Michel Blay, Dieu, la Nature et l'Homme. L'Originalité de l'Occident, 360 pp., index. Paris: Armand Colin, 2013. 26€ (paperback)
Reviewed for Isisby Steven Vanden Broecke (Ghent University)
One has to admire Michel Blay for the sheer nerve of producing a book which seeks to unveil the hidden demons governing our lives and to instill a conviction of the utterly contingent, man-made character of these. The first component is the terrain of the analyst of ideas, the second of the story teller. Privilege the latter over the former, and you get historiographical empowerment.In this book, Blay expects his narrative revelation to function as a call to résistance against the ecological challenges which we face collectively, and the utter meaninglessness in our working lives which many of us face individually. All of the human practices and experiences underlying these phenomena, Blay suggests, are little more than the practice of a specific idea about nature.Shatter its stahlhartes Gehäuse and we may not only be able to understand how it was possible for us to end up here, but also to move on to a better place. Blay does this in three parts.
The first part of this book focuses on what Blay calls "thinking with infinity" (penser avec l'infini), and may be seen as the reworking of another book which Blay specifically devoted to this theme in 2010. Thinking with infinity is a practice which thrives on the notion of nature as an immanent "infinity in magnitude and number". As a collective, Blay suggests, Westerners think with infinity because, and to the extent that, most of them used to be Christians. This means that we are uniquely interested in incarnation of the divine andthat it was possible for usto extend such incarnation to the created cosmos, including infinity. According to Blay, this happened in the 16th century with Copernicus and Bruno, but would come to realise and underwrite the ambitions of a mathematised physics in the 17th century and after. In this respect, Bruno stands at a cultural crossroads: his distinction between immanent infinity in magnitude and number (increasingly informing notions of nature) and transcendent infinity in existence (associated with God), while actively attended to by the likes of Descartes and Malebranche, will ultimately be forgotten by Western scientific culture in favor of the former.
Enter Colbert and the second part of this book.Through a series of examples, the Paris Académie royale (1666) is taken here as a symptomatic case of the way in which human manufacturing fashions an entire realm of 'productive nature' for itself by accommodating living and non-living beings as mere sources of manipulable, productive forces. The latter notion is the precise point, Blay suggests, where thinking with infinity is beginning to enter the workplace. This new presence receives a fateful reshaping in 1829, when Gustave-Gaspard Coriolis introduces the notion of 'work' (force acting through a distance) in mathematical physics, allowing nature to become a source of labor, and ultimately an energy resource.At this point, however, the realities of existence confront thinking with infinity in the progressive 'exhaustion' of things: God, airs, waters, places, and finally man, that "motor of the motor of all Western exhaustions" (p. 105).
Man is at the center of attention in the third and longest part, which is heavily dependent onan earlier book-length study of Blay(2007). This part focuses on the period around the turn of the 20th century, described as the age of the advent of homoenergeia: a reservoir of usable energies which happens to be called 'man'. Energy finally becomes a social phenomenon managed by institutions; so does exhaustion. Interestingly, it is in modernist art that Blay finds homoenergeia most forcefully articulated and celebrated, while the French CNRS circa World War II, the economic thought of von Hayek, and the contemporary modelling of human 'competencies' furnish him with case-studies in the advent of technocracy or, in Blay's terminology, le déshumain.
Indignation is a hugely interesting and important motor for historical narrative. Itwelds together a firm focus on an entire society's present with a critical eye for the legitimizing functions of narratives about the past. Whig history was good at the former and bad at the latter:however, its ostracization in modern academic historiographyoften tends to throw out the good in the name of a misapprehension ofthe bad, only to come up with a meagre art of producing exceptions. There are undoubtedly a huge many exceptions one could make to the historical accounts contained in this book. One could also criticize the author for not taking in critiques of secularisation theses in the history of ideasà laBlumenberg's Legitimacy of the Modern Age; investigations of the dialectical relationship between theology and science such as Amos Funkenstein's Theology and the Scientific Imagination; sketches of man's decentered existence in scientific discourse as offered by Michel Foucault and his countless epigons. At the same time, that would miss the point of a book which is so unrepentant about the primacy of exorcism over representation.