Science and Ontology: From Merleau-Ponty’s ‘Reduction’ to Simondon’s ‘Transduction’
If philosophy today must, as I believe it does, posit itself as ontology again, it cannot do so without engaging in a close confrontation with the natural sciences. Why? First of all, because many of the questions and issues that traditionally fell under the authority of philosophy, and which helped clarify the fundamental meaning of that which is, now fall under that of science. More importantly, though, and as a result of the evolution of science itself, because such questions and issues have been radically transformed in the hands of science, especially in the last hundred years. Does this mean that, henceforth, philosophy must become philosophy of science, and let its own problems and methods be determined by those of science? Not at all. In the light of the event of science, philosophy must avoid a twofold trap: that of philosophizing without taking into account the challenge of science for thought; and that of subordinating philosophical thought to scientific procedures and ‘facts’. In other words, it can be a question of neither blissfully ignoring such a challenge, nor turning it into the sole measure of thought and an unquestionable paradigm. The task, rather, consists in setting a new ambition for philosophical thought against the background of the event of contemporary science. It is a question, in short, of allowing thought to advance in and through a genuine dialogue with science.
This ambition was already formulated by worthy predecessors, especially in France. This is perhaps no coincidence, as many French philosophers of the last century inherited a double tradition, which they treated with equal respect: the history of metaphysics and of metaphysical problems, on the one hand; and the scientific rationalism and the philosophy of science of the last two centuries on the other. In what follows, I would like to isolate just two such philosophers, in order to show how they have helped forge the terms of an encounter with science against the backdrop of a philosophical commitment to ontology. They are Merleau-Ponty and Simondon. Simondon was Merleau-Ponty’s doctoral student. Simondon’s monumental doctoral thesis, however, does not reveal any traces of influence on the part of Merleau-Ponty. And Merleau-Ponty’s comments on Simondon amount to virtually nothing. Does this mean that the two approaches are incompatible? Such would seem to be the case: where Merleau-Ponty insists that philosophical questioning be rooted in perception, and finds his impetus as well as his method in Husserlian phenomenology, Simondon simply ignores phenomenology. Yet, a closer look at Merleau-Ponty’s later thought, which aims to overcome the Cartesian dualism still present in Husserl, reveals a certain proximity to Simondon’s problematic of pre-individual being. It is mostly in the context of his long confrontation with the natural sciences, and their propaedeutic role for philosophy, that Merleau-Ponty sets the stage for an encounter with the thought of Simondon. It is indeed in the context of these lecture courses that a subtle yet decisive shift takes place, one that takes Merleau-Ponty’s thought away from the ‘reduction’, which designates the very possibility of thought for phenomenology, and into the Simondonian ‘transduction’.
The influence of Husserl’s phenomenology on Merleau-Ponty’s thought could never be sufficiently stressed; decisive from the start, it remained crucial until the very end. The thematic of perception, which unifies that thought, and which is meant to signal the origin of subjectivity as well as that of the world, remains incomprehensible without referring to the manner in which Husserl himself privileged it. By way of caution, let me emphasize from the start that Husserl never equated perception with sensation alone.1 Perception is an intuitive act: that is, according to Husserl’s own definition, a sense-fulfilling act. This, in fact, is what distinguishes it from the merely sense-bestowing – or signifying – act, which refers to an object without presenting it in person or in the flesh (leibhaftig). Intuition, on the other hand, does not merely represent the object, but allows it to be there, bodily present, as it were. With the notion of fulfilment, Husserl is able to extend our conception of perception beyond the merely sensible object. As a result, a given category is thought to be actually present in categorial intuition. Similarly, an essence is present ‘in its corporeal identity’ in eidetic intuition.2 Perception is an act that is broader than sensation. Merleau-Ponty takes up and explores further this fundamental feature of Husserlian phenomenology. Only on the basis of such a feature can we understand the ‘perceptual faith’ that is spoken of in The Visible and the Invisible.3 It is synonymous with actual, bodily givenness, and encompasses virtually every experience or act.
This being said, there is no doubt that, within this originary givenness, sense perception – that is, perception of the sensible world – is granted a certain privilege. On this point, too, Merleau-Ponty follows Husserl very closely. It is indeed Husserl who first granted sense perception a prominent role; in sensation alone is the intention actually, completely fulfilled, and the object bodily given. This, however, and by virtue of the determination of perception as actual, bodily givenness, of which sensation is only an exemplary case, does not mean that categories or essences, which in themselves are not sensible, and therefore real, cannot be said to be perceived in a broader sense; whilst not objects of sense perception, they are indeed given in and as themselves. Let me summarize this point: only in sense perception can something be truly and completely given; yet there is an intuition of the non-sensible also. Merleau-Ponty draws the conclusion of this idea by claiming that perception extends and exceeds itself in something other than itself; it is the ‘archetype of the originary encounter’ that is ‘imitated and renewed in the encounter with the past, the imaginary, the idea’.4 In what amounts to a genuine reversal of Platonism, the idea, the imaginary – in short, all that is not immediately sensible and that, within Platonism, used to fall within the domain and under the authority of the intelligible – is now envisaged as essentially derived from a single origin: namely, the sensible. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the sensible world puts him at odds with the intellectualist or Platonist school, for which the sensible world is only the perversion and degradation of an intelligible reality that is in principle accessible to a purely intellectual intuition. Rather than reiterate the opposition of the sensible and the intelligible, of sense perception and intellectual intuition, Merleau-Ponty chooses to speak of the visible and the invisible. Between the two, there is no longer an opposition or a hierarchy, but a movement of deepening and extension of a single structure; the invisible is the invisible of the visible itself, and accessible only in and through the visible. In so far as all experiences are rooted in the sensible, it remains, however, that sense perception constitutes the exemplary or archetypal sense of what is bodily given, and not one of its modalities only. Perception is essentially sense perception. At the same time, it is irreducible to – and potentially always more than – sense perception. It is this chiasmic structure, indicative of a new sense of being beyond the disputes of idealism and empiricism, which Merleau-Ponty precisely calls the flesh. Hopefully, it has become clear why the concept of the ‘sensible’, which we find throughout The Visible and the Invisible, designates at once a dimension of the world and the world itself. Similarly, it is now clear why Merleau-Ponty equates the flesh, the perceived (le perçu) and the sensible, even though he now prefers to speak of a ‘brute’ or ‘wild’ being, rather than of the perceived.5 This is because ‘to see is always to see more than one sees.’6 It is the sensible itself that transcends itself in its own sense and not, as Husserl believed, the transcendence of sense that is realized in bodily givenness. The transcendence in question is no longer vertical and supersensible, but horizontal; the sensible overcomes itself in a movement of self-deepening, and its ‘sense’ is precisely this depth. Sense is the hidden side, the lining of the sensible.
Where Merleau-Ponty departs from Husserl, and progressively introduces a new sense of being, is in his conception of bodily givenness (Leib), which he understands in terms not of a full and total presence of the object, not, therefore, of a fulfilment of an intention that, up until then, had remained empty or only partially fulfilled, but of an awakening and an initiation to a world, an experience of a ‘there is’ which, because it is no longer equated with the full presence of the object, does not exclude a dimension of withdrawal and absence. It is the very meaning and function of bodily givenness that has undergone a certain transformation; where the flesh used to provide an access to the saturated presence of the phenomenon – envisaged as an object of knowledge and the horizon of all acts – it now awakens the sensible body to a world and a sense of being as ‘there is’. The move, then, is one that takes us away from the ‘ontology of the object’, which characterizes modern metaphysics, including aspects of Husserlian phenomenology, and classical physics (in the broad sense of the science of nature of Descartes, Galileo and Newton), and into an ontology of the flesh as the proper and originary mode of givenness of the world, the outline of a ‘there is’ from within which the very being of the human emerges. Bodily givenness is no longer a function of an intentional, intuitive act, albeit that of an incarnate consciousness. If anything, it is rather the ‘subject’ who is now intended and constituted within the world, in what amounts to a reciprocal and co-originary opening up. To the reversal of Platonism previously mentioned, and which did not result in a mere empiricism, we must now add the suspension of all idealist theses, including that of Husserl himself (for, whilst not a matter of representation, the transcendental consciousness remains constitutive). More fundamentally still, we must note the advance that consists in overcoming the dualist ontology of the sensible and the intelligible, as well as that of the subject and the object, through an ontological monism that is rooted in the notion of perception and unveils the world as carnal reality, a reality to which I myself belong, a fabric woven with the same threads as those of my body. Idealism and realism both find their point of departure in a world that is divided from the start, and are left to wonder how to reduce the gap. To overcome this separation, however, all they would need to do would be to see how the flesh, as the originary presence on the basis of which all givenness can be thought, constitutes their common origin. The flesh exists only as this self-transgression and self-differentiation. It is entirely contained within this doubling of itself (the visible and the invisible, body and mind, the life-world and that of science), which gives the illusion of two separate worlds, or of a rigid division of the world. When thought according to its essence, however, the world always appears in its originary doubling or difference.
Merleau-Ponty never called this primacy of perception into question. It continues to guide his lecture courses on the concept of nature from the late 1950s.7 The questioning that unfolds in those courses is itself motivated by the desire to elaborate a philosophy of nature on the basis of the theory of perception. It is now a question of showing that the perceived object that was described in Phenomenology of Perception has an ontological meaning, that it corresponds to the fundamental meaning of being and that, to use Barbaras’s own formulation, it ‘defines the conditions to which everything that has a claim to reality is subjected’.8 Let me emphasize this point: that which ‘is’ or is ‘real’ is everything that can be perceived. Perception, which defines the fundamental structure of reality, is the key to the understanding of the sense of the being of beings as a whole. Despite Merleau-Ponty’s claim, however, and his ambition to think outside the opposition of empiricism and idealism, I would like to ask to what extent the sense of being I have just identified does not reintroduce a kind of transcendental subjectivism – no longer that of the sense-bestowing consciousness, which constitutes a world of objects in principle reducible to their essence, but of the sense perception and the corporeality through which the world occurs as sensible. Despite the methodological reversal to which Merleau-Ponty subjects his own project, and which consists in taking his point of departure in nature itself, in order to reveal the identity of being and of perceived beings, rather than envisage nature as the completion or the correlate of the acts of an incarnate consciousness, I want to question the value and the chances of success of an ontology that, from the start, will have subjected the sense of being to that of a subjectivity, albeit reformulated in that way. The question of science, and of ontology’s relation to the sense of nature it discloses, will turn out to be crucial.
It is in the context of this ‘passage’ from transcendental phenomenology to ontology, or from the sense of the being of consciousness as the ‘origin’ of the world to the sense of the being of the world as ‘flesh’ that Merleau-Ponty engages in a close dialogue with the natural sciences. The word ‘dialogue’ is, I believe, appropriate, inasmuch as Merleau-Ponty does not seek to ascribe to science a particular place in relation to philosophy, and one that, naturally, philosophy alone would be in a position to determine, but to ask whether certain developments in the natural sciences, far from obscuring the task of ontology, can confirm the hypothesis developed in his later thought. Unlike the Husserl of the Crisis, Merleau-Ponty sees in the recent developments of the natural sciences (from relativity to quantum theory and biology) a profound attempt to call into question the very ontology of the object that he himself is trying to overcome. The question, in other words, is one of knowing whether the world of twentieth-century science is still a world of mere things, of inert objects, or whether it is in the process of becoming a world of living phenomena. Such an evolution on the part of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with respect to science is decisive, and deserves close attention. It is an evolution that consists in a quasi-reversal of the initial phenomenological presupposition: far from constituting an obstacle to the formulation of the new ontology – one that is no longer of the object, but of the flesh, no longer a dualism, but a monism – contemporary science and its general ‘attitude’ would seem to set us underway to the sense of being as sensible being. The phenomenological ‘reduction’ of the world that is required would thus no longer take us from the natural world to its transcendental origin, but from the transcendental philosophy itself to the very being of nature, which today’s science would help to clarify. More than an evolution, this transformation amounts to a revolution, in the double sense of a reversal and an upheaval. Indeed, once science is no longer viewed as merely naive – that is, as presupposing its own object, and the world itself as object, without calling into question the manner in which that object is constituted and its relation to the object in question; once it begins to revise and redefine its own fundamental concepts in the light of a different and emerging sense of nature, we can only wonder about the necessity to uphold the phenomenological reduction and the fundamental distinction between the ‘life-world’ and the ‘scientific worldview’.
A number of Merleau-Ponty’s claims from the lecture courses on nature and The Visible and the Invisible seem to confirm the hypothesis I have just formulated. ‘Modern science’, he writes, ‘often criticises itself and its own ontology.’9 The opposition between a rational subject and nature as an object spread out before it, which for so long characterized it, ‘is valid only in the case of Cartesian science’ and ‘not in the case of modern science’.10 Quantum mechanics, for example, ‘deprived the old mechanics of its own dogmatism’11 by signalling the ‘emergence of a new scientific ontology’ that will make us ‘forever unable to re-establish Laplacean ontology, at least not with the same dogmatism’.12 Does this mean that we should rely on science completely in order to isolate the concept of being of life and of nature in general? Is ontology itself destined to be nothing but the metaphysics of physics, as was the case for Descartes and, possibly, although in a different sense, for Kant? Is Merleau-Ponty slowly converting to something resembling the neo-Kantian position or, more radically still, the very scientific positivism that phenomenology, himself included, began by opposing so strongly? This is the point at which Merleau-Ponty’s subtle, if not ambiguous position with respect to science becomes manifest. Whist remaining faithful to phenomenology’s thesis, according to which philosophy is the science of pre-science, he claims that the pre-science in question is itself accessible through science alone, and this means through a detailed and demanding confrontation with it. It can no longer be a question of suspending or neutralizing the scientific attitude altogether, and of accessing the life-world that underpins it directly. Rather, it must now be a question of immersing oneself in the natural attitude, and of extracting its hidden truth, which philosophy alone can reveal. The scientist is himself too busy looking for ‘ways to grasp and get a grip on the phenomenon’ (‘des “prises” par où saisir le phénomène’) to be able really to ‘understand’ it.13 Yet it is the phenomenon itself that the scientist has in mind, not its mere image or representation. The thought of the scientist is not motivated by the concern to see – and a fortiori to see, as Merleau-Ponty claims, that one always sees more than one sees – but to ‘intervene’ and to ‘find a foothold’ (‘trouver des prises’). In this effort to get a firm grip on things, however, ‘the scientist discloses more than he sees in fact.’14 It is this excess that becomes the object of philosophy. In a way, the philosopher is an opportunist guided by the question regarding the sense of that which is. He sees ‘behind the back of the scientist what the scientist himself does not see’.15 Scientific thought is essentially interventionist and efficacious; it is a thought that measures and predicts. But science does think, and its thought is one that increasingly maps on to the phenomenality of phenomena – that is, to the reality of the world as we perceive it: it is a world of flux and becoming, and one that is often opaque. It would seem, therefore, that the distinction between the world of phenomena and the world of scientific objects no longer holds, at least no longer in the same rigid and absolute way. In the context of philosophy as ontology, and of the need to extract the meaning of nature as sensible nature, science is a propaedeutics for philosophy. What does this mean? That in order to extract the sense of being in question, philosophy cannot proceed directly.16 Phenomenology called for a ‘return to the things themselves’ beyond naturalism and the scientific worldview. This is a call to which Merleau-Ponty still wishes to respond. His response, however, brings science back into the task itself. Science has become uncircumventable for philosophy itself: ‘One cannot construct a direct ontology. My “indirect” method (being in the beings) alone corresponds to being – “negative philosophy” like “negative theology”.’17
Only as the way that takes us through the scientific attitude, and not simply as the suspension of that attitude, can the phenomenological reduction still designate the mode of access or the method that corresponds to the phenomenon in question (the being of beings). The method is now a via negativa. At the end of this indirect voyage alone will the matter at hand become positively manifest. All of this is summarized in a working note of The Visible and the Invisible:
The search for the ‘wild’ view of the world nowise limits itself to a return to precomprehension or to prescience. ‘Primitivism’ is only the counterpart of scientism, and is still scientism. The phenomenologists (Scheler, Heidegger) are right in pointing out this precomprehension which precedes inductivity, for it is this that calls in question the ontological value of the Gegenstand. But a return to pre-science is not the goal. The reconquest of the Lebenswelt is the reconquest of a dimension, in which the objectifications of science themselves retain a meaning and are to be understood as true . . . the pre-scientific is only an invitation to comprehend the meta-scientific and this last is not non-scientific. It is even disclosed through the constitutive movements of science, on condition that we reactivate them, that we see what left to themselves they verdecken.18
What Merleau-Ponty is indicating here is a circular structure between the pre-scientific and the scientific levels, between the Lebenswelt, to which phenomenology wants to turn, in so far as it constitutes the originary phenomenon in which all acts, practices, values and institutions are rooted, and science, as one such discourse and practice – indeed, a dominant one. It is precisely in so far as science has become the dominant discourse regarding the sense of nature that phenomenology must itself go through the movements of science, and extract the pre-scientific in it. Science, and the attitude that characterizes it, cannot be set aside or suspended in the task that consists in returning to the things themselves. Those things, and the unifying, fundamental meaning that underlies them, must be wrested from science itself, in which they are implicated – enveloped, as it were. Philosophy does not merely repeat or even clarify the movements and concepts of science. It is not metascientific in that sense. Rather, it seeks to extract from science what science itself does not think: namely, its implicit ontology, itself indicative of the meaning and the place of the human being. There is always something that science covers over (verdeckt) in disclosing its object. This, Merleau-Ponty insists in the same working note, has nothing to do with the lived experience, and philosophy itself with the desire to reduce scientific facts and data to a phenomenology of the Erlebnisse. Philosophy must not believe in consciousness as in a criterion and measure of truth; it too deceives us about ourselves, the world, and the nature of language. The phenomenology of lived experience is itself naive, and not radical enough. The turn to science can itself enable phenomenology to radicalize itself. Science itself can point us in the right direction and indicate the sense from which it emerges – on the condition, of course, that we manage to disclose the soil it covers over and know where and how to look. It is this origin and its discovery (Entdeckung) that is the object of philosophical questioning. The task of philosophical thought, then, is to see where scientific thought measures and predicts, to find again the meaning of the phenomena through the objectifications of science itself.19 It is now possible to find the being of phusis through physics, the being of life through biology and so on, in such a way that ‘all the particular analyses concerning Nature, life, the human body, language will make us progressively enter into the Lebenswelt and the “wild” being.’20 Merleau-Ponty seems to be going even further, when he warns philosophy itself against its own impatience to see and understand, and even against the ease with which it can generate concepts and become complacent with the language it forges to interpret scientific data. Philosophy must become aware of the traps of its own, natural language (what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘gnosis’, especially in relation to Heidegger), and not only of the objectivistic tendencies of science. If Nature is an all-encompassing something (un Englobant), he writes, it cannot be thought on the basis of philosophical concepts alone, and least of all ‘by way of deductions’.21 This reservation, formulated with respect to a certain philosophical danger, this re-evaluation of scientific experience in the context of a philosophical problematic, are, to say the least, surprising, and take us further away from Husserl’s attitude to science.22
Let me now turn, albeit briefly, to the specific way in which key developments in contemporary science can be seen to open the way to an ontology of the sensible, and reveal the sense of being of nature as perception. To a large extent, contemporary science can be seen to have presided over a radical revision of its subjectivistic and objectivistic presuppositions, thus facilitating the task of a philosophical questioning directed towards the being of natural phenomena. It can be argued that the scientific object is precisely no longer an object in the sense that Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty after him, initially criticized as an abstraction. In addition, it can be argued that the scientist himself is no longer this Laplacean demon: that is, this omniscient being who describes the world from the viewpoint that would be that of God Himself. If the scientist is no longer a ‘subject’ in the classical sense, and nature an ‘object’ in the sense of what stands there before us, partes extra partes, how can we begin to describe the nature of the relation between the scientist and his object? How can we conceptualize our relation to nature as it emerges from the new scientific data?
Let me begin by analysing the manner in which twentieth-century science called into question its own objectivistic presupposition. In the first sketch of the last lecture course devoted to the concept of nature, Merleau-Ponty mentions three ways in which contemporary science overcame the modern, classical conception of nature. Each is to serve as an indirect access to philosophy’s own goal: that is, to the possibility of extracting a new ontology from the scientific discourse itself. We should mention, to begin with, the overcoming of the Euclidean (metric) thought of space in Riemannian geometry, and its application in the theory of relativity; Euclidean space is only a particular instance of a larger space, to which we ourselves belong. In fact, Euclidean space, which, as we know, underpins the Cartesian conception of space, and of physics up until Einstein, is only one aspect which non-Euclidean space takes on over relatively short distances. We can even envisage it as emerging from a continuity that is itself non-metric. Thus, Riemannian space contains and envelops Euclidean space, which seemed to exclude it at first. By disclosing gravity as the force that gives space its metric properties, the theory of general relativity provided this geometry with a concrete, physical reality. The emergence of gravity as one of the four forces of the universe suggests that at a certain temperature – the temperature approximating that of the universe at the time of its creation – the forces in question lose their individuality and merge into one another, in what amounts to a unique and highly symmetrical force, the geometry of which has led to intense mathematical and physical speculations in the last three decades.
Next, we should mention the overcoming of the classical conception of the atom as an indivisible substance and an irreducible kernel of matter in the purely statistical being of the quantum object. This new kind of object has no status outside this statistical measure. Whilst real, it is not actual in the classical sense. Unlike the classical physical object, it does not occupy a precise position at a precise moment, predictable in advance, but a number of positions, which can be predicted only statistically. Quantum mechanics claims that the universe evolves according to a precise and rigorous mathematical formalism. At the same time, however, it claims that this framework determines only a probable future. It cannot predict whether or when this future will actually take place. By appealing to this intrinsically statistical dimension of the quantum object, Merleau-Ponty is right in emphasizing the fact that it challenges the classical conception of natural beings as substances: that is, as self-present and self-identical things to which corresponds a specific position and speed. The quantum object is indeed ontologically distinct from the pure Cartesian thing. But does it confirm Merleau-Ponty’s hypothesis regarding the being of natural beings as perceived?
Finally, the most decisive transgression, at least that to which Merleau-Ponty devotes the largest amount of pages, is that of biology, and of ontogenesis and phylogenesis in particular. According to Merleau-Ponty, the impossibility of identifying life with its organized state alone, and the necessity to define a sense of being that no longer coincides with actuality alone, is really what is at stake in the question of ontogenesis. In embryogenesis, the emphasis is indeed on the progressive emergence of structures and functions through a cascade of bifurcations and differentiations. Against the advocates of preformation, for whom the tissues and organs of the fertilized egg are supposed to be present from the start in the egg itself, at an embryonic level, precisely, Merleau-Ponty agrees with the idea, popular amongst most biologists, that the differentiated structures of the complete organism emerge progressively as the embryo develops.23 If such an idea has become acceptable, it is because it no longer presupposes what for a while seemed to be the only alternative to preformism: namely, epigenesis, or the idea of an amorphous and completely undifferentiated embryo, which was somehow thought to possess the spontaneous ability to generate its own final, fully organized state. We know today that the egg possesses a structure defined by zones of biochemical concentration and by polarities established through the asymmetrical position of the kernel. The embryo goes through various phase transitions that correspond to as many breaks of symmetry. This is the structure that clarifies and resolves itself as it unfolds. We are now confronted with a situation where the egg does indeed possess the biochemical elements and the genetic information it needs to develop into a fully formed organism, without, for that matter, possessing a clear and distinct picture of that organism. Merleau-Ponty is echoing those debates when writing of ‘the progressive determination’ of life that is ‘production starting from a predominant equipotentiality’.24 He also speaks of ‘the profound equivocity of place in the living substance’.25 This is because the organism, as an individuated being, comes from this space ‘where there is not yet “visible” differentiation (anatomy) nor “functioning” for that matter’.26 If life is indeed to be characterized in terms of its potentiality or capacity, it cannot be a question of understanding the possible as ‘simple preformed reservoir’ to which a principle of choice would be added. In addition, the potentiality or the possible that characterizes life, and which needs to be asserted in its precedence and difference from the complete, actual organism, ‘eliminates actualism’.27 In other words, ‘it is simply not the case that all is actual’; we must indeed recognize a genuine reality to the power of becoming and transformation that constitutes the organism, yet this reality is distinct from mere actuality. The fully differentiated structure, or the complete genesis alone is actual. This is the fundamental meaning of Driesch’s following claim, which Merleau-Ponty cites: ‘There are more morphogenetic possibilities in each part of the embryo than is actually realised in a morphogenetic case.’28 This, still according to Driesch, explains how the eyes of crustaceans can be regenerated identical to themselves when the optical ganglion has been left untouched. On the contrary, if the ganglion is taken out, an antenna develops.29 What does this mean with respect to the category of possibility, which the organism is supposed to illustrate? That it can no longer be taken in its classical sense: that is, as the prefiguration or preformation of actuality. Similarly, actuality can no longer be seen as the realization and the perfection (the entelecheia) of the possible. In the move from the possible to the actual, a change occurs. The actual constitutes only one possible realization of this potential. There is, therefore, an excess of the potential over the actual, and a dimension of being of the organism that remains latent in the complete organism. It is no longer possible to consider life, and nature in general, as a mere ‘bag of possibilities’. It is not as if the crustacean had a reservoir of eyes. Rather, it is itself a ‘virtual’ field that can evolve and resolve itself in various ways.30
What conclusions can be drawn from this brief survey of twentieth-century physics and biology? One decisive conclusion concerns the change of emphasis from a nature that was essentially fixed and immutable, made of beings grasped in what we could call their final, already made or fully individuated phase, to a nature that is essentially evolving, in the making, and thus irreducible to its actual realization in a fixed time-space. What emerges from Merleau-Ponty’s analyses is the impossibility of grasping the essence of the organism on the basis of its organized state alone, the essence of metric or Euclidean space on the basis of its sole extension, the essence of the atom on the basis of a concept of indivisible substance. We could summarize this new problematic with the concept of emergence, or that of genesis. Whether in the case of Euclidean space with respect to Riemannian space, of gravity with respect to the other forces, of the particle with respect to its field or, most of all, of the formed organism with respect to the embryo, the emphasis is now on the operation through which the fully individuated being, which ordinarily we tend to take as our point of departure for the investigation of the sense of being, emerges progressively from a pre-individual, pre-phenomenal horizon. Merleau-Ponty’s critique of actualism, inspired by scientific developments, leads to a kind of geneticism, or a philosophical ontogenesis. At the same time, and more discreetly still, this geneticism is coupled with a structuralism. One does not need to choose between genesis and structure. Why? Because the structures in question do not govern processes of identity but of differentiations, do not produce substances but events. If we consider the biological example of ontogenesis, we realize that beneath ‘life’ as an enveloping phenomenon (phénomène-enveloppe) lies a ‘cumulative structure’.31 In addition, Merleau-Ponty claims, ‘the being of science and the being-perceived of the embryo amount to less than its Being, which is structure.’32 Implicitly, and besides the problematic of perception, with which he began, Merleau-Ponty recognized a sense of being as genesis and structure, which, it seems, he did not have time to develop. Were we to extend and clarify Merleau-Ponty’s own analyses, often only partially developed, especially in the last lecture course, and draw the necessary conclusions, we would need to wonder about the compatibility of the ontology of perception and of the flesh with that of genesis and structure. We need to ask whether, in order to be realized as ontology, philosophy must not go beyond the phenomenological standpoint. This is the point at which Simondon’s thought, to which we shall turn very shortly, turns out to be decisive.
As for the subjective pole of contemporary science, we see the extent to which it is modified with the transformation of the objective pole. For this new gaze turned towards the world is a gaze that comes from the world, and a gaze that affects the world; this living being that I am describing is also this being that I am, and it is the gaze of a living being that interrogates it, and interrogates itself in interrogating it. The destabilization of the scientific object as a pure, external thing goes hand in hand with our ability to call ourselves into question as existing outside it, or as linked to it by a difference in kind. The worldview according to which man and nature face one another is no longer tenable. As a living being, the human partakes in what it describes; as a sensible being, its approach to nature is always an intervention carried out from within it, and one that modifies nature, as quantum theory testifies. His curiosity, rationality and scientificity he holds from nature itself. By illuminating it, he illuminates himself; by analysing himself, he discloses it. His power of thought and analysis is that of nature itself, and his reflection on nature is always the self-reflection of nature itself, or what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘hyper-reflection’ of nature. It is perhaps this notion of reflection – and not that of reduction – that now delineates most precisely the philosophical attitude according to Merleau-Ponty; it no longer consists of a gaze directed towards the lived experience, of a phenomenology of Erlebnisse, but of nature’s self-reflection, through which its brute being surfaces.33 Between the human and nature, there is a common destiny and a mutual encroaching. It is this reciprocity and this co-belonging, this common origin which philosophy needs to clarify. And that, Merleau-Ponty believes, it can do only by revealing the sense of being as sensible. Everything, including the world of spirit and of science, of history and of language, follows from the sensible, brute being.
Let me finish by indicating, albeit briefly, how Simondon’s ontology enables us to extend this genetic and structural dimension of being, but at the cost of a challenge to the phenomenology of perception.
Simondon’s conception of being is contained entirely in his notion of individuation. The thematic of individuation is very old. The classical, mostly Aristotelian concepts, however, which hitherto oriented the question of individuation, turn out to be of very little use when it becomes a question of thinking the process of individuation itself as the defining feature of being. With Simondon, the ontological problematic undergoes a remarkable shift; whilst the tradition began with already individuated beings, and raised the question of their individuation in terms of principles, Simondon emphasizes the process of individuation through which they become individuated, and identifies this process with their very being. Instead of taking the individual as his point of departure, and asking how it became what it is, Simondon chooses to interrogate the reality that results in the individual as we know it. Where the word ‘being’ used to stand for a thing or a principle, it now stands for an operation. The shift, then, is from beings as things to being as event. If there is indeed a phenomenon in the narrow sense of the term – that is, in the sense of what is perceived in an immediate intuition, there is also, and more significantly, a broader phenomenon, which contains the pre-phenomenal or pre-individual horizon of every individuated being. This is the phenomenon that philosophy needs to think. Every being contains and expresses a horizon of being that it can call its own and that is not immediately apparent. In order to define this horizon, Simondon discards the classical concepts inherited from the tradition – those concepts that presuppose the ontology of the object Merleau-Ponty wishes to overcome: substance (which indicates the self-identity and self-presence of being, and a non-generated reality that is closed to everything that is not itself), form and matter, as well as the principles normally associated with such concepts (of identity, the excluded middle and sufficient reason):
Unity, characteristic of the individuated being, and identity, authorising the use of the principle of the excluded middle, do not apply to the pre-individual being. This explains why it is impossible to reconstitute the world, retrospectively as it were, with monads, even by adding new principles, such as that of sufficient reason, so as to organise them in a universe.34
Only when considering the individual as the ultimate reality does it become necessary to posit and call upon principles, and to think the coherence of the world as an aggregate of units. Both the monism of substance and the dualism of form and matter (which Simondon calls ‘hylomorphism’) presuppose the existence of a principle of individuation that is prior to the individuation itself; the individual, as the reality to be explained, is the point of departure, and the question regarding its coming into being is raised only subsequently. It is the very notion of principle that is problematic, in so far as it locates the conditions of existence of the individual outside the individual itself, thus denying itself a genuine access to the genesis of the individual.
The question of individuation will no longer be raised in terms of principle, then, but in terms of genesis. Principles are instruments of logic. Genesis, on the other hand, is an ontological category. It aims to grasp the individual as it emerges, and to follow it in its own becoming. It refuses to posit or postulate a power of being that is independent of the individual itself, and of which the latter would be the emanation. On the contrary, it will allow the individual to emerge from out of the pre-individual horizon of being that characterizes it. In place of the old concepts inherited from the tradition, Simondon creates a new conceptuality aimed at bringing to life the reality that unfolds ‘before’ that described in those concepts. The individual is now envisaged on the basis of its own operation of individuation, and the reality that is now to be thought, the ‘ultimate’ phenomenon, is the assemblage individuation-individual. The individual – the phenomenon in the narrow sense of the term – is not the whole of being, but only one of its phases, and actually the final one only. Far from constituting the origin and the completion of philosophical thought, then, the perception of the phenomenon, as the fully individuated thing we are for the most part familiar with, only provides a point of entry into the process that unfolds prior to it, and of which it is itself the completion. It is the operation of individuation that is now primordial. The individuated entity is only secondary and derivative with respect to it. Simondon’s approach is somewhat reminiscent of that of Merleau-Ponty. We saw how Merleau-Ponty wanted to wrest ontology from the metaphysics of substance, actuality and identity. He too emphasized the genetic dimension of natural beings. Yet, unlike Simondon, he could not conceive of an ontology that would not, somehow, remain attached to a pole of subjectivity, albeit redefined in terms of perception.35 As a result, the question of genesis, as indicative of the horizon of being of all natural beings, remained in an awkward position with respect to the dualism that Merleau-Ponty set out to overcome. Everything happened as if, as a result of his confrontation with the new science, in the margins of the thematic of perception as it were, and almost despite himself, Merleau-Ponty had discovered another ontology, one that would no longer unfold between a subject and an object (this is the in-between of the Flesh), but within every individual (including within ourselves), between the individuated and the pre-individual being. It is this other sense of being that Simondon extends and interrogates further.
Upon leaving the familiar shores of individuality, and of identity, for those – as yet uncertain but more promising – of the pre-individual and the differences that constitute it, a new conceptuality becomes necessary. Like the Merleau-Ponty of the lecture courses on nature, Simondon finds the necessary resources to overcome the classical ontology of the object in a number of scientific developments. His concepts are often derived from those of science. Thus, he prefers to speak of ‘systems’ rather than ‘substances’. This allows him to privilege the relationality of being, as opposed to its identity, and its potentiality, as opposed to its actuality. In doing so, he too criticizes ‘actualism’ in philosophy. He envisages the individual on the basis of a horizon of problematicity, and as a solution to a pre-individual problem: it is a ‘mode of resolving an initial incompatibility that is rich in potentials [riche en potentiels]’ and the last phase of a ‘tense, oversaturated phenomenon, above the level of unity’.36 The pre-individual horizon or stratum is thus defined in terms of an incompatibility, an imbalance between potentials of energy, from which the constitution of an individual emerges progressively. The individuated individual emerges as the solution to a problem that is itself of a different nature. Let me emphasize that the individual always retains its pre-individual reality, even when fully individuated, and that its individuation does not exhaust all of its potentials at once. It is, to use Merleau-Ponty’s own conceptuality, a phénomène-enveloppe. An organism, for example, and as Merleau-Ponty himself made abundantly clear, is always ‘more’ than its organized and fully differentiated reality. This excess signals a virtual reality that can be observed at the embryonic stage.
At the most basic level, however, the system that best illustrates the process of individuation – and which Simondon eventually shows to be operative in the psychic and collective individuation of the human – is the crystal.37 Starting with a unique and very small germ immersed in water, a crystal grows and extends progressively; once constituted, every molecular layer becomes a structuring base for the constitution of the following layer. The result, Simondon claims, is an ‘amplifying reticular structure’.38 A paradigmatic value can be derived from the study of the genesis of crystals, inasmuch as it allows one to grasp at a macroscopic (or molar) scale a phenomenon that relies on system states that belong to the microphysical (or molecular) domain. Such a study makes it possible to grasp the activity that takes place at the limit of the self-forming crystal. It becomes possible, then, to witness the emergence of a solution within a system that is neither actually stable, nor simply unstable, but, to use Simondon’s vocabulary, ‘metastable’. By that, we need to understand a system that is rife in potentials. The individual – the crystal – emerges as the solution to a pre-individual problem constituted by internal tensions, and which it continues to express once individuated. It is not enough, therefore, to claim that Simondon replaces the notion of substance with that of system. The system in question remains to be thought as metastable. This metastability alone accounts for the individuation of the phenomenon. The stable state designates the level at which transformations of the system are no longer possible. This happens when the potential of the system has been exhausted, when all its potentialities have been actualized. It is the state that corresponds to the lowest possible level of potential energy, beyond which the system can no longer transform itself. Remarkably, the Ancients recognized it as Being itself. They could not conceive of a sense of being other than individuated beingness. Outside it, they could conceive only of its negation – namely, becoming – which they associated with instability and chaos. But the metastable system is neither order nor chaos, neither rest nor motion, neither pure being nor random becoming. A metastable system is a system that, whilst not contradicting the second law of thermodynamics, which stipulates that, in the long term, all differences of energy will be cancelled, harbours within itself a sufficient amount of energy – of differences of potential, in other words – to create order. Most of the existing systems are of that kind. Even though the ‘law’ is that dictated by thermodynamics, and even though, in the long term, entropy can only increase, the ‘rule’ is that of negentropy, and of information. There is no form that presides over the organization of matter; there is simply a series of processes of in-formation through which matter organizes itself. Against the background of inert and self-identical being, a flourishing of differences and a remarkable power of becoming unfold. A general ontology can emerge from this scientific context. Like Merleau-Ponty, Simondon sees the study of natural phenomena as a stage towards ontology. To be more precise, I would say that it is a stage of ontology itself, inasmuch as the physical and biological individuation eventually leads to l’individuation psychique et collective, each level revealing the same type of operation, the same meaning of being.
Yet, let me repeat, this ontology is not one of perception. The sense of being that is disclosed is not that of the perçu. This is because the being that I myself am does not escape this process of individuation. As a result, it is only on the basis of the pre-individual horizon that is my own that my own being can be grasped. Now this horizon presupposes the physical and biological individuation from which the psychic and collective individuation emerges, as a new domain of reality, and a solution to a problem that is in itself not human. It cannot be a question, therefore, of referring the being of the natural world to its perception, since perception itself follows from it, and constitutes one of its phases. This, however, does not mean that we need to fall back into the old dualism; to define the world as sensible world, made of the same fabric as myself, is not the only way to overcome the abyss that separated me from the natural world. For as soon as being is envisaged in its pre-individual and constitutive (or genetic) dimension, a unique process unravels, from which all individuals follow, including this individual that I am; if I am, to use Merleau-Ponty’s own terminology, of the world and of being, it is not, first and foremost, because I perceive, but because of the pre-individual and impersonal singularities that I share with the natural world as a whole. In a way, the thematic of perception is already too advanced in the operation of individuation. It grasps subjectivity at a stage that presupposes too much already, and which the thematic of individuation is precisely there to make explicit.
A method follows from the task that Simondon sets for thought. This method differs from the phenomenological reduction, and even from the ‘reflection’ Merleau-Ponty develops in his later thought. The reason why the reduction is no longer required as a method is because, in a sense, it has already taken place at the level of the phenomenon itself. What phenomenology calls a phenomenon – that is, the reality that manifests itself to a consciousness or a lived body in an immediate intuition – is actually the completion of an internal process of formation, the progressive emergence of an actual being from within a field of problematicity. The phenomenon in the phenomenological sense is only an epiphenomenon, the ontological reduction of a pre-individual and pre-phenomenal field of differences and potentials. The problem with phenomenology is that it has too much faith in appearances, and subordinates the task of thinking to clarifying the meaning of our primitive, perceptual faith in the validity of such appearances. It rejects traditional scepticism, which is obsessed with the question regarding the existence of the world, in order to raise the question of the meaning of that existence. Unlike Husserl, who located such a meaning in the essence of the phenomenon, accessible only to the transcendental consciousness, Merleau-Ponty locates it in the sensible itself, accessible to the lived body. His ‘faith’ in intuition and perception as the origin of our being in the world forbids it to call into question the phenomenality of the world as a principle of knowledge. Now if the truly modern dimension of scepticism – which leads to the certainty of the world as a world reduced to its extension and its mathematical reality, and to that of the I as a thinking thing – is one that Simondon rejects with phenomenology, he is, in turn, quite sceptical of phenomenology’s commitment to the world as a world of appearances, and its belief in the perceived world as the only valid world. Simondon’s own scepticism, in turn, aims to guide us further into the being of the phenomenon, and further away from any essentialism. The being of the phenomenon that is here in question does not refer back to a horizon of transcendence, but of immanence, in so far as it designates the internal genetic dimension of the phenomenon itself.
The unity of being, Simondon tells us, is ‘transductive’. By that, he means that a being is essentially characterized by its ability to dislocate or ‘dephase’ itself (se déphaser) with respect to itself and from either side of its centre. Transduction designates the structure of dislocation and ‘déphasage’ of being with respect to itself, through which a being is individualized. If every process of individuation amounts to an operation of transduction, it is because it consists of a series of déphasages, each triggering a new phase of being, or a new state of the system. Thought is itself an operation of this kind; it is the self-reflection of transduction, the doubling of transduction back on itself – much in the way that Merleau-Ponty’s thought of the flesh signalled the hyper-reflection of nature itself. Transduction is not only an ontological category, then. It also designates the method of thought itself. As a method, the transduction does not remain outside thought. It is not a preliminary stage that would set thought under way. Rather, it is philosophy itself, and itself an enactment of being. It is at once an instance of being and its reflection, a material process and a spiritual event. This identity of subject and object, of thought and being will come as a surprise only to those who, too used to linking thought to already individuated entities – the thinking thing and the extended thing, the mind-thing and the body-thing – and abstract principles, such as form and matter, fail to dive into the depths of the pre-individual, for which such a dualism no longer makes any sense.
Philosophy need not shy away from the challenge of science. Yet the challenge in question is a challenge for philosophy. It is a challenge that, if taken up, makes philosophy richer. If philosophy becomes richer in the process, it is by remaining philosophy. It remains philosophy to the extent that it develops an eye for what science itself cannot see, and yet discloses. It is concerned to disclose the being of the phenomena science analyses. The question regarding the being of phenomena is the question of philosophy. It cannot be developed, however, independently of science. Philosophy is neither within nor outside science. It traverses it. The questions it puts to science are not the questions of science. Yet the answers to such questions can be found only in and through a certain mode of engagement with science. With Merleau-Ponty and Simondon we witnessed two fine examples of the spirit and the manner in which such a philosophically productive encounter can take place. It is an encounter that needs to be taken up again, and further. The task of thinking demands a dialogue with science.
NOTES
This chapter was originally published in Angelaki, 10.2 (2005), and is republished by kind permission.
| 1. | See R. Barbaras, ‘Le Dédoublement de l’originaire’, in Le Tournant de l’expérience (Paris: Vrin, 1998), pp. 81–94. |
| 2. | E. Husserl, Gesammelte Werke (Husserliana) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), vol. XIX/2, Logische Untersuchungen, VI, §45, A 614/B142; Gesammelte Werke (Husserliana) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), vol. III/1, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie, I, Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, §24, 43–4. |
| 3. | Le Visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 209; trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 158. Henceforth VI, followed by French and English pagination. |
| 4. | VI 210/158. |
| 5. | VI 300/247. |
| 6. | VI 300/247. |
| 7. | M. Merleau-Ponty, La Nature. Notes. Cours du Collège de France (Paris: Seuil, 1995); trans. Robert Vallier, Nature. Course Notes from the Collège de France (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003). Henceforth Nature, followed by French and English pagination. |
| 8. | R. Barbaras, ‘Merleau-Ponty et la nature’, Chiasmi International, 2 (2000), p. 59. |
| 9. | Nature, 120/85. |
| 10. | Nature, 120/85. |
| 11. | Nature, 125/89. |
| 12. | Nature, 125/90. |
| 13. | Nature, 120/86. Quite obviously, Merleau-Ponty is making a crucial distinction here between the ‘concepts’ of science, which make sense of phenomena by taking hold of them, by finding a foothold in them, grasping them in the sense of a Begriff, and the concepts of philosophy, which do not seek to intervene amongst phenomena, but ‘understand’ them in a way that remains to be clarified. |
| 14. | Nature, 121/87. |
| 15. | Nature, 121/87. |
| 16. | Let me nuance this statement: through a close dialogue with the natural sciences, philosophy can access the sense of being as flesh indirectly. That being said, a more direct experience of the world as flesh is given in the relation to the work of art. This distinction, I believe, allows one to understand the nature of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of science in the opening pages of Eye and Mind – a critique that may otherwise be seen as contradicting his appreciation of science in the lecture courses, delivered at about the same time at which Eye and Mind was written. |
| 17. | VI 233/179. Translation modified. |
| 18. | VI 235–6/182. Translation modified. |
| 19. | See VI 220–1/166–7. |
| 20. | VI 221/167. |
| 21. | Nature, 122/87. |
| 22. | And further away still from ‘the false etymologies of Heidegger, his gnosis’. We must resist ‘the illusion of an unconditional treasure of absolute wisdom contained in language’ (Nature, 122/87). |
| 23. | Nature, 305–7/240–2. |
| 24. | Nature, 305/241. |
| 25. | Nature, 306/241. |
| 26. | Nature, 306/241. Translation modified. |
| 27. | Quantum mechanics too eliminates actualism by granting the subatomic particle a statistical reality outside actuality. |
| 28. | Nature, 295/232. The French translation of the citation in question can be found in Hans A. Driesch, Philosophie de l’organisme, trans. M. Kollmann (Paris: Rivière, 1921), p. 65. |
| 29. | Nature, 297/233. |
| 30. | Nature, 307/242. |
| 31. | Nature, 304/239. |
| 32. | Nature, 304/239. |
| 33. | See VI, note from February 1959, 235/181–2. |
| 34. | G. Simondon, L’Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1995), p. 23. |
| 35. | In two short unpublished notes (317 and 319), Merleau-Ponty comments on the marginalization of the thematic of perception in Simondon’s work. As expected, his appreciation of it is ambiguous. On the one hand, he goes as far to recognize that it cannot be a question of formulating ‘all problems in terms of perception’ and that such a tendency characterizes ‘the phenomenological attitude as Fink criticises it’. Life, he goes on to say, exceeds the framework of perception, and ‘we don’t perceive all the time.’ At the same time, he insists on the fact that it cannot either be a question of simply discarding perception as the origin of philosophical questioning: ‘we no longer know what we are talking about if we take root in the metaperceptive [si l’on s’installe dans le métaperceptif].’ |
| 36. | G. Simondon, L’Individu, p. 23. |
| 37. | See G. Simondon, L’Individuation psychique et collective : à la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et métastabilité (Paris: Aubier, 1989). |
| 38. | Simondon, L’Individu, p. 31. |