International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 62

Syria: An Epistemological Obstacle
The French people must quite simply recover their liberty, that of expressing themselves
first and foremost. Down with censors, blackmailers, gurus, and intellectual
terrorists: they have no place in the country of reason and liberty.”
Barring a victorious return of the Enlightenment, which would also have to
handle all the ploys of the most obscure digital networks, Alain Chouet, Michel
Raimbaud, and Anas Alexis Chebis do not call for a return to a long-lost age.
Their statements represent a number of approaches, or even prolegomena, for the
deconstruction of spontaneous, ideological, and propagandist phenomenologies.
This is true promotion of a new critical spirit in the service of modern crises.
GASTON TO THE RESCUE!
This non-exhaustive description of some of the devices used in the phenomenology
of Syrian war discourse shows how they prevent and present an
obstacle to a calm, balanced, and rational understanding of a major event
in contemporary international relations. They have taken French foreign policy in
improvised, emotional, and truly ideological directions. They have presented an
obstacle—an epistemological obstacle—to other more reasoned, more developed,
and fairer alternatives.
The concept of the epistemological obstacle was formulated and developed
by philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his book The Formation of the Scientific Mind,
published in 1938. It designates something that places itself between the academic’s
desire for knowledge and the object of study. This obstacle misleads by producing
various immediate, affective, and pre-scientific phenomenologies of discourse.
For Bachelard, however, these are not external to the act of knowledge but rather
form an intrinsic part of the act of knowledge, which thus imagines explanations
to be later refuted.
Applied to the effort of rational, even academic, understanding of the reality
of the civil-global war in Syria, Bachelard’s concept advocates four imperatives:
achieve intellectual and affective catharsis, reform one's mind, refuse all
arguments of authority, and disturb one's reason. In the first chapter of The Rules of
Sociological Method, Émile Durkheim warns the researcher of the risk of error that
he runs in entering the social and political sphere, where the sociologist exposes
himself to being subjected to a sociological pseudoscience already in use among
social actors, just as he also exposes himself to retaining his own thoughts, practices
and interests as a social actor.
In sociology and in all other sciences, including those with a greatest focus
on the non-human world such as chemistry and physics, the whole scientific approach
must in fact transcend epistemological obstacles that prevent its progress
by trapping it in errors that are caused not so much by difficulties internal to the
object of study as by the very resources and tools of scientific thought itself.
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