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October 05, 2008
Biology
Note: I wrote this a while back after having read the interview with Alain Badiou in Collapse I, but didn't post. I don't know quite what I mean by “Bergson, of all people.”Badiou's claim that biology cannot yet be counted as a science shows that he has a rather idiosyncratic notion what science is. The complaint is that biology is a morass of observations and specific theories: these may give rise to plenty of useful knowledge, but nonetheless biology lacks an over-arching conceptualisation that would give the subject meaningful order. The concepts of biology “fail completely to present the phenomena concerned in the register of eternal truths.”
I don't want to get into the question of whether the requirement for eternal truths is a merely philosophical imposition; nor the question of whether Darwinism might speak in the register Badiou wants to hear (nor whether this would be a good or a bad thing). Instead I'll reminisce for a bit about why I never cared much for biology at school.
There were superficial reasons; such as the variety of dead things in pickling jars displayed on rickety shelving around the lab. But it was also that what we were taught seemed to be without rhyme or reason. Whereas with chemistry almost everything at that time seemed to be tied in with the periodicity of the elements, biology was just one thing after another: pollination, the set of little bones in the ear, the carbon cycle, the circulation of the blood, etc, etc. It sometimes seemed that the main skill required was to be able to pick up on all the vocabulary involved.
In reality the main skill was to be able to correctly label the diagrams that featured in the syllabus: this much as explained to us by one of our biology teachers. She also suggested that it was a good idea to remember the number of labels that each of the set diagrams was supposed to have: that way it would be easier, in exam conditions, to know whether or not you'd missed something out. At the time I think I was rather shocked that a subject could require you to treat its content so cynically. In retrospect it was probably perfectly good advice: if you like biology, and you want to study it further, then it makes sense to use a bit of cunning in order to get through the more elementary material. I couldn't understand how it would happen that someone would decide that they liked biology; to some extent I still can't.
The closest I've ever come to acquiring a taste for this sort of thing was with the smattering of cognitive neuropsychology included in my undergraduate degree. I recall enjoying the difficulty of it: the careful thought needed to see what it was that some theory was predicting or that some evidence was showing. Badiou is even more damning here: “Even more so than biology, [cognitive science] is just a mass of facts and techniques, devoid of concepts or adequate formalisms […] It is no more advanced in its understanding of the phenomena than was Gall's phrenology.”
At university I was particularly struck by the theorising about implicit learning and memory: the idea that it is possible for someone to learn something without being able to give an account of their knowledge, or even being able to remember having learnt. It is apparently possible for amnesiacs to acquire new skills. In 19th century psychology it was thought that the brain must contain memory traces that could influence behaviour but were either too weak to reach consciousness or had become dissociated from the ego. But in the 20th century it became generally accepted that some memory must differ in kind from that normally considered. It seems that this starts with Henri Bergson, of all people: “The past survives under two distinct forms: first, in motor mechanisms; secondly, in independent recollections.” (See Schacter, D. L. (1987). “Implicit memory: history and current status.“ J of Exp Psych: LMC, 13 for more details.)
This, of course, can be of no importance for Badiou: if truth is to be distinguished from mere correct judgement, then it cannot be understood by looking at the mechanisms of knowledge (be they neural or institutional). Nonetheless, it can't be completely without interest. The distinction between two different kinds of memory, as well as being noted by Bergson, shows up in 20th English philosophy as the difference between ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’, and loosely corresponds to ‘present at hand’ vs ‘ready to hand’ in Heidegger. Might this not qualify it as being a decisive event in the history of philosophy? (My knowledge of Bergson and Heidegger is vague and largely second-hand—but my understanding is that they treated this distinction as being much more than some arbitrary psychological fact.)
Posted by robin2 at October 5, 2008 02:17 PM