Michel Magnen, author of Meaning and Distance

Childhood, adolescence and youth of Michel Magnen

My name is Michel Magnen and I was born on 6 July 1948, just outside Ebolowa, in Cameroon, in a period of popular uprisings, within a very international Protestant mission, with a Swiss and an American presence. My parents, who arrived later in Chad after many vicissitudes, were able, when my younger brother was born, to send me, for my schooling, with my elder brother, to France. The forces of the metropole, served by the military, were obliged to undertake decolonization, and my parents, returning to the country, first settled in the Chevreuse valley, in accordance with their plan, and then in Paris. In both places, I was marked by a whole series of relationships — masters, teachers and remarkable schoolfellows — and I shall name a few, at the risk of misspelling them: Collet, Benech, Sarrailh, Regnault, Lavallard, Bloch, Azéma. By a thousand determinations, within the historical tangle, I entered, in 1969, the École Normale Supérieure of Saint-Cloud at the top of my year and so, while being almost submerged in the political whirlwind of the period, I continued my studies in preparation for becoming a teacher of philosophy. Constantly placed at the opposite pole from the anti-determinism that was then becoming dominant again, I also continued, but always episodically, my researches concerning on the one hand social forms, and on the other texts of largely imaginative content, strong as I felt myself, in these domains, in the equipment provided by my upbringing, my observations, my reading, as well as by what I acquired, from 1969 onwards, through the lectures and conversations of which I was given the benefit, individually or otherwise, by a great many speakers, scholars and people of action. Later, as a teacher with classes to give, I had much less free time and restricted my researches to imaginative texts alone. No authority has ever reproached me for my main orientations, which derive, it is true, from illustrious currents of thought continuously represented, for a very long time, in philosophical discussion. These are the analytic vision of things; mechanism; empiricism; the method of progression by the rectification of errors put into practice and then leading to failure; probabilism; and the use of the measurement of objects. Moreover, the project of one day producing a work according to these guiding principles seems to have been received with neutrality — or simply ignored — by the various administrations. In this scholarly milieu, most of the time conducive to reflection, I also benefited from the warm assistance of many of my colleagues from the many academic specialities, most often ready to answer my questions generously, and most fortunately able to do so with knowledge. The aim, which gradually emerged, was to analyse the mechanism of the distance between ideas, within imaginative texts, in order to be able to determine, by means tested in the course of practical attempts, which connections between meanings separated by space, in writing, or by time, in speech, have the highest plausibility. The analytic method has this advantage over any other: that, supposing the whole of an object or discourse, whether concrete or abstract, to be made up of its parts — which together include the whole of the relations between two or more of them — this suffices to exclude, for whoever obtains knowledge of the constituents, having to suppose any unknown and mysterious complement. We strengthen this perspective by mechanism. On this view, the machine, although it is an invention, supplies in the diagram of its operation the essence of the operation of all processes that can be studied in depth. For example, the cloud of ash, caused by a series of volcanic eruptions, in turn causes another phenomenon: it prevents a portion of the solar rays that strike its zone from reaching the ground. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was possible to show, regarding chemical reactions, that they have as their foundation an electrical mechanism of equilibrium between positive and negative charges. There then opened up for the scientists the programme of a description of chemistry as a branch of micro-mechanics. In the course of the last two centuries, the fine knowledge of many organic processes pushed towards an attempt to account for them as chemical. There is therefore no longer any cause to ridicule a mechanism that could take as its reference only the weight-driven clock or the spring-driven watch, and so there does indeed result, from historical development, a philosophy of the world, at once complete and deterministic. The parallel between, on the one hand, the very long-pursued deduction, proceeding from one proposition to another — never A without B; never B without C; never C without D; never D without E… — and on the other hand causality rebounding for a very long time from one fact to the next — a causes b; b causes c; c causes d; d causes e… — opens onto the idea of the constitution of knowledge as an artificial mirror of the most tenacious appearances. The philosophy of this constitution presents a force of conviction unmatched, by very far, in anything put forward by other philosophies. To be sure, an effect may have several causes! To be sure, a truth may imply several different ones! To be sure, the observation of the effect implies that of the cause, as in "the proposition 'it is snowing in ordinary terrestrial conditions of atmospheric pressure' is never true without the proposition 'the temperature is zero degrees or thereabouts' also being so". The attendant complications do not at all prevent us from arriving, by determining precisely the circumstances in which the phenomena present themselves, often enough at noting, in discourse on appearances and in the accessible traces of the real, the two chains described just now and the parallel between them. As for the extension of these views, it is accepted that for everything that presents itself to the mind, the mind passively unifies, through a very vague impression and some mental image, the elements of lived experience that have reached it. One may also voluntarily provoke experiments, either to record what would furnish a supposition of regularity or of cause — concerning the phenomena or what takes place within them — or to confirm or to invalidate a supposition. These attitudes belong, in particular, to empiricism. The last comes close to the method of trial and error, which is that of the progressive modification of suppositions, bearing on facts accessible by way of appearances, in accordance with the successes obtained and the failures undergone in the trials conducted on the basis of those same suppositions made first, at each stage of an investigation aimed at a supposed fact — or tenacious appearance. Such a procedure, codified still further, takes the name of “experimental method” in many sciences.

Example — Réaumur, 18^th century

Concerning, for example, the digestion of grain by various kinds of birds, Réaumur began, in the 18th century, from the ordinary supposition among naturalists that the grinding performed by the gizzard constituted a decisive factor. He bought a buzzard from itinerant showmen who had trained it to swallow and then spit out pieces of metal. Réaumur supposed that grain, once shielded from the gizzard, ought not to display the appearance of a foodstuff in the course of digestion. He envisaged the hypothesis of a chemical factor, in liquid or viscous form, which might combine, in digestion, with the factor of grinding. He therefore had the bird swallow a capsule pierced in many places, but made of resistant metal. He observed, when the buzzard expelled the apparatus, that the latter bore marks of denting in the metal, and that the grain appeared in the form of paste. Digestion seemed to him to be in progress, despite the relative protection of the grain by the metal of the pierced walls. There was a partial success of the initial supposition, since a grinding had caused the observed denting. But there was a partial failure, since the grain had been transformed into paste, despite the protection of the metal. The author of the 1752 treatise „Observations on the Digestion of Birds“ therefore acknowledged the newly demonstrated facts. One could indeed — while remaining honest — only pursue the task of research by slightly modifying the supposition from which Réaumur's reflection and action had taken place.

We shall endeavour to adapt to the enterprises of knowledge conducted on our own object of investigation, the perspective of the naturalist — and of many other scholars of the past or current researchers. This contribution will thus combine with the analytic and mechanistic views. Another vision of things seems to us to improve still further this synthesis of perspectives rendered convergent, and it is probabilism, duly reworked to treat the relations between two images in imaginative texts, which has already been presented under the name of “verisimilism”. The effort to treat, in very great numbers, facts of the same kind, by the scientific calculation of probabilities, within the rigorous frame of necessity, leads to a measurement of what was previously called their possibility. The empirical extension, through verisimilism, of such a probabilism, prompts us to nourish the ambition of rendering accessible, technically, the plausibility of certain interpretations of imaginative texts or of various parts of them. The advantage of maintaining, on a more modest plane than that of demonstration, the search for measurements of phenomena consists in offering a precision without which many discussions could never be brought to a close. We therefore apply this means, within the narrow framework of our essay, by developing measurements of plausibility. More broadly, the synthesis of the views previously set out opens onto a philosophy of history, since the understanding of physical, chemical and biological mechanisms, as well as the use of formalisms of cultural origin, give the means of producing machines, which in their turn directly facilitate, through observation, or indirectly, through automated calculation, the analysis of mechanisms first examined without them. Finally, becoming capable of the knowledge of the processes that develop around us — such as the precipitation of rain or snow — of the understanding of others, to which we belong, such as that of the evolution of species, and of the grasp of those that take place within us, such as the healing of a wound, we can act, or weigh more heavily than our ancestors did, upon such mechanisms.

Michel Magnen: 1990 — the philosophical understanding of time as intuitively perceived change

In the 1990s, ideas long stirred within me found a formulation, and I gave it a first development, which led, over the following years, to a series of others. The basic notion comes from the understanding of time as intuitively perceived change. A modification takes place in the object — for example in the sky, with the appearance of the sun, or the degree of brightness. The change takes place in thought, with impatience or boredom. One mingles all of this in idea, object and subject, since it is a subject who sees the object. The whole, outside any careful analysis, then furnishes a disconcerting impression. Now, one of the principal possible modifications, in the regard given to two objects or ideas, is the arrival of a climate of thought made up of neglect, inattention and forgetfulness towards them. When one establishes a connection between ideas, one mentions them jointly. On the contrary, when one considers them in a disjointed way, one lets the words that signal them grow distant, half-forgetting the presence of the one or the other. It was only in 2014 that I began to study usefully something other than the clearly voluntary thought of an author. The elaboration of the successive remarks made in this regard will soon form the content of “Meaning and Distance 8”.

Fundamental observation on the gap between words in imaginative texts

Faced with a text of one's own or of someone else's, the means of counteracting forgetfulness is to make, or to observe, a reminder, such as “we have seen this above”, or a repetition, or a rhyme — such as the one between «pillars» and «familiar» in „Correspondences“. But in the absence of a link of this kind, the drifting of thought brings about the forgetting or the neglect of earlier words, on the plane of clearly voluntary thought. It follows that in an imaginative text devoid of any firm reminder, it is unlikely that the author has strongly united the meaning of two very distant words. Thus we can draw from this philosophical observation that to measure the gap between words, in a work, makes it possible to show the implausibility of certain interpretations that have been given of it. It suffices that the interpreter has supposed a very strong union, in the mind of the author, between very distant words of the text, for the degree of plausibility of the meaning proposed to be low. It is true that there exist cases in which the author distances two images greatly out of fear of censorship, while wishing the public to be able to make the connection, but to suppose such a thing as a matter of course exposes one to numerous errors, since in principle one speaks together of the ideas one wishes to see joined.