Barthelemy - Individuation and Knowledge, The Refutation of Idealism in Simondons Heritage in France

Individuation and Knowledge: The refutation of idealism in
Simondons Heritage in France

Jean-Hugues Barthlmy, Mark Hayward, Arne De Boever
SubStance, Volume 41, Number 3, 2012 (Issue 129), pp. 60-75 (Article)
Published by University of Wisconsin Press
DOI: 10.1353/sub.2012.0030
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Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2012
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Individuation and Knowledge:
The refutation of idealism
in Simondons Heritage in France
Jean-Hugues Barthlmy
1. The double fundamental problem
in Stieglers relation to Simondon
In this essay, I want to begin a dialogue with the French philosopher
Bernard Stieglers book Technics and Time. Stiegler is internationally known
as the inheritor of another French philosopher whose work is currently
being rediscovered worldwide: Gilbert Simondon. In Stieglers work, this
Simondonian heritage plays itself out in the domain of continental phi-
losophy. The thesis maintained here will be the following: there is another
relation to Simondon that is possible, one that also takes up the major
problems weve inherited from the continental philosophical tradition.
The double fundamental philosophical problem raised in Stieglers
debate with Simondon is the following:
A) On the one hand, how are we to interpret Simondons most
fundamental thought, namely his thesis that knowledge of individua-
tion is itself the individuation of knowledge? This thesis is the properly
Simondonian way of overcoming [dpassement] the opposition between
subject and object. This overcoming is, of course, something that has been
sought after by all the great continental thinkers from Kants Critique of
Pure Reason to the six proposed volumes of Stieglers Technics and Time.
1

This follows a trajectory that also passes through Fichte, Husserl, and then
Heidegger/Derrida, but also through Schelling, Bergson and Simondon/
Deleuze.
2
Stieglers most fundamental thought develops the encounter
between Heidegger and Simondon. The opposition between subject and
object, whose overcoming is sought by continental philosophy (which is
always in search of itself in its difference from science) is the defnitive
ground of all the classical oppositions we need to subvert, oppositions
initially combated by Kant: between empiricism and innateness, idealism
and realism, dogmatism and skepticism. In posing his fundamental thesis
about knowledge of individuation as the individuation of knowledge,
Simondon has proposed a new way of overcoming the subject/object
opposition whose interpretation will turn out to be problematic.
61
Simondon and Stiegler on Individuation and Knowledge
B) On the other handand this is the second fundamental problem
raised by Stiegler in his debate with Simondonwhat is the status of
the reality that Simondon calls pre-individual? What is the status of
this reality from which all individuation proceeds, and whose existence
Simondon hypothesizes in order to make sense of the genesis of each
individualphysical, vital or psycho-social? I will show that there is
an intimate connection between this second fundamental philosophi-
cal problem and the frst, and that this is why Stiegler is in debate with
Simondon on two aspects of what, in the end, will turn out to be what I
call the double fundamental philosophical problem.
But before we get to that, the frst part of this essay will recall some
of the general trends in Simondons thought that seem in need of defense
and development.
2. Overview of Simondons main propositions
In Simondon, the absolutely central notion of individuation does
not refer to a differentiating individualizationas is the case with Jung,
in whose theoretical work individuation is a central notion as wellbut
rather to a physical, vital, or psycho-social genesis. One should also re-
member that this latter regime of individuation, to borrow Simondons
phrase, is also called the transindividual when it is a question of fore-
grounding the fact that the collective is taken as axiomatic in resolving
the psychic problem (LIndividuation psychique, 22). The technical object
is defned in Du Mode dexistence des objets techniques as the support and
the symbol of that relation that we would like to call transindividual.
Serving as intermediary, the technical object thus creates an inter-human
relation that is the model of transindividuality (247-248). We are there-
fore talking about a genetic ontology in Simondongenetic in the sense
of genesisplaced in the service of a new Encyclopedism
3
that revolves
around the two main propositions.
The frst is that Simondon wants to unify the sciences in order to then
refound the human sciences more specifcally on the basis of the continu-
ity between vital individuation and psycho-social individuation. Through
this, he can begin to theorize on the far side of the artifcial separation
between psychology and sociology about whether the purely psychic
and the purely social are merely limit-cases, as Simondon puts it, of
a specter that is crucially and indissociably psycho-social.
Second, it is a question of showing how technics is essential to
culture. This task cannot be accomplished unless we understand that the
psycho-physiological alienation favored by the becoming-industrial of
culture and labor is not caused by technics itself, but by a bad coupling
of man and machine, with the meaning of the latter having been misun-
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62
derstood. Du Mode dexistence des objets techniques makes this goal clear
from the get-go when it announces that the goal of the book is to make
the reader become conscious of this proper meaning.
4

We can assume that Simondon will not be able to reconcile culture
and technics (his second goal) unless he also reconciles technics with
nature, and culture with nature. This is the architectonic point of his
philosophical engagement. He is attempting to think becoming technical
as an extension of a broader process of becoming that is the process of
individuation of natural beings. A concluding passage from Simondons
1965-1966 course titled Imagination et Invention (published in 2008) formu-
lates in its own way the conception I would like to defend:
A created object is not a materialized image posed arbitrarily in the
world like an object among other objects, one that overlays nature with
a supplement of artifce. It is, in its origin, and remains, in its function,
a system for coupling the living being with its milieu, a double point
at which the subjective and objective worlds communicate. In social
species, this point is threefold because it also becomes a path for rela-
tions among individuals, organizing their reciprocal functions. In these
cases, the threefold point is also a social organizer. (186)
In this passage, we see the ideaalready present in the work of
Canguilhem and Leroi-Gourhan (and before them Ernst Kapp and Alfred
Espinas)that the artifact extends the relationship of the living organism
with its milieu. Simondon uses the example of the birds nest to explain
this. But the passage just cited adds another thesis: in social species,
the artifact also serves to mediate between the individual and the col-
lective because it organizes the reciprocal functions of the individuals
according to Simondon. In his work, this merely means that artifacts are
social organizers; hence it is diffcult to exclude insects and their arti-
factssuch as a wasps nestfrom the thesis, and reserve it for humanity
alone. However, Simondon already remarks in his book Lindividuation la
lumire des notions de forme et dinformation that the purely social aspect
of insects is vital unity at its most basic level while the real collective
is a transindividuality whose reality is psycho-social and not purely
social.
5
The individual constructs itself therein as a psychism, through
social relations.
Therefore, only primates and (to an even greater degree) humans
provide examples of societies that have developed without damaging the
individuality of individuals. Instead, they have done so as the very condi-
tion of this individuality, which as a result is able to achieve a complexity
Simondon calls personality. The latter certainly seems to be a paradoxi-
cal reality: in it, the maximum of individuality is also the inseparability
of the psychic and the social. However, this needs to be understood as an
63
application of Simondons doctrine of the realism of relations, which
claims that relations produce being, and that individuality is augmented
through the multiplication (via unfolding) of the relation. Simondon is thus
at the same time anti-substantialistbecause the individual is relation,
not substanceand anti-reductionistsince the process of individua-
tion reinforces individuality by multiplying relations as it passes from the
physical to the vital to the psycho-social realm of individuation.
More generally, the paradoxical character of Simondons thought is
thus what allows him to subvert the classical alternatives in the Western
philosophical tradition. These paradoxes are not contradictions since, in-
sofar as it describes processes of individuation, Simondons entire genetic
ontology rests upon what he calls the hypothesis of the preindividual.
Pre-individual reality is postulated as being more than unity, which is
not the same as a dialectical non-unity.
6
For Simondon, the contradic-
tions claimed by dialectic thought cannot be resolved; in this, they differ
from paradoxes, which only doxa takes to be insurmountable. As for the
hypothesis of the preindividual, it is fundamentally substantiated by
the more than unity of the microphysical reality of which each thing is
composedthe famous wave-particle duality of quantum physics, whose
role in Simondons thought I will soon clarify.
But lets return for now to the connection between nature and culture
via technics. Because the artifact for Simondon is a social organizer
among social species in general, we know that among primates (and
even more so among humans) the artifact becomes the prosthesis (as
Simondon writes at the beginning of his 1965-1966 course) that acts as
the intermediary through which the social will nourish the psychic. As
is well known, his thesis regarding the construction of the psycho-social
on the basis of artifacts has today been radicalized by Bernard Stiegler. In
his work, Stiegler has extended the thought of both Simondon and Leroi-
Gourhan by arguing that the artifact is the crutch of the mind acting
as an exteriorization of memory that paradoxically makes possible the
construction of interiority itself, insofar as the psychic is nourished by the
social via the artifact. (Stiegler, Technics and Time vol. 1). We must grant this
particular point to Stiegler; in my view, he thus formulates the conditions
according to which culture extends nature via technics.
Thanks to Simondons theoretical intuitions and anticipations, we are
no longer able to ignore the advances of scientifc disciplines like ethology,
a discipline he held in high esteem. Ethology studies animal behavior in
order to discover the cultural and technical dimension of natural forms
of life such as the forms of life of the great apes, who are frst of all bio-
psychic individuals, but whose psychism is nourished by the collective,
64
and produces artifacts. Following Simondon, I therefore deny the discon-
nection he calls anthropologicalthe essentialist disconnect between
the living and the human being, because I do not believe (unlike others
throughout the history of Western philosophy) that reason is innate and
proper to the human being. Nor do I believe that human beings have a
psychic or on the contrary a social essence, points that can be found
even in Freud and Marx..
7
Rather, I believe in the biological potential of
the human beinga potential that must be actualized in a form that is
crucially and indissociably psycho-social, with the purely psychic and
purely social being mere limit-cases.
By denying the anthropological disconnection, I also deny the reduc-
tion (likewise anthropological) of technics into a simple set of means to be
used by human beings. This anthropological reduction (overcome today)
consisted of not seeing technics as a cultural fnality capable of changing
the human being; instead, the reality of technics was only considered
within the narrow frame of human laborand in such a way that the
human being was considered a given. I must stress here the connection
between these two objections: the refusal to divide culture from nature, on
the one hand, and, on the other, the refusal to divide technics from culture.
For this connection comes about through the refusal, which is always
there in Simondons case, of a third opposition: that between technics and
nature. To make the connection between these three refusals of traditional
oppositions more precise, and as a way to take up again these refusals
in the order in which they have been explained, let us say the following:
to think the continuity between nature and culture need not lead us to
place technics outside of culture, as if it were anti-natural and thus an
obstacle to the continuity between nature and culture. Technics is not an
obstacle, but precisely that which prolongs nature and opens it to culture.
This is also why those who, like Simondon, want to reconcile culture and
technics should not presuppose that technics and culture somehow fnd
each other in their opposition to nature. Simondon himself has already
pondered the diffcult, simultaneous overcoming of the three oppositions
of nature/culture, nature/technics, and culture/technics. Indeed, in order
to fundamentally reconcile culture and technics, Du Mode dexistence des
objets techniques has made the frst steps towards their common reconcili-
ation with nature.
Therefore, I believe in the possibility of deriving culture from nature
via technics. This powerful thesis rests on a broader assumption, which
addresses less than the thesis, but whose validity I should nevertheless
discuss and defend. If we want to derive culture from nature via technics,
we must assume that nature is anterior to technics and to culture. Such
an assumption, as evident as it seems, must today be argued rather than
dogmatically admitted.
65
3. The debate with Stiegler on the status of the preindividual:
From the philosophical problem of the refutation of idealism
to the epistemological problem of interpretation in quantum physics
Today, more than ever before, one could indeed raise the following
objection to what I have presented: namely, that everything that can be
said about nature is the result of a technically conditioned culture. This
is notably so in the physical and biological sciences, where nothing can
be said about nature unless it is based upon technologically produced
experimental verifcations whose interface is, furthermore, a mathematical
instrument. I think, and I would like to explain here, that this objection is
defnitively the true groundeven though it has remained implicitof
Stieglers discourse on the preindividual as something that is always
already technical. Remember that the preindividual is that from which
all individuation proceeds. Yet, Stiegler offers an argument according
to which the preindividual is itself constitutively techno-logical and is
ceaselessly technologically reconfgured.
In Stieglers thought, this thesis is presented as radical because it is
outlined not just in its weak version, but also its strong version. For
him, it is not just about affrmingand this would be the weak version
of his thesisthat technics plays the role of preindividual that makes
possible the passage from vital individuation to transindividual individu-
ation. In Simondon, this passage is enabled by a provisional emotional
disindividuation, whereas technics is, for its part, a phase of culture
at the same time that it is the support for a relation that is a model of
transindividuality.
8
Furthermore, in connection with this frst point (the
weak version of the thesis) it is worth noting that Stiegler relies for this
on an ambiguity in Simondons thought: Simondon envisages different
forms of preindividuality at each stage of the process of individuation;
moreover, he occasionally calls the trans-individual itself non structured,
assimilating it on these occasions with the pre-individual.
9
We understand
that, since for Stiegler the transindividual realm is prosthetically founded,
the equivalence between the transindividual and the pre-individual, even
if it shows up only occasionally in Simondon, furnishes the pretext for
thinking the preindividual as constitutively technological.
However, the root of this debate seems to lie elsewhere because, as
I already noted, Stieglers thesis is much more radical. He wants to ar-
gueand this is the strong version of his thesisthat the preindividual
source of nature, whether it be vital or even physical, is itself ceaselessly
reconfgured by technics through the becoming metastable of technics
itself. The core of the argument is, therefore, that it is not just a question of
the inseparability of different levels of individuation, but also of Stieglers
reduction of the pre-individual to the techno-scientifc mode of knowledge
66
that one can have of it. As Stiegler says in an unpublished interview with
Thierry Bardini, nature does not exist because it is constructed.
This reduction of the preindividual to its techno-scientifc mode
of knowledge should not be denounced ipso facto as confused, because it
takes its argument from Simondon himself. On the one hand, given that
knowledge of individuation is also the individuation of knowledge, we
would no longer be able to oppose the subject and object, in such a way
that the mode of knowledge and that which is known are no longer dis-
tinguishable a priori. On the other hand, the preindividual is that which
only possesses indirect indications of presenceindications that are
justly furnished by quantum physics, which has put forward the revolu-
tionary argument about a quantum of action: here, there are no objects
without interaction. Instead, we get a technological interaction between
a measuring apparatus and a measured object. In this sense, the source
of Stieglers thesis is based on a theory of knowledge, even if this source
remains entirely implicit in his work.
Where does this lead us if we take this source for Stieglers argument
seriously? I do not believe in the thesis that the preindividual is consti-
tutively technological, even though I agree that the quantum of action in
quantum physics demands a profound phenomeno-technical rethinking
of the theory of knowledge.
10
The problem with Stieglers thesis, in my
view, is its treatment of the famous issue of the refutation of idealisma
problem that has, since Kant, accompanied the greatest thinkers in the
continental tradition in their attempts to overcome the fundamental op-
position between subject and object. We might very well admit that the
trans-individual is prosthetically based, and that this prosthetic base
(which Stiegler calls the third strand of psychic and collective indi-
viduation) is characterized by a metastability. We might even seriously
consider that this prosthetic base of the transindividual plays the same
role as the vital potentialwhich is in fact pre-vital and even pre-physical,
but carried by the living being. But such a constitutively technological
preindividual will not allow us to truly fnd the world again unless it is
itself derived from a history of the living being.
This is not to say that the preindividual as such is derivative. How-
ever, to the extent that it would be carried by technical becoming, it would
have to have been carried frst by living beings, up to the prosthetic be-
ing that is the psycho-social human individual. At one point in the frst
volume of Technics and Time, Stiegler seems to offer this derivation of
the human being from the living in connection with the work of Leroi-
Gourhan. However, in the third volume he argues that the refutation of
idealism rests exclusively on the external presence of the prostheses of
human consciousness.
67
The problem of the refutation of idealism was born in the Critique
of Pure Reason where Kant calls attention to the scandal that philoso-
phers had yet to provide evidence, beyond all idealist temptation, that
the world existed.
11
Heidegger would later respond in section 43 of Be-
ing and Time that the true scandal is that we demand a demonstration of
the existence of the world since the world is always already given, if we
truly understand our being-in-the-world that is Dasein. Stiegler, for his
part, reproaches Heidegger in the third volume of Technics and Time for
not having seen that this being-in-the-world by which the very question
of needing to refute idealism is dissolved, is constituted by the pros-
theses as the constitutive exteriority of the whothe who in Stiegler
being what Heidegger called Dasein.
12
In other words, Stieglerand this
is the force of his argumentreproaches Heidegger for not having seen
the true reason why the question of the refutation of idealism is indeed
resolved: if the world is always already given, it is because I am unable
to have consciousness of myself except thanks to those crutches of the
mind that are there outside of me.
In fact, behind this reproach to Heidegger there is a common problem
in the refutation of idealism that forces Stiegler to share with Heidegger
the thesis that, by virtue of the being-in-the-world that is the only way
of resolving the refutation of idealism, one must start with the who.
In Stieglers thought, it is the relationship between the who and the
what (the prosthesis) that is the starting point. Through this Stieglerian
optic, the living being cannot be thought philosophically except through
privation, starting from this who that is prosthetically based. This thesis
of the secondarity of the ontological thematization of the living being in
relation to the thinking of the who is more or less Heideggers thesis
presented in section 10 of Being and Time. This explains why Stiegler does
not identify his ontological thought with classic ontology. Elsewhere,
he refuses the Heideggerian idea of fundamental ontology because
the Heidegger who is important for Stiegler is the frst Heidegger, the
one of Sein und Zeit, who constructs an existential analytic but not yet a
fundamental ontology.
Certainly, in his preface to the second edition of Simondons
Lindividuation psychique et collective, Stiegler applies the idea of an exit
from ontology to Simondon himself, in the sense that ontology is under-
stood as the objectifying description of a state, whereas in Simondon,
ontogenesis is the individuating description of a process of individuation.
But Stiegler intends to differentiate himself from Simondon and fully to
accomplish this exit from ontology in his own work, in the sense that for
Stiegler the knowledge of individuation is not truly the individuation of
knowledge, unless one thinks this process of individuation from where it
68
has led us. This is why Stiegler only wants to think of the psycho-socio-
technical becoming at the present point [suivant son actualit]. This how
we arrive at Stieglers convictionnever written, but often spoken and
applied on a daily basisthat thinking is not relevant unless it nourishes
action, and vice-versa. We can therefore understand why Stiegler has
recently argued that the question of philosophy is the political question
of the transindividual.
Here we come to a truly abyssal question: what exactly does the
thesis that knowledge of individuation is the individuation of knowledge
mean? In Simondons work, the thesis appears in the fnal lines of his in-
troduction to Lindividuation la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation,
where he writes:
We cannot know individuation as it is commonly understood. We can only
individuate, individuate ourselves, and individuate in us. This insight
is, in the margins of what is properly called knowledge, an analogy
between two operations, which is a certain mode of communication.
The individuation of the reality that is exterior to the subject is grasped
by the subject thanks to the analogical individuation of knowledge in
the subject. But it is through the individuation of knowledge (and not by
means of knowledge alone) that the individuation of non-subjective
beings is known. These beings can be known through the knowledge
of the subject, but the individuation of beings cannot be grasped except
through the individuation of the knowledge of the subject.

(36)
There is, then, in this last affrmation, and even in the proposition
that precedes it, an ambiguity. Indeed, we may consider this passage to say
that only the knowledge of individuation individuates knowledge at the
same time that it comes to know. But the passage may also be saying that
the knowledge of individuation consists of an analogy between subject and
object based on the refexive return of knowledge on itself; non-refexive
knowledge on the other hand also individuates knowledge, but without
this refexive return. The frst reading seems closest to the passage itself,
but one of its consequences is that it turns philosophical knowledge
into a knowledge that is superior to scientifc knowledge. The second
reading allows us to set philosophy apart thanks to its uniquely refexive
character, and not due to its ability to individuate knowledge. We must,
as I understand it, privilege this second reading because there is no other
place in his work where Simondon suggests that scientifc knowledge does
not individuate knowledge. He merely notes that scientifc knowledge
thinks already individuated structures rather than genetic operations.
Stieglers position and philosophical practice complicate the situ-
ation even further, since he implicitly proposes a third interpretation of
the thesiswhich he takes up in his very own waythat knowledge
of individuation is individuation of knowledge. In Stieglers work, the
69
thesis turns into the idea that the knowledge of individuationbecause
it takes as its object that which is not ob-ject, but which individuates
itself in the subject knowing itself)must each time refexively take
into account the new prosthetic conditions of the very thought that is
realized in a discourse that is from now on radically post-ontological. The
entire question then becomes knowing whether the taking into account of
these conditions of thought justifes the passage, which Stiegler has put
into operation, to a privileged thematizationone that would always
have to be started anewof the actual becoming of the three strands
of psycho-socio-technical becoming.
4. Quantum physics as paradigm
of the philosophical knowledge of individuation
I would like to propose here a settlement between these different
interpretations of the thesis that knowledge of individuation is the indi-
viduation of knowledge. This settlement can be reached if we begin once
more from the particularity of quantum physics. This starting point will
allow us to return to the refutation of idealism, to provide a response
that is new, yet compatible with the Simondonian enterprise of a gen-
eral ontogenesisone that would not make it impossible to frst think
nature so as to then let psycho-socio-technical individuation emerge. As
noted earlier, quantum physics calls for a phenomeno-technical theory
of knowledge according to which, thanks to the famous quantum of ac-
tion, no object can be known without interaction between such an object
and that which measures it. Rather than deduce from this that nature is
only what we make of it, and that it is only the being-in-the-world of the
who (whether prosthetic or not) that always already refutes idealism,
I would like to insist on the following: this nature that is produced in
laboratories is only defned by interaction, by virtue of what it is. The
quantum of action is not only the minimal and unavoidable interaction
between the measured object and the measuring apparatus. It is also the
object itself. This does not mean that interaction would be anything more
than a deformation of the objectin other words, that interaction would
be a creation of the object. Rather, this means that quantum physics has
access to reality such as it is at its smallest scale, where being consists of
becominga becoming by relation. This is the truth of Simondons real-
ism of relations. Following Simondon, one can thus say that quantum
physics reaches the thing in itself because it offers the thing as the set
of relations from which a phenomenon proceeds. In other words, if
quantum physics is able to integrate into its mathematical formalism the
70
interaction between the measured object and the measuring apparatus,
it is because the object itself is nothing but interaction.
The consequence of this argument is important: rather than seeing
in quantum physics something that would legitimize the thesis that the
preindividual is always already technologically conditioned, it is neces-
sary to recognize that in quantum physics, technics is naturalized, as
Simondon would say, to the point of revealing the very basis of nature
itself. Stiegler, who occasionally thinks the engendering of nature by tech-
nics (naturation in his terms) can only willfully be ignoring this idea
of the naturalization of technics. Contrary to naturation, Simondons
naturalization of technics defnes the point where his thinking of tech-
nics opens up onto a new phenomeno-technical theory of knowledge. The
naturalization of technics is, indeed, the integration of the laws of nature
into technical progress.
13
And if quantum physics integrates into its math-
ematical formalism the interaction between the measured object and the
measuring apparatusan integration that might seem paradoxical if the
formalism of physics is exclusively objective rather than refexivethis
is because the measured object is itself interaction.
From this perspective, what singularizes the quantum object is the
following point: what is within it is objectifed only insofar as it comes to
be as interaction that is as a relation that makes the being itself through
becoming. Quantum physics has a specifc characteristic: it is a science
of the very process of individuation insofar as it is primary and therefore
the giver [donateur] of space and time (which are individuations dimen-
sions, as Simondon writes). This is why, according to Simondon, the
quantum duality of wave-particles is a paradigm for thinking the more
than unity of Being insofar as it isand not of being insofar as it is
individuated. However, quantum reality is not strictly identifed with
the preindividual itself. Rather, it is the becoming of individuation in its
relative indistinction vis--vis the preindividual from which this becoming
proceeds. Quantum physics is the science of the real as radical genesis,
or also of being as becoming.
But what distinguishes this science from philosophical knowledge of
individuation, for which it yields a decisive paradigm? What distinguishes
scientifc knowledge of individuation from philosophical knowledge of
individuation is not that the one would individuate knowledge while
the other would not. Rather, it is that quantum reality reveals, without
quantum physics being able to say so, the relative indistinction between
the preindividual and its operation of individuation. Because it is able
to speak of this relative indistinction, philosophical knowledge of indi-
viduation is refexive: it involves a process of individuation that always
exceeds the very object that it is. Thus, it opens up onto the preindividual
71
and includes every possible individuation. This is why the philosophical
knowledge of individuation is immediately a general ontogenesis, cover-
ing not only the physical but also the vital and psycho-social regimes of
individuation.
The refutation of idealism can be based on something other than the
necessity of exterior prostheses for human consciousnesssomething
other than the artifacts that would paradoxically constitute it. By saying
this, I am certainly not calling into question the Stieglerian thesis that the
interiority of consciousness is paradoxically developed through a process
of self-exteriorization through artifacts (the so-called crutches of the
mind.) I am merely arguing that there is no need for a transcendent
who and its being-in-the-world (as one fnds it in Heidegger, for ex-
ample) in order to know that the world exists. The thought of the who is
not frst philosophy, contrary to what both Heidegger and Stiegler suggest.
However, I dont want to suggest that the anteriority of physical
and vital individuations in relation to psycho-social individuation allows
Simondon to call his global onto-genesis a frst philosophy. I believe that
this sort of frst philosophy would still be a knowledge that unwittingly
turns the philosophizing individual into an absolute. I say unwittingly
because what is at stake is the very attitude of philosophizing individuals
themselves in their meaning-making practices: in Simondon and Stiegler,
as in the entire tradition of Western philosophy up to the present day,
the meanings of individual, individuation, transindividual, and
prosthesis are ob-jectifed meaningsmeanings equated with things
so that we can talk about what exists. As a result of this, however, objec-
tifed meaning does not constitute the philosophizing individual, which
consequently presupposes itself to come frst.
As I have shown elsewhere, Heidegger had an intuition of this
fundamental diffculty traversing every philosophy, and the Wittgenstein
of On Certainty did so as well.
14
Neither of them, however, invented the
pluri-dimensional explosion of meanings that presents the only path out
of this deadlock. If the philosophizing individual does not want to abso-
lutize her- or himself, she or he must, before anything else, think her- or
himself as individuating meaning, because meaning is pluri-dimensional
and cannot be reduced to the dimension of the ob-ject alone. Refuting
idealism is, therefore, leaving knowledge to science, and thinking oneself
as made by the meaning that surrounds one and that knowledge reduces
to a single, misleading dimensionthat of the ob-ject.
My thesis, therefore, is that neither Simondon nor Stiegler holds the
key to the refutation of idealism, because neither one of them practices
the problematic that defnes frst philosophy. For what is philosophically
frst is non-knowledge, and the positions of Simondon and Stiegler are
72
still engaged with knowledge, or rather they are already engaged with
knowledge, whereas they would need to yield the ontogenetic transla-
tion, adequate but secondary, of frst non-knowledge. It is by virtue of
this operation of secondary translation that Stieglers thought of the
psycho-social whoeven though it is far from being philosophically
frstprolongs and completes Simondons thinking of physical and vital
individuationan ontogenetic thought that even though adequate, is
itself philosophically secondary.
The refutation of idealism therefore does not reside in the thought
(supposedly fundamental) of the being in the world of the who. Rather,
it resides in a practice of signifcation that allows the philosophizing
individual to think her- or himself as constituted by meaning insofar as
the latter would be a constitutive transcendence. In one sense, Heidegger
posed the thesis of the world as a world of meaning that constitutes the
Dasein, but this thesis of the fnitude or non-originarity of Dasein was
never applied by Heidegger to himself because, in order to apply it to
himself, he would have had to invent a new signifying practice. Rather
than objectifying these signifcations in order to affrm something about
the world, such a practice would have needed to explode these signif-
cations pluri-dimensionally in order to reveal the different dimensions
of the meaning that constitute me as a meaning-subjector as meaning
individuated.
As I have explained elsewhere, the different dimensions of meaning
that my new philosophical problematic seeks to open up are economic
production-consumption, ontological information, and axiological edu-
cation.
15
These different dimensions of the meaning-that-makes-me will
then enable me to develop what I call a uni-dimensional secondary transla-
tion of this problematic of frst philosophy, which will fnally engender
(1) a philosophy of economic production-consumption, (2) a philosophy
of ontological informationsomething already largely thought by Si-
mondon and Stiegler, since genetic ontology is already understood by
Simondon as a philosophy of information processand (3) a philosophy
of axiological education.
At this point, one could think that the position inaugurated by the
new problematic of frst philosophya problematic that requires the
philosophizing individual to think her- or himself in her or his fnitude
and non-originarity, and therefore as meaning individuated into meaning-
subjectmerely radicalizes the way of thinking that I reproached Stiegler
for practicing above: the fact that Stiegler begins philosophical discourse
with the thematization of the pyscho-social who. In fact, however, this
thought by the philosophizing individual of its own non-originarity is no
longer ontogenetic. This is why it does not radicalize the way of thinking
73
that I reproached Stiegler for practicing: the thought of the non-originarity
of the philosophizing individual is not the thought of a psycho-social
who, but is a new form of know thyself. This is why its secondary
ontogenetic translation the philosophy of ontological informationwill
have to pass, with Simondon, through the thought of physical and vital
individuation before taking up, with Stiegler, psycho-social individuation.
I am unable to explore in great detail here the reasons for such an
architectonic state of affairsthat is, the reasons for such a system of sec-
ondary translations of the problematic of frst philosophy. I will merely
point out in the form of a conclusion that Simondon firted with the pos-
sibility of a problematic of frst philosophy that is not ontogenetic. At the
beginning of the section entitled The Necessity of Psychic Ontogenesis
which comes at the end of the third chapter of Lindividuation psychique
et collective, Simondon adds immediately after his qualifcation of the
ontogenesis of frst philosophy: Unfortunately, it is impossible for
the human subject to witness its own genesis (163). Here Simondon is
aware that the problematic of frst philosophy must be knowledge of the
self rather than a genetic ontologyeven if he still retained the idea that
this knowledge of self must necessarily be, just as it is in Hegels Phenom-
enology of Spirit or even in the later Husserl, a description by the subject
of its own genesis. It is for this reason that Simondon, in this particular
instance, very logically judges the realization of the problematic of frst
philosophy impossible.
If, on the contrary, we radicalize the exigency of non-objectivation
in applying it to the very signifcations manipulated by the philosophiz-
ing individual, then genetic ontology is nothing more than a secondary
translation of frst non-knowledge in which the philosophizing individual,
rather than objectifying the signifcations that she or he manipulates in
order to speak about reality, explodes them in order to open up different
dimensions of the meaning that constitutes her or him in the individuals
non-originarity. This knowledge of the self has the virtue of translating
itself secondarily in each of the dimensions of meaning that will have been
opened up and, in one of these dimensions, it has the virtue of rediscov-
ering the genetic ontology of Simondon in suppressing the theoretical
tensions that inhabit this ontology.
16
This is my philosophical approach, and I have tried to show here
how it can emerge from a post-Simondonian debate with Stiegler about
the refutation of idealism.
Universit Paris Ouest Nanterre
Maison des Sciences de lHomme Paris-Nord
translated by Mark Hayward and Arne De Boever
74
Notes
1. Three volumes have already been published; all three have been translated: Bernard
Stiegler, La technique et le temps, Vols. 1, 2 and 3 (Paris: Galile, 1994, 1996 and 2001);
translations: Technics and Time, Vols. 1, 2 and 3, (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1998, 2009 and 2010).
2. On the decisive infuence of Simondon on Deleuze, see the Chapters X-XI-XII in Anne
Sauvagnargues, Deleuze. Lempirisme transcendental (Paris: PUF, 2009.) The infuence of
Simondon on Deleuze is the equivalent to that of Heidegger on Derrida, which s is why
I write Heidegger/Derrida and Simondon/Deleuze.
3. See Jean-Hugues Barthlmy, Simondon ou lEncyclopdisme gntique (Paris: PUF, 2008).
4. Here are the very frst words of Du Mode dexistence des objets techniques: Cette tude est
anime par lintention de susciter une prise de conscience du sens des objets techniques.
La culture sest constitue en systme de dfense contre les techniques; or, cette dfense
se prsente comme une dfense de lhomme, supposant que les objets techniques ne
contiennent pas de ralit humaine. Nous voudrions montrer que la culture ignore dans la
ralit technique une ralit humaine, et que, pour jouer son rle complet, la culture doit
incorporer les tres techniques sous forme de connaissance et de sens des valeurs (9).
5. Here is the passage outlining the distinction between the purely social and the tran-
sindividual as psycho-social: Ltre psychique, cest--dire ltre qui accomplit le plus
compltement possible les fonctions dindividuation en ne limitant pas lindividuation
cette premire tape du vital, rsout la disparition de sa problmatique interne dans la
mesure o il participe lindividuation du collectif. Ce collectif, ralit transindividuelle
obtenue par individuation des ralits pr-individuelles associes une pluralit de
vivants, se distingue du social pur et de lindividuel pur; le social pur existe, en effet,
dans les socits animales; il ne ncessite pas pour exister une nouvelle individuation
dilatant lindividuation vitale; il exprime la manire dont les vivants existent en socit;
cest lunit vitale au premier degr qui est directement sociale (Lindividuation la
lumire des notions de forme et dinformation, 167).
6. See the Introduction and Conclusion to Gilbert Simondon, Lindividuation la lumire des
notions de forme et dinformation.
7. See Jean-Hugues Barthlmy, What New Humanism Today? (Trans. Chris Turner).
Cultural Politics, Vol. 6, no. 2, 2010 (Berg Publishers).
8. On these two points, see Jean-Hugues Barthlmy, Simondon ou lEncyclopdisme gntique,
Chapters IV and V.
9. Simondon even writes that the transindividual is that reality which the individuated
being carries with itself, that call to being for future inviduations (cette ralit que ltre
individu transporte avec lui, cette charge dtre pour des individuations futures) (Lindividua-
tion psychique et collective, 193).
10. On this second point, see Jean-Hugues Barthlmy, Penser la connaissance et la technique
aprs Simondon, (Paris : LHarmattan, 2005).
11. On the refutation of idealism in Kant, see Critique of Pure Reason, section Critique of
Paralogism 4 of Transcendental Psychology.
12. On this point, see Stiegler, Technics and Time, Vol. 2 : Disorientation.
13. On this point, see my Glossary: Fifty Key Terms in the Work of Gilbert Simondon
(trans. Arne De Boever), in De Boever, Arne, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe and Ashley Wood-
ward (eds.), Gilbert Simondon, Being and Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press), 2011.
14. See J-H. Barthlmy, Hegel et limpens de Heidegger , Kairos n27, 2006, Penser la
connaissance et la technique aprs Simondon, op. cit. and Penser aprs Simondon et par-
del Deleuze , Cahiers Simondon n2, Paris, LHarmattan, 2010.
15. On this point, see Jean-Hugues Barthlmy, Penser aprs Simondon et par-del Deleuze,
op. cit., and Penser la connaissance et la technique aprs Simondon, op. cit., 240-268 & 281-286.
16. On these tensions, see the two volumes of my Penser lindividuation, (Paris: LHarmattan),
2005.
75
Works Cited
Gilbert Simondon. Du mode dexistence des objets techniques. Paris : Aubier, 1958.
. Gilbert Simondon, Imagination et invention. Chatou: Editions de la Transparence, 2008.
. Lindividuation la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation. Grenoble: Editions
Jrme Millon, 2005.
. Lindividuation psychique et collective. Paris: Aubier, 1989.
Stiegler, Bernard. La technique et le temps, Vols. 1, 2 and 3. Paris: Galile, 1994, 1996 and 2001.
Translations: Technics and Time, Vols. 1, 2 and 3. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998, 2009 and 2010.

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