Metaphilosophy by Henri Lefebvre

Author:Henri Lefebvre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Hegel’s Phenomenology already contained this striking theory of the abstract animal: man who, taking the abstraction and split of his activity (specialization) as reality and thing into which to absorb his consciousness in a seeming self-realization, becomes again animal – but an animal without spontaneous life, deprived of vital impulses and confined to the ‘spiritual animal kingdom’.28 A profound theory this, as much so as Marx’s theory of the abstract object (commodity, money) that alienates and reifies activity. We glimpse in this the theory of ‘theoretical realization’.

With the automaton, with ‘theoretical realization’, does knowledge remain in the air, without foundation, as philosophers fear in the absence of a theory of knowledge? Certainly not. The technological object guarantees its objectivity. It realizes this practically, in technological praxis.

Classical Western philosophy, we will say, broke the connection between subject and object right from the start. This then had to be reestablished, which was attempted on two levels: that of metaphysics, and that of theory of knowledge (the relationship between the two remaining ill-defined). Metaphysics did not succeed, as it borrowed its principles either from a hypostasis of the subject (the absolute ‘I’, the transcendental ‘ego’ of Fichte, Husserl and, in his own way, Sartre’s ‘for-itself’), or a hypostasis of the object (substance, the in-itself, matter). These hyperboles could not bring the separate terms into harmony, as they presupposed this separation. Nor did the theory of knowledge, ‘gnoseology’ or general methodology succeed any better. They shifted the ‘problem’, which became that of the relationship between the given and the constructed, the pure fact and scientific observation.

Today, the problem has disappeared because it has been resolved in scientific practice. A certain methodological and theoretical notion has acquired growing importance, that of simulation. We already know this. We find it here better illuminated and in a wider perspective.

The notion of simulation accompanies contemporary advances in microphysics, molecular chemistry, the construction of electronic machines, cybernetics. It is a very broad and powerful concept, susceptible moreover to a rigorous (axiomatized) definition.29

We presuppose an ‘observer’ external to an ‘object’, a given ‘reality’. This scientific observer differs from the ‘witness’ or ‘judge’ – who, physicist or philosopher, or both at once, passively observed empirical facts or relationships. As active observer, he disposes of technologies and operations that enable him to apprehend the ‘real’ (the object) as ensemble of phenomena, dimensions, perspectives. These means then enable the observer to construct an object that ‘reproduces’ the initial object, initially posited as external and real. Constructive activity supersedes classical empiricism. This activity is not rational in the sense of classical relativism; it does something; it constructs not just concepts and representations, but the real. Effective realization plays the role of experience in the methodology accepted up to now.

Simulation thus includes the reproduction of a set of phenomena by technological mechanisms [dispositifs]. These means may be crude, little metal balls, wires and threads, as in the oldest ‘models’ of modern physics, or again painted paper, bits of wood. They may be refined, for example

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.