Abstract
In the wake of the previous chapter, and taking the opposite of complaints and unquietness -though without forgetting them- of a world that fears having to deal only with robots and never more with beings of flesh and blood, we suggest that linkage and promiscuity with machines do not « destroy mankind », but rather take part in its irretrievable and irreducible wanderings. Complaints, that intend to be more or less philosophical and which are heard here and there, often seem to us the effect of mere intuition, without leading the least authentic research about the real damages caused to « man » -if the notion remains indeed valid- nor providing the least solution.
We notice that one of the passions unceasingly awaken by the linkage with machines might be astonishment, wonder resulting from the event of meeting. It is a misconception that the notion of meeting must be reserved to relations between humans only and valued provided it be in a unique intersubjective context. The machines -those that save, support and facilitate life- may be « met ». Descartes made of the astonishment the first of the passions of soul; the reasons to make this choice may still be ours even beyond what that great philosopher might think.
A new approach to the notion of intimacy and to the notion of meeting as two main categories of ethics seems necessary to be activated.
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Notes
- 1.
Those systems ensure a presence. As they move, they can follow the person and answer his questions, when they are asked aloud. They also allow the family and friends to keep in touch remotely. This is in any case one of the arguments used by the developers of pet robotics. Let us recall that patients who suffer from dementia repeatedly ask the same question of their increasingly exasperated relatives , ten, fifty, or a hundred times. A pet robot with a conversational agent answers the repeated questions with endless patience, relieving the care givers and relatives from avoidable stress and reducing the demands on their time.
- 2.
Authors often note the great success in Japan of these pet robots – which take the form of little seals or dogs – with the elderly.
- 3.
Has Lacan not amply shown, in his analysis of Symposium, that ‘l’être de l’autre dans le désir n’est point un sujet. L’éroménos est érôménon, au neutre, et aussi bien τα παιδικά, au neutre pluriel – les choses de l’enfant aimé, peut-on traduire. L’autre, en tant qu’il est visé dans le désir, est visé comme objet aimé’ ([12], p. 66).
- 4.
[7], p. 373. <«Wonder. When our first encounter with some object surprises us and we find it novel, or very different from what we formerly knew or from what we supposed it ought to be, this causes us to wonder and to be astonished at it. Since all tis may happen before we know whether or not the object is beneficial to us, I regard wonder as the first of all passions. It has no opposite, for, if the object before us has no characteristics that surprise us, we are not moved by it at all and we consider it without passion» ([6], p. 350)>.
- 5.
As Leibniz would have said.
- 6.
Greek gives the same impression since to translate the French word rencontre, one would have to turn, depending on the contexts, to words that are as diverse as ἀπάντησις, ἔντευξις, άπ-α𝜈τάω (going to meet), σύνοδος, σύγ𝜅ρουσις (shock of two objects), συμbολή (shock of two armies), καιρός (occasion), τύλή (meeting) derived εὐτυχία, δυστυχία.
- 7.
I have translated Table of the Springs of Action [2] into French – La table des ressorts de l’action [3] – but, as far as I have been able to ascertain with the help of Michael Quinn at the Bentham Project in London – and despite the expressed wish of Bentham himself, who did not, however, expect much from the French in this regard, it has not been translated into any other language.
- 8.
One can read, from that perspective, the beautiful beginning of a text that is quite remarkable for our own text and which is entitled Première Rencontre. Le Cheval et l’Homme: (Vingt Écrivains Rêvent), [1]. Its author makes one feel how the horses introduced by the conquerors of America were perceived as strange beings by Indians, who could not identify them as flesh-and-bone beings. Real animals may be met as artifices, as some sort of toys in the reality of which one does not believe. In that meeting of Native Americans and Europeans, things and animals were at least as strange as human beings and were lived, in perceptions themselves, as beings unquestionably existing and yet unauthentic. Such discrepancy, which is linked to the collision between an expected experience and what is really seen but difficult to believe, is an experience of meeting.
- 9.
We are referring here to the famous excerpt from the Second Meditation ([5], p. 25).
- 10.
[13], p. 156ff. ‘Lorsque l’obscurité fait place à la clarté, il ne s’agit point de ce que la lumière rend maintenant visible dans l’ambiance les objets qui s’y trouvaient antérieurement mais qui restaient inaccessibles à notre regard, mais de ce que le monde tout entier change d’aspect, obéit à des lois nouvelles, se peuple, entre autres particularités, non plus d’ombres fuyantes, mais de corps’ (p. 157). Here Minkowski referred to a previous work, Le Temps Vécu, published in 1933 (reproduced by PUF with the same pages in 2013), ([14], p. 392), where the clear and black spaces are distinguished as modalities of the space and not as ‘objective’ sensory characters. His work ended on that image.
- 11.
That is, as knowledge of time and space, and not as knowledge of the beautiful.
- 12.
This is why the Cartesian disposition which places admiration , the passion of meeting, before all the passions, as if they all owed it something, is so clever. In the meeting some process starts, even as a sketch or very modestly.
- 13.
That idea of work exists even when the meeting is between things. The meeting points of curves are indicators of work. The meeting between different elements is not a simple mixture of different elements: For a meeting to occur, the elements must take and take one another with a view to a problem and a solution or an answer. One could say, in an Aristotelian way, that the elements that meet are about to become the pieces of a hypothesis , which is the ontological moment of a proposition, and not only its simple character of statement.
- 14.
Entitling his book, L’Enfant à la Rencontre du Langage [19], Dominique Taulelle indicates, from the very first sentences, that the acquisition of language demands tremendous efforts and a reflection on language from the child. One recognizes all the elements of the meeting, even though the author does not thematize the concept of meeting in his book. Such attitude is quite common: meeting can often be found in the titles of books, and seem thus to be summing up the experiences and providing a synthesis of them, but the author does not devote a single line of the book to explaining what he understands by meeting, as if the concept were well known.
- 15.
Though it is not impossible to talk of a first, second or third meeting.
- 16.
As when he talks of impressions of reflection (which are the equivalent of our passions or affects), unlike the impressions of sensation (which are the equivalent of our perceptions) [10].
- 17.
[15], pp. 31–38. A French version of this text has been published by Hermann in 2019. One can read, pp. 34–5: ‘It is true, in a sense, that whenever we act rightly, we are always doing our duty and doing what we ought. But what is not true is that, whenever a particular action is right, it is always our duty to do that particular action and no other. This is not true because, theoretically at least, cases may occur in which some other action would be quite equally right , and in such cases, we are obviously under no obligation whatever to do he one rather than the other: whichever we do, we shall be doing our duty and doing as we ought. And it would be rash to affirm that such cases never do practically occur. We all commonly hold that they do: that very often indeed we are under no positive obligation to do one action rather than some other; that it does not matter which we do. We must, then, be careful not to affirm that, because it is always our duty to act rightly, therefore any particular action, which is right, is always also one which it is our duty to do’.
- 18.
Unlike Rousseau who, in the chapter of Contrat Social [17] on the general will, teaches us to be wary of it, Montesquieu does not understand the word « brigue » <partial groups, in opposition with « global society »> in a pejorative way. See above note 36, p. 124–125.
- 19.
It is worth noting that the author who makes a big deal of wonder in his system of passions [7] [6] and, consequently, valorises the meeting, is the same author who, in Le Monde [8], opposes to the real and true world a world built that allows one to understand the first – be the two worlds out of step with each other. This idea of discrepancy is as much a principle of the Cartesian science of the world as it is the starting point of his system of passions.
- 20.
It may be better to talk, like Hume, about making the structure reflect on itself.
- 21.
See p. 131–132, above.
- 22.
See Rethinking Medical Ethics, [4], pp. 139–160.
- 23.
Kierkegaard saw this point very well in his criticism of Hegel in Repetition: ‘La reprise est proprement ce que l’on a, par erreur, appelé la médiation . Il est incroyable de voir quel bruit l’on a fait dans la philosophie hégélienne autour de la médiation, et le flot de niaiseries que l’on a mises en honneur sous cette enseigne. On eût mieux fait de soumettre à un examen rigoureux la notion de médiation. […] Le terme de médiation est étranger; celui de reprise est un bon vieux mot danois, et je fais compliment au danois de ce terme philosophique. De nos jours, on n’explique pas comment se produit la médiation; on ne dit pas si elle résulte du mouvement de deux moments antagonistes, en quel sens elle s’y trouve déjà contenue, ou si elle est un facteur nouveau qui intervient et, dans ce cas, comment’ ([11], pp. 707–708).
- 24.
It is often a pure effect of title, of a captatio benevolentiae, for, beyond the title, one discovers that no further mention of meeting appears, and that the so-called psychiatry is not very different from a classical one, at least it does not appear in a thematized form. As the word attracts a good press, it can bestow its blessing on the book without having to be analyzed. The Net provides, to whoever wants to consult it, a very large number of titles of books and symposia in psychiatry that include the word ‘meeting’ (‘rencontre’ in French) without its meaning being fully, or even adequately, explored in the body of the text. The term then functions as a kind of slogan for a humanist claim that has both virtues and limitations.
- 25.
[16], vol. II, pp. 1031–1035.
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Cléro, JP. (2021). Conclusion: Is Meeting a Reality or a Fiction? – A Few Epistemological Reflections on the Possibility of Constituting a Concept of Meeting. In: Reflections on Medical Ethics. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 138. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65233-3_7
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