Exactitude in Science

[323]

On the Meaning of Explanation

Sur le sens de l’explication

Georges Gusdorf (1968)

The question of the nature and the range of explanation in the order of culture is of present concern; for the debate has opened between the tenants of structural explanation and those of historical or genetic explanation. These polemics, at times sibylline, would no doubt become a little clearer if, before asserting the exclusive validity of a particular type of explanation, we set out to examine the nature, the meaning, and the range of the explanatory process in general. The order of knowledge does not constitute an independent and autonomous domain which could find in itself its origin and its end; it intervenes as a moment and as an aspect of the human presence in the universe.

The appearance of life on the planet Earth consecrated the coming of a new order. Life can subsist only through the combination of a certain number of available possibilities in the material environment. The living order makes use of geological elements scattered in the environment according needs which are peculiar to it. Every living being intervenes as a centre out of which a radiant finality is superimposed onto physical, chemical, and mineral determinisms. If its conditions of existence cease to be met, organic existence becomes impossible.

In this regard, it is clear that each biological order, from the most rudimentary forms of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, are characterised by a variable degree of autonomy with respect to their material environment. At the lowest level, life suffers almost passively the causality of the environment, but from the beginning, processes of adaption intervene and superimpose the immanent finality of life on the immediate determinisms of the environment. If there exists no life without its conditions, the essence of life is to develop or to increase the conditions peculiar to it in order to assure its permanence. Thanks to this right of reply [droit de reprise] which, in the domain of animal species can become a veritable right of initiative, the physical environment finds itself transformed into the environment of life’s behaviours, such as Jacob von Uexküll has shown. [323–324]

Gradually, through the hierarchy of living beings, the trials and the errors of each species express the search for an ordering of the world, that is, the search for a configuration of equilibrium where its fundamental needs might be satisfied. Man, in this regard, makes no exception to the common rule; he affirms his presence on the earth, transfiguring the material environment in a landscape summoned to become the proper place of his stay. A certain number of animal species already carry out the distribution of the common living space between specific individuals and groups, capable of punctuating and even, in a certain measure, of converting their proper domains according to the cyclical needs of their behaviour; boundaries are defined, itineraries fixed, and locations set aside for food and rest.

The establishment of man on the earth presents an original character only insofar as the living space becomes a metal space. Thanks to the mediation of language, human intelligence possesses the privilege of reduplicating the landscape within the mind. The presence of man on the earth unfurls a sphere of intelligibility: the dispersion of objects and rituals of conduct are grouped together in a network which unites the world with a new coherence. There does not exist an order of things, but only a disorder. Order intervenes with the mind. Escaping the pressure of particular situations, knowledge institutes a new situation, a situation of the situation, at the level of which abstract operations can be realised. The animal and the plant, can, within certain limits, adapt themselves to the environment [milieu]; man adapts the environment in view of his proper residence. He lives in the desert and at the poles of the earth; he even prepares to live on the moon, thereby attesting to his capacity to create his conditions of existence, thanks to the recasting [remise en jeu] of the possibilities scattered in nature.

The succession of human behaviours does not, therefore, constitute itself as a disordered collection of reactions to external or internal stimulation. The adaption of man to the environment is simultaneously an adaption of the environment to man; the action is organised at the level of consciousness according to the order of discourse. The mediation of language [parole] institutes a debate between each with themselves and others, thus implicating a detachment in relation to the immediate needs of the concrete situation. At the very level of archaic groupings, the passage from existence to essence is realised; behaviours systematise themselves according to the order of a program [324–325] which institutes a hierarchy of urgency. The present takes shape thanks to a negotiation between past experience and the prediction of the future. Space-time is enlarged beyond the obvious facts of the primary surroundings. The biological world has made place for an intelligible world; norms of thought federate needs. The realisation of a deferred action—which is an action at a distance—multiplies the possibilities of intervention at the level of this categorial behaviour, characteristic of the human species, which consecrates the priority of the abstract over the concrete.

The practical activity of human beings consecrates a mutation of the obvious facts. Man adds himself to nature, he dominates it while obeying it. The additions to the environment [milieu], little by little, transformed into a residence, take on the form of a methodical conquest, each innovation founding a new practice, a creator of ulterior possibilities. The human universe is a universe of significations which refer amongst themselves, and so all innovations have eventual repercussions and place the established order in question. While the living environment of mosquitoes or elephants has remained what it has since the origin of the species, the human face of the word has not ceased to change according to the growth and vicissitudes of history.

***

It is in this perspective that the notion of explanation takes its meaning, as an awareness of man in his world, a debate between man and his world and between man and himself. Explanation occurs as a settling of accounts between the order of man and the nature of things. Hegel said that culture is a need for those needs which have already been satisfied; but the stage of this second need must not be understood as chronologically posterior and therefore superfluous. Thought and meaning do not occur after action, as a reward or as an activity of leisure; because human action, from the beginning, is the bearer of meaning, it is an operator of order. The high works of culture may well have that value of being a search for meaning disconnected from immediate utility; however, the humblest forms of the affirmation of human life demonstrate a power of arrangement and the aftershock of the awareness of things. The very origins of humanity must be extended back to the moment when a being left the ranks of natural species and discovered itself capable of arranging the universe according to its own needs.

The adventure of the human species unfolds therefore in the material universe, [325–326] such as it presents itself to vital necessities, but this material universe is perceived, utilised, and lived as a thought universe, thanks to a constant transfiguration which constitutes at any moment human reality as an ensemble of significations. As in the words of Erwin Straus,

it is as a questioner that man addresses himself to the world—to the world of the environment and community (Mitwelt und Umwelt)—as well as to his own existence. With his questions he can turn himself towards others; he can interrogate himself, or interrogate others; he can find himself put in front of certain questions by others; he can push questions aside or discover certain interrogations. In all these activities and passivities, a fundamental aspect of human existence is affirmed and accomplished (…) even when man endeavours to push back against certain difficult questions, freeing himself from all responsibility, the questions follow him and pursue him even in his sleep. They tower over from the past and they menace from the future, their torment spills out onto the present. The torment of the question never eases because it is the questioning itself that knows no rest.¹1. Erwin Straus, “Der Mensch als ein fragendes Wesen (1953),” in Psychologie der menschlichen Welt Springer, Berlin 1960, p. 317.

Such an analysis gives us an understanding of the sense and measure in which man is by vocation a metaphysical being. Right from the beginning in fact, human existence is not analysed as an ensemble of behaviours, reacting to the presently given situation without more. The actions and reactions of the individual overtake immediate urgencies. Human mental space cannot be comprised at the sole level of direct material determinisms; its horizon unfolds between the authority of memory and planning, which both orient the perception of things and the realisation of behaviour. Each situation puts in question former situations as well as situations to come, all of which overburden [surchargent] the presence of the present. The possible determines, or rather overdetermines, reality insofar as the actuality of thought endeavours constantly to submit the urgencies of the event to its law. The human world appears as an intelligent world where values contest facts, where values take charge of facts, imposing on them a meaning in the image of human necessity. Intelligible space brings together the aspects of the given according to the possibilities of human intervention. The whole history of knowledge—in the order of practice and theory, in the order of religion and art, technology, sciences, and philosophy—works only to prolong this possibility granted to the human species to decipher the [326-325] significations of the world, and of putting them back into play once constituted. Man affirms himself as a focal point of intelligence, the utiliser of possibilities which he himself has given rise to, and which it belongs to him to utilise, that is, to put them back into play at any time, perfecting them without end.

***

This anthropological perspective allows us to place the vicissitudes of systems of explanation in the general horizon of the human adventure. Mental space does not constitute a pure logical network the circuit of which need to obey the sole necessities of the laws of intelligibility. The truth of the world is not constructed outside of the world and independent of it. The epistemological dimension does not close in on itself; its deployment is subordinated to the development of the original intentions which define the conditions of existence of human beings in a universe of significations that they have created in their image. At the level of abstract research, subsequent axiomatisations in mathematics and physics for example, or in the order of pure logic, seem to be organised in autonomous domains, where thought owes to itself only its principles, its means, and its ends. But such an independence would be abusive and illusory if it claimed to cut the umbilical chord which binds it to the first affirmations of man in the universe.

The methodological diversity of mental spaces does not exclude their fundamental unity. The dissociation of the universe of discourse is in itself a normal procedure, indispensable to the formalisation of a particular domain, or a particular order of intelligibility. The danger is that, from derivation to derivation, one comes to forget the indispensable reference to the situation of man in the world, the only thing capable of assuring the intrinsic coherence of knowledge. When men of knowledge affirm that a particular science possesses in itself an independent finality, they forget the second and first finality which link together all disciplines to the great overall outline of man’s habitation on the earth.

Gonseth, in his work Fondements des Mathématiques, rightly cites the opinion of Eddington, physicist and philosopher, who wrote in the last paragraph of Space, Time, Gravitation:

On the shores of the Unknown, we have discovered the peculiar trace of footsteps. We have constructed profound theories, one after the other, so as to explain their origin. Finally, we have succeeded in [327–328] constructing the Beings from whom the footsteps stem: it is ourselves …²2. Arthur Eddington in Ferdinand Gonseth, Fondements des Mathématiques: De la Geométrie d’Euclide à la Relativilé générale et à l’Intuilionnisme, Blanchard, 1926, p. 185.

Every search for an explanation of explanation, or a foundation of foundation, must lead to the same result. Here, the Anglo-Saxon myth of Robison Crusoe on the beach of his island joins up with the very old Greek myth of the riddle of the Sphinx. To every question concerning the meaning of knowledge, it is necessary to respond by questioning the question, which, closer and closer, will eventually refer back to the original necessity of man in search of his accomplishments in a universe which his presence alone suffices to transform. In the words of Wilhelm Dilthey, it is culture which is our world.

However, the meaning of culture is one of diversity within unity. Each circuit of intelligibility seems to close in on itself, according to the movement of questions and their responses; but despite all the requirements of style and all metal restrictions, intelligibility cannot be freed from all reference to the first alliance of thought and the world. The horizon of all science, configuration and justification of knowledge and action, remains the great outline of a development of the earth of humans.

It is absurd to imagine that the truth is dependent on its ability to make us escape the world and ourselves. The human form cannot be an impediment to the truth for the very reason that it is for us the condition of all truth. Whether one wants it or not, it is there, from the beginning of the most elementary consciousness; it marks thought all along its development. The one who claims to exempt their thought of this form which informs it, would be akin to the man who attempts desperately to release himself from his own shadow.

Every problem capable of presenting itself to man is by that very fact a human problem. The truths of the sciences are only truths under a particular condition, they are truths of the human condition.

***

Every explanation, whatever epistemological area may be considered and degree of formalisation attained, possesses therefore a psychological and anthropological value. A demonstration of geometry presents itself as a more or less complex search, the origin of which is a discord of the mind with itself, and the termination of which is a resolution and reconciliation of thought. The formula Q.E.D. consecrates that return to order, the balancing of all accounts in the restored equilibrium.

The point of departure is the awareness of a discord of the mind with the world and with itself. Every question that is posed states a disquiet [328–329]: thought discovers itself out of balance, before an unusual void, which weighs as a menace, or at least as a challenge. The need for explanation gives rise to a slow development which will lead from the missadaptation to the readaptation. It is a question here of an experiment with the truth, searching for the ease of mind, an acquiescence with the world and with itself. Of course, the ‘truth’ that is here at play, is not an eternal and absolute truth; it is defined by the prior certitudes and obvious facts of the considered subject. Each person in any given epoque struggles for their own account, the intellectual as well as ancient humans, and even the everyday man on the street.

In the words of an English historian,

the clarity of an explanation seems to depend on the degree of satisfaction that it brings. The most satisfying explanation is the one which joins up with a need of our nature, a necessity for security deeply anchored (…) Considered as a psychological event, an explanation could be described as a change of quality in our reaction to an object or to an idea. This change is characterised as the relaxation of a sort of tension, as it commonly happens when a kind of mystery is clarified. If it is in accord with our conscious needs or not, explanation wishes for and gives rise to a change of attitude in regard to the object that concerns it. There, where formerly we felt fear, curiosity, dissatisfaction, anxiety, or respect, we now experience a relaxation; we consider the same object with an easy familiarity and perhaps with a certain contempt.³3. Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background, Penguin Books, 1934, pp. 10, 12.

That which is at once explained is, at the same time, in a sense, eliminated; it is explained away.

This description encompasses scientific explanation, but it is also of value to all forms of non-scientific explanation. The rules of the game can vary; they can impose norms more or less rigorous, according to the orientation of curiosity. But whether it is a question of the mathematical axiomatics or the most popular communal meaning, the experience appears identical. A thought, the background of which is constituted by an ensemble of presuppositions, finds itself in the presence of a situation, an event, or an element apparently incompatible with the established situation. The disequilibrium thus noticed gives rise to a negotiation of the mind with itself and with the order of things. The belief in the possibility of explanation founds itself on the implicit certitude of an original complicity between consciousness and the world. If this complicity did not exist, the adaptation of the human species to its conditions of existence [329–330] would have been impossible; humanity would have disappeared. The very fact that humanity has been able to develop implies a founding agreement which authorises us to hope for a solution for the difficulties to come, or at least the essential difficulties.

In this psychobiological perspective, it appears that man is the master of posing to himself the question of the conditions of his own satisfaction. The mind organises the network of the intelligible world in such a manner that every new question suddenly appears in the interior of a discourse already constituted. The appearance disturbs the equilibrium of such a discourse up until the moment when its response emerges, imposing a solution which submits the question posed to the general discipline of the established order. Both rigorous science and the disciplines of rhetoric proceed, in this regard, in an identical intuition.

When a theologian examines a point of doctrine, when a preacher in the pulpit deals with a particular problem of casuistry, the solution comes into view when the orator produces biblical texts responding to the question. A reference to Marx, Lenin, or Mao will produce the same relaxation [détente] and the same appeasement when a particular political actor addresses themselves to their public. Each climate of opinion could be characterised by certain key words, the opportune invocation of which dispels contradictions, at once giving rise to both light and enthusiasm. Depending on the environment, the notions gifted with such a marvellous phosphorescence will be, for example, those of “imperialism” and “capitalism”, or on the opposite, those of “international Judaism” and “stateless communism”, etc.

One will object, of course, that such examples arise, not from knowledge worthy of the name, but from a passionate demagoguery. The question of knowledge would then be whether it is possible to determine a precise border between authentic explanation and those which are not. Of course, the science of scholars, duly verified, furnishes exemplary justifications of this proper discourse. But if scientific explanation is valid only in theory [en droit], it recovers in fact only a very faint part of the human domain. The result is that, by according to scientific theory an exclusive validity, one places humanity outside of the common right of explanation. Such is the attitude of contemporary neo-positivism which, by consecrating the only language as physico-mathematical, abandons the near totality of human reality to incoherence and nonsense.

Maurice Leenhardt has recounted the history of an island community of the Pacific that was decimated by a formidable epidemic. The tribal chiefs, [330–331] the divines and sorcerers, executed without result the prescribed procedures of conjuration and expiation that were required in such cases. The sickness increased until the day when a person walking along the beach discovered an old washed up canoe a small distance from the shore against a pointed rock which towered above the sea. A light was kindled in their minds: the wrecked ship had painfully aggravated the tooth of a god, who took revenge in the manner accustomed to gods. The old boat was immediately removed according to the proper rites; a sacrifice was performed; and the epidemic was stopped.

One will object, of course, that such an explanation is without any value insofar as it puts in play primitive and backward mentalities which are proof of a culpable complacency for the basest of superstitions. To which one can respond that explanations of this genre have given complete satisfaction to humanity for the major part of its history, and, moreover, that they are far from having truly ceased in their currency today. The importance is not the validity of the interpretation, but the psychological function thus illuminated. Explanation, in the face of a disorder once noticed, procures the return to order. The element that is incongruent with the pre-established system of intelligibility finds its place in the general discipline of interpretation. Everything happens as though the intellectual landscape, which for a moment was clouded, has rediscovered its serenity. It is a question of re-establishing the pre-eminence of the privileged ‘form of health’ [bonne forme] which, in the eyes of a given group at a certain moment in their history, enjoys an intrinsic obviousness.

For the inexplainable, the problem presents itself as a ‘form of sickness’ [mauvaise forme] which destroys the harmony of consciousness. The development of knowledge tends towards supressing the unusualness that emerges. The intention is to substitute for an insecure situation where order is threatened, another situation where those concerned feel sheltered from all anxiety. Even if it concerns an apparently secondary interrogation or an entirely intellectual character, what is at play is the vital equilibrium of the human being. Gradually, step by step, all attempts at explanation will refer to an ontological ‘consciousness of being’ [prise d’être], the foundation of the human condition. What is at question in every question is the very meaning of the truth.

The philosopher Etienne Gilson, in an autobiographical piece, celebrates the happiness of being a Thomist: “it is perhaps,” he confesses,

the only legitimate reason that one may have of claiming to be a Thomist: one must feel happy for being and one must want to share this happiness with those who are made for it. The day will come when one discovers that they will no longer be able to live [331–332] without the companionship of Saint Thomas of Aquinas. Such men feel in the Summa Theologica as fish do in the sea. For outside of it, they become dry and do not rest until they have returned to it. It is there that they have found their natural environment, where their respiration is easier and their movements more effortless. It is this that is maintained in the depths of the works of Thomism, this state of joy about which only experience can give an idea: one finally feels free …⁴4. Etienne Gilson, Le Philosophe et la Théologie, A. Fayard, 1960, pp. 220-221.

One would not be able to better characterise the experience of man’s habitation in the truth, the consecration of explanation once acquired, than is given here by Gilson. On the condition, of course, of placing the word “Thomist” between parentheses, and recognising that there exists concurrently a happiness of being a rationalist, Marxist, Freudian, and structuralist … The only inconvenience is the very plurality of systems of explanation, each of which furnishes to those who identify with it the explanation of every explanation. In each case, it seems that one finds oneself in the presence of a coherent discourse, but closed in on itself, and so assured of having an answer to everything that it finds itself incapable of having any questions remain. What then appears is a sort of fiduciary circulation of significations, which refer to one another and mutually support one another thanks to a perpetual petition of principles.

According to a famous formula of Marx,

humanity never poses to itself questions that it cannot solve; because, on a closer consideration of things, one will realise that the question is posed only when the material conditions of the solution already exist, or at least when the material conditions are found in the course of formation.⁵5. Marx, Introduction à la critique de l’Économie politique, preface.

Before Marx, Hegel himself had said:

without a problem, there is no solution; but if the problem is found, there too the solution is given at the same time.⁶6. Hegel, Philosophie de l’Histoire in Morceaux Choisis de Hegel, Lefebvre et Gutermann, N.R.F., 1883, p. 223.

But this maintains that all explanation is only the act of making an implicit meaning explicit, and the response, not being able to put in question the question, must be contented with bringing out something which is already there in a sort of indefinite and vicious circle.

***

It is difficult anywhere to admit that there may never exist anything new under the sun of explanation. Humanity has a history, as well as a knowledge; history of human knowledge, however, is made of questions and of answers, of both resolved problems and irresolvable ones. Something must have happened which is not illusory: culture has been put together through the force of trials and errors.

Émile Meyerson, quite unknown today, devoted his life to [332–333] the study of scientific explanation. His works studied the mechanism of intelligence in the domain where its exercise is submitted to the most rigorous conditions. It appeared to Meyerson that all searching has its end in re-establishing unity and identity in the appearance of diversity. Scientific laws sanction the institution of an unchanging order, constitutive of physical or chemical reality, the disciplines of which are imposed on the totality of phenomena. An affirmation of the mathematician Poinsot, which serves at the epigraph of Identité et Réalité, summarises this thesis:

We know with total clarity only a single law, that of consistency and uniformity. It is to this simple idea that we seek to reduce all others and it is uniquely in this reduction that for us science exists.⁷7. Poinsot, Éléments de Statistique, 1861, p. 239.

Such would also be, according to Meyerson, the ultimate culmination of the search for the explanatory absolute. Human reason unfolds as a gigantic principle of relentless identity, refuting the indefinite diversity of appearances according to the strictest of norm.

The operation of scientific explanation has as its point of departure and point of arrival the primary apprehension of reality. This apprehension of reality must be accounted for through the implementation of universal schemas in as restrained a number as possible. The sensible and practical world, the world of common meaning, is characterised by the variety and the indefinite diversity of appearances. Science reduces this diversity to an intelligible unity. The Cartesian parable of the piece of wax characterises perfectly this orientation towards reality. Under the mind’s watch, the concrete piece of wax offered to perception sheds itself of all surface level sensation; its profound identity, its essence, reveals itself as that of an element of extended matter, presenting certain particularities of structure which physical and chemical analysis alone will be able to describe. The transition from the sensible world to the universe of reason furnishes a complete justification of what might seem at first capricious and aberrant.

It remains to be seen whether such an explanation is fully satisfactory. From reduction to reduction, analysis and synthesis dissipates the mystery of the appearance of the piece of wax; however, the chemical formulas of scientists cannot purely and simply be a substitute for the concrete substance that is put together by bees. The bees’ piece of wax is the product of an original gift; it remains, in the first reading, within this common experience, even after the wave of the magic wand has stripped it of its identity; this initial piece of wax is what it is because our eyes, our [333–334] hands, and our sense of smell are what they are. The scientist can quite rightly consider these sensible qualities as accidental and negligeable; but the chemical substance alone would be valued in its ideality only in the case of a person born blind, afflicted in addition with diverse atrophies and sensorial paralyses which would make them into a sort of sub-human.

This is why the work of universal rationalism that was attempted by Meyerson ended in the recognition that reality remains irreducible to the rational. “No phenomenon,” he concluded,

even the most insignificant, is completely explicable. In vain have we reduced the phenomenon to others, substituting it for increasingly simpler ones: for each reduction was an infringement on identity, each one we abandoned as a rag … ⁸8. Meyerson, Identité et Réalité, 3rd edition, Alcan, 1926, p. 459.

Everything happens as though scientific explanation develops in opposition to reality, just as Myerson himself said very well: “reason has only one means of explaining what does not come from it, that is, to reduce it to nothingness …”⁹9. Meyerson, La déduction relativiste, Payot, 1925, section. 186, p. 258.

Scientific intelligence, in its dream of total formalisation, pursues the completion of a knowledge without presuppositions. But the radical dissolution of the concrete into the abstract appears impossible to follow to its end insofar as, whatever the domain considered may be, man, in his carnal presence, always intervenes both as a means of knowledge and as an object of knowledge. He cannot not presuppose himself.

***

Once the impossibility of such a radical explanation—which moreover would be the destroyer of its object of knowledge—is recognised, it will be admitted that the proper domain of intelligibility unfolds between two limiting situations, defined by the commitment to explain everything, or the commitment to explain nothing at all. In the first hypothesis, reason would somehow digest itself and, under the pretext of transparency, would vanish into pure and sterile identity. The second position would consist in recognising opacity and irreducible mystery everywhere. Since, in the final account, nothing will be truly elucidated, and since one will come up everywhere against the irrationality of all presence in the world, in sensation, in consciousness, in life and death, it is as much for one to recognise that all claims to explanation, whatever it might be, end only in a trompe-l’œil, or rather a trompe-l’esprit, much more dangerous than it is useful. The extreme opposites, therefore, seem to join together in a shared nihilism. [334–335]

In truth, it is the peculiarity only of philosophers to sometimes claim to a total explanation (or a total non-explanation). Men of science put into work more limited ambitions, except in the case where they give in to extrapolations, generally regrettable, outside of their proper domains, posing as philosophers. Generally, the training ground of intelligibility is situated between the two extremes, according to the mental hygiene of a healthy relativity. The progress of explanation is marked by the dissociation of well-determined epistemological fields, fields of a homogenous structure according to which a determined system of metal operations could be applied. The history of the sciences appears overall, therefore, as a slow dismemberment of the unitary field of knowledge, such as it existed in Antiquity and again in the Middle Ages. Areas of specialisation appear, each of which must be studied with the appropriate epistemological equipment.

Explanation progressively becomes clearer as the classification of the sciences is enriched; but the clarity gained in this way is the counterpart of a restriction of the mental space under consideration, which specifies the postulates of each particular axiomatisation and renounces all search for an explanation of explanation. It appears nevertheless possible to attempt a sort of general epistemology, which would offer to enumerate and describe the procedures of explanation as well as the ways and means implemented in each case.

Without doubt, Euclid’s geometry can be put forward as the first entirely formalised and absolutely coherent explanatory system. Its perfection, in fact, exemplifies the prototype of the most radical (reductive) intelligibility up to our modern times. In this example, it appears that explanation is an instrument of thought which allows for the reduction of complexity to simplicity, followed by the reconstruction of complexity from simplicity, all in a mental space articulated in a systematic manner. Knowledge closes in on itself at the level of principles defined at the beginning of play; and if some unintelligibility subsists within the system of postulates, it is right to recognise that Euclid himself had a very clear awareness of it, permitting us to see in him the first non-Euclidean.

In the closed field of Euclidean geometry, once the presuppositions are admitted, everything fits together and everything follows on from before, no event can occur which is not perfectly justifiable. Euclid’s classic work was titled the Elements; it seems that the decomposition of the [335–336] whole, reduced to the elements which constitute it, represents for the human mind a constant type of procedure designed to assure the triumph of intelligibility in any given domain. Given an intellectual system which presents a problem, the difficulty will find itself clarified when one manages to find in the situation or object against which thought finds itself confronted, an order already familiar, or a combination of simpler principles and notions, the combined implementation of which allows one to bring under control the initial impression of disarray.

Explanation in this case is of the analysis-synthesis type; it constitutes through decomposition and re-composition a sort of epistemological model, a replica or simulation of reality. The mind no longer meets any resistance in an object of thought that it is capable of reconstructing according to its own techniques. Of course, a schema of this kind can only postpone the difficulty: the chemical synthesis of water or ethylene is an explanation which terminates with the ‘elements’ (i.e. hydrogen and oxygen) made use of by chemists and goes no further. Yet, one day the new problem of the synthesis of these elements will be exposed, and then, from whatever they may be, the elements of those elements. Every explanation is provisional; it is established at a certain level of analysis, awaiting a further level of interpretation to reveal itself. The primary origin plunges into metaphysics; it links back, closer and closer, to the Leibnizian question of knowledge: why there is something rather than nothing.

In such a case, it is the simple which explains the complex, explanation presents itself under the form of an combinatorial arrangement [combinatoire]. It is a question of finding permanency in variation, constancy and uniformity in change. Mechanical philosophy, which dominated seventeenth-century thought, claimed to reduce the indefinite variety of phenomena to such arrangements of matter and motion according to the general schema of the corpuscular hypothesis. All things are explained when one has been able to illuminate the arrangements of material particles which associate and dissociate according to the laws of the motion and collision of bodies. Cartesian physics, such as it was set out in the Principles of Philosophy, furnishes an excellent example of this schema of intelligibility, both in its totalitarian claims and final shortfall. The theory of vortices, the implementation of particles of matter presenting forms either sharp or smooth so as to justify sensible qualities, all this attests to the allegorical character of explanation, which is content to transfer one universe of discourse into another, so that the mind may find its satisfaction where the Aristotelian physics of the [336–337] scholastics no longer furnished it. But certain facts emerge which will present difficulties in their turn. The essential thing is the discovery of a new mental field, approached with new means, which appears to take on the prestige of authority and simplicity. Mechanical philosophy is defined as a collection of mental precepts [altitudes mentales] and behaviours, which presuppose a radical transformation of the mode of interpreting reality.

This mathematisation of the given keeps a static character. The mind feels in a position to decompose and recompose the phenomena according to their intelligible essence, but the becoming of reality escapes it. What it would be necessary to explain is the very genesis of knowledge: why and how the world and thought are the way they are? From the end of the seventeenth century, the search for explanatory schemas is applied to the progressive constitution of knowledge. For more than a century, in the context of the empiricist mentality, an explanation of the genetic type will come to predominate, the most perfect form of which will without doubt be the method of analysis advocated in France by the Ideological School.

The law of 20 Frimaire year III (10 December 1794) on the organisation of teaching and learning defined the method to be employed in the article Des Ecoles Normales:

This method will without doubt be founded on analysis. Locke, Helvetius, Condillac have sufficiently shown that it is solely by means of analysis that we can penetrate with assurance into the domain of science (…) Thanks to this art, which steers the mind, which prevents it from losing its way; which takes it tirelessly from the simplest observation to the most sublime truth; which teaches it both to form collections of ideas which it knows to take up again when needed, and to make no unnecessary steps (…), we will make more progress in a year in human knowledge than in ten years otherwise … ¹⁰10. Cited in Johanna Kitchin, Un journal “philosophique”, La Décade (1794-1807), Minard, 1965, p. 123.

Without so much replacing mechanical philosophy, what was called the analysis of sensations and ideas became a privileged explanatory schema,¹¹11. Cf. ibid., “attending the introduction of the courses, the terms analyse, analysis and analytic enjoyed an immense prestige.” finding moreover its appointed place at the time of the creation of the Institut National in the section for the Sciences Morales et Politiques. It is necessary to add that Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry, belonged to the group of Idéologues; the introduction of the word analysis in the vocabulary of chemical science attests to the influence of the theory of knowledge, of the psychology of the ideologues, on the constitution of the new science.

The prestige of analysis was linked to the emergence of a genetic epistemology, which mobilised in a way, mechanical philosophy. The nineteenth century, [337–338] however, would see the affirmation of new explanatory schemas. The constitution of biology as the science of life, running on from the vitalism of the eighteenth century, introduced the concepts of organism, physiology, then evolution in the Darwinian sense of the term. The becoming of reality thus justifies itself as an autonomous growth, in the image of the development of the living being from the initial germ up to its death, passing through the embryo, the state of childhood, and the state of adulthood, then to the diverse sages of aging. A whole conceptual material appears here, which will find fertile grounds of application in the most diverse areas of knowledge.

But, parallel to the biological dimension, another perspective of explanation knew a considerable popularity in the nineteenth century. The historical sciences, equipped with an objective method, responded to the concrete needs of Western consciousness after the period of Romanticism. History is a descriptive discipline, but, in exposing the how, it seems in the same stroke to reveal the why; it makes obvious the social influences which govern cultural developments; it determines the role of circumstances, personalities, accidents, and institutions; it justifies the passage of one situation into another situation. Explanation is proposed here as a comprehension of meaning; it attests to the passage of a given moment into an subsequent moment; becoming constitutes itself as a succession of periods or of stages. Those who witness this becoming, according to the progression [cheminement] chosen by the historian, in the same stroke believe in grasping the reason for its being, according to the law of post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this). In many disciplines in the nineteenth century, history became the royal road of explanation: history of religion, history of philosophy, history of languages and literature, history of sciences, history of institutions, and history of arts all develop an autonomous intelligence. In describing the successive states of a particular area of knowledge, one thinks, in a way, of attaining the law of their succession. One has the impression in any case of revealing the meaning behind the march. The systematic philosophy of Hegel represents in this perspective one of the most extraordinary attempts of total explanation, allowing us to make a return to the real under the law of the ideal. Hegelian explanation will engender, in turn, the Marxist explanation as it was developed in the dialectical method.

The philosophy of history reduces history to philosophy. But the universal claims of these movements of conceptual horology give rise to the resistance of sensible minds on the basis of the intrinsic diversity of [338–339] the aspects and moments of reality. Intelligence must follow history and not precede it; intelligence must induce it and not deduce it. The nineteenth century was, as announced by Augustin Thierry, the century of history; but it was a history conceived as a methodical inventory of the becoming of human societies in respect to their irreducible diversity. All infidelity to empirical reality, all invocation of an intelligible or transcendental necessity appears questionable. The historian searches to establish that which was, or to re-establish wie es eigentlich gewesen (how it really was), in the words of Ranke. Only such an ambition is, perhaps, doomed to failure; never sure in all cases of having attained its goal in total rigour. It risks, moreover, losing itself in the indefinite multitude of details. In every manner, explanation gives way to description, and it is only at the expense of a sort of illusion or self-suggestion that an inventory of a situation or a succession of events appears to give reason to what has passed.

The major difficulty of all comprehension is thus brought to light, and one can ask if it does not rather have the character of an illusion. Explanation consecrates the satisfaction of the mind which, when faced with a new or unusual element, manages to re-establish an impression of familiarity. One believes one has put order in the object, whereas one has perhaps only recovered a lost good conscience. Historical interpretation allows us to be present at the genesis of meaning, but this meaning develops itself in the intelligence of the historian and in that of the reader much rather than in past reality, which remains always hypothetical.

In other words, the mirror of thought, where the image of reality is supposed to affirm itself, might well be able to reflect only thought itself. Total explanation would be only an explanation of certain presuppositions, inscribed in advance in the very constitution of knowledge. And these presuppositions themselves, insofar as they reveal themselves as efficacious, attest to a certain pre-established harmony between the human mind and the universe in the midst of which it finds itself situated. Historians must therefore have with them certain fixed elements of the knowledge of themselves and the world. As much as one can judge it, the present vogue for explanatory schemas based on the idea of structure would be justified by the insufficiency or the vanity of the themes of traditional intelligibility. The investigation of synchronic as opposed to diachronic histories refers to an original composition of all knowledge, evoking at once the order of things and the order of the mind. Structure is presupposed as a theme of complexity, logically [339–340] and ontologically prior to the elements which it assures the correspondence of. Structure intervenes as a key for intelligibility, itself intelligible, prior to all genesis and independent of all comprehension of meaning. Consciousness finds itself challenged here, insofar as it cannot call into question its own foundations. Every meaning is a false meaning and history itself offers only a game of deviations and illusions, since it does not in itself possess any own law of its own. Structuralism, as a metaphysical doctrine, introduces a philosophy of identity all the more totalitarian as there is nothing to understand because structure does not have any meaning. Everything is explained and is perfectly justified right from the moment when there is no longer anything to explain. At the limit, one could ask oneself why the theoreticians of the new school take the pain to write such large books so as to establish a doctrine of radical non-sense? Without doubt it is a question of demystifying the human mind by explaining clearly the inanity of the need for explanation.

***

This brief review of explanatory schemas highlights in all cases the relativity of current procedures of explanation. The ideal of intelligibility would be the constitution of a formal system, the first achieved model of which was Euclid’s geometry. But such an axiomatic system reduces the totality of its development to a series of tautologies, the difficulty and interest is transferred to the set of presuppositions at the outset: conditions of the analysis, they set an irreducible obstacle against the analysis itself. Explanation does not explain itself, and it explains all the better since it does not explain anything.

The share of the irrational and the inexplicable continues to grow in size as one passes from the abstract sciences to the sciences of reality; when knowledge takes man as its object, the activities and institutions of man, all attempts at axiomatisation seem to take on an illusory character. One is then able to take sides from there and maintain that the human order is not susceptible to explanation; human experience would be an errant experience at the level of the sentiments and passions, mere aspirations or values which are not the objects of science. Such is the position of modern neo-positivism in summary. Another position would consist in maintaining that human consciousness and the development of meaning which it brings about are only secondary aspects, disorderings of a more fundamental reality, which is itself the object of science. [340–341] A certain materialism of the nineteenth century held that consciousness was only an incoherent and inconsistent ‘epiphenomenon’ of biological processes of which science would one day be able to give an account. In contemporary language, one would say that the explanation of human phenomena finds itself in the last analysis in the reciprocal actions of particular amino acids. Structuralist ontology appears as a close enough neighbour of these interpretations. The ‘structures’ which underlie all knowledge, beyond the illusory domain of significations, refer to a reality in itself, the reality of a neuro-cybernetic or physical order. According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, civilisation in its totality is only a gigantic enterprise the purpose of which is to “fabricate what the physicists call entropy, that is to say, inertia.” All human order is explained, in the eyes of Lévi-Strauss, from the moment when the science of man, formerly called anthropology, is written as entropology.¹²12. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Plon, 1955, p. 448.

This atrocious play of words highlights, in all cases, the fact that insofar as explanation concerns the fulness of reality, that is to say human reality, explanatory schemas the most rigorous in appearance take on a rhetorical character. One can formalise arithmetic, one can attempt to formalise a particular area of physics or chemistry; but as soon as one claims to axiomatize the human order, one can do it only in a human language, the most rigorous explanatory schemas then take on an allegorical and metaphorical value, strangers to their original calling.

In a recent, otherwise interesting, work devoted to the Civilisation of Classical Europe, the historian Pierre Chaunu furnishes good examples of these pseudo-explanatory diversions of one domain into another. On the role of Spanish America in the seventeenth century, he observes:

in modern terms, this great power which was added to Europe contributed to the constitution of the13. Pierre Chaunu, La Civilisation de l’Europe classique, Arthaud, 1966, p. 76; cf. p. 423, on the progress of the sciences: “A critical mass of revolution was established. A process of growth was set in motion. Here is the scientific revolution, the radical revolution of the representation of the world and thought. The leading sector, to borrow again from political economy, is astronomy …” critical mass of transformations which set in motion the chain reaction of growth at the end of the eighteenth century.¹³

The comparison is not right, but the conceptual vocabulary of atomic physics gives the reader the impression that they understand what has happened. Biology is able to render similar assistance when the the same historian mentions, that “American Indians do not completely heal from the microbial shock of the conquest.”¹⁴

14. Ibid., p. 82. Another example of this rhetoric in social relations; “The environment is inseparable from the things which populate it; at the same time, they constitute a field of gravitation, where loads and distances form a coordinated ensemble and where each element, by being modifying, brings about a change in overall equilibrium of the system.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté, P.U.F., 1949, p. 598.One sees how poorly suited the explanatory schemas of physics or medicine are to the domain of civilisations. It is no more than [341–342] a question of phraseology here; but it is a fact that this new rhetoric gives the reader the improper impression that they have grasped the meaning of history’s becoming. A great number of ‘principles’ or ‘laws’ which theoreticians have claimed to discover in the domain of history, sociology, or psychology are hardly anything other than truisms or manners of style. But because the image and the symbol is borrowed from a particular area of the exact sciences, it seems that something of their rigour is communicated to the human sciences. It would be wrong to let oneself be taken in by this illusion, however widespread it is. When Leibniz himself defined the ideal mechanism in biology by affirming: “Everything that happens in the body of man and all other animals is as mechanical as what happens in an engine,”¹⁵15. Leibniz, Opéra philosophica, ed. Erdmann, p. 777. this formula went well beyond the knowledge established in the period; it gives as a scientific truth an allegory satisfying for the mind, but not at all founded in rigour.

***

Either explanation explains something, but then it does not explain very much; or it tries to embrace human reality itself, in its totality or in a particularity of its aspect, and then it is not properly speaking an explanation. The exact sciences allow us to axiomatise a homogeneous and delimited domain that scientific activity has constituted by sampling a particular order of phenomena from the mass of reality. In mathematics, the mind implements abstract needs which it itself defines; it plays, in some way, with its shadow. In physics, chemistry, natural history, it is the exterior world which finds itself in question, but this world is submitted to a prior censure; it is reduced to the obedience of an collection of norms, the guarantors of objectivity and universality. The circuits of scientific intelligibility place reality in question, but always through the interposing individual of the scientist, who poses the question and searches for answers according to the correct ways and methods.

It is therefore vain and claim to make an abstraction of the human form under the pretext that it no longer appears from the moment the procedures of rigorous knowledge are defined. All science is a work of humanity; it would be absurd to claim that the architect does not appear in architecture once it has been constituted. The great periods of science each have a unique style, which is their historical mark; there is [342–343] a Hellenic science, recognisable by certain constant characters; there is a science of the seventeenth century, or nineteenth century, or twentieth century, which manifests in the most diverse areas of thought a similar attitude. Only an appropriate mental restriction allows one to admit for a moment the possibility of an operation without an operator. The distinction between the sciences of nature and the sciences of man appear here as a simple difference of degree of abstraction, the most rigorous disciplines being those which put in question the most stripped bare schemas of the human being, a necessary reference of knowledge whatever it may be, because there cannot be knowledge without a knowing subject.

All explanation is anthropological although all explanation is tempted to affirm itself as an absolute, that is to say, valid even outside of the human space. Every explanation is under the condition of and is conditioned by the human condition; it carries the sign of the one who explains, the one who, in the final account, is the intellectual native of this world, as described by Kant. Around the world, each theory, each particular knowledge develops an aspect of a self-consciousness. It is not possible for the scholar, whoever they may be, to push back the world of men with a strike of the heel so as to hover, as it were, in a space without gravitation.

Léo Spitzer, historian of literature, proposed the expression ‘hermeneutic circle’ to describe the method of literary criticism in the explanation of the works he studied. He understands by this the mutual relativity of the one who explains, and the reality which they claim to give an account of. The search for meaning begins with a presupposed meaning, an original donation of meaning, consubstantial with the human being; this primary intention and intuition is confronted with its object, which verifies and denies it, which refers it to itself, so that, reviewed and corrected, it can make richer a new interpretation. Thus by successive approximation, a knowledge constitutes itself, never completed, but always capable of ever newer forms of perfection.

The idea of a hermeneutic circle, even outside of literary criticism, could be applied to all forms of knowledge. More exactly, one could evoke the figure of an ellipse, the two centres of which would be the interpreter and the theme of their knowledge. The scientist casts themself into their science, which refers them back to themself until more fully informed. In the social context of a certain mentality, the epistemological dialogue confronts and affronts both the subject and object. Despite appearances, knowledge progresses only [343–345] insofar as neither the subject nor the object are rigorously defined; new attitudes are able to intervene, significations manifest themselves, which place in question the equilibrium once acquired. The summit of a science is a dead science; living science is where the imperfection of the acquired explanation calls for new curiosities.

It would be necessary here to give up the exemplarism of mathematical knowledge which, according to a somewhat improper schema, leaves the work of living intelligence in the shadows, under the pretext of consecrating the prestige of a science which is essentially a search. The hermeneutic ellipse is particularly sensible in the human sciences, where the whole personality of the one who searches projects itself into its object. The axiomatic of the state of control of the epistemological game intervenes no doubt as a filter guaranteeing the objectivity of affirmations. But the apparent rigour of this discipline must not forget that the scholar understands according to what they are; their sympathies and antipathies as well as their biases all serve the scholar as heuristic instruments. It appears highly improbable that a Marxist historian highlights facts which would not agree with their doctrinal schemas; and one must not expect of a Catholic historian results denying the general outline of their orthodoxy. But this does not signify that historical work of Catholics and Marxists are without objective value; on the contrary, one can think that both of them, by the very fact of the presuppositions that inspire them, are capable of highlighting certain aspects of historical reality that remain hidden in the eyes of uninformed scholars. This is the way things are: Marxist historians have made contemporary history take charge of economic and social life, and one can note, amongst others, that the privileged interest manifested by Pierre Chaunu for Calvinism and Jansenism lights up our knowledge of the seventeenth century with a renewed importance.

The problem is that, once the relativity of historiographies is recognised, it appears impossible to reconstruct an total history through the addition of relative histories. Partialities which exclude themselves cannot come together to compose a totality: without doubt, the major epistemological difficulty of the human sciences is here, insofar as their ambition is to define not the abstract schema of a particular order of thought, but an image of concrete man. The contradictory multiplicity of [344–345] axiomatics appears to preclude any hope of a unified field which would submit all hypotheses to an arbitration of the same jurisdiction. This discordance seems, moreover, linked to the intrinsic diversity of the human being; human personalities are not rigorously superimposable, and the diversity of interpretations affirms the same disagreement which projects itself into both the human reality to know, and the knowing thought.

To explain [expliquer] means to unfold [déplier], to spread out in full light all of what is hidden in shadows of the folds. Any particular explanation in a determined domain, progressively refers back to a total explanation which would force into intelligibility the human being in its entirety, the human being who interrogates as well as the one who is interrogated. However, what prevents us hoping for the advent of a total consciousness is the fact that consciousness is made of shadows as much as from light. All the more so, since human consciousness is located in time; the temporal distance between it and its object puts back into play the significations that occur throughout history, multiplying the possibilities of their misunderstanding.

Under these conditions, it appears difficult to claim a truth which would be a total explanation. The methodological procedures in use allow us to control the accuracy of a particular detail, but interpretation in its totality establishes itself in the affirmation of a certain human bias, beyond any verifiable accuracy. The hermeneutic ellipse always corresponds to a begging of the question, that is, to a profession of faith in which the values proper to the observer enter into concurrence, or composition, with those of the reality observed. The human given escapes, in its concrete presence, the positive determination which would make of it a neutralised object, defined both for all and accessible to an investigation without presuppositions. The historical phenomenon of the Renaissance, or the French Revolution for that matter, is not accessible outside a history of historiography, that is, of a summary of the principal mental attitudes which gave to these epistemological objects a particular meaning. The positively minded historian can imagine that it is possible to successfully carry out a history without bias of any sort, for which they would be content to accumulate duly controlled facts. Only the number of facts is, in theory, infinite. Why chose to take note of this particular one rather than that particular one? And, above all, the grouping together of facts so as to build up great collections of interpretations necessarily calls for individual choices. One either sympathises with the mind [345–346] of the Renaissance or not; one is for or against the Revolution, and one could even maintain that the meaning of these ancient events, multiple, indefinite, and contested in their own time, establish themselves for a moment only when the historian, at the end of their work, resolves the ambiguities in the affirmation of a certain vision of the whole.

The explanation of human reality would therefore be a situated truth, the truth of a relation. An historical event, a period, a personality, a work, these do not exist in themselves with a ready-made truth that the good historian might decipher as one deciphers an inscription engraved into marble. The artist and the historical figure do not hold onto the secrets of their work or their action; they are not the master of their own personality, and can be just as much mistaken about it as any outside observer. From which follows the plurality of interpretations, several ones of which, even apparently incompatible, can when combined together have their truth, but without anyone being able to put forward a total explanation, because such an explanation does not exist.

Pierre Bayle, author of the great Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, one of the first monuments of the European Enlightenment, has been for a long time considered by historians as a free thinker in the tradition of the erudite libertines of the sixteenth century and a conscious objector of the religion and the politics of classical Europe. Historians of a conservative and traditional mindset used to see in him a distant precursor of revolutionary thought, agreeing in this respect with progressive theoreticians such as Lévy-Bruhl, Cassirer, and Paul Hazard, who liked to pair Bayle and Fontenelle together, two great proponents of the demystification of the human mind. In 1906, the positivist Jean Delvolvé published an important work: Religion, critique et philosophie positive chez Pierre Bayle, which, for more than half a century, was to set the figure of a Bayle as positivist as his historian.

Bayle was a French minority Huguenot, a victim of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and condemned to live the major part of his life as a man of letters and publisher in exile, far from his country of birth. This non-conformist, who suffered the persecution imposed on his kind, thus initially attracted the attention of those who saw in him a precursor of the Encyclopedists, an incredulous and destructive mind, who gnawed away at the fruits of religious and political orthodoxy from within. Things stayed this way until Bayle found in Elisabeth Labrousse a historian animated by a different mind, [346–347] for she herself belonged to a family of priests and reformed theologians. Thanks to the intervention of this new witness, Bayle escaped from the Catholicism-positivism alternative that did not concern him at all; his combat has nothing to do with the war cry of Voltaire “écrasons l’infâme.” The author of the Dictionnaire became a refugee for the cause of religion in Hollande which was then outside the range of the Roman Catholic Church, one of the privileged locations of European culture. The non-Catholicism of Bayle and his anti-clericalism are not at all forms of irreligion, they are the marks of a different Christianity, which the majority of France, believers or non-believers, are incapable of recognising because, for historical reasons, France has found itself placed outside the sphere of influence of that other Christianity. The personality of Labrousse, her education, her intellectual sensibility, allowed her to present a Bayle who was ignored and not properly understood; hence a new reading of the texts and of the correspondences, an interpretation of biographical facts which reconstruct a more authentic historical reality.

This example highlights the reality of what we have called the hermeneutic ellipse; a sort of reciprocity sanctions the alliance between the historian and their object. But one must not conclude that interpretations have a generalised relativity, that one is always chasing the other waiting in its turn to be chased by the one that follows. That there may truly be progress, it is necessary that, in justifying themselves, new explanations at the same time justify previous explanations, both in their errors and in their truth. The Bayle of Labrousse is substituted for the Bayle of Devolvé and Lévy-Bruhl, but takes them into account. The best perspective is the one that integrates the perspectives that lie behind it. And if ever the author of the Dictionnaire were to find another historian of a different mindset, it would be necessary that that historian situate the works of Elizabeth Labrousse in their new vision and furnish the reasons for possibly disagreeing with it.

***

This particular case of historiography manifests the totalitarian character of explanation; it is not a question of a limited operation carried into a particular area or a particular aspect of reality. Gradually, and despite all mental restrictions, explanation makes itself limitless; it calls into question the whole personality of the one who explains and the entire domain of the explicable universe. Even in the case of a well-defined scientific problem, the search and the solution mobilise all the principles of thought [347–348] and every mental attitude that helps to guarantee epistemological procedures. This background is implied even when it is not directly called into question. An explanation establishes itself in the combined context of the dialogue of a thought with the universe and with itself; it intervenes as a moment of equilibrium in the balancing of accounts. Intelligibility does not appear only as a preoccupation of the order of logic, but also takes on a living value. The historian who devotes fifteen or twenty years of their life in the attempt to rediscover the true face of Pierre Bayle commits to their conquest a lot more than a simple scientific curiosity. In a sense difficult to specify but undoubtedly so, it is clear enough that the truth of Bayle is also the truth of Labrousse. For the historian of the French Revolution or of the Middle Ages, similarly, these things are passions of the soul. Things are no different for the chemist or the biologist who, with all the respect that they may have for the disciplines of the laboratory, commit their personal fate in a game which can appear exclusively intellectual.

In this sense too, one can say that all sciences are human sciences, because they appear as human endeavours. In addition, this humanity is not only individual; it is necessary to recognise in it a collective character. We have until now considered explanation as the concern of an isolated individual; yet the history of the sciences highlights the existence of a community of both questions and answers. It is not by chance, nor by the fact of some unjustified predestination, that a problem appears at a certain moment thus giving rise to a curiosity which it had not been able to benefit from until then. One must admit to a sort of epistemological timeliness [actualité épistémologique], by virtue of which scholars of an epoch wonder about the same difficulties and sometimes, independently of one another, discover analogous solutions. “A problem,” wrote Pierre Brunet,

is above all a collective one because, in addition to the typical cases in which it poses itself at the same time in several thoughts, the conditions, the occasions, and the circumstances in which a problem is presented to the mind of the single scholar overwhelms the limits of an intellectual individuality. Not only does the problem have known antecedents—those thoughts in the mind through which the problem subsequently appears somehow renewed, through a different point of view, through aspects heretofore neglected, through connections insufficiently illuminated by previous searching—but in the most frequent cases, the problem has, so to speak, [348–349] simultaneous concomitants, which are parallel or concurrent, more or less obvious, sometimes even difficult to reveal, but which nevertheless keep their value and their force.¹⁶16. Pierre Brunet, Les Physiciens hollandais et la méthode expérimentale au XVIIIe siècle, Blanchard, 1926, p. 17. Cf. ibid., p. 15 : “Richer’s observations, made in 1672 in Cayenne, on the slowing down of the pendulum’s movement in this region, would not have been able to attract the attention of Huygens and Newton in the same manner, if the question of the size of the Earth had not been recently a topic of study; and it is not at all possible on the other hand to neglect these experiments if one wants to understand the transformation in this epoque of the problem of the size of the Earth into that of its figure or representation.”

One can therefore consider scientific research as the interior of a personal adventure through an abstraction. If one isolates the problem and its solutions from all the synchronisms which have played an essential role in the procedures [démarches] of knowledge, one seriously risks attributing elements to the genius of the scholar which, in some way, originate within the communal space of the epoch under consideration. The one who searches for an explanation is themself constituted in their intellectual identity, informed in their language, through a certain state of affairs [état de la question] which is passed through to them from the environment and is generally accepted. Each state of knowledge presents an institutional character; it consecrates the establishment of the human community in the world in a given moment of its history. This contract which fixes the relation of individuals with a universe for which it defines intelligibility, is a collective contract. Each new interrogation puts in question the established order, but one can reconsider a particular aspect only in the general context of an established mentality. Scientific anxiety, doubt, and new inquiries are all based on a certain state of science.

Gradually, therefore, the meaning of explanation takes on a totalitarian character. Before being able to pose a new question, there is a pre-established explanatory system which consecrates the habitation of thought in a universe which it has organised according to its resources and for the satisfaction of its needs of every kind. A problem appears when an incoherence in the order of thought manifests itself, or when there is a discordance between this order and the reality to which it is supposed to correspond. Most often, the solution will be found in a detailed readjustment within the midst of the pre-existent schema of intelligibility.

The great epochs of thought thus appear characterised by the development or working out of a general horizon of knowledge, which plays the role of a security system for human thought. The archaic world of prehistory found in myth the justification of its existence and a necessary and sufficient condition for every possible induction. Greek culture, when the sovereignty of the logos affirmed itself, define the epistemological model of the Cosmos, the arrangement of which governed the becoming of phenomena in their totality. Medieval explanation was realised thanks to a compromise between Christian revelation and Hellenic intellectualism. [349–350] Discordances would intervene, insofar as these two needs were not perfectly compatible; but, even though, it seems that scholasticism found in the Aristotelian doctrine of the four causes a schema of unparalleled rationality. The final cause, the formal cause, the material cause, and the efficient cause, offered a perfectly satisfying framework for the philosophy of nature such as it then existed.

In the interior of a pre-existing, general epistemological framework, explanation consists in reducing the incident, or the problematic event, to the discipline of the generally accepted order. In the example reported by Maurice Leenhardt, the canoe wrecked upon a rock explains the epidemic. Mythological consciousness rediscovers its equilibrium according to the causal sequence which is proper to it. It would have been evidently pointless to invoke before the ancients of the tribe details of a bacillus or virus. For these belong to our mental universe and not the universe of the Oceanians. In the same way, we judge as stupid the doctors of the seventeenth century who, according to Molière, attributed the soporific power of opium to the ‘dormitive virtue’ which it contained. Such an explanation no longer explained anything in the eyes of Molière himself; it is a testament of an age of transition where the explanatory system as a whole was put in question. Nevertheless, on must recognise that astrological doctrine gave satisfaction to the needs of the Western consciousness for two millennia. By the sovereignty of astral deities, the classical schema of the governed Cosmos founded the science of astrology; it inspired the investigations of alchemy, as wells as theoretical and practical medicine until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Today, of course, this schema is discredited, and could never be restored to its eminence. But one must recognise in it a singular coherence; its virtue of totalitarian intelligibility enabled it to ensure a general satisfaction in people’s minds and in the world for the major part of the history of science and of thought, whereas mechanistic explanation—which today appears to us evident by itself—hardly dates for longer than three centuries.

***

The problem of explanation can therefore pose itself at two different levels, depending on whether the question is able to be resolved in the interior of the pre-existing framework of intelligibility, or whether it puts into question the framework itself. In most cases, the problem can be dealt with in the very language of [350–351] the axiomatic in which the problem finds itself formulated. The interrogation has revealed only a transitory disorder; the ensemble of knowledge absorbs and digests the aberrant element. Thus the astrological medicine of the Middle Ages always found the means of interpreting the symptoms and syndromes that it took note of in its patients according to its norms; this reduction of the unusual took place without difficulty according to the order of medicine as well as in the domain of natural philosophy and theology.

The phenomenon of comets, however, risked putting in question the traditional conception of astronomy since, in their restless wandering across the sky, these stars would have had to collide with the solid spheres on which the planets revolved. Comets were apparently not compatible with the generally recognised system of the spheres. The difficulty was nevertheless resolved by the thesis according to which comets were exhalations of fire, originating in the earth and circulating at low altitudes, entirely under the cover of the first celestial sphere so that their trajectories never met. In addition, as comets appeared and disappeared, it was clear that that they belonged to the world of generation and corruption, that is, to the sublunary world, because the superlunary realm knows only of incorruptible beings. This interpretation of comets appeared satisfactory until the end of the sixteenth century. Tycho-Brahe, one of the founders of the new astronomy, then established through calculations and observations that the trajectories of comets were situated well beyond the moon, and, moreover, that they cut through the orbits of the planets, that is, those planets could not have been supported by solid spheres.

In other words, if Tycho-Brahe was right, it was the whole astronomy of Aristotle and Ptolemy that had found itself condemned. The mystery of the world, an explanatory system universally accepted, had to give up its place to a radically different intelligible whole. The audacity of Tycho-Brahe was such only insofar as he was already one of the witnesses of the crisis of consciousness from whom would soon emerge the image of a new heaven and earth. The Copernican revolution still did not have a winning cause; it would find its hero and its martyr in the form of Galileo, the trial of which would take place only thirty years after the death of the Danish astronomer. But this trial itself appears retrospectively as a rear-guard combat; Galileo’s inquisitors, if they deluded themselves, were defending a cause that was already lost, and the condemnation which they pronounced was not able to change anything. [351–352]

In other words, the meaning of the Copernican revolution is that it was a complete renewal of the explanatory system. Scholastic natural philosophy had to give up its place to a new world system which set the general furnishings for modern science. This explains the obstinate resistance of the majority of people who, literate or not, did not easily resign themselves to modifying their mental habits. Moreover, one must not forget that, despite his discoveries and the courage he would manifest in publishing them, Tycho-Brahe himself never accepted a properly Copernican representation of the universe. He had, in effect, calculated that if the earth rotated about the sun, the distance between the two bodies would have to be several thousand times larger than it was admitted then. The calculations of the Danish astronomer were correct, but the results appeared to him inadmissible because, he felt, God could not have created a space so immense and empty while at the same time serving no purpose. Tycho recoiled before the revelation of astronomical distance and he preferred to develop a new system through the elaboration of the traditional Ptolemaic system, which allowed for the saving of celestial appearances without placing the dimensions of the cosmic order in question. One can understand here the intrepidity of Galileo, who, despite the interference and the shockwaves generated between the new intelligibility and the pre-established system of values, granted to scientific reflection an un restricted authority. With the Florentine scholar, a situation of rupture was reached; the Copernican revolution was accomplished, in the sense of a general consolidation of mental and spiritual space.

There would therefore be two forms of progress in scientific explanation. In the more frequent case, the problem and its solution are located in the interior of an already acquired perspective; it is a question of appending a new element to a pre-existing whole. Once, for example, the classification of Linnaeus had been established, the botanist and zoologist who discovers a new species, gives to it an official status and a place within the interior of the unanimously accepted epistemological horizon. To this progress which concerns continuity, is opposed a form of progress—a lot more rare—that proceeds according to discontinuity, when the very framework of intelligibility itself is put in question. It is no longer a question this time of a precision in detail, but of a revolution at the level of the ensembles of knowledge [des ensembles du savoir]. The changing of the explanatory system institutes a new relationship between scientific thought and its object. From this negotiation a new model of knowledge will be born, [352–353] a paradigm which will employ organisational schema for past and future knowledge.

One often praises Lavoisier, not without just reason, for his research on oxygen. But the important point here is not the discovery of the element itself; several contemporary chemists had brought it to attention at the same time as Lavoisier or even before him. “Lavoisier,” writes T. S. Kuhn,

saw there oxygen where Priestley had seen dephlogisticated air, and where others had seen nothing at all. In learning to see oxygen, Lavoisier had also to modify his view concerning many other more familiar substances (…) In the end, and as a result of his discovery of oxygen, Lavoisier saw nature differently (…) Once he had discovered oxygen Lavoisier was working in a different world.¹⁷17. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution in the Encyclopaedia of Unified Science, II, 2, University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 117.

One sees clearly what distinguishes Lavoisier from scholars like Priestly or Scheele; the genius of Lavoisier does not come to him from a particularly fruitful research; it is for having constituted a new chemical intelligence, to which his followers of the nineteenth century will give a prodigious expansion.

Perceiving oxygen in the place of dephlogisticated air, the condenser instead of the Leyden Jar, or the oscillating pendulum instead of an impeded fall, these were all only an aspect of a radical modification in the way that scholars would look at a great number of related chemical, electric, and dynamic phenomena. Paradigms determine at the same time vast zones of experience.¹⁸18. Ibid., p. 128.

Explanation within the interior of a pre-established framework of intelligibility contents itself with drawing consequences from living principles [principes en vigeur]. The mutation of an explanatory schema implies a renewal of the mind itself. Explanations have a fate, and one can wonder why a particular explanation, which appeared satisfactory for a long time, one day loses the value of being convincing. Without doubt, it can happen that new explanations are convincing from the first stroke, as in Lavoisier’s chemistry. But this is not always the case: when in the seventeenth century mechanical philosophy knocked over the traditional philosophy of nature, this mechanical philosophy as a vision of the entire universe was far from having furnished justifications to the extent of its claims. It claimed to explain everything, but in fact, it did not explain very much. Galileo’s dynamics had only a limited range; mechanical biology was based on Harvey’s discovery of the circulatory system, but it would hardly progress beyond it, and the doctrine of [353–354] the ‘human machine’ put into effect by the iatro-mechanics and Descartes, was only a caricature with no future. Mechanical explanations triumphed well beyond the real positions it occupied; it imposed itself on the majority of minds through the persuasive force of the allegory of the machine, founding a rhetoric for which one finds applications in the most varied domains, in morality, politics, and theology, or still, in the apologetics of Bossuet. However, in other times, the biological doctrine of evolution, or wave mechanics, finds an similar success in which schema, at least claiming to be scientific, are exploited in regions that are the furthest from their place of origin, and where without doubt it has nothing to do with the object of study.

One could object that science is not responsible for the abuse that one commits in its name. Scientific explanation explains what it explains; it is either true or false, but there is no place for attributing to it rhetorical generalisations, even if certain authentic scholars let themselves be taken to inadmissible extrapolations. The trouble is that it is difficult to determine rigorously a precise limit where science would end and the abuse of trust would begin. One can oppose science with scientism, for example; but it appears a lot more difficult to distinguish them. Not just the results of scientific research, but also procedures that they have inspired, mental attitudes, past intellectual habits in prejudicial form, all inscribe themselves in the same circuits of thought which compose the entire ensemble of intelligibility. A man like Lavoisier belongs to a group of Idéologues, masters of thought in a French revolutionary epoch. Among them there were empirical psychologists, disciples of Condillac, physicians, philosophers, economists, historians, mathematicians and physicists, theoreticians of literature, as well as political actors. Lavoisier’s chemistry can evidently be considered in itself and for itself; through a supplementary abstraction, one can also reduce it, reviewed and corrected, to what it contains of a definitively acquired truth. But then, not very much of it would remain, and undoubtedly not the essentials, insofar as those few propositions and theorems, quite devalued today, would appear released from their central justifications, without the context of the mentality which oriented the inquiry, suggested its methods, and inspired the order of its exposition.

This sense of the solidarity of knowledge occurs a lot more clearly in the case of the human sciences, inquiries of man on [354–355] man, where the image of man, the knowledge that one has of oneself, serves as the means of investigation. But the exact sciences, although they refer to a universe of discourse more abstract, are not for all that endowed with a privileged of exterritoriality compared with the becoming of history. Each epoch integrates its scientific heritage into the general conception which it possess of the world and of man. In this context, the purely scientific givens communicate with the communal sense of the established intelligibility, furnishing it with images and schemas which can be employed outside of their proper place, therefore with an incorrect, allegorical signification.

Explanation discovers here its totalitarian character, and its function as a form of mental adaption between man and the universe. Formerly established scientific results furnish points of contact with reality, but the very loose network of these points does not furnish it with an image of the world all alone. It is necessary to complete it with a masse of interstitial tissue, where generalisation and analogies more or less well-founded hold a predominant place. So as to constitute a human universe, the system of obvious facts must be finished off with replacement materials of unequal quality. The properly scientific elements form the centre around which is emitted an intelligibility of decreasing values. The Aristotelian universe of scholasticism organised itself around a certain number of rational certainties. After having discredited the former intelligibility, the universe of mechanical philosophy imposed another form of intelligibility. The passage of one image of the world to the other is not founded on rigorously scientific reasons, but, insofar as the second universe cannot, any more than the first, furnish objective and universal justifications, it is a question here rather of a sort of conversion of intelligence or of spirituality, where scientific research and the results acquired play an inductive role. Their intervention is necessary so as to promote the change of attitude; but reduced to themselves, they could not alone suffice.

Although such an affirmation might appear unsatisfactory and disagreeable, one would come therefore to admit that the disappearance of a system of traditional intelligibility and its replacement with a new system cannot be explained according to the norms of exclusively rational procedures. There is a wearing down of the general systems of intelligibility, which, after having prevailed for a certain time, lose their value of being convincing [355–356] and that force of conviction from which they formerly benefited. The obvious facts that one had acquired with fervour, because they possessed a revelatory value, appear no more than platitudes, truisms without explanatory power. Then through the consequence of an epistemological fatigue, these certainties which once really certified, no longer certify anything. One becomes tired of the words mechanism, organism, and physiology, as the themes of evolution, or dialectic later became tiring too, and the following generation does not understand how the one preceding it were able to let themselves be so fascinated by such confused notions.

In fact, the persuasive value of an explanatory schema is never so great than at the beginning, during the triumphant morning of science and thought. The first successes obtained allow us to anticipate the coming triumph of the young epistemology, which appears capable of occupying the horizon of knowledge in its totality. Francis Bacon announced the complete occupation of the globus intellectualis thanks to the inductive method; Descartes did not doubt that mechanical explanation was capable of giving an account of the totality of phenomena thanks to an a priori deduction realised from a few simple principles of his natural philosophy. Cartesian physics would soon declare bankruptcy, and if Baconian induction would have a future in English experimental philosophy, it was according to directives singularly different and a lot more modest than the programs of the Lord Chancellor.

An eminent American ethnologist has, for twenty years already, protested against the new vogue for the word structure. “The notion of structure,” he writes, “is probably nothing other than a concession to fashion: a term in the well-defined sense suddenly exerts a singular attraction for ten years and—as with the word aerodynamic—one uses it indiscriminately because it rings agreeably in the ear. Undoubtedly, a typical individual can be considered from the point of view of structure. But the same thing is true of a psychological cohort [agencement], an organism, a society or culture of some sort, a crystal, or a machine. Anything, on the condition that it is not completely amorphous, possesses a structure. Thus it seems that the term structure adds absolutely nothing to what we have in in mind when we employ it, if not an agreeable provocativeness.¹⁹19. A. L. Kroeber, Anthropology, new edition, New York 1948, p. 325; cited in Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, Pion, 1958, p. 304.

Kroeber’s critique is all the more interesting as it concerns a concept which, far from being now denied, has continued to be affirmed [356–357] as fashionable since 1948. The structuralist fascination has extended itself gradually to the totality of the mental space of our times. From a few areas of epistemology—in the order of phonetics or linguistics—where the new type of explanation appeared to furnish original insights, the new schema has propagated by analogical transfers and rhetorical conversions, so that it appears to enjoy today a privilege of universal jurisdiction, at least in the eyes of the initiated. One could not conclude from this that science is henceforth complete, nor even that, outside of some very localised success, it is much more advanced. What appears is the affirmation of a new language and of a new intelligence; the questions have changed, if not the answers. Everything happens as though curiosity’s points of application were no longer the same.

Once established, a system of explanation corresponds to a state of relative equilibrium in the mind. The persuasive force of that system allows us to rectify and compensate for aberrations when deviations produce themselves through a relation with the state of the prevailing mind. But when incompatible elements, interrogations without answers, doubts, and suspicions multiply, the figure of the system becomes ambiguous; and the moment comes when gaps accumulate and the general form of intelligibility begins to fall apart so as to reconstitute itself according to a new order. This change of configuration is made easier by the fact that the old schemas are maintained only by the force of traditional inertia, while the revolutionary suggestions benefit from all the prestige of youthfulness and novelty. What one has really understood, what one has really believed, no longer persuades anyone; attention turns its preference towards the new, which gives to the mind the joy of a new birth; the Cartesian vortices fascinate the Femmes savantes, and the circulation of the blood has for it the court and the city, against the reactionaries of the Parliament and the Faculty of Medicine.

***

It is evidently regrettable that, in this history of truth, the worst is mixed together with the best, that authentic knowledge is mixed with absurdity. But the becoming of explanation is not separable from the sociology of knowledge. The science of a given epoch is one of the forms of knowledge that a human society can have of itself. Yet, it happens that this science, reduced to itself, limited to results justified in the mind and in truth, cannot be sufficient to produce a satisfactory representation of the [357–358] world. It is necessary to complete the certain with the possible or the probable; it is necessary to make an appeal to the imagination, because men are never content knowing only what they used to know.

In other words, if it is possible to pass from one explanatory system to another, it is precisely because there is no such thing as a total explanation; something which, in giving a definitive figure to the mental space in its entirety, puts an end to questioning. Such a hypothesis, moreover, would be the end of man as a being who questions, and humanity would carry the risk of falling asleep in the worst of dogmatic slumbers. But such an eventuality remains improbable as far as the domain of culture is concerned; because if there can be answers to a question, such an answer never prevents a question of the original question from gradually posing itself at another level—and so on and so forth. This is why, while leaving to one side the great mass of explanations that explain nothing, one can admit that every good explanation is at the same time an incomplete explanation; it respects the possibility of additional, adventitious, and complementary explanations none of which recovers the totality of the epistemological domain.

The notion of the complementarity of explanations would itself be insufficient, insofar as it seems to admit the possibility of an addition of interpretations of which one could hope that the sum might one day constitute the searched for totality. Yet, according to the particular epistemological perspective of each of the considered schemas, there are multiple planes and orders of explanation. One can search for intelligibility according to analytical reduction or synthetic reconstitution, according to element, structure, logical genesis, or the history of the meaning of consciousness. These explanations can contradict and exclude one another without mutually cancelling each other out; they interfere with themselves, and they sometimes elude one another, or sometimes they add and multiply together without being able to attain the fullness which defines their ideal limit.

It appears absurd to conclude from this that all explanations are equal, or that, by going from one to the other, there has been no progress in knowledge. It is true that knowledge accumulates with time, and that this accumulation of the givens of the sciences must bring about a reshaping of the image of the world. But no image up to the present has managed to group together the totality of available givens; and even the enormous growth of information capitalised by specialists of all disciplines during recent history seems to defy every possibility of being reduced one day [358–359] to the unity of a single human consciousness. Therefore, the excess of knowledge ends by becoming an epistemological obstacle itself, just as much as in the past its insufficiency or its falseness was one.

The problem of explanation therefore changes its meaning when one comprehends the necessity of renouncing the hope of both a unitary and totalitarian systematisation. In the indefinite immensity, and the irreducible plurality of different kinds of knowledge, the schemas of intelligibility are able to collect a variable mass of available information, although this ensemble itself might be full of lacunae and insufficiencies compared to reality such as it is.

One must not make of this an argument in favour of definitive scepticism; and even so this does not signify that all explanations are the same. The best remain the ones which carry the ray of their intelligibility the furthest; but each of them leave outside a good part of the domain of knowledge, which, moreover, continues to expand. Thus, the passage of one system of explanation to another justifies itself when attention changes to hidden zones of investigation, irreducible in the established understanding. New groupings take place, corresponding to a mutation of the intellectual sensibility. The Copernican revolution thus appears as a renewal of epistemological perception, well symbolised by certain celebrated anecdotes in the gilded legends of science. Suddenly, in the cathedral of Pisa, Galileo saw the figure of physical reality change when the ceiling light appeared to him to no longer oscillate in Aristotelian space but in the space of modern dynamics. Newton, in the light of the moon in an English orchard, suddenly perceived the apple and the moon in a new space of universal gravitation.

The obvious facts do not suddenly manifest from the outside to the inside, through a happy Visitation; it is from the inside to the outside, from the metal space to the material landscape, that certainty propagates itself. Ceiling lights and apples, and the moon itself, did have to give up their old habits so as to adopt the new style of truth, awaiting the day when Einstein would again place everything in question. It is wrong to conclude the relativity of truth from the relativity of schematisations. Because the space of Galileo and Newton give an account of the space of Aristotle too; and the space of Einstein will find in Newtonian space a particular case of application. Despite revolutions of intelligibility, men today, indigenous intellectuals of this world, continue to live in the universe of [359–360] Aristotle according to the basic rhythms of everyday life; in other moments, when they travel for example, or in their experience of automobiles, the same individuals visit the Galilean universe, and in the rarest of circumstances, the Einsteinian universe becomes the universe man inhabits.

It is necessary to reintegrate the share given to scientific truths into human truth. The scientistic prejudice according to which the scientific truth is the truth of all truths does not stand up to examination. For the scientific truth itself is a fragmented, broken, and incoherent truth; under its name an amalgamation of varied sectors is invoked, each with their own perspectives, more or less reduced to a different axiomatic in each case. The unity of knowledge is a pious wish, a great and respectable hope; but it would be premature, illusory, and dangerous to act as if this unity is found already acquired, or if it were here and now hidden in the world of things, within the reach of the first brilliant scientist who would place their hand on it. The unity of knowledge is a myth, the eschatological myth of knowledge. And this knowledge of the world of things, even supposing it to be accomplished, would still be a knowledge without man. Yet man is at once the subject and object of science; which is to say that, in the last analysis, he would still keep over total explanation, if it was ever given to him, a sovereign right of reply and jurisdiction in the name of human truth.

***

Explanation does is not unfurled within a vacuum; it organises an epistemological field according to certain principles, postulates, and presuppositions, furnished at the beginning by a human consciousness. All explanation is a process of making explicit [explicitation]. A demonstration is, in Latin, a monstration, that is, the revelation or unveiling of an obvious fact.

Those who explain grant to the intelligible articulations that they implement more interest than to the initial and final certitudes from which they are inspired; the form counts more for them than the substance, since they elaborate the form without any power over the substance. But logical artifices should not delude; their true function is to facilitate access to the essential facts, to the first establishments of thought.

As it was said with perspicacity by Frederic Schlegell:

The demonstrations of philosophy are demonstrations in the military understanding of the term; and its deductions are no better than political deductions. In the sciences too, one first occupies the [360–361] ground, and then, only after the fact [après coup], does one demonstrate one’s right to do so (…). There are three types of explanations in the sciences, those which furnish us with a light or a direction, those which explain nothing, and finally those which obscure everything (…). The essential thing remains always to know something and then to say it. To want to demonstrate it, or even to explain it, is, most often, something perfectly useless (…). It is unquestionably more difficult to affirm than to demonstrate. There are plenty of demonstrations, excellent in their form, for plain and insipid propositions.²⁰20. Frédéric Schlegel, Athenaeum (Fr. trans. Lucien Braun), Berlin 1798, pp. 197-198.