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“Fire and Steel: Typical Examples, or How to Philosophise with Experience”: a commentary

This commentary on Raphaële Andrault’s Le Fer ou le feu. Penser la douleur après Descartes (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2024, 389 pp.) was presented at the Forum Descartes in Turin, 21–23 January 2026.

Towards the end of Le Fer ou le feu, Raphaële Andrault’s study of philosophical and medical conceptions of pain in the seventeenth century, in the part dedicated to the role played by Epicurean moral philosophy, she quotes a passage from Malebranche’s La Recherche de la vérité where the Oratorian criticises the Stoics for being out of touch with human experience:

I can grant that reason teaches us to suffer exile without sadness; but the same reason also teaches that we must also suffer without pain to have an arm cut off […] But experience teaches us well enough that things are not as our reason tells us they should be, and it is ridiculous to philosophise against experience. (Recherche, V, ii, cit. p. 300)

“It is ridiculous to philosophise against experience,” Malebranche tells us. In the event, he states this as the major premiss in an argument to the effect that it is impossible to “stoically” overcome or neutralise the human experience of pain and pleasure or ever arrive at a point where these experiences do not affect us. Malebranche does not elaborate on this premiss. He simply posits it as a general principle of philosophising requiring no justification. In other words, this reputed Cartesian rationalist tells us that reason cannot do without experience in the exploration of a given phenomenon, in this case the phenomenon of pain. And this, of course, sounds like the profession of faith of an empiricist The rationalist-empiricist distinction falls apart. In fact, as we can say it with Andrault, the “shadow of Epicurus” hangs over Malebranche’s entire argument.

Now, we all know already that the rationalism-empiricism distinction is not operative in the seventeenth-century and that it creates more problems than it solves. In that respect, the Malebranche passage teaches us nothing new—that is, it teaches us nothing new until we notice that the principle has a subtler side to it; that it does something different than just scramble an old historiographical distinction between epistemological orientations. For, in the end of the day, Malebranche’s principle aims not at rejecting reason in favour of experience, or at making experience the judge of reason when it comes to the determination of truth. In fact, the principle is not concerned with truth at all. Rather, it highlights the fact that semantic principles grounded in experience underpin the principles of knowledge. It makes no sense to reason against experience, Malebranche seems to say, simply because rational knowledge must be about experience or because reasoning corresponding to no discernible experience is meaningless. We may reason all we want without experience but will not know what we reason about. This is why Malebranche does not say that it is false to philosophise against experience; even less does he say that it is impossible to philosophise against experience. He says that it is “ridiculous.” It makes no sense; all one can do is laugh it off.

So: on Malebranche’s account, what is lost when philosophy loses touch with experience is not so much truth as it is meaning. In the event, Malebranche is criticising the stoics for devising a universal principle of moral action with no possible application. It makes no sense, he reckons, to morally advise a person not to feel pain while sawing their arm of. Such an advice, or rather the principle of it, is at odds with every personal experience and any available historical testimony. We could perhaps today say that, for Malebranche, the stoic’s moral principle lacks reflective equilibrium. When we are talking about getting our arm cut of, paraphrasing Rawls, there is just no way that all the relevant examples and arguments relating to that experience can be brought into conformity with that moral principle (cf. Rawls 1971: 49). So far so good.

Now, I have taken up this passage to say something more general than what Andrault herself uses it for. It is this: I think her entire book, in the way it is structured, in the way it argues, in the way it mobilises texts and contexts, and the way in which it draws on the history of science and medicine in doing history of philosophy—I think it everywhere embodies this same general principle, namely, that it is ridiculous to philosophise against or without taking into account experience. Andrault is very discreet about this polemical backdrop for Le Fer ou le feu, but I think that we can learn something important about what she is up to by highlighting it.

What I have in mind is best explained by focusing on what she describes as “typical examples.” In the introduction, she announces that the aim is to explore, and I cite, “the meaning [pain] has in the post-Cartesian texts, that is to say, in texts written after Descartes’s death which all refer to his philosophy as to a common material.” In doing so, she wants to capture, and I cite again, “a particular philosophical, historically circumscribed moment within which pain acquired the status of a typical example” (p. 17). Hence, she writes, there were “several examples which they very frequently returned to in their writings: the pain occasioned by a sword, the one that results from a pin prick, and the one that corresponds to a burn” (p. 15). Her entire study turns on the way in which these typical examples circulated, how they were used, and, in particular, how they were mobilised for broader philosophical purposes, especially in the controversies about dualism and mind-body relations, where pain “played a major role in the elucidation of the relation between our sensation and the nature of physical phenomena” (p. 145). The typical examples are, indeed, pivotal for Andrault’s study and my aim is to clarify what role they play, exactly.

For Andrault, to say it succinctly, the typical examples are paradigmatic instances of a form of experience, namely the experience of pain. There are two aspects to this characterisation which, I should stress, is not Andrault’s own, but reflects the way I read her. One has to do with Andrault’s methodological use of the examples; the other has to do with the historical material itself, i.e. with the way in which the post-Cartesians use these examples. I consider these two aspects in turn, beginning with the methodological one.

In her study, Andrault develops what she calls an “in-depth” or “thick” historiographical account of a “philosophical moment” (p. 21–22). The typical examples play an essential role in this enterprise as the foundation for organising the historical material, the sprawling corpus of post-Cartesian thought, into texts, passages, theories, and explanations that can be compared, correlated, and confronted with one another. The precise experiences—the burn, the wound, the pin prick—function in her account like longitudinal coordinates from which a cartography of the phenomenon of pain can then be undertaken; they are determined points on the circumference of human experience—specific experiences of pain with specific causes—, upon which all the doctrines of pain can be aligned as so many explanatory declinations of one and the same phenomenon, like philosophical latitudes of pain.

The historiographical role of the “typical examples” does however not reduce to the one they play in the mapping of this heuristic cartography. They play a deeper and more theoretically informed methodological role in a historical epistemology where experience forms the basis. In other words, the “typical examples” provide not just an organisational principle. They point to an underlying understanding of what it is the history of philosophy should do and what it should study. This becomes particularly clear when we understand exactly what it is that Andrault does not do.

By writing the philosophical history of typical examples, what she is not doing is writing the history of an idea or a concept. What she is writing is the history of how an experience was conceptualised, which is something entirely different. This is because, strictly speaking, a “typical example” is not an example at all, at least not in the sense that it merely exemplifies something previously established by other means, as a mere corollary, an afterthought, or a didactic illustration. As paradigmatic instances of a kind of experience, they are first in the order of reasoning. They represent an experiential field, circumscribed by the experiences and practices of patients, physicians, and anatomists, which the philosophers then philosophise about. Here is how she says it herself, with her characteristically discreet approach to polemical statements: “The factors to take into account in the history of pain should not all be sought out on the side of religious or philosophical representations, as one is spontaneously inclined to do; they can be found just as often on the side of the history of practices and techniques” (p. 14).

On that basis, including practices and techniques, Andrault then goes on to write a philosophical historiography which is organised around a both common and medical experience, as opposed to a philosophical historiography organised around an inherited concept. I want you to understand this correctly. She is not saying that we should stop studying pain as a philosophical concept and instead study pain from the point of view of the suffering involved and the medical practices surrounding that suffering, i.e. in short, stop doing history of philosophy and do history of medicine instead. She is saying that a history of philosophy of pain cannot cut itself of from the history of medicine but must keep an eye firmly on the experience of pain recorded by patients and medical practitioners to know what phenomenon exactly that philosophising is about. In other words, as we could say it paraphrasing Malebranche, she is saying that we must do history of philosophy with and not against experience.

I think that is quite original in its own way, so I will say it again, just to hammer in the point. Le Fer ou le feu is truly a philosophical book. It is not a book in the history of science or the history of medicine. It is concerned with philosophers and with the way in which they conceptualised pain. But it is not a book about the early modern concept of pain because pain does not principally figure in Andrault’s account as a concept. It figures as an experience. So: it is a book about the early modern experience of pain and how post-Cartesianism tried to make conceptual sense of that common experience. It does not offer the history of a concept and what that concept meant, but the history of an experience and how that experience was understood. It is not a history of science, but it is also the opposite of a history of ideas or Begriffsgeschichte.

But this is not all. Andrault’s focus on typical examples is not just a methodological move that she adopts to organise her historical material in an original way. This focus is also, in a certain way, dictated by the historical material itself. This is the second, shorter, point I wanted to make.

For the post-Cartesian philosophers, she shows, the examples of pain were not just meant to “illustrate” theoretical constructions which were otherwise conceived speculatively. They were in fact core elements in their theory-building in two ways. First, as was already the case among the Aristotelians, everyday experiences recognisable by all provided the pre-theoretical backdrop for defining the phenomena that philosophers set out to elucidate. The typical examples fulfil that role:  among philosophers, medical practitioners, and patients, they serve to organise the semantic fields where the common meaning of the concept of “pain” is negotiated and constructed; they circumscribe the experience that the philosophies of pain were about. At the same time, however, now going beyond the ancient Aristotelian use of experience and moving toward specifically early modern conceptions, the typical examples also represent simple experiments conducted within a controlled environment. In this capacity the typical examples are not pre-philosophical vectors of semantic determination. They are philosophical vectors of experimental demonstration. This is why, as Andrault writes, in the post-Cartesian philosophers we find “a constant mingling of a phenomenology of ordinary pain and a neuro-cerebral anatomy based on the study of pathological cases.” (p. 17). Take the pin prick. You can reference it as a common experience to ensure that everyone knows exactly what kind of experience it is that you are addressing. But you can also study it as a simple experiment by observing yourself sticking a needle in your finger and registering the outcome of the experience.

These two roles of typical experiences—as pre-theoretical starting points of theorising which serve to circumscribes the phenomenon semantically; and as an integral part of theorising itself, i.e. as an element in the demonstrations proposed concerning that phenomenon—are intimately connected. This is why, in her account, Andrault is always very careful to never sever the relations between everyday conceptions of pain; the empirically based conceptions of pain offered by practicing physicians and anatomists; and the reconstructions of mind-body relations proposed by post-Cartesian philosophers. These levels are distinct, of course. It is one thing to ascertain that ones’ theoretical framework conforms to the initial pre-theoretical intuitions we have about the identity of that phenomenon; it is quite another to say that ones’ theoretical framework must include as one of its elements contrived and organised forms of experience, or experiments, as an integral part of the method of discovery. Still, in the early modern philosophers, Andrault shows, common, physiological, and philosophical conceptualisations of the experience of pain are never separated from each other.

In showing the constant, systematic appeal to both common experience and contrived experiment among post-Cartesians, Andrault clearly places herself on the side of those historians of philosophy/historians of science who reject recent narratives—redolent of but not identical to older descriptions of “rationalism”—about early modern Cartesianism as a kind of “speculative” philosophy. In fact, she demonstrates, whenever someone at the time did attribute purely speculative aspirations to Cartesian philosophers, it was adversaries such as Nicolas Steno who for their part also declared philosophising against experience ridiculous, except they refused to give the Cartesians due credit for their efforts. And this common allegiance to experience, shared by Cartesians and anti-Cartesians alike in the post-Cartesian context, is exactly what transpires in their discussions of the “typical examples” of pain, understood as paradigmatic instances of pain as a form of experience. Like Malebranche, they all thought it ridiculous to philosophise against experience. And this is why, as Andrault shows, their competing conceptualisations of the experience of hand burns, sword wounds, and pin pricks, are all a testimony to how “the shadow of Epicurus” was hanging over most of continental early modern philosophy.

 

MOGENS LÆRKE

 

 

 

 

Research for this blog post was funded by the European Union (NOTCOM, ERC Advanced Grant no. 101052433). Views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the European Union nor of the ERC. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for any of the views expressed herein.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
adminnotcom (January 23, 2026). “Fire and Steel: Typical Examples, or How to Philosophise with Experience”: a commentary. NOTCOM. Retrieved March 15, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15jt8


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