To say that modernity is over does not mean that we are out, rid of it, but that we resist its project to simplify the world. Chronicle of Eva.
« Architecture is no longer a passive object considered in its completion, it is the place and time of our outstanding habitats ». Have EVA’s interviews analyzed a topical theme: a single land, what become of habitat projects? Marc-Antoine Durand, cycle coordinator, reports on these exchanges.*
Chronicle 07_ Modernity thinned the world, bifurquer!
Western modernity has been built on the project of a limitless development, which no longer corresponds to the world we want to live. We have changed people, we no longer live on the same land. To leave modernity, and therefore to branch out, it is to stop seeing things from the point of view of production to consider them from the point of view of the house. This was the purpose of our interview, which brought together the philosophers Catherine Larrère, Chris Younès and Didier Debaise, September 5, 2023.
How to think out of modernity with brains formed and distorted by it? A first element of response was given by Catherine Larrère. **
Catherine Larrère :
« Modernity is first of all an era, which begins in the XVIIe century and including Bruno Latour tells us that today it is over. It is a scientific horizon, which is installed by the GaliléNewtonDhoarse. It is an economic promise: we will not just stand in subsistence, we will not just stop preventing the shortages. We can hope for abundance. This promise that the candidate kennedy to the presidency in 1963 formula by saying: “The rising tide brings all the boats to the port”. There will be something for everyone. And then, it is a moral and political aspiration, an aspiration for freedom – the modernity of the Enlightenment as an age of emancipation. We can summarize this in terms of progress.
At the end of the 18th century, we spoke in the plural. Progress. It was to be free from ignorance, illness and poverty, hunger. Later we started to assimilate progress and technical developments.
Today it’s over. What these IPCC reports say is that there is no room for the western developmente or European for all countries of the world, that it is not possible. There will not be a tide that will bring all the boats to the port. In the sense of progress, this no longer exists. If we think that modernity are promises, we know that these promises will not be held ».
Getting out of modernity is not so much to change our ways of doing things. Ecological bifurcation is generally defined as a restructuring of the political-economic apparatus and its productive modes, but before being a social project it is a resistance to conceptual slimming of the world engaged by philosophy from the 19th century.
A first project, explained Didier Debaise, *** was thus initiated by the philosopher Whitehead (1861-1947) in his fight against logical reductionism. What he called ” Bifurcation of nature Note all the mental, experimental, epistemological and political operations at the origin of our modern conception of nature. He invited us, thereby, to fight against all the processes that divide and reduce reality. He also invited us, already, to deconstruct our modern thinking.
Didier Debaise** :
« Here is what Bruno L writesatour : “A certain conception of nature has enabled Moderns to occupy the land, in such a way that it has prohibited others from occupying their own territory differently”. DecThis proposal, I would like to give off some elements for the discussion. It first implies that a sort of genealogy should be established. Genealogy in the sense of a story of the concept of nature, but finding your birth moment, just to say that is already weakening the concept. Indeedto say of such a universal, as timeless concept, that it has a date et A place of birth is absolutely fundamental because what we mean, by nature,school has shown the extreme town of this notion. Ce that we call nature is something that has invented in a precarious and fragile way, in the 18the century in experimental sciences, it is my first point. What we describe as nature and that we see everywhere, this thing, this reality which would be before us, which would not resist our constructions, which would not be dependent on our modes of representation, which would be worth for all humans and others on earth this thing was invented in the XVIIe century and mainly in Europe.
How did she invented this nature invented? It is something very precise, very clear and very local. This is the way in which in the 17th century we try to qualify bodies whether physical or alive. What is a physical body? It can be defined by two quality regimes. Qualities that are considered to be intrinsic to this body, qualities which belong in depth to this body and then secondary qualities. The experimental sciences will seek to qualify the body in these primary qualities and to do this, they must reject all the secondary qualities, it is a scientific, operative gesture.
This gesture is legitimate in a certain way, but (…) what is illegitimate said Whitehead is to have removed these operations from scientific practice and modes of experimentation and to have said : “We will call these primary qualities in nature”; What Moderns call nature, far from being observed and discovered, is the object of a pure construction by which all the secondary qualities have been emptied. In other words, For nature to become what it is, it was first necessary to remove its aesthetic dimensions, the relationships that beings had with each other, values inside it, and the interdependencies that all these beings had with each other.
It is this nature, with Isabelle Ssea by taking up a William J phaseameswe qualified as a “thinned” vision of experience. William James made a very beautiful diagnosis, he said: “The world of Moderns is an thinned world”. This does not mean not that he is thin, that means that he is looking for a single law, one rule, a single mode of composition of bodies to the detriment of all the plurality of existence. It is this slimming nature to which the Moderns were dealing with, and it is this nature of which we are still the heirs (…) ».
This reductionist operation is what Whitehead calls the ” Bifurcation of nature », Operation which must be resisted. Didier Debaise continues:
« Whitehead Give a small example that I find very telling. He says : “Imagine someone who observes a singing nightingale in the morning. He can marvel at the song of the nightingale, he can have an aesthetic attachment to this nightingale and he can even think that this nightingale sings and celebrates the sunrise. He can do it ”. The supporters of the bifurcation will address him saying: “You believe that the nightingale sings the sunrise, you believe that there is an aesthetic dimension in this field, but if you had the good categories you would know that these are only secondary qualities and that the primary qualities are the purely physical qualities”. That is to say the photons that touch the Rossignol retina, produce a nervous reaction, a stimulus producing a response, a song that you find melodious, but which is only the fantasized recomposition of your own projection on nature. Whitehead that: “Immoral act of this chanting of bifurcation”, Not only is it false, but it is immoral. For what ? Because we would then derive the experience of experience by reducing it or slimming it. (…)
If the whole compass of modernity makes us incapable of living in the earth, perhaps we must first get out of the acts of the bifurcation, make it genealogy because our educational and thought modes are all from the bifurcation. (…) First element therefore, rather than turning, replace everything, let’s learn and it is perhaps the exercises to which Bruno L calledatourlet’s learn to thicken situations. Against the practice of modern thinning which was supposed to frame all experiences, let’s learn to thicken, that is to say to put everything in situations, without prior hierarchy, without uniform logic. (…) A being only exists because other beings participate in its existence, that because other beings make it exist, maintain it in existence ».
To say that modernity is over does not mean that we are out, rid of it, but that we resist the simplification of the world of its project. “” We do not solve a problem with the modes of thought that generated itand ». This false quotation by Albert Einstein perfectly illustrates the dilemma of the contemporary: bifurcation or counterta bifurcation?
Marc-Antoine Durand
Cycle coordinator
**Catherine LarrèrePhilosopher and Professor of French emeritus philosophy (philosopher in Paris I – Panthéon Sorbonne). Specialist in Montesquieu’s thought, and environmental ethics, she participated in France in the development of environmental philosophy, in particular on the subjects of nature protection, risk prevention and environmental justice.
***Didier Debaisedoctor of philosophy, is a researcher at the FNRS and teaches philosophy at the Free University of Brussels.
*The scientific council of the EVA-Adig training center organized in 2023, in partnership with Chronicles of Architecture, a cycle of conferences and exchanges around the theme of the future of habitat projects at the time of the ecological crisis. By bringing together among the most renowned researchers, under the marraining of the philosopher Catherine Larrère, it was a question of questioning and making public questions that work on the profession, and of paving the way for new fields of prospective questioning.
Image credit: Thinking about nature with Jean-Jacques Rousseau © Getty-Hulton Archive
