was fiillowed by two oth­ ers, each entitled Notes dr cow s, in 1996 and 1998.1 Phis posent volume is a translation ol die three courses given in 1956 to 11)f>V 1957 to 1958, and 1959 Lo 191id at the ( Collège de li ant c, collet ted together and pub­ lished under the title La No Inn Oilici volume*. comprising “Notts tie tours” limn nihei coût tes given during Merit an Pon tv's tenure al 11>< ( loliège, art .n préparai on. They will piovjfle new insight into the de­ velopment ot the philosopher . thought. Rut tin texts th it herein follow do not tonsiimie an unfinished or* abandoned work by Merleau-Ponty, nor arc they working notes with a view toward the preparation ol a man­ uscript. 1 he\ are latlu i the “written traces” of three courses be gave at the Collège n: netmslv Inuu them iVhat follows, then, are the written traces of a th ill iug pint < - th; i look hold of itself only in its spoken expression. To be more precise, the first two courses are student notes taken by an auditor whose identity remains unknown. As the French editors of the texts i ep true l'or the 1 as we ll. There is not. a Coincidence of myself with m yself. The 1 is an indeterminate, empirical intuition. 1 possess ne diet the key to the world nor the key to my 1. What I take hold th is only an Erscheinung. I can grasp die unity of the I only through its produc­ tions. There is a facticity of the experience of myself and the world. 1' seems that all knowledge rests on a constitution that is particular to me. At first the Copcrnican revolution can appear as a reversion to a psy­ chology. The principal meaning is not to be found there, hut is indi­ cated by the theses in “The I ranscendental Aesthetic” (cf. the word “constitution”).3 The Subject as Absolute

lint, if there are only human phenomena, them consequently there is nothing else as a term of reference. If taken seriously, this relativism ends up getting ovei turned. These phenomena to which I have access are a construction, but not an arbitrary one; I may return to it, refer to it. The Erscheinungis not a Schnn, that, is, the phenomenon is not some­ thing merely apparent. 1 carry within myselt the possibility of an “object” as a term of reference. This “relation to an object” is characteristic of consciousness, from the moment that the object is only what 1 perceive, there is no risk of skeptical doubt insofar as it is understood that this ob­ ject is the only one that; may have a meaning for me and that it is coex­ tensive with all that we may call truth and Being. My subjectivity' appears as a power of ordering, a capacity to give laws, to posit the idea of a world to which I can refer throughout my own duration. In this sense, the Copcrnican revolution is in no way a return to human being as happenstance, but rather a return to human being as the power to construct. The return to human being appeals as the re­ turn to a nalumns that operates in us. Kant is probably not going as fair as the idea of ati absolute, creative nalurnns, but. he’s heading toward it' (the interpretation of Lachièze-Rey).'1 Here, then, Kant returns to a metaphysics of the Absolute, in which the Absolute is thought of no longer as substance, but as subjec,. These two meanings tire inevitable. Psychological relativism cannot be maintained. Alter a certain time, human representation becomes syn­ onymous with Being. In the same way, transcendental relativism cannot cut itself off from a reference with which till knowledge begins. There are two directions in Kant. Within human contingence (quid facti) he discovers a positing power (quid juris). Human being is a lac-deity that gives itself validity de jure.

23 THE

HUMANIST

CONCEPTION

OF

NATURE

To these two meanings of the Copernican revolution, there corre­ spond two meanings of the word “Nature.” 1. To the first meaning will correspond an impoverishment of the con­ cept of Nature. If we decide to consider it all as a human representa­ tion, then Nature will appear as the Inbegriff5 of the objects of sense. Nature is what a sensible being perceives, the simple correlate of per­ ception. This idea loses all its savageness. 2. To the second meaning, Nature will be such as the legislative activity of understanding reveals it: hence the Nalurbegriffe. There is an a pri­ ori of Nature. Nature becomes richer. Nature exists in us as a blue­ print and includes a solid structure, the solidity of which Kant has no doubt overestimated. See Lin the Opus Postunium] the deduction of the “I-'irst Principles of Nature,” in which Kant, starting from the prin­ ciples of the understanding, strives to take account of all that Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz had been able to introduce into Na­ ture. He even seeks to deduce tbe combinations of attractive and re­ pulsive forces, even though he finally judges them a mystery. Brunschvicg calls this a “constructivist fantasy,” signaling a “bizarre parallelism of Aristotelian logic and modern mechanics.”0

This double meaning of the word “Nature” thus constitutes an equivocation. On the one hand, Nature is something about which we cannot say anything except through our senses; hence the agnosticism oflhis idea. On every side, there is something fortuitous that we cannot know. On the other hand, Nature is known as constructum: it is the return to Spinozism. Kant’s entire philosophy is an effort to unity these two meanings. The Critique o f Judgment

The Critique ofJudgment is an attempt to connect these two meanings: judgment makes this link between receptivity and spontaneity, between understanding and reason. “Determining judgment” gives way to an alternative in its construc­ tion: it is this, or else there is no world. There is a risk, but it is absolutely necessary to take it. “Being or not being, itself and all things, one must choose,” as Lagneau will say.7 “Reflecting judgment” does not have rules. It cannot constrain human being to choose. Reflection chooses, not the rules, but the max­ ims that are advantageous for us to follow without being forced. Thanks

24

nature

these judgments, we Find properties in objects Uiat call (or a linkage that is other than external. Thus, between the parts of living being, there will be an internal link that in.ikes lot an agreement between my perception and tin 1 ,,i ,n Is n| Reason I he fat till, of judgment is tin. type of reflection hv «jh.it b I discover beyond (be constituent elements, .1 nev lave.t of undoubtedly indu opunorphii propel tit —properties that an posit.-d exit nisii ally, but arc nonetheless posited by everyone, and that am human reflection s led to posit, livery mideist.aiding, pos­ sessing the same qualities as unr own, is led to posit them. 1fence the ap­ parent linalitv. Tin properties that I ronlY t on die objet l of reflecting judgment are human properties, judgment liter, by remains subjei the, but litis sub jet Livity is that ol every bum it) being. Our Ictidi m ies agree uitb (lie phenomena. Here there is the experience ol tin- “happy am dent."* Kant then poses the following problem. Constructive idealism bad no need for a critique of judgment since it was constructive. For it, there is no problem. Father being will be being-for-itself, or it will not, but then it: would be nothing for me. lienee the equality of Reing and being-for-itself. With the tyritufue of Judgment, Kant recognizes that it does not suffice to coniine himself to this ultimatum. The .solidarity of the con­ structed with the given is not everything—it is not denied, but there is a bit of play in it. Judgment is a faculty where the agreement with the senses is a happy accident. The concern is to ground this happy accident philosophically, to elaborate a statute of finality, in order to be able to judge if it is necessary to see in Nature a simple causal mechanism or a fi­ nalized mechanism. Kant introduces a finality in regard to (hut not in) the concept of Nature. Finality does not belong to natural beings, but we must think it in regard to them. In The Organism, Goldstein0 refers implicitly to Kant, when lie says that finality does not have a domain [Grbiet], but has rather a terrain fBodrn] in Nature. Kant argues that, in geometry, we are tempted to speak of finality when the same principle results from parallel conclusions. In fact, I think only of a disjoined universe, of a mental universal of essences, of propet ties. Rut in the geometrical place, for example, the unification of i hope i tu s dm iml have iin.ill tv fot a test tit, because niU'ltiplii itv derives from tin place ol my demonstration. But. someone might say', il the cir­ cle s an existing ôlyect, then it ts a being of Nature in fact it is again I who traces the >ii be possible, there must be an increasing conceptual­ ization between the laws that are recorded and the observed facts. Un­ derstanding wants experience to be possible. How does this demand get satisfied? How do these laws of Nature coordinate themselves in a sys­ tem? There is something anarchic in the scientist’s mode of calculation. The procedure of thought rests on the conviction of being able to use analogy. Why, asks Kant, do the laws let themselves be classified, so that they are not reducible to each other? Kant admits that we have the right to discount such a harmony in Nature, but it is only a maxim: Nature acts by the most, simple laws, fins proposition is the most simple, but that's all. ( )ulv in lïr'iiîgorganized bring- do we a* knowledge a finality, lor a liv­ ing being is both its own cause and effect. Phenomenon A results from phenomenon B. and vice versa: causality is doubted and turned back. But 111is doubling of i ausalily means that we are no longer in rausaliiv: natural beings have their causality within themselves, their own legality [Gesetzmàssigknt]. There is an interior in the exterior. How is this possi­ ble? If we want to speak of an organism, we must take totality as tirkmntnisgrwid. The organism is not. the result of an art; the idea of a technique of Nature does not suffice because the worked-over objects (which serve to make the object of art) work on matter through Nature. In the organism, the tool is inherent to the materials, the in u rials being given spontaneously to tools f Natinviilln.imniniliri Vet finality cannot be given as a mode of production .1 natural pin uumcna, ince experience demands a generalized causality. There is an antinomy be­ tween causality and finality. The two terms (thesis and antithesis) must be considered as affirmations, not of determining judgment, but of re­ flecting judgment. It is sun ill t a blade of grass10 will never he reduced by causal analysis. („ 1 tsitij tins ■ without limit., but it cannot attain what is Naturzweck. The solution of the antinomy in the limitation of human understanding, nothing being affirmed in Being. This analysis leads judgment back from the phenomena of Nature to our simple faculties of knowing. If we want to avoid the confrontation of two antithetical principles (finality and causality), we must no longer refuse, a thing-m-itself (dogmatism), hut think another foundation of Nature, circumscribing the phenomena around an intt’Ileclus archetyfnis, who will see the manifold from the inside. In order to give all its value to the solution ol tin 1antinom^one must, not remain on an agnostic plane, hut rather consider as thinkable an architectonic in which this kind of break between causality and finality would not exist, such that both are overcome in a productive thought beyond human understanding. For human being they are excluded, but we have to renounce an ideal of in-

NAT UR E

lellig'ibility [Griirul iln Vereinbenkeit\ And so wheteas S( lie ling will lake hi.s point of departure from section 76 of the Critique ofJudgment, and will install himself in intuitive unde rslanding, for Kant, we do not possess it

and can conceive it only negatively. It is from the point of view of finalilv that we perceive analogies in living beings. Kant foresees tint tranformati >t thought, but he sees only a jumble in it. We think according to causality. It is logical to establish anal >gies among sprfljes (resemblance). 11 may be net essar to Iran late this in i< i.uion n I ..nil' km hip (the idea of the -volution oi pl loi mul.ie, Bergson wants to signify that there being anterior to all knowledge, which takes place at the same time as perception. We construct perceiving beings starting from the universe ol i.nages”; hut this world of “images" was altoadv the woi id ol a perceiving being. Idealism and realism onlv cvri see b ill the Ilungs. Bei gson wants to 11 store the entire >111 Ie. lo clesoiibe a common medium of Being and perception—that is, this “universe of images” in it­ self, this perception in an impersonal third-person On, without inhciem e io a tom bmg individual to one of its limits, to Being, and to the othi . ot individual perception (partial being), and he wants to desc ribe, within m , this gionnd of the real by which I “plunge” into things that have “dee® toots ”hl But does Bergson succeed in making this mystery clear ny means of the intuuion without movement, of vision as immobile? Perception is probably in some ways immobile intuition: when the world offers itself ton: as presence and not is representation win n du- thing is the-re in its natural stupidity. Bin in xt to ibis iiilniliou. Beigson posits that, of per­ ceived being, as the c entei of indeteiTnination that introduces (he possi­ ble into lull Being By this, nothingness conn s into the- world, md Dut ural being loat-s the* se 11-sufficiency that had at lii si been accorded to it. Can this second intuition simply be added to the first? Can one suc­ ceed the other in a relation of continuity? Pure perception, which coin­ cides with the object, exists de jure rather than de facto: it would take place in instantaneily/’- In our perceptions, there is a duration, memory, whence the budging or unsticking with respect to the real. But if our perceptions are absolutely distinct from pure perception, how c an they keep pure*, perception in themselves arid take root there? All that has

57 THE

ROMANTIC

CONCEPTION

OF

NATURE

been said III the Ifl mous 1)1 pure perception and olll eplifms is re­ versed. My perception appeared at ülÿt as .in impoverishment, “bin Ih m is. in this iu-cc,ssarv povertv oT mir imiMiiiiis perception, snme111111pi that in | i .M i e, ll>.n foretell; spirit: it is. in die etymological sens of die word, discernment ”** Wli.it appeared as less, appears now vis oilier and in a sense, as more 1 li< thing taken in iis< ll would be ai boilom altogi - I empf\ and inarticulate, were there not my exterior per­ ception. Nothingness has a positive role. Without this virtual, the thing itself would lx TOiliont content, without contour, indefinable* a,s an tintaken or undeveloped photograph. But then, not much of the initial intuition of the natural thing re­ mains. How to conserve while overcoming it? Wc cannot reproach Berg­ son for tills contradiction, but does lie give it the place that it merits? One intuition has net just chased away another: there i.s at first a wholly positive perception (the world is there, the tiling is there), then tie says of it that “we grasp, in perception, at one and the same time, a slate of out; consciousness and a reality independent of ourselves. This mixed character of our immediate perception, this appearance of a realized contradiction, is the principle theoretical reason that we have foi believ­ ing in an external world which does not coincide absolutely with our perception . ” 64 Here perception is contradiction realized, and Bergson is ready to make the contradiction thematic as the apparatus of our Sub­ jectivity, but he does not draw all the consequences from it: II the re are actions that are really free, or at least partially indeterminate, they can only belong to beings able to fix, at long intervals, that becom­ ing to which their own becoming clings, able to solidify it into distinct moments, and so to condense matter and, by assimilating it, to digest il into movements of reaction which will pass iln ough the meshes of natu­ ral necessity. The greater or lesser Lension of their duration, which ex­ presses, at bottom, their greater or lesser intensity of life, thus determines both the degree of the concenlraling power of their perception and the measure of their liberty.1’’'

It would thus be the concentration of perception that would permit grasping another being, not by adhesion, hut by contraction of its rhythm. Bult.hen, is to perceive to espouse the rhythm til the brute thing or to contract it? Valid intuition according to Bergson is threatened with taking on a positivist aspect, it places itself in danger. On the one hand, there is the immediate intuition of the thing that is there, and m relation to which all the rest s negation. There is in matter [something] like a present!-

53

NAI

„ E

ment propel f human experience.”l,û But this philosoph­ ical and nr essai )' Him I r, compromised by taking sides with positivism, wjhii 1 mat s of tin prehuman a being with which we coexist. Does the return of intuition to the immediate in coexistence translate properly tlie profound thought of Bergson, which aims at being a return to the primordial? Nature as Life

Bergson wants to rediscover intuitively the natural operation of life, in opposition to every type of human operation, or every type of ideology. The Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience is a book oriented en­ tirely against both those who wanted to make of consciousness an en­ semble of processes exterior to each other arid those who wanted to reduce the unity of consciousness to a unity super imposed o n these mechanisms. Bergson had had the intuition of subjecLiv.io as duration. Ihe whole recousu m don ol nm unity had been over mnr In die 1 >Ik sion of the duration that we are, and dial ij not in boni o| us as an object to construct This intuition of duration guides BcrgMHS in Creative Iktfilvtion because lilr is also a Manual operation dial cannot hr made up of assemblages, as met lianism makes it. and 1 1 it sees there a mulliplii it, ol prot esses; now dualism does give a unity 10 these assemblages b) adding ni end to them, but this en# re mains exterior lo the living. It is only an idea. Yet life nevci gels caught tin re as we think it r ould: il is both above and below nnalism. The constitution of the apparatus of vision is, rather than a creation, a reduc­ tion of this power to see, caused by cer tain necessities of adaptation. The constitution of this apparatus is due to a work of canalization, to an act of piercing, and “the visual apparatus simply symbolizes the work o:f canaliz­ ing.”81’Just as it is not (he mountain that makes a tunnel, neither does the apparatus ol vision make vision. Again, as Jankélévitch says, “[TJhe ani­ mal sees despite his eyes rallier than by them.”8' Likewise the nervous system >s compared bv Bergson to a “vise” 88 that would impede con­ sciousness from completely realizing itself and would allow it to pass only by deserting itself more or less completely. In this way, the operation of life is ultimately attached to a princi­ ple of unity transcendent, to the contingent, manifestations of life, and

63 THE

ROMANTIC

CONCEPTION

OF

NATURc

thereby fife is no longer thought but overcome. All the details ol life lose thçj; value; they must he considered only as a means of Impeding con­ stitutive reality, Tbe constitutive a< t of life advances more ojr less (hr. lollowing the resistant e of matter me t long the wav o-j iollowing the foire ot it. itui tilie t xplanation l realize it in a homogeneous principle. In a text on RavaisM>n,‘u lie allows that. God creates non Being, the void, at h;.« ex­ pense. The dialectic i.s thus not suppressed but put back in God. Bergson hesitates, however, to make a theology of his philosophy: he sometimes sees in it the intuition of the total solidarity of the principle and its man­ ifestation, the feeling oi contact with an Absolute that “lives with us,”® absolute uatumns, which lasts like us and of which we can wonder id it is a principle of the same kind as the Cartesian vahtmns. Jankélévitch an­ ticipated this text on Ravai.sson. Concerning the Bergsonian conception of life, he says: “There are two inverse movements in the presence of each other, one in the other,’”"' one movement of decline and one of rés­ um a uor To this i xlei I. w. set the dialer H< singing loi th again: “Life net ds to Mu m iisell in this manner which kill it, ii is nuly in a state of t oniinna! sin,” lie sais again.''' YVe dins see die idea ol St helling, accord­ ing lo which the fall is an insepai ihl element Imm ciealion, appear again in Bt ig.son We find again in this movement from die second lo die third cliaplers of ( '.reativs 1‘junhUkm Bergson s hahii io pass to a defined positive re a lily, io perceive that m tins reafiLi there is a negation, hence Lbc trajisbuiou of llns negaliou into positive 1er ms (in ill . ease, die pb-y.sk a! hu I the psychic ), and hence fin alii in ordei io conserve die inrorpt n alion ol iliis new negation in die concepts of being and the positive, de­ spite all the positive unity. The Ontological Infrastructure of the Concept of Nature in BergsonThe Ideas of Being and Nothingness

Bergson polcn.icizes against negative concepts, but we will see that in his polemic lie seems not to understand himself, because one part of his polemic, cannot lead him to where lie wants to go. hi the whole of fiiis polemii . Bergson wains lo el inmate die idea of coni mgem v, lie wants lo . hmmaic questions ol die kind "Why is iliere something1' Whv Lhi.s world and not atjoiher?” because these questions pi cscui 11iem.seIves only when we give priority to labrir ation ovci pro due non, when we eo.Mside) every spc< ie-> of being .1 ; fabricated either In \ \- ns. But they are no longer posed when we pass to die point ol view ol a natural pile deletion We have lo return quilr simpl) to a I). ing dial ex'sn The Idea o f Disorder

According to Bergson, the 1 lea ol disort ici :s t a void in the world, all thought ol tit 1void is the thought of a certain plenitude. Il 1 annili late tin cxlcrioi an Id In thought, then this world takes refuge in the interim world ol my giis ol die ae:,lheli< world,' die I fbmi-fivi'U. Prior lo this, Husserl show in Idea# IT313 that there are oscillations in which, little hv little, Nature is that which embraces all, both philosophy and consciousness, for which he uses the term "spiritual Nature, ” 11'1 saying as well that mind i the ab­ solute. .Husserl doesn't manage to overcome the duality. These texts are not susceptible to a coherent explication, nor shall we adhere to a literal reading. Ini! ..v shall wek rather to indicau the double postulate in them, reiving on more recent texts, such as the one on Copernicus call d 'Found Idon 11 Investigations ori the Phenomenological Origin of the Spafiality of NnttU •” (19114).nr’ At die beginning o.f Ideas II.1lh 1lusseiI posits Naim e as “the sphere ul pure things,” die cn. nlile of I,.mgs dial art* only things.11' Nature t t|tials ( lartt’si in N line such as die si lists conceive ii. This conceplion is not considered by 1 Iiism-i 1 as a histotical eiiscmhle; it lias its foun­ dation in a structure of human perception. It seems to him that there is in every scientist, or even in a perceiving individual, a step toward a conception of this sort. If “the science of Nature knows no valuepredicate , ” 1IR this abstraction is not arbitrary. We normally get this idea circumscribed when we make a theoretical subject of ourselves. In this purified altitude, we will meet purely material things such as tables, of which we encounter only the layer of materialism, or such as men, of which we encounter only the layer of animality. This conception of pure

THE

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tilings has a general tenor; we come spontaneously to adopt it when our I, instead of living iri the world, decides to take hold of something [erfasstn\, to objectify it. In these conditions, the 1 makes itself “indiffer­ ent," and the cot relate of this indifference is the pure thing.11'’ Properly speaking, the subject is not indifferent to everything, de­ spite what Husserl says, but its activity consists entirely in what will make being appeal. 1'20 The idea of Nature as sphere of pure things is the idea of the real, the in-itself, as a correlate of a pure knowing, and in a sense for Husserl this Nature contains everything, it extends itsel. of itself, without: limit: this is what he calls the universe, the Once we allow this idea of the Wdtall, we are obliged to put everything in it. There is not a decisive break between the stone and the animal or between the animal and the man: “When a philosopher travels, he takes Ins ideas with him,” In this sense, everything is Nature, everything is attached to Nature, is linked to it, is posited on it. This conception of Nature certainly is not the only possible one; there is another conception just as natural, for example, when we speak with someone: the interlocutor is no longer localized at one point in space, he obsesses your mind from all points at. once. But if this experi­ ence is not the only phenomenon of which we have to take account nevertheless, if not precisely for this reason, we must look for the justifi­ cation of this idea of Nature— lhat is, we must both ground its legitimacy and go beyond it by showing that it is not the only conception possible. This universe, considered in itself, refers to a primordial universe. The universe of theory subtends an already present universe. Behind mis world, there is a more originary world, anterior to all activity', “world be­ fore a these the perceived world. Whereas the .first is given as a con­ structed world, the perceived world is given itself in llesh and blood, L&bhafl [sic]. It has an insurmountable character, underneath winch is nothing. On ihe contrary, the universe of pure things is an undermined universe, behind which there is the solidity of the perceived: the reference of one to the otliei is inscribed in the very meaning of the blnjk Sarhen. When we examine the meaning of a thing, we lind the history of this mean­ ing sedimented in it: Cartesian extension has its history in it; the bhfie Sndini appear as idealizations, which are ulterior ensembles constructed on the solidity of the perceived. If we stay in the blofie Sachm, we understand noihing like the absolutely relative movement in Descartes, for example. So lhat this has a meaning, we must have an absolute experience Of move­ ment, to know what movement is, to be. able even to speak of it: h is to make the return trip to a preliminary level that will play the role of a source. If we follow this retrospective movement of intentionalily, what will we find as the references to which the pure things necessarily allude?

r 74 NATURE

The Role of the Body in the Position of Things

So that there be something, it must be presented t.o an incarnated sub­ ject, Suhjektlih. In what, wav will the; body intervene in the position of things? As an Organ o f the Ich Kann, the Je Peux, the I Can When I perceive an object I am aware of the motor possibilities that are implied in the perception of this thing. The tiring appears to me as a function of the movements of my body. But if these movements are de­ ployed around the object, I must not imagine that they are thought by me as objective factors. Perception is not an analysis comparable to that of the physicists, in terms of which we would refer certain perceptions to our body, for example, the tremor of the countryside under each of our footsteps. But in reality, this tremor is nett perceived, the movement of my body gives me naturally the means to deduct the appearances; in this sense, knowledge of my body is not a knowledge, and nr moveme nts are not thought as objective factors of knowledge. The awareness that I have of my body is a sliding awareness, the feeling of a power, of a being-ablet.o. 1 am aware of my body as an undivided and systematic potency to or­ ganize certain unfoldings of perceptual appearance. My body is that which is capable, of passing from one such appearance to another, as the organizer of a “transitional synthesis.” I organize with my body an un­ derstanding of the world, and the relation with my body is not that of a pure I, which would successively have two objects, my body and the thing, but rather I live in my body, and by means of it 1 live in the things. The thing appears to m< in this way as a moment of the carnal unity of my body, as enclosed in its functioning. The body appears not only as the exterior accompaniment of things, but also as the field w'here my sensations are localized. The Body as "Excitable, " as "Capacity to Sense, " as "Subject-Object" To say dial my body is excitable is not to say that it is the place of objec­ tive. events that would be accompanied by consciousness. The bond is much narrower. Let’s imagine, Husserl tells us, a consciousness in rela­ tion to a locomotive, which, when it is being ( barged with coal, would have the sensation of heat: tin; existence of this sensation of warmth in my soul would not make of the locomotive an existent, being similar t.o my body. Because the sensing of my body is not found in the soul, hut rather it is localized in my body, which is its field of localization. In order to understand this relation of sensation and my body, I ïusserl appeals to an experience of touching. 122 When I touch my left hand with my tight, I'fiy touching hand grasps my touched hand as a thing. But suddenly, 1

75 THE

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perceive that my left hand becomes the sensing. The relation is reversed. We have the experience of a recovery between the contribution of the left hand and that of the right, and of a reversal of their function. This variation shows that, it is always a question of the same hand. As a physi­ cal thing, it. remains always what it % yet it is different accord ii to whether it be the touched or the touching. In this way I touch rnvself lone liing, I realize a sort of reflection, of cogito, of a grasping of the sell by itself. In other words, my body becomes subject, it senses itself. But the conc ern is for a subject, who occupies space, who communicates with itself interiorly, as if spate had taken to knowing itself interiorly. From this point of view, it is certain that the thing takes part in the body. Be­ tween them, there is a relation of co-presence. My body appears as “ex­ citable,” as “capacity to sense,” as “a tiling that senses.” The Body as Standard Thing, "Zero o f Orientation"

My body, is both object and subject. How to reconcile these two points of view? My body is a thing that has a particular relation with things, and which furnishes us with its mode, the zero point of orientation. My body is the absolute “here.” All the places of space proceed from it, not only because the location of Other places is cot'Ceived starting from the place of my body, but also because my body defines the optimal foi-ans;1*-’1'when we look in the microscope, Husserl says, there is a strange teleology of the eye that means that this eye is appealed to instinctively by an optimal form of the object. The activity of the body defines this form; therefore the idea of a Rechtgrund is established in us, from which all knowledge will be formed . 1'2'1 1 could then displace the norms, but the idea of norm has been founded by my body. The Absolute in the relative is what my body brings to me. The Role of the Other

But: if there are no things without the fréquentation of my body, the thing given to my body is still far from being the pure thing, it remains like a curl of shaved wood kept within my body. The subject is carried into things by its body, but the role of its body is not yet conscious. We have to learn to consider my body as an object, yet my body is not yet completely objectified If bv touch I manage to reflect on the action of my body, this reflection is still quite incomplete. The knowledge that I have of niy body is lacunary. A subject that would have only eyes, Husserl says, would not have knowledge of itself. There must be a mirror for it. There must be others. Until now we have only a solipsist thing as body. In truth, as Husserl remarks, the word “solipsist” is not entirely exact.121’

n a t u r e

The subject alone ignores tliat it is alone, it. ignores its limitations- (cf. egocentrism according to Piaget).121’ The thing is lost, in t.he ha/e of'in dividual life. I he position u! other perceiving subjects is ptescnted bv Husserl as a pure and simple reply ol the t onseiottsness I have ol my body. II tin l.od is the dtnple local Talion ol consciousness, then while perceiving exteiiui hodiis, 1 perceiv» that this body is inhabited by a «oui Husserl declines to list the woi nly a bas­ tard concept, which, even in its most valid moment, is irreducible to the autonome of man. Such is Kant's position at the end of the Cntii/nc of judgment. The problem is much mote limited as we diminish the role of constitutive concepts after Kant. For lit unschvicg, all con­ cepts have only a regulative value. The causal conception of the uni­ verse is no longer an excuse for adi,tilting finalism. 2. Natural production is conceived as a hyperphysical causality. This is the temptation of Schelling’s philosophy, to which his friends the ro­ mantic poets (liaader, Novalis) totally succumb. Reason is mistaken, and the rational human is conceived as what remains of a being that is now extinct, a being that, would have lived irt the golden age in con­ tact with the potencies of Nature, a contact that we can no longer re­ trieve today except in a dream. This is radical and uncontrolled naturalism. 3. Certain philosophers, on the other hand try to think the phe­ nomenon of natural production starting from the Critique of Judgment. Natural production must not be considered as a sudden appearance out of nothing. Nature is never posited in this way, but as an allencompassing something, as a type of englobing being in which w»e discover ourselves already invested prior to all reflection. Nature for the Cartesians gave way to two questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why this and not something else? To that, the Cartesians responded by showing a radical necessity under an appar­ ent contingency, cither under the form of a system of law's (Descartes) or under the form of the selection of the heaviest possible body (Leib­ niz). For Schelling, Bergson, and Husserl, such a way of explaining Nature denatures it, removes its very chai acier. The very idea of re­ sponse is meaningless and impedes us from understanding Nature. Contingency must not be thought, a a lesser being, but must be thought by itself: faclicily is not that of wiiicli we must take account. Being is not in front of us, but behind. Whence the return to a pre-Socratic idea ol Nanti t . I Icraclitus says that Nature is a child at play;1 it gives meaning, but in the mannei of a child who is playing, and this meaning i; never total

For such a thought, finalism and causalism are both rejet ted as ar­ tificial constructions that, hv definition, ignore natural production and

r _ INTRODUCTION:

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85 AND

PHILOSOPHY

arc. therefore also insufficient to take account of it. Causality and finality are moreover often indiscernible. As such, L. Bounoure, m his book Déterminisme et finalité," shows first that we cannot compare the organism to an electronic mac..me; but (hen we are surprised to see him define the. organism as a machine. Science is constrained to discover strict ma­ chines and so must speak of “vital force.” Finalist thinking needs mecha­ nism in order to chase away hypervitality. Mechanism, which identifies the machine and the organism, likewise implies the constructor who regulates the machine. Mechanism affirms a natural artificial while iinalism affirms an artificial natural. Philosophy, on the other hand, is a will to confront human artifice with its outside, with Nature. Certainly the position of the philosopher is not without risk. As Bachelard says, what we call “natural” is often only bad heory. ’ But if we are aware of the artificiality of thinking, as Bachelard is, do we need to find a dialectical contrary for it, this opposing entity—if not Nature, at least the. perceived? The natural must not be a lazy postulate. What re­ mains is to wonder if thinking can live in an exclusively human and arti­ ficial universe. We are going to try to specify this idea of Nature by asking for help from the sciences. But in what way should the plulosopher interrogate science?

Science and Philosophy Science is notan unmotivated instance. We have to psychoanalyze science, purify it. Scientific consciousness lives in the natural atutude, as Husserl said, and it ignores Nature because it is there: it is a naive and uncritical enjoyment of the natural certitude. Moreover, science still fives in part on a Cartesian myth: a myth, and not a philosophy, because if the conse­ quences remain, the principles are abandoned. Its concept of Nature is often only an idol to which the scientist makes sacrifices, the reasons for which are due more to affective motivations than to scientific givens. And so this scientist, cited by Ruver, who, believing himself to be able to affirm an immutable order, adds this personal conclusion: “fortunately. ” '1 But. modern science often criticizes itself and its own ontology. Also, the radical opposition, traced by Heidegger, between otitic science and ontological philosophy is valid only in the case of Cartesian science, which posits nature as an object spread out in front of us, and not in the case of a modern science, which places its own object and its relation to this object in question.

86 NATURE

Certainly we do not ask science for a new, ready-made conception of Nature, but we find in it what [we nee.d| to eliminate false concep­ tions of Nature. On the other hand, the received concepts of “Nature” give to our thinking if not orientations, then at least terms of reference. It is not possible to speak of Nature without speaking of cybernetics. Maybe this is only an ultra-finalism without mechanism, but. we cannot th' rk Nature without taking account to ourselves that our idea of Nature is impregnated with artifice. This is what is both exciting and exasperating in the scientist: lie looks for a way to grasp the phenomenon, but he doesn’t seek to under­ stand it. In this way, for example in embryology, scientists glimpse a phi­ losophy of life, but they forget what they discovered. Driesch,3 by separating the cells of the embryo, was able to realize a regeneration of a new embryo similar to the first. He then tried the coimterproof: con­ necting two hydra together; the new hydra had at first twelve tentacles instead of six, then gradually there was a reduction of twelve tentacles to six as if the type of. species demanded this reduction. Etienne Wolf6 was able to show that monstrosity was an unfortunate functioning of this re­ duction and of this fusion of paired elements. The bifocal sketches of the eye are similarly reduced to just one sketch when the cortical center of vision is destroyed. There is a regulation by a global system. I verytli ng happens as il 7 what remains when we produce a section will resign itself to taking account, of the situation, to make one out of two, or two out of one, as if there were immanence of the whole to the parts, lint the scientist concerns himself little with doing a “philosophy of the organ­ ism.” Immediately after having discovered the phenomenon, he looks for the conditions of it.. So that regeneration is produced, the organizers must be in the two pieces, and this organizer arranges the parts by a se­ cretion. organisme. Rut this can only play the role of trigger (representable to the rtpaipliywcist? Einstein's point ofblew, in a lamuus rejoinder reported by de Broglie, is that “every physical ihçor) should he al>le, beyond every calculation, to be illus­ trated by images so simple that even a child should be able to under­ stand them. ” '1 Operationalises, on the other band, want to detune the variables only; bv the role they play in equations. Can physics give an image of reality? In fact, the operationalises themselves, lot whom con­ cepts are absolutely free, never think it thoroughly lest theyrslumld no longer sav anything in the words of their phvsics, which would be only an ensemble of measurements and previsions deprived of signification for the physicist taken as a human and not as calculator. It is at this junction of the universe of the scientist and the universe of language that we must examine quantum mechanics, at the moment when the scientist-philosopher tries to give a meaning to his formalism. The issue of the debate matters little: what counts for us is the apparition of a new scientific ontology that, however disputable it may fie, will make us forever unable to reestablish Laplacean ontology, at least not with the same dogmatism. The point of departure for the new theory was the failure of the wave-based theory of light when confronted with the facts (cf. the pho­ toelectric effect, of HertxL In 1905 Einstein proposed to come back specifically to a particle-based theory of light In a monochromatic lumi­ nous wave, energy is curled up under the form of particles: photons. But these photons are defined with the help of a frequency, a notion ex­ tracted from the wave-based theory. An argument of the same type, hut with a contrary meaning, ap­ pears in the theory of matter. Elementary atoms do not follow the law of classical mechanics: the evolution of their movement is not continuous hut discontinuous, of such a kind that whole numbers appea- in their re­ sults—whole numbers characteristic of wave-based phenomena. Between 1924 and 1927, dc Ih ugh • sli u\ to liuf ill esc two aspects of reality in a synthesis having a physical signification This brings In, thinking close to Einstein5 Fhe panic I would he an anomaly of the field, the only reality; the position of the panic le would he due to a cer­ tain intensity ol tb field: it is the field oi indent a boni flic panicle would he singular willin' a wave-based phenomenon dial would guide it (the theory ol the pilot wave), I hat would explain dial die pmti, le sub­ mit-, to the influence of ail actions on die held and not jus I to die onlv points that it would iCcogtiiy.e is in c Inssical mn haute

L

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PHYSICS

Bui faced with tiit- obstades provoked by this theory, de Broglie ejmbrared the positions p;l Din r, Bohr, and Heisenberg For them, it is not possible to Glu t svmliesis b< tween waves and particles Waves and par'titles are complementary but mutually exclusive. We can think ither one or the other. For a measurement of quan uni mechanics vve get ei­ ther a notation of a position or o( velocity, but we can never know both the velocity and the position of a particle at. the same time. All the other positions are. equally possible The falling into a position is the fact of out observation, so much so that, de Broglie can call Bohr the “Rem­ brandt. of contemporary physics” 5 and say that the diverse phvsic.s are not defined in a precise way within defined spatiotempora! systems. There is a “reduction” of the packet of waves by the measurement. The: probability of the presence of a particle is not conceived here as in classical mechanics. It. docs not concern anything but our igno­ rance. With probabilist indeterminism, we leave to deal with pure proba­ bility. We admit that, probability enters into the fabric of the real, and the statistical is introduced concerning an individual, generic reality. We have the idea of a wave and the idea of a particle, but each has only a phantom existence, and we can search even less for a synthesis to recon­ cile the two phantoms. If de Broglie took sides with this thesis it. is be­ cause all the other invoked solutions only complicate the equations without taking better account of the facts. However, he always had trou­ ble accepting them. The motives for his change of mind are philosophi­ cal. He under'lines it himself three times in his book: when he speaks of his former attempts at interpretation in the framew'ork of Cartesian rep­ resentation by figure and movement; when he declares that he had always preferred intuitive physical images to the formalism of mathe­ matics; and [when he] recalls Laplace and Poincaré, who admitted that probability resulted from our ignorance or from an overly complicated determinism and that probabilist intuition ended up at, a sort, of subjec­ tivism close to philosophical idealism, even though, as Meyerson pointed out, the physicist is a realist Over against de Broglie, von Neumann tries to extract a probabilist logic within which quantum mechanics would lose its strange character. If for Schrodinger probabilist mechanics takes on the aspect of magic, it’s because it. is seen by a classical logic that tries to integrate it more or less well. Madame Paulette Destouches-Février ' says that the efforts to transform quantum mechanics in classical terms are not themselves clas­ sical because it would be necessary to suppose hidden parameters in order to transform it into a determinism, observed parameters exclud­ ing this completely. This manner of rejoining classical thinking, now, is

n

92 ré A T U R t

not classical. From the mom u it invents hidden parameters in order to preserve itself, it renounces i■s own mode of existence in order to direct itself toward the occult. This bias, which consists in posing the logical question concerning quantum mechanics is more incontestable than a certain manner of sav­ ing the principles bv returning to the occult. On the other hand, these authors often go too far. They try to show that tint old logic is contradic­ tory, that the hidden parameters are inaccessible de jure. There is a misunderstanding here. There is a de facto contr adiction between neo­ classical thinking and experimental results only if these results are ulti­ mate results. If it is legitimate nor to separate philosophy and physics, it is much more contestable to declare that this philosophy, this logic, and this physics ar e the only valid ones. And so Heisenberg's relations of uncertainty would not only an­ nounce a physical incompossibi’ity, hut it would also be necessary to convert this into a “logical ir*timpossibility” (Bachelard)” and to form a universe of discourse in which such an incornpossihilily would he the law Hence the creation of a logic not of two, but of three values. later­ ally, there is creation and annihilation of particles in the act of observa­ tion. But to the states of nonexistence and existence is added the Veto state expressing the possibility of the passage to existence. ” 9 1 he prob­ lems posed to logic by wave-based mechanics are comparable enough to those posed by Zeno’s paradox. The movement is not at lime T in point M, or in time T ’ at point M' It is at no moment between the points. Clas­ sical thinking wants likewise to take account only of positive determina­ tions, to compose them in a unique reality. Wave-based mechanics, now, affirms the impossibility of composing them in a preformed and com­ pletel) accessible reality, j ist as it is impossible for Zeno to form move­ ment starting from points. This amounts to admitting that existing things are not individual realities, hut generic realities: “An isolated movement loses all physical signification, just as in geometrical optics a ray of light, does not have physical signification by virtue of the laws of wave-based optics, and only certain ensembles of movement take on a signification, those that we call ‘measurable ensembles. ” 10 London and Bauer likewise see in quan­ tum mechanics a “theory of species, ” 11 and tfiey put in doubt the idea that every object has an individual existence. There is an “indiscernibiliiy of panicles of the same species.”1' “The function T (x, y, z.) repre­ sents a maximum description of the composed ‘object,’ consisting in the object; properly called (x>, the apparatus (y), and tfie observer (z); nev­ ertheless we do not know in what state the object x is found . ” 1 ‘ If’ the function T gives us probabilities, it does so only iv viezu of a possible mm-

k .

T 93 CLASSICAL

AND

MODERN

PHYSICS

sûrement. There are not, so to speak, only potential probabilities . . . they do not achieve the precision with which die state of the system is currently known. ” 1'1 The statistical phenomenon is thus not composed of virtual objects, one of which would he real and the others fictive. It is the maxi­ mum image of the object, of which the different situations revealed by the measurement are examples. The reason for this effort toward a new logic results from the new re­ lation established between the observed thing and the measurement. The postulate of classical logic is that given the observer as fallible subjectivity, there can he appearance, but this de facto appearance is reducible de jure by a better knowledge of the apparatus and of our sensorial imperfec­ tions. The idea of an “objective truth” is not beyond reach. For the probabilists on the other hand, the apparatus, the observer, and the object are part of a unique reality existing not de facto, but principally de jure. “The classical conception, leaving in the shadows the necessarily limited charac­ ter of our information at the same lime as the action of measuring on the observed system, always postulated ihe possibility of an infinitely precise knowledge, simultaneous with all Lite employed parameters in the de­ scription of this system.” The introduction of the notion of the wave trans­ lates the fact thaï “certain quantitative values [grandeurs], said to be noncommutablc, cannot be simultaneously known with entire certainty, of the sort, that each system characterizes, by a certain number of observ­ able quantitative values, different forms of maximum knowledge which correspond to what we call ‘pure cases. ’ ” 1-0 There is here the idea lhat we should consider the knowledge involved with marginal realities not as a simple approximation, but as a maximum. The idea of maximum preci­ sion no longer exists de jure. There is no more individuated being in the system. We only ever have to deal with families of trajectories. The measuring apparatus, in quantum physics, no longer has the same meaning as in classical physics. For classical physicists, the appara­ tus is the prolongation of our senses. From the gnoseological point of view, the apparatuses are compared to a more precise sensoriality, they make us know the state of a thing. The apparatuses in wave-based me­ chanics “are no longer amplifiers; they put processes of release and of avalanche in play, susceptible to provoking the manifestation of exuemely small phenomena at the macroscopic level, so small that the dis­ proportion between what is really perceived and what one wants to know becomes enormous.”11’ The apparatus does not present the object to us. It realizes a sampling of this phenomenon as well as a fixation. Hence, as Bachelard noted, the factitious character of the modern scientific fact. Known nature is an artificial nature. But isn’t it possible despite it all to retrieve Nature in itself? The very content of the measurement obliges

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us to conceive the measurement differently. The act of measuring is going to fix the object, make it appear in its individual existence. Let’s compare, with London and Bauer, the view ihe observer takes on tilings to that of a witness who watches the observer. For we who consider the system {x (object), y (apparatus), and z (observer)} as an object, the sit­ uation seems little changed in relation to that which we had met earlier when we were considering only the object: we now have three mixtures, one for each system, with statistical correlations among them, linked to a pure case for the total system. In effect, the function 'F (x, y, z) represents a maximum description of the composite “object,” consisting in the object properly called (x), the apparatus (y), and the observer (/.); nevertheless, we do not know in what slate the object x is found. The observer has an entirely other point of view: for him, only the object x and the apparatus y belong to the exterior world, to what he calls “objective.” On the other hand, he has relations of an entirely particular character with himself: he has a charac­ teristic and very familiar faculty that we can call the “faculty of introspec­ tion”: he can take account immediately of his own state. In virtue of this “immanent knowledge,” he is attributed the right to create his own objec­ tivity, that is, to break the chain of statistical coordination . .. by stating, “I am in the state wk,” or more simply, “I see g = gk,” or even directly “f = fk.” It is thus not a mysterious interaction between the apparatus and the object that produces a new t of the system during the measurement. It is only the consciousness of an I that can be separated from the old func­ tion T (x, y, z), and constitute in virtue of its observation a new objectivity by attributing henceforth to the object a new function 'F (x) = uk (x) . 17 We could bring these texts close to Descartes’s on Dioptics: “il is the soul that sees, and not the eye.”ls But. for London and Bauer, the deci­ sive role of awareness has another meaning. In effect, the object to which classical thinking assimilates the physical system is a wave of prob­ ability; the role of the observer is not to make the object pass from the in-itself to the for-itself (as in Descartes): the quantum object is an objeci that does not have actual existence. The role of Lite observer will be lo break the chain of statistical probabilities, to make an individual exis­ tence emerge in act. What makes this existence emerge is not the inter­ vention of a for-itself, but rather a thought that annexes itself to the apparatus. The operation of measurement in wave-based mechanics is an engaged operation. F.very operation of the new mechanics is an op­ eration in the world, which is never foreign lo the act of the measuring. We must distinguish this will lo measure logic on the objects from a militant indeterminism that has the tendency to demonstrate Lite impos-

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sil»ility of determinism, bv showing that every objective description ol'inicrophysical phenomena is transformed in quantum mechanics as soon as we eliminate the hidden parameters from it. But. tins is only a tautology here. Or else it is a dogmatism when we conclude from it that all me­ chanics can only he indeterminism. A theory, as solid as its cxpçi imenial support, carmen, annihilate the possibility of new theories. Facts joined to­ gether by formalism can take on the character of a principle, but these principles are only historical. Weizsàcker, in one of his books, shows that the great discoveries of scientific thought appear less under the form of questions than as affirmations. 111 We open onto a held of thought much more than we close it out. A theory falls into disuse when it no longer nourishes Science. Physical thought cannot be purifiée! of a1coefficient of facticity. To change something here would be to substitute a new dogma­ tism, to consider indeterminism as a sufficient theory. Determinism is not made impossible and unthinkable by a new logic, hut it is rendered improbable Let's compare the history of physical thought with philoso­ phies of history. A conception of History appears used up without a grip on events, but we cannot demonstrate it: the events m Hungary do not make Marxism unthinkable. We can preserve it 'heoretically. Logically there is not a claim of failure. Rut on what ground does one stand in order to say that the revolution is in the apparatus and not in the prole­ tariat.? That the proletariat is, de jure, the apparatus? Is it not to mak° the hidden parameters appear? Beyond a certain point, this thinking is dead: it is not understood, it impede,-, seeing. There is not a decisionism how­ ever, in the choice of a new theor y, but there are motives. We cannot say at what moment the decision is taken: it is always to he taken or already taken. It will have been. The last drop of water operates much more than the other drops: it brings about, a reorganization of the whole ensemble. Tt is in this way that we know, in all the models of knowing. It is m this way that Laplace presented his nebula with all sor ts of reservations. But scien­ tists for a hundred years have accepted it with more dogmatism than did its author, until the day it collapsed: “Scientists share with children, who often have a simple and wily soul, these sympathetic qualities one of which is devotion to the idea, and the other, sincerity in bad faith.” 20 If we want to be entirely convincing, we are making only preparations.

The Philosophical Significance of Quantum Mechanics We may have the temptation to rid ourselves of tile problem of truth. Physics should not be conceived as a search for the truth, it should give

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up determining a real physics: it would be only an ensemble of measure­ ments linked by equations, allowing |us| to foresee the result of future measurements. Formalist physics receives all freedom, but it loses its on­ tological content. It signifies no mode of being, no reality. I.ike all radical nominalism, this nominalism cannot articulate it­ self. It is not the same thing to reduce physics to the simple management of an algorithm and to say that logic must be able to take account of all of our experiences. We want therefore to open logic without consider­ ing it as a simply formal way of defining physical reality. We can equally interpret quantum mechanics in a Kantian sense. This is Wei/.sacker’s position.21 To tell the truth, Weizsàcker takes Kant in different directions. He thinks at first of a sort of psychologism: physics is then only a human representation. We are not obliged to say what it means in the order of Being: atoms are objects of experience, not ob­ jects in themselves, reality is the “totality” of relations between humans and things. This is a slightly vague way to interpret Kant, which lakes the truth back to what is true for everyone and defines the truth by inter­ subjectivity. Likewise, for London and Bauer, the act of observation is an act of objectivation: the object is constructed by the subject. But at the end of their explanation, they wonder if we must see in the community of scientists a “spirit society. ” 22 Isn’t the truth of physics only a welllinked phantasm, common to the community of scientists? They finally appeal to an event that makes this intersnbjeclivity possible. Madame Destouches-Février shows in the same sense that it is not necessary to adopt ihe idealist position, because idealism itself is only another form of objectivism. In effect, it objectifies human representations: “This does noi mean that it is then necessary to adopt an idealist conception of re­ ality, because idealism itself is objectivist in that it objectifies the states of consciousness considered by it as the sole reality.”2:t The relations be­ tween reality and measurement must be conceived outside of the di­ chotomy of in-itself'/ representation. In other places, Weizsàcker says that modern physics is Kantian be­ cause it posits the wave-particle duality', and it assimilates this duality to a Kantian antinomy. The duality between waves and particles is under­ stood only when we refuse to posit it in itself and when we accept them only as phenomena. Kant likewise accorded to science the right to adopt finitist hypotheses. But even in this sense, we can wonder if Kantian phi­ losophy can help us think quantum mechanics. The phenomenon in Kant is objective because it is grounded on an ideality of time and space. This ideality makes of it something other than a phenomenon and al­ lows us to construct a phenomenon having the value of an object. Now quantum mechanics does have this virtue of integrating the manifold.

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which according to Kant is the very definition of objective thought. Clas­ sical thought coordinates the phenomena in an objective model of Na­ ture. This unification seems impossible to us at the level of quantum mechanics. If a philosophy can correspond to quantum mechanics, it will be both a more realistic philosophy, of which the truth will not be defined in transcendental terms, and more subjectivist. The situated and incarnated aspect of the physicist must succeed the universal “I think” of transcendental philosophy. This is what leads Weizsâcker to speak of a new philosophical problem: The function 'P of the atom is constituted in such away that we can make only predictions of probability on other quantitative values such as speed, or on qualities that characterize it as wave (wavelength, phase). Inversely, if I know the wave-based qualities, I may prophesy its particular qualities only with probability. Thus I do not have the right to say “ The atom is a particle” or “The atom is a wave,” but only “It is both a particle and a wave”; and I decide by the disposition of my experience the form under which it is manifested. Is it thus that reality would depend on our good pleasure? Not reality, but the image by which we understand it. We can­ not learn anything of the atom other than by experience, yet experience is a violation of nature. We summarily forge the atom to communicate its qualities in art adopted language to us. In reality it is not spatiotemporal perception that errs, for we learn nothing of the atom other than the re­ sult of a measurement in time and space, t he law of causality is not defi­ cient . . . because by each experience we create closed causal chains; but these fragments of our observation and these isolated causal chains do not fit together in an objective model of process. . . . This situation is not altogether new for human thought. We know that a process must be ob­ served in order to be known, and that this observation changes the pro­ cess in its essence. We know it by the difficulties of self-observation, in which the subject of knowledge becomes its object (Bohr) . 24 Yet more than does the problem posed by introspection, the prob­ lem posed by physics approaches the problem of perception. The dual­ ity of the body and the field evokes the duality of the perceptual process, more and more global and attentive. Madame Desiouches-Février also ends up in this direction while in­ terpreting wave-based mechanics. Physics cannot be realist in the classi­ cal sense: there is not a coincidence with an object in itself. “We are in the presence of a human physics, a physics of solidarity or a collective physics. ” 25 Nevertheless physics cannot be idealist, either. It is rather a question of what Madame Desiouches-Février calls a “partial realism”21’

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c.>r a “participat.ioni.st:” conception .-7 Reality is a notion to affirm .*8 We must strive to distinguish several meanings: • a first plane ol reality, where objects exist in themselves and where the properties that we attribute to them are intrinsic. Madame Deslouches-Février calls this the “plane of existence of physical sys­ tems.” 29 • a second plane of reality, intersubjective, where reality is constituted uniquely by the “results of measurement” *0 and where an object is de­ fined by the whole of its properties—that is, by a whole of results of measurement, in such a way as to eliminate the notion of substance (positivism). • a third plane, the structural plane, transcends the opposition object-subject, the objects corresponding to observed systems, and the subject being prolonged by the measuring apparatus. From the fact that this plane transcends the subjectiveobjective duality, the structural relations dress an absolute character up in the framework of theory. In effect they are independent of the results and of the process of measurement. They are however relative to the species of the system studied, by their independence from the results of observations, they dress up a certain objectivity, comparable to the Platonic objectivity of the Idea vis-à-vis its sensible realizations. But on the other hand, this independence which detaches them from all sensible contact with the object could make them refuse objectivity. In effect they refer not to an object, but to certain mathematical forms necessary for the description of the relation of the subject to the ob­ ject. They present the same ambiguity if we envisage them under the angle of reality; to the extent that they appear completely detached from the results of measurement—that is, from the immediate meet­ ing with the objects studied—they lose all reality, and their nature ap­ proaches mathematical being; but we just saw that the whole critique of knowledge withdrawn into modern physics consisted exactly in un­ masking the illusory character of the phenomenal reality as just as sen­ sible as rational. Of such kind that the character of reality seems to have to take refuge, preferably in the structural plane, relatively more independent, permanent, and coherent than the two precedingplanes. Moreover, the fact that structures are determined by the the­ ory in which they intervene—since they schematize the general condi­ tions on the observers in their relations with the objects—confers unto them a reality that purely mathematical beings independent of all sensible signification do not possess.31

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All of this is only an indical.ioti. How can thi$ notion of structure be distinguished from sum lure in the Kantian sense? Wc would see it only if we perceive dial il can only be thought starling fy0m the per­ ceived thing. It is a question here of a qualitative relation, dépendent on the situation of humans in the world. Is this idea of structure, this structural conception of truth, of de facto order, which abounds with contingencies when we get close to it, so imaginable? We say that the conceptions of quantum mechanics lead us very far from ideas that natural perception give us of the object. Is this true? Yes, if we consider perception in its term, in its conclusion. In this case, then, perception puls us opposite defined beings that at e Jure ex­ teriority, “pure things.” But this is only a half-truth. Perception does end up at the blojir Sacheonly if we consider it not in its field of origin, but in its conclusion. Laplace’s ontology is far from being grounded on natural pert épiions; its conception of perception is due to an elaboration of perception by culture. The ontology of the pure thing is not the onlypossible conclusion of pen option. We must therefore distinguish per­ ception as an isolating attitude, like the art professor teaches, which makes me give to each thing a figurai grandeur, and perception as a nat­ ural attitude, in which such an operation is impossible. In the natural field, I am going to find ambiguous beings, which are neither waves nor particles. What is the wind perceived? Someone? A thing? A phenome­ non? It is all three at once: a continuation of movement without mo­ biles, of behaviors without subjects, as the tail of (lie comet Or the sinning star (Husserl)—that is, probable beings are led back to a sheath of probabilities—after all, what is reflected [ le rejh’.t] is not a unique itjnai vidual, it has multiple functions—and to nondetei minute beings with­ out. this indétermination t endering them ordinary (such as the board behind me, a marginal object), to negative beings whose entire essence is to be absence»#:! . Scheler on the experience of the absence of a chalk­ board)/'” and t.o beings neither finite nor infinite. The gestaltrsts tried to mark the limit of the visual field, but it i impossible to define this limit by a black border: to see black s not to see nothing. All the objects at the limit recover this indétermination, f lic- «try notion of sc ale is an ab­ solutely incomprehensible notion if we do not refer to perceptual expcnence; the homogeneity ol the measured and the measuring implies that the subject makes common cause with space. The idea of an incar­ nated subject is necessary in order to understand tire microscope and micuophysics. It is in approaching myself that I perceive there is disorder in the statistical order. The idea of a reality that includes an infinite se-

lies oF quantitative values is an idea of perception. Perception teaches me the infinite divisibility of space and teaches me that Being is not coinposed of elements. If all this is true, then we see that the meaning of physics is to make us make “negative philosophical discoveries” by showing that “certain af­ firmations which claim a philosophical validity do not in truth have any.”3* It teaches us that the Laplacean conception of being, like ontol­ ogy in the common sense, does not have absolute coherence. Physics destroys certain prejudices of philosophical and noil-philosophical thought without, lor all that, being à philosophy, li limits itself to invent­ ing biases in order to cover up the deficiency of traditional concepts, but it does not posit concepts de jure. It provokes philosophy, pushes it to think valid concepts in the situation that is its own. That does not mean perception contains everything. The internal ciitique of physics leads ns to become aware of the perceived world. The perceived world is in no way an immediate given. The mediation of knowing allows us to retrieve indirectly and in a negative way the perceived world that anterior ideal­ izations had made us forget. Such a conception is not psychologism. Per­ ception does not give us an artificial constr uction of nature.

2

Notions of Space and Time

The Notion of Space Science teaches ns three tilings: 1. Euclidean space is considered as an a priori condition of our science and our experience. It is not a structure de jure. Non-F.uclidean geometers make Euclidean space a particular space by generalizing the notion of space. 2 . Noil-Euclidean spaces teach us that Euclidean space is not a de facto privileged structure. It is not the only real space among all possible spaces. We can consider that it is an aspect that takes non-Euclidean space on little distances. 3 . I'he very question of the nature of space has no meaning. Apparently there are means to resolve experiment;™ the nature of space, by the measurements of which the results would he crucial under the relation of the structure of space. Imagine a surface of a general planar form, except in whal il presents, in its milieu, a hemispheroidal protrusion . .. a surface represented by the transversal section Al’BQRG. Suppose thal this surface constituted the entire universe—that is, that all physical events took place on this surface. In particular, the beings that live there would also be only bi­ dimensional conformations able nevertheless to cover this universe. We ask: Are these beings capable of recognizing the form of it? It would he false to believe that they could see the protrusion. If we are qualified to perceive by vision one of them [the beings] on a plane, it is because the luminous rays have a rectilineal figure in three-dimensional space and so in this way they [the rays] cannot cross the ledge; it [the ledge] hides the world situated behind it from us as a result; hut in the

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bi-dimcii sionai world tiitt we depicLed, the luminous rays will describe curbed trajectories on the surface; the hill thus eclipses nothing, an object situated behind it, at point C, can be seen from A, thanks to the light, via B. Nevertheless there is it mean by which animated beings of this world would be capable ° f recogn ring the curve of their bi-dimensiortal space. They could in effect detect the separation of it in relation to the plane, bv means of surveying. Having attached a rope to a peg at the center of the ledge, they can de­ scribe a c ircle. They can then measure the diameter and perimeter of the circle. The relation of these two measurements could only give a number inferior to it = 3 .14. The reason for this is that “the line BPQis not a ‘true’ diameter of the circumference, since it should pass within tlie hill. . hey would be no less capable of recognizing the curvature of Iheir surface, to which the diameter measured by them furnishes a num­ ber inferior to tt = 3.14.” At a certain distance below this superficial uni­ verse, we represent, another world, either A, IV or G, dressing up everywhere the planar and lived form with bi-dintensional beings. Imagine that in this world is exercised a mysterious force that distorts, in a peculiar way, all the objec ts and standards of length. In cutler to de­ scribe the nature of this distortion, w'e can suppose fen example that tight rays fall from above on the first surface, cross it, and carry onto the sec­ ond the shadow of these objerts. The surface-beings of these two worlds would know nothing of these rays that bring the third dimension . . . we suppose in ef fect that under the effect of this mysterious force all the ob­ jects of the world [of the second universel are deformed in such a way that they acquire precisely the grandeur of the shadows corresponding to the universe ABC, shadows projected toward the bottom. The inevitable consequence of this supposition is obvious; when the beings [of the sec­ ond surface] make geometrical measurements, they have to append everywhere their graduated rule exactly as many times as is required by the geometrical operation corresponding to the world ABC. If they thus trace around point B a circumference passing by 1’, symmetrical to Rl’Q. and measure it with their standard, they will find in the relation of the circumference to the diameter the number obtained in the world ABC. Now. what are the inhabitants of world ABC going to think of its form? They will ignore the existence of the mysterious force, given that they no­ tice nothing of it; nor do [hey claim that the length of theit meters varies in the transference, since ^tll the other objects, without excluding theit own body, ate similarly modified. They will thus manage to infer 1 out it,

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just as do rlu- beings of world ABO, dial their universe-surface is a plane with a protrusion. 1 And so there is not an experience of pure geometry in which we can grasp the snucturc ol’ space. It is impossible t.o relate this or that proposition concerning space to the structure of space, and some other [proposition] to a physical influence. Then' is the experience neither of pure physics nor of pure geometr y. The same physico-geometrical en­ semble is capable of covering both flat space and curved space This puts in doubt the idea of a nature in itself of space. The pari that amounts to the structure of space and to the: physics of the milieu can be established only by a mind that knows space from the outside. But the world is not something that we can dominate. The result is thus not a de facto result, but a result, in principle. To pose the question of the nature in itself of space is to admit a kosmostheoivs. The question is not posed for living be­ ings because it has no meaning for them: space is part of their situation, yet a space of situation is not in-itself. Reichenbach’s artifice is mislead­ ing, to the extent that it figures in three dimensions a space that has but two. To the extent that, its analogy is transcribed in a Euclidean lan­ guage, it risks for this very reason to mislead us. After such analogies, we imagine that non-Euclidean space is present in the sense of a living being, that we can see as well in two dimensions as we can in three. By thinking in this way, we will get used to considering non-F.uelidean space as being intuitive. To say, then, that, space is not Euclidean is not to say that space is non-Euclidean, or Riemannian, for example. Space is not .something. The different geometries are metrics, and metrics are nei­ ther true nor false; and as a consequence, the results of these different metrics are not alternatives. If we take relativistic science seriously, we must say that Rietnanniau space is not real, but objective to the extent that it. allows lor Ein­ stein: ii allows for better integrating the results ol modern physics than does Euclidean space. We can thus speak of a closed space, such that in pursuing it we return to the same plai n. The experimental verification is relative to it. If space is closed, it is clear that there can be a double image of the same star, the whole difficulty being only to identify them. Whatever the results of the theory of relativity, if they verify the objectiv­ ity of Riemannian space, they do not. authorize us to say that, space is Riemannian. It is a question o f ‘ parametering,” nothing more. In this sense, the idea of closed space must not be considered as a return to a finit.ist thesis and as an overcoming of Kantian relativism, but on the contrary, as its accomplishment, (such is the position of Brunschvicg).

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Arc these considerations die end of the philosophy of space? Yes, if the object of physical theory is all that we can call the real, whether we give to this construction the sense of a massive realism, as scientists gen­ erally have the tendency to do (cf. Einstein: “Yon believe in a god who rolls dice and I believe in the only value of the laws in a universe where something objectively exists, that I seek to grasp in a savagely speculative manner” ) . 2 But this tendency to convert relations into things ends up at paradoxes of the type: science cannot pass itself off as philosophical considerations, but philosophy must be founded on science, which amounts to saying that science attains the Absolute or that “the physicist will never accept that an entity—time—whose symbol figures in its cal­ culations should not be considered and treated as a physical quantitative measure” ;3 or whether we adopt Brimschvicg’s position: science gives us only the constructed object and nothing else. Except that this object constructed by science lets the contingency it has owing to our carnal contact be sensed. Bergson responds to this question in a passage added to the sec­ ond part of the “Introduction” to The Creative Mind: The universe of relativity is just as real, just as independent of our mind, just as absolutely existing, as that of Newton and of the community of men: only, whereas for the community of men, and even for Newton, this universe was an ensemble of things (even if physics limits itself to studying relations between things), Einstein’s universe is not more than an ensem­ ble of relations. Invariable elements that we take here as constitutive of re­ ality are expressions where parameters enter, which are all that we would want, which do not represent more of time or space than does anything else, since it is the relation between them that will exist alone in the eyes of science, and since there is no longer either lime or space if there arc no more things, or if the universe has no figure. In order to reestablish things and, as a result, time and space (as we necessarily do each time that we want to inquire about a determined physical event, perceived in deter­ mined points of space and time), one of course has to restore a figure to the world, but it is by having chosen a point ot view, adopted a system of reference. Moreover, the system chosen becomes, by that very fact, the central system. The theory of relativity has precisely the essential function of guaranteeing that the mathematical expression of the world that we find front this arbitrarily chosen point of view will be identical if we con­ form ourselves to the rules that it posits, to those that we will have found from any point of view whatsoever. Retain only this mathematical expres­ sion, there is no more time than anything else. Restore time, yon re-estab-

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lish tilings, but you have chosen a system of reference, and the physicist who will he attached to it. There cannot he another system of reference for the moment, even if any other one could have been chosen.'1 Bergson too often claims lor philosophy only the right of an intu­ ition of time different from the determinations of physics and seems to say that the essence of space exhausts the intuition of space (such is the thesis in The Creative Mind before the note). The text of the note does not place measured time and lived time in view, but rather the equations of the physicist concerning spaces and things, without which these equa­ tions could not concern Nature. Physics is possible only if we can have a perception of space. The equation of the scientist must not be consid­ ered as an entity comparable to the Platonic Idea. We could say that the attitude of the perceiving human before science symbolizes with the sci­ entific attitude, in the sense that the human before science is as little sunk into a Euclidean conception as is the human after science. There is in vision an anticipation of the unity that science will realize in articu­ lated form, there is the promise of what will be realized by science. Hence the idea of experiencing the perceived world with this idea that perceived space is not Euclidean (cf. R. K. l.uneburg, “Metric Meth­ ods in Binocular Visual Perception” ) . 5 l.uneburg takes up Helmholtz’s experiment: The subject must regulate points of light in the dark, in a way to construct two parallel rails. The subject observes the parallels even though there is a curve: the right angles are concave near the sub­ ject and convex far from it. By taking up this experiment, the American mathematician seeks to give a mathematical law to our perception in the dark and finds that visual space is a Riemannian space of constant nega­ tive curving for each individual. But I.uneburg’s collaborators con­ tested, in the name of the experimental results, the exactitude of this assimilation. Was it a matter of a factual question? Behind this discor­ dance, is there not a reason in principle? Can we construct a physical space starting from a series of punctual placements? II'we suppose so, is this not because we represent visual space as a second, real space and that, we imagine another space that is a thing all the same? But is there a meaning to wondering what the form of perceived space is? Or to saying that this is imposed in a univocal fashion (see the example of perspec­ tive)? We can say neither that our space is Riemannian nor that it is nonRicmannian, any more than we can speak of the tendency to curb space. Perceptual space is polymorphous. The perceptual field offers us the first model of Being, with which science works in order to give an articu­ lated vision of Being.

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The Notion of Time Science can make only “negative philosophical discoveries, ” 12"1 tell us what space and time are not, hut only on the condition that we understand (hat these negations must not be. taken as masked affirmations. Science does not provide an ontology, not even under a negative form. It has only the power to divest pseudo-evidence of its pretension to be evi­ dence. After the critique of'absolute time and unique time by Einstein, we could no longer represent time according to classical conceptions. But. if it is true that there is the negation of the idea of simultaneity applied to the whole of the universe, and thus an idea of the unirity of time, then there art' two ways to understand this idea: either in a paradoxical way, which consists in taking the view opposite to common sense by affirming the plurality of times; or on the same level as common sense, as a psy­ chological—and thus exoteric—translation of physical conceptions, comparable to the way Zeno presented movement as being impossible. But Zeno’s paradox was also the occasion to refine our conceptions of Being. Likewise for the pulverization of time within relativistic, physics: w'e can present it as a replacement for common sense, hut then we often have a naive ontology; we can, on the other hand, present the two physical discoveries while being content to say what science says with assurance and by seeing there the givens, of which every ontological elaboration must take account Now what does science tell u.s for certain? . fhe time of physics is a relative time and not an absolute time. 1 lie time of physics is a measurable time. At the origin of every scientific intuition of time, there is the choice of unities of time, and so, for ex­ ample, staggered time has ’ong been considered canonical: the equal­ ity of staggered days measured the equalities of the duration. 2 . This meant that for physics, time is a variable isolated by thinking, but which however cannot be: thought as a separate reality. There; is a soli­ darity among all die notions of physics like causality, light, space, uni energy. Physics proposes to verify this ensemble of notions. The en­ semble, and not the concepts taken one by one. It is not a matter here: of doubting the physical reality of time. Such a doubt has no mean­ ing, since it would be to consider time as a real thing 11 science veri­ fies an ensemble of parameters, it is because it studies a massive Being in which whatever time, space, matter, etc., are must appear not so much as juxtaposed realities, but rather as one undivided reality. In this way, according to Whitehead, science today teaches u.s that con1

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cepts (like lhat of time) are abstractions of constant terms.7 These ab­ stract products do not correspond to separated terms, hut they are not nothing, either, bftcau.se that of which we speak is abstraction. Sci­ ence is a rigorous ensemble of constructed elements lhat we cannot separate from the Whole that justifies it. 3. Time is not a phenomenon indifferent to nature or to events that take place in it, or to the point of view of the subject who observes in lime. The conditions of the measurement of time must be considered as limiting the very nature of time that we consider.

For classical science, each instant of time is valid from one end of the world to the other: it cuts a transverse: slice through the universe and would yield the entire universe by the addition of this slice to new slices. In reality this notion of time is not to be taken as an absolute, as consti­ tuting the inevitable constitution of every thought of the universe; it is not a trail inherent to the very essence of things, it is confused with the measurement of time; yet this never allows us to assure a common “now” at two faraway places. Hither, for example, the problem that consists in evaluating the duration of a voyage from the Earth to Pluto: the notion of simultaneity loses its meaning, and there is no meaning in localizing what happens here on the scale of what happens there. Or, an observer on Mars and another on Earth, both able to correspond with the help of a ghl signal: it is impossible for them to synchronize their watches. In effect., the time taken by the light signal to go from Earth to Mars and from Mars to Earth can be considered as determined only if the clocks on Mtirs and Earth are already synchronized.8 Thus the de facto condi­ tions of the measurement of simultaneity cannot be separated from the very notion of time. Remarks like these put the unicity of time in ques­ tion. And so, as is often the case, a situation that until now appeared as a de facto situation now appears as a principle, and it is here that there is a novelty in thought. Here is the ensemble of negative truths that science presents to us. But to say these truths, which have their meaning fully only in scientific practice, is wholly other than to translate them into paradoxes consisting of saying black where common sense says white. We will speak of the di­ lation of time or time contracting itself. We all have the impression of a more or less dense time, of different tempi, but without abandoning the idea of a unique time: what is age for a dog is youth for a man. But the paradoxes that certain physicists developed at the beginning of the theory of relativity go much further. What is to come for me may be the past for you. It is in this sense that Becquerel said that for an observer sit­ uated on Earth, a traveler voyaging on a bullet would take eight hours to

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accomplish a round trip, even though for the traveler, the voyage took only four hours/1 We suffer a certain malaise with such paradoxes. How can we tele­ scope different durations without measuring one by the other? The idea of a plurality of lime is falsified if we present time as simultaneous in­ stants. Is not the paradoxical presentation linked to a way of thinking that is impossible in its principle? We scuttle universal time, but we make use of it. In a more precise form, we have to recall what Bergson said con­ cerning I .orent/.’s equations in Durée et simultanéité. The physicist, having set up a system that allows him to pass from one reference to another, can do so only by getting a foothold in a system that he immobilizes in relation to others that appear as mobile. We have to allow a stationary point and suppose that in other points time is not the same for tin: ob­ servers who would be placed there. But in this case, there is only one sin­ gle lived time, the others are only attributed. This operation being reversible, it amounts to the same as fixing the stationary point in S or in S’. But if we want to be placed in all the points at once, and not just give a reciprocal value to the stationary points, then I have to compare the times lived by everyone, and not just the lived time and the attributed times. Now these lived times are non-relative. The point of view of physi­ cists is only a semi-relativism, and we take seriously the point of view of an observer who would see the time of all the points of view at once. The paradoxes of relativity come from its absolutist character, according to Bergson. In order to have a veritable plurality of time, we must have dis­ joined times and only disjoined limes. Bergson strives to conceive relativity philosophically. He finds in the doctrine of physicists an absolutely valid element: the conception of a time that would not be independent of our instruments of measure­ ment and that would be conceived such that our instruments of mea­ surement help us to define it. “The measurement of a thing is, in the eyes of physics, the thing itself.” He considers this doctrine as his own, intends to propose a development of it faithful to its principle, but not confused with the physicists’ use of this principle. He wants to put physics in question, in the name of the very principles of physics, to bring about what we could call an "overcoming from the inside." He finds that the idea of the concept of time is not developed in a coherent man­ ner. The physicist, formulating the principle of relativity, tends to make believe that the time of a time situated in S is not superposable on an­ other physicist’s time situated in S’. By saying this, the physicist is both faithful and unfaithful to his principle: faithful, since he links time to the instruments of measurement, but unfaithful, since he confuses the

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effectively lived time of the observer situated in S and the attributed time of the obsetvcr situated in S'. "I.oreni/'s formulae express quite simply what must he tli me.i-.ni emenis attributed to s', so that the physi­ cist in S sees the plush ist imagined fry him in S', to find the same speed of light as him.” The time S' is neither by the observer on S nor by the ob­ server on S’. The time S ’ is a perspective on time, not time itself. The va­ rieties of time are no longer a treason to doubr the unity of time, any more so than the variations of the quantitative magnitude of an object arc reasons to doubt its constancy. On the contrary, lie must change views so that he slays the same when he distances himself The phenom­ enon ofthe plurality of time is a phenomenon of'perspective. The con­ ception of the relativist, physicist is an egocentric, conception. He thinks in a situation and give us the representation that we get from other situ­ ations starting from the former, given that the stationary situation is or­ dinary. He multiplies the successive egocentric views rather than bringing about the philosophical coexistence ofthe times o ltb e differ­ ent observers. By the bias of equations, lie attains a multifaceted solip­ sism. He thinks the world successively from all points of view, but never from all points of view at once. What the philosopher looks for are the conditions of possibility of such an equation. The philosopher starts from the relativity inherent, t.o each observer and wonders how intersub­ jectivity is possible, how this idea of coexistence saw the day—he seeks to disengage the deep meaning of our singular situation and our belong­ ing to the same world. It is a matter of justifying physical thought by rea­ sons other than his own and of giving ontological signification to the practical difficulties that, the scientist meets, of understandii ig the mean­ ing of the situation better than lie understands himself; what is proper t.o a philosopher is to understand what is done better than those who do it. If physicists reproach Be.rgson for certain errors, it is because they do not understand that he is situated on another plane than they are. Nevertheless, if Durée et simultanéité had not been understood by the physicists dm mg its publication, physics afterward moved closer t.o Bergson and was even inspired by certain of his themes. We admitted that the plurality of time was not necessary, that we had to distinguish between lived time, attributed time, real time, and possible time. The de­ velopment, of wave-based mechanics ended up at a self-critique of objec­ tive thinking and at thinking that the use of algorithms was not an exhaustion oftiie.se concepts. Capek, in an article entitled “La théorie betgsonienne de la matière”1" (Rivue de. métaphysique et. île. momie, 195.H), speaks in order to translate the plurality of time, of a plurality of temporal thylhms, which puts everything into question again, because if it is only a question of the.

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plurality of tempi, tlien tlu-re is no longer a plurality of time, since the plu­ rality of rhythms does not exclude the par ticipation of these rhythms in a factor F. Likewise he shows that in the space-time continuum, we must speak of a temporalization of space rather than a spatiali/ation of time. Ac­ cording to Costa de Beauregard, Bergson exaggerates by asking for a unique time, it suffices that all temporalities go in the same direction. That poses a problem to physicists: Why do all times go in the same direction? But that drags a dynamic cosmology along with it, compatible with relativ­ ity and comparable to the dynamic philosophy of Bergson. S. Watanabe ad­ mits that the physicist necessarily borrows from consciousness, because we find in it notions that the physicist uses constantly, but of which he cannot take account, at least to relate them to a lived experience." Bergson may have deformed relativist physics, but physics became Bergsonian. 1'he idea of the growth of entropy signifies nothing without a positive meaning of the flowing of psychological time. The fact of intersubjectivity, of the coex­ istence of worlds, is considered as a given by physics. This congruence of consciousness must be considered as a participation in one same life. Watanabe sees in the growth of entropy the sign of life in matter. In conclusion, for the physicists, the last sense of the relativist equations is not given, it must be related to other domains. In particular, we have to make phenomena of quantum mechanics intervene. 1'hat means that K.insteinian theory must be followed by a critique of continu­ ity in the measurement of time. It is the conception of a “cellular space,” of an atomic time, the “chronon,” below which we cannot descend. We end up evidencing, as a milieu, a milieu of which we would know to say only that it is neither temporal nor spatial into evidence. In the eyes of physicists, the critique of the dogmatism of unique time appears as a par­ ticular element within a general critique of these notions. That said, we must recognize that in his polemic, Bergson is open to certain critiques:1 1.

First of all, he is reproached for having believed that this experience of time with which we are in contact, and that wo must compare to sci­ ence, is entirely elosed on itself and without relation to scientific time. Bergson was never of this opinion. At the beginning, he thought that differential calculus can give an approximation of quality. It is only at the end that he brutally accords space to science and time to philoso­ phy. Why this separation into two domains without common measure? Why not admit that physics, as objective as it is, can he highly mean­ ingful for philosophy? There is, as Bergson shows in his Introduction to Metaphysics, 12 behind the authority of science, the halo of science at work, and this atmosphere is full of philosophy.

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2. Bergson was wrong to speak of an internal experience of time without admitting that space can be the object of identical considerations. In Durée et simultanéité, does he not declare that “the measure of space ex­ hausts its essence”? 11 Science attains the absolute in what concerns space. Must we not retrieve the polymorphous space that is of our lived world, arid which is frequented before tnetrim*, be they F.uclidean or non-But lidcan? 3. He. was wrong again when he thinks of the internal experience with which we can manage to coincide. Again, Bergson never supported this idea, as the text already cited from The Creative Mind attests. There Bergson posed the problem: The equations of science consid­ ered in themselves arc; like 1'latonic Ideas. How does this world partici­ pate in these Ideas? In order to apply them, the world must present a figure. Unless the world presents a figure, there is no properly spatial, any more than temporal, meaning to the world. The task of philoso­ phy is to restore not only the duration, but also the world of things, which presents a figure. The Absolute that the philosopher returns to is that of the incarnated and situated subjec t: “We cannot be displaced in relation to ourself.”14 As a conscious body, 1 ground an Absolute. What Bergson indicated as being the proper given of philosophy is not interior time, but the time in which we are placed, in which we Live, not the signification time and space of science, but actual time and space (cf. the note in The Creative Mind). “The times ofrestrained relativity are defined in a way to be all the times when we are not, save one. We could not be there because we bring with the self, every­ where wc go, a time that chases away the others, like the clearing at­ tached to the walker, makes the fog back away with each step.”1’ The very image of the clearing implies that my duration is not a purely in­ terior one. Certainly universal time is not the same as mine (there is not objective simultaneity), but il cannot Lie absolutely other, either. Something responds to my duration: “We have to wait fo.r the sugar to melt.” But the others? Is the absolute of their situation the same as the absolute of mine? I form the idea of others by borrowing from my re­ lation with t.he tilings. 1 can grasp the other*; only as occupying situa­ tions within my world. It is because two consciousnesses have in common the extreme portion of the field of their exterior experience that their time is one. “We surprise ourselves doubling and multiply­ ing our consciousness [growth oi the field of perspective [, transport­ ing it to extreme confines of our exterior experience, then at ttic end of the field of new experience that is in this way offered, and in this way then indefinitely: these at e multiple consciousnesses issued from ours, similar to ours, that we charge with making the chain across the

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immensity of the universe mid with attesting bv tin* identity of their in­ ternal durations ;md the contiguity of their exterior experiences, the ini ..y of one impersonal Time." This co-perception i:, not identical perception. There is all the shift that we would want. It is simply the positing of a unit)— that is, a philosophical non-physical simultaneity. If the phvsieist. believes to retrieve a world behind equations, it is be­ cause there is a participation in this intersubjectivily. This philo.soph! cal simultaneity emerges from our belonging to the world as the world from which we arise. Ft reveals the world's hidden framework, which attests to whatever .spatiotemporal densities that can separate ns. The result, of relativity is not in its exoteric formulations. It is a question not of destroying the ideas of common sense, bur of .specify­ ing them.

It remains to elaborate, starting from the critiques of the concep­ tion of causality, space, and time, a new vision of Nature. We will ask it of Whitehead.

The Idea of Nature in Whitehead

aplacc’s classical conception tacitly supposed the id! a l an unlim­ ited being dominating nature, being abls thus to conceive Nature as I— a staggered Whole, composed of an in.inih of temporal and spatial points, individuated and without the least possible ontological confu­ sion. This “contemplato of the world" dominated the world with the help of a system of thermal laws, irreducible de jure to a unity, and which take account of the totality of phenomena without any remainder. In such a conception, space and time must receive a particular treat­ ment. They must be both rigorously distinct and rigorously got . dative. Rigorously distinct: that is, that no confusion can exist between space (the order of .simultaneous events) and time (the order of successions). But. also a narrow correlation: that is, time and space form a system. We can conceive one of the two only in making use of the other, hi order to think the simultaneity of space, we must precipitate in time all that is of the order of succession. Space and lime limit themselves in relation to each other. Classically separated front each other, and moreover strictly correlative, space and time are today neither separable by an ideal analy­ sis, nor reunited in a system by what Kddington called “vast moments like the world, ” 1 or by a perfectly neat succession of instants. There is no spatiality cleansed of all temporal depth. In the same sense, Whitehead can say that “classical thought rests on the idea of'a flash point. ” 2 For such classical thought, the futur! s what i; not yet, the past what, is no longer, and there is the (lash of the present, that represents the only real being. Time is reduced to a punctual moment Whitehead puts this idea of a spatial “unique emplacement” of each instant in question again, an idea according to which each being occupies its place, without: participation in other spatiotcmporal exis­ tences. From the first impression, he says, this concept reveals “trimness. ” 3 He is not in a position to lake account of “brute facts. ” '1 To 113

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consider brûle facts, we will observe that “the edges of nature; are always ragged.”r’ According to Whitehead, it is not possible to think of punctual spatiotcmporal existences, nor to compose the world from such insights. These punctual existences are only the result of a work of thought, of a work of division. Suppose that we have before us a barge passing in front of the Louvre. What is given to us is the life of the barge and the life of the Louvre. We divide the duration, during which the Louvre and the barge are given to us, into parcels of “events,” as distant as possible. Such a form of thought is not illegitimate, but to think that, we can compose Nature from the dust of such events is to place the cart before the horse. In Nature mid Life, Whitehead, after having said how much tlu; old con­ ception of Nature remains alive among physicists even though each of the elements that composed it had been questioned, defines it in the fol­ lowing way: “the old conception allows us to make an abstraction of change and to conceive the full reality of nature at a given moment, ab­ straction made of all temporal duration . . . nature at a given moment is . . . as real at an instant when there was nature at any other instant, or not.”1' Newton’s weakness comes from the fact that he conceived but a single mode for occupying space. What then happens to velocity at the moment under consideration, since velocity and the moment require being conceived according to the way the state of things at other times and in other places affects the occupation of this location? Infinitesimal calculus does not help. Velocity is only the limit of a function in a point, but Newtonian physics in no way explains this mathematical definition of velocity. According to modern views, the “process” is the given. At an instant, there is nothing. Every instant is only a nucleus destined to group the givens together. In this way there is no Nature in an instant: all reality implies a “moving on of nature. ” 7 The negation of a unique emplacement must not be conceived as the affirmation of a multiple emplacement, in the same sense that em­ placement was understood by the classics. With such a conception, we renounce only the ideas of Nature as a “complex of facts without mean­ ing,” which would suffice unto themselves, and would have “passive” or “accidental” relations.s There is here possibly an attempt to find an “in­ ternal activity” in Nature, but such an activity remains a problem for Whitehead, and does not consist in a process from Nature to Spirit. It is not a question of a reversal of the sign within a same conception of space and time, a reversal which would introduce magic and irrationalism into physics. The negation of absolute simultaneity is in no way the affirma­ tion of a future equal to the present, which would be only a heuristic manner of reversing common sense. If we perceive in the present a star that no longer exists, then we perceive in the present that which in fact

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is past. Bi.il. we must not ligure that the critique of'unique emplacements consists in saying that our present and die existenc e of the perceived slatare two flashes of one same event.. U would again be to share the classical conception of Laplace’s kosmostkeoros. Whitehead invites us to conceive nonserial relations between space and time. Whitehead coiise< ves the nght to speak ol' “successions” and “simultaneities,” but only those that will no longer be in themselves, but will rather be spectacles ol succes­ sions and simultaneities. In 1840, while discussing the notion ol class, Whewell says that “one natural class of objects is determined, not by an exterior frontier, but by a central point within—not bv that which it. strictly excludes, but by that which it eminently include by an example, not by a ptece.pt,.^ We could likewise say that, for Whitehead, time and space art; examples of individuals, or types of species. No matter how small they may be, we can find what, divides them. Nevertheless, there is a temporal unity, because all the thickness of time is centered. In any ease, the negation of unique emplacement must not be under stood as the affirmation of multiple emplacements. Whitehead takes sides nei­ ther for aciion-at-a-dist.ance, nor for actiou-by-transmission. In effect, in the case of the edeetron, these two conceptions are grounded. The electron is not found where its charge is. The electron is a certain prop­ erty that plays a focal role, and to which we relate the observed physical events in a “situation current. ” 10 The distinction between action-at-adistance and action-by-transmission would be grounded if Being were identical, but the electron does not exist in the sense of absolute Being, which is all or nothing: the electron does not reside in a punctual and objective spatiotemporality; it is an “ingredient” (this word also has the sense of making an ingression ) 11 in its whole vidn.ty, it is the hallway of certain “traces,” of certain “roles” observed by the observer. 12 It is a transspatial and transtemporal being, but not any more separated from appearances. According to classical thinking, Whitehead tells us again, the objects are “uniform,”l;! that is, localized at every moment in a point of the duration But why would there not be nonunilbi m objects? We will meet them in our experience of incai nated subjects, as for example sound: we perceive it as a whole in a certain duration, but it is at no time of this duration, although the. notes that Compose it can be localized. The temporal minima will not be made of indivisible moments of time, but will always have a certain thickness of time. Bui if Whitehead pushes back the notions of action-at-a-distance and action-by-transinission, what does he propose in their place? He speaks of “overlapping relations,” of “relations of extension,” to he un­ derstood before all spatiotemporal specification as the foundation of time and space as well as their union . 11 The spatiotemporal unities over-

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lap. The task imposed on the philosophy of Nature would be lo deepen the relation that exists between these; unities. It is not a question here of the spiritual interiority invoked by Brunschvicg, and compatible with the exteriority of a pure mechanism. What Whitehead seeks is an element that is not a part but already a Whole. Hence the idea of an “ether of events” which would be the ultimate substance of matter. 19 Such a conception implies a critique of the notions of matter and substance. The traditional conception of space and time as Jeniaincrs, as “that in which nature; is installed” orders a conception of matter and substance. Matter can be only a substantial entity of which till phenom­ ena will be the attributes. The accents of our experience are thus dis­ placed from the attribute to the substance. We thus realize a simple process of thought, legitimate no doubt if it is aware, and which consists in a process from sense, or from sense-awareness to discursive knowl­ edge. The “course of nature” was interpreted as “the history of matter,”1G “as the chances of matter in the adventure of nature. ” 17 “If we must look for a substance somewhere, I will find it in events. ” 18 The event is natu­ rally opposed to the object. The pyramids. A thought which sticks to the objects will see (hem as something invariable. But the pyramids are meticulous at every moment of existence. The object is what does not pass, the eternal, the recognizable, and the event appears only once, the unique. But this is only a first approximation. If we realize the events separately, what would then be posited is the problem of the origin of the object. The object is not foreign to the event and vice versa, but not in the manner of continued Cartesian creation, because to say that ob­ jects are continued events would be to recommence Descartes’s error. The critique of unique emplacement must make the conception of the object and the event possible. The object is the focal property to which we can attach variations submitted to a held of forces. There is an “in­ gression” of the object in a current of the situation. The object is the abridged way of marking that there was an ensemble of relations. The abstraction is not. nothing: replaced in its context, it is true. What is true is that something continues to be here and at such a time, or that “Na­ ture contains in itself enormous permanence.” The existence of the great pyramids as objects makes us thereby conceive the spanning of the events in relation to one another. But this abstraction that is the object must remain an abstraction. To think Nature as a process from the event to the object is to take “our abstractions for realities. ” 19 We can only un­ derstand the nature of Being by referring to our “self-awareness,” to per­ ception in the state of its coming-to-be or birth.-0 If this experience is not taken into consideration, it is because it is repr essed by the distances that we establish between “causal nature” and

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“apparent nature,” between the fust qualities and the second . ' 1 Accord­ ing to Whitehead., these distances have no raison d’etre. “All that we know of Nature is in (he same boat and destined to sink together.”2- The construction of science, is an explanation of simple perceived things. We must deny the “bifurcation of Nature” and consult both abstraction and perception .23 What does this return to self-awareness givè us? Il 1 refer to self-awareness, 1 find there a complex of'events and in this whole, two in­ gredient. factors: on the one hand, a foyer of the duration, and in this cast: Nature presents a “now” that serves as the model of the construc­ tion of lime; and on the other hand, a spatial foyer, which means the dt tinition of the present, that is, to be here. The positing of being in perception is simultaneously the positing of a spatiotemporal matter by our body, and defined such as it appears to us who perceive. Hence: rfhe unity of events, their inherence in each other, appears as the cor­ relate of their insertion in the unity of thinking being. 2. The mind must not be considered as an impartial observer of Nature: “its awareness takes part in the process of Nature."24 3. This process of Nature which assures the inleriorily of events in rela­ tion to one another, our inherence in the Whole, links observers to­ gether. It is what joins. Tire process of Nature is represented here as making progress, as being annexed to the body o, lubjecls. In other words, the process of Nature, which corresponds to the unity ot the sensing body, and since the body is itself an event, makes the unity of the body, and also makes die unity of different observers, it is also a Nature for many. There is a sort of reciprocity between Nature and me as a sensing being. I am a part of Nature and function as any event of Natur e: l am by my body part oi Nature and the parts of Nature allow for them relations of the same type as those oi my body with Nature. Whitehead tries to think causality and knowledge as two vari­ ables of the same relation. Hume’s weakness was to rake the immedi­ ate and not to have grasped this type of infrastructure, behind the immediate, lor which our body gives us the feeling. The pressure of tlie duration is as much a generality as it is an individuality. 1.

The critique of unique emplacement makes us understand the on­ tological value of perception. What l pet reive is both for me and in the things. Perception is made starting from the interior of Nature: 1 be­ come aware of the lamp which is held in front of me in a temporal sense. Nature is given to ns only in sense awareness, and perception brings ns a term to which one cannot come any closer. Not only i.s Nature for thought a “dosed nature," hut it is also dosed to the sense awareness it-

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self.-’ Sense awar eness puts us in the presence of a term that cannot be approached at first, that is its '‘terminus,”2e all the while being its con­ trary insofar as it is revelation and "rests in itself,"'i ' and in its opacity. It is thus first, as close as possible, that which is closest, and second as dis­ tant as possible, separated from us by all the distance of its coincidence with itself, by its viscosity. It is thus both near and far. Its proximity (there is nothing more between sense awareness and it) is to be at a distance, precisely because it is the last, or first term—that, which is informed by is in a hundred places; it is what has never been unveiled, and which re­ mains intact alter unveiling. By definition perception puls us in the pres­ ence of a defuntivaly opaque term. In other words, Nature that, we perceive is as distant and as close as possible, and for the same reasons. There is nothing between me and the Nature that I perceive. When I perceive a thing, 1 cannot conceive of a perception interposed between me and the object. But this extreme proximity is at the same time the greatest distance, because there is a radical distance between the thing that coincides with itself and the transparent being of the fact, that it per­ ceives, because the first term is a hundred places removed from that which is informed by it. Nature is thus what remains intact after percep­ tual unveiling, what, is indifferent to the look that I pose upon it. There is a transcendence of Being, to the extent that it must be at a distance to be attained without intermediary. But Whitehead s analysis is not limited by this claim of the tran­ scendence of Nature. Nature is more essentially for him an “o< currence,” which means that it is entirely in each of its apparitions and never exhausted by arty of them. And these, two characters (immanence and transcendence) are for Whitehead strongly united. “There is no means to stop Nature to look at >t.”M If wc try to improve our access to this, our effort is in vain. Perception is not what will benefit from it, but another perception. Nature is always new to every perception but it is never without a past. Nature is something that continues, that is never grasped in its beginnings, although appearing always new' to us. According to Whitehead Nature is a species of activity which is ex­ ercised without being comparable t.o the activity of a consciousness or of a mind. If we cannot stop it. it is not because it is made of instants, but because it is an activity, because it. befctomes. There is on this point a dif­ ference with Sartre, for whom the moon in its first quarter is what it is, that is, not a quarter but. a complete being; with Sartre, Being is without exigency, without activities, without potentialities. Sartre, like the whole Of the philosopl ’cal tradition from Saint Augustine to Bergson, defines matter by the instanianeity, the instantaneous present, and conceives memocy and t.he past only by mind; in the things there is only the pres-

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o n , and con datively, the “presence” of the past or of thc future requires mind or the l'pr-itsell. Whitehead no longer wants to define matter and Nature by the present and by the instant; lie denie. that the past is no more and tint the lutine is not,yet. Nature is going to be conceived as a .spatiotemporal unfurling Measured unie, what we call “serial" time,29 is for him relative ab­ jective, and without unity. But there is a time inherent to Nature. This tinté, in Whitehead, is inherent in the things, it embraces us, to the ex­ tent that, we participate in the things, or that we i n ' pail in tin h f the articulated organism, that in relation to this funda­ mental process, other facts, like the nervous connection, are second­ ary. II wc want, to under,1stand the animal, we thus must not resort to the nervous function of conduction, as a statu: anatomy does. The or­ ganism is not just a telephone switchboard. In order to understand n, we must include in it. the inventor or operator of the telephone: wc could say that the axolotl is a telephone which invents and maneuvers itself. If we wish, the human is mechanism, buta mechanism within the limits of its constitution and its milieu: the human is, Coghill would say, creator of itself, and places itself in the functioning: of itself.

Such a notion of behavior poses a philosophical problem. Behav­ ior appears as a principle immanent to the organism itself, as a principle that would first emerge as totality. But in terms of'behavior, there is not here a vague vitalism. No one. more than Coghill is attached to the study of'conditions of behavior; hut the local obsei ved phenomena, such as that of gradient:, form a totality when they are considered in rheir whole, a totality which is not reducible to its parts. Hence the organicist idea supported by Coghill, according to which inasmuch as we analy/.e the organisms piecemeal, we find opposed only physicochemical phenom­ ena, hut when wc 1ise to the consideration of the whole of the organism, the totality is no longer desctibable in physiological tenus; it appears as emergent. How are. we to understand this relation of'totality of parts as a result? Whttt status must wc give totality? Such is the philosophical ques­ tion that Gogh ill's experiments pose, a question which is at the cenlei of this course on the idea of nature and maybe the whole of philosophy. But before approaching this question head-on, it would be inter­ esting to put GesSM’s ideas next to CoghiH’.s. Coghill allows us to watch the conquest of the body-object, that is, of the organism such as it. is de­ limited by our observation, and shows us that the animal body must be defined dynamically. The decisive question is not so much to know to

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whai point in space; the tissues arc extended, but; to what point the body is extended. Likewise in (desell, whose l.mbryology tJ 8>’haviorshows us the narrow relation between rnotricity, actions, and postures. There is no precise oorder belwe.en attitude and action; the action of'the organism can be considered as a posture and an attitude, albeit the calmest, [and it.| can always be understood as an action or a preparation for an action. Now, in the organism, the postural function is subtended by muscle tone, by the fundamental activity of the organism in narrow relation with the basal metabolism. Insofar as (here is no posture, there is no liv­ ing body. , ’.escTl defines the body as a species of circumscription of space: ]i st as the Roman augur traced a holy and meaningful contour, so does the organism define a trmpluvi where events will have an organu signification. Among these events, the gestural elements are defined. One of these elements is the asymmetry ûf behavior. Even though it is constructed hi laterally, the organism confronts the world, not frontally, but obliquely. The human has “oblique reactions.” The center of gravity of behavior tends to he placed in an eccentric position in rela­ tion to the geometrical center of the organism. In t.his way, there is a pre­ cocious apparition of the tonic reflex oflhe neck in the embryo of four weeks; if we turn the head of the embryo to the side, the members of the same side pass to the extension, whereas those of the opposite side flex At sixteen weeks, such a rellex, until then only mechanic il, passes under optical control. Wily is t.his asymmetry characteristic of man? Gesell doesn’t even wonder, and in his l eading, such an asymmetry would be a contingent phenomenon Now, a disyrmnetiical behavior goes without saying in a being capable of action. It is only from tins disymmetry that what Proust calls “sides" are realized. T he objects must seem to he in sep­ aration in relation to the symmetrical position which is the first, position in the embryo that, is, the position ol rest, fliere is hen.- a behavior a bit like that of language, where each word differs in meaning only with re­ spect to other words of the same language. The sign is a separation of signs; it is diacri ical (Saussure). The acquisition of a behavior is similar to the acquisition of a formal language f langage] of which (he body would be the spoken language [ian/riri: just as language designates only in relation Lo other signs, so too can the body designate an object as ab­ normal only in relation to our norm, only as rupture in relation to its po­ sition of rest. The animal body is in this way defined by Gesell as a take on rite exLeiior world. It. follows ft in this that there is no difference between the organization of the body and behavior, since the boclv is defined as the place of behavior. In this way, for example, Gesell shows that sleep and wal ing must be considered as behaviots, that the aptitude to sleep is

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conquered: the premature child In effect has only a hesitant, sleep, diflicult to distinguish from waking. Kverything happens next: “as il the child had learned the talent to sleep,” Gesell more or lt;ss says. 1 l itis phrase of Gesell’s should be put in relation with that of Dullin, showing that the actor who lakes sleep must not be content to lay down on a lied: “he must fake sleep; it’s another life.” The sleep of the child takes form at the same time as waking; waking and sleep are reciprocal terms of a unique function. Now, this function is as much under the dependence ol the organism as under that of culture. To sleep at night, to wake in the day, these are social facts, lint the existence of periods of continuons sleep is an organic fact, as (he sleep of the premature infant proves. The organic maturation allows for the distinction between two well-marked periods of waking and sleep. Born or not, the child adheres to the inter­ nal sequence for the maturing of its behavior. I Ie or she remains bound to a fatality, whether it be born or not, and for as long as is necessary for maturation. Here, Gesell concludes, is a sure factor for the development of the organism .5 Gesell finds an organic character in all other behaviors. In his study on what we could call “inspired behaviors,”1’ he compares the be­ haviors of an obvious organic character with higher activities, particu­ larly acts of tine learning, in which we conquer an aptitude and where we are not content to repeat a gesture, as in artificial apprenticeship, and, in particular, the growth of the embryo and that of genius. II we graft a tissue onto the embryo, the resulting organ depends on three fac­ tors:7 the genes present in the graft, the point of application of the graft, and the moment of the growth (luting which the graft lakes place (chronogenic localization). The same thing happens in all creative be­ havior; there are always three elements on which something depends for the moment. Likewise for language. A word has a proper meaning which is differentiated in space; depending on its place in the sentence or in time; depending on (lie stale of the spoken language | langus That can mean tirai all of the negative determination is only negation, irreality in relation to die supreme reality, or that determination is the finit of a labor, which would lead us to make a subject of this principle, in thé sense that. Hegel

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says “the Absolute is the Subject. ” 29 But that can have a third sense. Negation would not he synonymous with irreality or with the principle that we may make work, but with the principle that we would have to rec­ ognize as divergence. The reality oflife that we would have to recognize would be limited. To recognize life would not be to recognize a point ol’ view from which the development oflife would be first foreseen. Life is not a sort of quasi-interiority, it is only a fold, the reality of a process, as Whitehead would say, unobservable up close, which assuredly is made, and which is a reality. From the moment that the animal is made, it was not absent at the moment when it was not yet made. And there is no con­ tinuity' by dissolution of forms here, as in Bergson; rather, the forms have a relation of meaning between them. This is obviously more an exhortation than a demonstration. To seek the real in a closer view would he to work against the grain. Maybe we must take the opposite path. The real is perhaps not obtained by pressing appearances; it perhaps is appearance. All comes from our ideal of knowledge, what makes a blojie Sache of being (Husserl). But in order to be grasped only globally, totality, perhaps, is not missing from reality. The notion of the real is not necessarily linked to that of molecu­ lar being. Why would there not be molar being? The model of Being would be elsewhere than in the particle; it might be, for example, in a being of the older of Logos, and not of the “pure thing.” Language [langue] contains all that people will say (else they would not be under­ stood); nevertheless all that will be said is not a potentiality in language [langue] . But these analogies hardly clarify' anything for us. On the one hand, language [langage] needs to be clarified; on the other, language Llangage] is situated at a human level. The difficulty is to be situated tit the level of the axolotl. If life is in the establishment of the bases of his­ tory, and if this history is different from the history of human being, then it’s a natural history. It is not an individual history; it is the future of a type, of a collective being. Moreover, the regulation of the species is not all-powerful, although monstrosity' testifies for the species and is the product of the regulations which assure the conservation of the type. And so cyclopic animals are produced by the same regulations as those that assure binocular vision. There is here more a sort of sliding than a rupture of the regulative principle (E. Wolff) . 90 The problem is thus to be tightened up. In this introduction, it was necessary to show how the notion of behavior disjoins certain facilities of thinking, compels us to distinguish an “objective possible,” as Max Weber would say, of a being in simple verbal potential. Hegel renewed already the distinction between potency and act by replacing it. with the distinction of the in-itself and the for-itself. Life would be Spirit-in-itsclf,

NATURE

and Spirit would be life for-it$elf. But life is not yet Spirit ii.-itself. We Find in Hegel the same, retrospective illusion as in Aristotle. To grasp life in the things is to grasp a lack in the things as such.

The Notions of Information and Communication These notions seek their philosophy across cybernetics, without finding it. Because for cybernetics, it is a little bit the same as for structural the­ ories of language. We see this concerning the evolution of Jakobsen, stu­ dent of Troubetzkoy, himself a disciple of Saussure. He first adopts a French structuralist, theory, which makes language a totality that is struc­ tured by opposition, then he goes to the United States, where structure is understood as a distribution of facts, a statistical repartitiomug 1of groups of signs, words, and letters. In this perspective, the notion of structure is not different, from the notion of a thing, whereas in France, the configuration is to be grasped by the intelligence and reconstructed. There is a battle between these two notions in Jakobsen. There is an ac­ tion and a reaction of this notion of structure in order to give it its philo­ sophical status. It does not have philosophical implications by itself, but it can be grasped by a philosophy that naturalizes it at its own > sk and peril. A hit of the same thing is found in cybernetics. Cybernetics is right when it takes information and communication for a theme of scientific research, but it is dangerous when it treats them as things. At the begin­ ning, cybernetics is the science of machines. Machines existed long be­ fore this science, but. we have considered them for a long time as the seal of physical phenomena, and not as being phenomena in themselves. Why make machines into a distinct object of study? New' machines evi­ dence something other than physical reality. Information machines have succeeded machines of powei Thermic machines bring about the transformation of energy in heat and movement; they do not have a per­ fect efficiency since energy is degraded in heat. Information machines are before all else emitter-receptors. And so the radio is a machine for informing: it does not traiismit so much the voice of the speaker as the form of this voice; t.he words pronounced gave form to the words that we hear and understand. Information machines are apparatuses to give form insofar as they are sensitive to the fort of excitation, and they re­ spond to these forms. And so cannon lire on radar is regulated by the results: die fire corrects itself. There is a reaction of effect to cause,

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which gives an air of finality to the apparatus. These machines can he more or less simple: the program can he incorpor ated in the mechanism of the machine, as is the case for the barbarian organ. Classical thermo­ stats have a fixed pr ogram, but they are regulated by a variable stimulus. Always, we can complicate this regulation by instituting a regulation ol regulation: the programmed temperature will vary with the exterior temperature, depending on the desired correlation. Hence the interest of the study of these organized bodies constructed by man, detectors of forms, emitters of responses themselves having a form. In this perspec­ tive, we will neat the phenomenon of observation as a physical reality Information will he the reverse of entropy. Information is antichance, the realization of a state of high structure which is not probable. Infor­ mation goes back up the slope down which entropy descends. Hence the search for the definition of the quantity of information, by comparing the capacity for ^formation of two keyboards. This definition ol infor­ mation supposes two things: . that we may realize all possible combinations of information, starting front a certain number of possibles, the list of which can ne given; 2 . thal we will compare every emitter to a linear keyboard, that is, we suppose that all information can be translated by a series of alterna­ tives, as in the social game where you must guess die object by asking questions to which the players who know the secret must respond with yes Or no. 1

In effect, within the machine we can realize only disjunctions or conjunctions. The machine cannot fix quntenus. Information is thus de­ fined more by its exterior contour than by Us contant, its definition is in­ dependent of content; it must, not transform meaning, quatenus, or the “as”-st'i ucture. It is not doubtful that information in machines is this. Rut can we sav that the rigorous concept covers the reality of all the phe­ nomena of information, or defines only the imitations of ...formation such as we discover them in a living being? This happens in this way in an artifact, but is it the case in a living being? The question could be left open by the cyberneticist. Over against a fact like nilormat.ion, the sci­ entist does not seek to “see” the fact, that is, that of which he speaks, but has the tendency to manipulate it, to find a mechanical equivalent in it. At the same time, the scientist who intervenes actively has the sentiment that this scientific activity is done only to reveal a thinking of which it is the secret. Hence Wiener’s myth: communication, objective transfer of structure, would be all reality (compare wave-based mechanics, in winch movement is defined as the propagation of a form), ft is both an ex-

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Livmel) materialist and au c.urcinclv idealist thinking. IT»o material transport is only a pai tii niai case ol communication, and communica­ tion is only the effective passage of a stt ucturo hom here to tin ic, so that there is an ideality ol movement and realii' ol communication. Wh) not then genetal./e the idea ol the telephone. Why not telegraph me in the United States? Because "there would be pure commitnicat.ion; there would no longer he communicating beings.”" In reality, things are less rosy. Information cannot he increased; it degrades itself: the noises on the telephone are an obstacle to communication, flic more the message is refined., the less great is the efficiency of the mes­ sage. We must not hope for a total reestablishing of information. Even il all information could he conserved, there would be tit. most a recu­ peration. Invention would be at most a recuperation. Every intellectual operation consists in reestablishing an “incomplete information"''" of eduction and relation: to draw a relation ol Certain correlates accord­ ing to a given relation, l itis is an idea that has been adopted by cyber­ netics: every intellectual operation is led back to work m this way; tml so sound is to hearing what vision is to sight. That consists thus in reestablishing an information given in the thing: we receive it from Being. A machine can automatically indicate the law ol a series of num­ bers by eliminating the anomalies. Then: is, however, a difference with true invention, which consists in thinking the anomaly with the rest. What is behind this is an ontology, and the; idea ol perpetual move­ ment. A quantity of information has been placed in circulation; it dete­ riorates here and there, hut on the whole it. is maintained, and m any case it t, not invented; the whole can, at most, be reestablished, from here, it is easy to see how cybet netics tends t.o become a theory of the living and oflanguage. Models of Living Being The Artificial Tortoise of Grey Walter

This is an apparatus of three wheels, powered by an electrical motor and accumulators, which is connected to a photoelectric cell that commands the motor by relay, in such a way as to direct the automaton toward light. Moreover, the tortoise is endowed with a “tactisrn": [W]hen lilt: shell meets an obstacle, a circuit closes, which neutralizes the pllototmpism and frees the directional wheel lor a moment: the appara­ tus .seems then to scallop around the Obstacle before retaking its path to­ ward the light. The photoelectric cell is on the other htwid .sensible to

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the intiMisity oi'liglil. II tlu: source is too intense, it ac ts ;is an obstacle and the tortoise goes around il.,'i

This pertains except when its accumulator is sufficiently discharged. In this ease, the intense light no longer acts as an obstacle, and the tortoise is directed toward it. If an intense light is held over the battery recharger, the tortoise seems to go seek electrical food, until which lime the photoelectric cell can act anew to distance it from the bright light. The automaton seems thus to imitate internal sensibility just as well as the external sensibility of living beings.'’4

Ashby's Homeostat

Described in a book cited by Ruyer, it is an apparatus constituted by four identical elements, each o( which reacts to the three others. One element includes a galvanometer which governs the plunging of a metallic thread in a potential-gradient conducting tank. As each galvanometer receives the current leaving from the others (without counting, naturally, its own current), the balance of each is a function of the balance of the whole. If the experimenter disturbs one of the elements by blocking, for example, the needle of its galvanometer, the rest of the homeostat adapts to this new station, seeks and finds the means to attain the position of “prescribed equilibrium.” Moreover, the exiling currents, before arriving at the take-ups of an element, pass by se­ lectors that represent rising feedback according to functions in tiers and which suddenly modify the principal feedback when, as a result of a me­ chanical obstacle introduced by the experimenter, it would try to lake an extreme position instead of seeking optimal equilibrium. The selector seeks the secondary feedbacks which suit it so that the principal feedback can accomplish its “mission” and the apparatus can seek anew and attain the prescribed equilibrium. . . . Let’s suppose that the experimenter re­ verses the conductors of the feedback in a way to render it positive, from the negative that it was, and to make it function as a regulator tliaL would fact | in reverse, and which would pack up or sLop the machine instead of regulating its speed. 1 he selector intervenes then by itself to seek the feedback that would correct or would place the reverse feedback outside the circuit and restore balance. If the experimenter solidifies the needles of two of the galvanometers by a rigid rod, the apparatus is likewise capa­ ble of refinding the stable balance to the point that when we take the so-

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lidifying rod away, the apparatus must again grope its way in order to re­ fold ihe preceding assembly, a little like a healed man, disoriented be­ cause he was used to his sickness.33

Pitts's and MacCulloch’s Reading Machine

It is a matter of a text read, transformed into spoken text for the blind. But the information realized is a secondary, derived information: it is understood only if we give an authentic ii.formation. We can describe it all by psychological simile. The machine seems to reali/.e the unit)* of the external or internal sensibility, or the election of certain valences in the world. It seems t.o realize the unity of the normal and the organism, the transformation of a message into another message. Sensibility, regulation, transformation: these words designate a lived experience. But that means little to the cyberneticist: for him, these lived experiences are only the reflective return of a functioning. There is here a sort of drunkenness of thought. Mbit-made machines are detached from us, and become the equivalent# of a living being. A very artificialist thought (according to which we must remake everything by human artifice) is pushed to such a point that it disappears. The artifice is denied and is posited as a nature. It is a return to nature, a.s there is a return t.o the pent-up emotion in Freud. In fact, the machine does .not retrieve the natural laws and realizes only an imitation of authentic phe­ nomena. It is conceived in order to reali/.e an illusion. The function of the tortoise is not conceived for itself but for the spectator. We choose as­ pects of the exterior world and the machine, in such a way that the ac­ tion of the stimuli largely resembles the action of the stimuli on the living being. But the real functioning and the function of the machine only partially coincide. The living being does not scallop around an ob­ stacle, the machine does not have a behavior molded by external phe­ nomena. Even if we realize an apparent projection around the object, the machine does not commit “good” mistakes (there is a community of structures of the fields of behavior which have a relation with the solu­ tion' the machine succeeds or fails). Ashby’s homeostat would need to come to itself, to realize its assembly itself. The acquisition of true habit for the living thing is the incorporation of a form susceptible to being transformed. The machine executes a foreseen assembly for a finite number of eases. The unforeseen margin of the machine is quire mea­ sured. Ifie machine functions, the animal live!—that is, it restructures its world and its body. The function of the machine has a meaning, but this meaning is transcendent; it is in tin mind of the constructor, whereas in the apparatus there is only the trace of meaning: the ma-

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chine goes only from what’s close t.o what’s close. As Rnyer says, “an ap­ propriated key opens a lock by corresponding point by point to the structures, and not by transmission of information. To say that the door opens only if the lock recognizes the key is to make a metaphor of dubi­ ous interest.”31’ There is no operating meaning within the machine, but only within the living thing. The Problem of Language

We can study the possible combinations of signs in the framework of a work, and thereby spaee the gain of information contained in a hook. But for that, we must allow other hypotheses: the gain must not be null, and the combinations of signs must, thus be intelligible. We must take ac­ count of the subject. T he content of information will depend on the in­ tellectual structures of the subject. Finally, we must take account of the treated subject. From this moment, the prevision of the rendering is fu­ tile. The true rendering does not depend on formal combinations of signs, but on the capacity of these signs to evoke a signifier, or not. Be­ tween the diverse possible combinations realized, there are differences that depend on the stylistic capacity of the author, a capacity that condi­ tions its power to inform. Now cyberneticists never study the relation of the signifier and signified. The problem for them is to translate (and again, by confining themselves to appearances). We code the message and this is the fundamental operation. But how is this information in the first message? It is what we do not say. To speak is not to code. We still have to arrive at the moment when the message has a relation with what it means. T he enumeration of possible combinations does nothing to help us understand the very act by which language takes on a meaning. Is language nothing other than a eode? It’s a real question. The code possesses a rationality that language does not have. Language has eustoms: associations of favorite letters, words, figures of predominant style. In a language, there are orthographies of all sorts. We spoke, how­ ever, of the orthography of a code as well. F very series of signs forming a message is submitted in effect to a very simple orthography (and so, for Morse code, between the dot and the dash, there must be a blank). But orthography designates here only an entirely physical condition of hear­ ing a message. When we combine the output or delivery [le debit] of two codes, we compare only the minimal conditions so that the message is scnsorially received literally. In real language, it’s another thing: there is a sur-power and a waste. Language is a lot less economical and a lot stronger. With all the dead tenses, language expresses incomparable shortcuts. As to the waste: language uses only a very weak part of the

NATURE

cumbinatoiy fabric Ural sei^vc.-s il is support. Lv< '.thing happens as if the speaking subject were ncglei i 1 tjhE no ' ibitii es of the. keyboard of phenomena that it lias. l’h< combinatory cl tscriptioft of the orthogra­ phy of French .s impossible to realize. There is no mathematical regu­ larity to it. As a consequence, we no longer see the orthography of' French with the help of a combinatory desa ’ption. bur with the help of a random description. There is a bet with orthography: we try to evalu­ ate the order of the magnitude of the frequencies observed; the propor­ tion of nouns, adjectives, letters, from which we draw a portrait of French. We could construct machines that would respect this structure and that would speak in a “French jargon.” We established in this way the statistics of combinations for the most, frequent letters; we did the same work with regard to Mozart’s music! Cyberneticists approach lan­ guage as a thing of nature: they then have to gather the distribution of elements that we have, without trying to reconstruct it on the inside. These studies probably have a practical utility-, because they allow study­ ing diacritical elements that, intervene ..t a language. But we do not thereby see what a language i,s. Orthography is considered as a species of abuse by the codeines. If we nationalized French orthography, we could reduce by half the length of messages. But orthography has an expres­ sive capacity that allows for guessing, for reading only half the signs, of the sort that the message better resists noise. As to the signifying power of language, it is impossible to evaluate it by means of combinatory structures. The structure of language, like the structure of the living being, is not a distribution of facts that would [allow] representing by a combination of possibles once and for all. To speak essentially is not to say yes or no, but to make something exist linguistically. To speak sup­ poses the use of contingency and the absurd To understand language as a closed structure is to understand language as made by .Reason. Now this is only half the truth: language does as much as Reason. The verbal chain expresses by reliefs and divergences. The relation between the words and the thought is not a homot.het.ic relation as between one curve and another. The .signification appears in thé- difference between the not mal distance of words and significations. For example, when julien Sorel says “1 am lonely being with myself [je suis seul à être à moi]." Language is a convention of customary right and not of written right. T he code is no more a language than is the automaton a life. They are only second-rate imitations, like chahis of Latin jargon according to Markoff.-17 The automaton is the jargon of life. We must not. imagine that man is trapped by his machines, for the simple reason that it is he who first constructs them (cf. Ruyer). If man disappeared, the automatons would wear out and gradually disappear, t here is no true order to the

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meaning of invention, or of the “consisting order.”:iR There is never in­ formation in the machine itself. What is this true information, placed into form, that is the origin of this information that machines transmit? To the myth of Wiener39 we must oppose (he claim that the world is not the place of chains whose beginning is nowhere: we have to stop in order to have the actual world. By what means is this stop furnished to us? By the presence of con­ sciousness to itself, Ruyer responds. Rut to speak of consciousness is a manner of saying what is missing from cybernetics. For Ruyer, automati­ zation of machines is a sort of spatial projection of that which is hyper­ spatial. When my hand takes a full glass on the table, the signifying ideation “takes the glass without turning it upside down” is nearly per­ fectly replaceable by an ideational for the automaton controlled by pho­ toelectric cells, and functioning in the means of stabilizing organs. The surveillance by the visual field is not really replaceable, as its effects are inimitable. In the case of the hand seeking a glass, there is a lot more consciousness than in the substituted automaton. The visual field with its multiple details surveys itself and is surveyed in a unity which does not imply the existence of an exterior point of surveillance. From such a field, by definition, all sorts of liaisons can be realized and improvised because they are already virtually in consciousness, this “imitas multi­ plex":'10 “the machine is an extract.”'11 From presenting consciousness to schematizing and surveying [survolantJ consciousness,12 then to surveilling [surveillant] consciousness, which completes the machine, we arrive at last at integral automatism, at the total replacement of con­ sciousness by a game of substituted liaisons. These reproduce the inher­ ent liaisons in the “absolute survey” that characterizes consciousness, by pushes and tractions, by closer and closer conduction.43 But if con­ sciousness is 'aimlas multiplex, the notion of information loses its sense. An absolute consciousness no longer needs to communicate. Now con­ sciousness is not informed in a head-to-head with its own inventions. Language is “nearly” an invention, Ruyer says.14 But everything depends on this “almost.” How can consciousness not be thoroughly the author of its own thoughts? Because, Ruyer says, it only surveys a small sector, that of my body; but the notion of absolute survey loses all meaning. The interest of cybernetics is that it takes information seriously, that it does not see in it the occasion to learn what consciousness can invent alone. For Ruyer, there are otdy two possible solutions: cither gradually the liai­ son, or the synopsis. But there is something else, however; that is, space, which does not consist in getting bogged down point by point or in sur­ veying all this, hut the space of discernment. Space as separation, for ex­ ample, between the position of the lamp and myself. I do not survey the

N A T U R E

lamp. 1 se c il. from a (( tain poim. rherc is a n:I< refice in me Lo space which '.s nol mine. Whai appi im to m is difficult (0 eliminate s not. a consciousness as absolut' sm \ y. but a situât hsei ve th.it in case «fan important lesion of epidermal ceh i process ol regent ration of ti. sues is designed, provoked bv the products of disintegration, and we can prove it experimentally by the ap­ plication of these products. The phenomenon has a behavioral aspect in that we see a migration of deep cells toward the lesion, and an activity (moi phoplasty) (if cellular division, in function of the number of dam­ aged cells, and sometimes W'ilh a supplement These two phenomena are not juxtaposed hut are regulated by each other. In case of a small wound., t.he second precedes the first; but in case of a large wound the two phenomena are complementary, as if all the means must he used But at the same time, this whole process is interrupted if we cover the wound over with cellophane. Everything occurs as if what was happen­ ing was the existence of a gaping .surface. The process thus has both a character of finality and of minimality: finality, since it is under the de­ pendence of the wound; nonfnality, since it suffices that the wound does not have a manifest existence so that it is not produced. Yet we can­ not make this behavior parallel with the phenomenon of repair that makes a beliaviot 'ntervene In certain larvae, the process of repair of its rasing constructed with grains of sand has a similar style. This repair presents a great suppleness, all while seeming equally ordered in its structure by very precise conditions. If the roof is broken, there is a re. placement of the destroyed part; if the posterior part (in relation to the animal s face) is destroyed in an insignificant manner, the animal re­ pairs its dwelling by enlarging the anterior part of the- casing; if it is half destroyed, the animal turns around, reconstructs, and then resumes its initial position. If the destruction goes beyond two-thirds, the animal can choose between six possibilities: construct a new casing, rebuild (be two-thirds, repair the rear while transforming the front, and so on. In the two cases, there is scarring and reconstruction of the casing. Russell notes three similarities: a.total and sometimes perfect restitution, a phe­ nomenon of hyper-regeneration, followed by a correction tha: leads hack to its initial magnitude. The organs used for regeneration are not foreseen by an innate construction. I.ikewis , it the larva does not find sand it uses debris for the casing, or lakes whatever is necessary lor the base which is made of another mixture of debris, sand, and mucus. What

180 NATURE

i$ embarrassing in these phenomena i that Lhcy are m'i in I v.lid being subordinated, on the other hand, to very prêt. in conditions (.small or large wound). Hence a process ppears is blindly conditioned But on the other hand, there is a process in v\ h I six responses a possible hence the hesitant activity. Russell also ( urn pares the activity of behavior and regulation within an *| it ,s that the work is not the same: human teleology consti u< i by a m irtbly ol machines, whereas the organism does t hv auto-dili'ei n non. Rn ell cites Sc liopenhauci to this purpose: “the organism is a crue mirât le and can compare to no human wx>rk, l-.ibi it a tec! artificially bv the light nf die lamp oi knowletlgc." There is a demi-bhndness of animal teleology, vim h is du prit ■ paid lot is gu i efficiency. The two facts must be ex­ plain* ti by lh< saint ason md rather than relating the imperTentions to mediaitit 1 obsta les, it s necessary to relate the perfections to a true finality. From there authors’ point of view, the unity of this morsel of mat­ ter that is the organism is realized only by its behavior and its activity, which is probably a relatively weak and uninventive action. If the action has a meaning, if the arrangement oi pa ti nla> phenomena an tic ipnte> a meaning, this meaning consists in icsioiing, const, mg what was the function, not more. The invention i on in: only th choii ol 'moans, and the activity tests in the framcwoik < I a pit listing lute bon Bui these animals are not machines, and 11 i.' p i.sch lot tin reason th.it they arc governed by a principle oi order that would h ivc a global 1 th iincn*>i in the study of the organism. This is a prcjudiie. W< . luiallv allow that the most real .s the deepest which it always keeps hidden inside. tl consideration of appearance, of an

187 ANIMALITY:

THE

STUDY

OF

ANIMAL

BEHAVIOR

mal form (gestalt) is not at all uninteresting. The laws of the interior and exterior are not of the same order: The interior gives the impres­ sion of a machine, the exterior gives the impression of a product of art. The exterior is symmetrical, the interior asymmetrical. The differentia­ tion of the animal is expressed in a clearer way in its exterior surface than in its interior organization (see, for example, the differentiation of the head and Lite anus in higher animals, and where the existence of ex­ terior testicles can he considered as a sign of high differentiation). The lower animal is in some way the “mask” of the “transparent” higher ani­ mal, or again the richness of the exterior form of one is “in extension,” whereas th'at of the second is intensive. And so spiraled mollusks have only an entirely extensive richness; their specific form is mechanically engendered. The rhythmic character of their secretion gives the spi­ raled form. In higher animals, on the other hand, the appearance is more sober, but the expressive capacity is greater: the body is entirely a manner of expression. What exactly does this difference between exterior and interior mean? Let’s take the example of the ornamentation of animals. The marks of the frog form a figure only on the condition that the animal slays in its biological position (folded legs). Everything happens as if the frog had been painted by one sole brush stroke. The feathers of birds are likewise joined in such a way that they form a whole design. How are we to understand these examples? The convergence between the elements of the design is an observable fact, like any other convergence of the or­ ganism, like the convergence of elements that allow for the phenomenon of digestion, just as the lungs are realized befor e the embryo has oxygen to breathe, so loo does the ensemble of marks contain a reference to a possible eye, to a “semantic ensemble,” to a “critical ensemble” that al­ lows the animal to be recognized by its fellow creatures. In the building up of animal form, we must see something other than an intraorganic ac­ tivity. If for the endocrinologist, “the crest of the cock is not other than the manometer of hormones,” as if the cock were made to be seen by an endocrinologist, it. is because this latter makes of the animal an object of science and because the endocrinologist does not consider it according to the truth proper to it. There are two ways to consider the animal, as there are two ways to consider an inscription on an old stone: we can wonder how this inscription was traced, but we can also seek to know what it means. Likewise we can either analyze the processes of the animal under a microscope, or see a totality in the animal. The shell of the rnollusk does not have a great deal of sign ification, because it is realized by a local process. The animal is not expressed in the shell. On the other hand, the design of the zebra’s skin has a signifi-

188 rt A i u n t

nation, because it is realized bv an ensemble of convergent processes. To what mode of signification does each of thèse an mais attest in its way of being presented to our eyes? 'The study of the appearance of animals takes on interest when we understand this appearance as a language. We must grasp the mystery of life in the way that animals show themselves to each other. In this way, in the twenty-seven species of crab in the Barnave islands, there are twenty--seven different pcs of s uial displat We must not see in this manife .1 liion ol s< .limit the snnpl miiamriitaiioc ol n essential fact, which would l> tl * recoin iliation of mal and h-malc cells, because we would not then understand the richness of these mani­ festations. Scxualits. il it aims only at utility, could manifest itself by more economic path Moreovfc-]. hern [phroditi.ini is frequent in lower spe< ies hut in oilier lowei spec ies. tlx cing n.i under stood. For most instinrt.s, there are (bin. d cot ;t Hâtions of tc'ial excitants. Rut. it is important, to note that, the trigger acts only by actual­ izing a certain style of behavior. It is not the cause, but i-. evOoatr c of an innate complex. We must insist' both on the quasi- nal charade! of stim­ ulation and on the fact that instinct is an endogenous at livitv lusiiin tis behaviot has more the style of a mechanical behavior even though it is not truly mechanical, a little like the Bavphui in l k xki'ill Mat bin tit ex­ ists only t.o the extent that, behavior had been pit pared ftoni wnhi.i and amused. As Rémi Chauvin says in his book on il pèlerin \ Lorenz, instead of going to walk with >thers upon wakening, as f Lhe habit of the species, goes to walk with a crow. As a "childhood companion” it had a young jackdaw, but as a “parent-companion” and Ss a “sexual companion” it had .man, in this case, Lorenz himself. There are thus three species of reciprocal action between the in­ nate schema and the exterior approach. A Pnigung, an “imprint" or “sen­ sibilization,” specifies the schema, fills it with a being not foreseen by Nature. Hence individual diversities. The unity of animal conduct is no longer founded on the object, but on the Ptàgwng. The innate schema draws in the emptiness a framework of fixed points. I bis Pragung lias a general character: it links the animal, not to an individual, bill to a species. Thus the goose that learned to follow a man vd 1 follow all men. This Pragung is distinguished from learning by two We refer then to the mind, carrier of the als, to intentionality, to meaning—hut then: symbolism is surveyed, there is no longer a body. By saying that the body is symbolism, we mean that without a preliminary Auffassung of' the signifier and the signified supposed as separated, the body would pass in the world and the world in the body, heeling or pleasure, because the body is mobile, that is, the power to be elsewhere, are the (.means of the] unveiling of something. An organ of the mobile senses (the eye, the hand) is already a language because it is an in­ terrogation (movement) and a response (perception as Erfuhlung of a project), speaking and understanding. It is a tacit language. The percep­ tion of the other shows it to us well, when we have the grasp of a moral physiognomy (.signature, gait, face), without knowledge of the categories that seem to subtend this comprehension. The given appears as reported in a certain code, in a certain system of equivalences, as a variant or a di vergence defined with respect to a certain human level, which is not yet a signification, an idea, or a knowing, since the characterology remains to lx: done—as words extended [in space] appear to me on the ground of a certain phonemic and semantic system (hat I do not yet know, since lin­ guistics remains to be clone. There is thus something of the tacit in Speech: it is only further delayed. There is the tacit to the extent that the pronounced or understood speech outruns its own motifs, as in percep­ tion. The difference is only relative between a perceptual silence and a language that always carries a thread of silence. As relative a.s it is it exists. What is it? What difference is there be­ tween the ready-made. Or natural symbolism of the body and that of lan­ guage? Is it the emergence of a thinking subject and its conventions? Are there two symbolisms, one of indivision where symbol and symbolized are blindly linked because their relation ol meaning i given by the or-

212 NATURE

ganization of the body, the other of language where sign and significa­ tion are surveyed by a mind in a way that would make us leave Nature? But convention itself presupposes a communication with self or other, and can appear only as a variant or divergence in relation to a prelimi­ nary communication.9 Each sign, being a difference with respect to oth­ ers, and each signification a difference with respect to others, [means that] the life of language reproduces perceptual structures at another level. We speak in order to fill in the blanks of perception, but words and meanings are not of the absolute positive. What we call mind is again a re-equilibration, a decentralization which is not absolute; the system of equivalences that animates language is no more possessed by the speak­ ing subject or even by the linguist than is the key to the world given to the perceiving subject. 10 Logos in the sense of language, Xo'yo£ 7TfXKpopiKo£, the proffered language, says everything except itself; it is reticent, like the silent Logos of perception, \o 7 0 ^ erôtctOfqxrÇ. It speaks in us rather than that we do speak it. It snatches us up like the sensible world. The invisible, mind, is not another positivity: it is the inverse, or the other side of the visible. We must retrieve this brute and savage mind beneath all the cultural material that is given.—Here the title takes on its whole meaning: Nature and Logos. There is a Logos of the natural es­ thetic world, on which the Logos of language relies. 4. The problematic of philosophy. Nature: An ontological leaf— the thin leaf of nature-essence is divided in folds, doubled, even tripled. By examining it, we have retrieved everything, not that everything is na­ ture, but because everything is or becomes natural for us. There are no substantial differences between physical Nature, life, and mind. We passed between causal-realist thinking and philosophical idealism, be­ cause we found in brute, savage, vertical, present Being a dimension that is not that of representation and not that of the In-itself. This dimension will be specified, in particular by a deepening of language and of history in the following years.—We will have to disengage better this idea of Being, i.e., of what makes these beings (Nature, humans) be—and be “in one another,” i.e., makes them be together on the side of what is not nothing; and we will have to specify in particular' the relation of the pos­ itive and the negative in them, of the visible and the nonvisible. And we will have to confront this Being interiorly woven with negation with the Being of classical ontologies. In order to resume our study of Natur e. Neither a theory of knowledge nor a metascience seeking the sub­ stance of physical Nature or the organism. But, across the movement of science, to open unto the placing in question of the Being-object of Nature, unto the Nature that “we are,”

FIRST

SKETCH

unlo the Nature in us—;uid thereby to begin a revision of the ontology oft he object, a fortiori, since the leaf of nature detaches from the object and rejoins our total being. That was shown concerning physical Nature: The going beyond the Euclidean thinking of space fias an ontolog­ ical signification: a space in front of us (projective) cedes its place to a space that we are, since it is only the metric of the physical world. Going beyond causality as the production of Being, of corpuscular being as an absolutely hard nut lens, in favor of statistical and collective being (without individualized processes of causality) also has an onto­ logical signification: challenge to the pure object. Concerning biology: The organism is not only its local-instantaneous reality, neither for a proximal thinking, nor moreover another reality. It is the macroscopic “envelopment-phenomenon” that we do not engender from elements, that invests the local-instantaneily, that is not to be sought behind, but rather between the elements. In ontogenesis, in evolution, everything is physicochemistry in conformity with thermodynamics, but it is neither physicochemistry nor thermodynamics that demands the constitution of these “singular points” that are organisms, these structures, this architectonic in which physico­ chemical events will play. The organism is not a failure of physicochem­ istry; it is in the inter-world, like a watermark, a mass reality, it does not oppose causality to causality, but goes beyond causality only by the de­ tour of a reinterpretation of a new dimensionality, by integration and qualitative differentiations. The domain of the architectonic: Upon examination, we will see that it is not an inexplicable residue, or a certain number of reserved facts. The architectonic is everywhere: in genesis, in functioning, even in perception. And the empirical-event-based is everywhere. Everything is science and everything is philosophy. Eundamental thinking and the thought of banal Being, a time before time, Being before functioning; compare mythical thinking, holy Being, and profane Being. That was said concerning animality. But it is to be shown in a more convincing way: • concerning ontogenesis (embryology)—to differentiate Driesch’s vi­ talism and the fundamental thinking of life; < concerning phylogenesis (Lhe theory of evohiLion in its current slate) Evolution conceived otherwise than as empirical “filiation.” Evolution that neither puts off its signification to the systematic and to morplto-

214 NATURE

logical differences, nor the reading of this signification by compared morphology (se.x). On these two points, clarifications of genetics, its corpuscular in­ terpretation and its statistical interpretation—modern aspect of genetics (in the population)—genetics and Darwinism. But our principal subject is the hitman body, with which evolution makes the transition to human being, situating the subject in the en­ semble in Nature. Implicitly we have already spoken of it with animality: animality— mechanism—animal institutions (love, Kumpan)—Difficult) not ahvays in relation with the degree of animal ‘'intelligence”—this encounters the distinction machine-intelligence. As a result, the human cannot appear in its qualitative difference hv the .mere addition of reason to the animal (body). Thus to approach human being at first in his body, in his manner of being a body. The relation of the animal to the human will not be a simple hier­ archy founded on an addition: there will already be another manner of being a body in human being. We study the human through ts body in older to see it emerge as different from the animal, not by the addilion yf reason, but rather, in short, in the b ie in a n d e r with the animal (strange anticipations or carica­ tures of the human in the animal), by escape and not by superposition— just as higher life appeared as singular points of physical Nature. Emergence of a (human) architectonic again, architectonic between its “body” and its “reason,” and not the imposition of a For-Self on an Ii itself. We were saying: Architectonic and myth: it is not a series of frag­ mentary events, it is a structural macrophenomenon, in the order of the Interworld and the Indnmidn: The fact is that mythical thinking indi­ cates best the relation humanity-animality that, we have in sight, that is best established in the dimension of the archiiectonic, where there is an adherence, a strange kinship between the human and the animal (cari­ cature) . (Compare Evelyne Lot-Falck. ) 11 Verification mte section, of what we said two years ago and what we say now. Then we saw that there were the means to think Nature ulti­ mately oidy by means of perceived Nature. Physical being and the brute Being of perception. Now we are going to see that the human body can be understood only as a perceiving body: perception and the perceived are the key, but by taking the voi ds in a new sense. If perception were only an “1 think that,” then perception would not give me the Ineinander

FIRST

SKETCH

of human being, human body, and Nature. It is this Inrintm about the human body In wl at precede d. It is on ly by te( tilling Nantie as visible tirai we can urn I: ■ island now the emergence ol an invisible perception in its relation n> what it sees, a - divet genOC in i elation to tin- visit'll Sketch of tliis idea of the human body. Compare new version in red pen.1L>

Second Sketch

he phenomenal body is not an idea, but rather a niacrophenomenon; the objective body is a microphenomenon. But the ver ifica­ tion is obtained only on the condition that we leave aside the notion of the body-object and mind, the In-itscil and the For-itseil, in order to think human esthesiology made to measure, in its Inrinmuler.

T

The Animal Body The animal body is a relation to an Uitmelt circumscribed by it (Uexkiill), but withouL its knowing. The urchin is not its Bnvplan; it is rather the effect of it. “Republic of reflexes.” The body [as ] motor-perceiving. The human body (or higher animals already): one says thrill it is inhabited by a consciousness. But. (a) the second mode of existence is without relation to the first; (b) moreover, it is very inadequate. It is not an object doubled by the consciousness of this object; it is of the world that I have consciousness, and of he body in the margin of this w'orld, on this side of the object; it is closer to me than are things. Let’s say rather that the Uviwelt. (that is, the world + my body) is not dissimu­ lated to me. I am witness to my Umwrdt. My body is likewise not dissimu­ lated for me. It is not a matter of a knowledge of a %uschnuer, a kosmostheoros, or iheoria, objectively. To know the Lhnwelt is a more or less large divergence in relation to a zero-body. Knowledge of the body is a divergence in relation to the “there” of the Umwelt. This divergence is the in vet re of the identification I gel. by movement: wahrnehnmi and sirh bçwegen. —The urchin is moved th ; dog moves, but that which moves and what it moves are not opposed to each other like subject and object = 1 do not move like an object. The moving and moved are not opposed to each other inv movemem is rather the reduction of a divergence, and

SECOND

SKETCH

the I which is the proprietor of'the movement, is that toward which this divergence points. What is consciousness of the body and consciousness of the world at a level clarified by the corporal schema, that is, my body grasped in its schenta[?j The frarisspatial and iranstenipojral unity—which is not, how­ ever, merely an idea—that is, first, the postural schema. All the elements of position totalized are either in series or simultaneously. Head : 1 taximetry.—And referred to the space of the world. Second, more gen­ erally there is an intersensorial system of equivalences that functions as a whole (view, labyrinth, touching) and totalization. Third, there is an ac­ count taken of my movements in order to create (?) Perception:- The corporal schema furnishes me with the tracing that intervenes in the reading of the world (e.g., the active movements of the: eye and the rest of the world despite the movement of images). This means that instead of a science of the world by relations con­ templated from the outs'de (relations of space, for example), the body is the measurement of the world. I am open to the wor ld because 1 am within my body, but how do I have a sort of commonality with this mass of matter?—Precisely because it is not a mass of matter, it is rather a standard of things. But how? flow does this have a reference to some­ thing other than itself? It is open in a circuit with the world, but it is ope, ,. Tt sees itself; it touches itself.3 The hand that 1 touch, I sense, could touch that which touches it. And this is no longer true past the limits bf iAy skin. The block of my body thus has an interior’'’ which is its application to itself. By this application, it has not only affective states closed on itself, but also correlations [7]—the sensibles and the world. The flesh (the touching touched, as an innate body) as the visi­ bility ofthe invisible (the touching hand, the look).— t. mergence of the flesh in life as life emerges in physicochemistry: the “singular point” of life (the urchin) where the Umwdi is no longer'dissimulated to itself— and just at life is not in physicochemistry, hut rather is between the ele­ ments, like another dimension, so too is Evipfmdbarlmt not in the objective body, nor even in the physiological. But this structure is, if not localized, at least not. independent o f. . quasi-localization.—My per­ ception is not in my head, but it has “attachments” with it. Esthcsiology: The miracle of this bodily arrangement which is for perception much more than it is an occasion 4 or even means. The Umwelt is cut up by the movements of rny eyes like the body of my migration moves in a man­ ner to . . . receive hotter temperatures. Birth: The soul of the child is not issued from the soul ofthe mother; there is no pregnancy of souls. It is a body that produces pregnancy and that moves to perceive when

218

NATURE

the actions of the world attain it. There is no descent of a soul into a body, but rather the emergence of a life in its cradle, a provoked vision. That is because there is an interiority of the body, an “other side,” invis­ ible for us, of'his Visible. It is not the eye that sees. Rut it is not the soul. It is the body as open totality. Consequences for the perceived things: correlations of a carnal subject, rejoined to its movement and to us sensing; interspersed in its internal circuit—they are made of the same stuff as it . The sensible L the fL ;h of the world, that is, the meaning in the exterior. The llesh of the body makes us understand the flesh of the world We have found the correlate in sensible Nature (statistical, macrophe­ nomenal being): it is the sensing body.—Natural negativity (by the ex­ clusion of fragmentary, corpuscular being) of the “hard nucleus” of being, which remained enigmatic, is clarified here: natural being is a hollow', because it is the being of totality, macrophenomenon, that is, eminently perceived being, “image.”

I

The Libidinal Body and Intercorporeity T’his = Einfühlung. Bodv-things, penetration, at a distance, of the sensi­ ble things by my body. Things as what, ar e missing from my body in order to close its cir cuit. Rut this is also an open ng of my body to other bodies: just as l touch my band touching, l perceive others as perceiving. The articula­ tion of their body on the world is lived by me in the articulation of my body on the world where I .see them This is reciprocal, my body is also made up of their corporeality. My corporal schema is a normal means of knowing other bodies and these know my body Universal-lateral of die co-perception ol the woilu. Animals (Portmann): The body as organ of the lor-other. Likewise lor us: Per ception of the physiognomy grounded on my relation with the world, which is given as a spatial nature. Taximetry: The others appear to us with a physiognomy. Projection-inirojection, relation of the fneinantler, which unveils a libidinal dimension of the corporal schema. Trend is thus an essential contribution to this aspect of the corpo­ ral schema: recuperate all that he said on this endoperccption o f others (and of animals)—“pleasure” is opened onto “reality.”—Pleasure is open like sensing is open onto the things/’ The sell’s body asking for

i

219 SECOND

SKETCH

something other than body, but asking for it by its own |)0 tlilv weight._ Neither first nor .second.

The Body and Symbolism All that precedes could be summarized as follows: the human hodv is symbolism—not in the superficial sense, i.e., where a representative term takes the place ol another—hut in the fundamental sense oh ex­ pressive of another. Perception and movement symbolize. And the meanings between them. For th unity of the body. Expressive = by their insertion in a nonconventionaf system of equivalences, in the cohesion of a body. An eye that inspects a landscape = interrogation and response. But is it. more than a metaphor? Can the symbolism of language clarify the body? Is it not wholly other? Symbolism of indivision, latent meaning arid conventional symbolism, manifest meaning. However, convention, the institution in the sense of the decision con­ cerning suc li symbolism taken at' such a moment, is obviously not the cause of language nor of its conservation—the “conventions” of a language refer entirely to one another, that is, they always suppose an instituted language; i.e., the institution of Nature (Descartes) , 6 the silent communication of perception. And the life of language, as perceptual life, is made of diver­ gences (corrections, not significations) of combinations of achieved signi­ fications. The origin of language is mythic; that i , there is always a language before language, which is perception. Architectonic of language. Thus the “exact," “conventional” symbolism, never reducible to the other, is nevertheless introduced into it by a hollow o.r a fold in Being Which is not demanded by natural symbolism, hut which recom­ mences an investment of lire same type. Here again, there is the intro­ duction of a new' dimensionality: that is, not facet contra facet, but in the milieu of natural Being, lh< hollow.ng out of a singular point where lan­ guage appears and develops of itself if nothing is opposed to it, with its own produt uvity. Thus, brute mind like savage nature. Necessity t.o awaken this spirit on this side of sedimented positivities. It. is in this sense and with these reservations that we can speak of a logos of the natural world. Communication in the visible is continued hy a communication in the backside inverse of our gestures and our words. Language as a rt sumption of the logos of the sensible worlcl in an other architectonie. And all historicity as well. Matrices bf history.

220

NATURE

[Ontology] Issuing from this program (which look us several years; language), we ar­ rive a( the problematic of philosophy or ontology. Brute or savage being against sedimçntcd-onlic being. Ontology .hat defines being from within and not from without: at every level of Being vs infrastructure, framework, bulges, and not of­ fered in perspective and calling for the construction of what is behind these appearances.—Research for an Entity. This means that ontologies concern the leaves of one sole Being in which we already are at the moment we speak, and which can he globally defined as what is not nothing.—Nature, life, man, and so hieintnider. It remains to consider this Being, to study the relation of the posi­ tive and negative in it, to situate it in relation to classical ontologies, to onlo-theologios.

Third Sketch

The Human Body

The Body as Animal of Perceptions; Esthesiology: What Is It to See? The animal body defined by the Umwe.lt, i.e., as aspeets of the world eut up and organized by movements. Neutral between the interior and exte­ rior of the body. Intertwining or movement and perception. Neutral be­ tween centrifugal and centripetal. In the urchin, is the lhmue.lt an intrinsic denomination? This seems [to bej our thought concerning the animal-machine. The Rauplan that the animal executes, according to which it. functions. Duality between art.ificialist thinking (as if the animal were fabricated) and mechanical re­ ality; republic of reflexes. The animal is moved, does not. move itself, does not support its Urnwelt. For it to move (and dominate its Unmelt itself), it would have to have a centralization. But: First, the urchin is at least organized, and in its embryogenesis it had to have an unfolding, a unity making a machine by differentiation. Second, it has thus been like the protozoa that make their pseudopods. Third, and higher animals have a regulation, that is, an interaction with the outside and the centralized nervous system within the organ­ ism; that is, circularity exterior-organism, they are their Bauplan, they recreate it. The human body (one of them—and different). —Its Unmelt, like theirs, is not subjected, received: it moves; it de­ fines the action itself. —Moreover, it is open, transformable; the body is armed with in­ struments of observation and action—thus, it is not a relation with the system of preestablished triggers, matrix and rails of behavior, ek-stasis in 221

222 NATURE

this melody, closure in it, but rather its “interpretation,” the projection of a system of equivalences and of normatural discrimination. No longer the body as fusion with an Umwe.lt but rather the body as means or occa­ sion of the projection of a Welt. Always each sense organ is linked to conditions of exercise as strict as that of the urchin, to its field or its Umwelt, designed by a style of move­ ment (the eye)—the prospective activity of the eye.—-The circuit of vi­ sion and movement—-Touching and movement. 1 Kach sense organ posits the same enigma as instinct, that is, the preordination of exterior triggers, ol an Umwelt. compatible with the outside. The “Institution of Nature” that makes us have “natural judgments,” that is, “to interpret” tin; action of things as if we divinely knew optics and geometry. There is here a Bauplan that we execute like the urchin. But just as the urchin is formed, so too are our sense organs—the machine is instituted. At least to allow the miracle in embryogenesis (the usual miracle, Malebranche), the eye must be constructed and put to seeing, ft is a body that produces pregnancy; there is no pregnancy of souls; the body must take to living a life and to seeing. We do not say that vision is a property of matter, as that means nothing.—But rather: the eye is much more than an occasion to see, for a thinking that would descend into it-— much more than a means or an organ—it is the cradle of vision, just as the body is [the cradleJ of a life. How must we think the body so that it becomes the provocation of vision? It is not the eye lhaL sees (the eye thing). But it is not the soul. There is a “body of the mind” (Valéry), something that is gathered in the apparatus of vision and hollows out the place there from which one sees. . . . Here’s the problem—what is “the animal of perceptions”? I have said that we progress toward the problem with the corporal schema: —Totalization of the spatial parts of the body, and of the relation of the whole to exterior space—system of equivalences and of differ­ ences that assure quasi-operations and a postural result. —Intersensorial totalization: The thing seen, labyrinth, touching, all form a unified system that allows for a reading of the world while making the suitable subtraction from itself.2 This means that the body is a sensible thing,3 the movements of which form a system of itself in the simultaneous and the successive— not only an individual mass—ehimalig—but first an articulated mass, a diacritical system; and second, this system is the keystone of the world, or inversely, has the keystone in the world and opens onto the world. It is one of the things, and in circuit with other things. The eye, the thing seen, the eye [as] opening to the visible.

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In the world, and [as] measurement., standard of the world. My hand-tiling, my hand that touches the things. How is this duality possible? To seek the solution in the relation of the body to itself: it is here that there is the touched-touching. My hand is a thing above all for the other hand that touches it. It is not the hand that is touching and touched. However, if it is not the same, how can 1 say that I am a body? Wholly active or wholly passive, it is not a body. And in effect, there is a sort of identity of touching and touched, in that the hand that touches finds in the other its similar; that is, it senses that this could in its turn become the active hand, and itself the passive hand. It could be that it is not absolutely verifiable. At the moment when the touched hand becomes the touching, it ceases to be touched; the reciprocity breaks up at the moment that it is going to be born. But this kaleidoscopic change does not destroy it: it seems to us that it is precisely because I was going to touch myself touching that suddenly everything collapses; it is precisely because the touched hand is the same that be­ comes the touching that it ceases to be a thing under the other hand. This failure is precisely the very apprehension of my body in its double­ ness [duplicité] , as thing and vehicle of my relation to the things. There are two “sides” of an experience, conjugated and incompossible, but. complementary. Their unity is irrecusable; it is simply as the invisible hinge on which two experiences arc articulated—a self torn apart. This circuit of the body touching itself, nearly closing itself in on it­ self, [isj closed by the synergic prehension of a thing. This circuit is what the corporal schema means: it is schema, or­ ganization, not an informed mass, because it is a relation to the world, and this because it is a relation to the self in generality. This thal-is-openness to things, with participation on their part, or which carries them in its circuit, is properly theflesh. And the things of the world, insofar as they are nuclei in them­ selves, as they participate in it [the flesh], as they are drowned in it, it is the flesh of the world, the sensible. This has been analyzed in the order of touching—there would be changes to make in order to apply this to vision. The eye cannot see the eye as the hand touches the other hand; it can be seen only in a mirror. The gap is larger between the seeing and the seen than between the touching and the touched.—A segment of the invisible is encrusted be­ tween the eye and itself as a thing. It is maybe only in the other that I see the eye, and this meditation means that the eye is above all seeing, much more seeing than seen, a more subtle flesh, more nervous. But if it were not visible, it wotdd not see, because it would not be a point of view, it

224 N ATU R E

would not. have planes, depths, orientation. . . . The flesh as “Empjindbarkeit,” as sensing sensible, measurement, standard.—How does it ap­ pear in life? We must say of it what w'e said of life in relation to physicochemistry. It is a singular point where another dimensionality appears. Bmpjindbarhe.it \s, if not localized., at least not independent of locality. It is not in nv head or my body, but yet even less elsewhere, fit perceives it at least in a Spielraum] outside; of which it is nothing. But surges forth by investment in life—by opening of a depth, that is, as not existing for |the rest of life, as a being-otht r, a relative nonbeing—relative, the only non being that there is to consider, natural negativity. All these researches are convergent: it is the brute being of per­ ception that permits understanding, first, how' there can be (new physics) being which is not. a hard nucleus; second, how configurations of macrophenomena of another level can be designed there: living beings; third, how these bodies can be llesh, Empfindbarkeit, how the Empfindm can be mounted on an invisible armature (the articulation of the touched body-touching body) and the things sensed, as well as the body touched, installed around a central emptiness, or inhabited by a struc­ ture that is their carnal reality.

The Libidinal Body and Intercorporeity; Esthesiology: The Union of the Soul and the Body Taken Seriously The usual alternative: The body as one of the things, or the body as my point of view on the things, is put back in question; it is both: tilingstandard as llesh; to sense rny body is also to have its posture in the world. The relation with the w'orld is included in the relation of the body with itself. The relation of my two hands = the exchange between them; the touched hand is given to the touching hand as touching; they ate the mirror of each other—something analogous in the relation with the things: they ‘ touch me” just as much as I touch them . 1 Not. surprising: They are that on which the synergy of my body opens; they are made of the same stuff as the corporal schema; I haunt them at a distance, they haunt me at a distance/’ I am with them in a relation of EinfiihlWig: my wid in is an echo of their within. But. as a result, the corporal schema is going to be not only a rela­ tion to the things and to an Ihmuclt cE things, buLalso a relation to other corporal schema. Among the things, there are living “similars.” These

THIRD

S K £ y CH

t H £ HU M A N BODY

are going 1.0 insert themselves in the types of very varied segmentations. As soon as the compression ceases, the division starts again in another direction. It is the proof that it is not directed by a nuclear division since the pressure overthrew the relative position of the nuclei. = The development “regularizes” itself or “is regulated” indepen­ dently of topographical dispositives. There is something other than the properties of elements defined by their localization, without absolute spatial individuality.2 Facts o f Regeneration

Restoration of organs or missing tissues. Facts where creativity is less visible = apparently it is not a matter of a direction conserved by detour, but a distribution of wholly other frag­ mentary facts, independent of the topography. It is a matter of an or­ ganism that recompletes itself. In reality, the operation is also entirely independent of conditions given once and for all.

FOURTH

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Ilydriodic polyps of the germs Tubuluria—a sort of sea anemone carried like a (lower at the; summit of the stalk—the Tubularin can re­ generate this flower or head.—But it is not only an amputated whole that recompletes itself. The new head is formed by the cooperation of numerous parts of the stalk: by cutting the stalk at any point, we always get a regeneration of the head, which then is reborn from any region of the organism, with a reorganization of the entire functioning of the latter. Ascidies of the genus Clavdlina: a branchial system + an intestinal sack: separated, each of them can regenerate the other. The branchial apparatus can be transformed into a white sphere (= two germinative epithelial layers with mesenchyme between them) which after rest is or­ ganized yielding a small and complete Ascidie. Regulation and regeneration. A complete development ran also take place from a segment V

or of a part VI

or of a part V2

or of oilier parts V3, V4

The parts overlapping, the same place changes the effects accord­ ing to the sectioning. Evidencing of a nondependence with regard to place, to topogra­ phy. Against the idea of preformation (fitting together of seeds) simple unfolding, for the idea of epigenesis: intervention of something in sur­ plus which is not given in the actual (the determined) of a non-actual. But these negations are to be elaborated. Does this mean the intervention of another positive factor? Passage from the aspalial to the mctaspatial? From the inactual to another activity? From the inactual to the possible as another actual?

232 n a ï

URE

Realization and Autocritique of the Possible

Beyond a /nuspeklivg Bedcuhing, a point lias a real destiny, a pmspcktive Pcitenz, a possible destiny. “Theft1 are more morphogenetic: possibilities in each part of an embryo than is possibly realized in a given morphogenetic case.”'’ Each cell of the blastula of the Echinus lias the same prospective potency a.s the other s that is, cquipotrntiality. = We realize; in each place not only what it becomes in one case, but what it would become in the others, and we have the tendency to place the head and the tail in reserve in abbreviated form at every point of die body of the dalworm. Ihe naive realization of the possible: ins doimitiva. Retrospective illusion.

fri

r•r i d

■‘ I

i

/. Now, as Driesch himself remarks, it is onh here that “the analytic ex­ pression” ol what happens (pp. 103-108)—necessary, partial expression, by what takes place in a point—tills falsifies the phenomenon: there are not only several possibles in each point, there is also art invariance of the result: type. There is not only a plurality or local possibilities, but a “species erf order” (p. 108), that is, a repartition such that from all the possibles in different cases, a constant type is realized. Must, we say a prospective potency of the system as chaos of possi­ bles + an invariable factor governing the realization of invariable possi­ bles? (p. 109) But the link is more narrow': we must say that the prospektive Balinitungchanges so that the type remains the same, file plu­ rality of possibles is only the inverse of the invariance of the type;, two in­ verses for one sole1 phenomenon of two faces. “If in each point of the seed something other than what is really formed in eacli case can lie formed,, why exactly does it produce what is produced m each case, and nothing orher?” (p. 6 6 ) Evocation of inert given possibles and, on the other hand, a princ iple of order that allows that which corresponds to the situation at. other points (corrective of inert, possibles—choice1), that is tiic: verbal expression of what happens: what happens is both at once, (lie two in one. Moreover, the regulation is riot perfect, unconditioned; the type is not maintained in every case—the larva in lithium: its endoderm is formed on the exterior, too large, spherical mass between die endoderm and the ectoderm, radial and not bilateral symmetry. The skeleton is missing: if there were a separated principle of invar iance, it w'ould reg­ ulate even then.'1 Since it does not do so, must we place these abnormal potentialities in the number of “prospective potencies” of the seen, and say that when they (normal larvae) are not realized, it is because they ate

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balanced by counter-potentialities? No: We must, conceive the one and the manifold as one sole phenomenon of which the larva in the lithium is a variant, and that: in each case, we must see that one sole value is pos­ sible in each point, in each case. The possible is referred to the total phenomenon. It is in the totality that there are diverse possibilities, and they are confused there with invariance. “ The concept of prospective potency, necessitated by our analysis, remains indeterminate, and represents no particular thing actively pres­ ent in the organism as a reason” (p. 77). (I would add: and likewise in the counterpart, principle of the choice of possibles.) These notions are markers of the limits of the spatial, but not yet the presence of a metaspatial. 11 This realist autocritique of the possible is obvious. Before the fact of the progressive determination: We do not have absolute equipotentiality, even at the beginning; there are sketches within which equipotentiality reigns, but which have different potencies compared to one another. The potency of the endoderm and that of the ectoderm are reduced in relation to that of the blastoderm which “brings the whole organism with it” (pp. 70-71). The restriction is pursued until we have the prospective potency dropped to zero—a step toward a “development in independent series” (p. 99). The mouth is formed even when there is no intestine. From a causal harmony, we pass to a harmony in constella­ tion—a development is not explained by the preexistence of the possi­ bles, but by their elimination. Will we say that it is governed by the principle of order or of re­ duction operating in the prospective potency? But it seems assured by tlu: plurality of “directive stimuli”; “formative excitants.” The force of the “arms of the pluteus of urchins are under the morphological influ­ ence of the skeleton—no skeleton, no arms. . . . The crystalline lens of certain amphibians is formed in their tegument as a sort, of response to a formative stimulus coming from the primary optical vesicle. When this vesicle does not manage to touch the tegument, the crystalline lens does not develop. On the other hand, if we transplant the optical vesicle, the crystalline lens can develop in very abnormal points, in the very spots where contact is established” (p. 95). “The eyes of crustaceans can be regenerated identical to them­ selves when the optical ganglion has been respected. On the contrary, if the ganglion is taken out, an antenna develops” (p. 95). Elsewhere the central nervous system orders the regenerative power. (Amphibians: They regenerate legs and tails only if the nervous connections are in-

234 NATURE

tael.)—Thus the sack of possibles oui of which a suitable possible choice would be drawn (antenna or eye) is an illusion: the “choice” is made by already acquired determinations which play a directive role, the sack ol' possibles is illusory, there is an auto-regulation of the process which is reinitiated and furnishes the diverse observable actualities. iii. Reciprocal Action

Far from a “reciprocal influence of the parts on each other. In reality, every embryonic part can be considered under some relation like a pos­ sible cause of morphogenesis for every other part. And here we find the true foundation of epigenesis” (p. 93), “reciprocal actions” (p. 98). This does not exclude the directive stimuli, but they are causes which are themselves effects. Simply there is a relief, more or less important causes, structuring actions,5 but wiLhout exterior, metaspatial principle. We do not have the heads or tails of llatworms in reserve (nor the an­ tennae and eye of crustaceans); it is appearance. We have a section (in­ tersection) that creates a new territory, and Lite place of the section decides what will be regenerated because it prescribes to the internal dy­ namic what it has to produce in order to retrieve its equilibrium. Factor F. is maybe only the “mutual reaction of the parts” (p. 118).6 “The prospective value of any ordinary cell of a blastula is a function of its po­ sition in the whole” (p. 67). We leave space in that what happens in X is an abstraction, exists in coherence with what happens at other points, and all that is in coher­ ence with the upkeep of the spécifie whole that, as an “image,” is the re­ ality of ontogenesis. But this is aspatial, the being is not in itself, not something metaspatial. It remains at every moment attached to micro­ scopic and spatial facts (reinitiated by localized directive stimuli).7 iv. Fall Back into the Metaspatial

In order to understand and to keep up this rigor, we would have to have a notion like that of gestalt—Driesch does not. Alternative: Either mat­ ter, machine, and the introduction is mechanical, a “constellation” of factors distributed in space (p. 125), or if it isn’t this (and it is not, be­ cause:) “each fragment being able to submit, to a complete development must form the machine in its integrity. Now as each element of a deter­ mined fragment can play an entirely different role in any one of the other fragments, the result is that each part of the primitive harmonic system must enclose at the same time all the elementary parts of the ma­ chine, and for a while, all the parts of the system are elements constitut­ ing different machines. An extraordinary machine that is found entirely in each of its parts” (p. 125), therefore the interaction is not the ma-

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chine, but life; factor E is not simply the “symbol” of interactions and constellations—it is the “expression of a true reality, of a veritable entity of nature, life” (p. 127), “entelechy” (which carries in it an itself). Philosophy as another positivity. The truth of factor E as inetaspatial is proven by the theory only in­ directly (p. 128). Philosophy proves it directly. Thus, at the point of arriving at the idea of totality, a recoil, an abandonment of the idea of the aspatial or the transspatial for that of the inetaspatial, limitation of science by another mode of knowing (ent­ elechy is “thought” and not seen), evocation of another science dou­ bling science, discovering other “factors,” of another “positivity.” But we must follow Driesch in this “philosophical” effort because he remains aware of the difficulties that had led him to totality. And moreover, totality is not a key: we must think it itself as a gestalt. And Driesch’s attempt, of course, teaches the difficulties of transcendental total­ ity, sketches the totality of emergence. The positive determination of entelechy, we are going to see, is always set further back = it is not in­ stalled there, outside of till relation to space. Attempt at a "Philosophy" of Entelechy

[Philosophy = yes, because we see the transparence. Dialectic of positive and negative, the possible and the actual, the part and the whole. (Lesson to be drawn from this: the gestalt, structural ontology.) After which: flow the inventory and conceptuality of facts evolves according to Driesch.] The apparition of the aspatial, of a difference taken as the mani­ festation of a inetaspatial positivity, of another identity. Return to the realist analysis: factor E = “intense diversity” (p. 129), that is, as both prospective potency and the principle of order that rules the cohesion of locally realized possibles in each case, and assures the upkeep of the type, the invariance of the whole. We see that this return conforms little to Driesch’s inspiration, since it restores the preformation, whereas Driesch gave the strongest reasons to abandon it for epigenesis. Any single spatial occurrence induced or modified by entelechy has its previous single correlate in a single feature of entelechy, as far as it is an intensive manifoldness. It would be quite inconceivable to assume any­ thing else, though our assumption leads to the consequence—strange as it is—that nothing really new can happen anywhere in the universe. All

236 NATURE

happening i.s '‘evolution” in the deepest meaning of the worth [Driesch, volume 11, p. 154J

Profound kinship of fmalism and mechanism: Nothing happens, all is given. What is F? We are going to see that he cannot positively determine F. Resistance to positive determination is instructive. It is not en­ ergy— It does not break with the principle of the conservation of energy;8 it must he “something other than physics” without being “anti­ physics.” It is not the power to transform energy, not even the Auslosung of the transformation of potential and kinetic energy. It has only a suspen­ sive power: the transformation of kinetic energy into potential. How’s that? Its suspensive power (= to he opposed to . . . ). Can ortly he the suspension of suspension, the suspension of an equilibrium between givett forces according to which these would play. Arrangement of a hollow where forces that are annulled are going to he in play. (Com­ pare Leibniz: Gravity makes for the transcendent (?), which would allow for heavy bodies to enter into competition and to descend.-’ For exam­ ple, in the determination of a tissue, entelechy suspends the equilibrium of potentialities which aie canceled, and one of them realized. It is the principle of reducing disadvantage: the arr angement of a certain place where forces get stuck, which allows other forces to come into play (sin­ gular point). (And so the incline that the balance meets and that ab­ sorbs its momentum and converts it into an inverse thrust,10 and so too elastic material in which an action is absorbed.) It is not invisible to ex­ terior actions: an action (hat breaks an equilibrium (loss of a part of the body) gives rise to a modification of suspensions that leads to reestab­ lishment of the normal (restoration). The form is fashioned, not by a positive factor, but by a set of vanishing equilibria liberating a set of reg­ ulative causalities. Thus it is not an aspalial substance—and yet it is not “in the locale”: “F.ntelechy is affected by an act upon spatial causality as if it came out of an uliraspatial dimension; it does not act in space, it acts into space, it is not in space, it only has points of manifestations in space” (p. 235). F.ntelechy in regulation: When the egg is split, the section does not double the entelechy, since it was not in the entire egg, but was its nega­ tive lining. There are not two half-entclechies, nor moreover, magically, two entelechies in the sense of things. The doubling of organisms means that, despite the section, we can again have “active manifestations” of en­ telechy, which is found to be in the plural: the duality is here only the in­ tegrity of entelechy.11 F.ffort to conceive the negative, the nonspatial, as

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negative, as a hinge of being. But difficulty: The participating things bring it into the positive, the other world (compare Plato): determined negations are here where they operate. Thus there must be a positivity to factor E. This is negative again because we think starting from space. But we could go to the positive (think factor E “directly”) starting from my body and its relation to space.12 In reality, the difficulty would be found again: How to understand this gap, this negative, encrusted between the situa­ tion and the response: Is it spatially between them? Such lhaL they are positively conceived, the gap is either a property of space (which means nothing: space is everything) or the intrusion of another substance in space. There is a solution only by putting the ontology of the in-itself back in question. Conclusion Negativity Possible Totality

Thinking according to the positive: being which is what it is. Space Time Possible Totality

Which is in itself (local properties). Linear causality: source of being, is in the ahead, the future, product of the past—preformation. Negation of the possible: Exterior diminution (?); Actualism. 'Thinking by micro-events, negation of the partial totality: There is of the whole only infinity.

Against the insufficiency of this thought: Second positive—another substance or causality. Possible as another realized actuality, reservoir. + choice, principle of transcendent order, metaspatial. Transcendent or fragmentary totality, descending in it. Epigenesis. 'These two modes of thought deny that something happens: evolution. Negativism or Idealism. There is an aspatial or an atemporal—which is not a second reality but an ideality. Possible as carried by the mind (“regulative” principles = the mind rec­ ognizes itself as carried by nature).

238

Totality of the mind—the rest is only a moment of it = Nature is the weakness of the 1 lea (Hegel). Hut the problem of participation: A pattern of negations i.s not nothing, it is a system. Against the philosophy uf the thing and the philosophy of the idea.

Philosophy of “something"—something, and not nothing. And this negation of the nothing is essential. Life lias both a fragility and an ob­ stinacy: it. wiM hf, if nothing opposes it. Not a hard nucleus of being, but tile softness of tlie flesh. Dissociate our idea of lifting from that of the thing: life is not a separable thing, but an investment, a singular point, a hollow in Being, an invariant ontological relief, a transverse rather than longitudinal causality telescoping the other, which microphenomena punctuate, and do not compose, possibility of limited variation around whic h they are grouped, improbable ensemble and not simple particu­ lar case of the probable (of possibles) nor positive principle of another order of reality, but the establishment of a level around which the diver­ gences begin forming, a kind of being that functions like a vault, statisti­ cal being against tire random, overcoming bv encroachment, ambiguity of the part and the whole (against Driest It: Thé machine is not actually reaction of all its parts), thus being by attachment, that we cannot grasp apart, not bring it close (like a hard nucleus), refusal of all or nothing.13 But life is not negativity: it is a pattern of negations, a system of oppo­ sition that means that what is not this, is that, field, dimension—dimension = the depth for flat beings. The impossible becomes possible. Relative to a subordinate dimension, it is my being. But the opening is not an opening to everything. It is a specified opening [_??] of dimension (Descartes), point of view under which a variation is possible, every dimension is riot quanti­ tative or quantity is allusion to dimensionality. Life = being by sketch or outline, that, is, territories, regions = inherence in increasingly more pre­ cise places in a field of action or a radiation of being. Structuration = by touil function.ng, the putting in place of local functioning in interaction. Compare the open situation: the mode of resolution assigned to a melody from ils beginning, without the or ganizing principle graspable apart—frag­ mentary facts are established around a level or a norm that is not mini­ mum, that is not maximum (Leibniz: The world is grounded on a divine calculus), but which i.s the establishment, of the very framewotk and the principle of all calculus, of: all economy, il y a. This structuration, having crystallized a constellation, will he pursued at our level, behavior. (Titus a rionserial space and time—blocks of space and time.) Tins bving-ther e by difference arrcl not by identity we think only fry the rehabilitation of the sensible world (compare Uexküll, the melody),

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not as a “psychological fact” to reconstruct in positive terms, but as the visibility of the invisible. Compare Goldstein: the organism—milieu. Bergson: “images.”14 But this is not to be understood as an anthropologism: to be seen is here less than to be—the gestalt of the psychologists makes an allusion to the pure gestalt. It subtends, with the psychologists, a sensorial field (organization of hearing which makes a phenomenon of melody appear).—In nature there is no preestablished field (if not the organism-parent, but how will it form a rejection?). In any case a new held is realized. Thus,15 the perceived form is not an anthropomorphic il­ lusion in relation to the nature in-itself behind it, but to nature englobcd in living nature, that we must strip of human clothing ( = science): we find then a center \foyer] of phenomena, a lateral encroachment of mi­ crophenomena on each other, a cohesion around invisible being even de jure, that they envelop, around which they fold up, crystallize the Gestalthafle. But then are the gradients the truth of the gestalt? Is it thus the truth of which the whole is the appearance? No, there are envelopment phenomena (for example, “outlines”) that have equal rights—but then this is a sort of nominalism: actually, we have the right to name and to describe the phenomena—but we name precisely only human objects of thought—cf. the curves of the increase of energy—the qualitative magnitudes of evolution—and the solution remains idealist (K Meyer: positive phenomenology).11’ Kantian: Being is determinable only as Being-object; there is no access to ontogenesis. This is not possi­ ble even from the point of view of science, which cannot construct purely “conventional” enveloping-phenomena. Causality side by side is not a criterion: we can observe, parameters beyond the historical series, but not arbitrarily (this would be once again variations concomitant with the object L?1 in function of abstract lime): it would be occultism. The facts put in a series must recover a structure so that we can pronounce such a law: for example, here, the cumulative structure that makes the Fortpjlanzung of energy, whereas there is no similar accumulation for other products of culture (tools carry their meaning more really than do symbols)—thus there must be a cumulative structure under “life” like an enveloping-phenomenon. “Ontogenesis.” The being of science and the being-perceived of the embryo are less than its Being, which is structure. I low to think it? The great difficulty comes always from the haunt­ ing of space—as partes extra partes—as full. That means: a being entirely exterior to itself. Idealism, the spiritualization of extension, does not change the problem: the pure exterior is doubled by a pure inferiority that is parallel to it and does not meet it. The notion of life equals the

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counterstroke of the in-itself to the for-itself when the latter perceives it­ self prepared from the outside: it cannot avoid this observation, but it docs not authorize animating the outside. Challenge again the extension-object as plenitude in which all parts are equal. Of course space spreads open, diverges absolutely, but not because there would be in it a pure positivity: this would not make a divergence. There is divergence only by site or situation, by UmhoJ'tes17 between ontological points, not positive ontological elements. This is where there is what we call structures. The Development of Research since Driesch Notes the Same Sensible Points

Since Driesch: From the aspatial to the metaspatial—but positively inde­ terminable —> negativity in Being. We could believe at first that the duel between mechanism and vi­ talism continues = regulation claimed by localized organizing centers: chemical substance (organism) (Spemann). Facts of induction = chem­ ical inductors. Induction linked to local covariations, contacts. But: These inductors are maybe not triggers (specific properties of territories where they operate). The localized organizer functions by edge-to-edge causality (“com­ petence of territories”). Zigzag of the researches on linear causality. Interaction? If it is conceived as an assembly of linear causalities, then it is an illusory clarity: Is there a thread or a finite number of threads of the skein? No: the “cause” is the effect; there is a network. Compare Gesell: Work on the reverse side, as with a tapestry, but man thinks in terms of the right side, the front. —The hody: the latter (the body) takes place in terms of the former (the double-sided work), which is not actual, or is actual in another way: here there is no pure exterior­ ity of biological space, no pure series of biological time. There is going to be ubiquitous Being and anticipational Being, time as effecting read­ justments [?], space as effecting readjustments [?]: The Being That Is to Be Understood

Is not preformed being (spatial multiplicity, serial time, with production in advance). Is not being by epigenesis = negation of the precedent, creation, borrowing from the aspatial. “Complementary” notions (|?J p. 190).18 (In the sense of the physicists.)

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These two beings are abstractions ol' one sole, aspects of one sole. The “progressive determination” that is production starting from Lhe predominant equipotentialiLy of the harmony of constellation, of the machine “flux of determination” ([?] p. 300). “Kmancipation,” “fragmentation” [?"]: Realization of a mosaic by induction in chain—there is a moment when we have outlines, “in the absence of a nervous system” that “are largely independent” (p. 21). At the same time, by the humoral and nervous system, there is a “cen­ tripetal” “regeneration” (p. 22) = realization of a “functional harmo­ nious unity.” It is not a passage from the single to the Multiple, but from one type of unity to another, from a certain relation of a multiple to another: profound equivocity of the place in the living substance: not only two meanings in the adult (anatomy and functioning), but again an opposi­ tion to this couple of embryonic life where there is not yet “visible” dif­ ferentiation (anatomy) or “functioning” ([?] p. 21, notes p. 3). Differentiation and organogenesis are “prefunctional”—yet the organ­ ism comes from it, has not completely left it (regeneration). This • •

eliminates the possible as simple preformed reservoir with a principle of choice; eliminates actualisai: it is not true that everything is actual; there is an actuality of the possible as possible, that is, the notion of an outline, the being of becoming actual that is certain possibilities.

There arc not two types of egg—regulation [and] mosaic—but two complementary concepts ([?1 p. 190, 39). So-called mosaic eggs (Ascidami where [?1 one gets a complete tad­ pole with a fragment of an egg, or even two tadpoles with the meridian section, on Lhe condition of bringing about a virgin egg; and not at stage two of the blastomeres, where regulation is no longer possible. L)J Like­ wise, the egg of the Spirolia, a type of mosaic. Regulation, subordinated, it is true, to the polar plasma necessary for a complete egg. Inversely there is a realization of the mosaic itt the egg that has reg­ ulation: (Ilorstudium: meridian section of the egg of the urchin at stage eight gives place to regulation—bur not the mesotorial section that gives two deficient embryos for the organs for which the part is not compe­ tent. [)] However, the mosaic does not have a precise border. Spemann’s grafts: Tbe grafts behave at first as ortgemàfi at the be­ ginning of gastr ulation. But at the neurulic stage they are herkunftsgemàfi—thus there is first regulation and then mosaic'.

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Neither “spatial” nor “metaspatial” are suitable terms: biological Being is always between the two. Precise determinations of outlines, but which do not function locally. Types o f Beings Introduced in Order to Express This "Locality" o f Life

Gradients ([?] 1929): Arranged vitelline plaques of the egg, less and less voluminous in the measure that we appioach an animal pole.—In­ versely, ribonucleic granules arc more and more dense in the measure that we distance ourselves from the vegetative pole. Double gradient, (p. 249). Gradients are “indicators” of morphogenic activity (p. 249). Gradients overlapping each other give the “animal field”—"veg­ etable field” with two types ot metabolism. The amputation ofOne of them animalizes or vegetali/.es the larva. Fields define the. organo-formative territories: “passage from the system of gradient.,. . . with graduated, quantitative differences to a mo­ saic of organo-formative, qualitatively different territories" (p. 276). De­ termination is an “invisible differentiation.” The local morphogenic field controls the supernumerary forma­ tion obtained in the case of the graft.—the field includes a region that it strongly regulars, and a periphery to which this regulation extends, however less probably. Overlapping in the fields ([?], p. 281, notes p. 11 ). Hence the question: In what sense is the field in the location? There is an attachment; it. is not distributively there. As to time, the field can remain “virtual (p. 292) while waiting for the hormone. Compare Spemann's History of the Organizer

T here is a precocious determination in the amphibians of a ceutramicrodynamic field prefigured by a clepigmented growth: each of the blastomeres gives a complete embryo if each kept one-half of the clepigmented growth. There is thus already a signification of the imscgment.ed egg. But does this inductor, the organizer-center, carry neural compo­ nents (?) (Spemann) or (Dacqué (?)). Is it itself made only of quanti­ tative differences of a gradient, its action being diverse here and there by a competence appropriated from reactional territories, with however an overlapping of the field [?]. The stimulus of induction seems banal, without zoological speci­ ficity: the organizer remains an inductor. Even adults, equipped, or in­ vertebrates are inductors, capable at least of “evocation.” The inducting capacity changes while warming. Nucleic acids? (B rach ct)W e see a cat-

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alyst, liberating the power of reactional tissues: induction unleashed by a piece of glass. “Hypothetical substances”: organisms, the action of which varies according to the thresholds for a superior or inferior concentra­ tion. . . . As soon as the formative action is physically analyzed, we find it again elsewhere. The nonspecificity in one point, or in the inductors, is a mechanist argument—but also quite vitalist: How can this banal and vague action give way to precise regulations? We cannot economize pure properties of the field (nonfragmentary). Compare the regeneration of flatwoi ms: The same region C regenerates the head if it is above the section, the tail if it is below. Thus, no specific materials in C, but another capac­ ity whether C remains solidary to such and such a point. Chronological “polarity” (?) of the remaining fragment, “arrangement in stages” of the different levels of the cephalo-caudal axis of the increasing or decreas­ ing chronological properties: conservation of O (greater than at the head) metabolic activity sensibility to cyanide, alcohol, temperatures, ultraviolet gradients, held

Ontological interest of these notions: The arrangement in stages in question does not give a reason for the properties of the field, is rather the symbol or sign of them. But it indicates an orientation of biology toward a Being in which representable interrogation is made, and which is not produced by shifted processes: the microproperties of the field are not vague analo­ gies of its macroproperties. The inter| ?1 is the orientation: transversal being Acausal Nonsubstantial Structure

Phylogenesis Problems of genesis: We indicate them because they put the very fabric of being in question. Particularly phylogenesis: because it emerges as a problem with Darwin, in the presence of the ideal kinship of animals.

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Morphology is lor him the “soul” of biology (sec The Origin of Species, chapter 14 on morphology). Extraordinary fact of identity (arti­ cles and articulations) between the hand, the clawed animal foot, the horse’s hoof, the turtle’s ilipper, the bat’s wing. The solution for him is in the identity of the origin—theory of de­ scendance. Thus the idea of a transformation of species is born against the “idealist morphology” (what we conceive as transcendent finality or as the idea of Nature: Goethe)21 = reduction of the internal sense to a causal series of events—the problem of phylogenesis = the architectonic not only of the individual, but of the biosphere or of the world of life: it is again more clearly an ontological problem rather than an einbryological problem. We can follow up the history of Darwinism with the attitude of sci­ ence in front of the problem of Being. Darwin: mutation-selection. Modification of the organism by the concourse of chance and of the pressure of selection. The problem of knowing where a certain resolute being comes from by showing how other beings are not—this is because that is not, a factor of life replaced by a factor of death. Elimination of the inept. What is, is by definition, is because it is the only possible. Returned fmalism, but determinations are as rigorously prescribed as by fmalism.22 Renaissance today of Darwinism or of neo-Darwinism. But pro­ foundly modified. Simpson: Tempo and Mode in Evolution.23 We say neo-Darwinism because we give an important role to natural selection—and that we ignore the heredity of the acquired (distinction soma— germen.)—vitalism and linalisin. But the conception of selection is very different. Neo-Darwinism or the “synthetic theory of evolution” (Simpson) is both a resumption of the “Democritean claims” (Ruyer, Néo-finalisme, 178) and a highly scrupulous inventory of “selection,” even the unveil­ ing of dimensiotts that are no longer those of the theory of descen­ dance. Democritean Pretensions

Attachment to the theory of descendance and to selection as explication. Julian Huxley, in Evolution, eliminates all divine and vitalislic guid­ ance.-1Thus it remains “at least to confess a total ignorance and to abandon all attempt at explanation of natural selection for a time.” (Cited by Ruyer, 177.) It is thus an a priori logic. More precisely: “We push into a corner”

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what is not mechanical, the human—hut what will we do in arriving there? “Scientific politics of the biologists who imagine that they will not have to overthrow the mechanistic frameworks of their science” (Ruvcr, 178). Biology shrinks back from making its anti-mechanistic revolution, forgetting that the overthrowing of the mechanist framework of phvsics had been made necessary by some facts: Mtchelson’s experiment— Planck’s experiment. The selection presented as a positive explicative factor, in the role of organo-formative, is often proven in the experiments only as a differntial case of the functional efficacity. Compare competition or war, which create nothing by themselves, which recompensate the inventors. But how is invention made? It must be made by selection because we posited an alternative: causal explanation or no explanation. From there the fragility of the a priori conceptions of neo-Darwin­ ism. Darwinism is reborn around 1930 with Fisher and Wright They cal­ culate the time taken by mutation in order to extend to a notable part of a population. They and Haldane believe they see that time is of the order of the magnitude assigned by paleontology and the evolution of species. Huxley: Medium rate of mutation (dominant): one out of 100,000 individuals—we suppose that it brings along one supplemental chance in 1,000 to be reproduced. It will thus be necessary to have 5,000 gener­ ations so that half the species is made of mutants, and 12,000 more for the entire species. The numbers are variable with the volume of the population. Taking account, of this, they more or less correspond to the: curve of evolution indicated by paleontology for the equids. In reality, this coincidence is obtained only with extraordinarily contestable auxil­ iary notions. The fondamental formula uses a notion of the “fitness” of a mutant variety and supposes that this fitness will remain constant during all Lhe duration of fixation = the variation of conditions yet excludes that, and excludes the upkeep of a constant differential mortality. The numbers here are really a mask. Cf. again the neo-Darwinian reasoning in order to reduce ortho­ genesis to ortho-selection. According to Morgan,2:1 the number of mu­ tant individuals would create by itself a soi t' of “rail” effect, because when this number augments, a second mutation in the same direction has a better chance of producing a new advance in the same direction.2r>. . . For example, when elephants had a trunk of less than a foot, the chance of having (by mutation) a ti utik of more than a fool was proportional l.o the length of the already existing trunk and to the num­ ber of individuals in which such a character could appear. (Cited by Ruyer, 187)

NATURE

This supposes that the fust mutation (generalized) placed the individu­ als “on a higher level.” Rut in redation to what? The organ to be realized. If the second mutation is fortuitous, the greatest number of primary mu­ tants does not augment the chances that the: second mutation (sup­ posed in the same direction) makes a “new advance in the same direction” = to suppose that the appropriation of the parts is the Vorhaben of a whole is to suppose our idea of the whole. Huxley takes thi: up in an example: In the evolution of the automobile the substitution of' the fom-rvlinder motor was a great progress; it had a survival value. But after the majority of automobiles had four-cylinder motors, the additional advantage of sup­ plemental cylinders was sufficiently great to give a greater value to six cylinders on the market.

But this supposes a human field where the four cylinders steer (hc clienls to the six cylinders. ft is not by bombarding the tooling of a car factory that we would have se­ rious chances of passing from the four-cylinder motor to the six- or eightcylinder motor, even with the help of selection effected by the choice of the clients. (In Ruyer 188)

This obstinacy that we sense in the scientists, in these fragile con­ structions, destined to elucidate the pioblem of natural genesis, led it to a statistical destination—we will say that it is an attachment to science in opposition to speculative constructions. But. why this dilemma? Here as elsewhere, the alternative is not dualism. No, this thought without rigor is a sht inking back from the architectonic, to the pluri-dimensioriality of Being, ft is a postulate: there is no more in creation than in conservation (Descartes). It is a “philosophy.” Is it science? The principles ate beyond question—and the constiuctions are ad hoc hypothetical. Very frequently in Simpson there is (beyond more or less before the combination [?J of the facts) construc­ tions starting from the principle of mutation-selection New this proof is never crucial. It is the center of interest of science that is displaced. It displaces itself, in fact, and not under Simpson’s influence But at the Same Time That Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism Are Science, They Drain the Facts

Neo-Darwinism, the complexity of evolution (“synthetic” thcorv).'"17 They no longer speak of the origin, hut rather the origins of species.

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There is a plurality of factors in evolution,2S plurality of evolutions (micro-mac.ro-niega evolution). With this plurality of factors, the causal explanation by selection disappears, maybe—appears by its own means a series of phcnomena-envelopes, properties of evolution and not the residue of selection, maybe the necessity of leaving the point of view of descendance, which assimilates the genesis of speeies to observable facts already given in the organism, of accepting a positive phenomenology— and finally maybe an ontology coming out of the dilemma of beingobject Fmalism. It is this that we are going to follow in Simpson. Simpson, Tempo and Mode, and through him, contemporary evolu­ tionism. New problematic, but that is not understood as such, blind, always led back to the causal explanation and to the schema of descendance— selection tliaL makes the mental horizon. “Tempo, " "Design" o f Evolution

“Evolution” not as concrete history, but as thing or variable. Statistical method allowing to posit it as a construction to be mea­ sured—for defining the “rate of evolution”—establishing the “envelope curve of the flux of life” (Simpson, p. IS). Which is good: We take into consideration the global phenome­ non, and beyond that the micro-events. Whal is worrisome: nominalism, the speculative character of the constructions of this global phenomenon—we hasten toward measure­ ments and statistics without so much as looking to know what we are measuring: Example: The notion of the rate of evolution: We believe that we notice constant relations between the rate of growth in different struc­ tures (size and length of the muzzle in the ancestors of the horse)—but often these correlations are not true. The two characters evolve together only because selection operates in the same sense on them. Not generic correlations. In others: The rate of evolution of entire organisms. We establish it by making the mean of evolutions relative to all the structures together (without choosing) by “new methods that reduce the traits of the struc­ tures to a coherent form easy to manipulate.”29 Here then, certain au­ thors propose to allow a “uniform rate of evolution,”30 the differences of the tempo express differences of durations, and the “quantity of evolu­ tion” serving to evaluate this duration.31 Others on the contrary: Or agaiti: Curves of generic survival—we compare it to the curve of the survival of populations of mutant Drosophila. They are compara­ ble—thus there would be a sort of “evolutive metabolism.” But, Simpson

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says, the survival of automobiles [?] almost follows the same Lrack as that of cockroaches—postulating the analogy between phenomena of a great horizontal extension and experimental phenomena. We will say it is the method of physics—it is only after we know what we measure. Is it not an exterior imitation? Because it seems that here the constructions are sim­ ply false, as Simpson shows. And when we deduct the false, there remains: the idea of accumulation of small mutations in medium populations, which is not in contradiction with the facts, but which does not respond to the posited principle: envelope-curve of the flux of life. And so in general: Most of the phyla manifest a tendency toward a greater size. But Simpson brings the paleontological fact back to a “causal background”: selection. This selection is only taken in the sense of the genetic theories of populations according to which the dimension of the population plays a decisive role, using the materials of mutation to make new organisms out of it because the volume of the populations deter­ mines the pressure of selection (competition) over against the pressure of mutation (in the given conditions of an interfecund group). But this plays a role of sealing off of the theory of mutation-selection = genetics permits the understanding that selection does not operate in the sense of the useful (conserved or developed organs in the hypertelia because they are genetically solidary with useful organs)—several genes for one single character, several characters for one single gene—the critique of a hered­ itary morphology shows that there are “potentialities of development” which are inherited; we interpret preadaptation in this way: it is a high variability in a population, a bank where mutations are deposited. All this making-supple of genetics allows to seal off a gap between the theoretical schema mutation-selection and the facts. But the schema, next, remains beyond question: it is not denied—it is not efficacious. Likewise, the "Explosive Stages" o f the Evolution o f the Group

Likewise: microevolution—changes in population continue—> genetic endo-evolution; macroevolution—apparition and divergence of discon­ tinuous groups (species, genus); megaevolution—evolution on a grand scale studied by paleontology. The discontinuity is the rule in the third group. We do not have discontinuous series. Simpson refers Lhat to a gap in the documents. The discontinuities of morphology always correspond to periods of considerable time. This is not provable, but seems likely. Thus the intermediary conclusion between the idea that every­ thing comes from the documents and the idea lhat there had never been forms of transition mote or less close to the first.

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Ho adds a reason: according to the genetics of populations, transi­ tional forms were not very voluminous varieties, hence the lack of docu­ ment®! Complementary explanation: These small populations become preadaptive and evolve by leaps. Slow and Rapid Lines o f Evolution

“Living fossils.” ^ The question is eliminated by considering these cases as inferior and superior limits of a statistical estimation. Limits (?): tuchytelelic bradytelelic horoLclelic (means)

“fixed evolution,” “imperative types.” That does not seem linked to any character or gr oup of characters of organisms (such as the long vital cycle or asexual reproduction) — Simpson invokes: the dimension of populations (fecund and con mu­ ons): bradytelia deduced (torn large populations with weak tortuitous modifications and a stable adaptation to a milieu that remains accessi­ ble. The pressure of selection in a large population eliminates every mu­ tation. • Acceleration of the rate of evolution: The secondary, more specialized phyla tend to evolve quicker than the ancestral stock. • Inertia, orientation and live .force:

a. Inertia = linear self-evolution; live force = acquisition along the way of something like an acceleration which provokes an overcoming of the goal and the hypertelia, or the liberation from the “pressure of mu­ tations,” the pressure of selection having diminished?3® Assimilation to laws of mechanics—assimilation [?] that Simpson rejects'. But maybe analogy? What does not come to mind for him is that there is to be constituted, from a kinetic, evolutionary phenomena. It confines itself to bringing the two ideas of inertia and live force back to mutation-selection. b. Inertia orthogenesis. Simpson opposes to the internal direc­ tive pr inciple (dir ection of the genetic mutations) that there are rever­ sals in evolution. Or thogenesis is only a part of the f ramework Itself can include a direction in typical (?) neo-Darwinism: it is false that all the imaginable mutations are produced, above all alter given modifications;

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it is “easier” to continue than to start an entirely new line (Waddington).31 The choice is between more or less, without positive or negative. But the control of evolution is not principally genetic. It is fitting that certain structures are used only at their complete achievement. Simpson is satisfied by responding that we observe a dif­ ferential effect on the mortality of infinitesimal differences. Reexamination of the orthogenesis of the world showing that it is not so straight—» orr.hoselection, a selection which is not that of an “en­ gineer,” mutations that are not ordinary (256). Critique of the idea of live force at the origin of hypertelia (Cuénot).35 There is a displacement of the optimum on this side of the origin—solidarity of hypertelia with useful mutations.31’ Eclecticism. Nominalism: We do not seek to think the thing—we combine prin­ ciples in counterpoint. We say the “philosophy” of neo-l)arwinism: the principle of mutation-selection = fortuitous mutations with their distribution and priming, by selection—the architectonic brings intraworldly events back on the plane; compare Descartes: there is not more in creation than in conservation = philosophy of the horizontal. descendance according to —» objective time (“facts”) and causal order (“science”) Apparition on this plane of more and more complex forms start­ ing from each other. Opposite, we would have “idealism” and an idealist morphology, and “ideas” of Nature: the “vertical” dimension from which come the grand phyla—Ruyer. n

y

The conceptions of the élan vital, of vitalism, of totality, represent, as emergent things, the invasion of another dimension into the horizontal

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order, and mark an effort to think their relation in a nondualist fashion. We will examine another ontology: consider that it is not to be ex­ plained causally and noncausally, nor are one or two dimensions to be posited. Darwinism: One dimension of the actual—the rest is impossible. Idealism: Another dimension; there is the possible. Us: They are right against each other: Darwinism is right to say that (he problem is not at first to explain why this (Leibniz), that we must show that the rest is eliminated—but it gives a fecundity of life starting from what there is only to be unfurled, a chance that uses everything. Idealism is right to say that the actual is not, like a unique plane and without thickness, without relief, sufficient—but the rest, it con­ ceives as ideal, with all the implied problems. Problem: To place something between chance and the idea, be­ tween the interior and the exterior. This something is the suturing organism-milieu, organism-organism. In this suture, something happens which is not an actual fact—a joinLure which is the articulation of the vertical order on the horizontal order. The idea of Being as dimensionality, the above dimensions of which are only the realization and abstract aspects. Place the two orders in this ontological milieu. Thereby there is a “kinship” of the living beings and us among them. The debate:123 Neo-Darwinism: Simpson. How Darwinism is charged with a new con­ tent—we see reappear here something other than the actual. 2. Idealism: Dacqué. 3 . Does it suffice to allow a “positive phenomenology” (F. Meyer) or an ontology? 1.

Fifth Sketch

The Renaissance and Metamorphosis of Darwinism Darwinian philosophy is modified by: • The statistical method: It has for an effect the introduction of the idea of cuu.Kility within an acausality—global. • Nondetennining: Interest for tin. rnvrlopmrnt-phenonirnon, the “curveenvelope of the flux of life” (Crumpton),1 disciplined altitude. • Intervention of the genetics ol population: Between the organism and nature, relations interior to the population intervene according to their volume. I Gnçe the idea of a pressure of mutation opposed to the pressure of selection. The pressure of mutation is not simple chance or “lluctuation." There iç a tempo of mutation depending on the amplitude of populations. Selection is a simply negative factor, a kind of pruning.' The milieu is defined neither simply by the physical milieu, nor by the actual milieu. Idea that the coupling of actualorganism and actual-milieu is not an overlapping of two possibk cir­ cles: possible functions of the organism for Ollier milieu. Idea of an ecological milieu or biotope.

These notions are superposed on Darwinian philosophy and modify it. In a sense, precisely because of the dogmatism of mutation-selection. Great freedom ol description. Simply: We do not give an ontological import to these descriptions. We fall hack into mechanistic ontology in the last analysis. Thus the novelty ol description. Relapses of mechanism that compromises them. Examples: E v o lu tio n as E n v e lo p m e n t- P h e n o m e n o n

We try to consider it globally, not only according to the empirical history of its descendance.

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Research for a “rale of evolution.” Its uncertainties according to Simpson himself. Nature and Logos, page 14.3 Proceeds constructive, nominalist—constrictions of variables of which we do not know the meaning. Is it the method of physics? Bui the majority of these constructions are simply false. M ic ro e v o lu tio n , M a c ro e v o lu tio n , M e g a e v o lu tio n

Nature and Logos, page 14, verso. “F.xplosive stages.” S lo w a n d R ap id L in e s o f E v o lu tio n : " L iv in g F o ssils"

F.xplosive stages with a “potency” of evolution (or “old age”). Simpson explains: relaxation of selection—variability of accrued group—less scientific adaptation—several genotypes can have an adap­ tive value. They diverge radially from the ancestral type. Simpson adds: that always supposes the opening of a vacant adaptive zone. Senile vari­ ability = subdivision of local groups —> less stable adaptation—impres­ sion of a preadaptive “exploration” before extinction. The cases of “fixed evolution,” the “immortal types.” All that is a limit case of tachytelia and bradytelia. Deduction by Simpson of these descriptive traits star ting from the dimension of populations. Compare Nature and Logos, page 14, verso. Me is right to refuse a bad metaphysic. But did he eliminate the descriptive fact by the causes? The synchro­ nism realized by history of such species gives way to a new phenomenon. In e rtia , O rie n ta tio n , a n d Life F o r c e 1

Of. Nature and Logos, page 14, verso A. It is right to criticize causal assimilation to physical inertia: the movement of evolution is not inertia save in physics; it is a force tiding against the pressure of selection. But we do not pose the question of the constitution of a critique from evolution: we confine ourselves to reduc­ ing ontogenesis to mutation-selection. Cf. Nature, and Logos, page 14, verso B. In brief, there is a sealing off of the hiatus between doctrine and facts—which conserves the doctrine—but is it heuristic? Large part of the theoretical construction with care only to show that it is not harmful. Live force: hyperlelia, Nature and Logos, C.

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"T e m p o a n d M o d e s " o f E v o lu tio n

The notes in red pen, page 7 [i.e., the “Second Sketch,” above]. The ground remains the same. But we arrive at enormous macroscopic dif­ ferences. The factor that creates it is not exclusively internal (quantum). Thus there is a crossing of organism-world. Advent of structures. Or again the next time opposed attribute (Dacqué). Neo-Darwinian attitude in front of: • Slow and rapid evolution: considered as a limit case of probabilistic distribution—thereby the “immortal” types, “fixed” evolution, taehytelia, and bradytelia keep a meaning. • “Inertia,” “orientation,” and “live force”—in evolution. Inertia = onto­ genesis, linear self-evolution.

Live force = acceleration acquired on the way, which provokes an overcoming of die goal (hypertelia). Mechanist notions = assimilation to classical mechanics. BuL also finalist: Hypertelia supposes an a fortiori orientation to the goal. Simpson’s attitude: lie critiques the superficial assimilation to me­ chanics: the evolutive movement is a farce acting against the pressure of se­ lection ([?] of the pressure of mutation). There are reversals of evolution. But what does he think of it himself? Orthogenesis

a. Reexamination of the facts: T he orthogenesis of the horse is not so di­ rect. It is an orthoselection • which not that of an engineer; • between mutations which are not ordinary.

b. In effect: Mutations are channeled by sexual selection—within populations. They include sometimes only two possibilities: yes or no, + or -. After a given modification it is “easier” to continue than to begin an entirely new line. I Ie admits a difficulty: certain mutations are useful only when they are [?]—hut experiments show a differential effect on the mortality of weak differences. c. Very just—the problem is only more striking. d. Population, the alternative, the effect of the rail = manners of reducing the field of the probable in order to explain the concentration on the improbable. All this supposes what is in cause: that there must be something rather than nothing.

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Last argument: Is the differential effect ol- weak mutations due to the 1 association with useful mutations? Then it is like the above manner of masking the passage to the improbable. Hypertelia

a. Displacement of the optimum on this side of the size of the species by change of milieu. b. Solidarity ofhypcrtclia with useful mutations. c. Coincidence of the direction of tne pressures of selection and the pressure of mutation. d. The pressure of selection plays above all on the weak. All this = theory as exclusionary—fact: non impossibility. We erase the de facto contours, it becomes illusion Danger of" this theoretical situation. Modality of evolution: "designs,” “styles.” Specialization by scission, phyletic evolution, evolution by quanta (large taxonomic unities), thresholds. But, despite the discontinuity ol documents, it br ings back in pr in­ ciple the three types of unity. No means of taking the theory m default. But. will there uot be de­ cline (and decline of causality in physics)? Because we can also try to construct the theory based on observable appearances. It would be: to construct the original “evolutionary kinetic.” In reali'y, it is here that Simpson himself should happen on it, since he excludes t.he explication of it by dogmatic causality: Major Fea­ tures of Involution, page 52, “The cause of an evolutionary event. . . is meaningless in these terms.” Thins, in par ticular, we arc going to privilege selection as the real­ ization of the probable iit given conditions. (That leads to introducing here anti-random factors: population, effect of the rail, which tacitly transforms it..) We would have to do right by a description oj evolution as such with its movement ofneg-entropy, its irr egular points which are not de­ manded by the probable.

Idealism This is what makes morphology idealist: Point of departur e: Not the idea of descendance = creation ol the in-itself of morphological varieties—but observation of these varieties.

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Relations of ideal Abkitung—and of the divergence between them of what we know in fact of descendance. T h e "U rb ild o f V e r t e b ra t e s " : A C e rta in T o p o lo g y o f C o rp o re ity

Horizontal vertebral axis, mobile, but capable of growing stiff. Master girder. The nervous system harms it. The load-bearing members of this axis are at the rigid and mobile extremities. Head in the prolongation with sense-organs—pendulum tail (Dacqué, note p. 56) .5 This idea = a priori, Bauplan, internal truth—noL derived from adaptation: framework of adaptation. All the animals are adapted and fill their places well enough. It is not the supreme Lor superior] degree of adaptation. It is Wesen. Not re­ duced to the visible (Entiuicklungsmechanik). The biological topography is not that of the crystal. Look beyond Linnaean characters. Topologischen I'ypen Idem. “Esthetic” grasp, “intense joy” of the primordial Gestaltung (?) = “play of Nature.” Or again the ammonites with their basic structure (habitacle, rolling up, knots, and segmentation of two shells) on which evolution plays. Take hold of an erhabene /wecklosigke.it, sublime absence of an end (Schopenhauer). These considerations are in reality the basis of every theory of de­ scendance: this theory is most often only the transposition of it, the ma­ terial being lacunar. Now the transposition into a theory of descendance masks the fun­ damental categories that derive from the former. B. i. Mutation

From this point of view, it is going to be a genotypic modification, thus interesting the Urtypus. Compare Max Weber: the necessity of ideal types in order to discern certain objective possibilities in history, certain deci­ sive articulations which would have opened another future. (We imagi te a suppressed fact and we construct the result with the help of types.) Now, even here the mutation is an Urnwurf. Thus to be conceived as, possibly, divergence or polyvalence. In a general way we have to observe the types of evolution.

FIFTH

SKETCH

//. The Cycle: Explosion or Virulence

Wciterbildung—or ontogenesis. Adaptation. Fnrmverwildcru ng: d e-civi 1iza ti o n. Hi Correlations, Thresholds, Convergences

Certain i ubicons” being crossed, the impossibility of going backward and the realization of similar developments in the relation of descen­ dante; ex [ample]: birds and mammals (Dacqné, p. 17). Dacqué affirms nowhere that we arc found in the presence of en­ dogenous determinations. But he doesn’t want us to exclude them and r enounce describing them for reasons of principle.

rejected divergence

parallel and related layer's

With this example, we see how we must distinguish the meaning of re­ semblances or of differences: the first ones depend on a participation in one same originary type; the second have a relatively secondary charac­ ter: they ate due to: convergences, adaptations. Don’t, postulate that the simplest is chronologically first (Schein-KontinuitiU). Critique analogous to that of ethnology'. Don’t postulate that all animals are classifiable ac­ cording to an objective hierarchy (like cultures). Reading of the facts: Statistics mix facts that have different meanings.

258 NATURE

iv. Zeitsignaturen, Zeitbaustile On this point he has very original views: there are characters that “are in the air” and are produced here and there without phylel.ic relation and without influences fi om similar milieu—and in diverse terms; here, edit (linked to Lite Urtypus), there, unerht. Ex[amplcJ: Terrestrial animals of the Mesozoic (Dacqué, pp. 28-29). Error in deducing that the reptile is the ancestor of the bird. The archaeopteryx is not the ancestor of the bird (31). The style in paleontology as a style of furniture. “Imitations”— “pure” types. Interpretation: Distinguish absolutely between evolution and filiation. Evolution is history and not filiation (which would become a his­ tory reduced to filiation?). There is not a relation of filiation that is not ambiguous (to he in­ terpreted in the sense of ascendancy, or de-desccndancyp). Ontogenesis as recapitulation? No: The somatic cannot give hack genetics. There is sometimes an anticipation. All phylogenesis is ideal: because Nature is made only of schema, then no IJrfnrm could live. History on the contrary is possible only through the idea of scheiden. In order to have a history of life, ihere would have to be the idea of what “it wants.” We do not have it. Nexi, our Urformen are always Verborgene (?). We are “in the vicinity” of them, but we do not find them. Therefore: Our ideation is only human—with our senses. It does not place us within natural production. We must employ it with aware­ ness of its insufficiency and of the fact that it does not grant us produc­ tive action, that the constructions of descent and ideas together do not suffice for production. Production: Not a tree, but bushes of several roots mixed together (ancient fauna (?) as divergent as our own—maybe all the types already realized for a long time). Kantian conclusion: Science is an ideality when the scientist wants to realize it. And in its reality: metaphysics. To be reexamined: Would it not be best to conclude with phenom­ enology (because the supposition of a Grand, of production is causal, authorizes anthropomorphism: study the improbable, and lead to ontol­ ogy: not idea, but structure.

Sixth Sketch

1. Descriptions of Morphology Morphology reestablishes the priority of description over construction (descendance). Examples: The “cycles”: explosion or virulence— Weiterbildung (ordinary or adaptation)—Formverwilderung (dc-civilization). Convergences, apparition of certain resemblances outside of rela­ tions of selection: The modifications of possibles are not ordinary. There is a Bindungov liaison. —“Rubicons” Convergences of birds and mammals: They tire grounded on their being in both cases warm-blooded —» hair and fur (neither coming from the other[)1 —» feathers. Pulmonary circulation and uneven heartbeat —> development of the brain, sense organs, a vocal apparatus —» walking and jumping com­ parable in birds and mammals in opposition to the slithering of reptiles: nonlalerally articulated members. This is possible only with accelerated exchanges and warm blood. These developments are parallel but not in relation to causality: Mammals conserved the left branch of the aorta—birds the right—the vocal apparatus is situated otfierwise. A first “shock” (warm blood) gives way to an entire series of steps in the same direction.1Js it by the simple addition of mutation? Difficulties. In any case, it is a descriptive fact. Other resemblances seem linked to the epoch to constitute an evo­ lutionary movement that increases the phyletic relations: Zeitsignaturen, Zeilbaustile beyond the phyletic relations, adapta­ tions, convergences—as if Nature were then building in a certain way, stretching the possibilities of certain styles (archaic, Roman, Gothic, baroque), thus creating the appearance of forms of phyletic transition, whereas it is a question only of the style of the epoch. This is mixed up with the facts of parallelism above. 259

260 NATURE

Fix [ample]: Begin at the Lias- tendency to lise up above the earth: shortening of anterior members, development, of the posterior. Walk/step nearly straight This it accentuated in the tendency of flight: presaurians. Finally the reptile changes i‘ . its scales for wings —> Urvogel—hut the terrestrial quadrupedal forms also have Vogelm rkm-al, even though they have nothing to do genetically with birds: regression of the teeth, jaws, of the horn or beak, structures of the pelvis and the foot, manner of laying eggs in the trachedion [r]. From there the false appearances of a genetic series with the tran­ sition from the reptile, to the bird, hi reality, the archaeopteryx is not a bird; there ate only feathers and some characteristics of the bird It is a quadruped that “imitates” the new type of bird which is then “in the ail The Zeitsigpuitur can include opposed realizations: while it signifies to raise oneself up from the ground,” it is also a “turtle signature” which is not a horned turtle (ventral armor, which is a sketch of the hot tied turtle that will appear in the superior Lias). An armor is found in the fish of the Devonian period that have nothing to do with the later bony fish: it is die ossification of the skin: the amphibians of the moment take part, in it—the armor has a ten­ dency to be “brought close to the ground f.iofj.” At tlu moment when mammals appear, reptiles take on a new character: the feet, which in dur Luft liagt without having the Grundorganization: the Pheromorphs (?) Likewise in paleobotany: False ferns appear at the moment when the ferns largely spread out. “Hours” of evolution, “prophetic” organs (Vandel).3 Concerning each trait, we must wonder whether its meaning is fundamental or superficial. Does an embryonic form give the essence of the species, or is it the adult form? There are scaffolded or staged forms. Are echinodei ms bilateral (ontogenesis) or radial in symmetry? In what, way does a form appear? Is it the emergence of a species, of an epoch? Or premonitory? Problem of the beginning—an order other than the order of pure facts: periodology grounded on the emergence of an ideal type, on an intrinsic possibility in the chain of facts (at. this moment, an­ other event would have engaged evolution on another type of develop­ ment). Likewise: Is this a specialization of the apparition of an Urtypus: speciali'ation, adaptation does not have the same value as the architec­ tonic of a type—it is only “technical.” The postulate that the simplest is First: now in fact we do not find either less numerous or simpler types by going back in the History uf the earth (fish are much less primitive than recent, fish; the stock fish is Naturstammung). The interpretation often

261 SIXTH

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can be ascendant as well as descendant. Description in order to bave “worked over" concepts'1 (Bachelard).n

2. Philosophy: Dacqué's Kantian Position Tliis whole problematic: problematic of history, but history supposes re­ lations uther than filiation. (The simplest is not the pnm.ave.) What will he the equivalent of it here? Dacqué does not propose a philosophy of Nature—he is neither a lixist nor a vitalise He stays in a Kantian-agnostic (?) attitude: all that he wants to show is that the reduction to the point of view of descendance is not scientific, masks the relations, and that there is an irreducible dual­ ity between phylogcne s and the systematic. The systematic is ideal and i i - . i l i i is iie\ct ^hematic: There are always concrete beings of mixed character I lie* is act T ill. Bbaren im Organisc.hen” (p. 417).° This ungraspable depends on what, we know; or by an understand­ ing which is not architectonic; or by our senses, which give us only the exterior. “Erlauben wir mit unseren 1 nf Sinnen mar von aufien her die Nauir zu betrachten” (p. 418).7 Der Stammbaum existiert uatnihistorisch wirklich nur in seinen Asten Oder Zweigcn . . . der Stamm . . das eigen tlich ZusammenhalLende, das, worans ailes das enlspringl, was es an Aston mid Zwiegen gibt, ist einc Idealitàt, wenn man es nalm wisscnschaftlich fassen will; dagegen ist es dennodi metaphysische Rcalitiit. (page 421)* Compare Kant; reference to an incomprcdiensible unity' of the two ponts of view in the "transcendent causes" (p. 423). “Holist” idea, the intention of the whole considering physicochernistry as the simplification of the hological. Dacqué allows for a consideration of the internal or the intrin­ sic, but only negative: we cannot eliminate it in the name of the explana­ tion from the exterior. But in each case, impossible to determine what conies from within and what comes from without (p. 439). For example, above, the description of the ZeitsignuHireii is not to he understood a; proof of a Spirit, of nature, but simply as description, being understood that the combination adapt.ation-selection-mutation-populat.ion can come into play. Dacqué claims only that we must not have a mechanist ontology

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of the in-it.self nor exclude regulative concepts. If there must he an image of the past of life = “Eine dicht verwobene Masse heterogener und doclt vielfach morphologisch typenmasig, gleichartigcr Slraucher dereu Büsche und Asie und Astchen sich formal durchdringen und uns so eien genetisch einheilliche I.ebenswelt vortauschen”(p. 407).3

3. Statistical Evolution a. Against the Problem of Filiation

Conception of “statistical evolution”— “statistical rise of a living form” (Meyer, p. 17). The problem of filiation is not false, but it is a bad prob­ lem: we make no progress methodologically if we think of the mind as the operator of knowledge, it is not in these questions that we progress: we have only a “theoretical mist.” We must address the free statistical knowledge of envelopment-phenomenon. b. Against the Eternary Causal Thinking (?)

This gives a notion of a “worked over” time. It intervenes in Lamarckism and Darwinism only in a banal sense, as a means of extrapolation. There must be a work over time, temporal structures, or forms. In particular, neo-Darwinism is not positive: the speed of evolution is not proportional to the speed of the succession of generations, and is thus not a simple name for the genetic facts; it is to be studied by evolutionary genetics, which defines it descriptively. In all the sciences, there is a distinction of the micro and the macro, beyond the principle of causality: To say that everything is mutation and selection is like saying that the history of Europc from the tenth century to today is an accumulation of the process of nervous influx: it is true, but without interest. The postulate of intem­ poral eausalities is exercising at every moment in the Precambrian pe­ riod, and in the Cretaceous period or now, the schema are everywhere the same, absorbing the “historical given.” The macroscopic facts of evo­ lution do not bring out more of this analysis than does the aerial photo of the electronic microscope. Do not consider the “moments as nodes of causalities in themselves inteinporal” (p. 83). c. For Macrophenomenon

Everything happens as if the events “were found trained and ordered in a temporal ‘field' by a line of polarization, by a ‘form’ from which they would take their temporal ordering” (p. 78).

--------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------- 263 SIXTH

SKETCH

Micro ,.nd rau.ro properties of file, solid. are broken up on ;i small jealt viscous fluid on die scale o f months md vein__ we , . nnoi

deduce llie last properties from die first: no more c «olntinn oi'gem t­ ics. Likewise io geology: ( hogeitie phenomena (propensity lor the ( loth, the l.tver of tilt, the slippage and deformations f liard rocks) ( an not be understood b\ the propertif sol these solids on Ilie st ale of daily life. Geneticists study evolution from the point of view of Homo faber. There are evolutionary derivatives. Likewise the grain of sand on the ground: on the scale of the latter, it moves according to the speed of t.he water in contact with the ground. On the scale of the sandbankyear, the displacement of the individual grain of sand is random and there is a dominance ol geographical factors, “scalar” structure of the real—Fabrizio at Waterloo10—“temporal spatial levels.” l.ikewise, so­ ciological facts overcome psychological motivations; we do not need to wait, for the achievement, of psychology in order to do sociology. “The statistical fact of suicide is not linked vertically to the psychological plane” (p. 106). There are “phenomenological strata.” There is a com­ plementarity that forbids the simultaneous fixing on the micro and the macro. d. Application to Life and Evolution

The global statistical approach has something particular in the case of life and evolution—the collectivity of life to be specified relative to the architectonic of t.he sand dunes. The living being, réduction of fluctuation, sum of instabilities. It is a structure of the spaiiotemporal field since the organism has an exter­ nal circuit, integration of a spatial divergence and of a temporal interval. It is an accumulation which is not. that of random distribution: the organism is “capable of suspending the spontaneous case of the random mixture in particular points of the universe, and of assuring a curious protection against disorder for the subtly organized and hier archized el­ ements” (p. 195). Compartmentalizaiion that impedes “the random mixture, the effects of which are entropie.” Construction of “systems of energetic mobilization.” Mixture, but not random, - structured. The organism shows itself as a trap of fluctuation. “Stationary states of the production of minimal entropy In all of this there is not one rupture with • • •

chemistry thermodynamics cybernetics

264 N A T U R E

Chemistry: Simply, our laboratory chemistry is a chemistry of mass, eras­ ing the individual properties of atoms. Thermodynamics and its universal evolution toward the mixture reigns: it is in the sweeping radiations of solar energy that the organisms live, thus within degradations (?); hut if the organism is not impossible by thermodynamics, then thermodynamics does not explain its pres­ ence in the world. Cybernetics: The increase of information is paid for, but “This does not explain that the realization is explained by the payment” (p. 223). We no longer obey the ultimatum of the type of conditions of exis­ tence because we no longer have the alternative finality—causality but rather macro-micro-totality-part. Causality is blurred to the profit of a sort of “phenomenal topology.” Megaevolution: “noncausal field of order.” Evolution is a “dimen­ sion of the universe.” Philosophical signification: for François Meyer, it is simply the Husserlian correlation of intentional object. We have the right to con­ struct freely these object-totalities.

4. Discussion and Conclusion The invasion of the concept of history in life gives way only to a method­ ological reform for Dacqué and Meyer, without taking an ontological po­ sition—the ordy being that we have to speak of remains Kantian phenomenal being, or, if there are several strata, Husserlian. lint is this notion of the object not attained by the methodolog­ ical reform? Compare, for example, when we tell ourselves that neoDarwinism is Homofaberreconstructing evolution—that the laboratory is not nude being, but being in its technical equipment: Evolution, life, physis, appear here as enveloping with regard to “consciousness” of human knowledge. There are no more pure objects. “Consciousness” and its objects is a philosophy, and inadequate to the being of which sci­ ence speaks. Abandon “causality” and “finality”: both are “actualist.” Both envisage only the actual equilibrium of the milieu and the or­ ganism, not the inscription of this equilibration in a “theoretical curve” which expresses sometimes a random mixture, sometimes patterned mixed-upness. 'This abandonment of causality and finality is an over­ coming of the Homofaber'And encompassing Being, grasped from within, and not surveyed, fabricated.

26L SIXTH

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Now this implies, at the same time, in all these authors (Meyer, Teilhard de Chatdin), an indifference with respect to substantialist dis­ tinctions: Life and not-lii'e, chemistry of mass and “individual” chemistry: Is the virus life or non life? Life and “mind” = behavior inserted in the dimension of evolu­ tion—the morphological is only a part of life. At the level of man, evolu­ tion is transported on technique and accelerated. Point of view according to which we cannot understand the human organism without its external circuit, its planetari/ation—phenomenon of the relay. In­ versely, there are “techniques” of evolution. Life = a certain indifference to the question of mechanisms (Dar­ winism—Lamarckism), since we believe in description (Teilhard de Chardin), of which they are not the measure. What will we put in this desciiption? Teilhard de Chardin puts consciousness there, the inside of the physical level. It is to speak of something of which we do not have the idea; it is to renew Hegel: consciousness witnesses its own reduplication from the exterior and its sell-return. It would be better to stick to de­ scription: realization of singular points by association of cells, that is, re­ alization of a cavity, of a locus, of a “certain physical size required11 for the possibility of certain movements.”12 And here there is a non-random accumulation, additivity, genesis of a before. Orthogenesis is the embry­ ology of a phylum. The Phenomenon, which is no longer subjected to locality, which is collective, permits speaking of a living mass with a fan­ shaped segmentation, ramification as in the cell, certain branches ag­ gregating in order to give a phylum, with possibly in what follows, new fan-shaped segmentations. In all of this, there is the use of chances,u and neither finality nor causality. We do not invoke the all-powerful and foreseeing life; we only observe, by convergences and parallelisms, that there is a certain vocabulary of life: Opening unto the Tertiary, geology teaches, a fragment of the planetary biota then in full evolution is found cut off by the sea and imprisoned in the meridional half of the American continent. How does this cutting off react to its isolation? Exactly like a plant, that is, by reproducing on the tiniest scale the design of the trunk from which it found itself separated. It took up pushing out its pseudo-procidians, its pseudo-rodents, its pseudo-horses, its pseudo-apes (Platyrhiniens) wholly a biota in reduction (a sub-biota) within the first. {The Phenomenon of Man, 125)

T hese convergences—account taken of selection and adaptation— represent, improbable nonstatistical structures, which are in no way the

266 NATURE

only possible (extreme richness of animality next to that which our mu­ seums contain), are thus neither causally imposed nor logically im­ posed, nor absolutely the best; they are at the jointure of all the conditioning, satisfying to all, and adding to it a manner of being im­ probable.

Seventh Sketch

Man and Evolution: The Human Body

T

Billiard de Chardin: “Man came silently into the world” ( The Phe­ nomenon of Man, p. 184). This means: 1. Preliminary types (that we will call “attempts”)—Sinanthropus—before the human of the Age of the Reindeer, and before the Neolithic revo­ lution that will make the human we know, with paintings, tombs, and cultures. Where does the human with consciousness truly appear? We do not see him any more than we see the moment when conscious­ ness appears in ontogenesis. 2. Because like all transitional forms, the human is offered at first in few exemplary forms. 3 . The human entered silently because his organization is rather less evi­ dent than that of the species—the morphological variety is minuscule. It is a perfectly strict arrangement, but which ends tip morphologi­ cally with only a few things that are new. The form of the human must be bipedal so that the hands can free the jaws from the function of prehension, and so that the maxillary muscles imprisoning the skull can be relaxed, in such a way that the brain can grow, the lace can di­ minish, the eyes get closer together and fix on what the hand takes up: “the very gesture, exteriorized, of reflection” (p. 188). That tin: human entered silently also means: no rupture: 11]n a (lower, the parts of the calyxes, the sepals, (he petals, stamens, and pistil are not leaves. They have probably never been leaves. But they carry in their attachments and in their texture all that would have given a leaf 267

268

NATURE

if they not formed under an influence and with a nçiw destiny. Simi­ larly, in human inlloreycenee, the vessels, agencies, and even the same of the stalk on which this inflorescence arises, are transformed and under­ going transformation, (p. 179) There is a “metamorphosis,” not a beginning from zero. This thought is not very compatible with the definition of the human by cephalizahon, cerebralization. and reflection—of which we said (here, with Teilhard de Chardin,) that it. would be better expressed by saying: transcendence. And moreovei, the pre-vital mode of being [would also be better ex­ pressed] by saying: brute or visible being (which would save us from placing consciousness in the atoms, as docs Teilhard de Chardin).1 Dif­ ference: We understand better that the human hotly is, for the human, not the stand-in for or lining of his “rellection,” but rather reflection in figurai form (the body touching itself, seeing itself), nor is the world an inaccessible m-itself, but “the cither side” oi his bodv. From this follows that the relation of the human and animality is not a hierarchical relation, but lateral, an overcoming that does not abolish kinship. Even mind is incredibly penetrated by its corporal struc­ ture: eye and mind. It is starting from the visible that we can understand the invisible. Starting from the sensible that we can understand Being, its latency and its unveiling. And reflection as the coming-to-self of Being, as the Srlbstung of Being, without a notion of the subject. And fi­ nally, the inclusion of visible Being in a more vast Being. The human body, in this perspective, during the last two lectures, lis understood] as esthesiological body and erotic body in a relation of iiuercorpotcity in the biosphere with all animality and by projeclimiiiitrojection—and also as properly human (reinvestment). All this, because from now on we are in brute and pre-objective Being. What is the philosophical signification of these endeavors? Uncon­ scious tendencies oi neo-Darwimsm. Idealist morphology. Statistical evo­ lutionism. And at the same lime what is the raison d’être for these long analy­ ses—what do they teach us about the archaeology of the body, and espe­ cially the human body? For the.- authors, this substitution of history for descendance im­ plies only a methodological reform (research on temporal structures, on envcloping-phenomenon). Ontology' remains intact: Dacqué, Kantian dualism of the regula­ tive and the constitutive, of the ideal and of Being, inaccessible natural production. Two planes: free description and real genesis, impossible to make them agree; beyond [this]: inaccessible metaphysics.

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q

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F. Meyer: Enlarges with Husserl (the first Husserl) the eorrelation of intentional object, consciousness-object. There are several strata of the object. Phenomenology. Hut positive, that is, destined to he ex pressed by the algorithm. The mixture, whether it be random or “p (t terned mixed-upness” [in English in the original—Tr.], gives way to a formulation, to curves, to operationalism. Correlative objects of situa­ tions of knowledge and of methods as “effectors of knowledge.” Likewise, the descriptive-phenomenalist-idealist attitude of Teil­ hard de Chardin: Tike the other authors, he is indifferent to substantialist distinctions: Fife and nonlife are different only as chemistry of mass and indi­ vidual chemistry: Are viruses living or nonliving beings? Fife and mind: Behavior is reintegrated into evolution: it [evolu­ tion J is transferred in the human from morphology to technique (and accelerates there), “external circuit” relieving the “internal circuit.” In­ versely, evolution has its “techniques.” Fife itself: A certain indifference with regard to discussion on the means or causes of evolution. Behind this phenomenon, there is an idealism, already behind physical being. Teilhard de Chardin puts an “inside,” a thought there. That’s why there is then no longer a difficulty in speaking of the biota as a “living mass” that is segmented like a cell. But Dacqué’s Kantianism conserves the antithesis of real genesis (evolution) [and] ideal genesis. Whereas it would perhaps be necessary, by having Laken the act, to understand being in life other than by • causality; • ideality. Meyer’s “phenomenologism” (neither causality nor finality, which are “actualist,” inscription of the equilibration equilibrium—milieu in a “theoretical curve”) enlarging our methods (causality or finality, Homo faber reconstructing evolution, laboratory science; it is being as now grasped through our technical equipment under very unlikely condi­ tions) invites us to recognize an enveloping physis in relation to human knowledge. Science takes part in history, even nature, and so is not its correlate. The phenomenalist idealism of Teilhard de Chardin is subject to the same objections as behaviorism: consciousness witnesses its own manifestation in the exterior, a sort of “parade,” with self-return. If we are given thought, the inside with physical being, then the most remark­ able descriptions lose their major interest. Examples:

270

1. Teilhard de dhardin says that “a certain size” is ‘physically re­ quired for the possibility of- certain movements” artel justifying thereby the aggregation of cells (p. 1(.)7) If we suppose an antecedent thought, it is a banal finality. Teilhard do Chardin's intuition was something other than this: equivalence, r nonyrny Of a certain size and certain move­ ments. The idea of the way chance occurrences get utilized—this idea of the contingency of life and of a sort, of clairvoyant: blindness ol'life. 2. Similarly: • •

convergences; the parallelisms, on which he insists:

Opening uuto the Tertiary, geology teaches, a fragment of the pi tnetary biota then in full evolution is found cut off by the sea and imprisoned in the meridional half of the American continent. How does this cutting off react to its isolation? Exactly like a plant, that is by reproducing on the tiniest scale the design of the trunk front which it found itself separatee!. It. took up pushing out its pseudo-procidians, its pseudo-rodents, its pseudo-horses, its pseudo-apes (Platyrhiniens) wholly a biota in reduction (a sub-biota) within the first,, (p. 125)

What do they mean? It may not be a confirmation of the first “thought? as a system of logically necessary ideas (these forms are nowise the only ones possible) or as entelechies: the oft-made comparison be­ tween orthogenesis and ernbryogenesis (embryology is the orthogenesis of a living being, orthogenesis is embryology of a phylum) and Teilhard de Chat din certainly does not' allow for the finality of embryology: He ad­ mits, for at least.f he suggests by this comparison not the positive finality of entelcchy, but rather a certain int.eriority of life, the “trial and error,” the intervendon of chance occurrences, a certain improbable not-al powerful totalization, but at least, sufficient to give life a certain vocabu­ lary. That is erased if we put thinking at the root of physical Being. Thus to look beyond • —idealism (critical or Hegelian); •

finality.

One and the other make of life: A “weakness of the idea”; A weakness of totality; Or an obscured (fallen) consciousness.

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Thus (hey conceive it in relation to mind, starting from it. Life as history is maintained in from of us, does not englobe us, would only be because (critical idealism) it is the mind that recounts and thinks history. But in diverse ways, these three authors suggest that life as history is enveloping in relation to our “thought.” We are in it. We must think it according to it, not relative to mind. Do not feign knowing what mind or consciousness or thinking is. What is there? First—visible or sensible being, things with their hidden “sides.” Among the things are bodies which also have their hidden sides, their “other side,” their being for the living (that is, not in that it is a consciousness, but in that it has an Umiue.lt). That, is not constituted by our thought, but lived as a variant of our corporeity, that is, as the appearance of behaviors in the held of our behavior. Animal life refers to what is sensible for us and to our carnal life; sensible, this is not our human kind of the present or timeless mind. In the order of Einfühlung, of the “vertical” where our corporeity is given to us, there is precisely an opening to a visible, the being of which is not defined by the petxipi, where on the contrary the Perdpere is defined by participation in an active Esse. Thus we must not bring everything and all life back to an object. We must not derive the human from life as an initself, or conceive evolution as without an inside or as a theory of de­ scent. We must say: Animality and human being are given only together, within a whole of Being that would have been visible ahead of time in the first animal had there been someone to read it. Now this visible and invisible Being, the sensible, our Ineinanderm the sensible, with the ani­ mals, are permanent attestations, even though visible being is not the whole of Being, because it [Being] already has its other invisible side. Life lis not seen as behavior, as Lrial and error, or as orthogenesis, but as configuration, if it is not defined as substance. Extend to the animal what Descartes said of the human body as a body, that it cannot close in on itself, in the manner of a fragment of space, because the use of life teaches us not only the union of our soul and our body, but also Lhe lat­ eral union of animality and humanity. What the meditation of our “strange kinship” with the animals (and thus the theory of evolution) teaches pertaining to the human body. Il is to be understood as our projection-introjection, our Ineinanderwith Sensible Being and with other corporeities. If we see this ontological part of the new science of life, then we will correct (in the name of their own intuitions) the conceptions of our authors as to the relation of the human and his “ascent.” Teilhard de Chardin defines the human of evolution by the ap­ pearance of reflection—of cephalization and cerebralization. Is this

272 NA T U R E

faithful to tht best of his intuitions? No: It is a return to a traditional phi­ losophy o.f consciousness, which establishes man in a dimension where he no longer had any relation with life. ISlyw Teilhard de Chardin in his best intuitions (intervention of the articulation of phenomena on each other) saw these relations, on the contrai y, always quite well. "Man came silently into the world.” That means: he appeared between pre-types (Sinanthropus, which we will then call an attempt at man) without us being able to (ix the point of appearance: there were pre-hominids, and m the Age of the Reindeer there is a human with paintings, tombs, culture, who is sud­ denly the very kind of human that we know. Compare the child of whom we cannot say at w'lial moment of ontogenesis that he i.-« a human being. It is not only because the transitional forms are lost (that even is not by chance: it is that they had been very few, that they did not make the tran­ sition); even if we had them, we would not see the transition being made, because it is morphologically minute. Little morphological novellv: bipedal so that the hands can free up the jaw, that the maxillary muscle* imprisoning the head can be relaxed, that the brain can en­ large, the face diminish, the eyes grow closer together and can fix on what the hands take up. Morphologically, it is a minute change. There is no rupture. 1.1]n a flower, the parts of the calyxes, the sepals, the petals, stamens, and pistil are riot, leaves. They have probably never been leaves. But they carry in their attachments and in their texture all dial would have given a leaf if they were not formed under an influence and with a new destiny. Simi larly, in human inflorescence, the vessels, agencies, and even the same of the stalk on which thi* infloi escence arises, are transformed and unde ■ going transformation, vessels, agencies, and even the sap of the stalk in which this flourishing is born. (p. 179) There is a “metamorphosis,” not a beginning from zero. That given, in what does metamorphosis consist? The organs that are hardly transformed (hands—jaws and maxillary muscles—skull— brain—face—eyes—eyes fixing on what the hands take up) ate trans­ formed in suc h a way as to make reflection possible: “even the gesture, exteriorized, of reflection.” But what does it mean? Is this metamorpho­ sis invisible because it is descended in the bod, from an illusion which i . by definition invisible? But the “kinship” is quite illusory, and the human and animal bodies are only homonyms. For us there is no descent, into a body otherwise prepared, of a reflection of which the body would be

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only the instrument. There is a rigorous simultaneity (not in any sense a causality) between the body and this reflection. We said: The body touching and seeing what it touches, seeing itself in the midst of touch­ ing the things, seeing itself in the midst of touching them and being touched, the sensible and the sensing body is not the stand-in of an al­ ready total reflection, it is reduction in figurai form, the inner of what is outer. On this condition alone the intuition of life and of vital relations provided by Teilhard de Chardin retains its force. This reflection is the coming-to-self of Being, Selbstung, through a sensing, and the realization of an intersubjectivity which is first intercorporeity and becomes culture only by relying on sensible—corporal—communication (the body as organ to be seen/of being seen). Thereby this is not a hierarchical but a lateral relation, or hmnandm. Il is to give this depth to the human body, this archaeology, this natal past, this phylogenetic reference, to restore it in a fabric of preob­ jective, enveloping being, from which it emerges and which recalls to us its identity as sensing and sensible at every moment, that we have given such a large place to the theory of evolution.

Eighth SKetch

The Human Body

Esthesiology Esthesiology puts the; Newtonian theory of colors in question. Basic ex­ periment: We get a colored image by projecting two beams colored in yellow, each of which is of slightly different wavelength, projected through two unequally colored gels-—the rays (“stimuli”) are not only “color making” [in! English in the original—Tr |. They are so only as “carriers ofinforination” furnished by divergence between the stimulus of an ensemble and others of the same ensemble, and by divergence be­ tween tbe two ensembles as such, or between the homologous stimuli of the two ensembles. Notion of information replacing that of the stimulus provoking the movement = causality.1 Novelty: 1.

274

Don't show that the body, by the institution of Nature, makes triggers of the stimuli in an intra-cerebral process: we know that. Already Maxwell and Helmholtz had shown that the colors claimed as “pure” are sometimes made of mixtures of wavelengths (the inverse of what the wave-based theory ofligbt. thought: three wavelengths suffice to produce all the colors), flic new theory is new not by going further in the same direction as Maxwvll and Helmholtz (one sole “objective" color instead of the trinitary theoi v),1 >ut on the contrary, hy showing clearly the insufficiency of the notion of stimulus: color making is the structure of the image as complete image, but Newton did not see it because he was working with patches of colors in pairs. The structure emerges as an autonomous variable. Counterpi oof: If we send light of a long wavelength through a gel, and then let a short wavelength pass with a filter, we get inversed colors (the reds an blue-greens, etc.). It is this interaction of long- and short-wavelength that operates.

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2. Don't show that there are thresholds of structuration of the pL sy< ho[.hysiologic;al ".subject,” a creation of qualitative differences start­ ing from quantitative differences—but rather that the interaction as such is a stimulus, or rather that we must, abandon the notion of stim­ ulus since it is structure the relief of information, that operates: the color photo record', die balance of the wavelengths of the ensemble ol the visual field. More exactly: it suffices to provoke it anew in the eve that looks at the photo. With the reception of this balance, then, what must be at issue is a structural fact, present back at the elemen­ tary level of reception of this “balance,” not of a “judgment.”

But constructing a graphic with the luminous intensities in abscis­ sion and in older, and by taking the resulting curve, we observe that the greys all are situated on the diagonal, and more generally that the whole ensemble ol' rectilinear or weakly curved points is grey. The colored image appears only if the raised points are distributed in a large two­ dimensional area. And they must he distributed by chance; that, is, if the trajectories carry fillets imposing a i pil e' decrease jn die intensity from left to right or Irom upper to lower, this law of distribution sup­ pressing the randomness also suppress, s the “stimulus”—and the color is thus the emergence of certain relations based on probable distribu­ tion, where the diacritical values hold only to different intensifies, com­ ing from the very structure of the photographie plate (not from the development). “What the eye needs to see color i; information about the short and long wavelength m the scene it is [?]." Information = not the stim­ ulus cause acting on the body as effect (with [?] lent to (hierphanomeyi) but Qjunphanome.n at the origin in the things as “in us.” As a result, vision != things iff themselves, producing a “visual tableau” thaï the cerebral eye would see by the redoubling of this process (who will see the cere­ bral eye?). The cerebral eye is a “computer,” i.e., it is informed, i.e., it re­ ceives “message ” i.e., a diacritical system that it decodes, i.e., it is no longer an operation of causality. Thus wc no longer have Real —» Stimulation —» Perceived 1 2 3 hut we have Information —> Decoding —> Perception Message l‘ 2 3 Where the first term draws Iront the third (feedback)

276 N A T U R E

Consequencefor the theory of estliesiology: Abandon the objectivist schema: In-itself —» objective body —> consciousness (in-itseli) —» objective body —» consciousness which is founded on a Cartesian idealization, on the appearance of perceived exteriority—thing file world is not—behind the perceived as a “visual tableau” —* !i:or above it (understanding) The perceived and the thing ate isomorphic; the thing is not definable without, perceptual predicates; the perceived is nowise “in me”; the world and the thing are taken up in the perceived, not behind it or above it;3 they are a nucleus of perceptions, and likewise a common nu­ cleus of my experience and that of others. Consequences as to the theory of sensorial intersubjectivity: I see colors = there is structuration of a field by information, and the immanent-transcendental field is not a private field, it is also open to others. Other consequences of structuralism are going to manifest them­ selves if we pass on to the libidinal body.

The Libidinal Body Kvolution, embryogenesis: The body-object is only a trace—Trace in the mechanical sense: present substitute of a past that no longer is—die trace for us is more than the present effect of the past. It is a survival of the past, an enjambaient. The trace and the fossil: ammonite. The living thing is no longer there but it is almost, there; we have the negative of it, which is related to it, not as the sign is related to the signification, the ef­ fect or the cause, but something for itself. And the mineral, reoccupying the hollow, remakes the animal in quasi. But hollowed fossils are more striking: there is nothing between them and the very animal—the trace of the footstep—Trace of the “statistical rise” it is still there.4 Certainly it must be reunderstood. In psychological experiments, ammonite is sometimes seen in the hollow, sometimes in relief, according to the dis­ tribution of light and shadow (lighting being always supposed above to the right). But in any case there is something that remains: the structure (reversible). Now the relation of trace to traced is that which we found in embryogenesis (the orthogenesis of the individual), in phylogenesis (embryogenesis of the phylum). The body is not comprehensible in the actual (actualisai). Thickness of the past, Crundbcstand of the real body.

EIGHTH

SKETCH:

THE

HUMAN

BODY

Bui this is not only the past: we would have? to study its opening to a present and to a future—(he eontii nation of the trace, the genesis of a wake. For example, the inaugur ation of a libido as relation to an outside and with other living beings—intercorporeity is not. only retrospective, hut. also in a simultaneity, or, by encroachment, on the future—to see the flit tire emerge not directly from the present., or support that gets tinlead on the past? Ksthesiology, sensorial human system—depends on the surface of the human body—we take it as a system of ready-made sense organs (for­ getting that they are formed from the whole t.o the parts); on which ex­ terior stimuli act. (causally)—the result is surprising: we must invoke the institution of Nature that envelops an infinite knowing. Natural pre­ science. Received when the soul is sealed in the body—inc.omprehensibk. How can thought have conclusions without premises? Actualisin demands, however, that the senses be just that: causal operation in the exterior world; occasion for “natural thoughts” that give a human equiv­ alent for this world. The Weltlichkeii of thought is conceived on the mode of the ontology of pure things (causal connection) and as we do not find all the intermediaries, we fill up the lacuna by Nature or by God. That is demanded of the ontology of the biofie Sriehen, and the Cartesian repres­ sion in the “soul” of the whole sensible spectacle. The whole enduring force of evolution from the past fifty years of research goes in another direction, (restaltthéorie at first. Critique of the notion of stimulus. The stimulus is only the trigger of a figuration, of a structuration—which restores the exterior structured properties—Iso­ morphism.—A sense or meaning is no longer a mechanical dispositive re­ ceiving causal action.—Restoration of the phenomenal over against the objCCtive.5 Always (Koffka) With a back against the wall, it is all the same, the universe of the language of physics winch is considered as the only one. The turn to physicism (in a pro-totalitarian form) which seems 1:0 abandon the path taken. In reality, we would have to see if pro-totalitarian thought is yet a physicalist ontology. Recent research—if confirmed, would clearly put the classical ontology of the physicists back in question (cl. Scientific American, May 1959). Overthrowing of the Cartesian conception: • •

oil the occasional cause of the sensed (world in itself—its action on the organism); and ol sensing itself.

Which comes before the iehabihtalion o1 the phenomenal. The opening of the body to the exterior (the inauguration of an esthesiology) (“birth”) hints n porte suhjeeti the Cartesian distinction of

278

thought—thing (after physics is already freed from ttie geometric con­ ception of the thing).

Libido 1. From Sensoriality to Corporeity

My body, as I see the things, is mediator of'an isomorphism = structure of die distributions of light (die “image” of the, film) scanned by ihe per­ ceiving body. This separates causality from the stimulus. But the question of the nature of the “computer,” of “seeing” is left open. Now seeing implies the possibility of being seen —lacuna of my vi­ sual image of myself . But this lacuna is compensated by the realization of the total image of the outside—vision makes something possible like the mirror—that is, “phantom”: my image in the mirror is something of me in the things (not a tactile mirror) that 1 contemplate. Touching immediately touches itself (the “bipolarity” of the Tastwe.lt). Vision breaks this immediate (the visible is at a distance, outside the limits of my body) and reestablish! s the unity by the mirror, in the world. Captation of the tactile body by the visual image: Schilder: I sense the contact of my pipe in my hand in the mirror. Place of the imaginary of seeing: By seeing and its tactile equivalents, the inauguration of an in­ side and an outside and their exchanges, of a relation of being to what, is however forever outside: The spatiality of the body is an encrustation in the space of the world (I find my hand starting from its place a the world, not starting from the axis of coordinates erf my body: taximetry), and I find m my visible body all my other attributes (the visualization of the tactile is an expedient, on the contrary). The corpor al schema as incorporation: The corporal schema is that. Finally thus (above all by the vision of the self) a relation of being between: •

my body and the world; the dif ferent aspects of tny body, a relation of ejection introjection, a relation of incorporation.

It. can be extended to the things (clothing and the corporal schema). It can expel a part of the body. It is thus not made of deter­ mined parts, hut it is a lacunary being (the corporal schema is the hol­ low on the inside)—inc ludes accentuated, precise regions, and other

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vague regions. (The hollow and the vague regions are the point of inser­ tion of imaginar y bodies.) Seiisorialil.y (above all by vision) intentionally implies incorporation, that is, a functioning of the body as a passage to an outside, by its “orifices."7 Other consequence: As my image captures my touching the visual image of the others captures it also: they are also the outside of me. And I am their inside. They alienate me and 1 ncorporale them. I see by tin eyes of the other —» the world.8 2. The Body as Universal System of Inside-Outside: Promiscuity

Thus there is an indivision of my body, of my body and the world, of my body and other bodies, and ol other bodies between them. Indivision. Indivision of my body and of other bodies: of its cavi­ ties, reliefs, and those of other bodies, and of these between them. Projection—introjecdon. Condensation and displacements grounded on equivalencies. There is a “thought” of the corporal schema, “a line connecting perception, imagination and thought" (Schilder, 192). There is an encroachment of corporal schema on each other (Schilder, 294). The anus as die plat e ol the connection ol body-images. Replace our analysis of him lions by die topology ol the hotly—anti our idea of separated apparatuses by dial of the both as defining the ravs of the world. “Body-images intercourse” (Schilder, 235)—their distance, their reconciliation, as at the circus where the parts of the body are intermin­ gled (Schilder, 236)—Distance, emotional distance. Thus sensorialit is an .nvestmerit: immobilisation of a power at the et ice nl Anti in\. unent in the promiscuity of power.-., of pow­ ers and of other . and i Others among them. Melanie Klein: She makes instances and Freudian operations ap­ pear as phenomena anchored in the structure of the body: a. Non-dividcdness of the world and offerings: The maternal body is the world (cf. Michelet: language is the speech of the mother). The mother is not an individual, but a category (a Mama-ness, “Mmunté"). b. Indivision of beings anti their body: Beings are not even represented by their organs, but identical to them, the organ being charged with an ontological signification, being a category—Father and Phallus. c. Indivision of beings between them: Father and mother are one sole being. Because of coitus? Even i1 there were not the primitive scene ol coitus, it is implicit, in the vision ot the body of the parents.

280

NATURE

a

g f

ji,

!

I

•i

Structurations of this promiscuity. Thai1given, corporeity as a relation Lo the things and to others is going to include all sorts of formulae according to the structuration of the corpora] schema:11Freud’s phases are such structurations: Fxfample]: Oral organization: biting, cannibalism: It is oral incor­ poration (make the other pass to the inside). Introjection. But to make him pass into my body is also to make a body pass into me which, like mine, bites. Retaliation. This action is thus passion, sadism is masochism. But at this level, not necessarily for humans only: polymor­ phism (= indilferentiation) makes the animal a good carrier. For other reasons (and number) and also because the child is a devouring or a grat­ ifier— (anal) poisoning—and rhal the animal is typically this also pre­ cisely because it is other. Laulréamonl’s bestiary (crocodiles, horns, claws, antennae, etc.). Abraham: The superego is the exterior body in­ corporated, the superego of the child was a pig. The investment by the body is a vocation of an absolute (Proust: the baby and the mother), in­ vestment: desire for unlimited gralilication which is crystallized therebv: and the mystery of the visible: the visible is a “thought” which is there. There can be an infinity of organizations by all the: orifices of the body: anal, phallic. Organization of a visual predominance (in view of analysis). Sartre’s analysis: The other is being seen, objecLivation, the hemor­ rhage of my freedom. This is true: this objectivation by the look is a pro­ found truth (cf. above what we said of the visual). But it is a particular case of a more general relation = Sartre gives himself the material of an analysis by saying: If 1 happened . . . to look through the keyhole. I am frozen under the look of the other, the other appears to me as pure ob­ jectivation of me, because \ sought to surprise or to overtake what is other than me by vision—I am seen as seeing or seer—the relation of retalia­ tion and of the captation of the other by me is behind the relation purely—perceptual and renders it possible. —“sensorial.” The relation becomes: 1 looked, I am seen, supposes the analysis of the reciprocity of seeing—being seen which is grounded on corpore­ ity—as listening and speaking. The subject: • •

sensorial described in this way is desire; corporal.

All of this = inaugurated by vision understood not as sensorial con­ tent, but as the structure of being: the visual sensorial is the “figure” of a

I

281 EIGHTH

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BOOT

“susçeption” that covers il or doubles it, and dial is desire a? the researcll from within in the outside and from the outside in the inside. Pleasure, t f Which desire can be die occasion, is the integration of what is seen to what is made. Thus the interiori/ation of the outside of inversely ejec­ tion10—pleasure as sensation is an unanalyzable quale. But we must manage to think sensation as structure in person. Likewise for pleasure, psvchologic.al-at.oiu. is the end of the overhanging visible—invisible. But what relation does this desire, this Eros, descriptively disen­ gaged like corporeity, have with: • —what we usually call desire, and which seems to he the result oi a corporal—objective apparatus; • what we usually call consciousness, spirit, mind?

3. Eros and Sexuality

We have passed from “apparatuses” (perceptual, for example) t.o the body as a structure of an ensemble, that, is, as an opening to the things and to others, that is, as sensing itself in the things and in others—undi­ vided in an undivided world. — Relation between the “apparatuses”: (“objectively” conceived) and the Incimmder. It is in no way a “spiritualization” of the body: the body has an outside, there is dependence; we must have optical nerves to see, there is a conditioning of affectivity. We sav only that all this is ab­ stract in relation to the operating body. We would have to repeat here what we have said of the critique of the external “stimulus.” The con­ crete is the body of our experience (which does mit mean interior ob­ servation). The phenomenal and the objective are “blurred.” —The. relation of the apparatuses and total corporeity is thus not a relation of content. to form—vision, sexuality, the hand are much mote than contents: gestalten, figures of the entire man, of total parts. And “more or less total”: nothing impedes that sexuality be coextensive with life more than vision or the hand. No problems o:l priority: A,LI is concentric—"mind” and “sexualitv,” for example—or “sexuality” and “aggression.” Because the human mode of sexuality contains at least expressions of premature sexuality (imagi­ nary, impotent rivalry —> death wishes)—sexuality as corporeity (that is, total system) is ever ything. Why speak of sexuality in the oral and anal relations, as we did? a. Because (here are precocious genital manifestations And that, in indivision, they must mix in with the rest. The lihido is sometimes de­ scribed by Freud as “genital excitation” or non-“mastercd,” “sexual”

282 NATURE

compulsive, without technique, not yet "placed in the service of repro­ duction.” This would make 01 libido a simple “surplus” of “pleasure.” Sexuali/.ation by association. b. In reality, in the pregenital, the sexual is not. simply an unem­ ployed surplus—but: also a development which overcomes, a cumula­ tion, a rearrangement:, the constr uction of an Improbable system.

\ v

/

/

libido

/

I bis does not mean an eritelechy: the libido precisely is not a univocal orientation toward a sexual organ, but a fantastic polymorphism, a pos­ sibility of'diverse “sexual positions.”11 It is thus a field, a polarity, the initiation to a dimension, that is, to a body-world “ray.” This dimen o t i ality is primordial (sexual “prescience” like sensorial ‘prescience”) — not in the sense of an entelechy pi of a retrospective illusion, hut because oral or anal desire contains the inlercorporeal schema of cop­ ulation as a watermark (two desires are linked in a unique Erjüllung) as the lattei is a gestalt pregnant with corporeity.1'2 Active prematuration, overcoming of the. lacunae and the unknown (“sexual theories” of'chil­ dren)1' that, are the very Varhabun of the sexual, an imaginary sexual that invests the whole body and of whic h the genital is the crystalliza­ tion. Thus the sexual is coextensive with the human not as a unique cause, but as a dimension outside of which nothing remains.

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4 . Ero s a n d C o n s c io u s n e s s

This Eros as rhe logic of aft incarnated, dialectical life which refers to it­ self—What is its relation with mind? Consciousness? YVe say that ■! is in tint oast onsm s (the unconscious state, which, says Freud, exi .1 s m without k >i < ami, t.hat he thinks by “analogy” with animal insure 1 (Mrm/is\iholngy) 13m nhat. is animal instinct? What is this prescience? Tendency to say: It is a thinking, tike everywhere where there is something other than mechanism. Either we deny the unconscious, transformed into irrellecfed consciousness, or we have in view a second consciousness, but in the first place, onsciotlst ss as t lalion to object has nothing to do here. Second, a second consciousness is impossible (Freud says so)—it would he hk* semi cor who otild thi d - hath in the depths of me, that is see confusedly—critique of this second con­ sciousness as the-: postulate of the priority of conventional thinking. What is thus this me that is not me, this weight., this surplus on this side of that of me which appears to me, and that in my eyes is wholly me, if it is not a thing—physiology? It is sousing itself in that it is not the thinking of sensing (posses­ sion) but dispossession, ek-slasis, participation or identification, incorpo­ ration or ejection. In brief, a Deckyng, a blind, nondifl'erentiated recognition (of the touching and the touched, of me and my image over there), the zero-degree of difference. The sensed = I don’t: know and I have always known it (Hyppolite).1'1We do not need to know what it is that we see since we see it. To be at . . . fascination or deduction of the sensible. To see is to think without thinking. Freud: Communication of unconsciousnesses without, the message being deciphered by sensible perception. But perception itself includes this same structure: what 1 sec, 1 see as a spectacle for others, because there is an Einfiihhmg with it and through h with other sensings. Rut does this unconscious suffice to take account of libidinal his­ tory? Does it not. unveil another (in the repressions), that reposirs the problem of the second consciousness? The repressed is not only a mute, unnamed sense. It is absent, hidden (emergence of a material of mem­ ory, primitive scene, etc.). Must we not have an energetii of the psychi­ cal apparatus here? Objection: Memory, how would it. exist in itself, as hidden percep­ tion, sinc e the mode of infantile apprehension is not that? The c hild nei­ ther speak nor thinks for itself: it must he lent the words and the thoughts (Freud). 1low to reactivate in ,, (and also in ns) the “perception that would become un conscious”? Melanie Klein: The unconscious as inaccetsible knowledge, indistinc t from the consc iousness. Hence: The un-

284 NATURE

conscious as figuration without equivocation, as latent univocal content would be the substrate of the creation of a solid me. The unconscious nfin’senUUimt—Freud: He allows (MHnp.syrholngy) that there cannot be un­ conscious sentiments—only the germs of them—on the other hand, the representation as an internal tableau would be the unconscious: lor ex­ ample, the sentiment whose object is unconscious. Here Freud misses psychology and philosophy = representation as internal tableau is dis­ credited, and it is wrong to know the theory of consciousness only by ori­ enting it on the representation. Today we would orient it on e/s,stasis. Freud’s descriptions agree with this: notes, page 7 [??J.

Notes

T ra n sla to r's In tro d u c tio n

I. The second book, Mam ice Merleau-Ponty, Noirs de cours, 1959 1961, ed. S. Ménasé, preface by G. Effort (Paris: Gallimard. 19%), contains “La philoso­ phie aujourd'hui (1958-59)," “L’ontologie cartésienne et l'ontologie aujour­ d'hui ( 191)0—(i I ),” and “Philosophie et non-philosophic depuis Hegel (1960-1961)” and will appear in a translation by Michael Gendre from the Northwestern University Press. The third book. Notes do cours sin l'origine de lu géométrie de Husserl, ed. K Robert (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), also contains a series of interpretive essays under the direction of R. Barbaras and will be published in a translation by Leonard l.awlor by the Northwestern University Press. 9. ‘Traces écrites” (“Written Traces") is the series published by Editions de Seuil in which these courses appear. The same series has recently publishedJean Beaul'ret's laxons de philosophie. 3. Xavier Tilliete, “Husserl’s Concept of Nature," trans. D. L.cder, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Texts and Dialogues, ed. H. Silverman andj. Barry, |r., trans. M. Smith el. al. (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1992), 162-68. 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, trails. R. McCleary (Kvanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 178. 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text,” trans. A. Dallery, in The Primary of Perception, ed. I. Edic (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 3. 6. Merleau-Pontv, “An Unpublished Text,” 6-7. 7. Ibid., 3. 8. Maui ire Merleau-Ponty, Ike Visible and the Invisible, ed. G. Lefort, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 170. 9. See below, 204. 10. See Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 168. II. These two courses are now published, and we have a hint of th&ir eontents from the course résumés, translated by ]. O’Neill and published in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Pres: 1963, .1970, 1988), 107-20. 12. Sec below, 4. 13. See below, 83. 14. See below, 204. 285

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15. Sec Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 108: “Give my equivalent of the Cartesian concept of Nature as the institution that makes us have at one stroke what a divine science would make us understand — Give an esthesiology.” 10. See below, 21,30-37. 17. See F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, trails.J. Gutman (LaSalle, 111.: Open Court, 1930), 31-37. This corre­ sponds to F. W. |. Schelling, Sdmmtliche Wcrke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling, 14 vols. (Stuttgart/Augsburg: J. G. Cotta'seller Verlag, 1850-61), 7:357-02. The “Theme” refers to Merleau-Ponly’s “Themes front the Lecture Courses,” available in In Praise of Philosophy. 18. See below, 53. 19. See below, 71. 29. See below, 77. 21. One notable interlocutor here is J. von Uexkttll, whose work in also treated by Heidegger in his 1929-30 course, which Meileau-Ponly could not have known. See Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trails. W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 26Iff. 22. See below, 199. 23. Merleau-Ponty, 'Fhe Visible and the Invisible, 267.

First Course. The Concept of Nature, 1956-1957 1. Patti Valéry, “Léonard et les philosophes,” in Oeuvres (Paris: Pléiade), l :234. 2. André Lalande, ed., Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), 670.

Part. 1: Study of the Variations of the Concept of Nature C h a p te r 1. T h e " F in a lis t " E le m e n t in A ris to tle a n d th e S to ics

1. Aristotle, On the Heavens, trans. W. K. C. Guthrie (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1986), 4.1,308a. 15-29 (pp. 349-51): “There are certain things whose nature it is always to move away from the center, and oLhers always toward the center. The first I speak of as moving upward, the second downward. . . . ‘Absolutely light,’ then, is the name we give to that which moves upward and toward the extremity. . . .” 2. R. Lenoble, “L’évolution de l’idée de nature du 16' au 18‘‘ siècle,” Revue de. métaphysique et de morale 1-2 (1953); reprinted in Histoire de l ’idée de la nature (Paris: Albin Mit bel, 1969). C h a p te r 2 . N a tu re as th e Id ea o f an E n tire ly E x te rio r B e in g , M a d e o f E x te rio r P arts, E x te rio r to M a n , a n d to Itse lf, as a P u re O b je c t

I. Compare V. Goldschmidt, Le système stoicien et l’idée de temps (Paris: Vrin, 1953), and his article “Epicurus” in Les philosophes célèbres, ed. Maurice MerleauPonty (Paris: L. Mazenod, 1956).

287

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2. Compare Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, bk. 10, "Epicurus.” 3. A. Koyré, La révolution astronomique (Paris: .Hermann, 1961). MerleauPonty could not have known this published work, but was undoubtedly familiar with Kyyré’s writings and lectures. 4. Compare the article “Nature,” subsections “Nature naturante” and "Na­ ture nalurée,” in Lalande, Vocabulaire, technique et critique, 673: “The expression seems to have had its birth in the 1.2th century in Avcrroes’s Latin translations.” 5. R. Laporte, “L’idée de finalité chez Descartes,” Revue d'histoire de. la philosofihir ( 1928); reprinted in a slightly modified version ni R. Laporte, Le. ratio­ nalismr de Destartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1945). 6. Etienne Gilson, La liberté, chez Descartes et la théologie. (Paris: Alcan, 1913), pt. 1, f.hap. 3. 7. René Descartes, Dtscouise on Method, pt .), in he Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trails. John Coltingham, Robert Sloolhoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 1:132. 8. G. YV. Leibniz, Die Philo.sophisc.hen Schriflen von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ed. C. J. Gerhardt (Berlin: Georg Olms llildesheim, 1961). 229 (translation mine). 9. Nicolas de Malebt anche, De la recherche de la vérité. (Paris: Pléiade), 6, pt. 2, chap. 4, pp. 671-72 (translation mine). This has recently appeared in transla­ tion as The Search after Truth, trails, and ed. Thomas M. Lennon and Patti ]. Olscamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1(197). 10. René Descartes, Principles of l’hilosophy, pi. 1, ai t. 204, in Philosophical Writings, 1:289. Their translation reads: ‘Just as the same craftsman could make two clocks which tell the time equally well and look completely alike from the outside hut have completely different assemblies of wheels inside, so the supreme craftsman of the real world could hive produced all that we see in sev­ eral different ways.” 11. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, art. 205, in Philosophical Writings, 1:290. 12. Descartes, Principles ofPhilosophy, art. 206, in .Philosophical Writings, 1:291. 13. Montesquieu, Tlie Spirit ( f the Laws, 3:1. 14. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, bk. 3, prop. 4. Merleau-Ponty translated this text himself during the course, and so I have here translated his translation. 1.5. L. Brunschvicg, Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique (Paris: Blan­ chard, réédition 1972), 145. 16. René Descai t.es, Meditations on Pint Philosophy, “Sixth Meditation,” in Philosophical Writings, (Jf.58-59. 17. Spinoza, Ethics, preface to bk. 3. As above, Merleau-Ponty translated the text himself, and so I have here translated his translation. 18. Nicolas de Malebranrhe, Correspondance avec j. ]. Dortous de. Matron, cd. J. Moreau (Paris: Win. 1947), 1.19. .19. Martial Guéroult, Descartes selon l'ordre des raisons, 2 vols. JParis: Aubier, 1953). 20. Descartes to Chanut, June 6, 1647, in Philosophical Writings, 3:319-23 (translation mine).

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21. Ç.uéroull, Di'sraritS selon Uaxdrr, 2:299. "Descartes's rationalism is tlnip rigorous, nol. insofar as il is absolute.” 22. Descartes lo Mçslanc., February 9, 1645, in Philosophical Writings, 3:241-44 (translation mine). There is another letter to Mesland, in Latin, with the same dale; the contents oh the two letters are different. 23. GuérouIt, Descartes selon l’ordre, 2:181. 24. Compare this concept in Malebranche, and Merleau-ronty’s commen­ tary on it in chapter 4 of L ’union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Hircin et Berg­ son, ed. Jean Dcprun (Paris: Vrin, 1968). This text, originally a lecture course in 1947 and 1948, is now translated as The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche., Brian, and Keigson on the Union of Bod) and Soul, trails. P. Burke, A. Bjelland, and P. Milan (New York: Humanity Books, 20Û2). 25. See. for example, Descartes to Vlesland: “The numerical unity of the body of a human does not depend on its matter, but rather on its form which is the soul.’’ 26. Guérot.ilt, Descartes selon l’ordre, 2:188 (Mcrleau-Ponty’s emphasis).

Chapter 3. The Humanist Conception of Nature 1. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Puture Metaphysics, truths. Paul Cams and James W. Ellington (Indianapolis. ILickelt. 1977), Ak 4:253-384; see sec­ tion 13. 2. The verb here, installer, has another sense in French, “to inaugurate,” usually a president, but also “to begin"; thus this sentence can also read “We have to naugurale ourselves in an experience.”—TV. 3. Compare, for example, Immanuel Kant, “The Transcendental Aes­ thetic,” Ak 3, in Criticpie of Pure Reason, traits. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929). 4. Compare P. l.arhièzc-Rey, L ’idéalisme kantien (Paris: /Mean, 1931; réédi­ tion Vrin 1972). 5. Immanuel Kant The Critique of Judgment, traits. We.rner S. Pluhar (Ixtdianapobs: Hackett, 1987); see the “Second Introduction”: “Nature as a whole of object of sense.” 6. Compare L. Brunsohvicg, L ’expérience humaine et la causalité physique (Paris: Alcan, 1922), bk. 11. 7. J. 1.agneau. Célèbres leçons et fragments (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 152. 8 This famous phrase is from Kr.nl, Critiijue oj Judgment, section 20. 9. Kurt Goldstein, The Organism (New York: Zone Books, 1995). H). Compare Kant, Critique of Judgment, section 75: “It is absurd for men to hope that someday some Newton will come, forth who could make it understood that it would be only the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention ordered.” 1 1. Compare Kant. Critique of Judgment, section 84. 12. Compare Br unschvicg, L ’expérience humaine, pt. 5, bk. 17, chap. 47. 13. Ibid., 479.

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14. Ibid. If). Ibid., 487-88. J6. Ibid., 502, concerning “The; Second Analogy of Experience.” 17. Ibid., 5.10, concerning Cournot. 18. Ibid., 513. .19. Ibid., 512. This is a citation of A. Cournot, Traité de. Tcnchahie.ment des idées fondamentales dims tes srienres at dans l ’histoire, section 181, in Cournot, Oeu­ vres œmplètes, vol. 3 (Paris: Vriri, 1981) ; originally published in 1861. 20. Br unschvicg, /. expérience humante, 512. 21. Ibid. 22. Added by Mçrlcan-Ponty. 23. Brunschvicg, L'expérience humaine, 5.16. 24. Cou not, "Exposition de la théorie des chances et des probabilités' (1843), in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Vrin, .1984), cited by Brunschvicg, L'ex­ périence humaine, 516. 25. Bnmschvicg, L ’expérience, humaine, 516. 26. Ibid., 521. 27. Ibid., 538. 28. Ibid., 5.17. 29. Ibid., 513. 30. Ibid., 518. 31. Ibid., 518-19. 32. Ibid., 519. 33. Compare F.. Boutroux, De la contingence des lois de la nature, .1874. 34. Henri Poincaré, "1,'évolution des lois,” in Dernière pensée^ (Paris: Flam­ marion, 1913), cited by Brunschvicg, L'expérience humaine, 522. 35. Brnnschvicg, I. experience humaine, 522. 36. Ibid., 506. 37. Ibid., 522. 38. Ibid., 536. 39. Ibid., 544-45. 40. J. bachelier, cited by Brunschvicg, L'expérience humaine, 532-33. 41. Ibid., 53'7. 42. Ibid.

Chapter 4. The Romantic Conception of Nature 1. Kant, Critiipie of Tare Reason, “Tire Ideal of'Pure Reason,” A61.3/B641. 2. Merleau-Ponty here cites Karl Jaspers, Schelling (Frankfurt: Piper, 1955), 130. The French editors modified the translation irt the student notes to con­ form to Jasper’s text and to 'Merleau-Ponty’s notes. At the time of its publication in 1955 (one year before the course) Jaspers's book was one of the only widely available commentaries on Schelling, and has not yet been translated into En­ glish. .Merleau-Ponty used it extensively in the preparation of the materials on Schelling. 3. |aspers, SeheRing, 129.

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4. Compare K. Lowilh, Nietzsche, Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, traits. J. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley: Universiiy of California Press, 1997) 148. One of ihe objeclives of Lowilh’s work on Nietzsche is to link the latter’s thought to its precedents in German philosophy, notably Kant, llegel, and Schelling. Merleau-Ponty seems to have used this text extensively in the prepara­ tion of the materials on Schelling’s philosophy of nantie, sometimes paraphras­ ing it in his lecture. A discussion of Schelling is to he found on pp. 146-50 of I.owith’s book. 5. See F. W. ]. Schelling, Sdmmtliche Werke, ed. K. K A. Schelling, 14 vols. (Stuttgarl/Augsburg: J. G. Cotta’scher Vet lag, 1856-61), 6:341. F. W.J. Schelling, The System of Transcendental Idealism. (1800), traits. P. Heath (Charlottesville: Uni­ versity of Virginia Press, 1978), 3. The only French translations of Schelling’s work to which Merleau-Ponty had access were those prepared by Jankélévitch, published under the title F. W. J. Schelling, Ks.stfis (Paris: Aubier, 1946), which, in addition to an excerpt from The System oj 'Transcendental Idealism, also contains se­ lections from Ideas fm a Philosophy of Nature {Sdmmtliche Werke. 2:1-344); Von der Weltseele (.SW 2:345-583) ; Tester Entwurf (.SW 3:1-268) ; Darstellung des Philo.snph.iselien Empirismus (,S'W 10:225-86); and Philosophical Investigations concerning the Essence of Human Freedom (.S'W7:331-416). In addition, Jankélévilch prepared a partial translation of Ihe 181 1 version of Schelling’s Die Weltalter. These transla­ tions are generally acknowledged to he inadequate (see J. F. CourLine’s and |. F. Marquet’s assessment in their “Avant-propos des traducteurs” in F. W. ). Schelling, Octanes métaphysiques [Paris: Gallimard, 1980], 1 1), so we may assume that while Merleau-Ponty undoubtedly consulted them, he likely translated many of the passages himself. 6. See Schelling, .S'W 10:225-86, Darstellung des Philosophischen Empirismus ( 1836) [Exhibition of Philosophical Empiricism, (.in translated]. 7. L.ôwiLh, Nietzsche, 146. 8. Merleau-Ponty here offers a paraphrastic translation of a passage from Lowilh, Nietzsche, 149, in which Lôwith cites a passage from Schelling. The F.nglislt translation of Lowilh reads: “The basic material of all life and existence, ac­ cording to Schelling and Nietzsche alike, is the terrible: a blind power and force, a barbaric principle that can be overcome but can never be eliminated, and that is ‘the foundation of all greatness and beauty.’” These last words are Schelling’s and are erroneously attributed by Lôwith to .S'W1:222, which is in the middle of “Of the 1 as a Principle of Philosophy” (1795); no such passage is to be found there, and the French editors did not correct the error. Lowilh is in fact glossing a passage from the 1815 version of Die Weltalter (see F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. F. Bolman [New York: Columbia University Press, 1936], 229-30), which corresponds to ,SW8:338-39. There, one finds a passage reading: “But if (hey were capable of penetrating the outside of things, they would see that the true basic substance of all life and being is just what is terrible.” This ac­ counts for the first part of l.ôwillj|i gloss; the second part is gleaned a few pages later (.SW8:343; Ages, 234), where, in the context of a complaint about modern philosophy, Schelling writes that the giddy idealism of Reason has given us “a world which is nothing but an image, indeed, an image of an image, a nought of

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il mitighn .1 sharl'W oi .1 shadow men who are alsi, nnh images, only dr< ams ol liadows; . |jid|plc who, in the good-natured t.Tf'm i m attain so-called (altTffhLcnmi ni, i i-ii 11',' il iT\r al ili< dissolution of ill i11( rhuughts, but who lost all llien strength togethc with lliiir d,ukne.-Ls, ami lost also dial barbaric pi ni(,;il( . . which when conquered bt.it not annihilated is the Font id niun of all j^i , at ness ami Ik nits." 1.own h s , 1 1ynvenir n IIv summarizes tin : iut >| iassi.gr.., ami Me Iran Poult seem In Tels on it inorr ilian oil tin- in iginal text ilsrll 9. Jaspers, Schelling, 178. 1.0. Sclu-'lling, .S,W/8:338; see note 8, above. 11. Jaspers, Sehedivg, 1118-19. 12. Ibid. 111. These two phrases jtfcfet to Srhelling-, ,S,M/ 2:52; in K VV. J. Schelling, Idea s fora Philosophy of Nature, trans. t). K. 11arris and P. l-Irath (Canibi idge: (.Iam­ bi idgr l ji liven sit y press, 1988). Hti. I i |,i.',|irrs, SilitUing, 288; tranritiud b) Merit m I’onlv 15. (1 W. Leibniz, Cattrspondnnr mice Ainniul, Irtlei 2li. rd ! . Picnant (Paris: AltbJet 1972), 201 lia English translation appears in Thv lAlmi Arnmüd Com \jnudi iiiy, rd and tram . 11. ’ll Mason (Mamlit st.er and New Yoi k Mam lirv iri lInivcrsltv Pi rs> and Barnes and Noble, 19li7), III (iranslalion modilird). lb. Mlnsion (O Leibniz, (Ï- 7 li aguirnt 111: “I In r bowrvrr a point again es­ capes the const ionsnrss of im n, what is tlie origin ol ilie im:. Ibid., 50. 6. Alfred North Whitehead, Nature, and Life (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1934), 195. 7. Whitehead, Concept of Nature, 54. 8. Ibid., 3. 9. William Whcwall, The Rhilnsnphy of Inductive Sciences, vol. 1 (London, 1840). Ruyer offered an account of this work in his article “L’oeil cl Eesprit,” Cri­ tique (February 1955).

300 NOTES

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115-27

10. Whitehead, Concept. of Nature, 190. 11. Ibid., 145­ 12. Ibid., .56 and 121. 13. Ibid., .162. 14. Ibid 59. 15. Ibid.. 78. 16. Ibid., lb. 17. Ibid., 20. 18. Ibid., 19. 19. Alfred North Whitehead, Science avd the Modern World (New Yoi : Free Press, 1907), 79; originally the Lowell Lectures of 1925. 20. Whitehead, Concept of Nature, 16. 21. Ibid., 39. 22. Ibid., 148. 23. Ibid., 16. 24. Ibid.. 67. 25. Ibid., 4 and 13. 26. Ibid.. 54 and 16. 27. Ibid., 4. 28. Ibid., 14-15. 29. Ibid., 55. 30. Saint Augustine, Cunjessimis, 1 1.28.37. 31. Whitehead, Nature anil Life, 200. 32. Whitehead, Concept of Nature, 47-48. We did not find a precise refer­ ence to Schelling, though it could refer to any