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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
One of the dominant characteristics of Western philosophical and literary history of the last two centuries is that the object of desire (in the novel) and the object of perception (in epistemology) have been made to reveal aspects which are more complex than the classical age had suspected. With Descartes, everything was clear: the object is but a portion of extension. But with Kant things already become more complicated: the object has a mysterious. en-soi (an sich-in itself) which escapes us. And the object of desire, in literature, acquires such a mystic character that it loses its status of creature. “For what the romantic lover seeks is not really the beloved”, writes Eric Heller. “Intermingled with his erotic craving, inarticulate, diffuse, and yet dominating it, is the desire for spiritual salvation.” It is no longer the object (the creature) which one wishes to embrace, but the invisible reality mirrored in it. Desire does not tend so much toward objects as toward what lies beyond these objects where, it believes, it will find its salvation.
1 Eric Heller, The Disinherited Mind (London, Bowes and Bowes, 1975) pp. 221-222 (original edition 1952). Here Eric Heller situates himself in a line of reflection begun by Anders Nygren when he wrote, "eros is a form of escape from the world … the intrinsic beauty of the object … has value … only inasmuch as it evokes a higher world". Eros et Agapé: La notion chrétienne de l'amour et ses transformations (Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1944), vol. 1, p. 197.
2 One of the most penetrating analyses of this idea is that of Lucien Laberthon nière in his "Etude sur Descartes" in Œuvres de Laberthonnière (Paris, Vrin, 1935), pp. 288-300. For an overview of the climate which encouraged the development of Cartesianism, see Robert Lenoble, Mersenne ou la naissance du mécanisme (Paris: Vrin, 1943). See also Paul Mouy, Le développement de la physique cartésienne, 1646-1712 (Paris, Vrin, 1934).
3 We should also mention the doctrine of the plurality of worlds which obviously destroyed every notion of cosmic hierarchy and, thereby, qualitative differences between the various parts of the universe. For a good presentation of the discussions which took place around this doctrine in England in the seventeenth century, see S.F. Mason, "Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England", in The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, Charles Webster ed. (London and Boston, Routledge and Keagan Paul, 1974), pp. 212-216. For a more detailed presentation, see G. McColley, "The Ross-Wilkins Controversy", Annals of Science III (1935): pp. 153-189.
4 Quoted by George R. Healy in Mechanistic Science and the French Jesuits: A Study of the Responses of the Journal de Trévoux (1701-1762) to Descartes and Newton (Ann Arbor, University Microfilms, Doctoral Dissertation Series Publi cation, No. 20515), p. 61. Let us point out with Pierre Duhem that Cartesians "pushed to extremes the tendency to remove the material substance of various properties", La théorie physique, son objet, sa structure (Paris, Marcel Rivière, 1914, second edition), p. 15.
5 "The wall is as truly white, as it is extended, and in the same sense". Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, No. 99. Or again, "What nonsense they talk when they make a distinction between things considered in themselves and the same things considered in respect to us, and pronounce the former the reality." Philosophical Commentaries, no. 832. According to G.W.R. Ardley, Berkeley's philosophy "is the first magisterial attempt to cope with the intellectual demoralization over which men like John Donne had lamented … In place of attitude of mere exploitation of natural resources encouraged by the new philosophy, Berkeley revived the sense of joyful intercourse of Man with nature as with his home". "Berkeley's Philosophy of Nature" in Philosophy Series no. 3 (University of Auckland, 1962), p. 10.
6 Richard Westfall compared Cartesian space to Newtonian space in "Newton and Absolute Space", Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences, 67 (1964): 121-132. I have also examined this subject from a different angle in "The Philo sophical Consequences of the Formulation of the Principle of Inertia", Diogenes 123 (1983), 1-29.
7 René Descartes, "Discours de la méthode" in Oeuvres et Lettres (Paris, Galli mard, 1966), p. 196.
8 Quoted by George R. Healy, op. cit., p. 50.
9 For the elimination of the condition for the possibility of cosmology after the seventeenth century, see Jacques Merleau-Ponty, The Rebirth of Cosmology (New York, Knopf, 1976). On the reappearance of this condition for the possibility, see Stephen Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982).
10 It is impossible here to cite every work which deals with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and its cultural consequences. One of the most complete is that of Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626-1640 (New York, Holmes and Meiers Publishers, 1976). Let us point out that the consequences of the scientific revolution are complex. On the one hand certainly, there was dread at seeing the collapse of the traditional cosmos; on the other there was extraordinary enthusiasm at the idea (sensed more than understood) of the power that man would acquire over nature. Chronologically, there is no precise frontier separating serenity (which we tend to associate with the traditional cosmos) from dread or from enthusiasm. Victor Harris noted, for example, that after 1570 the theme of a profound corruption of nature took hold and was amplified before being eliminated abruptly in 1630 by the idea of a regenerated nature (All Coherence Gone, The University of Chicago Press, (1949), p. 87). As for the role played by science in the cultural and intellectual climate of seventeenth century England, the thinking today is that this was much less important than had been believed. This is the opinion of Michael Hunter in Science and Society in Restora tion England (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981). For France, see the work by Jean Ehrard, L'idée de nature en France à l'aube des Lumières (Paris, Flammarion, 1970). For the history of the expression ‘scientific revolution', see I. Bernard Cohen, "The Eighteenth-Century Origins of the Concept of Scientific Revolution", Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXVII (1976): 257-288.
11 According to Emmanuel Levinas, "intentionality carries in itself the innumer able horizons of its implications and thinks of infinitely more ‘things' than the object where it is affixed". En découvrant l'existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris, Vrin, 1967), p. 130 (reprint).
12 "The transcendental subject does not see the world unless it leaves its absolute ly non-worldly and non-temporal-spatial point: the pure present…" Marc Richir, Au-delà du renversement copernicien (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1976) p. 9 (the underlining is my own). We have no study comparing desire and intentionality.
13 For Heidegger there is no inherent sense perception of beings and of things, a perception which would then be converted into intellectual terms. "The establish ment of the divorce between what can be perceived through the senses and what cannot, between what is physical and what is not … is unsatisfactory". Der Satz vom Grund (Pfüllingen, Günther-Neske, 1957), pp. 88-89. Arion L. Kelkel observes that, from Heidegger's point of view, it is "impossible to have pure sensations of color or of light or of sounds … [and that there is] an ‘apriority' of the world … relative to every intra-worldly entity". La légende de l'être: Langage et poésie chez Heidegger (Paris, Vrin, 1980), pp. 222-223. It is very difficult to see how Heidegger's position can be reconciled with his theory of Seiende. If the world is always first given to us, what happens to the Seiende? As for Wittgenstein, after having thought, while writing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that it was possible to obtain a representation of the real which did not appeal to elements extrinsic to this representation, he came to consider that the idea of a direct access to the world or to things which occur in our minds had no meaning. Wittgenstein, according to Jacques Bouveresse, was perfectly aware of the fact that, "whatever we might see, it must be read and understood anew… for it would have no meaning in itself and taken in isolation, but only because of a certain system … of a certain usage". Le mythe de l'intériorité (Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1976), p. 34. In L'Etre et le Néante (Paris, Gallimard, 1943), Sartre already affirmed that the notion of pure sensation was a "hybrid notion … a psychologist's pure illusion" (pp. 377-378). The tendency to deny that anything is given to us or presented to us has only grown stronger since then. We know the analyses of Jacques Derrida on the inexistence of any inherent perception: "There is never perception, and the ‘presentation' is a representation of representation". La voix et le phénomène (Paris, PUF, 1967), p. 116, or the analyses of Willard O. Quine which, as Paul Gochet explains, "show that the quest for undeniable evidence and the obsession for foundations are two idols of classical epistemology which it is urgent to tear down". Quine en perspective (Paris, Flammarion, 1978), p. 36. Richard Rorty sets John Dewey alongside Heidegger and Witt genstein inasmuch as all three "are in agreement that the notion of knowledge as accurate representation needs to be abandoned". Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 9.
To understand better this rejection of all inherent perception and, a fortiori, of every object given to our awareness, we must remember with Leszek Kolakowski that during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, "efforts were made to do away with subjectivity, since the subject had come to be considered as a construction without a counterpart in reality, something illegitimately added to the content of experience…. The essential thing was to reach … a pure ‘experience' rid of… every subjective element". The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought (New York, Doubleday, 1968), p. 104 (original edition 1966). So radical an undertaking must necessarily provoke violent reactions. From that point on a large part of modern philosophy must be understood as a protest against the alienation of the subject brought on by the quest for a pure experience. The rejection of the possibility of such an inherent experience is but a roundabout means of reintroducing the subject into the world. That this reintroduction occurs at the very time when the death of the subject has been proclaimed says much about the ambiguities and the confusions of contemporary philosophy.
14 To my knowledge all non-technical works on the developments of modern physics consider the impossibility of apprehending the building blocks of the universe to be an undeniable thesis. But all insist likewise on the fact that this thesis still holds an all-powerful fascination for contemporary modes of thinking. Herbert Butterfield in The Origins of Modern Science (London, 1949) has made some very pertinent remarks in this respect.
15 R.M. Albérès, Bilan littéraire du XXe siècle (Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1962), p. 35.
16 "An explanation, whatever it may be, can only be in excess when faced with the presence of things … things will only accept the tyranny of meanings but apparently—derisively—to show better to what degree they remain foreign to man". Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris, Les Editions de minuit, 1963), reprinted by Gallimard, Idées), pp. 45, 24.
17 According to Winfried Enger, for Robbe-Grillet, "Three dimensional space assumes functions which leave no room for a point of view specific to the author". The French Novel (New York, Frederick Unger, 1969), p. 221 (translated from the German). Winfried Enger forgets to add that without a point of view, not only does the author disappear but the world as well.
18 Even the simple view of an object is not the view of an object. Virgil C. Aldrich, following Nelson Goodman, emphasizes, "that nothing is simply seen". "Mirrors, Pictures, Words, Perception", Philosophy 55 (1980): 39:56. And long before Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Dewey, Quine or Derrida, Ernst Cassirer had already shown, not without elegance, that the grasping of individual elements, far from being given to us in an intuition or in a presentation, appears at the end and not at the beginning of intellectual processes: "Die Anschauung scheint den Inhalt als losgelös ten, sich selbst genügenden Bestand zu ergreifen: aber sobald wir daran gehen, diesen Bestand im Urteil zu fixieren, löst es sich in ein Gewebe relativer Setzungen auf, die einander wechselseitig stützen. Begriff und Urteil kennen das Einzelne nur als Glied und gleichsam als Punkt einer systematischen Mannigfaltigkeit, die hier somit … als das eigentliche Prius gegenüber besonderen Setzungen erscheint". Substanzbe griff und Funktionsbegriff: Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntnisk ritik (Berlin, Bruno Cassirer, 1910), p. 124 (italics are mine). Jean Piaget observes, along the same lines, "Scientific objectivity [during development of scientific thought] is no longer the result of an immediate intuition of a thing … there is no object en soi". Introduction à l'épistémologie génétique (Paris, PUF, 1974), vol. 2, pp. 67-69.
19 This is Thomas Molnar's thesis in Dieu et la connaissance du réel (Paris, PUF, 1976).
20 For the importance of representation and, in particular, of geometric represent ation in the genesis of Kantian philosophy, see "Kant and Newtonian Science: The Pre-Critical Period", Ronald Calinger, Isis, 253 (1979): 349-362.
21 As L. Wittgenstein said, "It is only that which can also be represented as being other than language can say". Philosophische Bemerkungen (Oxford, Blackwell, 1964), p. 84.
22 Nothing better expresses this arrival of vision to the detriment of word than the third of Descartes' Regulae: "Circa objecta proposita, non quid alii senserint, vel quid ipsi suspicemur, sed quid clare et evidenter possumus intueri, vel certo deducere, quaerendum est; non aliter enim scientia acquisitur". Oeuvres de Des cartes published by Adam et Tannery (Paris, Leopold Cerf, 1908, p. 366, vol. X).
23 Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1967, reprint 1981), p. 221.
24 The importance acquired by linguistics and the modes of knowledge associated with it is perhaps the sign of a return to a philosophy in which the world, in its essence, is word and not matter, or according to which, as Louis Bouyer writes, "all knowledge of the world is but… knowledge of a linguistic type, which would imply that the world itself is but a language shared by minds". Cosmos (Paris, Les Editions du Cerf, 1982), p. 42. According to Bouyer, the world, as language, is one of the characteristics of Aristotelian epistemology. It seems that the status given to matter depends on the adoption of the world as logos. The more that matter is declared real, the less the world is language and conversely. We need only recall Berkeley who denied all reality in matter; nothing is more typical of his philosophy than the affirmation that nature, to be fully understood, must be extended like a language, "because phenomenal sequences succeed one another in a semantic, and not causal, perspective". Michel Ambacher, La matière dans les sciences et en philosophie (Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1972), p. 94.
25 Scientific faith in an iconic reconstruction of the real reaches its high point in Ernst Mach, for whom the goal of science "is the most complete and most coherent … image of the world". Die Prinzipien der Wärmelehre (Leipzig, 1896), p. 366. However, Heinrich Hertz declares, "In der Tat wissen wir nicht, und haben auch kein Mittel zu erfahren ob unsere Vorstellungen von den Dingen mit jenen in irgendetwas anderem übereinstimmen, als allein in eben jener einen fundamentale Beziehung (the experimental relation)" [Die Prinzipien der Mechanik in neuem Zusammenhange dargestellt (Leipzig, Johannes Ambrosius Barth, 1894), p. 2] Ernst Mach proscribes everything which might be found beyond this representation, including the idea of a "res cogitans" or of a "res extensa". Mach thus finds himself in a Buddhistic type epistemology, as Robert Bouvier pointed out in La Pensée d'Ernst Mach (Paris, Libraire au Vélin d'Or, 1923). For the controversies created by Ernst Mach, see John T. Blackmore, Ernst Mach: His Work, Life and Influence (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1972). One of Ernst Mach's adversaries in the scientific world was L. Boltzmann whose ideas have been very well presented by René Dugas in La Théorie physique au sens de Boltzmann et ses prolongements modernes (Neuchâtel, Editions du Griffon, 1959). Boltzmann was not opposed to representations; what he demanded was the freedom to imagine without reference to "sense data". Conversely, "The Vienna Circle intended to … show the way in which concepts feed from a base of empirical observation. According to this view science, physical science in particular, contains or will contain everything we can know about the world". Stanley Cavell, "Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy", Daedalus, 93 (1964): 946-974. John Heil observes that Wittgenstein's intention was to "provide for a linguistic level at which there is no room for ambiguity or interpretation, so that any interpretation becomes superflous … This theme was of course later abandoned by Wittgenstein". "Cognition and Representation", Austra lasian Journal of Philosophy, 58 (1980): 158-168.
26 Richard Rorty, Philosophy. and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 319, 394.
27 The impossibility of realizing this project was clearly grasped by L. Wittgen stein who, according to Jacques Bouveresse, "contests the fact that primary signs really exist if this means signs which cannot and should not be interpreted". Le mythe de l'intériorité, op. cit. p. 396. In a book published in 1962, John Passmore observed, "Philosophers had supposed—Wittgenstein has particularly in mind the Tractatus and Russell's logical atomism-that there must be an ‘ultimate analysis' of an expression's meaning, an analysis consisting of simple elements to which we would point in order to make that meaning perfectly clear. But there are no ‘simples', he now thinks …". A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London, Gerald Duckworth, 1962), p. 430. As for scientific historians and philosophers, they have known for a long time that "what are called ‘observation' statements in the sciences as well as in our daily pursuits assert far more than what is actually presented in a momentary experience". Ernest Nagel, Teleology Revisited and Other Essays in the Philosophy and History of Science (New York, Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 92.
28 For criticism of representation or image in Heidegger, see J.L. Mehta, The Way and the Vision (Honolulu, The University of Hawai Press, 1976), pp. 381-384.
29 According to Joseph Mazzeo, "the language of poetry is conceived as essential ly the language of relations, metaphorical language, not the language of direct reference or statement". Nature and the Cosmos: Essays in the History of Ideas (New York, Dabor Science Publications, 1977), p. 29. By ignoring or excluding the possibility of immaterial relations between the elements it designates, the "language of direct reference or statement" is an acosmic language, that is a language which refers to an homogeneous and infinite universe. Poetic language, however, "frees us from the one accepted and firmly aggregated reality of the world we believe we live in, opening up before us multivalent relationships and other worlds". Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (Baltimore, The John Hopkins Press, 1963), p. 23.
30 Karl Löwith best expressed this doubt in "The Nature of Man and the World of Nature", in Martin Heidegger in Europe and America, ed. by Edward G. Ballard and Charles E. Scott (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), pp. 37-47.
31 In addition to such "dissidents" as Berkeley or Husserl, we must naturally mention Leibniz who believed that there was nothing at all in nature without a soul or something equivalent to a soul. See for example, "De la nature en elle-même, ou de la forme inhérente aux choses créées et de leurs actions" in Opuscules philosophiques choisis, translated from the Latin by Paul Schrecker (Paris, Hatier-Boivin, 1954).
32 Michel Ambacher, Cosmologie et Philosophie (Paris, Aubier-Montaigne, 1967), p. 322.
33 "A disenchanted world is also a manageable world … Man, foreign to the world, establishes himself as master of the world". Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La Nouvelle alliance: Métamorphose de la science (Paris, Gallimard, 1979), p. 28.
34 Jean Starobinski, L'Oeil vivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), p. 10.
35 Ionesco refers to the "nullity" of space in his Journal en miettes, when he writes, "My internal space is not free. I cannot even reach my own door, nor the window to let in a little air". (Paris, Mercure de France, 1967), p. 59. It is as if the void space sought since the eighteenth century had, in the twentieth century, surged back into the world of objects.
36 On the theme of confinement and solitude in modern literature and philos ophy, see Ben Lazare Mijuskovic, Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology and Litera ture (Assen, Van Gorcum, 1979).
37 According to Aristotle, natural objects have an innate tendency to move themselves or to stop, a principle of movement and of stasis (Physics, Book II, 1, 192b.) "All natural bodies … are mobile by themselves depending on the place". On the Aristotelian concept of nature, see Friedrich Solmsen, Aristotle's System of the Physical World (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1960).
38 William Gilbert delivered one of the most decisive blows to the Aristotelian concept of space, even though he managed to retain the Kepler theory attributing occult forces to bodies causing them to attract or to repel. "Sed non locus in nature quicquam potest: locus nihil est, non existit, vim non habet; potestas omnis in corporibus ipsis". De mundo nostro sublunari philosophia nova (Amsterdam, 1651), lib. II, cap. 8, p. 144.
39 "The idea of a pure object, or thing, or body is contradictory". Raymond Ruyer, La Gnose de Princeton (Paris, Fayard, 1974), p. 42.
40 According to Newton, "No being exists, or can exist, which is not related to space in some way … if an entity is posited, space is posited also…". Unpublished Scientific Paper of Isaac Newton, A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall (eds.) (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 98. Newton was absolutely opposed to Descartes on this point. The same opposition was manifested in a letter from Henry More to Descartes: "I question, however, if the soul does not occupy the whole body. Otherwise, I beg you, how can it happen that the soul … can be so exactly united to the body?" Second Letter to Descartes in Oeuvres de Descartes published by Victor Cousin (Paris, 1824-1826), vol. X, p. 229. Newton was in fluenced by More's philosophy.
41 The hostility of the universe to revelation was, it seems to me, an obsession with Rudolf Bultmann, and the origin of his demythologizing project. See, for example, "Jesus Christus und die Mythologie", in Glauben und Verstehen: Gesam melte Aufsätze von Rudolf Bultmann (Tübingen: Mohr, 1965), p. 178. It is true that Bultmann relativized the power of fascination that he seems to attribute to the image of the world which results from modem science when he writes, "kein Weltbild von gestern oder heute oder morgen ist endgültig. Das wichtigste ist jedoch nicht das konkrete Ergebnis wissenschaftlicher Forschung und die Inhalte eines Weltbildes, sondern die Denkart, aus der die Weltbilder kommen". (p. 157). One of the best critical analyses of the philosophical aspects of Bultmann's work is that of Hans Jonas, "Is Faith Still Possible? Memories of Rudolf Bultmann and Reflections on the Philosophical Aspects of his Work". Harvard Theological Review 75 (1982): 1-24. In my opinion this critical analysis is better than that of Karl Jaspers, "Wahrheit und Unheil der Bultmannschen Entmythologisierung" in Karl Jaspers, Rudoff Bultmann: Die Frage der Entmythologisierung (Münich: Piper, 1954), pp. 5-56. For a more general analysis of Bultmann's impact on Protestant theology, see the excellent work by Heinz Zahrnt, Die Sache mit Gott. Die protestantische Theologie im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (Münich: Piper, 1966).
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