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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 July 2024
It has become a commonplace to say that Western civilization—all the civilizations of the globe, in fact—is in a state of crisis. Spengler and Toynbee, after studying the laws governing the development of great cultures of the past, expressed the opinion that our experience is repeating what marked the decline of each of them: development of universal empires, atony of languages, cultural as well as religious agnosticism. For those who may distrust such sweeping views, it is sufficient to observe that today's questioning attitudes represent neither mere matters of detail nor even the major renewals experienced by a civilization in a state of becoming. Humanism is shaken to its very foundations, and, the object of criticism and schism, has lost its inspirational force. Renaissance and revolutions broke with their immediate past only to breathe new life into an endangered civilization. This new breath was either drawn from an old tradition or anticipated in political and social readjustment. The French Revolution professed to be carrying out the aims of reason and nature, which had inspired the West for eight centuries, just as the Renaissance had professed to rediscover the spirit of antiquity. Our questions, on the other hand, arise not from a disorder in the old but from a conviction that the old has exhausted its principles and its possibilities and that it can henceforth only give way to something entirely new.
1. "Civilization," "culture," and "humanism" do not have in French the clearly de fined meanings they possess in German. We shall frequently use them synonymously.
2. The shades of meaning in this bald statement will be developed in our conclusion.
3. Cf. Louis Leprince-Ringuet, "Psychologie nouvelle du chercheur scientifique," in L'Homme et l'atome (Geneva: Rencontres internationales de Genève, 1958).
4. J. L. Destouches and Paulette Février, L'Interprétation physique de a mécanique ondulatoire et des théories quantiques (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1956).
5. On the notion of self-regulation in the life of societies see Norbert Wiener, Cyber netics and Society (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1948); but a society cannot remain homeostatic, and for this reason We add to the notion of self-regulation that of creativity, as intended by Maslow in Motivation and Personality (1955).
6. Our definitions, examples, and several of our ideas in this paragraph are taken from Gilbert Simondon's remarkable work Du Mode d'existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1958).
7. Let us imagine an air-cooled engine. Cylinder and breech are reinforced by ribs; heat dissipation is accomplished by winglets. But in fact the two functions are the fact of ribs-and-winglets which allow no distinction between the volumetric unit and the unit of heat dissipation. There is not only compromise between functions but also concomitance and con vergence (Simondon, op. cit., p. 22).
8. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958.
9. In this recollection of religious philosophy Henry Duméry retains only its phenom enology, symptoms of a universial methodological current, and purposely excludes the transcendental idealism, reminiscent of Husserl and Plotinus, which belongs to the personal philosophy of the author.
10. Cf., among others, Psychologie sexuelle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951).
11. Henri Van Lier, Les Arts de l'espace (Paris: Casterman, 1959).
12. On all this see Simondon, op. cit.
13. Art et société (1955).
14. Cf. Pierre Francastel, Art et technique (1956), and Van Lier, op. cit.
15. E.g., the Robbe-Grillet of La Jalousie (1958) does not describe the jealous person, either in the third or in the first person but makes him relate his suspicions as he lived them, obliging the reader to perceive, to reason, in short to "function" with him. It is for this reason that the book is entitled La Jalousie, not Le Jaloux. And this functioning, need we say, is not limited to a recording of facts, nor does it create them; it "constitutes" them, according to the apparent shifts of feeling and the profound relationships—in space and in time—of its existential dialectic.
16. When unruly students, several years ago, put the clock of the Paris Observatory out of order, public reaction was quite violent. The feeling of sacrilege arose not from an evalu ation of the damage done, which was, after all, relatively minor, but rather from the fact that an attack had been made against the key point of a network, since this clock sends out hourly signals over the radio (cf. Simondon, op. cit., p. 221).
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