First notes

What is the feeling of discomfort, the feeling that something is wrong, that one gets when reading about science and the real meaning of the copernican revolution? After Finitude produces this feeling towards the end, despite, or because of, its marvellous breadth and audacity. But how can we describe it? Man, fragile, alone, amidst icy cosmic winds, in the "frightening silence of infinite spaces." Man only a split-second murmur in the galactic becoming without, only an illusory placeholder for the meaningless cellular becoming within. And yet only man has mathematics. Only man can step into the great outdoors. Zizek captures this incongruity when he says:

"Humiliation, 'narcissistic illness,' seems to generate a sense of superiority,
paradoxically grounded in the very awareness of the miserable character of our
existence. As Pascal put it in his inimitable way, man is a mere insignificant
speck of dust in the infinite universe, but he knows about his
nullity,and that makes all the difference." (Parallax View p163)

We can discern at least two strands of thought emerging from this 'knowing': knowledge of the infinite universe, which can be nurtured and eventually developed into the ontology that today promises to lead us toward a specifically extra-terrestrial truth; and knowledge of the speck of dust. It is this second knowledge which I would like to turn to here. Meillassoux talks about how, after Kant, philosophy tried to undermine science by revealing its real, underlying truth. But it is as much of a distortion of science to read into it the destruction of our commonsense world-view, as if this destruction were essential to scientific progress. In fact, two pseudo-sciences, psychology and sociology often reinforce the common-sense understanding of things, not because they abandon scientific rigour but because they apply it thoughtlessly. The point of the neutrality of science is confirmed with the inevitable specialisation that followed the rapid growth in scientific knowledge. He studies enzymes, she is grappling with a knotty mathematical problem. These people, for the most part, are not philosophers. Scientists just do science - they carry out the research, solving problems that are primarily local problems.

And yet how astonishing is the volume of relentless experimentation! Millions of people in research centres and laboratories all over the world, with only one question: 'how does it work?' And only one answer: 'let's open it up and look inside.' But this looking inside is a certain kind of looking. A robust looking. A looking that gets to grips with what it is looking at. And it doesn't matter what they are looking at; a piece of pre-frontal cortex or a mathematical equation.

Given that philosophy always wants to step in and posit, or find, a significance in science beyond that of the discipline itself, what is to be done? I think it is time to return to an old friend, to find (posit) an instrumentalism at the heart of science. Rather than, in a way, focusing on the highest of human capacities, with the idea that mathematics (and mathematics alone: this was the only way I could make sense of After Finitude) can lead us off the correlationalist treadmill - we ought to focus on the lowest, which is to say that all our knowledge, culture etc has issued from us in our speck-of-dustness. This not in order reject science however (though ontology is a trickier question) but as another route to Marx's idea of changing the world instead of interpreting it. Science can teach us how to get stuck in again, and remind us that we are only apes who've gotten ideas above our station.

Does our materialism leave us waiting for science to tell us how the world works? The philosopher is not a scientist, he proceeds differently. The philosopher must mobilize science in order to return to the basic questions. As François Châtelet says, in relation to the Greek questions of exercise and eating well: "Philosophy - it is necessary to insist on this point - begins with simple questions: what we have the habit of calling, in the philosophical jargon, 'empirical' questions." (Une histoire de la raison p29)

There is the risk that reflection becomes paralysed by that fact that 'truth' only comes to light in a laboratory. Just because we have forgotten how to see does not mean we should abandon all attempts to observe, to hypothesize, to experiment. (This is related to two things I would like to discuss in later posts a) a tactical or epistemological, rather than ontological use of Hume on causality, and b) the issue of the extent to which our perceptual and affective apparatus has been mutilated. Hint: the last Hollywood film I saw at the cinema was 'Inglorious Basterds,' the experience of which can only be described as a sensory and emotional assault.)
To conclude these first remarks, I would like make a plea for a kind of applied intelligence - as Rancière defines it in Le maître ignorant - where what counts is our attention, and the unstructured nature of learning and theorizing (every thinker who recognizes a 'master' didn't find him using reason; there was an encounter at the right moment, something aleatory took place) and at the core of this process of understanding is the injunction: 'relate everything to everything else.' Folk psychology, astrophysics, ethnography - mobilize this intelligence, hypothesize and experiment. Answer the question, how does it work?


(This is really far too sketchy and too hurried, but lots of material for me to try to clarify later)