Darwinism Dead at 150

Philosophy

Descartes laid the philosophical groundwork for the modern scientific period by separating subjective cognition from objective bodies, thereby also dividing epistemology from ontology reducing knowing to indifferent âobservation.â This is the perspective of consciousness and its object, of which material science only imperfectly studies the object. In reality these two are not separated but dialectically related and sublated in the higher comprehending original unity of self-consciousness. Physical scientists fail to study these higher categories of reality and are therefore left with an incomplete understanding of a mere superficial nature that is inadequate to comprehend the core truth. But scientific, rational inquiry will not stop until a comprehensive idea is reached that is coherent with the full range of our knowledge of life. That spectrum of knowledge is not circumscribed merely by chemistry, physics and mathematics. Thus Vedanta-sutra advises, that you will have to continue your search, athatho brahma jijnasa, until you reach brahma, the underlying spiritual source, janmady asy yatah, the fountainhead where all inquiry will reach its purpose. Then beyond knowledge Bhagavatam will guide us to the ultimate search â raso vai sah, the search for our highest fulfillment, sweetness and love.

/7/22, 8:21 AM Darwinism Dead at 150 | Darwin Under Siege https://scienceandscientist.org/Darwin/2010/12/01/darwinism-dead-at-150/ 2/5 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 Darwinism Dead at 150 Wednesday, December 1, 2010 || By: Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja, Ph.D. || Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Darwinism, or the original theory of evolution proposed by Darwin 150 years ago in his Origin of Species, in which he introduced the idea of natural selection, was laid to rest about a half century ago when it was succeeded by the neo-Darwinian theory involving genetic mutation and natural selection, also known as the modern synthesis. Since then an endless stream of textbooks, courses, media presentations and "genetic toolkits"[1] have been used to indoctrinate students and the public with these ideas causing many to give up their religious conviction in God or the soul as integral to their understanding of life.However, with the advancement of science, especially in the field of biology, more detailed knowledge of the genes and genome have revealed a far more complex dynamic relation between the genome and phoneme and its environment than can be explained by appeal to simple genetic mechanisms. This has been a dawning realization among biologists during the last few decades, but the "evolution industry" (Suzan Mazur, The Altenberg 16: An Exposé Of The Evolution Industry (2010)) has kept the public in the dark about the real scientific overthrow of the modern evolutionary synthesis. Now all of that is about to change. 2/7/22, 8:21 AM Darwinism Dead at 150 | Darwin Under Siege https://scienceandscientist.org/Darwin/2010/12/01/darwinism-dead-at-150/ 3/5 Scientist were invited to attend a 2008 conference in Altenberg, Austria, to address this critical junction: "The challenge seems clear to us: how do we make sense, conceptually, of the astounding advances in biology since the 1940s, when the Modern Synthesis was taking shape? Not only we have witnessed the molecular revolution, from the discovery of the structure of DNA to the genomic era, we are also grappling with the increasing feeling – for example as reflected by an almost comical proliferation of "-omics," that we just don't have the theoretical and analytical tools necessary to make sense of the bewildering diversity and complexity of living organisms." A senior investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, and National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, has published two peer reviewed papers on the current status of the "modern evolutionary synthesis," wherein he states, "The edifice of the modern synthesis has crumbled, apparently, beyond repair." [Eugene Koonin, The Origin at 150: Is a new evolutionary synthesis in sight?" Trends in Genetics, 25(11), November 2009, pp. 473-475] and [Eugene Koonin, Darwinian evolution in the light of genomics, Nucleic Acids Research, 37(4), 2009, pp. 1011-1034]. From the abstract of his second paper: "Comparative genomics and systems biology offer unprecedented opportunities for testing central tenets of evolutionary biology formulated by Darwin in the Origin of Species in 1859 and expanded in the Modern Synthesis 100 years later. Evolutionary-genomic studies show that natural selection is only one of the forces that shape genome evolution and is not quantitatively dominant, whereas nonadaptive processes are much more prominent than previously suspected. Major contributions of horizontal gene transfer and diverse selfish genetic elements to genome evolution undermine the Tree of Life concept.[2] An adequate depiction of evolution requires the more complex concept of a network or 'forest' of life. There is no consistent tendency of evolution towards increased genomic complexity, and when complexity increases, this appears to be a non adaptive consequence of evolution under weak purifying selection rather than an adaptation." The concept that natural selection provides the foundation for evolutionary change has long been challenged for its failure to explain how different forms arises in nature, but only how they may be favored once they do arise. Through the work of scientists like Motoo Kimura, Tomoko Ohta [Theoretical aspects of population genetics, Motoo Kimura and Tomoko Ohta (1971)] and others, it has been concluded both theoretically and empirically that natural selection has little or no effect on the vast majority of the genomes of most living organisms. In this regard, Dr. Koonin adds (see above): "There is no consistent tendency of evolution towards increased genomic complexity, and when complexity increases, this appears to be a non adaptive consequence of evolution under weak purifying selection rather than an adaptation." Purifying evolution refers to the cell's coordinated elimination of harmful mutations. Allen MacNeill [teaching biology at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY] writes on his blog[3]: "Kimura, Ohta, Jukes, and Crow dropped a monkey wrench into the "engine" at the heart of the modern synthesis - natural selection - and then Gould and Lewontin finished the job with their famous paper on The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm." [4] Suzan Mazur, laying down the gauntlet recently wrote [5]: "Let's begin with the facts: The days of evolutionary science being an exclusive old boys club are over. The public is a party to the discourse now and knows the emphasis in evolutionary science is on VISION and not textbook rules. And while Rutgers philosopher Jerry Fodor's and University of Arizona cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's new book, "What Darwin Got Wrong." does not showcase amateur evolutionary theories, the authors do indeed reach out to the public "hop[ing] to convince" through Fodor's sublime ability to argue a point and Piattelli-Palmarini's wit, charm and biophysics savvy that we as a people have got to move on because the central story of the theory of evolution - 2/7/22, 8:21 AM Darwinism Dead at 150 | Darwin Under Siege https://scienceandscientist.org/Darwin/2010/12/01/darwinism-dead-at-150/ 4/5 natural selection - is wrong in a way that "can't be repaired". They are careful not to say what the public also knows, i.e., that a critical mass of people is simply tired of Darwin's vision. It's out of vogue." And, as if to add yet another nail to the coffin: "Unless the discourse around evolution is opened up to scientific perspectives beyond Darwinism, the education of generations to come is at risk of being sacrificed for the benefit of a dying theory." – Stuart Newman ( professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College in Valhalla, NY) [6] It was Darwin, himself who explained how he should be buried: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." [7] Suzan Mazur writes, "Stuart Newman's now got a seductive theory about the origin of form of all 35 or so animal phyla–"it happened abruptly" not gradually, roughly 600 million years ago via a "pattern language"–which serves as the centerpiece of the "Extended Synthesis."" [8] While what is being called the "Extended Synthesis" does not outright dispense with natural selection and gene mutations, it subordinates them to minor roles. And while the concept of evolution itself is certainly not yet rejected by these scientists, the gradual march of science is demonstrating how scientific understanding is constantly subject to error and revision because of its inherently finite, incomplete view of reality. In order to assuage the feelings of the Darwinian ideologues like Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education in the US, and others the term "expanded synthesis," is being promoted with the assurance that neo-Darwinian mechanisms are still being brought into the picture, although in a subordinate way, in order to ease their transition into what is not only a change in thinking about life, but a change in how to think about life in a non-mechanistic, dynamic, and holistic way, e.g. Complexity Philosophy' [9] Vedantic science does not suffer the fate of finitistic science but has proposed for millennia that the cause of the diversity of species is due to the underlying variety of conscious living entities that manifest such bodies as indicated by theistic Samkhya philosophy. Modern science has not yet progressed to the finer level of understanding that requires advancement beyond a purely materialistic ontology. It must be properly appreciated that Vedantic knowledge is also systematic, scientific and rational but requires a different epistemic-ontological grounding than the impersonal/materialist paradigm assumes. And it is condescending to think that the ancient cultures were somehow more primitive, mythological, or somehow less informed about nature and reality than modern scientists. The chronological conceit of authors like Jean Gebser, Brian Swmimme and others think modern man to be superior to all previous civilizations that they know of based on a narrow materialist, Eurocentric education and the hegemony that the history of civilizations from that perspective has gained. Of course, there are civilizations mentioned in the Vedas that they simply have no knowledge of or they consider mythological. Nonetheless, their ideas are simply not true when considered from the conscious basis upon which reality is grounded according to Vedic understanding, from which a strong case may be made for their superior advancement. Much evidence of those civilizations has been lost through the course of history but what remains in the form of sacred literature has never been excelled. Descartes laid the philosophical groundwork for the modern scientific period by separating subjective cognition from objective bodies, thereby also dividing epistemology from ontology reducing knowing to indifferent "observation." This is the perspective of consciousness and its object, of which material science only imperfectly 2/7/22, 8:21 AM Darwinism Dead at 150 | Darwin Under Siege https://scienceandscientist.org/Darwin/2010/12/01/darwinism-dead-at-150/ 5/5 studies the object. In reality these two are not separated but dialectically related and sublated in the higher comprehending original unity of self-consciousness. Physical scientists fail to study these higher categories of reality and are therefore left with an incomplete understanding of a mere superficial nature that is inadequate to comprehend the core truth. But scientific, rational inquiry will not stop until a comprehensive idea is reached that is coherent with the full range of our knowledge of life. That spectrum of knowledge is not circumscribed merely by chemistry, physics and mathematics. ThusVedantasutra advises, that you will have to continue your search, athatho brahma jijnasa, until you reach brahma, the underlying spiritual source, janmady asy yatah, the fountainhead where all inquiry will reach its purpose. Then beyond knowledgeBhagavatam will guide us to the ultimate search – raso vai sah, the search for our highest fulfillment, sweetness and love. References: [1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/4/l_034_04.html [2] Will Provine, Tisch distinguished professor of Paleontology at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in an interview states, "We've discovered that Darwin's idea of evolution by descent from comment ancestors does not really work well as soon as you get behind multi-cellular organisms....and our methods phylogeny reconstruction are so poor, that we will never have a tree of life that goes back to the origin of life." [3] http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/ [4] Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin. "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme" Proc. Roy. Soc. London B 205 (1979) pp. 581-598 [5] http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1003/S00236.htm [6] Stuart Newman, Evolution: The Public's Problem, and the Scientists' (2008). [7] Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species Ch. 6. (1859) [8] http://www.archaeology.org/online/interviews/newman.html [9] http://www.calresco.org/lucas/compute.htm Visitors: Free Web Counter This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 1st, 2010 at 1:50 pm and is filed under Challenges/Evidences, Darwin's Illusion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Be the first of your friends to like this.Like Share Like 11 Share


Stalling for Time

Philosophy

# DRAFT# Stalling for Time Gabriel Furmuzachi Abstract Carel Fabritius left behind few but important works of art. We are concerned here with the View in Delft, and attempt to make two points about it. The first is that this small painting manages to break away from the classical perception of perspective, an endeavor informed mostly by new findings in the field of optics of the time. The second point, theoretically related to the first, stresses compositional elements that would bring View in Delft closer to a meditation on the fleetingness of life, making it a "town-scape" vanitas. I The View in Delft, by Carel Fabritius (1622-1654) is a small painting (15.5 x 31.7 cm) showing a street corner, at the back of the Nieuwe Kerk, in Delft in 1652. On the left side of the painting there is a man (perhaps a musical instruments seller) sitting in a stall at a table (on which we can see a lute and a viola da gamba) and seeming to be somehow lost in thoughts. As we look further to the right, our gaze is led inside the picture, then across the canal, acknowledging the tiny silhouette of the Delft town-hall, then come back, following the convex curvature of the Nieuwe Kerk (central to the painting) and then, again, down the road and along a second canal, our gaze travels all the way to the heart of Delft in order to finally come back again in the proximity of our instruments seller. The painting is on display at the National Gallery in London and, although it is presented flat (canvas mounted on wood) it is very likely that it was part of a perspective box. Carel Fabritius View in Delft (1652) 15.5 x 31.7 cm (Wikipedia) Walter Liedtke in The Burlington Magazine (1976) brings convincing arguments supporting the fact that Fabritius not only made perspective boxes but also that he was some sort of authority in this respect. The View in Delft, Liedtke considers, was meant to be mounted at the back of a V-shaped box, in a hemicycle at 80° viewing angle. Presenting it this way would give one a much better sense of depth: the tree on the right would become almost detached from the picture (with some virtual space between itself and the houses behind it), the light and shadow play would become plausible, the church would lose its plumpness and receive taller proportions and the road on the right would be, as Liedtke puts it, "less reminiscent of Champs Élysées than of this little straatje in the actual town". Moreover, the man on the left seems now "slimmer but rounder", he "occupies space and gains his proper scale" closer to the viewer than to the church. The rest of the viola da gamba would be completed with a drawing on the floor of the perspective box, which would thus put it right "beneath the viewer's nose", below and in contrast to the church. Fabritius plays with our gaze in this small work. This does not mean, however, that he managed to pull a sophisticated trompel'oeil on us. Not because he were not capable of such a thing, but because he was less interested in "making the kind of illusionistic curio common in contemporary kunstkabinets than in testing the limits of mimesis in painting (an aim evidently consistent with his approach in other mature works)." (Liedtke, 1976) Liedtke also suggests that Fabritius might have come in contact, while being an apprentice in Rembrandt's studio, with ideas on perspective present in a manuscript copy of the first edition of Leonardo's Trattato della Pittura (published in Paris for the first time in 1651). We will never be able to know if that was the case, but illustrations of Leonardo's thoughts on painting seem to inform Fabritius' work. That the main aim of painting is to make a "plane surface display a body in relief, detached from that plane", or that darker objects appear detached when put against a bright background are examples to be found in Fabritius' work. "The View in Delft", considers Liedtke, "is one of the greatest and historically most significant monuments of seventeenth-century Dutch painting not because it broke with the tradition in any way, but precisely because it represents a conscious effort to extend the established representational conventions in accord with a deepening interest in the physical environment." (Liedtke, 1976) Fabritius' painting seems to be more scientifically informed than other, similar works of his time in that, as we will see, it makes use of ideas at the confluence between philosophy, science and art. Fabritius was interested not only in painting the world but also in learning how we manage to see it at all. View in Delft is not only about a small square in a Dutch city. It is also about how our eyes work when we take in the world around us. But it is also not a celebration of the way we gain knowledge, rather a disenchantment. The closer to a truthful representation it gets, View in Delft implies the extent to which we could be deceived by our own eyes, leaving us wondering, as a prominent philosopher of the time does, about the certainty of knowledge. II We know very little about Fabritius. We know (Valentiner, 1932) that he was an apprentice in Rembrandt's studio, that he married young and that by the summer of 1643 he lost both his wife and the twins she gave birth to. We also know that he remarried in 1650 and lived together with his second wife in Delft. We know that he was almost never able to run his financial life, as he seemed to have perpetually been in debt, even if he was recognized as a master artist during his time and had apprentices (one of them could have even been Vermeer himself). We know he died young (at 32 years of age) two years after this painting was finished in the great explosion of a gunpowder store in Delft, which also destroyed his atelier. Over a dozen paintings are known to be by his hand. It is also very likely that he painted several anamorphic murals but, sadly, none of them survived. Most of Liedtke's considerations are about the painting as an object how it should be looked at, how the perspective works, if Fabritius used a lens (a reversed telescope, for example, as other painters of the time did; and no, apparently he did not), etc. We are not going to challenge these findings here. What we would like to do now is to look at the painting as a painting, as a representation: to be its spectator. III How should we then look at the View in Delft? This is such a small painting but it manages to pack quite a lot in terms of artistic accomplishment, geometrical perspective, symbols and emotion. If we have Fabritius' work mounted on the hemicycle and look at it through the peephole, we see it in a perspective that is almost Kafkaesque: a small bug sitting on the viola da gamba, watching the world unfold. This kind of perspective is not something we see very often in a painting. The view we are offered is not as simple nor as straightforward as we might first think. Our gaze is forced to jump from foreground to background as we watch, to focus on different subjects and at the same time keep all of them connected. Linear perspective, the only method used by painters for hundreds of years, does not inform the View in Delft. However, this was not something completely new: already in 1604 Karel van Mander offers a pictorial alternative to Alberti's method of representation, departing from the latter's ideas that the ultimate aim of the artist was to imitate nature. A painter, van Mander thinks, could make use of close views and combine them tactically with distant vistas thus realizing a "multifocal panoramic landscape, punctuated by multiple perspectives that mobilize the eye." (Brusati, 2012) Vision becomes a guided process by carefully modifying and intensifying what the eye can see. Later, Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten in his Introduction to the Academy of Painting (1678) writes that perspective does not render things as they are in nature but only those aspects that can be re-created by the eye in an image-making process. This process is not unlike drawing itself, where "colored forms" make their way into the eye. A good painter is one who understands that seeking to represent nature in itself is not as important as representing how the world appears to the eye. Because the same way the eye is tricked in the process of seeing should be used in making a perspective painting. The box containing the View in Delft is not a play on the eye, it is not a trick, it is not a trompe l'oeil. By containing what the spectator is allowed to see, Fabritius attempts to concentrate and focus our gaze and, at the same time to encapsulate the "madness of seeing", as Merleau-Ponty has called it. He creates a virtual space and compels the viewer to take part in it, even if only through the tiny peep hole. Merleau-Ponty pointed out in The Visible and the Invisible that when we see something we "possess" that thing, we bring the object at hand. "He who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is of it." (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 134) What Fabritius does with View in Delft is to have a go at bringing the landscape at hand, at "manipulating" it, taking it in, transferring it from something pertaining to the outside world into something happening inside, internalizing it, understanding it. In What is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari (181-2) write that, throughout its history, painting actually only struggled for one thing, namely for painting forces, "forces of gravity, heaviness, rotation, the vortex, explosion, expansion, germination, and time". Now if we look again at Fabritus' painting we could notice the heaviness of the church, the revolving of feeling from the weariness of the instruments seller to the lightness of the woman in blue, from the explosion of the tree's branches in foreground, to the play between the finite time of the music and the sign of eternity pointed out by the church, and filtered lightly by the silky clouds. And Fabritius takes it a step further: since the forces at work here tend to pull the gaze in multiple directions he proceeds, in an attempt to bring them back in a balance, to contain and level their dynamic. He seems to want to apply force to the canvas, as well. He stretches it on a hemicycle and boxes it, making it a world in itself. IV But let us go back to Hoogstraten's idea, namely that perspective does not render things as they are in nature but only those aspects that can be re-created by the eye in an image-making process. Translating it in Aristotelian terms we could talk about a sort of mimesis at work here. Usually, mimesis is taken to mean "imitation" but it is actually closer to "actualization", a process where "objects, events, or actions which, because they are divine, past or canonical, belong to a more valuable domain of reality than our quotidian lives but are therefore in some way remote from us, enjoin upon us the obligation to restore their actuality." (Most 1998) Mimesis is, at least, an ambivalent term and it can both point out, depending on the circumstances, either the inferiority of actualization (as opposed to its superiror model) or, the other way around, the superiority "it acquires by its temporary participation in the model's prestige". (Most 1998). Perhaps Fabritius sensed this ambivalence and View in Delft is his answer to the question of mimesis. As we will see, it would aline very well with his understanding of vision, of what it meant for him to see the world. It was not his intention to reproduce reality in its minute details. Even if Fabritius went quite a way in "testing the limits of mimesis", he did not intend to bring up an example of..., let's call it photorealistic work (if the term were available in his time). Photorealism takes part in a different world altogether. Photorealism, as Frederic Jameson put it, "looked like a return to representation and figuration after the long hegemony of the aesthetics of abstraction until it became clear that their objects were not to be found in the "real world" either but were themselves photographs of that real world, this last now transformed into images, of which the "realism" of the photorealist painting is now the simulacrum." (65) A photorealist painting is a painting of a photograph, which in turn is a copy of reality. Thus it appears that the simulacrum is a copy which has been removed twice from reality. After all, following Baudrillard who pointed out in his critique of postmodern society that the distinction between what is real or natural and what is artificial has been gradually lost, we could understand how the artifice managed to take over the real. Baudrillard distinguished three orders of simulacra. The first order corresponds historically to the pre-modern world where images were seen as merely illusions, faint copies of the reality. The second order is connected to the multitude, to the mass production of copies which was a typical phenomenon in the nineteenth century. The third order, of the postmodern world, brings in a kind of sovereignty of the simulacra, which go beyond copying reality, preceding and even determining it. This is where the inability to distinguish between reality and its representation comes in. If copying reality is what Fabritius struggles to achieve with View in Delft, we should place it into the first order of simulacra. However, one does not look at the world through a peephole, one cannot contain a copy of reality inside a box. For obvious reasons, the painting does not belong to the second order of simulacra either. What about the third? Does it precede the world, does the world take upon itself to follow Fabritius' rendering? Obviously not. What kind of representation is it then, we might ask? In an essay aptly titled Realer than Real, Brian Massumi points out, following Deleuze's thoughts on the idea of simulacrum (Plato and the Simulacrum), that we deal here with a difference in nature and not with a degree of replication: this difference "undermines" the distinction between copy and model. "The production and function of a photograph" writes Massumi, "has no relation to that of the object photographed; and the photorealist painting in turn envelops an essential difference. It is that masked difference, not the manifest resemblance, that produces the effect of uncanniness so often associated with the simulacrum. A copy is made in order to stand in for its model. A simulacrum has a different agenda, it enters different circuits." (Massumi, 1987). We could say now that View in Delft does not copy reality, it does not make a reproduction of the little square overlooking the church. It goes beyond it. It opens for us a different world altogether, a world which slowly began to be investigated in Fabritius' time, a world at the confluence of art, optics and philosophy. In his article, Massumi brings up a scene from Blade Runner, where the leading "replicant" (a bio-robotic being) tells the man who built his (mechanical) eyes: "if you could see what I have seen with your eyes". View in Delft has, of course, nothing to do with the world of android robots from Blade Runner but it has very much to do with the idea of the seeing eye. Because Fabritius' painting is the eye itself, and through it he tries to give us an insight into what the eye sees from within. The moment one looks through the peep-hole, one looks through the new eye, the one discovered by Descartes. With Descartes and his work on optics we (as well as the world of Rembrandt and Frans Hals and Fabritius and Vermeer) find out that the eye is not a window towards the world but, indeed, merely a screen. In Dioptrics, Descartes considers that what affects the soul is not a picture representing the object we are looking at but an image of that object, an image that is not similar to the object itself but which would remind us rather of an etching a bit imperfect, perhaps lacking in details, color, etc. Otherwise, if the object would resemble its image in all respects, we would not be able to distinguish between them anymore. The image of the object appears inside the eye even without the observer (for his experiment Descartes says one could use the "eye of a newly deceased man or of an ox or some other large animal" to make a projection of an object on the retina), even if there is nobody there to see it. Sight is no longer the substance of the eye, as it used to be for a philosopher like Aristotle. Thus, the observer is not required for the world to be seen. Already with Kepler, in 1602, the human observer starts to fade out. The eye itself becomes a sort of camera obscura, and the "pupil takes the place of the window". The image we see on a piece of paper placed inside the camera obscura is the same as the image being formed on the retina. It is imperfect and the imperfection is caused by the "accidental shape of the aperture". This means that we can trust the instrument (a device like camera obscura or the telescope) as much as we can trust the eye: science becomes henceforth the "guarantor" of vision's "limited reliability". (Gal and Chen-Morris, 2010) However, we should not forget that the reverse is, unfortunately, also true and that whatever flaws the instrument might have, could also be encountered as flaws in the eye itself. Visual errors, unlike the Aristotelian view where human imagination would intervene in seeing and consequently alter it, are now thought to happen due to the structure of vision itself. The images the eye would be able to offer are rather fuzzy as they are caused by light effects; they do not and cannot show a precise likeness to the objects focused on. Descartes points out that owing to the flawed way we see, the eye is not to be trusted. In order to develop his system he needed something like the eye but stable and trustworthy. His trouvaille was "the eye of the mind" which would see more clearly as long as the eye of the flesh would steer away from the abundance of sense perception. Thus, "he invented the eye of the mind, modeled on but completely independent from the eye of the flesh, and in this reversed the epistemological role of vision. From being the guarantor of our knowledge and a paradigm of direct acquaintance, vision became a metaphor for mediation. It was a paradoxical insight: by accepting that knowing is seeing and understanding how we see, Descartes was convinced that we may not know at all." (Gal and Chen-Morris, 2010) That we may not know at all... Would it be possible that Fabritius somehow managed to grasp how serious the findings of the optics of his time and of the views philosophers held on light and color were for his own work and for painting in general? Would it be possible that he wanted to experiment for himself and in his own way and thus played with anamorphic murals and perspective boxes while at the same time continued to paint as his master did or, better still, as his master would? How much do we know when we look at View in Delft? How much do we understand of the world when we see it from the Kafkaesque perspective Fabritius is offering us? Do we see more if his manipulation is more dexterous? It seems, the longer one looks at this painting the less certain one becomes as to what one actually sees. In her book on the Rhethoric of Perspective (2006), Hanneke Grootenboer, writing about anamorphosis, brings forth some pictures of Dutch photographer Jan Dibbets who, in a series called Perspective Correction (1969), plays with our gaze quite like Fabritius did a few centuries earlier, although Dibbets presents us with an "anamorphosis in reverse", as Grootenboer calls it (where we do not need to wade our way through lines and colors in order to find the hidden picture, as one normally does with anamorphosis representations). Watching Perspective Correction we wonder first where exactly is the correction. Something happened to the image, we can feel it, but we do not know what it could be or where. For example, in #3 we see the inside corner of a studio, and we can follow the wall on the left hand side as it continues toward the vanishing point, merging with the other wall in the background at a right angle, clearly forming a perspectival structure. Now, on the wall on the left we can see a square which – and here comes the "Aha!" moment – seems to have been drawn on the photograph rather than on the wall itself, as it skips the perspective distortion altogether. It is still a perfectly good square and not an elongated geometrical structure, as if it escaped the laws of perspective. It is as if the square floats inside the picture, not affected by the forces at work in this representation, as if it would establish its own space, as if there were no model for it in the real world. Here we can see once again how vision becomes a metaphor for mediation between the eye of the mind and the eye of the flesh. Dibbets manages to show that what we see and what we expect to see are two different things, that the usual way we look at the world in perspective can be simply distorted, or as he put it, corrected. Fabritius paints a picture, which he distorts in order to bring it closer to a more faithful representation of the world. Dibbets takes a photograph (in other words, he makes a copy) of a world, part of which does not seem to fit in with the rest, like a ghost from another dimension. As if the truthful eye of the camera is corrected by a second, invisible eye. Dibbets corrects perspective by altering the real object, by changing the environment itself, whereas Fabritius changes the medium, the canvas and stretches it in an unusual though more faithful manner to the act of seeing. V Except, perhaps, for the light summer breeze slowly pushing the light clouds, there is no impression of sound, not even of noise or of something going on in the background. We could almost think of View in Delft as a still life with musical instruments. The quietness of the scene points out an intention to avoid a textual interpretation. Although describing it makes possible a linguistic approximation of this painting's meaning, the trouble is, as soon as we are done describing and we rejoin its parts into a whole, we clash once more against its muteness. We still do not know what this painting is trying to say to us. The question is then, what if it does not want to say anything but instead only attempts to make us think, to make us connect with it visually and not verbally? Encapsulating it in a box, Fabritius made it available to only one viewer at a time. This means that View in Delft does not prompt us to interpretation but to seeing and thinking. In order to understand it, we need not reason about it verbally but look at it (and only at it) as close as the peephole allows us. How does a painting think? Drawing on an analysis of perspective, Grootenboer writes that "Painting is a kind of thinking and perspective serves as a rhetoric of the image. ... The rhetoric of perspective convinces us of that which painting shows, while it provides a method for that which painting thinks" (Grootenboer, 10). Grootenboer's idea to look at perspective as a method for thinking comes from Walter Benjamin who claimed in his thoughts about allegory that a philosophical writing is nothing but an allegory for truth. Benjamin does not regard philosophy as a privileged way of bringing up concepts or as a "trans-linguistic generation of principles" (Cowan, Bainard) but as allegorical literature. A philosophical treatise does not come up with proofs, according to Benjamin, but it only represents its object anew. The way a philosophical writing acts as an allegory for truth, so does in painting, perspective act as a rhetoric of the image. It does not produce reality, it only re-arranges our apprehension of it. Perspective has thus an epistemological relevance since it is a kind of thinking about the way we relate to representation itself. As Hubert Damisch put it in The Origin of Perspective: "In the art of painting the impact of perspective is not limited to the register of the imaginary; it not only facilitates the construction of images, it assumes a role, a function that we may properly designate as symbolic. Perspective, I repeat, is not a code, but it has this in common with language, that in and by itself it institutes and constitutes itself under the auspices of a point, a factor analogous to the 'subject' or 'person' in language, always posited in relation to a 'here' or 'there', accruing all the possibilities for movement from one position to another that this entails." (Damisch, 53) In other words, a painting speaks to us quite in the same way a book speaks to us. If a book is a story told by a narrator, a painting is a story shown from a certain perspective. Through perspective a painting delineates its world, shows what should be shown and hides what should be guessed. Going back to Deleuze and Guattari, we could say now about perspective painting that it coordinates forces in relation to a subject and that it arranges them according to a logic of the space (where logic should be taken as a mode of reasoning). If we are right in our assumption that Fabritius tries to give us an account of seeing as it appears to the eye itself (we are talking here about the eye of the flesh) then, the perspective at work in View in Delft gives us the chance to also have a glimpse at the thinking eye, at the eye of the mind. We deal here with a painting which thinks it is an eye and which invites us to think about seeing as well, to see how we see. VI We could say now that View in Delft is not a landscape in the traditional sense of the word. Or not only. It shrinks its view field to just a street crossing but it also enlarges it by going deeper inside. It also paints a portrait (of the seller in his stall) albeit only partially. Fabritius managed to be one of the first painters to zoom in to a landscape and give us a townscape and, at the same time, zoom in to a person inside the townscape and give us a portrait. The townscape seems to quietly record life as it happened on a street in a generic Dutch city. A snapshot, much in the way tourists today take photos of places they visit. Looking at it this way, View in Delft could be just another piece in the portrait of Holland of the time, as is much of Dutch painting of the Golden Age, an observation which is in tune to Eugene Fromentin's Les Maitres d'autrefois, where he suggested that Dutch painting was essentially a portrait. A portrait of Holland as "des hommes et des lieux, des moeurs bourgeoises, des places, des rues, des campagnes, de la mer et du ciel, tel devait être, réduit à ses éléments primitifs, le programme suivi par l'école hollandaise, et tel il fut depuis le premier jour jusqu'à son déclin." Fromentin celebrates a democratization of painting, where scenes were not laden with the heavy symbolism of classical antiquity but where the depicted subjects were easily recognizable and their deeds were easily placeable. # But then again, we should not forget that vision is madness and Fabritius seems to have been aware of it. The reality he makes visible compels us to assume his perspective and when we do, we find ourselves sharing this Kafkaesque point of view avant la date. We are, as spectators, a tiny speck of life as significant as the little peephole allows us to be, but from that vantage point we permeate inside the world with its people and houses and trees and fluffy clouds. In a different take on Dutch Golden Age, Paul Claudel considers that Dutch painting was actually focused on expressing feelings and not depicting events. Dutch landscape paintings express a sense of space, of our place in the cosmos; genre interiors depict aspects of time. "Claudel sees paintings by Vermeer, De Hooch, Metsu, Dou and Terborch as essentially abstract in theme even though they appear to show contemporary reality. A woman reading a letter evokes absence; a woman looking in a mirror, reflection; a figure in a window, the dialogue between interiority and the external world." (Kelly, 2003) Claudel points out the invitation to meditation present in Dutch paintings, in reaching within ourselves and pondering on our own being here. The two worlds of the painting, as Fabritius shows, rather than being separated, are being brought together by the spectator. Fragmenting perspective, Fabritius manages to show something about both our place in the cosmos and about a fluid aspect of time. The playfulness of music (hinted at by the instruments) is stopped short by the pensive and (perhaps) gloomy attire of the man in the stall. Music (as also life) are transitory things. They both take place in time and they both expire as soon as nobody plays the instruments or as soon as our body gives up. The church, a sign of eternity and redemption, in the way it is depicted by Fabritius does not, however, bring us reassurance nor helps us transcend the feeling of insignificance which we have when we think about our place in the universe. It does not offer us a glorious moment of reconnection with eternity as it would were it shown from the front, in all its might. Would this be a way to point out eternity? By emphasizing death? The more one looks at this painting, the more one could see how it develops into a sort of (well) hidden vanitas painting. By the time Fabritius painted the View, the royal crypt of the Nieuwe Kerk (which actually is placed at the back of the church) was quite packed: William the Silent, Maurice of Nassau, Frederick Henry, William II, etc. Moreover, the tragic story of the William II who died of smallpox only three years after his father (Frederick Henry) must have been still fresh in the mind of the Delft people (Fabritius finished the View one year later, in 1652). We should not forget that, concurently, the Dutch of his time were extremely rich. After shaking Spanish control and the Union of Utrecht in 1579 led to the emergence of the Dutch Republic, the global trade and banking flourished and the Dutch upper class reigned over immense wealth. But however rich and powerful one could be, one would still not be able to achieve immortality. Death is always lurking around every bend. As a matter of fact, while the painting came into being, the Dutch were engaged in fighting the first of what will be known as the Anglo-Dutch wars a conflict spawning over more than a century. VII Transitory. This could be the word that best describes the scene Fabritius presents us with; a townscape vanitas, a meditation on the hollowness of earthly life which, however rich and wonderful can be, it is still ephemeral. Much like the hollow instruments on the table. The seller himself seems to have fallen into a melancholy state, pondering on the fleetingness of life, stalling for time. Vanitas means literally "emptiness". As we noted above, View in Delft is a silent picture, without a message, hollow. Its rhetoric lies in perspective, in harnessing the forces of "gravity, heaviness, time...". As with perspective, putting the painting in a box, trying to contain the madness of seeing, a vanitas tries to combine "complexities of the ontological difference between being and nothingness with the impenetrabile passing of time and the inevitability of death." (Grootenboer, 137-138) Nonetheless, the vanitas of the View in Delft is considerably more refined when compared, for example, to David Bailly's painting Vanitas: Still life with portrait of a Young Painter from 1651. Bailly's work is packed with symbols ranging from a skull to a smoking candle, an hour glass and soap bubbles to portraits and sculptures, dying flowers and a musical instrument to the writing on a piece of paper: vanitas vanitum et omnia vanitas. As if Bailly wished to go over the dialectical polysemy by getting hold of as many symbols as possible in just one work. David Bailly Vanitas (1651) 65 x 97.5 cm (Wikipedia) In comparison, Fabritius' View is light and open. The symbols are present: the music instruments, the church, the washed out swan on the street sign, the gaze of the man, the washer woman looking at the church across the canal, the weathered wall with the painter's name on it and, although it is almost a quarter in size compared to Bailly's, and the symbols are by far less numerous, its invitation to meditation is perhaps more profound and longer lasting. In a sense, Bailly's Vanitas would be a wonderful exemplification of Fromentin's position on Dutch painting, whereas Fabritius' View would side with Claudel's. One of them going for the snapshot and for democratically giving each symbol its due, the other opting for a less obvious representation, using only pointers and manipulating the way we look at it. Transience, as we saw, is also part of the viewing process. Through the perspective box, the sight we are presented with is also transitory. One could only see it as long as one peeps through the hole. You cannot look at this picture in passing, have it hanging on a wall and, while going from a room into another, have another quick glance at it. You have to actively look at it in order to see it. As it is/was the case with music you have to actively play it in order to hear it. Some think that the music instruments seller is actually a self-portrait, a Fabritius who somehow lost part of the exuberance and visceral features present in the self-portrait from 1645, for example. If true, the person painted not only deals with objects that make time palpable but is, simutaneously, the painter himself who makes space not only palpable but, as is the case with the View in Delft, also ephemeral. Carel Fabritius Self Portrait (1645) 65 x 49 cm (Wikipedia) Fabritius is challenging the viewer and the idea we have of vision itself (at least for a viewer of his time). In a way, he offered us a chance to see "how we see". View in Delft, even if it is just a "screen", a piece of canvas mounted on a wall inside a box, is reminiscent of the screen that is the eye itself (the retina, to be more precise). The painter fixed the view on the canvas as the observer or the spectator fixes the view on the back of his eye. As Barthes once put it, "Depth is born only at the moment the spectacle itself slowly turns its shadow toward man and begins to look at him." (Barthes, 12) And this is true not only about the depth as perspective in the painting but also about the depth as tradition from which Fabritius comes and which he manages to surpass. By inviting us to reconsider the way we look at the world, by questioning the reliability of vision and by pointing out doubt and transience where we hoped to find certainty and eternity, Fabritius' View in Delft does become a metaphor not only for mediation but also for meditation. References Barthes, Roland Critical Essays. Northwestern University Press. Evanston, Illinois, 1972 Brusati, Celeste Viewing Dutch Pictures in Real Time. Art History. November, 2012 Damisch, Hubert The Origin of Perspective, MIT Press 1995 Deleuze, Gilles Plato and the Simulacrum: October, no. 27 (winter 1983) Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari Felix What is Philosophy: Verso, London, 1994 Descartes, René The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, 1985 Fromentin, Eugene Les maitres d'autrefois : Belgique-Hollande. Plon. Paris, 1877 Gal, Ofer and Chen-Morris, Raz Baroque Optics and the Disappearance of the Observer: From Kepler's Optics to Descartes' Doubt. Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 71, Number 2, 2010 Grootenboer, Hanneke The Rhetoric of Perspective, University of Chicago Press, 2006 Holmes, Charles Carel Fabritius: The New Portrait. The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 46, No. 264, 1925 Jameson, Frederic Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, 1991 Kelly, Anthony Paul Claudel on the poetry of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Word and Image, Vol.19, NO. 3, 2003 Liedtke, Walter A. The 'View in Delft' by Carel Fabritius. The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 118, No. 875, 1976 Massumi, Brian Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari. Copyright no.1, 1987 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Evanston, Illinois, 1968 Most, Glenn W. Mimesis in Craig, Edward Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, 1998 Olds, Clifton Wollheim's Theory of Artist as Spectator: A Complication. Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 24, No. 2, 1990 Valentiner, W. R. Carel and Barent Fabritius. The Art Bulletin, Vol. 14, No. 3, 1932 Wollheim, Richard Art, Interpretation, and the Creative Process. New Literary History, Vol. 15, No. 2,


The grand challenge for psychoanalysis â and neuropsychoanalysis: taking on the game

Philosophy

As Ebbinghaus (1908) tells us in the opening words of his popular textbook of psychology, âpsychology has a long past but only a short history.â In my opinion, there are three foundational moments in the history of psychology and, paradoxically, all three are moments of great advancement in biology. First, in the long past of psychology, psychology did not exist as such but was part of philosophy. It is extremely interesting to understand why it has been necessary, at one point of time in the sixteenth century, to invent this field and to create a signifier â namely âpsychologyâ â separate from philosophy, which enabled the field to distinguish itself from philosophy (Mengal, 2000/2001). In this century of religious violence, bare corpses lay everywhere and progresses in anatomy are major. In 1540, the German religious reformer Philippe Melanchthon publishes a book which comments the De anima of Aristotle and he completes the Aristotelian text with a long treaty of anatomy (Mengal, 2000/2001). On the basis of this new knowledge, Melanchthon attributes functions to the body which were previously reserved for the soul. The brain becomes the principal organ of sensory functions and displaces the heart as the seat of emotional life and of thought. To the Aristotelian position that all living beings, whether plant, animal, or human, to varying degrees possess a soul which organizes the body, Melanchthon opposes a dualistic anthropology which divides the human in body and soul. The two-dimensional âanthropologiaâ is articulated in âanatomia,â science of body, and âpsychologia,â science of the soul. It is this new anthropology that is diffused into the world of the Reformation (Mengal, 2000/2001). The Dutch reformer Snellius (1594), for example, defines the body and the soul by their respective essential property: âThe rational soul of man is the thought that, coupled with the body, completes man. (â¦) The physical things closer to natural bodies that move naturally, have an extension and for that reason occupy a space. (â¦) The faculty of the rational soul is the mind or will. Thought is the faculty of the soul to discourse and think about things which are and which are not.â1 (Snellius, 1594, pp. 26â27). It is as a philosopher that RenÃ© Descartes proposes his dualist vision much in line with the reformist opinions. Descartes dissects animals and human cadavers and is familiar with the research on the flow of blood (Fuchs, 2001). He comes to the conclusion that the body is a complex device that is capable of moving without the soul, thus contradicting the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul. The metaphysical order, which states that the body exists by the soul, is broken.

The grand challenge for psychoanalysis – and neuropsychoanalysis: taking on the game Ariane Bazan* Service de Psychologie Clinique et Différentielle, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium *Correspondence: email@example.com As Ebbinghaus (1908) tells us in the opening words of his popular textbook of psychology, "psychology has a long past but only a short history." In my opinion, there are three foundational moments in the history of psychology and, paradoxically, all three are moments of great advancement in biology. First, in the long past of psychology, psychology did not exist as such but was part of philosophy. It is extremely interesting to understand why it has been necessary, at one point of time in the sixteenth century, to invent this field and to create a signifier – namely "psychology" – separate from philosophy, which enabled the field to distinguish itself from philosophy (Mengal, 2000/2001). In this century of religious violence, bare corpses lay everywhere and progresses in anatomy are major. In 1540, the German religious reformer Philippe Melanchthon publishes a book which comments the De anima of Aristotle and he completes the Aristotelian text with a long treaty of anatomy (Mengal, 2000/2001). On the basis of this new knowledge, Melanchthon attributes functions to the body which were previously reserved for the soul. The brain becomes the principal organ of sensory functions and displaces the heart as the seat of emotional life and of thought. To the Aristotelian position that all living beings, whether plant, animal, or human, to varying degrees possess a soul which organizes the body, Melanchthon opposes a dualistic anthropology which divides the human in body and soul. The twodimensional "anthropologia" is articulated in "anatomia," science of body, and "psychologia," science of the soul. It is this new anthropology that is diffused into the world of the Reformation (Mengal, 2000/2001). The Dutch reformer Snellius (1594), for example, defines the body and the soul by their respective essential property: "The rational soul of man is the thought that, coupled with the body, completes man. (...) The physical things closer to natural bodies that move naturally, have an extension and for that reason occupy a space. (...) The faculty of the rational soul is the mind or will. Thought is the faculty of the soul to discourse and think about things which are and which are not."1 (Snellius, 1594, pp. 26–27). It is as a philosopher that René Descartes proposes his dualist vision much in line with the reformist opinions. Descartes dissects animals and human cadavers and is familiar with the research on the flow of blood (Fuchs, 2001). He comes to the conclusion that the body is a complex device that is capable of moving without the soul, thus contradicting the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul. The metaphysical order, which states that the body exists by the soul, is broken. At the end of the seventeenth century, this way to present anthropology, science of man, in two parts, anatomy and psychology, is widespread, mainly in the medical literature (Mengal, 2000/2001). However, it is not before the middle of the nineteenth century that psychology, which is still widely regarded as a branch of philosophy, emancipates as an autonomous domain of science. Again, this is concomitant with a period of great advancement in biology. Indeed, the nineteenth century was also the period in which physiology, including neurophysiology, professionalizes and sees some of its most significant discoveries. Among its leaders are Charles Bell and François Magendie who independently discover the distinction between sensory and motor nerves in the spinal column, Johannes Müller who proposes the doctrine of specific nerve energies, Emil du Bois-Reymond who studies the electrical basis of muscle contraction, Pierre Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke who identify areas of the brain responsible for different aspects of language, as well as Gustav Fritsch, Eduard Hitzig, and David Ferrier who localize sensory and motor areas of the brain (e.g., see Brennan, 1998). One of the principal founders of experimental physiology, Hermann von Helmholtz, conducts studies of a wide range of topics including the natures of sound and color, and of our perceptions of them (Warren and Warren, 1968). In the 1860s, while he holds a position in Heidelberg, Helmholtz engages as an assistant a young M.D. named Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt employs the equipment of the physiology laboratory to address more complicated psychological questions than had not, until then, been investigated experimentally. In 1874 Wundt publishes his landmark textbook, Grundzüge der physiologische Psychologie (Principles of Physiological Psychology) (Wundt, 1874) and in 1879, he founds a laboratory specifically dedicated to original research in experimental psychology, the first laboratory of its kind in the world. Psychology as an autonomous domain of science is born. In other words, it is the confrontation with the amazing complexity of the body, respectively of the brain, which in the sixteenth and nineteenth century instigates the necessity to invoke, and then to settle, the discipline of psychology. What seems to happen in each of these moments is the recognition that what was previously ascribed to the soul or to the spirit, is in fact taken care of by the body. It is very paradoxical that it is precisely this recognition which, in turn, promotes psychology as an autonomous field. In the sixteenth century, the observation that anatomy in itself can explain how a body comes to move, for example, promotes the institution of a field, separate from anatomy, for the qualities of the soul which do not 1Translated by the author from the French translation (in Mengal, 2000/2001, p. 10): "L'âme raisonnable de l'homme est la pensée qui, conjuguée au corps, parachève l'homme. (...) Les choses physiques plus proches des corps naturels qui se meuvent naturellement, possèdent une étendue et à cause de cela occupent un lieu." Original text (Snellius, 1594, pp. 26–27): "Animus hominis est mens quae corpori coniuncta hominem perficit. (...) Physica pressior in corporibus naturalibus, quae physice moventur, magnitudine sunt praedita, and propterea locum implent. (...) Rationalis animae facultas est mens aut voluntas. Mens est animae facultas de entibus and non entibus disserens and ratiocinans." www.frontiersin.org September 2011 | Volume 2 | Article 220 | 1 Specialty Grand challenGe article published: 07 September 2011 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00220 exemplified by this relatively new field of "neuropsychoanalysis" (e.g., Solms, 2004). Fonagy (2003, p. 75) explicitly poses that "to be taken seriously as a scientific study of the mind, (psychoanalysis) has to engage in systematic laboratory studies, epidemiological surveys or qualitative exploration in the social sciences." I would be more cautious, undecided and open than simply voting to rally the proven research methods used elsewhere. Indeed, if I might plead for a plurality of methodological approaches – and there is certainly a lot to say about possible experimental research in the domain of psychoanalysis (e.g., Shevrin, 2001) – I would be far more cautious in seeing in this recourse the condition sine qua non for being taken seriously. Psychoanalysis owes to clinics for being psychoanalysis, owes to the laborious, lengthy, imprecise, unsystematic, untargeted, unfocused clinical journeys for its very identity. If it is in the position of proposing a quite different but nevertheless elaborated, systematized psychological theory based on logical principles, it is for agreeing to engage in these open and uncertain clinical journeys. In my opinion, this also makes for being a very basis to be taken seriously. When questioned about the future of psychoanalysis, Howard Shevrin in an interview in June 2005 said: "What I feel right now is that as more and more neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists get into studying psychoanalysis, they will begin to co-opt psychoanalytic ideas, without giving psychoanalysis any credit whatsoever. They will take what they want to help them understand this particular thing and they will sadly leave the rest of it. And so even psychoanalytical theory may then become sort of irrelevant. That is, what they find useful they will use, and what they do not find useful for their immediate purpose they will ignore and discard and they will have no appreciation of the fullness and depth of psychoanalytical theory. (...) So there has to be some way of presenting the overall theory in a way that you can not just simply pick and choose. You could, but you're going to lose the richness of what the theory has to offer in understanding these things. So that's my fear that unless that theory is presented in a coherent way and in a way that takes into account what is actually going on right now, that it will simply fall, its bones will be picked..." (Bazan, 2010, p. 266). It seems to me, then, that one of the major challenges for psychoanalysis in the years and decades to come, will be to respond to "this hour of truth" for psychology. The way this response is to be articulated remains open, but the challenge lays in taking on the game. Indeed, from all elaborated psychological theories, psychoanalysis is the one that most clearly is articulated at another organizational scale – it is the reason why it is so often still preferentially used when dealing with clinical problems and why it has this epistemological status that is often experienced as different from the rest. But, more profoundly, it is the one theory of which the organizing foundational hypotheses are at the subjectlevel rather than at the function-level. For example, what fundamentally constitutes the mental apparatus in psychoanalysis is the defensive principle – e.g., repression, denial, dissociation, projection, etc., – and this is as the same time what clinically fundamentally characterizes the subject both in his way of taking up his life, and in his way of interacting with others. This is to say that psychoanalytic theory proposes conceptual tools – a major example being the defensive principle – which are at the same time highly informative about the organization of the mental apparatus and about the clinical profile of the subject. It seems to me no other psychological theory is in this position: e.g., functions like memory, attention, perception, etc., or cognition and intelligence profiles, or eating, sleeping, or other behavioral profiles, though informative about the mental apparatus and potentially contributing valuable clinical information, seem nevertheless (far) less powerful to understand a subject clinically than, e.g., his preferential defensive or transferential modes. It is for this reason, that I think it is important for psychoanalysis to respond to the changing dynamics and stakes in the scientific field of psychology. This call seems to be heard by various psychoanalytic authors, as many are pleading that it is time for psychoanalysis to become part of or to reintegrate mainstream science (e.g., Kandel, 1999; Hoffman, 2010) or "to take its place at the high table of the scientific study of the mind" (Fonagy, 2003, p. 75) and many are effectively taking steps in that direction, either by engaging in more systematized and quantified research, or by engaging in interdisciplinary research, as is seem to have an extension and therefore do not occupy a space, such as thought, discourse, and will. In the nineteenth century, the observation that neurophysiology helps to explain perception and language, definitively confirms psychology as a scientific discipline, emancipated from philosophy, but, paradoxically, though firmly grounded in it, also distinct from physiology itself. It is as if, by each progress of anatomy or physiology, the more precise description of what happens mechanically, allows for a sharper definition of what is not explained by the sole biological substrate, thereby paradoxically confirming the necessity of a psychological science. I believe that, since the decade of the brain (1990–2000) and the introduction of brain imagery methodology, we are now in a third moment of this dynamic. This time, the findings are momentous and no characteristic which still might have been seen implicitly as a prerogative of the soul – such as emotions, will, intention, motivation, love, attachment, empathy, intersubjectivity, play, etc., – escapes from biological characterization. These advances in neurosciences oblige us to thoroughly revisit the concept of what it means for something to be psychological. Indeed, this forward march of neurosciences has pushed the whole field of psychology to retreat in its ultimate corner, leaving open this fundamental question: if psychological functions and instances have minute and comprehensive brain architectures and can be tied to characterized brain dynamic patterns, what then remains to be understood as psychological, what then is psychology? What this amounts to, in my opinion, is that if the necessity for a psychological science resists nevertheless, that some "hour of truth" for psychology has arrived: not a specific function makes psychology psychology – nor consciousness, nor will, nor emotion, nor agency, nor, for that matter, the unconscious – but organization principles different from those at the biological level. In the same way biology does not consist of elements different than already present at the chemical level, but is concerned with another organizational scale, psychology does not consist of functions, modules, components different than what might be characterized as such at the biological level, but is concerned with a radically different organizational scale than biology. Frontiers in Psychology | Psychoanalysis and Neuropsychoanalysis September 2011 | Volume 2 | Article 220 | 2 Bazan Taking on the game techniques within psychiatry. Hist. Psychiatry 21, 455 –470. Kandel, E. R. (1999). Biology and the future of psychoanalysis: a new intellectual framework for psychiatry revisited. Am. J. Psychiatry 156, 505–524. Mengal, P. (2000/2001). La constitution de la psychologie comme domaine du savoir aux XVIème et XVIIème siècles. Rev. Hist. Sci. Hum. 2, 5–27. Shevrin, H. (2001). Event-related markers of unconscious processes. Int. J. Psychophysiol. 42, 209–218. Snellius, R. (1594). Partitiones Physicae. Hanoviae: apud Guilielmum Antoninum. Solms, M. (2004). Freud returns. Sci. Am. 290, 82–88. Warren, M., and Warren, P. (1968). Helmholtz on Perception: Its Physiology and Development. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Wundt, W. (1874). Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie. Leipzig: Engelmann. Received: 11 August 2011; accepted: 22 August 2011; published online: 07 September 2011. Citation: Bazan A (2011) The grand challenge for psychoanalysis – and neuropsychoanalysis: taking on the game. Front. Psychology 2:220. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00220 This article was submitted to Frontiers in Psychoanalysis, a specialty of Frontiers in Psychology. Copyright © 2011 Bazan. This is an open-access article subject to a non-exclusive license between the authors and Frontiers Media SA, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and other Frontiers conditions are complied with. I'm not sure it should be the speculation of the gains and losses – which, as a clinician knows, are a priori always and for everybody unsettled – which should form the motive to take on the game. Rather, it is the game itself, the sole faithfulness to something that is happening, which should be decisive. Something is happening, which clearly and loudly summons psychoanalysis to respond; as said, how to respond, is not a priori clear, but a non-response would imply a certain loss. RefeRences Bazan, A. (2010). Conversations with Howard Shevrin II. Ann Arbor, June 17th, 2005. Psychoanalytische Perspectieven 28, 247–269. Brennan, J. F. (1998). History and Systems of Psychology. London: Prentice-Hall International. Ebbinghaus, H. (1908). Psychology: An Elementary Textbook. Boston: Heath. Fonagy, P. (2003). Psychoanalysis today. World Psychiatry 2, 73–80. Fuchs, T. (2001). The Mechanization of the Heart: Harvey and Descartes (translated by Marjorie Grene). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 247. Hoffman, L. (2010). One hundred years after Sigmund Freud's lectures in America: towards an integration of psychoanalytic theories and So, one proposal for responding to the forward march of neurosciences might minimally imply "taking into account what is actually going on right now" and an endeavor to present the theory "in a coherent way." This, I wish, is what this journal "Frontiers in Psychoanalysis and Neuropsychoanalysis" wants to be a forum for: it welcomes any contribution in the field of psychoanalysis which is willing to present itself in a coherent way and willing to take into account what is going on right now, or, minimally, to indicate its awareness of the actual context. The signifier "neuropsychoanalysis" in the title is there to function as an enabling condition, not as a necessary condition. Finally, a lot of practising psychoanalysts might have this question: what is there to win for psychoanalysis to take recent neuroscience advances into account, or, even, to play a part in the making of science, of psychological science? Let me respond in the most analytical way: I do not know. There is no agenda for what there is to win, nor, for that matter, for what there is to loose. www.frontiersin.org September 2011 | Volume 2 | Article 220 | 3 Bazan Taking on the game


Intellectual Intuition in Kantâs Critique of Pure Reason and Schellingâs System of Transcendental Idealism: The Limits of Self-Consciousness

Philosophy

Master's Dissertation

          (Awarded Distinction from Warwick University â assessed by Professors Stephen Houlgate and Christine Battersby, 2002)

Kant on Self-Consciousness This is an extract from Peter Hughes' first-class Master's Dissertation, 'Intellectual Intuition in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism' 2002 ... Empirical Apperception 'That which determines the inner sense is the understanding and its original faculty of combining the manifold of intuition, i.e., of bringing it under an apperception'.[1] This remark introduces to the reader the idea that the determination of the inner sense by the understanding is done by means of an initial, original, combining. We shall see that this combining uses a type of memory which therefore is antecedent to inner sense, for it cannot be derived therefrom. Inner sense will thereby be determined as an intuition of a manifold of objects (rather than being an intuition of a manifold of objects). Inner sense alone represents the form of intuitions,[2] i.e., in time. However, inner sense alone, therefore, cannot be aware of (understand) this succession – it is the succession. The understanding is therefore required for this awareness. Further, to be aware of succession means to be aware of the moments in succession – to be aware merely of one moment, and then the next, with no link, is not to be aware of succession, but of successors. Inner sense being succession (time) therefore requires an understanding of this whole. To be aware of moments linked, rather than moments per se, would thus be an understanding of inner sense. In other words, the manifold must be combined for the determination of inner sense. Moreover, this combining must be one of memory and synthesis: to link moments means to remember the moments past, and then synthesize them. Kant calls this original action of the understanding on the inner sense the transcendental synthesis of the imagination (or synthesis speciosa).[3] Imagination is the word Kant uses for this type of memory: 'Imagination is the faculty for representing an object even without its presence in intuition.'[4] Synthesis is the a priori act of combining representations (i.e., representations are not combined a posteriori – they do not in themselves contain the link to other representations).[5] Synthesis speciosa is transcendental because, first, it is as mentioned a priori, second, it is a condition of knowledge.[6] Kant also calls synthesis speciosa the productive imagination to distinguish it from the merely reproductive imagination. The latter is merely the memory of association, or recollection; it does not produce the possibility of knowledge but only reproduces what has already been known.[7] Since the latter does not belong to transcendental philosophy, I will henceforth refer to the former when I use the word 'imagination.' 2 Now the understanding of the inner sense through synthesis speciosa is a 'subjective unity of consciousness, which is a determination of inner sense, through which that manifold of intuition is empirically given for such a combination.'[8] Kant needs to define this understanding as a subjective unity in order to distinguish it from an objective unity of consciousness. It is subjective because the intuition it receives empirically (i.e., as the objects of the intuition of inner sense, not the a priori forms of intuition which are universal), which it synthesises as its self-determination, are contingent on the empirical circumstances of each person. The unity is not one which is universal for every self and thus not objective,[9] but one which is particular to every self and is thus subjective. Apperception means the determination of the self;[10] the determination that is synthesis speciosa is therefore called empirical apperception. It should be noted that although empirical apperception is the everyday selfconsciousness that is contingent on empirical circumstance and therefore subjective, its method, the transcendental synthesis of imagination, is universal to all. Its content (of objects) is subjective. Everyone has the imagination, but everyone applies it differently. The determination of inner sense is therefore an act of the understanding (synthesis speciosa) which is empirical apperception. This is the ordinary self-consciousness that is subjective to each person and thus dealt with in psychology. It is a cognition of the self as appearance (as inner sense),[11] not a cognition of the self as it would be in-itself – its intuition is appearance, inner sense, not an intuition of the transcendental condition of appearance (which would not be sensible).[12] As Kant states, 'the determination of my existence can only occur in correspondence with the form of inner sense [synthesis speciosa], according to the particular way in which the manifold that I combine is given in inner intuition, and I therefore have no cognition of myself as I am, but only as I appear to myself.'[13] Empirical apperception is a cognition of the self as appearance, it is not the appearance itself (as is the undetermined self of inner sense). This explication of empirical apperception has, however, posed two other questions: what is the objective unity of self-consciousness which he draws in distinction to the subjective unity, and can we cognise our self as we are in ourselves? The answer to the first question is, to be concise, pure apperception; we will find that its explication answers the latter question, concluding with the necessary exposition of intellectual intuition. Pure Apperception and the 'I think' Empirical apperception is the subjective unity of consciousness because its object (the self) is not the condition for objects. If something is the condition for objects it is called objective – as transcendental and therefore universal to all selves. The self of empirical apperception is not transcendental but empirical – therefore subjective. 3 Consequently the objective unity of self-consciousness must be transcendental, not being determined a posteriori but a priori (therefore pure as opposed to empirical). What then is the condition for an object, bar the pure forms of sensible intuition already explained? First, these intuitions must be united under a concept.[14] But this is not possible without that manifold of intuition already being presupposed as generally[15] united. Per se, the intuitions are not united. This unity cannot be synthesised by synthesis speciosa because, as quoted, imagination is 'the faculty for representing an object even without its presence'.[16] That is to say, synthesis speciosa presupposes objects.[17] Therefore even empirical apperception is conditioned upon a higher synthesis, one which must be pure (it cannot be determined empirically, which empirical apperception is): '[a] pure synthesis of the understanding ... grounds a priori the empirical synthesis.'[18] This pure synthesis Kant calls synthesis intellectualis.[19] 'The transcendental unity of apperception is that unity through which all of the manifold given in an intuition is united in a concept of the object. It is called objective on that account, and must be distinguished from the subjective unity of consciousness'.[20] The transcendental unity of apperception, or pure apperception, is thus that a priori unity which grounds the possibility of objects. Thus it makes empirical apperception possible as the subsequent subjective synthesis of objects. But we shall find that it also conditions it in a more fundamental way. Pure apperception is a formal condition of objectivity. The sensible condition of objectivity forms our intuition of an object (spatio-/temporal), the formal condition unites these intuitions for the possibility of their being subsumed under a concept (category). This unity must be prior to a synthesis of the imagination[21] in us because it must be presupposed that all of the intuitions, which could be synthesised as such, all belong to me. Without this latter possible thought, which posits the identity of the self throughout all intuitions, a subsequent synthesis would merely yield representations which, though combined with each other, would not belong to me. This apperception is thus pure because I cannot derive a posteriori an identical self through the cognition of objects themselves, if I did 'I would have as multicoloured, diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious.'[22] Empirical apperception must thus presuppose pure apperception for, first, the possibility of objects, secondly, for the identity of the self throughout representations generally. Consequently, the possibility for objects is also the possibility for selfconsciousness. The self-consciousness, however, is not equal to the (necessarily presupposed) identical self. That identity must necessarily be maintained for any consciousness of objects whatever (it is objective). The consciousness of that identity is only an ability, not a necessary consciousness which accompanies every object.[23] The 4 ability to be conscious of the identity of the self in every representation is expressed by 'I think' (this or that object). The I think is therefore an analytic proposition which can accompany any represented object, analytic because, as mentioned, an object contains the necessary identity of the self for its possibility. This possible analysis is self-consciousness as consciousness of the identity of the self throughout my representations. This I think therefore is also called the analytic unity of consciousness as distinct from that identity itself (pure apperception) which is called the synthetic unity of consciousness. The former is self-consciousness, the latter is the self. The analysis I think presupposes the synthesis pure apperception. The united subjective representations of empirical apperception can be accompanied by the I think which would determine the identical self that is pure apperception. I think is not equal to empirical apperception: the self-consciousness of the latter is necessarily subjective, the self-consciousness of the former is objectively possible. Pure apperception is an intellectual synthesis of sensible intuitions (synthesis intellectualis). This means that its synthesis can only be thought, it cannot be intuited. This is because pure apperception is originally[24] the identity amongst sensible intuitions and therefore cannot be sensibly intuited itself. If it were, then a contradictory infinite regress would occur whereby one would have to presuppose the thought of the identity again for this intuited identity to be possible as an object for me, ad infinitum. In other words, my intuitions must presuppose my self for the possibility of their cognition, therefore I can never intuit the self which is the condition for any intuitions being cognised. Hence the identity that is pure apperception is strictly formal, i.e., it cannot be cognised, only thought, for it cannot be sensibly intuited. This has essential implications for our self-consciousness, as we shall see. I can have a cognition of the self, but this self is the self as appearance. Empirical apperception is the cognition of the self as appearance. But the I think is the thought of another self (pure apperception) which is the condition of the empirical self. Therefore we can think that the self is necessarily not an appearance, but the condition thereof. But now we cannot have a further cognition of this pure apperception because the intuition, which would be necessary, could not be sensible (this would be a contradiction as explained above – the self would be both the condition and the conditioned). Our human intuition can only be sensible and therefore our self-cognition can only be of ourselves as appearance. But we can think that we necessarily have an existence behind this as its condition (so we are not mere appearance), though we cannot know (cognise) what this existence is. Thus, I think that I am, but I know not what. I have cognition of my self as I appear, but not as I am; and I am certain that I am because I can cognise. Or as Kant puts it: 5 In the transcendental synthesis of the manifold of representations in general [synthesis intellectualis], on the contrary, hence in the synthetic original unity of apperception [pure apperception], I am conscious of myself [through the I think] not as I appear to myself [as in empirical apperception], nor as I am in myself, but only that I am. This representation is a thinking, not an intuiting. Now since for cognition of ourselves, in addition to the action of thinking that brings the manifold of every possible intuition to the unity of apperception, a determinate sort of intuition, through which this manifold is given, is also required, my own existence is not indeed appearance (let alone mere illusion), but the determination of my existence can only occur in correspondence with the form of inner sense, according to the particular way in which the manifold that I combine is given in inner intuition, and I therefore have no cognition of myself as I am, but only as I appear to myself. The consciousness of oneself is therefore far from being a cognition of oneself'. (B157-58, pp. 259-60.) Intellectual Intuition We cannot cognise pure apperception because, as explained, the necessary sensible intuition corresponding to my thought of this self would have to belong to me, and therefore I have posited another self (me) which is not intuited, but thought. However, if, in theory, the thought (intellectuality) of my self (pure apperception) could also immediately represent (i.e., intuit) myself, then I would not require a separate mediating sensible intuition for the cognition of my thought. Such an intellectual intuition would, therefore, be the only way in which I could cognise my pure apperception. '[The self can] cognize itself merely as it appears to itself with regard to an intuition (which is not intellectual and capable of being given through the understanding itself), not as it would cognize itself if its intuition were intellectual.'[25] Such a faculty, however, is unavailable to humans because we intuit things in space and time, and these forms are transcendentally ideal not real – i.e., things for us are mediated by space and time. Things cannot be given immediately, as would things in intellectual intuition, because space and time are given a priori – not therefore given in the immediate intuition of things themselves (a posteriori).[26] In other words, because we humans have experience in space and time, intellectual intuition is impossible for us, according to transcendental idealism. Kant, however, does not say that intellectual intuition is a contradiction, for there may be beings who do not have experience in space and time, and for whom intellectual intuition could therefore be valid. '[An] understanding that itself intuited ... as, say, a divine understanding ... would not represent given objects, but through whose representation the objects would themselves at the same time be given, or produced'[27] Intellectual intuition is not a contradiction because transcendental idealism is merely a human condition. 6 Intellectual intuition is thus a faculty of direct knowledge, it knows the thing-in-itself. This is because the thing is the intuition, there is no dualism as in transcendental idealism. If I were to think something, that thought would be the something; it would not be a thought the object of which was separate. If I were to intellectually intuit my self, that intuition/thought would be my self. It is therefore absurd to posit the possibility of intellectually intuiting pure apperception (the human self identity) because pure apperception is the identity amongst sensible intuitions, the existence of the latter contradicts the intellectual intuition of the former (due to the mutual exclusivity of sensible and intellectual intuition). Intellectual intuition is impossible for the human, the self of which cannot be known. F. W. J. Schelling believes that the human self, as the condition of knowledge, can be known; and indeed can do so only through intellectual intuition. In the following part we shall examine how he argues this and thus how he can escape the limits of selfcognition posited by Kant. ... NOTES [1] Critique of Pure Reason: B153, p. 257. [2] Of objects. [3] Also called the figurative synthesis (see B151, p. 256). [4] B151, p. 256. [5] See B129-132, pp. 245-6. [6] Could we not represent a plurality of objects, even without their actual presence, in a judgement, that judgement would not be possible; it would be a mere heterogeneity of objects without combination. Knowledge would thus be impossible. See B140-2, pp. 251-2. [7] As Kant says, '[it] contributes nothing to the explanation of the possibility of cognition a priori, and on that account belongs not in transcendental philosophy but in psychology' (B152, p. 257). [8] B139, p. 250. [9] Objective specifically meaning the condition of objects, which therefore must be universal to all selves (who all experience objects). This definition will be thoroughly exposed in the following section on pure apperception. [10] See B132, p.246. 7 [11] More specifically, the cognition of the self as the appearance of the manifold of objects. [12] But intellectual. Here we have the beginning of the need to posit intellectual intuition as a possible non-sensible (i.e., non-human) faculty. Its full explication will be brought out in what follows. [13] B157-8, p. 260. [14] See A76/B102 onwards for how concepts interact with sensible intuition. [15] I.e., as united prior to the specific concept. 'This unity, which precedes all concepts of combination a priori, is not the former category [concept] of unity ... The category therefore already presupposes combination.' (B131, p. 246). [16] B151, p. 256. [17] Plus the fact that it would not be able to store an object without it formerly being intuited. [18] B140, p. 250. [19] B151, p. 256. [20] B139, p. 250. [21] If, in theory, it could pertain to intuitions as well as objects. [22] B134, pp. 247-8. [23] 'The I think must be able to accompany all my representations'. (B131, p. 246). [24] It also, of course, provides the identity between objects, therefore making judgements possible (see B141-2, pp. 251-2). [25] B159, p. 260. [26] See the above explication of the Transcendental Aesthetic. [27] B145, p. 253.