accueil > liste des articles > between positivism and phenomenology

BETWEEN POSITIVISM AND PHENOMENOLOGY

An exploration of the being of human being across transcendental phenomenology, analytic philosophy and the cognitive sciences
by Jean-Luc Petit

Published by http://www.onlineoriginals.com

When I agreed to write my own philosophical biography in the context of a collection of articles dedicated to Paul Ricoeur I underestimated the difficulty of the intellectual exercise to which I had committed myself, still less the 'malaise' of the, let us say 'spiritual', situation in which I had placed myself. First, by qualifying my biography as 'philosophical' I meant to exclude from my account any feature which might evoke that deplorable tendency (often characterised as that of the 'me generation') which has become only too common these days: to indulge in anecdotal exploration of the intimate details of one's personal life, even, and even especially, in what concerns its most obscure corners.

Philosophical reflection, as I understand it, turns the reflecting subject away from itself to return it toward something other than itself. This is a necessary condition: a necessary condition for the one who intends to focus upon the matter under consideration in the context of a well-defined field of investigation, a focus which often fails to be sufficiently concentrated; a necessary condition also for the one who hopes to control his somewhat too errant thought processes by making them conform to rules governing the proper treatment of the objects in question.

Having said this, any teacher confronted with the lack of motivation on the part of his students knows from experience that this purely abstract requirement cannot be so easily imposed, and this no matter how impressive the intellectual heroism of just such a dedication to the object under investigation might prove to be. It would also be dishonest not to admit that the above also applies to the researcher himself. No matter how remote from oneself the theme of one's research might appear to be, the very fact that one sticks to it has to be the response to some desire and has to furnish this desire with some kind of satisfaction, one which could not perhaps have been obtained by pursuing another intellectual path.

Moreover this transcending of the personal does not imply any abolition of the subjective. On the contrary, a certain rehabilitation of the subjective forms a necessary part of the movement of reflection, to the extent that the loss of self in the object is only the initial phase of a long and laborious process which also includes a phase in which the progress accomplished is recuperated and reintegrated with a view to attaining a synthesis which also encompasses an element of personal unification as well as a recuperation of the self.

Far from dealing exclusively with this fictional, even though transfigured, personality that the tradition calls the 'self' and which emerges at the end of the reflective movement, second degree reflection brings to light personal motives which might otherwise have remained concealed due to the turning away of the attention from the self (ego) to the other. It obliges us to undertake an examination of conscience, which often exposes us to certain intimate humiliations. The humiliation of having to admit that more often than not one's path has been defined by external circumstances and fortuitous encounters rather than by the dominant and predominant pressure of an internal necessity. The further humiliation of having to admit that one's own published work might only have been wrested away from the limbo of frustrated aspirations by dint of unpredictable possibilities or convergences, often of a very local and circumstantial kind, and this not just at the level of editorial constraints and the pressure groups who impose such constraints (true but trivial) but even at the level of one's own original conception. Finally, the humiliation of having to concede, in one's own case, that personal motives and impersonal objectives do not share the same temporality. Though sometimes superimposed one upon the other, they rarely fall together without a significant time interval.

Without dwelling further on the question, let me just say that the so-called 'law' governing the transformation of contingency into destiny finds confirmation both in my career as a professor (in my country, as a civil servant) and in my philosophical itinerary. I began by teaching philosophy in a major Parisian Lycée, went on to work in a department of philosophy in a university in the east of France before I was temporarily put in charge of a research team set up by the ministry of education in the framework of my department. Finally, I was appointed by the C.N.R.S. (an institution which manages a considerable proportion of the scientific activity in France) to carry out a programme of research in a physiological laboratory at the College de France.

I hope the reader will forgive me for not wanting to go into my Curriculum Vitae in any greater detail, more especially since these details only concern me and the administration within whose competence I fall. After trying ceaselessly to get free of such external constraints as seemed to me (rightly or wrongly) to bring with them more disadvantages than advantages and which, in particular, seemed to stand in the way of the development of my 'Chef d'Oeuvre' and having come to see that it was as futile to try to modify these external conditions as it was wearisome to oppose them, I repeatedly based my hopes for change upon a hypothetical institutional recognition of the value of my theoretical work and this by gambling on the intellectual qualities of those anonymous persons to whom I sent my dossiers. All this in spite of the fact that, without being entirely incidental, the range and variety of the positions I have held successively in the course of my academic career have rarely had as direct a relation with the course of my research as I once imagined.

Enough of the tribulations of a professor at odds with his institutional environment. I am only too happy to trace what has proved to be my continuing preoccupation in philosophy back to its origins in Ricoeur's last series of lectures at the Sorbonne. These lectures were given for students preparing for a degree in philosophy in the university year 1963-64, at a time when I was still at the lycée Henri IV preparing a competitive examination for a place at the Ecole Normale Supérieur de St Cloud. It could also have been the following year when, as a cloistered 'normalien', I still depended upon the Sorbonne for my diplomas and to a lesser degree for my teaching (limited to purely informative courses like those of Simondon on psychology and others which we took to be intellectually more rewarding) and when Ricoeur had not yet left the Sorbonne for Nanterre, a move he made at the beginning of the academic year in October 1965.

These courses were intended simply as an introduction to Husserl's Ideen. But I still vividly recall these lectures as being something quite different from the kind of generalities dispensed in the way of an introduction to the uninitiated. Ricoeur was like the leader of an expedition exploring an unknown territory and discovering, in the course of overcoming obstacle after obstacle, the contours and the organising structure of an entirely new field. The structure of the work emerged out of an exemplary struggle conducted by Ricoeur, the attentive and demanding reader, as he hacked his way through the thickets of his text, all this in contrast to what teaching is assumed to be in the manuals, a sort of approximate survey, undertaken to spare the reader the trouble of thinking for himself and punctuated by the occasional pontifical pronouncement.

This experience of the labour of thought which reactivates that other labour deposited in what the reader often falsely assumes to be the 'objective form of the text' and which requires that one relive the original situation as the actor-observer of an experience came across as positive confirmation of my own rejection of the dreary procedure which held sway in the teaching I had absorbed at school and which consisted in endowing the great philosophical texts with a kind of sacred authority, to which should be added my almost equal suspicion of the supposedly more scientific authority of the structuralist approach to philosophical texts. Over and beyond this revival of an experience -- to be more precise: an experience of thinking as an active structuring power and not a passive registering of experiential information -- Ricoeur's introduction to Husserl made it possible for me to envisage taking up again the great reflective tradition and carrying it through in a context which at first sight might seem to be resistant to such a project, the context of a clarification of the basic meanings upon which the new humanistic sciences depended.

In contrast to many of those who graduated with me from the Ecole Normale Supérieure and who tended to make fun of the reflective tradition as a sub-species of the 'philosophy of the Subject' and who in so doing adopted the empirical or historical approach illustrated by Bachelard and Michel Foucault, I contended that this tradition could still meet the challenge represented by the human sciences. They could do so on one condition, a condition which ranged me against the adepts of the structuralism movement: that it should rely upon a return to the austerity and rigour of a genuine reflective method which, for me, took the form of a theory of transcendental constitution, by no means limited to egology but committed to pursuing to the end the logic of its own procedure and this with respect to a spectrum of regional ontologies corresponding to the domains of the different positive sciences. This is the point of view which I developed in my M.A. thesis on Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, under the direction of Ricoeur, where I relied, in an admittedly somewhat superficial and fragmentary fashion, upon insights gleaned from Saussurian linguistics and Piaget's genetic psychology, (I no longer remember whether Marx's 'science of history' made up the third panel of a triptych).

This attempt to uphold the integrity of the 'orthodox' Husserlian programme against a French phenomenology more influenced by Heidegger than Husserl and whose diverse 'deviations' (this is the word that came to me later as most appropriately describing what was going on then): Derridian, Lacanian, Althusserian etc, made up the intellectual horizon of the epoch, was probably a cul-de-sac. It was something of a contradiction to want to reinforce the Cartesian tendency towards subjective closure while at the same time claiming to open the way to a transcendental foundation for the positive sciences. All the more so since the teaching at St Cloud offered by my other mentor, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, discouraged any attempt to seek in pure subjectivity a foundation which had not first come to grips with the procedures operative in the specific domains of the disciplines in question.

Ricoeur himself, who inspired me to proceed in this way, a way brilliantly opened up in his lectures on Husserl, eventually gave up this approach. Having subsequently completed his confrontation with psychoanalysis, the further course of his thinking led him across a vast terrain with which I became familiar by attending his seminars. First, a fresh dialogue with analytical philosophy, initially, in its application to the theory of action, then, to the theory of history and from there on to an original interpretation of the hermeneutic tradition, an Odyssey which finished up with the massive construction: Temps et récit. Within the framework of this vast enterprise dedicated to a reflective comprehension of the entire field of meaning, I made of the 'semantics of action' my particular speciality.

I left open the possibility of an extension of the theory of the noematic structures of intentional consciousness to domains other than those of mathematics (formal idealities) and the physical sciences, most notably, to the domain of the concrete idealities of practical life. For its part, analytical philosophy, particularly the ordinary language tradition emanating from later Wittgenstein, drew attention to certain stable configurations of meaning in ordinary usage, configurations which could be reduced neither to logical laws nor to grammatical rules and which came to be called 'speech acts', 'language games' or quite simply conceptual networks and which were treated not as structures of experience but as conventions governing linguistic communication.

The link sketched out by Ricoeur in 'Discourse of action' (Introduction to his seminar: La sémantique de l'action, eds du CNRS, 1977) seemed to me particularly evident in connection with practical noetic structures which, from a phenomenological point of view, confer their subjective (and inter-subjective) meaning upon our everyday actions. Relying upon this intuition with regard to the rootedness of concepts of action in an experience of the agent at a deeper level than any that could be recuperated within the conventions of language, I undertook a systematic critique of the analyses of action developed within the analytical school without limitation to the disciples of Wittgenstein whom Ricoeur took to be privileged authorities (despite the lack of any response on the part of his British equivalents, horrified, perhaps by the atmosphere that reigned at Nanterre in 1969).

This undertaking, by virtue of its comprehensiveness and reflective procedure, contrasted with the argumentative and dialogical procedure of analytical philosophy, more interested as it was in the discussion of the latest objection formulated by a putative opponent in abstraction from any wider philosophical context than in a reflection upon the intrinsic limitations of their approach to philosophical problems in the context of the tradition to which it belonged, a tradition which, in a certain sense, it also betrayed. Be that as it may, this source of inspiration brought with it enough material for a minor doctoral thesis (3'me Cycle), a reading of Marx's Grundrisse in the light of my own version of 'analytical phenomenology' (Du travail vivant au système des actions, Seuil, 1980), followed by my major doctoral thesis (Doctorat d'Etat à la Sorbonne): L'action dans la philosophie analytique, PUF, 1991).

At the university of Strasbourg II, where the friendship of Jean Frère made it possible for me to attain the status of full professor despite a hostile environment where the vindictiveness of those who could not forgive my ironic asides conspired with the vulgar jealousy of others, ten years of scrupulous obscurity went by before the chance appointment of Alain Marc Rieu, former colleague at Saint Cloud, to the maison Franco-Japonaise de Tokyo resulted in my being made responsible for receiving doctoral candidates. Financed by a Ministry anxious to encourage research at the university and therefore endowed with a sizeable budget, it was left to my discretion to decide how to manage the sums of money made available.

Applying the workshop formula that I had discovered at the seminars devoted to the cognitive sciences run by Jean Petitot at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Social Science, I set up a series of workshops under the rubric: 'Philosophy of Action and the Neuro-sciences'. In the context of these workshops I managed to bring together for days of presentations and discussions complimented by satisfying meals in a Weinstub not just those considered indispensable in the field cognitive philosophy but also historians of philosophy, analytical philosophers as well as researchers in neuro-physiological laboratories capable of bringing to our debates empirical information which had not yet been adulterated by philosophical interpretation. For example, at the height of a truck strike which paralysed the country in 1995, Giaccomo Rizzolatti bravely undertook the journey to Strasbourg (and subsequently a journey to Paris where I had organised with Alain Berthoz an extension of our Workshops at the Institut de Biologie des Cordeliers) to present his discovery of 'mirror neurones', a discovery going back less than two years and which one now finds mentioned in all works on cognitive science.

But why, and on what, to get a dialogue started amongst persons whose intellectual horizons were so varied as physiologists, philosophers and psychologists? I already had a ready answer to the question: 'on what' since most neuro-scientific laboratories, whatever might be their claim to the status of cognitive science, were in fact already working directly on movement, whether it was a matter of ocular orientation or locomotion (Berthoz) manual prehension (Marc Jeanerod), or the observation of someone else's manual action (Rizzolatti). This concern with movement linked up with an important part of the analytical literature devoted to the analysis of the language of action and events.

So my own philosophical itinerary now obliged me to take up again a tradition of philosophy of action stemming from Aristotle through Fichte to Maine de Biran, Bergson, Blondel etc, with a view to extending the Husserlian theory of constitution to objectivities of the practical world, thereby also confronting me with the intentional structure of action. However, one might well ask whether it is even possible to prevent a dialogue on action between philosophers and scientists from degenerating into a diplomatic juxtaposition of incompatible positions as so often happens in inter-disciplinary colloquiums. As soon as one minimises the difference between, on the one hand, human action: voluntary, conscious, rational, inter-subjectively situated, oriented toward values etc, and, on the other, muscular movement, the 'torques' which it brings into play, the degree to which the members are freely articulated, the patterns of activation of the neuronal networks in the brain of the individual agent intending to move, the construction of the motor programme, decision, anticipation, stimulation and control of movement etc, it becomes a serious question whether one does one not have to turn one's back on the phenomenological tradition and surrender to objectivism and naturalism.

The answer to this question is by no means easy, if only because one is moving forward in mined territory! The entire intellectual life of my country reproduces, from generation to generation, a fracture line which remains identical under different labels, the essential question being that of determining whether, by temperament, one is better suited to the place marked 'scientific positivism' or the place marked 'literary humanism'. And if one does not feel oneself suited by temperament to either of these two places, the choice is clear: either one accepts being nowhere at all, or one has to commit oneself to whatever appears cogenial in either position, whose positive content then becomes a matter of relatively small importance by comparison with the collateral benefits which one hopes to derive from upholding it.

However, all my guests at the workshop confirmed the following: that the exotic setting, into whose composition might be counted the water-side, the heavy Wiilhemenian architecture of the university palace, the audience sprinkled with students who were somewhat disconcerted not to find their preacher, either a protestant priest or a local intellectual celebrity helped to establish a setting that proved to have a liberating effect in relation to the traditional academic divisions and to the disciplinary cloistering of laboratories. In addition, I am entitled to claim some credit for my ingenious decision to impose the same rules (and the same requirements) upon all and sundry. Blissfully ignorant of all the usual sociological taboos, I invited each individual to bring to philosophical reflection recently acquired experimental results more or less devoid of interpretation. The scientists forgave me this unauthorised authoritarianism because they were both surprised and flattered by the consideration of philosophers, while the latter consisted of friends who appreciated the opportunity to meet members of a tribe other than their own.

After all that has been said thus far, I imagine that the reader is now waiting for me to say something on naturalism. For s(he) will recall my preference for the authenticity of a phenomenology of transcendental constitution and will probably also be aware of the movement which goes by the name: 'naturalisation of phenomenology'. To such a degree that the contradiction between the transcendental anti-naturalism of Husserl and the naturalism professed by the theoreticians of cognition might even appear blatant.

I will attack the problem from both ends. First of all, even if one acknowledges its indebtedness to the transcendental tradition, the theory of constitution does not consist solely in a Cartesian reduction to the immanence of the pure subject. If this reduction is important, it is as a step along the way to an incarnation of the meaning of the being of each and every thing (including one's own body and that of the other) in the subjective experience of a living body. And this incarnation is not the application of a mental programme in the machinery of one body or another. It is much rather the recognition of the conditions of the empirical and contingent possibility of a sense which is not isolated in some intelligible heaven but accessible simply and solely through perceptual activity and the movements of a body in action.

The usual presentations of phenomenology tend not to make much of an aspect of the theory which bring it into close relation with a physiology of perception and action: the crucial role accorded to kinaesthesia, the intimate sense of 'moving', 'making my hands move', for instance and its repercussions for the meaning of objects of perception and the goals of action. So constitution is in fact nothing other than the bringing to conscious awareness of the normal and regular correlation between, on the one hand, the series of visual, tactile or auditory aspects of that 'multiplicity of appearances' which makes up the objectivity of any object that lays claim to the perceptual status of ontological permanence and, on the other, the unfolding of those kinaesthetic sensations of movement or rest on the part of the perceptual organs, which latter are also motor organs. For what appears to us as a physical thing is nothing other than a certain constant correlation between just such a series of appearances and the kinaesthetic series: rest -- movement -- rest.

The own body is no exception to this rule. For the one who animates it, the own body is precisely that continuously closed surface which is the bearer of localised tactile sensations and which animates this sensationally impregnated flesh with movements accomplished by the 'I' (or with movements passively registered). The presence of the other is no exception either. (S)he is only what an empathic participation, motivated by the attentive consideration of the movements of an other body 'like mine', allows me to take account of as an animate being existing in a common world where I am not alone.

All these constitutions of meaning are dependent upon constitutive operations which are not purely abstract conditions of the possibility but which consists in real movements felt in the body of the subject who accomplishes them. These accomplishments are subject to the vicissitudes of experience, an experience which can be normal or abnormal, just as the existence of an individual may unfold normally or abnormally and with anomalies which impact -- sometimes devastatingly -- upon the constitution of the world - not the absolute physical world of classical physics but the life-world (Lebenswelt) which the organism perceives and in which it intervenes depending upon whether the latter is in good health and in full possession of its faculties or ill and handicapped, whether physically or mentally.

Approaching the problem from the other end as I do, I take it to be important that the philosopher reject the classical picture of a necessarily objective science, a naturalistic and positivistic science, and that he pays more attention to the fact that this appearance is only a fallacious façade, if not a deliberate fabrication, and that science is just as controversial as philosophy. More specifically, we are indebted to Merleau-Ponty for having brilliantly exposed the opposition between, on the one hand, a bodily and so essentially labile experience, one that cannot be enclosed within the limits of the anatomical body but which opens up upon the surrounding world and is open to the most subtle of spiritual intentions and, on the other, a body intellectualised by science as a physical body, shut up within the frontiers of the skin with its functions rigidly localised in different regions of the brain, a body completely determined in what it sees of the world as well as in its actions.

This opposition, one might say, is no longer one which operates between a science and a philosophy of the body but rather between the science of the past and the science of today (or tomorrow). The functional flexibility of transitory activation ('body maps') which techniques of cerebral imagery bring to light in the brain of a subject while accomplishing complex tasks has been the theme of intense research for the last twenty years. Extrapolating from this work, one can say that the need for a new science of the functional dynamism of the living organism is explicitly recognised by the research presently taking place and that the whole effort of developing theoretical models is concentrated upon the working out of a neuro-dynamics which no longer appeals to the relics of Cartesian mechanism, the kind of mechanism which still lurks in the contemporary paradigm of the Turing computational brain.

Without wanting to take desire for reality, a philosopher is today entitled to claim that this new neuro-dynamics sustains the same kind of critique of mechanism as that advanced by the phenomenologists of the last century. For all that, the objectifying and naturalising tendencies have still not been defeated. So that if one wants to unmask them and attack them it will be impossible to avoid climbing into the arena of scientific controversy and contributing to the working out of that philosophical biology which will alone succeed in furnishing us with a satisfactory understanding of the living organism, and this by reconciling functional dynamism with structural constants, autonomous organisation and action with openness upon the world.


BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jean-Luc Petit,
1 L'action dans la philosophie analytique, PUF, Paris, 1991.
2 Solipsisme et intersujectivité: Quinze lessons sur Husserl et Wittgenstein, Cerf, 1996.
3 Les neurosciences et la philosophie de l'action, Vrin, 1997.
4 'Constitution by Movement: Husserl in light of Recent Neuro-biological Findings', in: Naturalising Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, Jean Petitot et al. Eds, Stanford UP, 1999.
5 'Repenser le corps, l'action et la cognition à la lumière des neurosciences', in: Intellecta, Revue de l'association pour la recherche cognitive, 2003.
6 'La spatialité originaire du corps propre. Phénoménologie et neurosciences', in: Revue de Synthèse, 1-2, 2003.
7 'On the relation between recent neuro-biological data on perception (and action) and the Husserlian theory of constitution', in: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2-3/4, 2003.
 

accueil > liste des articles > between positivism and phenomenology