Maxwell
Cummings lecture, Mac Gill University
Thursday, October 4, 2001
Dear
Professors,
Dear students at Mac Gill University,
Given
the circumstances, I hesitated up to the last minute to come to Mac Gill, because
I was not willing to be far away from my loved ones. To desist, however, would
have been to back off from the very values that we have now a duty to cherish
and defend, values that are over represented in the tradition I have devoted
my life studying. I am speaking of freedom and democracy, and, in the particular
case of this invitation, an open, democratic and free exchange of ideas.
If, for whatever reason, we shy away from these fundamental values, those who
literally hate these values to death will have won. Of course, I don't consider
my visit here a great heroic deed. It is just my modest, my humble way to stand
for freedom (of expression, of religion), to express my love for tolerance and
openness and for an unimpeded and democratic debate.
I am here then just to show my will to uphold and defend these values, without
which life is not worth living.
It may seem strange to you that a specialist in Medieval French Literature would even ask the question that is the title of this lecture. What is the link between Medieval French Literature and epistemology or the history of science?
So, a few words to explain my interest in these questions seem appropriate.
At the university of Geneva, I was formed as a strict humanist; it was a first class education, but it gave no inkling whatsoever about the history of science or epistemology.
Now, later, by profession - of course some medievalists will contest this affirmation - to study Medieval literature, I had to focus not only on literature itself, but on its broader context, which in the western Middle Ages is represented by rhetoric, theology and religion, not counting, of course, history. Hence, given the overwhelming accent given to religion in medieval times, I was bound, sooner or later, to get into problems that were not purely literary; this, even if literature and its rhetoric is never far away, even in the writings of great theologians like John Scot Eriugena or Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.
Also, early on, I developed an interest in psychoanalysis, where epistemological questions are at the forefront, starting with Freud, when he compares his discovery of the unconscious to Copernicus' heliocentrism, both having the effect of decentering humankind's narcissistic belief in its centrality.
Concurrently, if you are a Medievalist, sooner or later you will ask yourself: what are the Middle Ages? This question in turn will lead to other ones: What is Antiquity? What is Modernity? How do we differentiate in essence these periods of Western history?
If, in order to find answers, you limit your inquiry to a strictly literary approach, you are bound to come up with inconclusive answers that could be soon reduced to a catalogue of rhetorical differences, not real ones, or a taxonomy of representational differences, which very fast become trivial and tautological: for example we can ascertain the existence of the feudal order in history and its concurrent representation in Medieval novels, and underline that these are not essential components of a modern novel. Very good, but not good enough, we need to dig deeper.
But what is a major epistemological cut? It is a radical shift in the way we are thinking and in the way we represent the world surrounding us to ourselves. A shift so radical that it affects all spheres of human activity and thought, leaving nothing unaffected, to the point where even the remnants of the past must be now seen, from the new side of the cut, as survivals and relics. For example, are the periods of Western history I just mentioned really separated by major epistemological cuts? Michel Foucault, for whom they are only subcuts in specific fields, would answer in the negative (for example, the cuts in the history of sexuality, the history of madness or the history of punishment are not coincident, and they don't depend on some other, overarching major cut). Others would negate even the possibility of an epistemological cut. Others again, like Alexandre Kojève, Alexandre Koyré and Jacques Lacan, answer yes: there are, in the history of humankind, major epistemological cuts.
Let us admit this hypothesis. Now, how do we go about locating, describing and understanding these major cuts? I propose to you a very simple tool, a tool in fact so simple it is almost idiotic in its simplicity. This simplicity has never prevented some my interlocutors from misunderstanding it and making me repeat my explanation, and every time I have been puzzled by this incomprehension. And then it struck me: in order to understand the tool, you have to also admit a presupposition that language is indeed capable, not only of self referentiality, but of realism, that is, capable of designating or, even better, seizing up something outside of itself. In passing, this presupposition is not that infrequent in the literary milieu in which I live: said another way, most of academic Humanities are inherently nominalist.
Of course, this is in itself a medieval problem, known as the quarrel of universals, which began in the sixth century with Boethius. In the Contra Eutychen and Nestorium he starts a 14-centuries-long dispute by examining the question of the human-divine nature of Christ (does religion have something to do with epistemology? The answer is yes, but be patient, I'll come back to this theme later). Eutyches thought that Christ was a God with the simulacrum of a body. Nestorius denies divinity to Jesus. Neither of them can accept the concept of a God being human at the same time. Boethius answers by rejecting both Nestorius and Eutyches as heretics and reaffirming the dogma of the Incarnation.
Boethius' solution is to declare that the name Jesus Christ, unifying two concepts previously separated (divinity and humanity), is a radical innovation: it is an absolute homonym of everything that has been said before. In other words, no name before Christ, even if its form is identical, designates the same thing as the name Christ COUPLED to what it designates. You see that the questions revolve here around language and what it designates, and also around the question of synonymy or homonymy. Is the name Jesus a synonym for something already known (the god of Greek mythology borrowing a body to manifest himself to humans) or a homonym, the word God now designating an absolutely different concept?
I propose to borrow the tool that will help us determine major epistemological cuts from Boethius' conceptual arsenal: the theory of homonyms will be the theory of epistemological cuts. I am of course not reviving a sixth century controversy that could appear completely irrelevant to our times for the sake of it. Indeed, in the twentieth century, Alexandre Koyré too relies on the theory of homonyms to anchor his magnificent elucidation of the history of science. For Koyré, there are no synonyms on either side of a major epistemological cut; after the cut, even if they sound and look the same, words don't mean the same thing.
The question revolves around language and representations, as indeed they should: and here springs on the scene the second obstacle to the understanding the conceptual functioning of homonyms (what I call in barbaric fashion homonymization); this resistance is grounded in the belief that something empirical, a historical praxis, can give birth, by perspiration (sudation) or emanation, to a conceptual break, or even to a simple idea. Well, this has never happened in the course of human history; always, in the beginning was the word: ideas, not sweat, beget ideas; could it be then that the statement "In the beginning was the word", which we usually ascribe to a religious sphere, also has an epistemological or anthropological value?
I defy anybody to give me a counterexample, where a praxis without words would have given birth to a concept. Indeed, a praxis is never without words, it is always already framed by them. Let us take Marx as an example: no amount of toiling by the proletariat can ever give birth to the concept of proletariat; toiling, unfortunately, does not give birth to ideas; quite to the contrary: you need Marx's conceptual and lexical innovation in order for the proletariat to discover itself as proletariat.
This is, therefore, how it works: a major epistemological cut is a cut where the names before the cut and the names (even identical) after cannot be synonymous, they are homonymous. An example of homonymy: the word orb before Kepler and after him, even if sounding the same, doesn't designate at all the same object. Before, it is the perfectly round circumference traced by a planet on a sphere of crystal, which rubs against the other adjacent spheres and thus produces the music of the cosmos. These conceptions of spherical perfection and musical harmony have no doubt a powerful psychological effect, which at the same time explain them: Antiquity's mankind is convinced of be at the center of the cosmos and of living in harmony with its surroundings. After the epistemological cut, after Kepler, orb is an irregular ellipsis whose only material existence is a mathematical formula. Another example would be momentum, movement in Aristotle and Galileo.
Concurrently, homonymization allows for the distinction of major and minor cuts, or even the nonexistence of some movements that are presented as cuts. The concept of Renaissance spring to mind; what I find in the Renaissance is a lot of synonyms inherited from the Middle Ages, but no homonyms; hence the Renaissance is not a major cut. When I go to a colloquium where medievalists and sixteenth century specialists participate, very often what the latter say is original to the Renaissance sounds utterly familiar to me as a medievalist. Indeed, the major accomplishment of the Renaissance is an evolution and a transference: that is, the same reverence manifested by medieval theologians for the letter of the Gospels is now applied to Greek and Roman pagan literature. Hence what we oppose to theology and the Church by calling it "humanism" is in fact an outgrowth of these two medieval institutions. Postmodernism comes to mind too; it is perhaps a subcut, but according to my criteria, not a major one; to give you a specific examples, Stanley Fish's work is a synonym (a repetition) of Greek (i.e. pagan) sophistry and deep nominalism.
But are there moments of homonymization that change everything, all the names? - Note that I don't say that no old names will survive. But precisely, the old names will be survivors, relics, testimony to the world that has disappeared; or, if you want, the old names will now testify to our reluctance to relinquish our old ways. For indeed, we like continuity, it is in itself reassuring, and we don't like cuts, especially major ones, we abhor them because they are inherently threatening.
Let me then, not without presumption, indicate major cuts in the history of humanity.
The first one would be, of course, the one when we humans created language and separated ourselves from the animal world. Indeed, in this originary moment, every word is a homonym, since there were no words before. It is only in retrospect that we can name what never had name; so animality, so the difference between animal instinct and human drive, so the distinction between animal codes and human language.
This is the moment where, in my lecture, I see a hand being raised and, inevitably, the whale (or dolphin, or ant, or bee) question being asked.
"But don't whales (or dolphins, etc) have a language too?"
And my answer is always the same: yes, whales communicate; but it is through a code: that is, a system of signs where each sign has one and only one meaning - that is, not a language, which is equivocal. A whale can certainly say to another whale "I love you." (or more likely "I want to make love to you"). It can indicate where it is, signal danger etc. to other whales. But it cannot say, "I hate you" when it means the opposite, whereas we human do it all the time because we use an equivocal language, not a univocal code. And also, as far as I know, there is no congress of whales deep in the sea to examine the nature of their codes, whereas linguistic colloquia are somewhat frequent in our human sphere.
So here we have our first cut, probably 150.000 years ago (although it is hard to determine due to the lack of written record and an ongoing debate among paleoanthropologists). A second cut major cut would then be the invention of writing.
Then what? I do not exclude at all the existence of intervening major epistemological cuts. But a third cut, in my schematic, 5 minute view of mankind's history, would be the invention of monotheism or Judaism, an attempt to homonymize the concept of deity and clean it up from its representational, that is, mythological aspects. Indeed, the word god in the Torah has a very different content from what its meaning is in Babylonian, Sumerian or Egyptian mythology. In Egypt, even Akhenaton's failed attempt at monotheism remains attached to a view of the deity that is material. There is only one god, but it is the sun: i.e. something that is part of our cosmos. By contrast, Moses' God is not only alone but out of this world (im-monde, in French); and this is indeed a major epistemological cut in regard to mythology. As the Midrash says: "God is the place where the world exists, and the world is not the place where God exists." (Genesis Rabba, III, p. 7).
A very important consequence of Judaism's cut, or Jewish iconoclasm, is to render purely abstract thought possible. Whatever the merits of Greek science and philosophy, it always thinks itself as inside an uncreated world of objects; indeed, Aristotle's unique God in the Metaphysics is still a substance; only the Platonic eternal idea is close to the Creator God of Judaism. But Plato's discourse remains enclosed in the realm of an uncreated matter: in other words, there is a firm limit to abstraction in Greek thought.
Which leads me to my third epistemological cut, namely, the Incarnation, which is the only dogma specific to Christianity, its only real and radical innovation). Here we have a discourse, whose clearest exposé is in Saint John's Gospel, that makes the abstract and non representable God of Judaism a man too. Indeed, the word "god" has once again been homonymized, in a way which is scandalous for the Jews (since God is suddenly in this world) and a folly for the Greeks and more generally, mythological thought (since gods in Greek mythology don't have, unlike Jesus, a real body, since for a God to be within human flesh would be a symptom of a degradation.).
What the new name of God means here is the collapsing of spheres that were separated in both Judaism and Greek mythology: on one side, the supralunar world heavens, eternal ideas - eternity, abstraction, pure mathematics, order; on the other, the sublunar world, good ole earth, change, matter, empirical reasoning, disorder. As Boethius says, "The name of Christ is a homonym and cannot be comprehended by any definition (I add: up to the moment it is utterred.)"
Which leads me to the last epistemological cut I will consider today. Let's fast forward 17 centuries, from Jesus to Galileo (I warned you that my version of history would be succinct).
Galileo creates modern science. Let me give you a definition of modern science: 1) it has to be mathematizable (that is, abstractly constructed according to the principles of mathematical reasoning) 2) and these abstractions have to be empirically verifiable (what Karl Popper calls falsification). Only starting with Galileo are these two characteristics united. In other words, Galilean science and modern science are synonyms. Or if you wish, the sublunar and the supra lunar world are now one: we no more live in a limited and spherical and material cosmos with two levels barely connected, we live in a universe without limits: we now live, thanks to Galileo, in modernity.
Thanks to Galileo, but also thanks to Jesus Christ, who was the first to have the idea of the collapsibility of the two worlds. Indeed, modern science can arise only in a mental framework that is Christian; Galileo himself always protested that he was a good Christian, and he was right; concurrently, the Church, which apprehended this new science through the lens of Greek science (that is, Aristotle updated by Saint Thomas Aquinas), inadvertently sided with a mental framework inherited from paganism when it condemned Galileo. This ironical twist of events is not the only one, since Galileo, at the beginning, set out to give scientific activity the same elevated status that was accorded to what was called then the liberal arts.
You may ask: why 17 centuries to go from the Incarnation to its consequence, modern science? Or (but this is the same question): why 13 centuries from the invention of monotheism to the God Incarnate? I have a simple answer to this question: psychologically, mentally, historically: We human beings need time to understand. We need to muddle through. Sometimes for centuries, to come to the moment where we say: "Aha, this was what was meant by this statement."
Allow me here a comparison which is not a mere analogy: human history is like a huge sentence, with no conclusive punctuation at the end. When I say "I love you" to somebody, I provoke an anticipation and a retroaction that need time to develop and make the meaning of what I say clear; the anticipation begins with the first word: "I", which anticipates what this "I" he is about to do. Then the verb "love", which creates another anticipation, then "you", the object that resolves the anticipation. Then, by retroaction, my interlocutor and I can begin to build the meaning of the statement; the sentence is immediately reread backwards in order to make sense. It is only when the sentence is complete that the double processes of anticipation and retroaction can come to the provisional closure of signification. It is the same with Jesus Christ and Galileo: it takes a long time for the consequence of the Incarnation to be drawn (and also an exceptionally gifted individual). Or you can say that the dogma of the Incarnation was premature, too strong an anticipation to bear all its fruits at the same time. You need Galileo's retroactive comprehension and reception for this dogma to bear its fruits in science.
The notion of cuts (or its synonym) of homonymy presupposes jumps, hiatuses, breaks in history. This goes against the grain of some of our disciplines of learning that are resolutely evolutionist, like mainstream history, or mental habits that makes us prefer evolution (for evident psychological benefits) to disruption and creation.
But the notion of creation is central to the theory of homonyms (or epistemological cuts); without this notion it is impossible to understand and account for epistemological breaks.
Of course, I am not speaking about life and its sciences, where Darwinian evolution keeps its legitimacy as a scientific premise. I am speaking about human history, where the transfer and application of Darwinian evolution is but a metaphorical abuse (for which the master himself gave the first example).
Let me give several examples of the import of creation, and, concurrently, the notion of revelation.
Let us go back to my first cut - the invention of language; we have an advanced primate, like you and me, but deprived of language; he or she has all the physiological elements enabling him-her to speak, but doesn't have, yet, language at his disposal. Will language emerge through an evolution, a perspiration, a sudation, a response to a stimulus, a praxis? Unlikely, even more so since we know that language is a differential system, where an element produces signification only by comparison to all the others: so the differentiating elements have to be there, all together at the beginning.
What I mean to say is that the creation of human language can only happen through a revelation, an intervention from the outside. And indeed we need to reevaluate those old religious words like creation and revelation and seriously test the hypothesis that they could have a content which is not limited to the spheres of faith, religion or theology.
Nothing, in the world of this advanced primate, prepares him for the irruption of language: as gorillas or chimpanzees prove, they live quite well without language - but of course with an elaborate social code, which is different. In other words, human language has to come from outside of the animal world of this advanced primate. He may have practiced a sophisticated code with his advanced phonatory apparatus; but nothing has prepared him for the jump from code to language, or the jump between a coded statement like "I want to copulate with you so that our species reproduces" to the much more equivocal "I love you". Some "I love you" can indeed mean "I hate you"; others, like those uttered by dictators to their people, can even lead an entire nation to death, or close to death. To sum it up, the invention of language is an absolute creation, it is produced by a revelation, i.e. an event that comes from outside - in this case, the outside of an animal world.
I want to indulge here for a moment in what I would call a paleofiction: would it be possible to reconstruct the content of the revelation of language? There have been attempts by Freud, in Totem and Taboo and others too; they all struck me as unsatisfactory. In particular, for Freud, the first event of humanity is a material act, a murder, the murder of the father of the primal horde, which, according to Freud, is the beginning of culture, the arts, civilization: mankind. There are problems with this scenario: how come, after the murder, all the brothers find themselves in the bliss of brotherhood instead of struggling for the place of the dead father? How can we reconcile this scenario with the other primary scene, that of the Oedipus complex (it is impossible)? And finally, and most important, how come a deed, be it a murder, engenders a concept, the Law of the dead father, which is above all a linguistic performance? No, the beginning of mankind has to be a linguistic act, from which all others derive.
Can we find today, echoes of this act that constituted us as speaking beings a very long time ago?
If we look across cultures and across time, indeed, it seems to me, a strong echo of the first word seems to be represented in every human society, wherever and whenever; the only concept shared by all societies on the face of the earth is the prohibition of incest. Could it be that the first word was a "no" uttered by an advanced primate when another advanced primate approached his female with the best or worst of intentions? We can indeed, from this inaugural word, derive the abstraction of the dead father as Law, the prohibition and hence the constitution of desire, the problem of sexual difference as separated from an organic grounding, the question of culture as sublimation, the problem of violence and its limitation and control, etc.
But, you will object, don't your originary scenario rest on something you have just deemed impossible, that is, an empirical event (the alpha male is getting close to the female who belongs to the beta male), giving birth to a concept (the prohibition uttered by the beta male)?
Not at all, because it is the opposite. It is the utterance of the prohibition that creates what is now interdicted (the desire for the female belonging to the beta male). From an instinct that drives any male to any female in heat, and with is controlled by a physical threat (which indeed builts the code of social hierarchy), we have now switched to a symbolic world, where, by this simple no, the father, the mother, the son and the daughter, sexual difference, desire and its prohibition as concepts have been suddenly created. Hence, we have eliminated the inconsistence we found in Totem and Taboo; in the beginning was not the deed (as Freud writes as a conclusion), but the word. In consequence, the contradiction between the originary scene and the Oedipus complex is resolved.
May be we should start a scholarly association that would be dedicated to give out a prize, each year, for the best originary scenario.
Let us turn now back to Moses' monotheism: again, nothing, in the cultural context out of which it emerged, has prepared its irruption. There is no conceptual evolution possible from the gods of mythology to Moses' out-of-this-world God, not even the Egyptian God of Akhenaton, Aton, who is unique but in this world: Akhenaton was not a monotheist, he was a monolater.
The same reasoning applies to the Incarnation; certainly, the God of Judaism speaks, which is a minimal anthropomorphization, despite the severe interdiction of the Second commandment. But from this ruach, this breath of God, to the human-divine body of Jesus, there is a jump that no evolution can explain.
And finally, an example closer to us: modern science. When Galileo builds his conceptual monument, he is surrounded by a knowledge, the science of Antiquity, whose basic tenets have not moved for almost two millennia: Ptolemaic cosmology, Galienic medicine, and also a Greek (i.e. pagan) form of reasoning, scholasticism, that has not been essentially challenged for three centuries, and on which Galileo's enemies will heavily lean to try to demolish his theories.
There is nothing, in this context that can be said to have prepared Galilean (i.e.) modern science; furthermore, no empirical experiment could have led Galileo to develop, almost as if by emanation or perspiration, his new system. Galilean science doesn't evolve from what preceded it; it doesn't spring out from some "scientific" experiment: it is a creation, a revelation, a homonymization: in the truest sense of the word, a major epistemological cut. Just as the phonatory apparatus doesn't explain the apparition of language in the advance primate, but only makes it possible (a necessary, but insufficient cause, as philosophers say), the conceptual framework necessary to the birth of modern science, i.e. a Christianity centered on the Incarnation, cannot explain the emergence of modern science: it makes it possible, but not at all unavoidable (that would be a deterministic, evolutionary scheme of the history of ideas).
A word here about Europeocentrism is in order: my scheme seems to fit squarely into the fantasy of "Western civilization". But this fantasy is grounded in the illusion of a continuity from the Greek to us; as you know by now, I refuse this continuity, since it is broken by at least two major cuts, the Incarnation and modern science, which make of the notion of Western Civilization a consoling illusion.
This said, it is my hypothesis that major epistemological cuts, aside from the invention of language, can only happen in a Judeo-Christian framework.
Another critique that can be addressed to my vision is the following: if modern science depends on the Incarnation, and since modern science is now accepted everywhere (even by the cowardly terrorists that use it), don't we have here the planetary expansion of Christianity? Not really. Let me dispel the misunderstanding: at its very beginning, modern science depends on the theology and dogma of the Incarnation. It also depends on a leap of faith, which is Galileo's: nature doesn't trick us (see Einstein's celebrated reflection); if there is an explosion during an experiment, it is not nature's fault, it is our calculation's. But, when this first step has been taken, then it is forgotten. Modern science is a process of forgetting the first steps (for example, nothing remains of Descartes' physics). Hence the origin of modern science, even if Christian, is forgotten, we can even say, negated by the process of modern science and its galloping expansion to the entire planet and universe.
Of course, the process of science's forgetfulness has to be contrasted with human history, which is about remembrance and repression of memories beginning when we started talking: remembrance and repression of the Oedipus complex.
By now, what I understand by modernity should be clear to you. Modernity is an era that begins with Galileo in the 17th century, and which has not been yet submitted to a new, major cut. It is synonymous with the invention of modern science and its planetary expansion. Postmodernism, in this view, is but a subcut in a localized discipline (architecture or literature or literary criticism). It may even be considered as a relic, a relic of the syncretism that manifests itself in Montaigne's Essais. Remember: "I am a half breed, my rear end between two saddles." (I, 54)
Should we be happy about the world expansion of modernity under the guise of modern science? Indeed, it promises us to makes us live longer and better, to make us more and more the masters of nature, etc. But this conquest is not without exacting a terrible cost. Modern science is in fact the abolition of the human subject. Let me illustrate this process. E=mc2, as soon as it is written, erases Einstein; in other words, E=mc2 forgets the human history that has lead to its discovery. Einstein as a human being is no more relevant to the understanding of his own formula, the formula has absorbed or even abolished its creator. The algorithm will work, so to speak, by itself, in the hands of scientists whose personal histories don't matter either. What matters is only their competence as physicists or mathematicians. Modern science creates a world where it is, increasingly harder to figure out our desire, a book where the properly human inscription has no place except as an operating agent for abstract formulas. Hence, the stronger and stronger resistance modernity, and its main component, science, encounter everywhere. The reign of scientific rationality should lead us to a better world. But, as a matter of fact, it may engender more and more irrationality.
Finally, if the Incarnation is the dogma that makes modern science possible, we should then see Christianity as the beginning of modernity. And this is of (narrow) interest to a medievalist like me: if the Middle Ages are Christian, aren't they modern too?