GHISLAINE FLORIVAL

 

 

The contemporary cultural problem is connected with the technical globalisation which constitutes already now the reality of the future world.The qualitative and quantitative change of the world in its objective realisation is constructed by techno-scientific power on a universal scale. This calls philosophers to renew their mode of understanding and even of behaviour. They must engage a practical reflection, and not only a theoretical reflection, about the sense of the future world that is being predetermined by a technological globalisation. What is the impact of that future Factum upon the contemporary cultural experience, and how can we respond it?

In its first part, this presentation appeals to the phenomenological concept of "teleology" as defined by Husserl in his later works. That concept may help us to understand how the future world, constructed by technological globalisation, intersects with cultural life and how the cultural restructuring must integrate these instrumental forces. The second part concerns the historial process of culture, by taking up again, through the mediation of corporeity, with its originary existential rootedness. The third part concerns the tension of sense which desire introduces into the institutional ethico-political action, considered into its proper cultural values, in order to justify the ultimate call of Sense in its "in-finite" ontological source or "donation."

But, whereas in the Ideas I, Husserl seemed to reject any facticity in the essential character of certain invariant structures, in his late writings he changed drastically his transcendental phenomenology, linking again to the primordial base (Ur). From that fact-like base "subjectivity has the means to assure a transcendental development." Husserl speaks of a Faktum by opposition to what belongs to the Eidos. This Faktum is not a simple anonymus facticity, devoid of any sense; it is at the origin of any orientation, including that of teleology: "A full ontology is teleology and presupposes the Faktum." "I am apodictically believe in the world. It is in the Faktum that worldliness, that teleology, can be unveiled as transcendental." Husserl thus refers back to the sensible (aisthesis) data,—or hylè in its most general meaning,—without which no world and no transcendental all-embracing subjectivity would be possible. To understand the development between Faktum and Eidos ? While maintaining the possibilities of eidetic development, Husserl gives it a genetic treatment, even if the teleology that derives from it is understandable but as transcendental.

The last texts of Husserl transform the transcendental process of intentionality found in his earlier texts. There is a re-articulation of the general phenomenological problematics between the two extremities of development: nature and history. That innovation,—as J.English points out,—consisted in the constitution of the other as alter ego in a community of monads, This transcends the dimensions of my individual life, particularly as in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, where Husserl was concerned with the side and the beyond of the constitution of other monads by my own. Eventually he supports this by "the structured articulation of our primordial sphere of belonging" which constitutes "the totality of nature". But while linking the transcendental development of the communities of monads with genetic development, Husserl does not lose any of the transcendental reflection.

The concept of teleology applied to the future concrete Factum of worldwide globalisation does not pertain directly to transcendental analysis. We can, however, recognise in it an meaning analogical to that of historial foundation. In the measure in which humankind recognises itself, for the first time, in its objective totality and confronts nature through the progress of the techno-sciences, people are included in the construct or framework which sustains him and composes their everyday world, without his knowledge or will. Cultural intersubjectivity reconstitutes itself daily in new objective forms as the world is transfigured materially by new technologies. It is no longer possible to confine oneself to the idea of a simply natural world; contemporary individuals have effectively transformed themselves into another world by new technocratic values. This can impose better modalities of existence, or inversely can alter radically its sense, in particular in the case of less integrated cultures. Practical reason is in some way anticipated by the instrumental possibilities of an artificial intelligence which judges new fields of experience, where it lacks control or even Cartesian good sense.

Today, however, cultural teleology is no longer only a matter of the temporal and historial circularity of the memory of the past, even if it is re-enacted in the present or future. We must recognise that teleological transcendental dimension, but we must admit the unilateral pressure of the future as constituted objectively by technologies. This exercises retrospective instrumental control of the present, at the risk of dominating the other possibilities of creativity proper to every culture. In the measure, indeed, in which the pressure of the technological world delineates a life conditioned by artifacts, it risks unilaterally to block the cultures in their natural destiny. The artificial Factum stemming from the instrumental operationality at all levels of experience determines the future globalised world. All cultures are constrained sooner or later to accept its control, be it only by the uniqueness of language, at the risk otherwise of extinction (of this the tragic case of the Amerindians is an example). For the first time also, the Earth as natural habitat is recognised as a common good shared by all cultures. This induces correlatively the awareness of a collective responsibility, in particular in view of future generations.

But what constitutes that mythical attractive force of a world of techno-science? Could it be that its absolute realisation manifests not only mastery over nature in its constitution, but also an ultimate scientific theory which would enable a perfect previsibility of events.That would give humankind mastery of space-time as an object of a cosmic desire. It would enable also a mastery of life with a remission if not abolition of death, pursuing thereby the myth of infinite temporality? This self-constituting rationality foreshadows a mode of life totally self-managed by an instrumentalisation of everything which would determine the identity of a future world. This would give the present a technocratic aura which, in return, would impose control over life choices. It would be the source of models not only of the goals of production, but also of the socio-economic plans of world policy, as well as of the media, education, and even daily behaviour.

The negative side effects of technology from its too rapid instauration put those who are culturally concerned on guard against the predefined dangers of the near future due to the risk of losing control of the process of computerisation. But the self proliferation of artifacts raises the fear of a bland anonymous world. That situation entials a collective responsibility, not only of the experts which have to foresee its effects, but also of simple consumers who do not yet control or master its import. Examples of this are the greenhouse effect, the reduction of the ozone sphere, genetic manipulation and human cloning. From another point of view there is also the political-financial leaps, which turn upside down in the short- or long-term concrete research predictions, etc. The danger of that uncertain programming imposes a collective prudence, despite the obligatory mediation of the networks of virtual communication. Thus, the cultural process is intrinsically predetermined by the present impact of techno-science.

The concept of corporeity makes explicit the necessary mediation between the ontological and anthropological dimensions of the existing being, as the in-between structure of sense. The interpretation of nature in terms of corporeity is the "sense" or differentiating relation. Sensing is the pathic resonance of a perception of another or of things in seeing, listening and sensible grasp. In the living presence of desiring by the body present sensing stands out upstream, as it were, to its original affective anchorage lived at the edge of life (birth). It opens downstream in the very act of existing (ex-isting) in search of what is given since the origin in presentiment as "desire of the other". Thus the things around one are offered to the perceptive subject as promise of an existential response to come. Borne by the affective sense of imagination, present or distant things are always making signs in the perception of the world even before being named. Sensing keeps alive the oral play of the sense organs as primordial, symbolic "sayings", before any universalising linguistic expression.

Applied to our problem, sensing operates on the artificial world of our new habitat, the natural world (Umwelt), which is transfigured by techno-science. Thus the world of artifacts, material or virtual, exceeds in quantity and quality the productivity of the previous methods at the expense of the habitat itself. This dimension of space-time, the natural basis of corporeity, recreates the existential horizons on an undreamed of scale. Is there a real rupture of Stimmung? The anchorage of bodiliness and the mediation of common sense continue playing their primordial role while enlarging the field of existence toward creative possibilities that are still unknown. There is actually a sensing of the artificial object, induced according to conniving advertising or design by the affective initiation of sensitivity. The proper finalities of the artifact are not given directly in their modes of appearance, but we can recognise in them some analogy with the natural object. Or we may anticipate their modes of appearance by perceptive analogies which bring about a kind of naturalisation of the artificial world, even at a high degree of sophistication. In the same way that the artificial object is carried along by affective mediation, technological operativity as a whole, through its synthetic material or its virtual models, is able to supply the originary affect with a direction. The body thus inscribes itself analogically in that nature "in totality," enlarged to the new artifacts and new possibilities. These are actually new creative approaches for the aptitudes of the living body.

In the same way, we could make use analogically of the term institutional corporeity in order to establish at the level of the Mitsein a cultural interrelation or structure of mediation for cultures between themselves. The aesthesiological body, as corporeity, is linked intrinsically with the history of Umwelt in relation to reciprocity with the others and with Nature (Ineinander). That originary alterity is founded on the Einfühlung, a reciprocal sensing of the subject and the other, before any identification of the body proper. Thus the "I" learns of itself in a pathic mode as subjectivity from the interior of a reciprocity aiming at sense. That common resensing makes precisely the bodily "in-between" as the language of the bodies between themselves. By widening that way of inhabiting the world, there is more than one Stimmung that induces us to link with people and with things. In the measure in which they become familiar for us and are daily recognised, the places also constitutes the frameworks of our action horizons. They keep in memory the originary imaginary and structure of the sensing before any objective thematisation. That pathic sensing relocates them in the originary space-time that is the natural basis of corporeity. From that point of view, the cultural mode of life inscribes itself immediately in its originary affective places, linked with the memory of the subject and borne by desiring tension. Daily existence thus owes its cultural surroundings to all its factors. By the relations of communication the originary affective impact is borne in the most significant way (cf. the incredible passion for the GSM today throughout the planet).

Could we say that the institution also depends upon "aesthesiology" proper to each culture? Taking into consideration the originary negativity of affect, this is generated since the beginning of life by the existential crisis of the passage of the infans beyond toward weening and Freudian jealousies. This enables one to discover the other as one’s other, that is, as socius. Negative affectivity takes account of "the principle of reality" through the experience of its own subjectivity and of common sense. On the other hand, concrete affects result from successive learning by imitation, competition and rivalries and all the interlacing collective relations stemming from corporeity proper. This interrelation between existing beings is founded, however, in their participation in a cultural history (Geschichte). Levi-Strauss, by his interpretation of the elementaty structures of kinship based on exchange, underlines an evolution of the natural process toward ever greater cultural differentiation. The priorities of existence are determined by the choice of values proper to each people (for example, the values attached to family in China, or to individual human rights in the West). There is also a pathic encounter of cultures between themselves in the sense that their institutions intersect by a kind of intercultural sympathy: analogous life conditions, though differentiated according to place, historic modalities, cultural levels, aesthetics, philosophical or religious forms. This woud be associated with the Stimmung of a shared "institutional incorporation."

Up to now we have traced the history of the subject in the presence to itself of the passive synthesis, which bears the "knowing" (in the French sense of "co-naître": to be borne with) of the "I" as habitat of well-being. On that existential base we can work, now not only personal, but on cultural restruction. Ethical action is certainly the most appropriate means to defend the world of "persons" against any neutralising and mortiferous drift characterising the technological blindly totalitarian world. In consensus of ethical choices, one "decider" should live again, from the interior of one’s adult practical subjectivity, the originary affective base which engages most profoundly one’s ethical intuition. Further the vital diversity at the level of the existing individual, is also valid on the cultural plane. There is thus an ethical responsibility on te part of those who make choices, which must work at all the levels of life. It must respect not only the human dignity of one’s own corporeity, but that of the communities in their cultural interchange. More radically and globally, ethical responsibility is relative to the ontological foundation of human experience: nature as the process of life with all features of existence in their circular interaction (Ineinander). We have, therefore, to found an ethic of nature as a whole both as a life process (the vital sense of the living being) and as an institution with both the personal and the cultural distinctiveness.

Differentiating the "sense" imparts to the ethical attitude its vital relational desire. However, while ethics remains in the field of practical rationality or "duty" (in the Kierkegaardian sense), it does not achieve its original purpose. Confined in rules, it risks stumbling on its own limits, and missing the unspeakable more encompassing experience which is irreducible to objective rationality. However, it can be affected by the "unwell-being" of a symbolic of evil, which makes it recognise its uncertainty or powerlessness. The fact of recognising oneself in the face of the limiting regulations contains its own self-overcoming. This is no longer of an ethical order, but enables one to glimpse "the supplément d’âme" of which Bergson spoke. How could this be expressed?

To search for the meaning of the ethical sense, that is the transcendental sense of the ethical, is to search for the original key of sense. Thusfar, the anthropological thesis of this paper concerned the implication of corporeity and its natural affective interrelation as necessary for cultural reconstruction. This is the deep root that conditions ethical action in all its aspects. An ethical debate does not necessarily return toward the affective originary Einfülhung, but from this draws its own existential conditioning, bringing this forward in the framework of ethical rationality. The structure of affectivity producing a sense of "well-being" is transposed in that framework beyond its existential aim. It enters into practical consciousness in such a way that by regulating its sense it gives affective existence a positive dimension. Thus, a reciprocal constitution of desire and ethical consciousness exists: one gives affective existence the ability to answer from its point of view to the formal universality of law; the other, the affective structure, induces the subject to enter into ethical life.

But the affective structure works also to overcome the ethical. It brings into play the "sense" of existence and its ultimate finality, the infinite aspiration which can be marked only by the beacons of ethics. The analysis of the structure of affectivity with respect to ethics thus brings to the fore a double perspective: the originary conditioning as a favorable field for ethical consciousness, and the ultimate source of sense. What is beyond the ethical limit foreshadows the moment of conversion by which ethical consciousness discovers itself as given to itself. This has repercussions on both the originary progression of affectivity and the ethical broadening of reasonable action. On the one hand, the transcendent source of sense give "well-being" as "transcendental sense" reverberating in the rational ethic. On the other hand, the source of desire and creation in the generation of the originary affective structure finds in the ultimate calling of sense the origin of its potentiality for giving, as well as the sense of its pathic role in the ethical consciousness.

Phenomenologically, the three dimensions (affectivity, ethic, and gift) intersect even if they do not interfere with one another. In the example of Chinese civilisation centered on the two foundations of family and city, the affective institution of family intersects in some way with the rights of the city and increases the values of distributive justice, collegial work and faithfulness to the ruling hierarchy proper to the city. In the example of human rights, which belong to the philosophy oriented on the notion of person coming from the Christian tradition, the experience of loving inscribes itself in existential experience as well as in the ethical intuition. As another example, actions that are heroic or linked to religious abnegation do not necessarily appeal to ethics, indeed the religious stage can be indifferent with respect to the ethical (Kierkegaard).In brief, the creative giving of sense, which founds the order of the "heart", overcomes the practical rationality of duty, that is, of simple ethical norms.

Ontological hermeneutics goes beyond the application of the phenomenological method to the study of affectivity by its teleological intention. This is aimed at the ultimate sense of desire, the existential condition of the personalising act as in the "I am." To recognise the gift by which the "I" receives itself from the being is to grasp in the depths of oneself the intuition of an alterity ,-this time not reciprocal-, which "gives Sense." It is by giving horizon that effective affectivity induces beyond ethics as the condition of truly personal relations. That horizon of sense enables everyone to recognise oneself in every authentic encounter as the "fellow person" of the other before the same cultural destiny. At that stage, it is possible to glimpse by analogy the required, if not assumed, intercultural recognition with respect to the future world that guides us. The exigency of an interrelational, as intercultural, ethical responsibility is not only at the temporal subjective level of passive synthesis, but at the historical level. This enables us to recognise genetically at its origin the exigency of desire intrinsic to the movement of life, and to recognise also the movement of sense. This is the becoming of the future already programmed in the facts which realise the proper destiny of every culture, even if that destiny already bears the objective mark of universal globalisation. Each culture responds to that invitation by entering into the field of exchange with other cultures, by the mediation of a kind of corporeity analogically instituted by the encounter. At the same time it actualises the whole of its creative possibilities in order to specify their style and effective imprint on the authoritarian texture of universal globalisation.

In conclusion, if cultural reconstruction becomes imperative today in view of the Factum of a universal instrumental globalisation, it must relate to the originary sense of existence. Phenomenologically, we can discover in it the retrospective foundation aiming at the knowing (in the sense of the French "co-naître"), which is the emergence of desire in everyone. Desire guides any action, by opening it to a teleological sense in everyone as in every culture. By a mediation analogous to corporeity, hermeneutics of the practical sense manifests also the mediation of an "institutional incorporation," an essential anchorage of mutual recognition among cultures. That interrelation is born of the originary force of desire which produces cultural recognition and differentiation. In the experience of encounter, it promotes the emergence of ethical-political responsibility which, despite the technological superstructure, is possible for personalised cultural institution in the hope of giving sense.

1. E.Husserl, HUA XV, p.731.

2. J.English, ‘Que signifie l’idée d’une téléologie universelle chez le dernier Husserl ?’ in Recherches Husserliennes, vol. 9, édit par le Centre de Recherches phénoménologiques des Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, à Bruxelles, 1998; pp. 3-36.

3. Id., p.19.

4. H. Arendt, La condition de l’homme moderne, trad.franç. (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1983), cf. Prologue.

5. M. Heidegger, L’Etre et le temps, trad.franç. (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), p. 461.

6. G. Orwell, 1984 (New York, 1949).

7. M. Merleau-Ponty, La Nature, Notes, Cours du College de France, établi et annoté par D. Séglard (Paris, Seuil,1995), pp. 263-380.

8. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phéménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 487.