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P L A S T I R
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Transdisciplinary Review of Human
Plasticity
Number 23
literary
paradigms, scientific paradigms: some poetic stakes of pluridisciplinarity
Christine Baron is lecturer in general and
compared literature at the University Paris III New Sorbonne (Paris) and has
just been named professor at the University of Poitiers. Her work is centred on the hermeneutics, the theoretical relationships between
philosophy and literature and the epistemological transfers between sciences
and literatures. Specialized in contemporary Italian literature, she in
particular deciphered the work of Italo Calvino and recently published two
works in this epistemological field at The Harmattan editions: “The thought of the outside” which shows
in what the literature, since always carrying a philosophical interrogation -
even an authority of truth -, takes as a starting point the scientific models
or the contemporary socio-historical approaches to work out new representations
(2007), and “The literature and its other”
where she analyzes “the formless a priori” as a literary concept developed by
Borges and the members of Oulipo such as Calvino and Queneau (2009). In this
article, she depicts these autonomous universes which interpenetrate, the
paradigms which found them and their borders. In perfect coherence with the
assertions of PSA, she makes the report that knowledges, whatever they are,
cannot be isolated, read in a strictly disciplinary framework - here, literary
-, required to establish formal or informal bridges with other philosophical,
scientific or anthropological knowledges. Thus this extract: “However the literary history and the history
of the theories of the literature teach us constantly that these others are not
limited to being this knowledge about which one speaks, but the form even of
the questioning which crosses them when in their presuppositions, even their
methods, they maintain a close relationship to the literary statements, even
the paradigms (formal, generic, historical, rhetorics) by which is defined the
literature in a proximity such as it is sometimes difficult to disentangle the
memberships and the genealogy of such or such concept however usually used and
considered as operational” where Christine Baron specifies us from the start
her position and introduced “the epistemological stakes and their paradoxes in
the thought of the literary paradigms”. The literature does not make the
other disciplines, but contributes to think them. It does not have only one
value, rhetoric, heuristics (contextualisations), “modélisatrice” as in science with Sainte Beuve or mimetic – knowing
that the author shows us very well the unthought-of the cognitive and social
practices related to this imitation and their impacts on literary and
university criticism -, but it contributes “to inform of poetic borrow of a
“thought of the outside”, what means naturally open and in the middle of pluri-
or even transdisciplinary stakes. Indeed, even if the author does not refer
clearly to what crosses and exceeds the disciplines, this thought appears
latent to us, at the same time in the text or account and his recurrences, the
geopoetics of the places, the translitterary representations, the multi-levelled
heuristic functions or in this “archistructure
of any form of knowledge” detected by Ricoeur and Gadamer in the corpus of
theoretical texts not properly literary but able to anchor common knowledge.
Knowledge which materializes in the metaphor, the triangularity, the episteme,
the crossed readings or the poetic ones, the stylistic devices, the
scripturality finally, like genesic approaches of an omniscience with literary
virtues. These geometries or these Geographies,
as Christine Baron likes to describe them, lead us to once again question the
process of the thought and the discovery (PLASTIR N°22): do the writer and the scientist
follow an opposite intuitionalist course, as Proust in At the research of wasted time suggests it, to arrive at their ends
? Do they have, as already Lucrece or Aristote recommended it, and then many of
our contemporary researchers, a common imaginary run systematically reinvested
in their field of creativity? It is Calvino who gives the answer through these
remarks of the author on his American Lessons: “Obviously, the literary statement engages by these choices a vision of
science; that of a scientific knowledge which is less interested in what is
than it does not try to even collect the process of the genesis in its dynamics
(a cosmogony relates to the universe in constitution, not its completed form)”
or, in this extract not describing in our eyes perfectly plasticity. Initially
“obsessed by the idea that the world does
not teach us anything and that only the words are carrying direction, it
describes a change of road which leads it to think that the vocation of the
literature consists in giving voice to what does not have a voice; the dumb
world of the things, informs it matter, and perhaps more still than the matter
itself its virtuality, that of the cell or the atom.” This Plasticity of the matter like rough material
of the script writer makes us penetrate ‘full foot’ in the research area of
Christine Baron on the process of writing: “[…] to say the materiality “of the inside” is to bet on the “outside”, the
nonhuman one to evoke it Malayan existential by the object, it is to avoid
gravity of introspection, to use the anthropomorphism like turning”. What
naturally takes us along towards Queneau who affirms that the formal language
of mathematics is autonomous and external with their own cognitive value or
their field of competence insofar as they do not relate to reality. Autonomy
which let it free from any reduction or dispute: the mathematical “true” is allowed
by fact. If it is not the case of the whole disciplines, it arises that the
single way of leaving the 'literary totalitarism' which would give an absolute
cognitive value to the account or unjustified paradigmatic slips, is the
confrontation of the knowledge through the words. And the author to quote
Foucault or Bouveresse - in connection with Musil - as contemporary actors of
“this third way of the relationship between knowledge and literature”, third
which is expressed in the “mutual
externality” of each one of these terms, without one not excluding or the
other does not despoil.
From
Jean Piaget to von Glaserfeld – Back to an epistemological
itinerary
Jean-Louis Le Moigne is engineer ECP, professor
emeritus of sciences at the University of Aix-Marseilles III and chair European
association of the program modelling of complexity (MCX). Becoming aware - with
the rise of cybernetics and the artificial intelligence resulting from work of
pioneers such as von Foerster, Bateson or Simon (PLASTIR n°22) -
of the need for changing framework of reading, Jean Louis Moigne will urge in
the years four twenties to develop new epistemologies known as constructivists,
in other words not purely positivists, but suitable for the apprehension of the
non-natural objects questioning all the fields of knowledge or the
representation. Referring to Da Vinci, Vico, Piaget, Bachelard, Valéry and
being combined with Morin for better determining complexity, he will attempt to
thoroughly describe the bases of this new episteme on the methodological,
economic and social, psychological, phenomenological and dialogical level ,
with a particular lighting on sciences of engineering, information and
education where it is pregnant. Many didactic works (PUF, 1977 several times
republished and 1999) or approaching in turn the rootings, the epistemology of
the interdisciplinarity and the modelling of comprehension suitable for the
constructivism (ESF, 1994, Harmattan, 2011 to 2003) will mark his researches
which nothing but does naturally extend and approaches the ecology of the
spirit, terrain de predilection of Ersnt von Glaserfeld who preaches an
epistemology more radical constructivist. It is there that the ground of
obstacle of this article is located where J.L. Moigne gives us historically to
discover - the reader will discover the importance of the years 1973, 1988 and
1994 in the development of “this epistemological route” and of the intrication
or the synchronicity of the knowledge which often makes advance the science -
the way which led him to discover this author on the late, and all that
connects him his reading of Piaget. In fact, the bond is obviously in the
peremptory necessity to work out an epistemological strategy which answers and
especially contextualise the new scientific currents, which integrates the
subject in its complexity and knowledge in the same gnoseologic approach. It
holds with the non-Cartesian nature of the paradigm constructivist of von
Glaserfeld, with the fact that it is freed once for all from a “metaphysical
realism” and that it defines intelligibility as auto-organized and auto-organizing.
Thus he will clearly say “Not to consider
knowledge more as the research of the iconic representation of an ontological
reality, but as the search for manner of behaving and of thinking which is
appropriate. Knowledge becomes something then that the organization built with
an aim of creating intelligibility within the flow of the experiment”. von
Glaserfeld adds to it an ethical dimension and a responsabilisation of the
subject being opposed to realistic epistemologies and to “the radical legitimacy of the phenomenological assumption”
prolonging and enriching the work of Piaget. It is on this phenomenology, this
process agent since the origins of humanity, more than on the radicality of the
epistemology of von Glaserfeld which the author will conclude following the
example of Simon, Morin or Valéry, giving us to reflect on the building and the
major nature of any knowledge.
The
intersection between science and art at the XXe century:
in the search of «the philosophical beauty»
Paulo Nuno Martins is PhD in
epistemology, history and philosophy of sciences of the new University of Lisbon. He also has a training of engineer in chemistry and
is graduate in Eastern languages (Japanese, Chinese, Arab and Russian). Member
of the CIRET, he is now doing a post-doctorate in the Interuniversitary center
of the history of sciences and technologies of the University of Lisbon. His
approach is inscribed in the movement of “Visual arts” which extends from the
cosmological models of the ancient world (From the Parthenon to the
Hiparco-Ptolomeu) to the contemporary visualizations generated by computer of
the life sciences. “Imagination is more
important than knowledge”: Einstein will say. This quotation inaugurates
the paper of the author by stressing the intersection between science and art,
the genesis which led the individuals “to understand” the scientific knowledge
through the ages, in particular by the means of their “imaginative vision”
resulting from the allegorical description of the art, present at the same time
in the Occidental cultures and Eastern. From the Renaissance with the De humani corporis fabrica to the
influence of positivist philosophy of sciences of the XIXe century,
in particular the theory of the species of Darwin, on realism, impressionism
(Degas, Manet Renoir) and the post-impressionism (Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin)
until BioArt representative of the XXe century (Rapoport, Anker),
the prototype of the beauty of Nature is everywhere, remains the eternal
junction point between sciences and arts. Paulo Martins gives us obvious
contemporary examples of them from the theory of the chaos to that of the Bing
Bang, with zooms on the differential equations of Poincaré or the analyses of
physicists like Maxwell, Weber, Eddington, Schrödinger, Einstein through their
fundamental discoveries, in particular in quantum mechanics. Discoveries which
upset the world, showed the creativity and the free will with work in the
“invisible one”, in nature and their psychologico-philosophical counterpart.
Indeed, the opposition between the doxa and the episteme, the unconscious
mythical one and the conscious reality is it crippling? Is there a linear
relation between scientific progress and progress of humanity? Obviously not,
the author answers while being based on the archetypes of Jung or the theory of
the thought (or conscious perception) initiated by Fechner then largely
followed in aesthetics (Malevitch) as in science (Damasio). One cannot all quote.
Thus still the influence of the interpretation of dreams of Freud on the
cubists like Picasso and Braque (Mimesis), of the theory of the fractals on the
expressionism, of the space with four dimensions of Minkowski on the surrealism
of Breton or of the holographic universe of Bohm where “Space and Time” are projections of the thought conscious” to the
theorem of Gödel. It is Eastern, Arab and in particular Indian philosophy with
Sri Aurobindo which will have the last word in this article under the features
of the “New alliance” of Prigogine with Arp, Chandrasekhar, the birth of Pop
art or the “minimalists integrating the Eastern push in their most sumptuous
creations like the Taj Mahal and sealing the seal of this bicephalous thought
[Western and Eastern] expressed at the top by the poems of Tagore.
Wittgenstein, the genious duty by ray monk
Claude Berniolles is poet, graduated in Compared
Right and followed a course in Letters and Philosophy while attending the
courses and seminars of Yves Bonnefoy and Jacques Bouveresse at the Collège de
France. In PLASTIR n°20, he had approached the
philosophical thought of Wittgenstein through the drafting of the “Notebooks”.
He is placed here in advised witness of the life of the Wittgenstein soldier during
the war of 14-18 reported by Ray Monk. Monk which elutriates work through the
man, makes us live and share “his philosophical interrogations” which emerge
during the fights ‘le front’, his loneliness, his ethical and also suicidal
thoughts, “his religious conversion” under the aegis of “the Gospel” of
Tolstoï, the birth of the Tractatus also… Tractatus which could have remained a
work of formal logic - all, “except the
final remarks concerning ethics, aesthetics, the heart and the direction of the
existence” – he says, if he were not loan of this humanity and this craving
to be shown without being satisfied to say typical of Wittgenstein. Claude
Berniolles seems to follow this logic sometimes actor, by showing us the
genesis of the work through the notebooks of the Master, of his letters to his
best friends, Pinsent, Russell, of his despair, his affects; sometimes reader
or biographer by describing us the return of Wittgenstein in Cambridge after
‘le front. He described there in particular his verificationnist phase where he
takes his distances with the Circle of Vienna by refuting the idea that
mathematical logic is directly related to a “true” factuality objectively at
the same time when Gödel stated its famous theorems of incompleteness. Many
other topics like the language, the value of the theories, pragmatics, the
teaching of philosophy, of his grammar - `grammar
is the mirror of the reality' -, of anthropology and the magic in
opposition to Frazer or of his ‘Judaicity’ in connection with the project of
autobiography of Wittgenstein are approached in turn under a literary or
quasi-analytical angle sometimes. They reveal by the means of the little story
(his meeting with Marguerite, his courses of Cambridge), of his humour, of
language or writing jokes (the blue book), in his way of working (work in
progress), the intimate side of his work, his metaphysics, which often
underlies in an unperceivable way construction of the whole building.
PLASTIR n°22
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