Homo Sive Scientia
François Laruelle
In En tant qu’Un (Paris: Aubier, 1991), p.54-60.
Some philosophers address themselves to scientists. This is not the first time, but they do so as “ordinary men,” with more humility than long before, in the hope that some among you will enter further into this new position of the problem. To take up the impossible dialogue of the sciences and philosophy on the henceforth basis of “non-philosophy” is for us of necessity.
Science is not philosophizable
What sets us apart? We no longer come, with philosophy in hand, to say: here’s the truth, the authentic thought, which must ground your very “positivist” and so philosophically “naïve” practice. Yes: we no longer ask of you to philosophize in your turn, by occasion and at the exit of the laboratory. We even say to you: most philosophers and epistemologists, who are only wheeled around [roués], lead you astray. Don’t feel obligated anymore to demand philosophy and anything else at all costs. The need to philosophize, that you say you experience, is born from the bosom of philosophy that you spontaneously adopt: it therefore proves nothing and is foreign to your practice. You refuse to believe in the unbelievable claim to which no philosopher ever renounces, that they negotiate at most: to found science, to legislate on it, to elucidate the meaning of its “technical” and “naïve” practice, to give science its genuine object, to decide on its type of objectivity and reality. But you only have to oppose it with “results” that are verified immanently and a surreptitiously philosophical reflection which blends what should not perhaps be so: local or partial scientific results of unelucidated philosophical presuppositions that you no longer at all control. We must go further, up to refusing a sobered epistemology which would abandon the question: “how is science, which exists de facto, possible?” and which would limit itself to a description and induction on the sciences to then take refuge (all ashamed drunk) in a sociology, as if the nihilist twilight of philosophical claims would really suppress them.
There is a scientific “thought”
Recently, one philosopher – Gilles-Gaston Granger – ceasing from being a philosopher of science to become an epistemologist of philosophy has admitted that philosophy does not have objects in the sense science has them (Kant, Althusser and even some others knew this), but that science was nevertheless a specific form of knowledge. It is perhaps here that the good position of the problem begins. Let’s extend this tendency, completing by inverting the criteria, the reasons and the sense of evaluation: science, as thought, not only as knowledge, is the measure of all things, of itself first, and then philosophy. Here is perhaps the new Archimedean point: science is the index of itself and therefore the index of philosophy. Correctly interpreted: we are not at all sure that this cogito of science, a necessarily naïve cogito, leads us back to Vienna or Cambridge and to a positivist reduction of philosophy.
We keep to this axiom which should found, provided that it would be interpreted in full rigor in what it says, a new posture of thought and another relation, otherwise a solution, to the discontent [malaise] of philosophy. The clarification and the new distribution of the relations of science and philosophy should now be carried out on the radical basis of science and no longer on the basis of philosophy as was always the case, even in positivism. The burden of proof comes back to us: to give a rightly radical sense to this power of science of being “index sui” and to reclaim the immanence – what makes up a thought – of its theoretico-experimental criteria. It is at any rate an ascesis that we propose to both, the abandonment of the common and old philosophical faith towards the possibility of legislating over the sciences, even through “empiricist” decisions. You want to elucidate the “meaning” of your “practice” all by remaining possessed by your practice and without exceeding the immanence of the laboratory? Then you have no need of philosophy, no need for always very general and remote decisions, that are made ad hoc and after the fact. Rather, take yourself positively in your own “naivety,” the immanence of your practice and make it your guiding thread! Invent an epistemic reflection rather than an epistemological one! Abandon the old epistemo-logical doublet and find the specific of the scientific posture in the face of [envers] the real…
These are the objectives. Here are the means.
The immanence of the laboratory
Epistemology perhaps commits an amphibology de principe – a confusion. It does not distinguish between the layer of theoretico-technico-experimental acts, what it absolutizes as the whole of science where it gives thus infinitely varying interpretations (empiricist, idealist, dialectical, etc.), and the real object to which science spontaneously but in the last instance alone relates these acts. Epistemology confounds the two immediately in an idealist way with the phenomena of epistemological objectivation, it does not elucidate for itself the very special real to which these acts are referred, it does not know the realism of science but within the extension of the phenomena, as their limit, instead of recognizing science’s realism with an original and perhaps non-philosophizable meaning. The point is to learn to discern in science an authentically “transcendental” claim (a relation to the real itself, and not “phenomena,” “properties,” “accidents”) that philosophy necessarily denies science – and to discern the consequently non-philosophical meaning that is stronger and more primitive than all of the “ontological” relations to the real. Thus, to renounce saying to the scientists that they must think, we shall describe the phenomenon of this strange relation, proper to science, where it is the real which situates and puts theoretico-experimental objectivity in place instead of concluding from it. This phenomenon which does not fall under the logos and yet has nothing to do with a “mysticism” is that of the immanence of the laboratory. It is a special, radical, immanence that resides in this intrinsically opaque or “realist” relation to a necessarily already given real, but which is never given in the form of transcendence, nor in the form of perception, of course, nor even in the form of objective acts of theory, model, and experimentation. An absolutely given real – without which there will be no science, simply a philosophical decision – but given as epistemologically absent or invisible and to which the scientist cannot not make a reference to: consequently in the last instance.
Thus, we will get rid of [dégagerait] a sort of quasi-ontology of the empirical sciences, proving that science is also an autonomous thought and not simply a blind production of knowledges. This realism of science must be specified: it is not transcendent (perceptive or even epistemological) but immanent and therefore without a figure identifiable with an object or a local knowledge. It is a realism of posture (the laboratory-as-subject) and not of an object – hence its incoercible but positive naivety which does not express a lack of reflection. It is a realism of the last instance and not of an objective scope or of the first instance: the last instance guides the labour of the scientist, the first instance is dissolved by this labour. The science of the laboratory, of course! But it alone, insofar as it is the epochè, the suspension of any philosophical decision. Science is just the utopia that the laboratory dreams of, but everyone does not understand this word in the same way: utopia is the place without place where science, against philosophy which dissolves science’s reality, affirms a consistency and an immanence which is not resolved into its socio-technological and even less political ingredients which are only overdeterminations. That some scientists lend their hand to interpretations which are those of nihilism proves how much they are compromised by the ad hoc philosophical hypotheses of the “communicational” and sociology.
On science as cause
This real of the last instance (alone), characterized by its immanence and through it that it then communicates with epistemological acts, is realistically science which itself describes the real. It suffices to trust the description of science to science: it is a non-decisional “cause” (of) itself and has no need of the philosophical help for theory. If this auto-description utilizes among other things philosophical categories, it no longer makes of them a use of the logos, but a use that is 1) purely descriptive and no longer constitutive of the real; 2) validates in the last instance alone within this function; 3) submits to a permanent rectification. We must admit that the words of philosophy are not automatically and definitively philosophical (Greco-ontological), but that another use of them is possible in view of rigorously describing this essence of science. We do not contradict ourselves by using philosophy under this rule – if not to the philosophers, the victims of their illusory omnipotence.
The real of the last instance to which the labour of knowledge refers or relates itself can no longer be what the philosophers called Being. Science, at least as the posture of thought, is totally independent from ontology. Being given its radical immanence which does not destroy the transcendence of objectivating epistemological acts, which gives philosophy by contrast its real seat, it is rather what they have called the One, but they have still understood the One as entangled with Being and through it, therefore immediately blended by objectivity, incapable of grounding the One in reality. The real of science is in fact the One which is not only One, nothing-but-One and is described as non-positional and non-decisional (of) oneself (without the characteristic decision and position of Being).
The god of philosophy, the man of science
Finally, a last thesis: homo sive scientia. The One, which is the foundation that the naivety of science can recognize and elucidate itself without destroying it reflexively through the transcendence of philosophical objectivity, is nothing but the being-immanent which makes up the (nonpsychological) essence of man. The essence of the real is not “individuel” (again, philosophy…), but “individual.” By individual, we certainly do not understand what is called individual in society, history, psychology and philosophy, but the real which is solely and radically immanent to itself and to which the sciences refer themselves in the last instance alone; the individual is therefore distinct from the objective “real” which belongs to the “object of knowledge” alone, not to its cause which is deprived of all transcendence. If philosophy explains itself through a god or a demon, only man is necessary to explain what there is of science. It is this intrinsically “human” finitude within science that is neither psychological nor theological that we must explain, whether we want it or not, and that philosophy is made not to explain. Not more than it is not bourgeois or proletarian, science is not Greek or Jew. Thus, the individuals are the “substratum” or the “infra-structure” of reality of the sciences (those who rightly assure their “reality”…) in the last instance alone. If they were so immediately, this would be of a dubious mysticism that some scientists, as we know, do not spare themselves. This immanent realism is not transcendent or philosophical; it is not of an Aristotelio-medieval nature. Yet the “individual” structures of the real keep us away from the confused spiritualism which swamps the reality of science in the Whole. The individual is the refusal of the Whole, but we must accept to discuss the problem of the reality of science: the spontaneous idealism of philosophy does not suffice here.
Who we call the “non-philosopher” labours for science rather than philosophy which exploits science. The non-philosopher is nothing but an individual assuming the posture, namely the immanence, of the scientific practice, but which leaves the naivety of its practice to be described without bringing reflexive artifacts, transcendent categories, epistemological idealities, and philosophical decisions into the practice. It is not shocking that the philosophers resist this posture of immanence and argue for the transcendence of their positions. If the philosophers then seem to need to be the object of an “analysis,” the scientists should be in a posture of “auto-analysis”: they are irreplaceable.
en-demic 