§57. French Experience

Jacques Roger describes the mood of the life sciences in France at the be­ginning of the eighteenth century as “not the conquering rationalism of Descartes, sure in its certainties and its evidence, but a critical and skep­tical rationalism that derived much more from Gassendi, either directly or through the intermediation of English scientists.” New observations of microscopic life were so unparalleled and unexpected that they compelled the effort of replication, focusing attention on the conditions of exper­iment and observation and correct technical handling of apparatus.

Buffon abandons Cartesian evidence, but does not opt for skepticism, exuding confidence that the right use of analogy and observation can sus­tain scientific natural history. However, this science is not a philosophical knowledge of things in themselves, but merely the knowledge of human beings and doubly relative to us, scientific laws being products of our thought, and thought being perfused by sensation, which is peculiar to our animal organization. Writing in 1749, Buffon asks,

Is it in fact all that difficult to see that our ideas come only from the senses... [and that] anything that does not relate back to a perceivable object is vain, useless, and false in application?... Real forms of know­ledge... stem only from the result of our sensations, once the results have been compared, put in order, and sequenced, and these results are what one calls experience, the unique source of all real science.⁵⁵

Claude-Adrien Helvetius, the physician-philosopher who cured Louis XlV’s dysentery, seized this opening to physical sensibility, which he says “unlocks everything.” It “explains all manners of being of men, lays bare the causes of their intellect, stupidity, hate, love, errors, & contradictions.” But since this sensibility “is man himself & the principle of all that he is,” therefore “his knowledge never attains beyond his senses.

Condillac

A French translation of Locke's Essay (1690) appeared in 1700. Voltaire's Philosophical Letters, which contained laudatory accounts of Bacon, Locke, and Newton, appeared in 1734. In 1746, the sensualist position received its major statement by Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, in his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge. He thought Locke's most important theory was the sensory origin of ideas, but Locke did not go far enough in the business. He is better than the Cartesians because he found the right starting point, which is sensation, but he leaves the account imperfect because his development is incorrect. In the name of a more consistent empiricism, Condillac denies reflection its status in Locke as an independent source of ideas. “The Other Foundation, from which experience furnisheth the Understanding with Ideas, is the Perception of the Operation of our own Minds within us, as it is employ'd about the Ideas it has got.” To Condillac, that betrays empiricism. Locke's project in the Essay has to be redone, eliminating ideas of reflection and deriving everything from ideas of sense. “I have tried to do what this philosopher forgot; I have gone back to the first operations of the soul.” All knowledge is transformed sensation.⁵⁷

“It is not enough,” he says, “to repeat, after Locke, that all our knowledge comes from the senses: If I do not know how they came from them, I shall believe that as soon as objects make an impression on us we have all the ideas that our sensations can obtain, and I shall be mistaken.” It is the mistake of those who, following Locke, “fail... to recognize the difference between seeing and looking. In fact, we do not obtain knowledge of objects merely by seeing; we obtain it to the extent that we look at them, and look with order and method.” That requires analysis.

The royal road to knowledge of nature is original experience, free of every­thing artificial and abstract, which requires a lot of artificial, abstract analysis to peel back the layers of history and abuse that occlude the sensory originals. Condillac distrusts imagination as much as Bacon and Descartes did. It is the source of beguiling abstractions improperly derived from sensation. The only power that can cut though their confusion is analysis, which “breaks things down and untangles everything that the imagination assumes without any basis to be in them.” Analysis is a hammer with which to smash Bacon’s idols, but it cannot operate without direction. How do we know when we have reached the sensory originals and when we should keep digging? Condillac’s answer is experience, especially the experience of experiments. “My design is to recall everything in human understanding to a single principle, and this principle will be neither a vague proposition, nor an abstract maxim, nor an unwanted assumption; but a constant experience, whose consequences will be confirmed by new experiments.”⁵⁹

That is not a helpful explanation. How can experience and experiments confirm that we have reached an experience that is primordial and imper­sonal? Diderot raised this problem for Condillac. In Letters on the Blind (1749), a publication for which the author was committed to prison, Diderot quotes the opening sentence of Condillac’s Essay: “Whether we raise our­selves, to speak metaphorically, to the heavens or descend into the abyss, we never step outside ourselves; and we never perceive anything but our own private thoughts.” This, Diderot says, “is the conclusion of Berkeley’s first dia­logue, and the foundation of his entire system.” In other words, Condillac is a subjective idealist, like the good bishop of Cloyne.⁶⁰

This is more than a witty gibe.

In his principal work on methodology, Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature (1754), Diderot follows Bacon closely, closer than critics think. He presents an entirely Baconian view of experimentation that has seemed to readers more original than it is and less Bacon's because they credit the canard that Bacon allowed no place for imaginative analogies in his experiments, while Diderot, who emphasizes them, merely emphasizes what he read in Bacon (§38). For instance, Diderot speaks of the wonderful unreason (deraison) that experimental inquiry requires, and Bacon said his favorite sort of experiment “is wholly irrational and, as it were, insane (furiosus)” To pursue the questions that interested him Diderot did not require more in the way of methodology than what Bacon offered. His ingenuity lay in new ideas about matter and its powers rather than experience and its methods.⁶²

To rebut Diderot's criticism Condillac wrote the famous text (in Treatise on Sensations, 1754) about a statue gradually roused to life and conscious­ness one sense at a time.

When I treat the ideas that the statue acquires, I do not mean to say that it has knowledge of which it can render an exact account to itself: It has only practical knowledge. All the light it has is properly speaking instinctive, that is to say, a habit of conducting itself according to ideas of which it does not know how to render an account to itself, a habit which when acquired guides it safely, without any need for it to recall the judgments that made it assume that habit. But as soon as its ideas have taught it how to conduct itself, it no longer thinks of it and acts by habit. To acquire knowledge, it is necessary to have a language: for the ideas must be classified and deter­mined, which presupposes signs employed according to method.⁶³

Condillac's statue falls short of a mature human mind because not eve­rything that matters to such a mind arises from primitive sensations. The argument dramatizes the importance of language, because full knowledge (les connoissances de theorie) is impossible without it, and as a function of society language is not available to the solitary statue. Condillac corrects and completes Locke, not solely by a more consistent sensualism—that is merely to go back to Gassendi. The argument about language is new. Locke devotes an entire book of the Essay to signs and language, and defines his own method of analysis as semiotike, but he does not appreciate the dependence of the theory of ideas on a theory of signs, without which simple ideas cannot be subjected to the complex reflections Locke takes for granted.

Locke wrote influentially about signs and language but he does not un­derstand them well. “Words in their primary or immediate Signification,” he said, “stand for nothing, but the Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them, how imperfectly soever, or carelessly those Ideas are collected from the Things, which they are supposed to represent.” The problem is that the account is finished when it explains what signs stand for, as if the most important thing about a sign were reference. No less important is syntax, those delicate particles that do all the synthesis. They explain a sign’s relation, not to an extra-semiotic referent, but to other signs and other ideas, enabling analysis and reflection. The singular function of signs is syntactic, the connection (li­aison) of simple ideas. “Philosophers have often asked whether there is a first principle of our understanding.... Everyone can consult his own experience to be... convinced that the connection of ideas (la liaison des idee) is without comparison the simplest, the clearest, and the most fruitful principle.” He was more emphatic in correspondence. “The arbitrary signs set free the oper­ations of the soul that the natural ones leave necessary. That is the most deli­cate point of my system on the absolute necessity of signs.”⁶⁵

La Mettrie

Two years after Condillac’s Essay, the radical physician-philosopher Julien La Mettrie published his inflammatory work Man a Machine (1748). Sensationalism and materialism belong to different though overlapping lines in French thought. Materialists like La Mettrie, Diderot, and Holbach tend to accept sensationalist analysis—Gassendi and Locke were their teachers too—but carry it a step further, from the soul to the body, taking a page from Hobbes and denominating sense as vibration. “It is never but through our senses that beings are known to us, or produce ideas in us; it is only as a re­sult of movements imprinted on our body that the brain is altered or the soul thinks, wills, & acts” (Holbach). These enlightened materialists want to stamp out tyranny, intolerance, superstition, and error, and foster a more rational, scientific society. We should not stop the analysis with sensations, which might be simple ideas but not simple effects, and their material conditions have to be elucidated. The senses cannot be isolated from the body, nor the body from its environment, which includes society and technology.⁶⁶

Paris enj oyed a pamphlet war during the years 1724-50 between physicians and surgeons. Physicians in the eighteenth century were products of the university medical faculties, where they were still educated by Hippocrates and Galen. Surgeons had no university credential, being craftsmen who learned their trade as any artisan did. They were also physicians to the poor, staffing the hospitals, and following the army. An ordinance of 1724 gave these surgeons the right to offer public instruction in surgery and anatomy. The medical faculty objected to the abrogation of their ancient privilege on medical instruction. Disaffected with the medical education he received in Paris, La Mettrie, a graduate physician, sided with the surgeons. His vitri­olic contributions provoked rising ire, until his writings were condemned to burning and he was expelled from Paris.⁶⁷

La Mettrie was not a medical radical like Paracelsus. As a practitioner he was entirely orthodox. His most prescribed treatment was bleeding, and he opposed the new practice of smallpox inoculation. He had studied medi­cine at Paris, completed his degree at Reims, then spent two years at Leyden under Boerhaave, the foremost medical teacher of the time, later publishing translations of Boerhaave's writings. His notoriety is in medical philosophy. Medicine is for him the epitome of scientific investigation, the exemplary empiricism, supplying the norms philosophy requires for its judgments, and principles appropriate to an enlightened reform of the world. He urges physicians to do more to communicate useful information for the public good, which would enable better self-care. Doctors should inform the public about medical disputes and issues and invite them to participate in debate and reform. That was not something the physicians, jealous of their fees, were keen to discuss, least of all with the laity.⁶⁸

La Mettrie imaginatively extended his criticism of the physicians to the Cartesian natural philosophers, challenging dualism with physiological ev­idence. Enough logic and psychology! Physiology is the way to advance the understanding of human nature. The best evidence for materialism comes from comparative anatomy, and muscular irritability is the decisive evidence that matter contains a principle of motion. “It is only a posteriori, that is to say, by trying to disentangle the soul in the organs of bodies that one can, I don’t say discover the very nature of man”—the discredited ambition of metaphysics—“but attain the greatest degree of probability possible on this subject with this evidence.”⁶⁹

Despite the dramatic invocation of machines in his famous title, La Mettrie is not a medical mechanist, like Descartes or Malpighi, and Man a Machine does not compare man to a machine. For him, saying that man is a machine is saying that we are but nature, parts of nature, activated as everything else in nature is activated, which he assumes is by quantitative (“mechanical”) differences. “Mechanism” in La Mettrie is the idea of a body operating in ac­cord with quantitative regularities, not the idea of automata. The feeling soul is physical, the thinking soul depends on the feeling soul, hence the step from sensation to reason is a small one. Hobbes had already made the argument and Diderot repeats it later.⁷⁰

Maine de Biran

Maine de Biran shares Condillac’s admiration for Locke and also criticizes Locke’s inconsistency, proposing a more consistently empirical empiricism. But unlike Condillac, who thought consistency required eliminating reflec­tion as an independent source of ideas, Biran charges Locke and more vehe­mently Condillac with failing to take due account of inner experience.

Locke’s “Other Foundation” from which experience delivers ideas is the perception of the operation of our own minds, as we are doubting, believing, reasoning, remembering, willing, and so on. Reflection is not representation, and is in that respect unlike external sense; we do not have ideas that repre­sent to us that we are, say, doubting or willing. Neither is reflection introspec­tion, being closer to what Jean-Paul Sartre describes as reflexive awareness (la reflexion). Hume misunderstands this in Locke, whose ideas of reflection are not Hume’s impressions of reflection, which really are inner objects, inner representations, expressing what Sartre calls the illusion of immanence, as if perceiving could itself be an object of perception, just like the objects of ex­ternal sense. Locke’s reflection is awareness, but awareness of action, aware­ness of doubting, or willing, as actions we are conscious of going through.⁷¹

For Biran, Locke's doctrine is good but his execution is imperfect. He fails to notice the willing involved in sensation, which he views much too passively (though this is the tradition since Democritus). Biran has a good idea of the activity in the background of Locke's simple ideas of sense. He appreciates, in advance of Helmholtz's experiments, how actively the body's musculature participates in all sensory acts, with tiny movements of orienta­tion and adjustment in the eyes, head, and neck, more generally throughout the body. We obscurely feel these changes, a corporeal aisthesis that forms the felt background of every perception and action. This is an example of what is missing in Locke, Condillac, and empirical psychology so far. Psychologists have fixed on outer sensation, neglecting this equipotent second source, Locke's Other Foundation. Biran's correction of Condillac's correction of Locke returns psychology to two sources of ideas, outer sense and inner feeling, acting together without losing their distinction.

In a work of 1811, Biran quotes the nihil est in intellectu motto, which he calls “ancient and famous” but also “controversial.” Its understanding is usu­ally restricted to the external senses, with the so-called internal senses un­acknowledged, being something philosophers “seem more disposed to flee than to investigate.” Understandably, since reflection is not a sensory impres­sion, not a representation, and cannot be modeled on external sense. Locke was right about that and Hume mistaken. Reflection is a separate channel, active, not passive, not set in motion by external stimuli.⁷²

Stimulation of nerves may cause sensations but not reflections, whose cause is “the soul's motor activity,” that is, effort, volition, conation, a kinetic cogito. Biran calls the experience of willing the primary fact. It is not a simple feeling, but rather the complex experience of resistance—will and obstacle. This primary self-feeling of conation persists in varying degrees of tension throughout waking life, and Biran dedicates several arguments to show how this neglected psychological experience overcomes the embarrassing lacunas of empirical analysis, namely, ideas of substance, causality, self, and freedom.⁷³

Biran thought the fundamental mistake of empiricism was to leave the analysis of inner sense incomplete and confuse it with outer sense. In this respect there had been no progress since Locke. Ideas of sensation are presentations, but reflection is something we live through and cannot be analyzed with the same concepts and methods as science applies to external perceptions. This argument foreshadows ideas made prominent by Wilhelm Dilthey eighty years later. His celebrated hermeneutics began as a descriptive psychology that placed a new priority on those experiences which do not merely present us with an object, but are something we live through.

In “Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology” (1894), Dilthey takes a stance against practically every leading trend of European psychology, including the associationist psychology that William James crit­icized in The Principles of Psychology (1890) (§73). He gathers all of Hume, David Hartley, James and J. S. Mill, Spencer, Hippolyte Taine, and Johann Friedrich Herbart, as well as the experimental psychology of Hermann Ebbinghaus and Helmholtz, under the name of explanatory psychology, and says that their approach, being modeled on natural science, is untenable in psychology. The experience that psychology needs to understand is not the perceptions that confirm or refute a hypothesis about causes. The objects of natural science are facts given from outside, as isolated phenomena. For instance, a serious philosopher, knowledgeable about science, gave as an example of an experimental protocol statement, “Here now pointer at 5, si­multaneously spark and explosion, then smell of ozone there.”⁷⁴

Natural science has to construct the continuum of causes from such fragments, using inference and interpolating and testing hypothetical connections, but that is not the experience psychology has to understand and not its method. Concrete experience, lived experience, is not fragmented like laboratory data, and does not require hypotheses to draw elements into a sig­nificant totality, which it is already and originally. The objects of psychology, and indeed all the human sciences, belong to a living continuum, a primary experiential whole (Zusammenhang). It is this experience, signaled by the then new word Erlebnis, that is the object of Dilthey’s descriptive psychology, which stands to explanatory psychology as Biran stands to Condillac and the empirical tradition in psychology.

Like Biran, Dilthey demands a more consistently empirical empiricism. Empiricism has confined its analysis to external perception, a position Dilthey identifies with Auguste Comte and calls Empirismus. He contrasts such doctrinaire empiricism with his own more consistently empirical em­piricism, an unbefangene Empirie, an unprejudiced, impartial empiricism that consults inner experience no less than outer, and attends not only to the presentations of sense but also to the experience of living through them. The instrument of unbefangene empiricism is the concept of Erlebnis, lived expe­rience, a word that only became common from the 1870s when it emerged in biographical writing, and Dilthey is the first philosopher to make systematic use of it in rethinking reflection and inner experience.⁷⁵

According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, the primary meaning of Erlebnis is to be alive when something happens, the occasion perfused with the memory of all that has been lived through. This lived experience comprises a perceptual core, which gives it immediacy, supplemented by the memory of past experience, and not solely recollections but recollected emotion, felt as lived through. Nothing about the experience implies that it is inner rather than outer, and in fact it is both. Lived experience does not exclude external perception, nor can external perception be stripped of interiority. We live through it all, the external and the internal, touch and vision, memory and desire.⁷⁶

Lived experience is not “inner,” it is continuous, which is easily mistaken for the inner, since consciousness is our first experience of continuity. Erlebnis is the unit of concrete experience, how it is originally given for awareness, in contrast to the mutilated experience of the psycho-physics laboratory. Every faculty is engaged, the whole organism: “The processes of the whole mind (Gemut) op­erate together in this experience,” which has a purposiveness that gives it conti­nuity and totality. “In it the entire nexus is given, whereas the senses offer only a multiplicity of items.”⁷⁷

When Dilthey analyzes the expressions of inner experience, which he did as a biographer and philosopher of culture, he finds the expression of external experience, especially when “external” includes the cultural environment and the effects of history. The distinction between inner and external experience is aufgehoben, destroyed, in this case by becoming otiose. Instead of dividing ex­perience into the part that is present and sensed and the part we live through, it is all Erlebnis, lived experience. We can still speak of inner experience, for in­stance, feelings that remain deliberately unexpressed; we might expect, how­ever, that if we could analyze it, that private experience would be shot through with external themes and references.

Significant expressions, from speech and gesture to fine art, are not orig­inal expressions of inner life, but are conditioned by and express historical circumstances. The personal and impersonal dissolve into each other, and expressions of experience become intelligible as individualized expressions of common life. This happens most dramatically in the fine arts, where artists tend to experience the world by means of the historical conditions of their art, their imagination reflecting a shared cultural world from an individual perspective. The difference between lived experience in Dilthey and reflection in Locke or Biran is to recognize the historical dimension of experience, indifference to which is as characteristic of Biran and the eighteenth century as obsession with history is characteristic of Dilthey and the German nineteenth century.