Marxism and Epistemology

Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault

Dominique Lecourt

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786632401
• eBook ISBN: 9781788732086
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

When this book was first published in English in 1975, the previous forty years had seen the emergence of a new tradition in the philosophy of the sciences, or 'epistemology' in France. The founder of this tradition was Gaston Bachelard. Rather than elaborating from existing philosophy a series of categories to judge science's claims to truth, Bachelard started from the twentieth-century revolution in physics and critically examined existing philosophy on the basis of the achievements of this revolution and the scientific practice it exemplified. This critique of philosophy produced an epistemology radically different from traditional idealism and empiricism. Simultaneously, it opened the way to a new history of the sciences which had been developed by Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault.

This critique of empiricism and idealism in the name of science clearly parallels the theses of dialectical materialism. Hence a dialectical-materialist analysis illuminates both the achievements and limitations of the tradition.

In this book Dominique Lecourt presents an exposition of Bachelard's epistemological writings and then offers a critique of that epistemology and of the works of Canguilhem and Foucault from a Marxist-Leninist viewpoint. In an introduction written especially for the English edition he compares Bachelard's positions with those of the different, but in some respects analogous, Anglo-Saxon traditions in epistemology descending from the works of Karl Popper, in particular with Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Part One

Gaston Bachelard’s
Historical Epistemology

Foreword

The present study by M. Dominique Lecourt reproduces a mémoire de maîtrise which seemed worthy of publication as much for the intelligent sobriety with which it interrogates Gaston Bachelard’s epistemological work as for the discernment with which it singles out the points at which to bring this interrogation to bear.

If in his study he does mobilize certain epistemological concepts imported from a source he does not conceal, M. Lecourt can justify himself, first by the discretion he demonstrates and second and above all by the fact that these concepts were invented and essayed in order to conform, in a domain to which Gaston Bachelard never applied himself, to certain norms and exigencies of Bachelardian epistemology.

The index of principal concepts which terminates this study will be useful to all those for whom the reading of Gaston Bachelard’s epistemological work is, in conformity with what he himself wished, an effort.

Georges Canguilhem

Introduction

Commentary on a commentary, reflection on a reflection, is this work a matter of historical erudition – as its title would suggest – or one of philosophical ratiocination, since it presents itself as a ‘philosophical memoir’? Such is the question justifiably posed before such an undertaking. Another form of this crucial question: is it a matter of exhibiting a curious variety, the historical species, of the genus which tradition has delimited by the name of epistemology? In that case, one would speak of ‘historical epistemology’ in the sense in which one speaks of ‘historical geography’ to designate a special branch of the discipline ‘geography’. Or is it a matter of isolating in the history of epistemology the instant bearing the name Gaston Bachelard so as to recall it to memory? In this sense, ‘historical epistemology’ would have to be taken to mean ‘historical monument’: a witness of the past which, although it has gone by, still deserves to be remembered.

Here it is a question of something quite different: Gaston Bachelard’s work, by an inner necessity peculiar to itself, escapes the clutches of these tedious alternatives. What it reveals to us is the fact that epistemology is historical; its essence is to be historical. If we take as a first definition of epistemology what etymology tells us about it, we can say: the discipline which takes scientific knowledge as its object must take into account the historicity of that object. And the immediate counterpart to this revolutionary proposition: if epistemology his historical, the History of the Sciences is necessarily epistemological. Once the tedious alternatives have been rejected, we are caught in an engaging reciprocity.

It engages us indeed, beyond the play on words, in thinking that of the concepts which are at work in it: epistemology and history. That is, in answering the question: what theoretical mechanism is concealed by the mystery of this double inauguration? or rather: by virtue of what necessity does the problematic installed by Bachelard in epistemology carry its effects beyond its own field into that of the history of the sciences? Still more precisely: what regulated system of concepts functions in Bachelardian epistemology to give rise to the construction of a new concept of the history of the sciences?

But we are caught in it: it is indeed clear that to say ‘historical epistemology’ is already to imply in the definition of the discipline the concept whose construction becomes possible as one of its effects. The aporia would be complete if we were to ignore the special status of epistemology: its object refers itself to another object. It is a discourse which is articulated on to another discourse. Literally, it is a second discourse whose status thus depends in the last analysis on the structure of the first.

Now, I shall attempt to prove that Gaston Bachelard’s discovery is precisely to have recognized and then to have theoretically reflected the fact that science has no object outside its own activity; that it is in itself, in its practice, productive of its own norms and of the criterion of its existence. This bold thesis produced by a philosopher who took it upon himself to be and to remain the modest pupil of contemporary scientists revolutionizes the field of epistemology. I shall be concerned to show by what theoretical effort Bachelard was able to produce it, within what network of concepts he was able to express it. Without anticipating the details of the analysis, a mere over-view of his work justifies the claim that it is all organized around a reflection on Mathematical-Physics; precisely on the riddle of the hyphen between them which contemporary science showed had necessarily to be resolved in theory.

Let me leap straight to my conclusions: by adopting as its object scientific knowledge in its movement, epistemology is dealing with a historical process. A whole field of real problems opens to its inquiry; outside the tranquil universe of the ideal problems posed by the philosopher about ‘Science’, about its foundations, its method, its reality, its status with respect to other forms of knowledge.…

It is thus clear from now on that this thesis runs counter to the convictions by which philosophy has lived hitherto. I propose to show that it runs counter to them in a very special way, in a non-philosophical way, although the collision takes place in philosophy. We shall find that on certain questions which the theoretical conjuncture has turned into ‘sensitive points’ – e.g., the question of intuition or that of quality – Bachelard rejoins the philosophers from a different starting-point. I take the risk of claiming that this meeting is not a matter of chance; it pertains to the fact that the problems philosophy poses also have a relation to scientific knowledge, but in a different modality, which it will be incumbent on me to determine.

A non-philosophical meeting in philosophy; indeed, I hope to prove that the theoretical discipline inaugurated by Gaston Bachelard poses vis-à-vis the sciences different questions on a different terrain; it invalidates the notions of previous epistemology, and – what is more serious – it disqualifies the problems of traditional philosophy; it puts them out of court. In other words: it stands in for – it occupies the place of – previous philosophy, but elsewhere. Here doubtless we have the ultimate and profound reason for the dêpaysement, the lack of bearings one feels in reading Gaston Bachelard’s texts: it is another country that one finds; a new world by the grace of a new style constructed with new concepts.

In fact, one could not but notice that Bachelard’s work is shot through and through with a constantly recurring polemic against the philosophers. Philosophy is present in it as a hydra before it is thought as a spectrum. I shall argue that the necessity of this polemic is inscribed deep in Bachelard’s thought: in opening the field of historical epistemology, he uncovers – lays bare and to the quick – what philosophy is eager to cover up: the real – historical – conditions of the production of scientific knowledges. This philosophical recovering is revealed by a systematic displacement of problems: Bachelard’s undertaking is to restore them to their rightful places, i.e., to their senses, obviously at the cost of returning philosophers to theirs. Hence there was a destiny in his theoretical thought which had to turn this peaceful man into the philosopher fighting on every front.

But Gaston Bachelard is not content to describe the mechanisms and effects of philosophical intervention in scientific knowledge; he also tries to find out why. It is clear, in his eyes, that what I have called the ‘displacement – re-covering’ cannot arise without an interest to order it. In other words, not only does Bachelard exhibit the unthought of philosophical discourse (the re-covering), he also sets us on the road to the unconscious whose effect in the philosophical text that un-thought is. In that unprecedented book The Formation of the Scientific Mind, and then continually in the rest of his work, he makes visible the values which order – in all senses of the word – philosophical discourse, ideological values whose intervention in scientific practice constitutes what Bachelard designates by a new name: the ‘epistemological obstacles’. This new word is a new concept which, for reasons pertaining, as we have just seen, to its nature, philosophy could neither produce nor even recognize.

It is in this way that I shall take seriously the notion of ‘psychoanalysis’ which appears in the sub-title to the book. I shall see in it an unprecedented project, often more admired than understood, whose necessity Bachelard was first able to conceive. In it, better perhaps than elsewhere, we find out why according to Gaston Bachelard the specific determination of philosophy is its relation to the sciences, how philosophy is defined in and by this intervention, how it is extra-scientific values that it imports into the scientist’s activity, that it superimposes on the operations of scientific knowledge. But also revealed is the main victim of this intervention: the scientist himself who, whether consciously or no, borrows from philosophy the concepts it has formed to reflect his own practice. It ultimately reveals why it is that ‘science does not have the philosophy it deserves’; what it is that it loses thereby; but also how it can acquire it. This book, which Bachelard wanted to be easily accessible, will undoubtedly bring us to the most difficult, most secret parts of Bachelardian epistemology.

Indeed, new tasks can now be assigned to the epistemologist. An open and mobile philosophy is required that respects the always new and unexpected openings of scientific thought. That is to say, philosophy must renounce systematic form, the comfort of its closed space, the immobility of ‘closed reason’ and take risks, alongside the scientists, behind them, in as yet uncleared ‘fields of thought’. As we shall see, it is to this that the set of concepts elaborated and reworked by Bachelard responds and is engaged; constitutive of his epistemology, they find their most noteworthy, because operational, expression in his last works: Applied Rationalism, The Rationalist Activity of Contemporary Physics and Rational Materialism.

It is surely not without interest to state it: it is at the beginning of The Rationalist Activity of Contemporary Physics, in 1951 – i.e., almost a quarter of a century after his first works – that Gaston Bachelard devotes a long introductory chapter to the definition of the ‘tasks of a philosophy of the sciences’. A remarkable manifestation of that openness which he demanded other philosophers make their main concern, this fact has a further import. If it is agreed that its location is of some importance, it can be inferred:

– That it is a reflection on the techniques and concepts of the new Physics which summoned Bachelard to conceive of new tasks for the philosophy of the sciences, or, what comes to the same thing, to establish the basic concepts of a new epistemology. His whole work confirms this for us;

– But above all that it is tardily, at the end of a long theoretical effort to disengage the specificity of the concepts of the new science that this epistemology can conform to its own concept – already at work but unthematized in the writings of the preceding period – and formally engage philosophical thought in a new problematic.

To my mind, it is very significant that it is the same book which, a few pages later, takes as its theme the problems of the History of the Sciences and reflects them for themselves; no longer incidentally, as was the case in the other books. The Lecture at the Palais de la Découverte on the Actuality of the History of the Sciences merely returns to and extends the considerations of the book of 1951.

I see in this a justification for the thesis I have already advanced: the institution of a new problematic in the History of the Sciences is the effect, outside its own field, of the Bachelardian epistemological revolution.

It is also from this double statement that I obtain my authorization for the order of exposition adopted here. It consists of first showing how Gaston Bachelard, thanks to an upheaval in Mathematical-Physics, simultaneously recognizes the object of science and that of philosophy; or rather, but in different senses, recognizes that neither the one nor the other has an object; and goes on to show that this double recognition, once its theoretical implications have been thought, produces a double and reciprocal foundation: that of historical epistemology and that of epistemological history.

It goes without saying that these theoretical positions which I am defending do not emerge without my setting to work a certain number of principles of reading. In particular, if what I have said is correct, it is clear that the architecture of Bachelard’s text is complex. Several levels can be distinguished in it, levels which may overli...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the English Edition
• Part One: Gaston Bachelard’s Historical Epistemology
• Part Two: For a Critique of Epistemology (Bachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault)
• Notes
• Index