Abstract
While there are important tensions between French historical epistemology and classical phenomenology as modes of thought, fixation on these differences has obstructed recognition of their similarities. Using the writings of Jean Cavaillès and Gaston Bachelard as case studies, this chapter shows that historical epistemology may be read as simultaneously critiquing and expanding the phenomenological project originated by Husserl in the early twentieth century. The author rebuffs the widespread conception that historical epistemology is phenomenology’s ‘Other’ and calls for further research on their historical and philosophical relationships.
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- 1.
By ‘historical epistemology,’ I have in mind a loose association of Francophone authors who specialized in the history and philosophy of the sciences. This includes, most notably, Gaston Bachelard, Jean Cavaillès, Georges Canguilhem, and Michel Foucault. Other figures connected to this tradition include Abel Rey, Léon Brunschvicg, Alexandre Koyré, Louis Althusser, and Jean-Toussaint Desanti.
- 2.
Thompson (2008) recognizes important similarities between historical epistemology and phenomenology, especially in the works of Foucault and Cavaillès.
- 3.
Althusser’s reading of Marx hinges on an anti-subjectivist interpretation of the nature of capitalism. For Althusser, Marx becomes Marx only when he liberates himself from Hegel’s anthropological concepts (e.g., ‘consciousness,’ ‘alienation,’ and ‘experience’) and replaces them with structuralist ones (e.g., ‘norms,’ ‘systems,’ ‘forms’) (Althusser and Balibar 1997).
- 4.
Readers should consult Badiou (1998) for an analysis of Canguilhem’s work in this respect.
- 5.
- 6.
For an extended discussion of Bachelard’s critique of Husserl, see Barsotti, Bernard. Bachelard critique de Husserl: aux racines de la fracture épistémologie, phénoménologie (Editions L’Harmattan, 2002); and Vydra, Anton, “Gaston Bachelard And His Reactions To Phenomenology” Continental Philosophy Review 47.1 (2014): 45–58.
- 7.
Bachelard, for example, offers a materialist interpretation of systems of scientific knowledge. For him, these systems include (a) ideational objects without spatio-temporal identities (concepts, ideas, hypotheses, principles) and (b) material objects with spatio-temporal identities (measurement machines, observational apparatuses, laboratory equipment, experimental techniques, and so on). These two kinds of scientific objects, moreover, are inseparable. The meaning of even the most abstract/ideational objects is shaped by their material conditions of discovery, while the meaning of even the most rudimentary of scientific tools (such as an abacus or a petri dish) reflects the theoretical principles that aided in its discovery and construction. All scientific ideas are materialities idealized; all material objects are theories materialized. See Lecourt Dominique, Marxism and Epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault (Vrin 1975), 75ff.
- 8.
Davis (2000) differentiates between ‘lived’ and ‘scientific’ experience by observing that the former is a conversation with mid-sized, three-dimensional, physical objects, whereas the latter frequently involves “intangible phenomena far outside common experience.” Hyder (2003) says “we inherit both the vocabulary and grammar of the languages we speak, including those of formal scientific languages. And this fact puts pressure on the transcendental theorist: since a speaker of these languages may never consciously have fixed their meanings, the theorist must explain where the meanings of such expressions are to be found, and such explanations run the risk of extravagance” (115). “It is evident that the fields of ideal objects that make up scientific ontologies are not given in immediate experience” (ibid.). This is why Bachelard says that the objects that appear to the scientific mind, such as the appearance of certain patterns of lamination on a backboard in a double-slit experiment, do not have the same status as the things that appear to a Husserlian ego. “The point is that a quantitative organization of reality has more, not less, content than a qualitative description of experience” (Bachelard 1984, 68).
- 9.
Goldhammer (1984) notes that, for Bachelard, “phenomenology is not enough” (xx). The systematic description of lived experience must be accompanied by “a way of producing experience of the right kind” (ibid.).
- 10.
Tiles (1984) claims that scientific domains are “independent […] of the constitution of the subject” (49–50). By shifting the foci of concept-formation from the cogito to rational domain, Bachelard reverses phenomenology’s critical formula concerning the relationship between science and experience. As Pariente (1987) notes, it is from science that we derive experience and not from experience that we derive science.
- 11.
In the 1940s, Niels Bohr argued that the complementarity thesis makes impossible “any sharp demarcation between the behavior of atomic objects and the interaction of the measuring instruments which serve to define the conditions under which the phenomena occur” (Bohr 1949, 209).
- 12.
When the physics teacher tells her student that light can be viewed as a wave, what she means is not that there is some Aristotelean ousia (οὐσία) that moves in a wave-like pattern. What she means is that wave-like behavior is one of light’s various experimentally realizable properties, a property that (like its complementary ‘other’) is only revealed under specific experimental conditions.
- 13.
The imagination is ridden with prejudices that yield aberrant intuitions. Substantialism is one of these prejudices, but certainly not the only one (Bachelard 2002).
- 14.
- 15.
Bachelard offers a version of the ‘Sapir–Whorf hypothesis’, except that he focuses on the impact of language on intuition rather than thought or perception.
- 16.
At the time Cavaillès met Bachelard, Cavaillès was only 31 years old but had already done extensive work on the history of mathematics. By 1934, he had also met Heidegger and Husserl and had begun thinking more seriously about the relationship between mathematics and phenomenology.
- 17.
The ‘principle of reducibility’ ensures the reduction of and of mathematics to a priori rules of subjective object-formation (Cavaillès 1986, 397).
- 18.
Husserl (1969) differentiates himself from Leibniz by noting that the latter failed to take the transcendental turn. Transcendental logic, therefore, “does not intend to be a mere pure and formal logic—conceived most broadly, in the Leibnizian sense, a mathesis universalis” (16). However, one could argue that what Husserl does is recapitulate Leibniz’s formalism within the sphere of the transcendental since mathematics remains a closed system of rules that doesn’t change with time and whose only function is to determine the most generic properties of presentive objects.
- 19.
Cavaillès (1986) says that in Husserl’s framework mathematics can only exist either in an applied mode (as mathematical physics) or in a theoretical mode (as formal ontology), but in neither is it truly autonomous. “Mathematics, conscious of it original meaning, of what truly is, divides itself into two parts: applied mathematics which is physics, and formal mathematics which is logic. It is only because he has forgotten his vocation that the mathematician can claim to be self-sufficient” (393).
- 20.
Speaking of Husserl’s formal ontology, Cavaillès (1986) says: “This is really the idea of a universal syntax as Carnap tried to describe it in a single stroke” (403).
- 21.
- 22.
Husserl (1969) argues that after the seventeenth century classical logic lost its unifying power and “became [merely] a special science.” As a result, all the sciences, which had turned to logic for a goal or a sense of purpose, “lost their great belief in themselves” (5). They became autonomous and mutually isolated fields of human action, rather than parts of the great journey of human reason. Husserl hoped that his transcendental logic would fill the conceptual vacuum left behind by the implosion of classical logic.
- 23.
Khalfa (2011) says Cavaillès’s theory of mathematics anticipated “the post-World War II replacement of a consciousness-based philosophical analysis of truth and intelligibility with a process-based one” (258).
- 24.
Although Reinach studied under Husserl in Gottingen and helped found the Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, he rejected Husserl’s idealist interpretation of ‘phenomena’ in favor a realist one in which the phenomena are not subject-dependent. This was a direct attack against Husserl’s declaration that the transcendental ego is arche and telos of all that is.
- 25.
Mensch (2016) argues that Patočka’s oeuvre gives us an ‘asubjective phenomenology’.
- 26.
In his early works such as Being and Time (1927), Heidegger deemphasizes the role of transcendental subjectivity, while in his late ones he seems to discard it altogether to make room for an outlook rooted in the world-disclosing power of poetic language (Gosetti-Ferencei 2004).
- 27.
Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior (1947) is guided by a materio-evolutionary conception of organisms in which experience is organized by material principles, not transcendental ones. His late works, especially the Nature lectures, a chiasmatic nature supersedes the transcendental subject as the ultimate source of meaning in the world (Mazis 2016).
- 28.
Historical epistemologists sometimes frame their disagreement with phenomenology as a conflict between two ethical characters: one that acts in the world like a war hero (the French epistemologist) and one that is politically apathetic like Hegel’s ‘beautiful soul’ (the French existentialist phenomenologist). In a speech given at the inauguration of L’Amphithéâtre Jean Cavaillès at the Sorbonne in 1967, Canguilhem mobilizes this framework to suggest that there is something inherent to historical epistemology (he hints at its emphasis on necessitation, normativity, and structures) that turns its followers into agents of action, while there is something inherent to existentialist phenomenology (its focus on contingency, subjectivity, and radical freedom) that turns its disciples into passive figures who cannot leap from political consciousness to political action. Speaking about Cavaillès’s participation in the French resistance movement, Canguilhem polemically says: “Let the supporters of phenomenology and existentialism do better than Cavaillès did, next time, if they can!” (Peden 2014, 21).
- 29.
- 30.
Two of Foucault’s most important concepts—the ‘historical a priori’ and ‘philosophical archaeology’—were first coined by Husserl.
- 31.
Alexandre Koyré was a Russian-born, Francophone philosopher who studied directly under Husserl from 1908 to 1911, during Husserl’s famous ‘Göttingen period.’ When Husserl (along with David Hilbert) rejected his dissertation on Zeno’s paradoxes in 1912, Koyré left Göttingen for Paris, where he became a student of Leon Brunschvicg and went on to play a critical role in the French tradition of epistemology.
- 32.
Derrida was Canguilhem’s assistant from 1960 to 1964.
- 33.
Like her predecessors, Suzanne Bachelard is critical of Husserl’s theory of science and attempts to go beyond “the horizon of transcendental research that has marked the originality of Husserlian phenomenology.” Unlike many of her predecessors, she seems to be more aware of the extend to which this ‘going beyond’ is more of a reformation than a rejection. In La conscience de la rationalité. Étude phénoménologique sur la physique mathématique (1958), she calls for the articulation of a “phenomenological epistemology” that recognizes, on the one hand, that subjectivity cannot be eliminated from the study of science (since “the experience of rationality” is essential to the unfolding of scientific history) and, on the other, that scientific subjectivity often effaces itself in its own results. The philosophy of science must, therefore, be conversant with, but ultimately independent from, the philosophy of the subject (6). This results in a non-classical phenomenology that nonetheless has a claim to phenomenological status. In fact, she claims that any phenomenological project that speaks about science must become epistemological in order to be truly phenomenological. In what amounts to a philosophical coup d’état, Bachelard defines as ‘phenomenological’ only those phenomenologico-epistemological projects that overcome the crude subjectivism of Husserl and the equally crude anti-subjectivism of first generation French epistemologists. “If we effect an ‘eidetic variation’ of the possible forms of phenomenology, we see that among the invariant characters that subsist in this variation the following one offers itself: a phenomenological inquiry must be an inquiry with a double orientation, it must have an objective orientation and a subjective orientation” (5).
- 34.
Various debates in the philosophy of science highlight the importance of blending epistemological, historical, and phenomenological insights, including debates about the nature of mathematical beauty (Montaño 2012; Rota 2008; Wells 1988), debates about the nature of historical experience (Díaz-Maldonado 2019), and the now decades-old debate that continues to shape theoretical discussions in social sciences about whether supra-individual structures jeopardizes the freedom of the individuals who come to grief with them (Dreyfus and Rabinow 2014).
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Peña-Guzmán, D.M. (2020). Not Phenomenology’s ‘Other’: Historical Epistemology’s Critique and Expansion of Phenomenology. In: Apostolescu, I. (eds) The Subject(s) of Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 108. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29357-4_20
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