© Georges Canguilhem, Trans. David M. Peña-Guzmán 2016 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No. 21, pp. 200-213, June
Psychology as the Science of Subjectivity The decline of Aristotelian physics in the 17th century marks the end of psychology as para- physics, as science of a natural object, and correlatively the birth of psychology as science of subjectivity.
Those truly responsible for the advent of modern psychology as the science of the thinking subject are the mechanical physicists of the 17th century.3
If the reality of the world is not confused with the content of perception, if reality is obtained and posed vis-à-vis the reduction of illusions of sensible experience, then the qualitative residue of this experience engages, in virtue of being possible as falsification of the real, the responsibility of spirit, which is to say, of the subject of experience insofar as it does not identify itself with mathematical or mechanical reason, instrument of truth and measure of reality.
But this responsibility is, to the eyes of the physicist, culpability. Psychology constitutes itself as the enterprise for the exoneration of spirit. Its project is that of a science that, in the face of physics, explains why spirit is forced by nature, first and foremost, to trick reason with respect to reality. Psychology becomes a physics of external sense in order to account for the counter-senses that mechanical physics imputes to the use of the senses in the function of knowledge.
The Physics of External Sense Psychology, the science of subjectivity, begins as psychophysics for two reasons. First, because it cannot be less than a physics if it is to be taken seriously by physicists. Second, because it must look in a certain nature—i.e., in the structure of the human body—for the reason for the existence of the irreal residues [résidus irréels] of human experience.
But even so, this is not a return to the ancient conception of a science of the soul, a branch of physics. The new physics is a calculus. Psychology tends to imitate it. It will seek to determine the quantitative constants of sensation and the relations between these constants.
Here, Descartes and Malebranche are the leaders. In Rules for the Direction of the Mind (XII), Descartes proposes the reduction of qualitative differences between sense data to a difference between geometric figures. Here, it is a matter of sense data insofar as they are, in the proper sense of the term, information from one body to others. And what is informed by the external senses is an internal sense: “fantasy, which is nothing more than a real and figured body.” In Rule XIV, Descartes expressly deals with what Kant will call the intensive magnitude of sensations (Critique of Pure Reason, transcendental analytic, anticipation of perception): the comparisons between lights, sounds, etc., which cannot be converted into
3 Cf. Aron Gurwitsch, Déveleoppement historique de la Gestalt-Osychologie, in Thalès, 2nd year (1935), 167-175.
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exact reports except by analogy with the extension of the figured body. If we add that Descartes, even if not properly speaking the inventor of the term and concept of the reflex, has nonetheless affirmed the constancy of the link between excitation and reaction, we see that psychology—understood as the mathematical physics of external sense—begins with him and culminates with Fechner, thanks to the help of physiologists such as Hermann Helmholtz, and in spite of and against the Kantian reserves criticized, in turn, by Herbart.
This type of psychology is enlarged to the dimensions of an experimental psychology by Wundt, whose is motivated by the hope of making appear, in the laws of the “facts of consciousness,” the same kind of analytical determinism that mechanics and physics expect from any universally valid science.
Fechner died in 1887, two years before Bergson’s thesis, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889). Wundt died in 1920 having formed a good amount of disciples (some of whom are still alive), and not without having contributed to the first attacks launched by the psychologists of Form against the analytical physics (at once experimental and mathematical) of external sense. This was done in accordance with Ehrenfels’ observations about the qualities of form (On the Qualities of Form, 1890), which themselves resemble Bergson’s analysis of totalities perceived as organic forms that dominate their supposed parts (Time and Free Will, ch. II).
The science of internal sense But the science of subjectivity does not reduce to the elaboration of a physics of external sense. It suggests and presents itself as the science of self-consciousness or the science of internal sense. The term psychology dates to the 18th century, having the sense of the science of the “I” (Wolff). The entire history of this psychology can be written as the history of the counter-senses [des contre-sens] that the Meditations of Descartes initiate without, however, assuming responsibility for doing so.
When Descartes, at the start of Meditation III, considers his “interior” to render himself better known and more familiar to himself, the consideration aims at Thinking. The Cartesian interior, consciousness of the Ego cogito, is the direct knowledge the soul has of itself qua pure understanding. Descartes calls the Meditations “metaphysical” because they claim to arrive directly at the nature and essence of the “I think” in the immediate grasping of its existence. Cartesian meditation is not a personal confessional [une confidence personnelle]. The reflection that gives self-knowledge the rigor and impersonality of mathematics is not the kind of self- observation that the spiritualists will to trace back to Socrates beginning in the 19th century, so that Mr. Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard can give Napoleon I the assurance that the Know Thyself, the Cogito, and Introspection all give the throne and the altar their impregnable foundation.
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The Cartesian interior has nothing in common with the internal sense of the Aristotelians, “who conceive their objects interiorly and inside the head,” 4 and which Descartes considered, as we have seen, as an aspect of the body (Rule XIII). This is why Descartes says that the soul knows itself directly and more easily than the body. We overlook the explicitly polemical intention of this affirmation too often because, according to Aristotelians, the soul does not know itself directly. “Knowledge of the soul is not direct, but only by reflection. This is because the soul is similar to the eye that sees everything but cannot see itself except by reflection as in a mirror [...] and the soul, by parallel, does not see itself and does not know itself except by reflection and recognition of its effects.”5 This thesis rouses the indignation of Descartes when Gassendi reclaims it in his objections to Meditation III, and to which he responds: “It is not the eye that sees itself, or the mirror, but spirit, which alone knows the mirror, the eye, and itself.”
But this decisive reply does not put an end to this scholastic argument. Maine de Biran uses it once more against Descartes in “On the Decomposition of Thought,” and A. Comte invokes it against the possibility of introspection, that is to say, against the method of self- knowledge that Reid borrows from Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard to turn psychology into the scientific propaedeutic to metaphysics, thus justifying by experimental means the traditional theses of spiritualist substantialism.6 Even Cournot, in all his wisdom, does not hold back from also taking up this argument, this time to support the idea that psychological observation concerns the behavior of others more than the “I” of the observer, that psychology resembles wisdom more than science, and that “it is in the nature of psychological facts to be translated into aphorisms rather than theorems.”7
One has misunderstood the teachings of Descartes if one constitutes, against him, empirical psychology as the natural history of the “I”—from Locke to Ribot, passing through Condillac, the French Ideologues and the English Utilitarians—or if one constitutes, after him, a rational psychology founded on the intuition of a substantial “I.”
To Kant still belongs the glory of having established that even if Wolff was able to baptize his post-Cartesian newborns (Psychologia empirica, 1732; Psychologia rationalis, 1734), he was nonetheless unable to successfully found their pretensions to legitimacy. Kant shows, on the one hand, that phenomenal internal sense is just a form of empirical intuition, which he tends to confuse with time. On the other, he shows that the “I” that is the subject of all judgment of apperception is itself a function of the organization of experience, but one of which there can be no science because it is the transcendental condition for all science. The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) challenges the scientific scope of psychology,
4 Scipion Du Pleix, op. cit., Physique, 439. 5 Ibid., 353. 6 Cours de Philosophie positive, 1re leçon. 7 Cournot, Essai sur le fondements de nos connaissance (1851), §§371-376.
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whether based on the image of mathematics or physics. No mathematical psychology is possible in the same way that there exists a mathematical physics. Even if one, in virtue of anticipating perception relative to intensive magnitudes, applied the mathematics of the continuous to the modifications of internal sense, one would not thereby obtain anything more than a geometry confined to the study of the properties of the straight line. There is also no experimental psychology in the same way that there is a chemistry that constitutes itself by the use of analysis and synthesis. We cannot experiment on others or ourselves. Plus, internal observation affects its object. Wanting to surprise oneself in self-observation would lead to insanity [alienation]. Psychology, then, can only be descriptive. Its true place is in an Anthropology, as a propaedeutic to a theory of skill and prudence, crowned by a theory of wisdom.
The science of intimate sense If we call “classical psychology” what we intent to refute, it must be noted that in psychology there are always classics for someone. The Ideologues, heirs to the sensualists, took as “classical” the Scottish psychology that only advocated, like them, an inductive method so as to better affirm, against them, the substantiality of spirit. And, before being rejected as “classical” by the theoreticians of Gestalt psychology, the atomistic and analytic psychology of the sensualists and the Ideologues was itself already viewed as such by a romantic psychologist like Maine de Biran. Through him, psychology becomes the technique of the Diary and the science of intimate sense. The solitude of Descartes was the asceticism of a mathematician. The solitude of Maine de Biran is the idleness of a school principal. The Cartesian I think founds thought itself. The Biranian I want founds self-consciousness over and against an exteriority. At his isolated desk, Biran discovers that psychological analysis does not consist in simplifying but in complicating; that the primitive psychic fact is not an element but already a relation, and that this relation is lived with effort. He arrives at two conclusions, unexpected for a man whose functions are of authority, which is to say, commandment: consciousness requires the conflict between a power and a resistance; man is not, as de Bonald thought, an intelligence serviced by the organs but a living organization serviced by intelligence. It is necessary for the soul to be incarnated, and so there can be no psychology without biology. Self-observation does not forgo recourse to either the physiology of voluntary movement or the pathology of affectivity. The situation of Maine de Biran is unique, between the two Royer-Collards. He has dialogued with the doctrinarian and been judged by the psychiatrist. We have from Maine de Biran a “Promenade avec M. Royer- Collard dans les jardins du Luxembourg” and we have from Antoine-Athanase Royer- Collard, the former’s younger brother, an “Examen de la Doctrine de Maine de Biran.”8 If
8 Published by his son Hyacinthe Royer-Collard (in Annales Médico-Psychologiques, Book 2 (1843), 1).
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Maine de Biran had not read and discussed Cabanis (On the Relations between the Physical and Moral Aspects in Man, 1798), if he had not read and discussed Bichat (Physiological Researches on Life and Death, 1800), the history of pathological psychology would ignore him, which it cannot do. The second Royer-Collard is, after Pinel and alongside Esquirol, one of the founders of the French school of psychiatry. Pinel had pleaded for the idea that the insane are at once sick patients like the rest, neither possessed nor criminals, and also different from them and should be cared for separately and separated, depending on the case, into specialized hospital services. Pinel founded mental medicine as an independent discipline, starting from the therapeutic isolation of the insane at Bicêtre and Salpêtrière. Royer-Collard imitates Pinel at the Maison Nationale de Charenton, where he becomes head doctor in 1805, the same year Esquirol defends his medical thesis on The Passions Considered as Causes, Symptoms and Means of Cure in Cases of Insanity. Royer-Collard becomes, in 1816, professor of legal medicine at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris and, in 1821, the first holder of the chair of mental medicine. Royer-Collard and Esquirol had as pupils: Calmeil, who studied paralysis in the insane; Bayle, who recognized and isolated general paralysis; Félix Voisin, who created the study of mental retardation in infants. And it is at Salpêtrière that—after Pinel, Esquirol, Lelut, Baillarger, and Falret, among others—Charcot becomes, in 1862, the leader of a service whose works will be followed by Théodule Ribot, Pierre Janet, cardinal Mercier, and Sigmund Freud.
We have seen psycho-pathology positively begin with Galen and culminate in Sigmund Freud, creator of the term “psychoanalysis” in 1896. Psycho-pathology did not develop in isolation from the other psychological disciplines. Because of the investigations of Biran, it compelled philosophy to ask itself, since at least a century before, from which of the two Royer-Collards it should borrow the idea of psychology that we must develop. In this way, psycho-pathology is at once judge and party to that uninterrupted debate in which metaphysics gives direction to psychology without thereby giving up the right to say a word about the relationship between the physical and the psychic. For a long time, this relationship has been formulated as somato-physical before becoming psycho-somatic. This reversal is the same, moreover, as the one carried out on the signification of the unconscious. If one identifies psychism and consciousness—based, rightly or wrongly, on the authority of Descartes—, the unconscious turns out to be of a physical order. If one assumes that the psychic can be unconscious, psychology does not reduce to the science of consciousness. And the psychic is no longer only what is hidden, but also what hides itself, that which one hides; it is not simply the intimate, but also—a term Bossuet takes from the mystics—the abyssal
