Jean-Luc LAMOTTE, anthropologist and essayist

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Today I begin with a definition, the one of language as a place of dialectic contradiction of appropriation and language exchange to make it clear, from the outset, the complete change of perspective that we must operate in relation to what I said when I tried to answer the question “What is thinking?” We turn, in fact, analysis of what is in the language of certain cognitive processes (fully implicit) that we have studied, which in it is entirely within sociology, is the permanent contradiction (and also implied) of divergence and convergence (now that you know well) constitutive of the person. I would add that the difference between speech and language, nobody does. Yet in anthropology Gagnepain proved that the two planes of rationality (rationality and social rationality) were clinically completely autonomous. I begin by illustrating the dialectical opposition of starting the existence of languages. Remember why I told you, while all the dolphins in the world speak “delphinien,” so to say, all men do not they speak the “anthropoid?” Just because dolphins -like all other animals – seek to “communicate” with each other, whereas what characterizes the man is precisely the denial of what is known in common parlance, the… “Communication!” You must understand, in fact, that it is the man that once said to another: “I am not you, it means, you know, we begin to dig ourselves a gap between us and our neighbor, we must divide it well, then fill, otherwise condemned to remain idiocy in the etymological sense of the term (the idiot in Greek, is one who remains locked in its singularity.) In other words, we must constantly we translate; translation should be taken into a model of a real communication.

However, if you admit this dialectical opposition of divergence and convergence, what can be called “a tongue.” Tonight we are supposed to express in one language that we agreed to call “French,” I mean that we use a talk and we refer to a certain doxa is a certain knowledge (the most extensive sense of the word) the two being inextricably linked (exactly as is, as regards the sign, signifier and signified.) But I begin by distinguishing for the convenience of analysis.

Regarding the speech, it is clear that there is nothing uniform, but it is a heterogeneous group in all the three dimensions of our “situation in the world, is to tell both in time and space in the middle (the social sense, of course.) In time, it is clear that the talk that we use today to express ourselves is no longer the one of Moliere, nor, a fortiori, neither the one of Montaigne, let alone which was treated in the Middle Ages. And it certainly is not, either, speaking in French that tomorrow will speak your children. In space, on the other hand, it is easy to see that our French is not only full of Anglicism, as has been sufficiently noticed, but also borrowed from many other tongues of English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, for example, without even mentioning Latin and Greek, called the “dead languages,” but among us are nevertheless extremely hardy: for proof, in French there is no way to derive not speak Greek and Latin (horseback riding and horse!) Finally, we see the difference between French academicians who, addressing a lady of the world, greeted with: “My compliments, madam,” and that of the gangster who give a “Hi, kid!” Or, again, between speaking of such who “went to the hairdresser” and that of another who “goes to the barber,” and so on (examples abound!) However, talk is not enough to talk. Permanently interlocution (not to be confused with the phrase) refers to a heritage constituted of ideas, opinions, views journalistic, scientific, literary, etc, Heritage, too, quite heterogeneous in time, space and environment (this means, varying for each of us according to his education, of course, but also his business, his curiosity, etc.) In other words, if I say, for example, the word “structure,” each of you interprets the word spontaneously in a different way as will or not trained in linguistics, architecture, physics Atomic, etc. This means that when we dialogue in French, we do not create knowledge spontaneously. At best, we contribute to knowledge, but in most cases, we quote or recite, or even celebrate (this is the “literature”) use already know, namely that, quite significant English call lore (which was used to form the word “folklore”,) and Germans called Lehre (that is to say, the knowledge transmitted by education.) Some among us have spoken of “mentality” and other “civilization,” as our language teachers who, having long ago realized that speak in a language is not only to talk, and is why they call themselves “teachers of languages and civilizations.” The intention was far from being reprehensible, certainly, but the simplicity was very high which was to make a speech later, the doxa and the other, suggesting that there are two different realities that aim would be to report (report what, exactly?) Both, as I have said, are absolutely inseparable.

However, we have the right to use the word “language” in singular, provided they see a political entity, this means an entity resulting from the permanent reduction of the gap between the trend towards ownership of a strange speech and a doxa (that ownership is one of two speakers, small group or large community, whatever) and sharing of this talk and this doxa , exchange, pooling them, their communication in the true sense. This reduction of policy, if you want, is that the gap between the idiocy of schizophrenic and paranoid consent of any word from the speaker, whatever it is about, gap, therefore, between the absolute heterogeneity and homogeneity as absolute. But what we must see here is that these two poles, except pathological blockage in one of two permanently exist at all in talking about the phenomenon of verbal communication. The social space of interlocution is a constant back and forth between these two poles. Explained by the same sign, the fact that any language is subject to both political antagonist “covered” (conservatism and progressivism,) trying to resolve the dialectic of divergence and convergence, either within the meaning of convergence, either in the sense of divergence.

On the one hand, it reduces the temporal heterogeneity, spatial and social dialects and knowledge in the sense of uniformity, imposing a language in which only some are expressed: among us are the inhabitants of Ile-de-France, even the Parisians (“It is good that billed the Paris already said Villon.) And this reduction comes at the expense of all internal differences, of any origin, and thus the Provencal and Breton, for example, are excluded as “patois.” That is the Conservative policy, if not reactionary (whether right or left, think Jules Ferry!) And as it denies the variety of dialects and knowledge, we can say: “That is French! This policy, of course, can never reach perfect purity, as we have seen that speak a language assumed ownership strange that we sign, so the divergence is a pure cat! It attempts to “stop,” the quasi-legal sense of the word, dialect and! “Literature,” which gave yesterday, at home, the dictionary of the French Academy Grammar of the proper use of Grévisse and in my time, the famous Lagarde and Michard, real institutions to give us the illusion of a French internal consistency. For this part, is that progressive politics (whether of right or left) is exactly the opposite: it calls for an extension in time, space and environment of language status in all dialects and all knowledge. This time, Babel: pushing the limit, there are as many languages as individuals. Not only would consider the “talk of Marseilles,” to borrow the title of a book that you need to know, but it would make academic theses on the language of the Marseilles fish alive, living near the Old Port and sixty years! In reality, as the Conservative policy is forced to tolerate some differences, progressive politics can never assert its claims so that everyone can have their own language and that language can always be recognized.

After distinguishing as clearly as possible what, in the language is, first, specific cognitive processes, namely the dialectical contradiction between the abstract and the concrete (the sign,) and secondly, what is a purely sociological phenomenon, namely the dialectic of appropriation and communication (language,) I would now like to draw your attention to the phenomenon of interdependence, or sign and language, the interference level of society in terms of the sign.

Actually, what we commonly call “language” is neither sign nor language, but overall, the quasi-chemical meaning of the word, both. It is a bit of “language” like water, resulting from the combination, as everyone knows, hydrogen and oxygen, the bodies in catalysis produces another body, endowed with new properties, and it is precisely that with which you wash your hands, enjoy a drink, etc. But comparison is not right. However, it has been shown that, after the period of babbling, a child has an early formal logic of an adult -at the age of two years or two and a half years, when he says, for example, “sleep” as I told you. In other words, there is no “baby talk” if we adopt the perspective of cognitive processes: the ability to sign is innate in humans. But it is true that the ability of sign can only be through the impregnation of the other language, language that will be instilled in children by his entourage (his parents, his family, his environment, school, etc.) If the impregnation does not occur, the ability to sign will never occur. This is the case of the “wild child,” which has occupied Dr. Itard. So, again, Herodotus tells us, this pharaoh who, curious to know what could be the first language spoken by mankind, decided to shut a baby in a closed room at birth and during early years of his life. It was absurd, and you imagine that poor boy, unable to absorb a language, was, in turn, become unable to sign, in the sense we have defined. The mistake is to think that men spoke a “first” language, first in the chronological sense. This means that Homo sapiens and Homo socius are perfectly contemporary. This same interference plans (that of the verbal and rationality of social rationality) that explains that we did not quite the same logic as that is practiced language like French, which has, for example, in speaking of what are called “proposals,” and a language like Japanese, do not include. All those who practiced the teaching of languages called “foreign,” quickly realized it was not simply to transmit a talk and a doxa (language and civilization,) but there had to Moreover, divergent logics. And the cons-test is easy to do: it can be seen clearly that the description of the French by an Englishman, a Turk or Japanese that has little to do logically with that made by French. In short, there are so many “French” that are “foreign” languages. We are in the most absolute relativity! That is why, incidentally, is completely absurd to have established in our Faculty of Arts Departments of “French Foreign Language” (the famous “FFL” cannot, scientifically, to have any existence.)

However, this feedback (to use in the language of cybernetics) of the cognitive sociolinguistics can possibly give, finally, a precise definition of the concept of mentality. Those who refer generally attribute this concept both in style cathedrals than how to stand in a bar or a dining room, etc. Sociologically, this is not true. But, sociolinguistics, it is the translator that best identified the problem: they realized that moving from one language to another was not only spend a talk and a doxa another talk and another doxa (operation that is already not so easy!) but there was always a residue absolutely incompressible, a Weltanschauung in the words of Humboldt, this means, a “worldview” specific to each language, even to the author writing in the same language. Well, what we call “thinking” in the strict sense (and etymological) the term; it is precisely this mental universe that follows the footprint of language on our cognitive processes. That explains, for example, that the work of Descartes, translated into English, can never be the work that the philosopher would have written if he had been himself an Englishman! At this rate, you see that even among languages that sustain them an undeniable kinship (both talking at the level of the doxa,) they are differing with attitudes.

I would finally add that this divergence of attitudes, as defined only for sociolinguistics that I gave to that word appears nowhere more clearly between mathematicians, who, themselves, have long renounced the dream formalistic “pure mathematics,” not to say “universal mathematics.” Mathematicians do not agree among themselves, but not limited to questions of theory! To convince you, then open a math book, not least that the simplest textbook, written by an Englishman, and another written by a German, and one written by a Japanese man: each of these three books you remain more or less tight, if you do not have at least the rudiments of English, German or Japanese, and this, even if these books contain only equations. There exist many mathematical languages! In reality, there is almost as much mathematics as mathematicians (and almost as many mathematical object to process: economy math is not for astrophysicist, etc.) You see the splendid isolation of the “well-made language,” to use Condillac is a farce! We must therefore admit that mathematics as it is the language, has all the properties, and, like language; it is language in plural. It is conceivable that mathematics is a script of the conceptual logic resulting from our ability to sign, but as this concept is logical, from the outset, inseparable from the different languages that manifest his writing, much less is too. The thing is very interesting. When I was teaching in Beirut, I had the opportunity to address the problem of translation into math Arabic to textbooks written in French. Mission impossible! Why? Well, simply because of an irreducible difference was this mentality that I just mentioned. And I realized at the same time, the computer could never help anything, as regards the translation of a language “natural” as they say, to another. It was then, in the late sixties, where linguists and computer scientists dreamed of developing “machine translation.” You put in the computer, for example: “The flesh is weak and the spirit is willing,” the cons-test gave you in the best case, something like: “The meat is soft and the brain burns!” Years later I found one of my friends (former IBM engineer) who wade through the means of dealing with mathematics by computer. I told him: “You are wasting your time! Why? Because it was convenient to be able to give the computer the resolution of all our equations would have freed the mathematicians who could finally tackle this immense effort they have to provide if they want to take into account the quality. But you understand that thought, even one-legged man, can not be processed by computer, simply by what it is expressed in languages as diverse and multiple languages that our “natural.”

Let us close this parenthesis: I did illustrate the divergence of logic and, more generally, the divergence of attitudes, a divergence which is characteristic of a man. In other words, they do better or they laments, we do not hear from French, or even among Europeans. You can imagine that, the globalization of thought will never exist: there will always, in fact, be a perpetual conflict of attitudes or cultures. Why? Simply because, as you know, universal is not human. The only universal in man is his natural body of anthropoids, but it should be added that this is the body that allows Anthrop, unlike the apes (not to mention computers!) to develop the singularity (the difference, if you prefer,) who finds uniqueness in all areas: it can no more exist “universal language” than “universal art” of “universal human” or “universal religion:” there are only languages, styles, codes, or sects. This is what we have great difficulty in admitting in Europe (except in the West) since the Renaissance, I mean, since the birth of humanism that we still today caught for universal concepts which were and remain as ours. We have no right to hate so it is in man! It is, rather, that we learn to translate, this means to overcome through dialogue, our differences at all levels, from the microscopic (in any of our conversations) at the macroscopic (in relations between nations, or “civilizations.”) You see that in speaking of “translation” is, in fact, all of our social exchanges that question is, exchanges that are all based (whether the exchange of words, goods, women, etc.) on ownership. You could say that the animal, too, appropriated a terrier, for example, or a territory or females. Certainly, but practice does exogamy? Have you seen the other two wolves exchange their territory? Or, a hare rent his house? Of course no. This is not, except at La Fontaine…  Everything is here! And that is why the animal is not “political” in the Aristotelian sense, this means, unlike humans, it does not contract, do not sign treaties in a word, it does not develop laws. If you prefer, it does not arbitrarily uses codified.

Well, precisely, language is to use an arbitrary code, the law: it is not pure coincidence that, in Latin, lex and the verb meaning “to read” are trained on the same branch. But then, you ask, from where it comes? From us, just exactly as it is within us lies the ability to sign. In other words, as we discussed the existence, in humans, a cognitive structuring principle, we must also recognize in him the existence of an organizing principle similar to that which we can produce the sign, but we can, this time to produce the society, not only to live in herds. But let us be clear on terms: in speaking of “herd” does not think that this is anything to denigrate the animal. The herd is a certain organization of “living together” as someone says, an organization can achieve, in some species, a level of extremely complex that we are still far from knowing. And as we never cease to belong to the animal kingdom, we may live in herds: see all the phenomena of emotional contagion, the phenomena of crowds, mass phenomena (like those that occurred during the death of Michael Jackson,) etc. -and perhaps even, as we have in common with the animal that is called “sympathy,” the fact is, literally, “suffering with.” But we are different animals, in that we have the ability, using our animal nature (as it has gregariousness) as a springboard to access, by abstraction, the principle of singularity, a principle that we are reinvesting Then our animalistic, without ever being able to coincide with it. Again, there is in this bipolar opposition of singular and universal a “game” quite similar to the one we analyzed for the reinvestment of verbal structure in the universe of the world to say.

However, everyone knows that laws are made to be amended, repealed or replaced at one time or another. If, therefore, there are no universal laws, it cannot be eternal laws. Similarly, why is there no contract that includes a termination clause? Because the termination is the foundation of the contract: no contract that stipulates the possibility of de-contracts. And it goes the same with all our treaties, all of our compromises etc. In short, any policy (not a politician in the sense of the term, you understand.) Policy, basically, in this sense, there is only one: the permanent revolution, insofar as we continue to be subject to becoming. Well, and it is through these words I will conclude, it is exactly the same translation, and therefore the language. That is why, as I told you one day, translations, this time meaning “language” of the term, are always repeated. That is also why the work of preparing a dictionary of the French Academy or use good grammar does not have the time. That is why, finally, the famous “Lagarde and Michard” time of my studies is being supplanted by new anthologies “folk” (in English meaning of the word, of course!)

Before you leave, I propose that we set a very brief summary methodology.
If you follow me, you understand that speaking of “language” as a scientific reality is an illusion, since this “language” involves four levels of determinism. A strictly cognitive determinism that we discussed when we posed the question “What is to think? Technical determinism, which I mentioned in dealing with ways of writing a social determinism, we have to consider now that that language is language, and finally an ethical determinism (or moral) I have met you in speaking of “freedom of expression.” In short, the language is not in any way a “given” scientific. In other words, the science of man, like any other science, must start by making its data. From this perspective, there is no difference between us and Lavoisier, who has scientifically break this kind of phenomenon that we call “water” to posit the existence of H2O. Lavoisier, so to say “deconstructed” this natural phenomenon to do what is called an “object of science,” and you know that through him we have gone from alchemy to chemistry. We need to deconstruct our “man” and, therefore, all phenomena, not natural but cultural. The difference between language and languages is absolutely fundamental, and nobody knows, except Mediations, of course, and it is a pity. Result: we talk constantly with the “mouth full,” so to speak, and it is doomed to see nothing and say nothing, scientifically, of what is yet to be wrong (as we may have an opportunity to see) as the entelechy of a man’s thought.

It is still unbelievable that the country castles of the Loire, which has had a tradition of culture and intelligence of many centuries, the requirement to fight to accept a theory that Chinese themselves are beginning to interest. We are going to look smart!
But it is not just Chinese! Gagnepain said I quote: “We do not claim, we must know, but we believe we can help, at least, better looking. So, it is not true that in the West there is nothing new. The few that we have representatives to the United States could very well one day or another return to Europe a new Columbus of our own ability to illuminate, in turn, what remains of the Old Continent. The current facility contacts lined with nearly instantaneous information should, in fact, simplify the task, provided that officials there are some that will. “What responsible?” you may ask: the so-called “government,” of course, but also journalists…and each of you, if you agree.

Thank you for your patience and for those who honor me and will continue to follow me, I will meet you in September.

Happy holidays!

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To my little children.

Teach children to count? You are joking! Any kid of two and a half years, when he says “sleep” or “am stram gram, peak and peak and gram, bourgeois and bourgeois and Ratata, etc.” Is higher in mathematics without even know the tables of multiplication.

You will say perhaps: “Well, it seems that the child speaks as Broca’s aphasia?”And you are absolutely right. Some may wonder what it is Broca’s aphasia. Without going into details here, I will answer that Broca’s aphasia is a guy who pushes the syntax to its climax (though often say the opposite,) which can be expressed as the horizontal axis “verbal units and their chains.” To see clearly, you must have in mind what I said (in simplified terms!) Mediations theory of the sign, when we asked the question: “What do you think?” And, in particular, what I explained about the biaxiality analysis process that defines the word rationality. I quickly remind you that we left the traditional analysis (which dates from the Middle Ages, anyway, I learned it in school,) namely that analyzing a sentence, it was to isolate it, of course, elements (words or propositions,) and define their nature and function. But what we could not tell me before Gagnepain was that nature and function was, in fact, indivisible, there was a reciprocal relationship between the vertical axis identities, differences, quality, etc. and the horizontal axis counts, units their reports. Well, say that Broca’s aphasia was lost following an accident, the two axes, and one identity, that is to say the vertical, called the axis of the “taxonomy.” But, not having lost the other (the horizontal axis or “phrase,”) he can beautifully calculate, proving that the calculation is indeed the verbalism. That is what we must understand. Nobody knows how to define Math: Well, it is just a language that is sometimes called the language of science (as we call us the “meta,”) but in no case are acts of a science (contrary to what some people believe.) Whether it is the most common words we have to say things or concepts mathematically more sophisticated, in both cases is the same verbalism it is, in other words, this is nothing more than what is called in grammar (Pascal, in particular, was well aware of this close kinship uniting grammar and math.)

But in the case of mathematics, we are dealing with an amputated grammar, this means a uniaxiale. You can understand that mathematical analysis has remained essentially the axis (horizontal) functions exactly as Broca’s aphasia; I mean the axis of counting and quantity. We owe to Descartes the fact that amputation of mathematics has become a kind of inexplicable grammar. Grammar is not simple, and, insofar as it is implied, it is very easily accessible, but still, it seems more familiar, because everyone is talking “normally” this means it uses its legs to walk. But in the case of thought-legged (mathematical thinking,) there is nothing to explain. Go and ask children who say “am stram gram…” to explain what they mean, they can only answer you: “There is nothing to understand. That’s it!” And that is exactly what I answered to my math teacher, gently and without laughing: “This cannot be explained. It is like that. These teachers were, somehow, right. In reality, whether calculation, arithmetic, algebra or geometry, there was nothing to explain. But it was very bad pedagogy. These teachers would have told me: “I will, introduce you to the grammar of a language that has no lexicon or morphology or variations…a language that does not say much other than itself. A language that is not spoke, but only written or one spell at a pinch, etc. That, at least, was honest, but there is the height: “This is not explained. The height of absurdity! It was of Ionesco. I have included the day I stumbled by chance on a radio broadcast of “The Bald Soprano” in the early fifties (I was, therefore, a little younger than you.) I choked with laughter: “The roses of my grandmother are as yellow as my grandfather who was Asian …. That’s it! Your grandfather is Asian? You know nothing, basically, and I either. But, after all, we will ridicule: “It is like that.” You see that the “crisis” in mathematics education does not start today. But finally, we suffered more or less obediently, because the dream of all parents of my time was to see their offspring entering to the Ecole Polytechnique. But today, it seems that there would be enough for kids to do math. But finally, if this judge does not teachers of math, because, as I have said in the beginning, when he says “sleep” a child is a first-class mathematician. All the kids are born with the Fields medal around his neck! I would even say that grammar teachers (but where are they gone, those there?) should teach math, and math teachers should teach grammar. And when I see the textbooks available to those children! It is really a shame! In my opinion, is proof that intelligence does not understand these books there. I think that already today, the same teacher should teach grammar and mathematics. Ah yes, probably teachers know all about math, so I suppose, speak of calculating derivatives, logarithmic or arithmetic progression, but just ask a math teacher to give you the correct definition of that over which he “operates.” They know very well “operate,” but be sure that they do not pose the question of defining the concepts on which they work, beginning with the number concept!

But all of this is not the fault of teachers. Thought-legged, in this third millennium, we would rejoice or lament that it is a damn! But we will always need bridges and causeways engineers. Do not make me say otherwise. But what about the rest? Physicists, chemists, biologists realize every day that basically it was not worth they do it yesterday, so hard to look like mathematicians a pretext to become a scientist, because science changes appearance. We can model anything in science called “nature” that requires the consideration of quality, without taking into account the interaxiality. Well, we are going to a different conception of mathematics, to anthrop mathematics. And how can we do that revolution! You are not going to teach your child to unlock as Broca’s aphasia. All in all, it is better to remove the teaching of mathematics and to quickly train teachers of grammar. I say many professors of grammar, in the most traditional sense, not “language,” since this grammar has been completely betrayed by the post-Saussurean linguistics. I am well placed to tell you. The language has been promoting the “little things” to talk like that Daudet was “pawn” in high school Ales. This was the Raft of the Medusa for “modern” literary who felt lost in the world that they were contemporary. Then, after 68, all these guys have found it: linguistics, semiotics, etc. With this, they said: “We will become the humanities popes, the popes of the modern world.” So if math were betrayed by Descartes and grammar by people like Chomsky, you understand that this famous crisis in mathematics education is in fact a crisis of knowledge in its totality.

To conclude: we have begun by the easier things. It is true that Descartes we got off the track by insisting on the concepts of quantity and measurement: that we may be allowed to go to the moon, but to the price of a considerable simplification of the conceptual thinking mathematicians (except that of Einstein, as you know,) since they no longer have taken into account the quantity (this quantity to be continuous or discontinuous,) laughing less about the quality, or attempting (unsuccessfully) to reduce this quality to the quantity. Well, it is finished. Mathematics of tomorrow, if they still exist, will considerably be more difficult! A such point that we can say, in a century may be: “really, mathematics in the past, it was a game of children!”

écrit par admin \\ tags: Anthropo-mathematics, arithmetical progress, calculation, chomsky, descartes, einstein, grammar, logarithm, math, mathematics, metalanguage, mutiplication, pedagogy, quantity., Theory mediation humain science

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If we want that the question of faith (fundamental question to understand the world as it goes) today it is posed in terms suited to our time, it should be formulated different from the Vatican, theologians and thinkers religious do. Since the disappearance of Jean Gagnepain, there is some of that! In reality, the mutations of scientific knowledge are that we can no longer have the same religious perspective that when it opposed the sciences called from “nature” to the faith, the Aristotelian reason to the Muslim faith (like Averroès) or to the Christian faith (as Thomas Aquinas:) all of this has become ridiculous! Let talk  about something else. There is in here that anthropologists perhaps have a word to say.

The way in which I will ask the problem requires to dissociate the act of faith (whatever the religion to which you belong or not), a dogmatic whatever, I mean a system of beliefs, that is institutionalized, (as in the Catholic Church) or that which is not (as in the Protestantism).In other words, it is, in order to ask the problem, to exceed the dogmas to envisage the act of faith. This problem, in the generations who have preceded us, was as virtually resolved (which, I say to you immediately, is not the case.) But how claimed them to have it resolved? It had taken his party, since the Renaissance, to separate very clearly two universe: the “safe” and the “not sure,” the nature and supernatural, in other words, since Bacon the “naturalist philosophic” and “supernaturalis philosopher” (which is opposed to theology.) Yet in the end of the XIX century, a disciple of Augusto Comte (representing the positivism,) said in speaking of a possible beyond, that it was an ocean where there was no bark, nor sailing. The formula was nice, but completely ridiculous because at a time when it says: “from there I do not have bark nor sailing,” we determine the shore that means the border between the certain and the uncertain. But the same time, when we ask, in the field of knowledge, the share of certain and uncertain, this uncertain becomes certain of the same time! Be sure at this point to eliminate one of the human aspects with as much certainty, it is a fideism affecting naivety. Define nature and supernatural as areas separated by a certain border, this defines the two sides at once, it is automatically ask the religious problem in a manner as foolishly realistic that the problem is natural. But it was, in essence, quite comfortable.

That it is to celebrate or that it is to lament, that is the problem of the nature and of the supernatural, that are thought settled, is a problem we can no longer present because it is completely questioned by the development of sciences called “nature.” Since Einstein, we are a relation to the sciences of nature, in a Total relativity: we know, now, that it is us who are the world, that there is no more substance, more fixed point nowhere. It is awful ! This does not mean that it must be a malign reason, because we have it at our disposal, then we must use it in the smartest way. There is no therefore more neither man nor nature: what we can seize, it is the interrelationship. You understand then that the concept of “nature of sciences” that, by convenience, it must be continue to call it that, it is a concept that today becomes ridiculous, because to speak of sciences of nature means sciences that are abstraction of the manner in which we observe; in other words, this means: sciences which put the man apart. Well, what I say to you is that the sciences of nature also apply to the famous concept of supernatural. Of the same that we can no longer design the nature as something that can be put to share of man, we cannot conceive a supernatural, I mean a divinity somewhere in the sky, which could exist without us. If the divine is inaccessible to us, I do not see why it must care to us!

The religious problem, in the sense that it should be put today, turns considerably. This act of faith, the religious, cannot be considered as an age of the humanity, as the fact Augusto Comte (you know its famous law of three states: the theological age, the metaphysics age, and finally, the positive age –I mean the scientific.) It is to lay the religious phenomenon as a human transaction: the man is an animal which, because that he has the reason, has the problem of the divine (the question does not arise in rabbit.) And, speaking as a rational operation this make to the man responsible and to the nature and to the supernatural. You understand that the theologians would fall me angry! Because if the clinical anthropology of Jean Gagnepain allows us to start to prepare a study as scientifically as possible of the act of faith (which does not prove its validity, nor his disability) it is made of theology, and even the philosophy, at least in the philosophy so-called classical, which is, in fact, that a secular theology. Remains that, as well as we regard to nature, since the beginning of the profound change in contemporary thinking, the man can no longer be in brackets, he can no longer be considered as what it is called the “transcending,” say the “spiritual,” “as another dimension of the man” since it is with us that this transcending is rooted. There is one more question “Other” with a capital letter. Why this shift and this compliance, since it is that we hold the ability we have to worry about? If you follow me, you realize that this is the end of the pseudo conflict between science and faith. More general, yesterday the rationalism opposed to the religious perspective as a certainty to another certainty. So it was a fanaticism that was all azimuths. Rationalism was also the most sectarian religious sects. That is why we could talk on both sides of fanaticism. Fanaticism is possible in the form of fundamentalism, of course, but it is a conceivable form of progressivism as well. Fanaticism, what is it? It said: “My convictions are the only ones that are worth.” At this point you understand that rationalism or the Pope is all the same. Nietzsche said: “It is not the doubt that makes crazy but the certainty.” We will find it… But first I want to complement and illustrate the early reflections that I have just submitted.

All scientific knowledge is in the process of change, we can not treat it today in the terms in which we dealt with until today, it means that through the holding that it was made of this rationality in science of physics (a “nature”) which in reality has nothing to teach us, since it is us, I repeat, it takes the concepts that allow us to explain. That is what I want to begin by illustrating very quickly.

You know, since Democritus and Epicurus, Western science has gradually developed the concept of determinism. This does not happen from one day to another, of course, not without giving rise to numerous debates. There is still rationality, at least among us, and we have never ceased to explain the world to challenge the luck or chance, or contingency (I mean what happens when that might not happen,) the name of a certain necessity. Science has always ruled that there was chaos in the world for the benefit of an abstract order which ensured consistency while a system of relationships from the point of view of intelligibility: if there were no order, it could no longer explain what the ancient Greeks, significantly, called the cosmos, a word which is a designation of the cosmeïn verb, it means to arrange, to order, just as “cosmetic” is to order our hair! Science, therefore, was constituted by the negation of chance that has been called determinism. Yes, but it cannot prevent researchers from going further, it means that these researchers have gone, thanks to modern means of detection, from macrophysics to microphysics, and they had then reflected a movement of particles that escape from laws of physics; they usually have escaped at the same time, the need they had asked regarding the most visible manifestations. In other words, this transformation of physics at the turn of last century, led to the question of indeterminism. After all, determinism is an illusion: if we will look further and deeper, it is the same; finally, we must know the indeterminacy and try to report it in Science, crossing the uncertainty and chance.

Immediately, most scholars have said: “It is not possible!” They must find a way to reduce this pseudo determinism, at least to a new determinism. But do not imagine that this new determinism abolish chance. It will only give rise to new hazards. It does not mean: “There is chance, let’s try to make science” anyway we always call it coincidence that resists explanation, or until such an explanation will be fine enough to show that the limits of chance still, as they say, fell. But pushing back the limits of chance, it will never delete it for a good reason we do not know if the chance exists or does not exist: it is what bothers us; we are human beings explaining the world, neither more nor less.

We can make it by saying that everything is random, everything is chaotic except for a man who desperately tries to introduce himself in this chaos. But what we must understand is that the universe is absolutely irreducible to what we think it is. This is not the world that requires us any logic, any determinism and makes us chase the chance. Similarly, the universe is absolutely irreducible even of what we perceive of him. It is not said at all, indeed, the world has even the appearance of what we give to him. Kant said: “If we were born with blue spectacles on our noses, the world would be blue.” In other words, the mere fact that, we are there, it is understandable that the world around us has the features that rightly or wrongly, we give to it: the constitution is never empirically that the projection of our meaning. In short, as one can not separate the world that designs, it can not be separated from who collects the flower on which there is the butterfly. It has absolutely nothing to see with that is harvested by men. That is the concept of “nature” it is a concept entirely fortuitous, linked to the existence to a particular being (human or butterfly,) by the fact that it contains. Now we understand that we can not ask the man a hand, “nature” of the other: there is a relationship of the bipolar world. Another genius philosopher -Berkeley- was right on this point, saying “esse is percipi…” (But never cites the following) and percipere that means: “it is being perceived and perceive. It was beautifully before there was that relationship, he realized that, thanks to humanities it will gradually discover much deeper: it is the substance (or in -itself) anywhere, and therefore we can not oppose the man and things. Accordingly to this, it is all our scientific concepts that must be considered as projections of ourselves in the world. In other words, for almost two centuries, we have determinism where there were none! In other words, we are doomed to animism. This does not mean at all that it was wrong. But it does mean that determinism is not the fruit of our projection in the universe. However, you may say, that this determinism is real since it has been proved. It has been proven, but what is shown is not certain. And then there are still a lot of phenomena that can be proven and that we have no idea.

Exactly in the same way, we plan on the universe what we call space. Why? Because we are extended to the perception or the understanding, we will confer the dimensions (length, width, height, etc…) And as it is us who specialized the universe is us who “temporalize” it because we can pose a beginning, middle and an end, that we place at least West, in a chronological sequence, that means, according to a temporality that we represent as an arrow. You see, this thing that explains the world in trying to model or by searching its origin, its evolution and its end is in both cases demonstrate, again, purely and simply of animism. We must conceive, therefore, that the birth and the end of the world, for example the big bang and the final cataclysm have absolutely no reality. When we hear dreamers like Hubert Reeves tell you: “At first there was the big bang, you want to reply:” But why are you looking for a beginning of the universe? And at the other end, when we hear these dreamers talking about the end of the world, you want their objection: “Why do you think there is a general destruction or what I know.” In other words: “Why do you think there is a beginning and an end? The whole problem of the temporal point of view is here.

You see, therefore, the enormous difficulty that science will face: it will be the “rationalization.” This will be certainly a “squared” rationalism as I told you, but a desperate rationalism, quest for certainty. But certainty can not be that, in turn, only partial and provisional, because animism, to be “square” will not be less than animism. It will then streamline the rationalization of rationalizes, etc. And this is infinity. In short, we never understand the last word; we know neither the nature nor the man, nor their relationship to the point where we can reach any certainty. That is madness! The universe is not in itself, man is not in itself he exists only in their relationship, a relationship that is no a science and will ever be exhaust. That is with nourishes us, this is what phenomenologist have called the “existential angst,” which is nothing more than a consciousness of this circularity is that it is ourselves who pose the problems we are trying desperately to solve. However, if this anxiety is the result of the risk and doubt that the man brought in the world, how can he escape to it? By faith, meet some people who have a religious option, live it as a consolation -or healing- of their concern. But we must admit that if the purpose of religion is to calm the anxiety, it is not opium, as Marx thought, but rather the final drug. God in fact is no more certain than the rest. That is why asking the question “Does God exist there?” Is as stupid as asking: “Does the universe exist? And it is true that if the universe does not exist outside of the conceptual or perceptual projection that our project onto him, God exists only in the bipolar relationship we enjoy (or not) with him. In other words God does not exist: It can be, too, that the object of a desperate, because, like the universe, He is the man.

This is what Voltaire was perfectly understood when he said: “God created the man in His own image, and he served it well! What is interesting is how, historically, he gave him. Take, for example, this projection in God there is a beginning, and develop a purpose: it gives you the Creation it was still not long ago, understood as the fact that one day God has said: “Look, I am going to do Adam, that will keep me busy.” And then after, there was the valley of Jehoshaphat or the Apocalypse. But all this for man of twenty-first century, it is nonsense (as the Immaculate Conception, the Magic and the Ark of Noah.) If indeed we now know that time does not exist, the Creation and the Apocalypse are, dare I say, permanent. And secondly, the famous Valley of Jehoshaphat is a farce: insofar as Christ tell you: “The Kingdom is within you… The Kingdom has already come.” This is not just to say “What am I after death” is nonsense: if you think you are God. That is all. Faith is not a mistake, but something much stronger than that. We must therefore ask the question of faith quite differently than does the Vatican. What is the Pope? He preaches against abortion, against condoms, etc. (Which everyone does not care), then it should take to grips with the problem of renewal of Christian thought, instead of recovering fundamentalists. The Catholic Christian thought has become old-fashioned, archaic, antediluvian nay. It is to discourage you from being a believer! The real problem today is simply that there is now a dizzying chasm between science and religion. Yesterday, I told you that scientific rationalism opposed to religion as a certainty to another certainty, and I told you I was finally comfortable (if not comforting). Now what characterizes scientific rationality for nearly a century is that its certainties have lived, so the relationship between reason and theology has considerably changed. On one side there is “the collapse of certainties,” to borrow the title of the work of Prigogine, but the other continued certainties become completely obsolete. How, at an age when science talks about the reversibility of time that makes us going beyond the idea of a time represented as an arrow even speak not only as we have seen, Creation and Apocalypse, but hello again, of eschatology (end of times) of “future life,” etc.? Eschatology as the “future life,” that which has no meaning, at least in their present form by the Catholic Church. So it is not dare to think that science today, unlike yesterday leads to the true faith of certainty which is excluded (or should be excluded) that is why we can never move from religion to faith.

One day, a brave lady told me: “I have lost faith the day somebody told me that Santa Claus, was the parents.” And I said, “Well, you did not lose much,” and I tried to show that any belief as superstition were obstacles to faith. Again, be careful with words: the verb believes, in French, may refer to both faiths (plural) to faith (singular.) Even ambiguity when someone says “is a believer: is it a man or a naive man of faith?” But there is a huge difference between the act of faith and membership (church or not) beliefs. Beliefs, it is still unproven, and that is why they go crazy, as Nietzsche said: notice that we can believe in “tomorrows,” for example the beliefs that go far beyond the “religious phenomenon” we can believe in race, spiritualism in the country, in Reason, etc. The dogma in general, is everywhere, if we take the word dogma in a very broad sense. Me too, who speak in this moment I am a dogmatic, of course, since the theory of mediation, I think! But unlike the Catholic Church, if I am protesting (you have probably already guessed that I had a Protestant education) I accept discussion, dialogue, debate. But Protestant education is a pure accident of history. Regardless of religious beliefs to which we adhere or not, regardless of religions and churches: they are only the entry in the history of systems more or less sophisticated beliefs: whether you will be born in Delhi, Riyadh or Rome, your beliefs are Hindu, Muslim or Christian, but your faith will be the same… “Finally, that means that “I have faith” or “I lost faith.” If you understand that doubt is always a founder of faith, it can never be acquired. It is always what you do or not like acts of faith. Faith, basically opposed to religion: that is what we usually do not understand. But this does not mean at all that beliefs are shameful. The conflict of faith and beliefs is in fact in all of us. After all, we are men, that is to say animals because they are rational, need certainty. And I will conclude by relating the story as you probably know all. One day Einstein boarded a plane to travel to Canada, a reporter rushed up to him: “Hey Professor, do you believe in God? And Einstein said: “If you tell me first what you mean by it, I will tell you if I believe!” I will comment it by saying this time: “For a silly question, intelligent answer! Because God, be sure that Einstein knew this is precisely the unthinkable, that is to say an in-itself that exists only to elude us, that is why it cannot be as I told you that being a perpetual search.

In other words, to such a question, other people could certainly answer: “No, I do not believe in it, but I hope on Him.”

écrit par admin \\ tags: Act of faith, animism, catholic Christian, certainty, démocrite, determinism, dogma, faith, fundamentalism, god, kant, metaphysical, nietzsche, philosophia naturalis, philosophia supernaturalis, Protestant, reason, religious phenomenon, religious thinkers, Roman Catholic Church, science, spiritual, systems of faiths, theology, Theory mediation humain science, thought Christian, transcending, understandable, Vatican

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The title of my speech should not lead you astray. It would suggest that I support the common opinion that would make freedom of expression to a side, for example, freedom of conscience, freedom of movement, information or something in other words, the word freedom is likely to be used in plural, depending on certain material that could be put behind the concept. This is an absolutely terrible misuse of language, since it confuses, then freedom with its practice, which as you know, is usually authenticated by company, and legalization itself defines what name is in fact self-reliance. However, it is very important to see that freedom and autonomy are not confused, nor are distinct on one side, the code (the so-called law,) which is a purely sociological reality, and what to call the standard, which is a strictly ethical concept.

It is therefore necessary to carefully distinguish between what is social, and what is the moral distinction that we are extremely difficult to perform since the language we use every day telescope almost always the two plans. Just take, for example, the concept of “law” it is to take it in its legal sense, or morality? And when we speak of our “moralists” writers;  are these thinkers who are interested in morality, or good manners? See, again, our “Academy of Moral and Political Science ‘in this expression, which content includes the epithet’ moral” And what about that famous “moral duty” in which people of my generation were still high. But the need for my welfare, and, as such, it is my responsibility it involves, while morality is a matter of fault, of guilty and not responsibility.

At this rate, the concept of freedom is a moral concept, it must not be pluralized, unlike the concept of autonomy. Freedom is one or not. Okay, let me tell you, but at this point, speaking of “freedom of expression,” you are still at odds with yourself. Not least if, as I suggested, you agree with me to define “expression” as the manifestation of our desire to say, a desire which is involved both in our messages to our or our being. And what morality teaches us, specifically, is that if indeed we do share our humanity, it is precisely because we can not say anything, do anything or any being, it is self-censorship of our desire that allows us to access, unlike the animal, to freedom, that is to say, basically, neither more nor less than self-control . And if we examine today the “discourse,” the investment of our words by our desires, we will not lose sight, provided that the manner in which we express as a substitute for all our other behaviors.

These reminders are made, I leave a well-known to all: as you know, all children at some time in their life, yield to the temptation of saying “big words” which never fails to disconcert some parents and educators. Why? Simply because, they are awakening to the standard, and they are imbued with discourses of “big people” (for speech, again, I mean the desire to say that invests in our words,) they understood that everywhere, in the words of these “big people” coarseness flush, even if their words, as they say, are “punished” (at least in theory!) We can not understand the phenomenon if we do not pay the child the feeling (even if it is confused,) the adult, continuously watered down his remarks, sweetening, paradoxically, is in line infringement, since it is good for adults, “say anyway,” which is nothing other than practice, say the “euphemia” (a word formed from the Greek prefix eu-, meaning “good” and phemi, which means “I speak.”) In fact, the euphemism is the result of men capacity to say without saying, to say without seeming to. You want to start the word of Cambronne, for example, but we try to do our best to speak otherwise, what does that euphemism as a culmination, when you can not really control yourself? The dirty word, or, as it also says the word “thought” which are basically successful in meeting the “principle of pleasure” made against the resistance, tell against the self of our desire to say. But the child that has not yet learned the subtleties, is simply naive and very depths of our discourse is that he has felt that all our adults words tend to transgression (hence the expression of popular wisdom: “Truth comes out of the mouths of children.”)

But be careful! This transgression I have described should be well distinguished from what is called the offense. You find here the distinction, once again very difficult to do, between the plane of our social existence, and that of our moral existence. I remind you that the transgression on our being as it is moral, while the offense relates to our being as a person, that is to say, our social being, and say that if transgression that defines the incorrectness, the offense, meanwhile, defines rudeness. In other words, we must distinguish between what one does not allow to itself, which, whatever group they belong, based correction, and enforcement of prohibitions arbitrarily coded by a particular group, it founded politeness. It is true that Freud did not help at all to make the distinction, since, in one of his books among the best known (Totem and Taboo,) he confused, too, in what he calls “taboo” code (which is the sociality), and the standard (which is the morality), that is to say, he admits to transgressions as if they are offenses, only in where they give rise to condemnation by the group. And just in general, all psychoanalysts, who, under the name “Law” (with a capital,) confusing the legal and legitimate, or if you want, politeness and propriety. And this confusion, I might add, is even more widespread than usually, as you know, but not necessarily, a standard is socialized into a law, in other words, is codified, it is legalized. But it is clear that if the standard can be a social treatment which legalizes, this is not what a treatment is: the social norm that bases the legitimacy of our words -and thus our actions.

Under these conditions, you will understand that we must not fall into the trap of attaching particular importance to the erotic nature of scatological verbal transgressions made by children at a certain age in their lives. It is just that, by impregnation, they learned that adults socialized form of transgression (though they do not know yet, obviously it is a transgression socialized) specific to the Judeo Christian. But know that if you were an Eskimos parent, for example, your kid probably would treat his girlfriend as a “seal” rather than “idiot” because, among Eskimos, the taboo of language is on uttering the name of the animal that is hunted, and not at all like us, the erotic and scatological vocabulary.

And you see the same symbol, how linguists, educators and psychoanalysts who are interested in this erotic and scatological symbolism of rude words in children are engaged in an absolutely complete deadlock, because, simply, it has to be defined, first, the concept of correction (or legitimacy), which is, you know now, a moral concept, and, secondly, that of politeness that is him, arbitrary that characterizes social code for example, legally. And if I come back here on the totally arbitrary nature of the social code, is better for you that the standard it has nothing arbitrary. Codification, so it varies, as everyone knows, according to times, places and cultures. However, that proves precisely this variation except that the principle of the standard is also to know the self-control?

Well, of this rule, each of us as being free, is the only master. But when I say “free,” you understand, I think that this is not to be free to “do what I want” or “say what I want,” as children claim; but free to “take upon itself”, as it was before. That’s all. Otherwise, you are never in the sense most spontaneous of your desire in the direction of your drive or your interest.

That said, let us be more precisely in the speech. We only show our freedom as much as in all our messages, even the most naive, there is always, except deficiency or pathology, to the satisfaction of both our own desire to express ourselves, and the desire to hide something, I mean to refuse to say who, by a kind of repression, thwarting our desire is to say, and this defines the fundamental duplicity of all our words. And if I say “basic” is that all our words are, by definition, double-bottom: as Freud has shown -and so, this time definitive and unquestionable -there is truth nowhere but everywhere ambiguity, across the duplicity. That is what we have got a little hard to admit, since we imagine that there would be any authenticity hidden beneath our words. But the authenticity -or, as they say, spontaneity -what? As to what our company does not say is the cry -or the dirty word -or, the lapses.

What is the process involved in the lapses? To the extent you agree that our speech is the expression of a struggle between the desire to say and censorship that we ourselves do weigh on him, the result usually is a compromise. But in the slip, what they mean and if not both appear in juxtaposition, mixing in some way. There is a failure of information about who we are, basically, the “normal” speech (that is to say formed:) if you exaggerate too much on something you should not say it falls into the slip, that is to say the failure of compromise, and then appear at the same time, and desire, and self-censorship. In this, we can say that the lapses are the passage to the limit of normal speech, when it tends to transgression. And, unlike what is the successful compromise? Well, that is what we call the “joke,” it must take it as the move to limit the success of saying without saying. Without doubt we are dealing here with a kind of lie in this case, we must say that this is a lie that makes us men. And do you feel better the nature of this lie, I will cite an example given by Freud, if I remember correctly, in his book. The joke is a relationship to the unconscious: it relates the famous reply of an Italian countess to Bonaparte, after he had  said that “all Italians dance really bad.” Non tutti,” said the countess, “my Bonaparte. You understand that the Countess in question could afford neither a brutal response, or a silence that would last for approval. Game of homophony in Bonaparte allowed her to lie… and lie, that is to say, to say the without saying. Where do you see that the joke is the personification of pure language.

And then how would you, if you have not learned to discipline language, learn to expect such adolescents to this perpetual joke (for the generalized understatement) what is the literary discourse, and Specifically, make them susceptible to this joke of jokes what the ineffable poetry? All disputes over the teaching of letters will not change anything, because you have understood, there is, on the subject, only one method: spanking granted to the child, for his good, once it knows about. We are very far! But this does not prevent us from talking a little poetry between us, if you wish, before we leave.

To say the ineffable that makes the transition to the limit of the joke of saying without saying, of lying without lying. For if the joke itself is moving to the limit of the success of saying without saying (that is to say the standard speech,) as we have seen, it is conceivable that the speech we say “inspired” is the passage to the limit of a passage to the limit! That is, if you want a passage to the limit in the second degree, what is really the flower of freedom of expression. That allows you to understand that there is no poetry that results from an extreme reluctance of speech and that this ambiguity absolutely irreducible. But this does not mean there under the words, explicit behind, another message decrypted and judged him “authentic.” It is conceivable that the explicit and implicit are in a dialectical relationship permanent. Take the case of the ineffable poetry as expressed, for example, in these two lines of Apollinaire:

Milky Way, oh bright sister

White streams of Canaan…

They say so little that I could just say:

Milky Way, light sister…

Or even – why not? – Only:

Milky Way …

With nothing to lose the charm of the operation carried out by those few syllables, which, because their meaning is literally poor and say everything poetically speaking. You see that poetic expression is the literal sense negation, the negation by which we reach the famous ineffable, but as this position is untenable, this negation is in turn denied, and we are again referred to the primary meaning, which is again denied, etc.. Etc..

A comparison with the oracular speech can, I believe, help us to understand the phenomenon. I think we may well apply to poetry what Heraclitus said of the master which is the oracle at Delphi – Apollo: outé Legei, outé krupteï alla sèmaïneï, “it does not say it not hide it beckons.” What is the speech inspired the Pythia at this in common with the poetic discourse that never gives meaning explicit or implicit: it seems in both cases it is a double word, where words are what they are and what they do not say and do not say. They are thus both, somehow, the word fable, fables, and so always a bit by creating a kind of double designificaction evanescent simulacrum of virtual and ambiguous. But the activity of discourse that grows at its most extreme limit say it is, the oracle and the poetic verse as a widening gap that gives me vertigo of possible meanings, and thus, they are at the same time , pressing invitation to fill this void. I throw a call, I ask them a question, but this call me back like an echo, to say the answer is in me. It is a real domino effect: as the poet, as Valery said, is a reader inspired, the oracle also has the power to inspire those who asked. They have nothing to say, neither one nor the other. And it is surely because it had nothing to say, not by cunning or mercantile caution that the Pythia was reticent in his oracles: “Everything is said, hello to the wise!” She replied, in substance, and men remained silent and gazed with staring eyes. You see, and that is where I finish, what is meant when one speaks of the “depth” of an inspired speech. In the philosopher, for example, the impression of depth is given by the effort that we are asked to enter to his mind. Regarding the inspired speech, the impression is given by the depth, by the time it takes to make our own everything that is a virtual one. In other words, the depth of the inspired speech is nothing but this huge future confusion wrapped in some words, which are simpler. Hugo had already felt: whether “the poets speak in a sufficient language for the future” is precisely because the depth of poetry -but it applies to the oracle, and, again, for the prophecy and parable- appeals to our own depths!

You will ask perhaps: “Can we go further of the freedom of expression?

Well, I would answer: “Yes…by giving it up!”

It is only about to be silent, to allow time in our silence, the silence of meditation, meditation or even prayer.

écrit par admin \\ tags: Arbitrary, autocontrole, concept autonomy, concept freedom, erotical-scatological, free expression, freedom expression, freedom opinion, impoliteness, Judeo - Christian, legitimacy, malpractice, mastery of one, sciences morality, social existence, standard, Theory mediation humain science

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To prepare this talk, I opened the Petit Robert, and I read, at the entry “aesthetic” and the beginning of the following definition: “science of beauty …” I immediately stopped my reading, because only in these three words make clear enough the imposture of Aesthetics, which I believe, for my part, as the false science of a false object.

False object, because what we call “beauty” is absolutely scientifically unsuitable: we speaks of a beautiful poem, a beautiful car, a nice gesture, a beautiful sunset, etc. This does not mean at all that there is no reflection on what is beautiful, but today I reject the consideration of this issue to speak only of the aesthetics as false science. Why a false science? Simply because aesthetics explains nothing just as arts. We immediately returned to the question: what is it to explain? And it is this question that I will start by answering.

You may know that there are two main explanatory perspectives: to explain it always returns to a phenomenon in principle, but principle -be careful here- is to be understood as a logically model and a chronologically contemporary antecedent phenomenon observed, either as an origin, a principle logically similar to the observed phenomenon, but chronologically earlier than him. I will immediately give you an example. Consider a bird perched on a branch. Suddenly, hop! He is gone. Well, the explanation is twofold. First explanation: why this bird has flown away? Because he heard the sound of a gunshot. Why has he heard a gunshot? Because Mr. Smith went out hunting. Why Mr. Smith has he gone hunting? Because he was fed up of his wife’s complains. (And you realize that we may well go back to the original domestic scene -this is the case to say! –the one of Adam and Eve). Second explanation why the bird has flown away? Because he is capable of flight. Why is he capable of flight? Because he has wings. Why does he have wings? Because he must ensure sustenance in the air. Why should he sustain them in the air? Because, given the gravity and density of the air…etc… So, first, the explanation has a chronological priority from the origin explanation which is by the logical antecedent model.

However, I will, first speak about art, the explanation by it origin. In a second time, I will talk about, in the same area of course, the explanation of model. And I will conclude by offering some thoughts. So, first, the explanation by it origin.

What has given this explanation by origin in our faculties of letters? History of art. What that means, except that it only adds obscurity to another? Indeed, the history of art explains nothing, for two reasons. The first is that this discipline has been unable to distinguish art (singular) and styles (plural), as when we say: “Roman style”, “Gothic style,” “Baroque style” etc. The second reason is that without having a proper theory of history that would clarify it, for example, concepts such as interaction, interference, influence, loan…it turns to the chronological catalog. You see that everything can be blamed for the History of Art, because it defines neither art nor history. This must be done! Knowing that it does not define anything, we understand that it is doomed to a totally useless encyclopedia.

Similarly, if you open a “History of Literature,” as large as it is, you will learn nothing about what some call the “literariness” No more than if you open a “History of Religions…” Look, I have a very good friend (she may be here tonight), who wants to read from beginning to end an enormous work of Mircea Eliade entitled History of beliefs and religious ideas. Obviously, she reached an age where these questions start to work on her! But then there! The book covers in two or three thousand pages, the whole world (I mean the whole world), since the “Stone Age” to today. This is an erudite work: this guy knows everything! Absolutely everything! So I told her: “But my poor dear, before you finish reading that thing, you are no longer of this world! Rather read one or two letters of Mother Teresa that have been translated into English”. Nothing to do. She objected me: “I am learning”. And that is what I want! I bet my bottom dollar that she will never know what a belief or an idea is (religious or not, it does not matter here.)

Let us return to our business. What is, however, interesting in the schools of letters, is the training received by the “art” students (that is relatively new). What does the expression, that the schools of letters have finally admitted that “All the same, in art, there is a little technical, a little manipulation, it should not be forgotten,” etc.? Under these conditions, you see that the existence of “art” is a sign of repentance so that clears a few teachers of Art History and Aesthetics of teachers to neglect the art. And then they have to take into account at least a little of “manipulations” to train those in my time we called drawing teachers. It is nevertheless true that training in art remains a poor relation, because as you all know, what matters in France at least, it is the bullshit.

More you spiel, the more you climb of steps on Jacob’s ladder of grades and treatments! While down there (we almost forget!) there are the Artists. They are not very troubles because they do not know cause any. And it is true: the experience taught me. When I was a young adult, Aimé Maeght had some interest in me because I made a few scribbles, and he presented me in his gallery, I met Giacometti, Miro, and Braque (and so on). Well, you can not imagine the intellectual idiocy of these people! Sad, but quite normal: cause of their art is not their thing. They do, and that, believe me, it is a sacred ball game (and then not given to everyone). What I just wanted to tell you is that there are people, like artists, with who do far exceeds the ability to explain what they do, and they do it very well. In other words, this is not because someone is not able to explain what he does (he will be a very bad teacher!) He can not show you how he does it. That is why, in my time, when speaking to an artist, they said, “Master.” It was not at all flattery: he was called “Master” as in corporatism; they spoke of “master craftsman.” Well, what did this master do? He showed in silence to his companions, what he knew to do, and they gradually “learner,” I mean they “took” from the master their practice.

So, the more bullshit, the higher we go up. Artists are down (Oh, if we could do without it!). At the level just above artists, you have the plastics, causing still a little. But as they work, so they tend to talk about what they do, too. A level above, there are the historians of art, who do nothing but talk, and the climax is what I would call the “Transcendental Aesthetic” in Malraux. Here we are in full nirvana is the mystical delirium, that is to say that completely derailed. And that, in general, for philosophers, who are the virtuous of this kind of sport.

And now for the explanation of “literary” by its origin. I turn now to the model of explanation. Here, I would be much shorter. Why? Because no thinker, never modeled, if only a small field of art… Except one! Believe me, I have read a lot about art (too much, indeed!). Well, the only book of Aesthetics that really made a difference to me, is the work of Pierre Schaeffer, a Polytechnic student (not a chance!), who has devoted his entire life trying to model; I mean to propose a scientific theory of music. He died like ten years ago, and his book, the first edition, in Seoul in 1966, entitled Treatise on musical objects. Well, what is needed here is to arrive to talk about a painting, for example, in terms as precise and technical than those used by Schaeffer to talk about music. Everything, absolutely everything, is to do! It should even begin to acquire or build, imagine a totally new vocabulary to talk scientifically not only about music, but also painting, dance, sculpture, etc. We are facing an absolutely colossal task, and may raise generations and generations of researchers! I used the phrase “scientifically speaking” to mean what? Simply what is known in science as the “nature” of theory. What is a theory? To see clearly, neither more nor less. You may know that the word “theory” comes from a Greek word theamai that means “see” and that given in English, the word “theater” (theatron in Greek).

That said, I come to the third part of my presentation, namely the one I will suggest some ways forward. I leave a note on the fundamentally abstract art. Usually, they speak of abstraction in terms of cognition (logos.) But what we must understand is that abstraction is not a matter of logic: it is a matter of technique. There would be no art if we did not have the technical ability of abstraction, and that is why all art is abstract. The “concrete art” does not exist, so there is no more “concrete music” than there is “concrete dance” and “concrete painting”, etc. Plato, Kant and Hegel had indeed found that art is abstract: they bound to the intelligible, and they were absolutely right. But the trouble is that, for them, the intelligible was the logos, that is to say the word, language, or the trial. Automatically, this reduction due to the logos has gone astray because they do not understand that there is in man a technical rationality. So it is not worth to read them!

To explore the abstract nature of art, it is better to study the drawings of children in a kinder garden class. But for that one that is interested in this child’s drawing, it took the venting process of painting done by the Surrealists to say this time of the modern art when art was no longer subservient to the resemblance. This has freed everyone. But what should grasp is why the kid’s drawing is necessarily and immediately, spontaneously, abstract. But as it does not give the ability to ignore the child, refuses to believe that it is rational and verbally and technically. Personally, I think we should consider the child’s drawing to study from life, technique abstraction. But for that it must make its production an object of study and not an object of admiration. We all tend, insofar as they are our little darlings who do this to save the museum. Even in schools, the masterpieces can be visited. It is the “gallery!” And I compare readily the child’s drawing of the cartoon. It said: “The cartoon? Minor art!. Absolutely not! The caricature drawing as a child, means a hell of analysis! Analysis of what? Everything that is there, and there are theories to the issue. But you quite realize the abstraction of caricature. A caricature is almost as abstract as a painting the Mona Lisa, which is perhaps in any Western painting, the height of abstraction!

Of course, we must go much further. When, for example, a mathematician sees an apple what attract his attention? The geometry of the sphere. But it is also what interests Cézanne! I mean that abstraction is exactly the same. The mathematician and the artist do not address the sphere of the same way, of course, but they are also abstract. Another example, take the high fashion. When you see a parade of models, you say: “It is not possible! No women will wear that! This is not done! It means that the eye of big fashion -Christian Lacroix, for example -is a geometric look exactly like the eye of the artist. What he captures in there, this is not the woman he could not care. A Dress Made by an artist in high fashion is not meant to be worn, as well as Cézanne’s apples are not made to be eaten. What interests Christian Lacroix is a geometric body, just as in architecture, we have a geometric habitat. Besides, is it a coincidence that “habit” and “habitat” are two words very related? (There is certainly no coincidence that the Latin word habitus, meaning “way of being,”) In short, the dress in “haute couture” and the Parthenon, is strictly the same thing! With Gagnepain, called “figure” almost geometric sense, these two types of art.

But this art abstraction is evident not only in technical rationality terms but also in rationality verbal terms . Thus, just as Cézanne’s apples are not made to be eaten, and the dress by Christian Lacroix, as it is an art, not made to be worn, so the message report called the poem is not to say something (example: “Honey, can you pass me the bread?.”) The poem is, basically talking without saying anything, since the message is taking he to be, just as in the figure, the path (or, if you want the gesture) is taken him to be. That is what showed in my opinion and definitely a great linguist, I am referring to Roman Jacobson. In his famous tests of general linguistics, published, also in 1966, analyzing the various “functions” of language, Jacobson makes room to participate in the “poetic function” as it defines how the message has “return to the message:” “The sight (Einstellung) of the message as such, the focus on the message for its own account, is what characterizes the “poetic function.” What does this mean? Jacobson takes an illustration the political slogan: I like Ike (Ike is the nickname of Eisenhower, presidential candidate of his country). You see clearly that the “poetic function” of Jacobson defines the method of producing a message that is also a quote to him, the concepts of rhyme and rhythm. In other words, a poem, phonologically (in the guise of sound) or semi logically (under the aspect of meaning) is a refrain and a cover. And this revival is the fact that the poem has to say, poetically, that is to say as it is Art, is nothing other than what it is. The poem gives us its own law. If I tell you:

“In Paris

On a gray horse

In Nevers

On a horse…?

…Green, of course! You have no more choice than Max Jacob had. That is what we call “inspiration.” You see it is quite simple: “In Paris …”

In short, you can say now that a poem is the linguistic structure is itself the object. This makes the importance of prosody (metrical verse, melody, rhythm, etc.) There is no question of talking to eye on the “final without end,” the “useful or pleasant,” the purging of the passions and the devil and all his train. You tell me that it is formal art. Of course it is a technicality, since the language is taking him to be not said! And just for music. I will tell you a true story from the life of Bach. One evening, Bach was playing a sonata in the living room of a German baroness as there are many. When he had finished interpreting his composition: “Ah! Master! It is wonderful!… But what did you wanted to say? Then Bach moved again to the keyboard, and replays his sonata. And when he had finished: “That, dear Baroness, which is what I meant.” It is, nonetheless, pretty darn interesting! This means simply that music, like poetry, works in closed circuit, and thus nothing can be “translated” as they say, nothing can “mirror” itself. His motto is: “My end is my beginning.” That is, if you want the snake biting its tail. Basically, the art factory that manufactures a point, that’s all.

So the figure in terms of technical rationality, is the equivalent of poem, in terms of verbal rationality. But this does not stop there, it also applies in terms of social rationality, as usual, is taking himself to be, its ceremonial, as also, finally, in terms of rational ethics, which behavior, is taking itself to be, its feat. It is here, complete what I told you some time ago about the “set” (as defined Gagnepain, this time) of the cultural dialectic, the tendency of any reinvestment of abstraction in favor, antagonistically or pole (structural) of abstraction, is the natural hub, what is still called “concrete.” Well, we must add a third referred Poem…, figure, ceremony and match achievement (in rhetoric, industry, politics and morality) in a performance endocentric (word coined from the Greek prefix endo-, meaning “in” and used to form the “endogenous” “endocardium,” “endoscopy,” etc.) that is to say, in a performance in which rationality is involved not in the outside world (it would be referred to something exocentric,) but inside (endo-) itself. You see, from the inability to avoid neologisms: new object to, new language. As I said, the snake biting its tail. But this is no way to be empty, because every time the process takes himself to be the poem is not empty: the message is full of itself, the figure is not empty, the book is full of itself, the ceremony is not empty, that use is full of itself, and finally the exploit is not empty, it is full of moral behavior in itself. In all these cases, the important thing is to understand that the aesthetic is, on every level, partly as other targeted, performance, but it characterizes the performance as it is still once endocentric.

And I would add that, of course, this is referred endocentric absolutely incompatible with the other two mentioned that they are exocentric: the poem is a poem in that it refrains (referred endocentric), it did not stop to say something (referred exocentric). It may be technically columns (referred exocentric), then these columns do young women called caryatids (referred endocentric) as the Greeks have done in this monument is located on the Acropolis of Athens and the called the Erechtéïon. Laying the foundation stone of a building can be a ceremony (referred endocentric) and be at the same time, a conspiratorial act done for the monument in question would collapse not (referred exocentric). Finally, you can do, without even suspecting it, the feat of beating the record of France’s one hundred meters (referred endocentric) just to catch your bus!

However, to remain in the kingdom of art, if you give this concept is a scope large enough (figure in the art of dance or figure skating, but also in the gymnastics ground, compulsory figures or figures free, etc.) you will see that this definition of art as the product of self-reference of a dialectical process of technical abstraction (I weigh each of my words), applies to all arts! I say absolutely everyone, from dance to the culinary arts, from architecture, sculpture, caricature, etc. I’m absolutely serious: take the time to think about giving you, yourself, some examples, you will see! It works! And if “it works” is that our hypothetical-deductive method is corroborated by the comings and goings between the observation of concrete and the theoretical hypothesis. Thus our theoretical position receives, not (yet) its clinical audit, but its validation. We have no access to proper scientific truth, however precarious and provisional as it is, but a proposal generally used in an explanatory model that is not built for the needs of a particular cause, but still operating in any similar occasion (if it was not the case, it would change the model, no more, no less).

In these conditions what would it be a true Science of Art? It is about analyzing the technical analysis implicitly made by the artist. In other words, here again what we have to do is to analyze an analysis “in double” in the mathematical sense, somehow. This complicates things! We analyze the analyzer! Do you realize the enormous complexity of the case? You can imagine that we will take centuries and centuries to achieve something!

And that’s not all! To be truly a science, it is necessary an experimental verification of the model that I just outlined.

And the rest is literature!… I mean, the imposture of an imposture that is suitable, before any unmasking of the strongest, if we want to progress.

écrit par admin \\ tags: aesthetics, art, art abstracts, endocentric, exocentric, figures, formal art, function poetics, geometrical eye, history art, leaders works, plastic arts, process dialectic, prosody, sculpture, social rationality, technical abstraction, technical rationality, technical style, the baroque's style, the implicit Gothic, theatre, Theory mediation humain science

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If you agree that concept is part of the sign, you already know that concept could be written. This is something, this is something that I’ve already asked me about; I discussed with you the issue of an ideogram (the figure) and ideogram (ritual). Today I want to quickly complete the analysis I’ve proposed, beginning by telling you a word of what is called the “symbol”.

I have returned from Egypt where I could admire the beautiful “paintings” that decorate the pharaonic parietal tombs. I am talking about “painting” murals, which, in my opinion is the most complete nonsense that we can make to these amazing human productions. It is not about painting (and therefore it is no “art,” with or without capitals), but rather a form of writing.

In other words, what they want to represent was not the “object” seen (thing or person,) but the idea of the thing, the concept. If you do not involve this fundamental distinction between the perceived object and the designed purpose (between the thing and the idea of the thing), for example the difference between percept and concept, you certainly can not achieve to understand the line of difference between painting (representation of percept) and pictographs (representation of concept).

Search now what is impossible to find!

To be clear, I will give you an example, even if it is trivial (I hope you will forgive me), at least the situation merit, I think, to talk to everyone. Take the well-known symbols in certain public places, reported as the toilet for ladies and gentlemen. While technically, these icons have a good relationship with some paint. In both cases, we have to do the same type of signal: this is a symbol that may be identical (wood, paper, rock, wall, etc.) Even with the same instruments, the same pigments, etc. But there is an absolutely huge difference: the painting is a direct object signal; the icon is signaling an idea on the object.

You will object me about that in the type of icon I just mentioned, we do not, however, confuse the silhouette of a man with the one of a woman. And you are absolutely right. I can answer this objection by saying that in any concept, there is a percept and in every percept there is a concept. But dealing with this issue tonight, we would go really too far! Just imagine that in a restaurant, you are a woman, sitting not far from the portrait hanging somewhere in the “Comtesse du Barry” represented “by nature,” you will say to yourself “is there the ladies bathroom?” No. You could not read the information. In other words, the painting is illegible. Why? Well, precisely because it is represented in three dimensions. However, the third dimension parasitic information to the extent that it creates, to use the vocabulary of telecommunications; it is the “noise.” It’s never the case of a pictogram, it is intended to be read (even if it participates by interposed concept, of course, be perceived), that is to say it is good writing.

That is what we have great difficulty to understand because, for us, writing is reduced to the logography, this means what we put in writing, that the technical nature of sound and meaning associated with the sign (that’s why we say that our writing is phonosemiographic). However, it is a huge mistake to reduce writing to the appearance it presents when we, in Europe, draw what are called letters. This reduction prevents us from seeing that, long before the Egyptians, that is to say, from the Paleolithic, man was already writing. It is absolutely certain that the alleged cave “paintings” of Lascaux were already writing a concept! “We have not done better!” Picasso said. He completely misunderstood the nature of what he contemplated. It is sure that, the Paleolithic man knew any more than Egyptians or Picasso, the third dimension. And downstream of Egyptians, take the icons (either Coptic or Byzantine) is still writing! The iconography does not care whether their representations are “lifelike”. Of course, since this is for him to write, and not to draw the portrait of the Virgin Mary! Would you ask if the figure of King David on some window in the cathedral of Charters is a good likeness?

The portrait is from the painting, that this means that it is the direct representation of anyone, without the mediation of the sign. Talking about this, the portrait is that, what, from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, we have called the “Fine Arts,” insofar as the aesthetic concerns prevailed to the resemblance. But this does not mean that, technically, the aesthetic concern is necessarily absent from writing. This is called calligraphy (that is, by etymological Greek, a word for “beautiful writing,”) provided, of course, does not reduce the term to the application that we put ourselves a form our letters on the school benches, with full and loose! The symbol of ancient Egypt, is also the calligraphy, as well as bison of Lascaux, the icon, the pattern made by the master glassmaker, etc. But you realize that in all cases I just mentioned, the aesthetic concern is certainly present, but it is secondary.

That allows us to sweep the idea that there would be people without writing. Whenever there is a man there is writing, of course but only, I repeat, if we do not reduce it to writing, in other words, if we are no longer ethno centrists. Going further, the fact that we can go back in time, we find the trace, for example, of ritual dances, no one can distinguish, it is true, if they are religious or secular (or funeral, for example.) Nevertheless, dance is body writing, writing without using any tool, it uses the natural instrument which is the body. But what does that change? Still, the dancers do not dance like we say the bees “dance”! What does this mean?

Simply that our body is able to express concepts -and concepts of sequences- an extreme abstraction and with a subtlety that presumes the dancer an absolutely amazing virtuosity. See the dance Hindu, for example, that creates, or rather recreates the world in dances; every attitude, every gesture, every pose (which controls not only the arms, hands and legs, but the neck, lips, eyes, eyebrows and forehead) manages to express the gods, the stars and all the creation (if this is not a narrative of the Ramayana). It is indeed an extremely complex writing, which should leave stunned the occidentals that we are, who, through laziness or ignorance, are, in general, never deigned to learn to read the script here. We could also mention the dance forms of writing that we meet in Bali, Cambodia and Japan, where the script reaches the extreme refinement of nô! It is true that, since these dances, we can speak again, of calligraphy, but this does not count here either: if this is written.

It is absurd to speak of “people without writing” and also of “people without history.” This idea of “people without history are linked to the technical nature of Western archives, which, means, the phenomenon of writing in the sense that we, the modern Europeans, understand. But before the invention of this writing, we knew the memory: there was not only the guys who wrote parietal or rock books, but others were dancing. These people obviously could not possibly conceive that there were “companies with history” and “societies without history.” These “societies without history” is a Western invention itself. Is that, insofar as the past seems all the more objective it is technology-in archives, deposited in places where we can maintain our form of how to write, it automatically appears that history is linked to knowledge of past filed. But when I spoke of writing, remember, I showed you that history is also included in the experience of companies, ritually, to commemorate other words, there is another way of writing we have defined as the rite, in other words, writing of a related sign, not because it has a formal way (phonosemiographic our writing), but it has conceptual. In short, we have shown that many companies that they say “no history” in fact wrote, but wrote in what is called the rite. The rite is a script that stores too, but it is not deposited archives: its archives exist only if they are dramatic, whether they are played as festive.

Under these conditions, you quite realize that there is no “societies without history,” there are companies that simply have a different kind of archiving as ours. Therefore, in a commemorative celebration in most societies that we believe they are (because they are not ours) ridiculous, there are always masks. These masks, reduced in number, representing the Veterans, the community founders, why do they use masks? Precisely because there is no creativity in the ceremony which is established you have the commemoration. The ancestors, then you live in the narrow sense that is to say that you are the ancestors from whom you are wearing masks. God knows all the blunders that have been written on the subject, and then we indeed are dealing with a type of writing. Our ancestors we have in our papers. The others, they cover their faces. In one case we have, in other cases they have. It’s no more magic in one case than in the other. In ancient societies which I have spoken, the elders, a ritual we live, just as ours are our sources. The famous “sources” of professional historians, these sources, there will always be sought in the grimoire (historian thinks he ought to be a bookworm), but the historian of the African people, for example the fact of attending the commemorative festivities: they are his “sources.” Actually, this is not really past that this is because it is a commemoration; it is not live past but to live like this, is a total of updating. In short, the purpose of history is not the past but the update of the past (this is still not the same thing!)

Finally, there are always people who say they are professionals and transmit orally story of group archive. Whether these stories are true or false have absolutely no importance, anyway, they all say roughly the same in a given society: consequently, these stories become founders of the group’s origins and, therefore, identity.

The case of all the tales that they have been and are still, in some societies, transmitting orally, they are writing, provided, again here, that we can reduce not writing to the appearance it presents to us. These stories follow a codified ritual of narrative composition, sequences of events nearly frozen, just as they would do in writing. It is impossible, for example, begin to tell (“here was a time …”) if you do not know the end (“… they were married and had many children.”) In other words, the storyteller does not talk like it when does gossip, “He talks like a book”, a term, it reproduces the narrative of memory (in some cases, it dictates.) It must be said that in this perspective, the distinction we make between an “oral literature” and a “written literature,” is absolutely false. All literature, indeed, is oral, but not what we use in our daily conversations.

Now what disgusts to most of our students of literature. Consider an example from music. Between the music and music theory (that is to say, writing the music), there is a world. Now, how many children or adolescents do not like a musical instrument because of the music theory? We say: “French are not musicians” Why? Because they are made to read or write music, almost never listen! But this is terrible! Well, that’s exactly transferable to literature. Let stop to make student worried about the writing (logographic) and let’s teach them to listen and of course to taste music.

That leads to a writing theory which must be completely renewed. To be true to consider a theory of writing is much more complex than we think, and it is why no one risks! In any case, this theory of writing, which have a lot to do, it have to consider all types of writing that instead of Graphing each other they play themselves, they dance together, they please each other, they sing together, etc. Because we must not imagine that the only way to writing is that we have by the Greeks and Latin interposed, we have inherited from the Phoenicians. The logography is a special way of writing that in the end is not an important part of history, it means, in the huge system that is the way man have always make information artificial. We have greatly simplified the problem because we look only for us and we constantly tell to ourselves that we are the humanity paragon.

But today, it is over. With modern technologies we have (radio, television, etc.) Writing is replaced by something else. It is true that the phonosemiographic writing never completely disappear (it complementarily continues to exist between the spelling, for example, and the computer). But it has always been like, but it is true that there were complementarities with ancient Egypt, among the pictogram, hieroglyphic writing and ritual (funeral or religious). As in the pictograms of Lascaux (and around the world) it was noted that, together with representations it contained many graphic or symbols (dots, spirals, grids, etc.) Which are probably the “legends” of these icons, provided to hear the word “legend” in the etymological sense: the verbal adjective legend (from the Latin verb legere) means “what must be read”. The final thing is that our time marks the end of the privilege of spelling.

écrit par admin \\ tags: Beautiful writing, calligraphy, ecriture concept, human productions, iconographer, ideogram, logography, oral literature, parietal frescoes, percept, phonosémiographique, pictogram, societies without history, Theory mediation humain science, written literature

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We face a very large and difficult game, which resides in the distinction that it should be carefully establish between, on one side, the language itself. I mean the cognitive processes to the phrase, and in the other hand, the languages countless and arbitrarily codified by all the companies, such or such time of their history, languages which president to the interlocution. I insist on the fact well put you in custody, because we have here a real obstacle, to extent that the process we are going to try to hunt down below the languages, emerges only invested in uses codified in number almost incalculable. It was understood that when an English said “water” when a French says “eau,” there is, certainly, an obvious difference of vocabulary – The difference which is, it, sociology (more precisely of the sociolinguistics). It must, however conceive that one as the other testify to the same capacity to sign. Then you see where the difficulty comes: we must take care not to impute the sign which is equivalent to its use, and, for this, bring to between parentheses, everything that makes that “water” and “eau” are, sociologically, words belonging to two different languages. We must recognize that this parenthesis in the language is very difficult to operate!

That said; let us start with the specific of the traditional definition of the sign as association of itself and its meaning. We know, today, that this definition is totally inadequate: since the beginning of the XX century, in effect, very exactly since Ferdinand de Saussure’s work, we know that his and this sense is to analyze conversely, this means that we cannot cut one of the two sides of the sign without automatically cut the other. To give you an image which will help you to understand this phenomenon, write, for example, on a piece of paper the word “maintenant,” and, armed of a pair of scissors, cut the word after the syllable “main”: you will have, on one side, a word, that means, in a system like French, “head,” “foot,” “leg”, etc. , and in the other hand, another word that oppose it and means “taking,” “unleashing,” “will,” etc. That is what Saussure called the reciprocity of two “faces” of the sign of language, that was called the “meaning” (at the level of the sign) and the “meant” (at the level of the sense). Take again the syllable “main” and replace the initial letter by “p” or “b,” it is obvious that, in the French system, it means “hand,” “bread” and “bath” and it serves to a totally different meaning. And it is so for all the languages that, each have, certainly, their own grid analysis of sound and direction, but which the signifying units all have in common to possess this bifaciality which means that they are always its analyzed by of sense and meaning analyzed by the sound (it is what defines, in Saussure’s terms, the “immanence of the sign.”)

But there is more: what characterizes all the language units, whatever the language is, there is also biaxiality it governs its mutual oppositions as well as its combinations. Of course, again, I will be extremely schematic for you to suggest the thing. I will take the example of the sound produced by a music instrument. There are, in reality, two ways of defining a music note: If I push, for example, on the key “g” of a piano keyboard, the note I cannot be perceive only with the other notes that could be in his place and that there is a point. The substance of the note is a degree in a certain vertical scale, scale that is called a “range.” But the note also has a relative value of difference compared to those which are above ore the one that follows, and this is what makes it possible what is called “melody.” All its musical is therefore an interference of a range and a melody, or, if you want, an opposition or a contrast, of a vertical axis and a horizontal axis. In other words, there is no melody without a range, and there is no range without melody!

Well, this double and reciprocal screening of a focuses on the other is the own of all our particulars, no matter what is the language we practice. There is always, basically, a grammatical and logic analysis we learned, not without good sense, namely, that the elements of a statement had a “nature” – this means an identity (vertical axis) – and a “function” (horizontal axis), this means that these two axis contribute, each for their part to the functioning of a statement (I leave aside, to simplify the great innovation of the successors of Saussure which was to extend this idea of function to the vocabulary itself). Or, for example, the unit “bread” (must be done, here, completely divorced from the spelling, and imagine that we are equivalent of the note “g”) “bread” does not exist, as a verbal unit, because I can say “the bread” or “he brained,” which allows me to classify the first unit in the range of nouns (range in which, lexically “bread” is opposed to “brained,” “brain,” etc. ), and to classify the second in the range of verbs (range in which, “painting” is opposed to “coloring,” “smudge”, etc. ). But, conversely, if I do not have the range, I mean the principle of classification; I could not organize these two units as I have done. We can no classify, without a layout, not a layout without no classification, or, if you prefer, there is no analysis on one of the two axis without an analysis on the other, this means that the two axis to analyze conversely, exactly as the two sides. That is the first contribution of Jean Gagnepain to the knowledge of language, on the basis of the clinic aphasiologique.

I want to clarify that is in the Middle Age that the old analysis date the one that many of you may have practiced at school, ate least I did; analyze a sentence, it is was to isolate the elements, of course, by defining their “nature” and then their “functions.” The “nature” meant “this thing which is defined.” The function was the report. But in the other hand, it has kept this opposition of nature and function, which is what, makes laugh all the “modern” linguists.  Well, that are the modern linguists which are made of fools, because they had been retained something that was important, I mean an axis opposition between a classification of identities and, in the other hand, an enumeration of units. Therefore, the grammatical analysis, which comes in a straight line of Aristotle, has been maintained by the grammarians who have not blushing, up to the emergence of our “school teachers.” The former teachers we may have left in primary education, but we have at least learned something. And this was nothing! (It is true that they could not say a word of the projection of the axis.)

Bifaciality and biaxiality that is what defines what is called the structure of language, structure we must design as a purely and formal system, without any content: the faces and the axis do not have any existence butt a merely virtual. This prevents not, of course, the existence of their reciprocal analysis, reciprocal analysis proven by the results of the clinic aphasiologique.

But it is the same clinic which led Jean Gagnepain, not only to highlight the biaxiality to his own process of language, which was already a fantastic step comparing to Saussure, but to ask, in 1960-1970, the assumption (since scientifically verified) of the intervention, in the implementation of the sign, a third process: a dialectical process. What is it?

It is understood that signify the language units, is not the only to their virtual structure, it cannot be anything other than a mere “for-say.” Because to speak, is always speak of something, in other words, if, in the first time (first in the sense logical and not chronological) we fly out of our perceptive representations, thus acceding to the structure, we reinvest, then, this structure in the universe of “things,” I mean, in essence, in the world to say. In other words, the structure is the implicit mediation (“unconscious,” if you want) between the percept and the concept: design (conceptualize, some people say) is beyond our representations, we do ideas, putting things in report these ideas, and, therefore, we systematize. Jean Gagnepain called grammar this formal structure of the sign (its bifaciality and its biaxiality) and “rhetorical,” the reinvestment of its structure which allows us to develop a concept.

There are three very important details to bring to this quick presentation.

The first is that if, in the model of the sign prepared by Saussure, the concept is external to sign, in the model developed by Jean Gagnepain, the concept is an integral part of the sign: it is the result of his mediation implicit in the structure in the circumstances, in other words, it is the product of the reinvestment of the structure in the universe of things to say, while not ceasing not to participate in sign.

The second important precision is that, this reinvestment is never a concept that can be completely adhered to the thing (the word “dog” do not bite!), and it is what defines polysemy of signifying units (“I custody a dog of his bitch.”) Take, again, for example, the word “foot”: it has a plurality of meanings which a dictionary of the English language may try to make the turn (“the human foot,” “the foot of a table,” “the foot of a mountain” “the foot of the nose,” etc.) And it is the same with all our statements. If I say: “Ernestine feels the lavender”, I want to say that Ernestine breathes a bouquet of flowers of lavender, or that it is perfumed with water of lavender? Of course, my three examples are extremely simplistic, but they will be enough, I hope. To make you appear that what is called “the words” are absolutely not labels likely to stick to things: despite all the desperate efforts that we can provide to try to reduce this many meanings, which defines their fundamental impropriety, in order to reach absolute transparency of words, there will always remain between the words and things that we “play” (as we speak, for example, the game between two pieces of wood or between two mechanisms,) and fortunately, because this is the game, precisely, it allows us to think. You see, as well as thinking, it is to exploit (certainly, with more or less of happiness!) this irreducible and permanent game which exists between the language of which we have the faculty and what we sometimes, baptize “real.”

Finally, I remind you that this “game” which I have just you spoken can be more or less important. This game is in his maximum status when we tend to fold the world to say, the words that we have to say, it is minimum when we tend to bend our words to this same world to say. In a case, you have this dialog in Raymond Devos way: “- The sea raves – Well, it must be appeased!,” In the other cases, one will speak about nitric acid, sulfuric or hydrochloric acid, for example, formulations that are trying to “paste,” the more possible, to what we believe to be the reality. In other words, the reinvestment that we are doing in the “real” of the verbal structure is submitted to the two “referred” antagonists you know well: the referred that Jean Gagnepain calls, one, mythical, the other, scientific, and you see, already, that myth and science are also rational one and the other, to the extent that they are all two of the same faculty of design, in other words they are the product of the same process, which is the same of a verbal rationality.

If you approve this model of verbal rationality mediations; I have very quickly explained you, the important questions will receive an initial response, to begin by the famous so-called “animal language.” I have recently seen exposed, in a great bookstore of our city in a good place, a book recently published and the title that caught my eye was: “Animals do they think?” I do not have to say that I did not see the first page of the book. The answer to this question is “No!,” Of course, since the animals do not possess this faculty of verbal rationality they cannot think this faculty belongs to the man. This does not say, of course, that animals emit no messages, and by means more or less complexes, even extremely sophisticated (even if it is far to know all), but it must do, animals are animals!

In a general way, this makes today a screen and we often prevents to see what distinguishes the animal rights, it is the existence of the etho-logy, I mean, the science of animal “morals”, while the animal belongs in its entirety to the animal biology (just as there is the plant biology), and, in its “morals,” to zoology (just as there is the botany.) Daring to do a “science of animal morals,” it is to make to the classical an old evolutionary sociology which said that, in animal, there is something of men, in other words that there is no difference with human, which, scientifically, has never been proven. In contrast, which is in the process of being proved, to the current hour, thanks to clinical researches by Jean Gagnepain, it is that there is a monkey in a man, here again, there is no not man in the monkey! We must admit that ethologic, to the point where it has remained, is a science without object which cannot only lead to the resurgence of the fable, this means that instead of using the study of the animal (of the animal biology and zoology) to study the natural functions that we have in common with him (in particular the memory, certain modes of communication by the contagion, signals, etc.) and especially what distinguishes us from them, the vast majority of ethologic doctors are not interested in animals that for relate it to us, which does not teach us nothing on the man, since, in any case, what the animal does, as we will see later, he does it different than a man.

Any ethology, being, therefore set aside, is absolutely sure, however, that the study of animals present a real interest in the specialist of the humanities in so far as it allows to explain, free state (to the state sometimes said “wild,”) which, among the man, also works, but always framed by the culture, namely natural processes available to it as animal, and in particular the capacity of percept. But the man is doing something else with this capacity. You see, at the same time that all the interests that there would be in the Koko, Washoe, Viki and other anthropoid apes, with the condition to take some precautions, especially when it compares their behavior so-called “language” to that of a child. Because, if the results of tests proposed for children and monkeys are often neighbors, one and the other are not at all in the same situation, in the extent that a child has the sole the capacity of verbal abstraction, so that we imagine that it is the same for the monkey as for the child, well this is false. There is a huge difference between children and monkeys, a monkey whose performance may not be comparable to those of the child, since the problem that is shall submit to the two, under the name of “language,” the one has it, while the other has nothing.

Added this, we can say that the behavioral assumption is much more serious than the evolutionary premise to the extent that is all a problem of experimentation in human sciences which is asked there: the behaviorism consisting not to take into account that the results, this means the successes and failures, misses of the only thing that should be apprehend, namely procedures, and, in the extent that error alone is human (provided that the analysis of the man alone, even if this analysis is implicit, this is the mechanisms of these errors which should be object of attention.) As an illustration, some tests so-called “non-verbal,” but which are in fact full of “verbosity”, I mean that we cannot solve without design. Such is the famous experience of Binet, which consists in this: we have several boxes returned, and we put sugar under one, the first and then under the second, and then under the third, etc. We are asking the monkey, and the child to seek the sugar; at the beginning, monkey and child will seek the sugar under the box where it was previously, but from the third attempt, the child and the monkey diverge: the monkey continues to seek in the previous box, while the child goes directly to the next box, because he has designed, without knowing of course, that the sugar is under the following box. That is what is called, intellectually, the intelligence: what a child has seized, it is a report, and it has seized a report, it is because he is able to understand, and it is capable of concept, it means to express of formal and not to express of things, it is that he is capable of language.

There is no absolutely no place to ask the question: “Do the animals think?,” Nor to speak of “animal intelligence,” even about these charming puppets which are, apparently, the best friends of the man. At worst, an animal is in a situation of pure dressage I mean the addiction to cultural realities which he will never have the key: as much as he learns to a mascot to swim using the arms! In contrast, the verbal rationality is done to humans, children are not in the same situation of animals because he can learn, he suffers infinitely less than an animal, because he is already able to understand the problematic in the problem of this proposes, it means to call into a question the way to ask, or even to rest, and this is why it will tend, as it is badly listened, to reformulate the problem otherwise, he will say that he is mistaken: it is why to err is human (the monkey is never wrong). In other words, for a child there is a really problematic, which is no the case for a monkey: it is purely and simply coercion, or even cruelty to animals.

That is why, it is absurd to speak of an “artificial intelligence” when we are talking about computers, even if only because, they are never mistaken (or at least, are they supposed to not be mistaken) they must be so precise that they have to get with the solution. We laughed with Descartes theory of an “animal-machine,” well, at least he was, certainly infinitely less ridiculous to speak, of an “animal-machine” in the seventeenth century, than ours ideas of today when we talk about an “electronic brain,” for example a “brain-machine”. In each case, it is in fact a metaphor that has absolutely no scientific value, a metaphor that we only return to Descartes when we compare animals to machines, or animal’s machines, and -the most ridiculous! – The human animals! To say the truth, whether it is an animal or a machine, we are dealing with two types of operations that have nothing to do with ours -that operation, in the case of the computer (which function by storage and drainage, for example “memory” and “Program”) is infinitely more dopey than the animal.

Because animals are capable of some abstraction degree and sensorial perception. They have, the capacity of that (unlike the computer!) They are under a natural treatment. You may know, as I have shown, that the seizure of an object returns to the animal to the seizure of another subject that he “imagined” (in the Sartre sense, and not analytic.) He has treated the subject in a particular way, a first object send it to a second, and even he has little imagination, the second referring to a third, etc. That defines a series. However, if you call the first object index and the second object meaning, indeed the second object may be in serial relation, the index of a third object becomes meaningless, so that in the series, any object can be defined by index and the place it occupies. But what do man does? He interrupts, as you know, the serial connection for each index and the link direction, and this bond of reciprocity defines, as we have seen, the “immanence of the sign, that is to say its bifaciality.”

On the other hand, it is perhaps not impossible that the ape, in certain situations of training (and perhaps to the “wild” status) is capable of selecting signals (vertical axis) and to combine (horizontal axis), but any ethnologist has not yet scientifically proven that the monkey had the ability to perform the reciprocal analysis of the two axes, an analysis which defines the biaxiality. And if the fact was established, it should still prove that he is capable of dialectic! In other words, if by chance you encounter a monkey before you manifest all the signs of an ability to analyze both bifacial, biaxial and dialectic, there is no possible doubt: as hairy as it is, you are dealing with a man!

That said, do not believe that man is “superior” to the monkey; that we are animals too, but different, that’s all. Better, even if we do not have, as some animals, at least the sensory and perception, and if we did not share with them the ability to treat it naturally, we would be absolutely incapable, of projecting our rationality to emerge in the dialectic of the sign. This time, we can say that there is no man because there’s a monkey in him!

What we can know for sure is that computers do not have any sensorial perception (which are the two levels of animal representation), not already in any way, treat them naturally! How do you think he has the ability to culturally process a natural treatment to make the sign? You see that to speak of an “artificial intelligence” and an “electronic brain” or a “computer language” we should begin by putting the monkey on the computer! It is clear that manufacturing intelligence or rational word, it is, in short, a dream of enlightened people!

It is true, however, that machines can go much further than animals and much further than men, and far beyond even that it does today: how our computers are the beginning of the XXI century it is absolutely ridiculous (in a few years they will probably “talk” almost like us, and they are certainly capable of much more), but the procedures are not the same. The results are almost perfect, but, precisely, computers are never wrong, at least not as the man is wrong, simply because is a man, and only he has the power to think.

In summary, you see that there are three ways of processing information: the artificial way (by storing and programming), the simplest and only accessible to the machine, the natural way, infinitely more complex and is only accessible to the animal and finally as cultural -that is peculiar to man, and which alone involves cognitive processes totally unconscious outside their manifestations in languages: an analysis of implicit representations, the man emerges from the structure (the faces and axes) and the reinvestment of this structure in the economy. That leads me to conclude, to say a word about the opposition that is commonly arises between the abstract and the concrete.

In addressing the problem of the concrete and the abstract, they generally say that a child begins with the concrete and ends with the abstract, and it sees “progress” of thought (see the work of Piaget, for example). However, in language, there is absolutely nothing concrete: all languages are abstract, so that instead of considering the process as a supposed “progress” we must say that a man is abstract from the start, and it is precisely this ability of abstraction that allows him to manufacture concrete. In other words, what we call real is just the product of reinvestment in the “real” of our ability to structure, so that we can never grasp the abstract or concrete: we can not grasp that the bipolar relationship between the two.

That can show us that the definition of sign may be the most faithful to the theory developed by John Gagnepain: the sign is where the mutual contradiction of the abstract and concrete. This means that we can not enter, anywhere, an abstraction that does not refer to a specific, nor, a concrete regardless of abstraction that allows to ask. The best that can specialists of humanities do is to take this contradiction round the waist, and make their subject.

And I would add, and this is where I conclude that this treatment of concrete-abstract representation is common to all men: not only to the “thinker,” but the child at least so far as a Nobel Prize. In other words, the mechanisms of abstraction do not have sense of the age or environment, or occupation, etc. Nor should it be considered as a knowledge “degree.”

Translated by WEBOMAX

écrit par admin \\ tags: abstract, Abstraction, analysis reciproque, aphasiologie, aphasique, béhavoriste, brains machines, capacity of sign, cognitive processes, ethologie, ferdinand of saussure, human difference threshold, parsing, rhetoric, saussurien, sensorialité, sound and sense, Theory mediation humain science, thought, to conceptualize, to think

To develop a genuine science of man, it should be, not only to get rid of literary, but also, to make an antagonism of neuron (the nerve, which is in one side of the body) and the psyche : l spirit, this means all the rest, which we don not know where it is located. In other words, what I would like to show you, today, is that these two schools of thoughts, which are the neurosciences and psychoanalysis, come under a totally and obsolete dualism, despite the many debates that it continues to generate even today, here or over there.

In the neurosciences, you have a scientific apparatus absolutely remarkable and, in the other hand, this neuroscience has the right to seek in the cortical packaging…but about what? The specialists have never posed the question of how to formulate with precision the “data” they submit to their apparatus. Once again, their apparatus are absolutely wonderful, but that is being used for encephalography, scanners, Magnetic Resonance Imaging etc. that is what they are doing, generally, some of these specialists? Well! They put a guy in a camera, and they tell him: “Go! Think!” And then these scientists say to you: “Do you see the lights? On the right, left! Oh, there! But ask them the question: “What is to think?” At that time, they are going to seat, and they will say “serious problem! We don’t know about that.” In the end this is the projection of the nature sciences (the “nat-science”) that we try to apply it in a simplified form, which is the source of the faculty to know or “cognition” (this is why we call it as a “Cognitive” of something to give.) It is the “Neuronal man” by Pierre Changeux.

Most formidable, still, the neurosciences claim to give a report for almost all of the phenomena culture. Thus, some neurobiology is asking, with the greatest seriousness, if it exist a homosexuality gene, a gene of love, and even a gene of God! I am not inventing anything! I had here a special number of the “Science and life” magazine devoted to the question. It seems that “Neurotheology” is to working! It is done: “It was discovered (I quote) the crucial role of a small molecule among those who have faith.” The “neurotheologue” was questioned about the nature of God, and here is his answer: “Of course, the definition of God that we use is not the one from the theologian’s, which reflect accurately on the nature the attributes of God. To us, it is simply defined as a superior entity, often invisible, and the origin of the world.” We are pretty advanced!

And again: I have looked for, a magazine a “serious” one (“The World of religions”) which has devoted a file review for the question: “Are we programmed to believe?” I cannot resist reading you the first lines of the first article: “The spectacular advances of neurosciences, in particular the techniques of brain imaging, have helped to skip “the ecstasy” scanner. The images of a Buddhist brain…” (But is Buddhism a religion?)… “The Buddhist brain in meditation or the Franciscan’s ones in prayer have shown a neurological particular state, which opens the way to speculate: is the brain programmed to believe, or are religions “derivative” of cognitive processes?” I am not inventing anything. It is from Bouvard and Pécuchet, neither more nor less! You laugh about the “Neurotheology.” Well, be aware about that, in his last book, Changeux has just invented, in some way, the “neuroepistemology,” and the “neuroethic” (“The True, the beautiful, the Good”) “It is enormous!” Flaubert will laugh. I have said enough, I think, that you understand that, neurosciences are, currently, a genuine end of route. Why? Because, this does not possess a rationality human model, the questions that they make are silly. The most formidable thing is that the neurosciences, take it all! All the suckers throw themselves into them. Why it takes that? Here again, because this fact seems serious.

If the neurosciences represent, currently, the “nat-sciences” applied to the man, we can say that the psychoanalysts still practiced their art (they are less and less numerous, it is true, and, in less than ten years, they no longer exist), and they are somewhat the “new philosophers of the man” They talk a lot about losing of sight one of the great Greeks myths, condemning to a neo-philosophy: they represent the persistence of the Renaissance philosophers, exactly as the neuroscience represent the continuation of the “nat-sciences” of the same time. They are dependent of the tradition of “conventional humanities,” the others of positivism. It is true that we can say that any of the two schools has not put, neither a foot, in the field of a genuine Science of man.

In fact, we can consider that neurosciences and psychoanalysis are only half sciences. Some of them have a scientific apparatus absolutely wonderful, and which does not stop of progressing from day to day, but, as they have no model of the man, they do not build their data. The other – psychoanalysts- with this double-bottom that they pose in rights and that they call “unconscious” clearly defines their data, but they have no scientific laboratory to check the validity and their model of man and the pitch that they take on him. You see from where comes their antagonism, antagonism in which it is not to take sides. In other words, the neurosciences are real sciences in what they have a technical apparatus which is constantly progress from day to day but those are the real sciences of a false object, since they have no idea of what is a man. As to the psychoanalysis, we can say that it is the false science of a true object. Then some more conciliatory and another, say: “well let us put a little of ours: we can perhaps understand each other. And see that in the end, we are compatible.” But what can that give, I ask you, the amalgam of nonsense (as far as the amalgam is possible). How, for example, do you want  to hear about the Cognitive which are from God the effect of a molecule, and psychoanalysts which make it a neurosis or “sublimation” of a sexuality (confused with the desire that it inspires)?

Honestly, we can take from psychoanalysis, which had invented Freud, the beginning of a full understanding of this confrontation, what his successors, by laziness or impotence, have completely neglected. The unfortunate Freud, basically, was betrayed by his heirs. About what was he dreaming? About biology which one day will allow to find the cortical packaging of psychoses, of the neuroses, etc. Freud, which was infinitely more intelligent than those from today, wrote in 1920: “Biology is really a field to unlimited possibilities. We must expect to receive form it the lights, the most surprising lights, and we cannot guess the responses which it will give, in some decades, to the questions that we ask. It will perhaps be, and probably, responses such as they will make collapse the entire building of our artificial assumptions” (Gesammelte Werke). We wonder if analysts have never read Freud! That baptized themselves as “the neurologist Viennese” has not ceased to tell that: “All that I say, is very nice, but what will remain is the poetry if we never develop a new biology.” Why new? Because “veterinary” biology was from his time, was inadequate for mental pathologies that he was studying.

Well, this new biology in which Freud was presenting the emergence that (and the one that he dreamed), Jean Gagnepain masterfully presented the foundations in the last book he published prior to his disappearance, and which presents more than one will (“one more reason or one less – About medicine and theology”), in particular the first part of his work named: “Spirit of body, anthropology appreciation.” “Anthropology,” why? Because it is a biology which does not reduce what there is, in the man or in the chimpanzee, but biology of pathologies of the man, which does not excludes, of course, the taking into account of pathologies that we share with animals. Knowing these things, this will certainly make the “Oedipus complex,” no longer exist, either the “narcissism,” nor the “dual relationship” and everything about that. Continue to teach the psychoanalysis model as a dogma is, today, absolutely ridiculous.

You see that Jean Gagnepain is the end of the perennial debate about dualism: spirit against material, psyche against neuron, angel against evil, etc. which is still working on mentalities: nobody accepts having an ill mentality, but everyone accepts to have a little crazy nerve, especially with the stress of modern life etc.! It is true that there is a little more than a century of psychiatry distinguishing the psychastheniques (sick of the psyche,) and the (ill neuron,) I mean, in the one hand, “psychopath” (according to the terminology traditional of psychiatric) which were the mentally ill, and, in the other hand, “neuropaths”, which were, as we say “sick of raw nerves.” But now we can no longer accept the separation of neuron and psyche. The dualism became weak: we cannot say anything, concerning the culture of pathologies, which has a cortical packaging, and therefore neurological disorders. In the end we will have to call the psychology the “human neurology” and neurology, at least the one that is not interested but only in the multiple sclerosis, the “human psychology.” You have there, in a single and the same framework, (and we must insist on the fact that there is no it only one) two aspects of a same reality. We no longer have the right to oppose, a dualistic way what belongs, to the beast and what belongs to the angel. In fact, neurology and psychology are two aspects, natural or cultural, and what belongs to human. In short, there is no neurology, nor psychology: there is no that a single science, which is indeed this “anthropology” whose paternity belongs to Jean Gagnepain.

At the same time, it is not about doing the respective share of somatic and psychic. There is somatic everywhere. If we do not have the cortex that we have, we could not have, no more, the faculties we have now. What we need to review is not at all the ratio between the somatic and the psychic giving more importance to one or the other: it must be admitted that everything is psyquesomatique…or psychosomatic (call in the way you like). A man is an entirely being, so we cannot separate the factors that constitute him. I mean, we must to understand the contradiction of neurology and psychology, with the purpose of better understand the difference in the operation of animals and humans functioning. This difference was not until now sufficiently asked. Or, more exactly, it is raised by variety of specialists (by, ethnologists, neurologists or psychologists) if they do not meet, they will not invade the field of the other without ever happen, not a compromise, (since I have told you that this was impossible,) but to an overrun of their differences.

In other words, we must consider that a man is a spiritual body, or a body spirit, as you want. It is an absurdity to admit that a spirit is intangible. The spirit is the function of the body: we have a different body from the one of the chimpanzee; I mean a body able to make us access to faculties that are the language, technical, society and the rules. It is true that we cannot say that the body is the house, and that there is a spirit which is traveling in the interior. The spirit is the function of the body that we have.

In these conditions, and it is by these words that I will conclude, you understand that to speak of materialism or of spiritualism is a philosophical stupidity. Why? Because, of a side, we put the body, on the other, the spirit. But why do we have to favor one or another? Speaking of the spirit as something which has nothing to do with the body or talk about the body as something which has nothing to do with the spirit is not important. Not a question of opt for one or the other. We are neither body nor spirit, but a type of body particular which enables us to develop mind.

Translated by WEBOMAX

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