Constituted reason and constituent reason

Behind the variations of the reason there is an ultimate and radical invariant. André Lalande proposes the relevant distinction between constituent reason and constituted reason. The first one is pure 'form', pure requirement of rationality, of coherence and of unity. Pure normativeness that results in principles. As such it is universally and eternally essential in its absolute radicality, necessity, obviousness, universality and totality. The second one is a 'matter' informed by this constituent 'form'. This matter is always multiple, located in space, evolving through time, diversified by multiple human projects, limited in its possibilities of analysis and synthesis, mixed up with multiple not-rational affects, in short, the hard advance of knowledge which is science.

Science is the reason in act and moving. Scandal for the traditional essentialism which counts on absolute contents and final assets. The moving reason discovers that what is absolute in it, it is not what it 'contains', always historically variable, but its pure 'container' possibility, its pure normative 'form'. This pure normative calls for contents. It is always 'form' of a 'matter'. Something like a compromise with the hard advance of the human rational activity which gradually reaches agreement. Agreement of the spirit with itself. Agreement of the spirit with the 'other' reality than itself. Agreement of the spirits with spirits.

The constituent reason is so discrete that it usually does not appear in full light. Leibniz already said of principles they were like the muscles and the tendons. You forget them when you are walking. It is poor compared with the richness of the constituted reason. It is a maidservant. It is tool of any tool. But it is also a queen. Supreme norm of every well considered thinking and of any coherent action. Supreme judge of its capacities. Escort and nevertheless sovereign possibility of a 'no', of a distance, making its irruption in the middle of nature.

All the different 'sciences', at different historical times, in different cultures, through different moments of a same culture, function inside this single and universal constituent space of the logos. Levy-Bruhl believed in a pre-logical state preceding the logical one. In fact logic is of always. Only it functions in a different way.

The reason is carried out historically while removing epistemological and pragmatic obstacles, through the evolution of the material and intellectual 'tool'. Thus scientific rationality is brought up differently. Actually through history we get not-Euclidean geometries, non-Archimedian arithmetic, non-Newtonian physics, non-Laplacian mechanics, not-Cartesian epistemology, and a big lot more. From 'continuous' the intelligibility of matter becomes 'discontinuous'. The space-time reference frames move from absolute to relative. Determinism itself slips on the side of indeterminism. General-purpose logics replace traditional bivalent logics. Contradiction itself becomes rationally fertile through dialectics.

The constituted reason at a given time is only a contingent manifestation of the eternal and universal constituent reason. It appears in the evolutionary plasticity of its historical-cultural forms. It experiments what Bouligand means by the 'decline of the logical-mathematical absolutes'. It knows that an asset of science is provisional according to the evolution of the scientific knowledge itself. The scientific reason changes itself to adapt to conditions of new coherence rising from its own evolution. The reason has not only to transform the raw data of the experiment, it must change itself to adapt to an experiment which changes. The scientific experiment changes in the sense that the solutions brought by science to such or such a problem, at such a given time of history, modifies the data of the problem itself. Science widens thus and modifies its own frameworks continuously. The advance in knowledge coincides with the evolution of the forms and the rational principles.

Through these historical adventures, the reason remains however immutable in its requirements. Whatever the concrete forms of its application, the reason remains imperturbably critical opening and requirement of rationality. As constituent, the reason remains immutably axiological requirement. And it is this actively constituent reason, the reason of any historically constituted reason, which universally governs the matrix space of the human spirit, the space of the logos.

'Science' is not simply made up science, that is the imposing building of the whole of concepts, knowledge, methods, laws and theories. The state of science at a given time of its step is never but one relative and revisable state. Behind made up or constituted sciences is at work the constituent science, the conquest of the scientific reason. A never completed adventure of scientific intelligibility.

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