Sorbonne

The Sorbonne appears as the setting for experiments that expose a limit in the scientific attempt to correlate subjective sensation with objective measurement: the subject experiences a world already populated by objects and other people, rather than an isolated interior from which sensation can be extracted.

Setting and Experimental Situation

The narrator recalls volunteering as a subject for physiologists or psychologists in a laboratory in the south building of the Sorbonne, in the middle of Paris. There, a screen might appear more or less illuminated, tiny electric shocks might be felt, or an indistinct object might brush against the hand. These experiences did not remove the subject from the world: the laboratory and its objects remained present, and the experiment’s meaning depended on communication with the experimenter.

The experimenter asked whether the screen seemed brighter or dimmer, or whether pressure on the hand felt stronger or weaker. The subject’s answers supplied information about things appearing in the subject’s world. Even the question about the intensity of a “sensation of light” made sense only because the subject had learned to use that phrase for light as it appeared in the world. In practice, saying that the sensation was less intense meant that the screen seemed less illuminated.

The Laboratory’s Objects and Relations

The experiment joins distinct objects and forms of evidence: a physical stimulant such as an electric current or chemical agent; a physiological object such as a sensory organ or free nerve ending; the Other considered as a psychic object; and language, through which the Other’s meaningful reactions become observable. The relation between stimulant and sense can be measured through the senses or instruments, while the subject’s responses furnish further empirical information about what happens when particular senses are acted upon.

Yet the observed connection does not carry the investigator beyond the world of objects. Establishing it presupposes scientific and technical skills, a shared world, and an original involvement in that world. Language makes the Other’s responses intelligible, but it too functions here as an objective manifestation. The laboratory can therefore trace relations among objects without turning those relations into direct access to an isolated subjective interior.

Two Worlds, Not a Subjective-Objective Table

At the end of the experiment, the result relates two series of objects: those disclosed to the subject during the procedure and those disclosed to the experimenter. The illuminated screen belongs to the subject’s world; the subject’s eyes, treated as measurable organs, belong to the experimenter’s world. Their connection may serve as a bridge between the two worlds, but it is not a table correlating subjective experience with objective fact.

The narrator’s experience at the Sorbonne thus makes the laboratory a precise example of the limits of experimental interpretation. The subject is never a detached interior being tested from outside: the screen, the pressure, the experimenter, and the exchange of questions and answers all appear within a world the subject already inhabits. Scientific measurement can relate what each participant encounters, but it does not erase the difference between those perspectives or convert lived perception into an object observed from nowhere.