Carnal Spirit - Matthew W. Maguire

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work of Simiand, Lanson, Mauss, Durkheim, Maurras, and countless others within the republic’s intellectual coalition—or their reactionary enemies. Nonetheless, Milhaud was a philosopher, and, until 1909, a provincial one. When the renowned mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré made distinct but congruent arguments, many unsettling possibilities entered broadly educated conversation, in France and beyond.

      Around 1890, Poincaré’s mathematical forays into the application of differential equations to celestial motions involving three objects exerting a gravitational attraction (for example, an asteroid in relation to the sun, the moon, and the earth) led him to a surprising conclusion: stable orbits for, say, an asteroid were only mathematically probable, not certain. Space did not appear to obey the order and regularity that Poincaré had expected,131 a conclusion that quickly led him to similar conclusions about time.

      In August 1900, Poincaré went further, claiming at a conference that “there is no absolute space, and we can only conceive of relative motion … there is no absolute time. When we say that two periods are equal, the statement has no meaning, and can only acquire a meaning by a convention.”132 Here, Poincaré in 1900 began to approach the theoretical innovations of Einstein. Whatever the precise extent of his prescience, that Poincaré found time to be a convention rather than an absolute had some troubling implications. What would become of the confident, at least broadly positivist metaphysical naturalism that gave many educated people the sense that a received materialism or a science of society, working in a commonsense time and space, was self-evident?

      Taking his argument further in his popular Science and Hypothesis (1902), Poincaré repeatedly turned to the ways in which the fundamental assumptions of mathematical inquiry into space could be changed. He gave particular attention to the non-Euclidean geometry associated with Nikolai Lobachevsky, in which, setting aside a long-accepted axiom of Euclid, there can be more than one line drawn through a point B that will be parallel to line A, when point B is not on line A.133 Drawing from the mathematical contributions of Bernhard Riemann, Poincaré goes on to show how our embodied experience gives us our given notion of space: in another world, with two-dimensional beings of circular shape living on a sphere, an arc would be the shortest distance between two points, and “in a word their geometry will be spherical geometry.”134

      In a neo-Kantian turn of phrase, Poincaré claimed that those who thought scientific reasoning gave access to things in themselves (that is, a kind of absolute and uniquely valid account of reality) were “naïve dogmatists,” since the immense power of science was predicated on its ability to make suppositions only about the relations among things.135

      Raising questions associated with the humanities as well as the sciences, Poincaré was also at particular pains to observe that the scientific emphasis on repetition (and with it, experimental confirmation) over time for the confirmation of hypotheses simply did not work as a way of inquiring about history.

      For Poincaré, history deals necessarily with the unique and unrepeatable event rather than replicable experiments. Hence a secure science of historical development à la Comte or Simiand was impossible. As Poincaré puts it, moving from science to the world of Victorian letters, “Carlyle wrote somewhere something like this: ‘Only the fact matters. John Lackland passed by here: here there is something admirable, here is a reality for which I would give all the theories in the world.’” Poincaré adds, “That is the language of the historian. The Physicist would say rather, ‘John Lackland passed by here: it’s all the same to me, since he won’t pass by again.’”136

      Like Milhaud and Poincaré, the theoretical physicist Pierre Duhem also argued against Cartesian, Comtean, and Renanian notions, most notably in his Physical Theory: Its Aim and Structure. Duhem said that “a physics experiment is the precise observation of a group of phenomena, accompanied by the interpretation of these phenomena; this interpretation substitutes for the concrete data actually collected by observation abstract and symbolic representations that correspond to them by virtue of the theories of physics assumed by the observer.”137

      For Duhem, scientists must take into account the limits of observation and measurement. Mathematics may be exact, but neither human perception nor the scientific apparatus and instruments that assist that perception can be exact. Hence “the results of a physics experiment are only approximate.”138 These conclusions naturally lead to a revision of scientific certainty in Duhem: as he puts it, “The goal of all theory in physics is the representation of experimental laws; the words truth, certitude have, in relation to such a theory, only one meaning: they express the agreement between the conclusions of the theory and the rules established by the observers.”139

      Certainly Poincaré, Duhem, and Milhaud were distinct thinkers: for example, Poincaré was careful to create a tiered protest against positivist accounts of science, arguing against Duhem that some hypotheses are, as Anastasios Brenner has said, “more conventional than others.”140 Furthermore, Duhem, Milhaud, and Poincaré were not saying that all science is unreliable or a radically constructed fiction. They were saying that scientific work and experiment participates in a multiplicity of realities and an expansive plenitude of variables and assumptions. Our scientific knowledge is integrally connected to our embodied being and environment (as Poincaré observed with his notional spherical beings), and—especially for Milhaud—our aesthetic sense as well. Working with diverse theoretical constructions, embodied experience and aesthetic sense, reason can be both creative and strikingly plural in its accounting for all the scientific data upon different questions (the questions themselves being cooperative work involving creativity). Furthermore, unique, unrepeatable historical events are simply not amenable to the creation of immutable “laws,” which often are more mutable than advertised anyway, or at least dependent upon more assumptions and variables than is generally acknowledged.

      In this way, Milhaud, Poincaré, and Duhem made several contiguous arguments about the construction of scientific knowledge, and attacked the notions of scientific certitude and objectivity within the natural sciences—notions that social scientists had assumed were “grounded” or endowed with “secure foundations” and could be straightforwardly transposed from the natural to the human sciences, from sciences of society to those of individual consciousness.

      Péguy knew this work of critical reflection upon science and its methods well: he was an admirer (and near neighbor) of Henri Poincaré,141 as well as a reader of what he called Duhem’s “admirable work.”142 He knew that challenges to positivist assumptions popular with many of his contemporaries were not necessarily part of some “antiscientific” political reaction (a reaction that, as we have seen, could be frankly positivist in inspiration), but often came from scholars deeply engaged in new and demanding scientific and mathematical investigations.

      From his student days, Péguy found his way to other sources of dissent, away from the regnant assumptions of the intellectual coalition. These included the neo-Kantian philosophy of Émile Boutroux, who had long been a prominent figure in French academic life. Among his earlier students was Durkheim, who credited Boutroux with teaching him about the nonreducibility of different forms of knowledge (not surprisingly for Durkheim, he came to this realization with some assistance from his own reading of Comte).143 Boutroux’s own work went in a different direction: he presented another critique of an all-encompassing science of human being, in part through a course he offered on Pascal, which the young Péguy attended in the late 1890s.

      In his Pascal, published in 1900, readers can find the Pascal taught by Boutroux. Péguy’s teacher gave sustained and positive emphasis to the ways in which, for Pascal, scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and moral and religious knowledge, on the other, operate in different domains of consciousness. In his account of Pascal’s thought, Boutroux argues that for Pascal, scientific knowledge belongs to reasoning from the senses, and morality and theology to an expansive faculty of memory.144 Inquiry into matter in motion can dispense with precedent and provide its own ground through experiment to acquire knowledge cumulatively; but this form of knowledge cannot be applied to memory, just as the authority of memory has no place in the adjudication of scientific evidence.145

      According

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