The Découpage of Phenomena

Abstract

In each society, the events that man takes part in are found to be spontaneously molded by language. Indeed, the further we go back to forms of civilization less penetrated by science than our own, the more we see that almost all events are those in which man participates, or more exactly, they involve an enlarged or transposed idea of human powers. This is the most certain meaning one can give to the “primitive mentality” in the analyses of Lévy-Bruhl and the more recent ethnographic descriptions. The transition from events to facts is effected by the intermediary of the spontaneous use of a language, which is itself a very elaborate result of social life. The facts to which a nascent science refers as its data, the ‘proto-scientific’ facts, thus cannot be considered as presented directly in the network of principles and schemes of a transcendental subjectivity; and if it is necessary to search in science for the monogram of such a subjectivity, this search must be carried out at the other extreme of the process of knowledge: the transcendental architecture of the scientific object is the conquest of hard-working, trained thought. The original fact, on the other hand, is subject to the extrinsic determinations of a concretely lived culture, of a practice the objectivity of which is completely external and in no way intentional. The untrained thought of a man whose oxen pull a cart moves from the event that he lives to the fact of cartage, from which he extracts a notion of force, apparently associated with uniform displacement; practice, in the complex and confused conditions which determine it, justifies perfectly this primitive notion of force and effort. But to the extent that this practice is diversified and extended, to the extent that a more refined wish to analyze is simultaneously awakened, thinking schools itself in the conditions of the phenomenon and objectivity is internalized.