20. The Hard-Boiled Egg and the Egg Timer
I’ll keep up with my usual manner and be honest: I couldn’t found this expression in Jean Gagnepain’s “Vouloir dire”, that I fancied knowing inside out. I’m a little offended, and saddened as well: my memory is starting to break down. So are my strengths. Reading the work of Jean Gagnepain has somewhat tired me out. Power to the youth (but where are they?).
What I wanted to tell you was that Jean Gagnepain’s thoughts are quite tricky to comprehend, for in truth the most important thing to understand in all the phenomena of culture is the dialectic. I prefer to use this word rather than “structure”, because a very bad issue of the journal “Le Débat” (Gallimard) made a special feature on Jean Gagnepain several years ago, and he was almost introduced as an old-fashioned “structuralist” in there! (I already had the opportunity to talk about this awful issue before you)
So, dialectic it is. Let matters be clear, as one philosopher (?) by the name of Philippe de Lara has wrote: “It seems to me that mediation is losing a part of its rigor and operative strength with these dialectic concepts born out of a vague Marxism and the Lacanian theory of truth. Is dialectic more than a superb representation, a way to depict the complexity of human rationality, but not a meaningful theory? For me, and despite the importance that Gagnepain grants it, the flood of the dialectic language after a certain level of the mediation is a sign of a difficulty and not its solution” (Philippe de Lara, Du langage à l’anthropologie générale (From Language to General Anthropology), in “Le Débat”, issue 140, May-August 2006, p.150). Obviously, this gentleman has not read a single line from Jean Gagnepain, or my own “Introduction…”.
Which gives an opportunity to few words about this book that I wrote under the close guidance of the Master: a handwritten correspondence evidences this quite interesting collaboration. I objected to signing this book, for in my opinion Jean Gagnepain’s name should have been the only author mentioned. He in turn strongly disagreed, just as he refused to be a co-author. For him, a disciple isn’t a ghostwriter: “A disciple, in its former Academie meaning, isn’t indeed a ghostwriter…” (letter sent to me on November 19, 1998). I can only hope that this ends the slanders and rumors that spread, born of course out of the jealousy of some petty people.
I would then like to note that in the glossary included at the end of “our” book, meticulously reviewed by Jean Gagnepain, I distinguish between two meanings:
1)Implicit process through which first man denies the things he shares with animal in order to reach a formal abstract principle, then rejects this negativity to put this formal principle back into his animality.
2) Binary opposition in which no term can be separated from the other one.
NB: it should be noted about the first meaning that the dialectic process through which man is acculturating his nature implies that there are three poles (or “moments”) and two stages, akin to the fact that there are only two intervals between three posts (the three poles are the natural pole, the formal pole and the pole of the formal pole reaching back into the natural pole; and the two stages are the access to abstraction (in the formal pole) and the return of such abstraction into the natural (return stage). It should also be noted that despite the fact that their use cannot be avoided, the word “first” and “then” used in this definition, there’s no chronological side in this: both stages are dialectically simultaneous.
Mr. de Lara could have hugely benefited from this. But why did I need to provide such clarifications? So that the word “process” by which I started my definition may not be ambiguous. If Mr. Lara were to read the first philosophy dictionary he can get his hands on, he will see that “process” is for the most part defined as a “mode of functioning” (model) and “organization in time” (chronology), of which Jean Gagnepain never refers to! Yet Jean Gagnepain isn’t being intellectually dishonest by doing so; for when he uses the word “dialectic”, he isn’t simply stating:”here, I use the word with the dialectic of nature and culture meaning” or “here, I’m using the word dialectic in its bipolar sense”. It’s just that reading the books of Jean Gagnepain requires at least the intellectual capacity of a student in his final year of secondary school!
Let’s exemplify both uses of “dialectic” in Jean Gagnepain’s work:
What is the dialectic of the sign? Here, it is necessary that you remember what I explained when we wondered: “what is thinking?”:
1. In the nature/culture dialectic sense: man uses the percept (first pole) as a springboard, rejects this percept (first stage), which allows him to enter the structure (second pole), then he denies this negativity (second stage) and uses this structure back into the nature to produce the concept (third pole).
2. In the bipolar relation sense: we refer here to what Jean Gagnepain calls the grammatical-rhetorical dialectic, where the structure (grammar) is opposed to the concept (rhetoric), with the precision that neither the (abstract) structure nor the (real) concept should be sought inside the brain, the process enabling their antinomy should be.
You can thus comprehend why the neurosciences have to seek the cortical conditioning of a unique process of abstraction, whatever level of rationality can be perceived by the clinic: verbal, technical, social or ethical rationality. This is an outstanding economy!
Under these conditions, how can the Theory of Mediation be defined? It’s a non-philosophical theory of reason, and I’d even say an antiphilosophical (and antihistorical) theory. How can Marcel Gauchet get it right, when he calls himself a philosopher and a historian? You have got to be kidding me!
In other words, we need to seek the cortical conditioning of the things we share with animals as well as the cortical conditioning of abstraction, which are:
- The faces
- The axis
- The nature/culture dialectic
Until now, neurosciences did what they could do, by asking the philosophers, linguists and human sciences experts to provide them with a model. Yet nobody could give them the right model until Jean Gagnepain.
Finally, I would like to add that the Theory of Mediation is an antipositivist theory of reason. What is positivism? Well, for a quick answer, I’d venture that it’s the spontaneous inclination of the mind to think the moon is made of green cheese, when it says for example that “leek” is a concrete word whereas “freedom” is an abstract one. From a cognitive process standpoint, both “leek” and “freedom” are abstract. The same thing can be said when one tells, “that’s something concrete”… Now you can understand that there’s no abstract per se, or a concrete per se. The only thing that exists is the bipolar relation between them, and that applies for everything. There’s not man in one side and environment in the other side, or the body and the person, etc. Even the most moronic mediationnists know that! How can we then hold in high esteem someone as pathetic as Quentel, who fist issues a volume about the child, then another one about the parent! The parent is within the child, and the child is within the parent! They cannot be separated, at least if one has grasped the teachings of Jean Gagnepain. The chicken is within the egg, and vice-versa.
And now I feel that I may be forced to lodge a complaint against our two crooks (Gauchet-Quentel), as well as against the Presses Universitaires de Rennes, for moral and intellectual fraud.
Perhaps when I come back from vacations.