Jean-Hugues Barthélémy

Those who know the work of Karl Popper will have recognized in my title the transformation into interrogation of a formula repeated several times by this eminent philosopher of science, whom some consider as the greatest of the 20th century in his specific field - even if they do not share his theses. This Popperian formula, to which I wish to devote my analyzes here, has at least the merit of being clear and impactful. But as often, what is clear and impactful can become too simple for what is to be thought, and perhaps even too simple to express faithfully the philosophy which one seeks to summarize there. Writing this, I am not claiming that Popper was not really a falsificationist. Far be it from me to dispute that the great thesis of his epistemology consists in making any scientific theory worthy of the name falsifiable or refutable. This is indisputable: for Popper, the dividing line between scientific theory and non-scientific theory lies precisely in this falsifiable character.

One cannot approach Simondon’s thought of technology without placing it in the genetic and general ontology constructed by him in terms of ‘individuation’. Therefore, after having recalled some biographical informations about Simondon, as well as the major stages of the posthumous and very laborious discovery of his work, we enter into the Simondonian thought of the technical object in the light of his thought of the living being. Then we explain the notion of function in Simondon’s thought of the technical object and of the progress of its functioning versus its uses. In a third time, we recall the more general ontogenetic framework that is based on the notion of ‘transduction’ as universal operation of genesis or ‘individuation’. Finally, after having focused on the text which makes the explicit transition between Simondon’s genetic ontology and Simondon’s thought of technology thanks to the question of the function of the technician in social life, we look, beyond Simondon and his own objects of questioning, on the problems posed in biology by the concept of function in context of unfinalized evolution, but also on those concerning informational metaphors used in molecular biology.

The aim of this essay is to introduce the dual themes of invention and imagination in the work of Gilbert Simondon. In the first part, I discuss Simondon’s account of techn(olog)ical invention, as it appears in his course «L’invention et le développement des techniques» and in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. This latter book is the one that posthumously established him as the greatest philosopher of technology in the 20th century, and as the only thinker capable of truly «entering the engine», as an engineer might. He is also unique among major philosophers in having developed a thinking that is both deeply technophilic and compatible with ecological commitment. In the second part, I turn to his 1965–1966 course «Imagination et invention», the full version of which was first published in 2008. Here, the theme of imagination takes precedence over that of invention. Simondon rethinks imagination through the notion of the image, proposing a genetic theory of it : the theory of the «image cycle». As this theory and this course are far less well known than his major work on technology, I provide a more detailed account, including even more substantial quotations, in order to shed light on a particularly original dimension of Simondon’s thought.

Beginning with The Automatic Society, where Stiegler, on the occasion of an analysis of the unification of the technical system by the digital, synthesizes his thought of the three stages of the process of "proletarianization," this paper comes first to a critical examination of the originary "prosthetic conditions" which, according to Technics and Time, made possible the ambivalence of the technical pharmakon and the "systemic stupidity" of today. This leads then to a development on the problem of the status of desire in the stieglerian pharmacology of mind, which makes it infinite and specific to humans. Finally, this development leads us to a confrontation between Stiegler’s mobilization of doing-right (faire-droit) to unify the domains of philosophy, and a redefinition of doing-right within a differently unified human ecology, whose archireflexive methodological questioning is translated secondarily in this redefinition in terms of suffering needs versus consumerist Desire.

I call Gilbert Simondon’s philosophical doctrine a “genetic encyclopaedism”, insofar as such a doctrine unifies his two doctoral theses: Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information and On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, and at the same time distinguishes itself from his courses published posthumously. The problem of the unity of these two theses was one of the many problems that I have encountered in my early work to articulate an exegesis of Simondon’s thinking. However, this exegetical work, although animated by the conviction that I could reveal all the strength and relevance of his thought, was in fact always directed towards something Post-Simondon. Even before my doctoral thesis, such effort was guided by the project of a future “all-encompassing refoundation” of his ontology within a new and global system whose first problematics will be a post-Wittgensteinian and post-Heideggerian “philosophical semantics”, and which will bear the name “Philosophical Relativity”. In this new theoretical context, ontology will become a second problematics and no longer a “first philosophy” as Simondon called it. The particularity of such a new and global system is that it does not constitute a system of Knowledge per se, since its globality is the consequence of the diffraction of meanings, a remedy to the traditional objectivation of meanings that knowledge entails, as well as to relativism itself – insofar as the latter still belongs to the objectivation of meanings by a philosophizing individual. This is what an internal criticism of genetic encyclopaedism itself will lead to.

As a first step, the « model of complexity by mosaic”, which makes the peculiarities of Chapouthier’s cosmogenetic ontology (Chapouthier, 2001), is contextualized and problematized. A second step is dedicated to the fundamental questions a/ of the role of ontology among the various philosophical fields, and b/ of the meaning of “right” when one intends to give rights to animals. Here, the whole combination and coordination of ontology, ethics and law needs a re-founding and reorganization. As a final step, a dialog is outlined between Chapouthier’s theory of human being and the theory named “decentred humanism” (Barthélémy, 2015).

Mark Hayward asked me to develop my personal position in relation to a dialog that my friend Bernard Stiegler has had with the thought of Simondon, and I accepted with pleasure as this gave me that opportunity to return to, and develop further, some of my own ideas, ideas I first set out in Penser la connaissance et la technique après Simondon, that is to say the second volume of Penser l’individuation. In that book, these ideas were specifically developed as part of an exegesis of Simondon’s oeuvre. My text today, however, involves a philosophical dialog with Stiegler that I am submitting to others, a dialog that concerns my own ongoing work, work that develops some of the final reflections found in the second volume of Penser l’individuation. This is only an overview, but one that I hope will nonetheless carry a certain weight. Bernard Stiegler, as it is already well known, takes up Simondon’s work on the fundamental grounding of philosophy itself. Yet, I believe that another way of inheriting Simondon is possible, one that takes up the great philosophical problems in a way that connects us to the continental tradition of thought. The double and fundamental problem that is at stake in the debate that Stiegler has initiated with Simondon participates itself (at least potentially) in a more radical problematization of philosophy itself, a problematization whose resolution would for me represent the key to establishing a new philosophical problematic that would be primarily and immediately global. The key to this new problematic is what I call the invention of an “open system” – a problematic that runs counter to all of the anti-systems of today, but also against the closed systems found in the continental tradition. This double and fundamental problem raised in Stiegler’s thought is the following: a/ On the one hand, how are we to interpret the most fundamental thought of Simondon, this is to say his thesis that knowledge of individuation is itself the individuation of knowledge? In the first volume of my Penser l’individuation, I described this thesis as the properly Simondonian way of a “moving beyond” of the opposition between subject and object. This moving beyond is, we know, something that has been sought after by all of the great continental thinkers from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to the six proposed volumes of Stiegler’s Technics and Time. It is a tradition that also includes the work of Fichte, Husserl, Heidegger/Derrida, as well as Schelling, Bergson and Simondon/Deleuze. Developing this problematic, the most significant contribution of Stiegler’s work has been elaborating the meeting point between Heidegger/Derrida and Simondon/Deleuze. The opposition between subject and object, the overcoming of which is still sought by continental philosophy, is the definitive ground of all the classical oppositions we have to subvert – oppositions initially combated by Kant – such as empiricism and innateness, idealism and realism, dogmatism and skepticism. In posing his fundamental thesis about knowledge of individuation as the individuation of knowledge, Simondon has proposed a new way of overcoming the subject/object opposition, a new way whose interpretation is problematic (by which I mean “difficult and open”), as it will make clear. b/ The second fundamental problem raised by Stiegler in his debate with Simondon is the status of what Simondon calls “pre-individual” reality, which is to say the reality from which proceeds all individuation and whose existence Simondon hypothesizes in order to make sense of the genesis of all individuals, whether physical, vital or psycho-social. I will show the connection between this second fundamental philosophical problem and the first, justifying my initial claim of a single double problem, and explaining by this how Stiegler differs from Simondon in the two aspects of his engagement of problem at the same time. Before we get to that, I would like to dedicate the first part of my contribution today to recall some of the general trends in the thought of Simondon that seem to me in need of defense and development. This build upon the work that I have been engaged in with Vincent Bontems in our seminar at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where we have brought together with several young French researchers who are interested in Simondon.

L'épuisement de la querelle du réalisme en physique, qui est la conséquence épistémologique de la divergence inexplicable entre mécanique quantique et physique relativiste, manifeste la nécessité d'un dépassement de l'opposition traditionnelle entre réalisme et antiréalisme. La Théorie de la Relativité d'Échelle de Laurent Nottale, dans la mesure où elle vise à réunifier microphysique et macrophysique grâce aux concepts d'espace-temps fractal et de dépendance d'échelle, opère le dépassement de cette opposition en postulant la valeur d'être des relations physiques. L'exigence d'un réalisme des relations en physique confirme ainsi les intuitions de la philosophie de l'individuation de Gilbert Simondon, qui jugeait nécessaire d'accorder à la relation une valeur ontologique pour fonder la «synthèse grandiose de la relativité et des quanta ».

If Simondon's genetic Encyclopaedism offers enough to overcome the crisis of meaning which characterizes the techno-sciences times, it is indeed first because he presents man's thought processes, an approach of technique and knowledge able to come to terms with two kinds of paradoxes without ever running the risk of falling into contradiction. On the one hand, it builds a non-anthropological thought about technique which, however, doesn't seem to appear as being « destinal », thus going beyond the traditional debate between the sociology of sciences and Heideggerian thought. On the other hand, it enables a theory of knowledge radically distinguishing between philosophical reality and relativism.

Heidegger reproche explicitement à Kant de ne pas avoir compris la « transcendance du Dasein », mais sa partition ontique/ontologique reconduit la partition kantienne de l’empirique et du transcendantal. Une telle ambiguïté du dépassement, qui se dissimule comme ambiguïté et se refuse même comme dépassement grâce à l’idée d’une « appropriation » de Kant, nourrit le soupçon porté par certains contemporains sur le profit tiré par Heidegger de sa confrontation au sommet avec Hegel, dont le statut exceptionnel à ses yeux consiste à être le penseur qui a déjà pensé l’impensé fondamental, et dont la Phénoménologie de l’esprit est de ce fait « ontologie fondamentale de l’ontologie absolue ». L’enquête montre alors que la nature restée inaperçue de cet impensé fondamental place Heidegger, mais aussi Gadamer et Ricoeur, à l’intérieur du Système.

Loin d'être une « égologie cartésienne » ou un « apriorisme kantien », la phénoménologie husserlienne se veut, d'un bout à l'autre de l'œuvre, une subversion des alternatives classiques dont relèvent selon elle Descartes et Kant et par lesquelles se définit la métaphysique au sens large. S'il est vrai que Husserl revendique un « idéalisme transcendantal », c'est en approfondissant la réfutation kantienne de l'idéalisme, et cela en un geste qui, par le biais de l'intentionnalité comme autotranscendance subvertissant l'opposition principielle du sujet et de l'objet, préfigure déjà l'annulation heideggérienne du « scandale » qui préoccupait encore Kant, mais selon une voie qui n'oublie pas pour autant de rendre compte de la possibilité de la connaissance. Far from being a « Cartesian egology » or a « Kantian apriorism », phenomenology is meant, from one end to another of the Husserlian work, to overthrow the traditional alternatives, i.e. metaphysics in a wider sense, including Descartes and Kant. Though Husserl asserts to be a « transcendantal idealist », one may get over the fundamental opposition between subject and object only by looking further into the Kantian refutation of idealism by the means of a reinterpretation of intentionnality as selftranscendence. Such an approach forecasts the Heideggerian cancelling of the scandal that used to bother Kant, but according to a new way not eschewing to give an account of the possibility of knowledge.