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Kant as a marker; happiness, a value that unifies the Enlightenment 0:00 To follow on from our last episode, we had gotten to, if I remember correctly, Kant, hadn't we? Well, no, I've tricked you. Yes, we had gotten to Kant as a reference point, if a proper name was needed, but I'd like to warn you against the personalization that these proper names imply. You see, I'm going back a bit to my little refrain from the very beginning of the course, when I told you, don't count on me to referee a brawl between the great names of philosophy by pitting Plato against Aristotle, Epicurus against Spinoza.
0:36 And I prefer to insist on what they all have in common as philosophers in search of Sophia. But this is a bit linked to that, and very precisely, especially because we had gotten to us. Here's what I'd like us to say. It's modernity that is in the process of appearing. It's us, it's you, it's me at that moment. We're at the end of the 18th century. I won't repeat myself, but you can see very well that the English industrial revolution has just occurred, the French political revolution occurring at the very moment when Kant is working on his enormous critical edifice, to the point that it shakes up his little habits, as we saw, since he's going to cross the famous boundary of his walks to be the first to get news of the storming of the Bastille.
1:20 It's quite an extraordinary period all the same. And so when I say Kant, I'm quite willing for us to say we had gotten to Kant, if Kant is simply the nominal reference point that expresses in the most adequate way, the most impressive way, the most rigorous way above all, that takes stock of the emergence, the appearance of this modernity. I want to insist on the break that this modernity presents in this little preamble.
1:50 Let me remind you that if there's one idea that unifies the whole century of the Enlightenment, the whole movement that will end in the cracks I was alluding to, cracks whose effects we still feel—I don't say we suffer, because there are also positive effects—we still feel the effects. This century isn't homogeneous; what could be more opposed than Voltaire and Rousseau? Voltaire, who was an entrepreneur, as we'd say today, wasn't he? Very industrious, shrewd. In fact, he had a little silk factory in Ferney, in Switzerland, and he counted on his connections at Versailles, and the marquises, to promote and advertise it. He's a real entrepreneur. There you go. And then his general conception: we must cultivate our garden, we must give up metaphysical wanderings, deal, here and now, with what's in front of us and enrich the little reality that it's capable of dealing with. There you go.
2:52 But what could be more opposed to Rousseau, who gives priority to politics over what seems to be called economics in autonomous terms? So we really should get around to having you give a presentation. Tristan should give us a presentation one day on the autonomy of economic science as a question. There you go. We don't have brilliant representatives of this discipline every day—we have them every day on the airwaves, but we don't have them in flesh and blood every day. There you go.
3:28 So, this century, so diverse—the seriousness of Montesquieu, very attentive to institutions and to what is concrete, one of the very first sociologists, the word didn't exist yet, seeking what is objective in laws, so that it wouldn't just be men's fancy. "When I set out to examine men, I believed they were not guided solely by their fancy." That's the first sentence of the admirable preface to The Spirit of the Laws. Well, everything explodes. What unifies it despite all these divisions? Despite the deadly struggle between Voltaire and Rousseau?
4:05 It's... Hello Sacha. That makes me happy. I met Sacha south of the Sahara, deep in Niger. That makes me very happy. We haven't seen him in a long time. What unifies it is the value of happiness. It's the century that dared to speak for the first time of happiness as a value. Not salvation. Salvation had existed before, of course. Look, the century before, Pascal's whole work is devoted to the salvation of the soul.
4:37 Enjoyment, we've been talking about that since antiquity too. Enjoyment, fleeting pleasure, the Epicureans, the libertines of the 18th century. There's no shortage of that. It's the height of libertinism. In both its senses. In the sense of morals, of course—Casanova, Don Juan, the Marquis de Sade, of course. But also in thought. Because it's very serious thinking. The libertines were also about freedom of thought. They were the ones who were atomists and materialists right in the middle of absolute monarchy.
5:09 Like an evil, the Cyrano de Bergeracs, Gassendi and others. The underground of official thought at the time, if you will. That's a bit what the libertines were. They were the underground of classical thought, of classical metaphysics. But what was new was happiness. I'm not going to give a course on happiness today. Soon. We're soon going to finish the theory of knowledge. Because then comes the philosophy of action. We're going to talk about more concrete things, which concern us more intimately. But for now, I'm not there yet. Still, I want to point out, to situate things, that we need to distinguish happiness from things that resemble it.
5:42 It's always the same. I've already told you we're not going to waste our energy looking for the difference between a thimble and a chainsaw. We look for differences between things that can be confused, not between things that can't be confused. Now, happiness, pleasure—all that gets a bit mixed up. So let's be clear. What characterizes happiness, to go quickly, is first of all a certain duration, as opposed to pleasure or enjoyment, which can be extremely intense but fleeting.
6:18 A duration, and it has a necessary relation to the world. There are the two characteristics. To the outside world. Because I could be in prison, condemned, etc., and at the same time have inner peace. Peace is something else, you see. I could have balance, peace, through meditation, whatever you like—that's possible, why not. Whereas happiness presupposes a positive relation to the world. A golden color in happiness. Like that of the sun, of oranges and gold. Sorry. So, why am I talking about happiness now?
6:49 Because this value manages to unite Voltaire and Rousseau. Nothing opposes them more than the way of reaching happiness—both are sure of that. Voltaire, roughly, through enterprise, and Rousseau through social justice, let's say. And yet this century talks of nothing else. This notion, not religious like salvation, but secular. Since it's linked to our relation to the world, here below, and not to a beatitude promised after death.
The mal du siècle: Senancour and Rousseau's melancholy 7:20 Which is quite respectable, and not in question here. But it's a distinct notion. You'll see where I'm going with this—I'll get there right away now. In a few years, in less than a generation, I'm now skipping over the cracks I mentioned earlier. And I'm going right back to the beginning of modernity. I'm skipping, I imagine, the end of the Age of Enlightenment. I'm skipping the Revolution, the wars of the Empire. I'm in the Restoration. Now people talk of nothing but unhappiness.
7:51 Literature teachers know this well—it's called the mal du siècle, the sickness of the age. What characterizes the modern period, starting a little after, as the industrial revolution begins to enter into customs, gradually transforming other lives—more slowly in the countryside, faster in the cities—is this unhappiness. If I read you texts by those who best expressed the mal du siècle, I'm not thinking only of Chateaubriand, of young Chateaubriand, of René, of René's anxieties, but of a remarkable author, one who has perhaps most surgically analyzed the mal du siècle, treating it with great objectivity, as it deserves.
8:35 It's Senancour, who is a bit less well known than Chateaubriand, an admirable writer. There was only one after the... wait. It's Senancour, that's the name. There you go. Who wrote only one book, so you'll find it easily. You'll find it in Folio, I think, in a paperback edition, called Obermann. That's the name of the hero of his novel, an epistolary novel, Obermann.
9:08 You'll find extraordinary analyses there. He's a young gentleman. In one letter he says, I am fortunate, surrounded by friends, etc., and I lead a sad life, empty though nothing is missing. Well, these are things that are familiar to you now. It's become the ABC of modern literature. But this mal du siècle still had something rather voluptuous about it among the Romantics. It had a certain pleasure, a voluptuousness of melancholy that Rousseau inaugurates. Remember that well. Letters to Malesherbes, which I told you about last time.
9:40 I didn't tell you about this passage, but at one point he says he was overcome by a certain sadness—I quote—"which I would not have wished not to know." There was, in this touch of melancholy, a voluptuousness. And now, as modernity progresses, I move quickly from the Romantics to Baudelaire. I'm taking literary reference points because, from a school standpoint, they're roughly established. With Baudelaire, it's spleen, a mal du siècle that worsens, and which suddenly takes on a physical dimension.
Reading of Baudelaire's "La cloche fêlée" 10:11 In Baudelaire, spleen too—we'd say today, at the time they'd say idiosyncrasy—psychosomatic, a psychosomatic suffering, wouldn't we? And more than that, an anguish, extremely painful sensations that have nothing more to do with the voluptuousness of melancholy. In fact, there's a text of Baudelaire's where, if you want to contrast the two, you can compare the voluptuousness of the Romantics' melancholy with the extremely anguishing side of Baudelairean spleen.
10:44 There's a poem called "The Cracked Bell," which is short, like a sonnet, fourteen lines, and which takes you—it's poetic alchemy, it's extraordinary—which transmutes, if I may speak like the alchemists, the melancholy of the beginning into a nightmare in fourteen lines. You'll see. "It is bitter and sweet"—bitter and sweet, there's Romantic melancholy. "It is bitter and sweet, on winter nights, to listen, by the flickering, smoking fire, to distant memories slowly rising to the sound of chimes singing in the mist." We're doing well there, you've seen it already—a little fire in the fireplace, the little bell ringing chimes, a little music, it warms things up, or better still, as in the 19th century, I pay musicians.
11:26 Proust, in his agonizing illness, in his room he never left, would have the Capet Quartet come—who were the best interpreters of modern music at the time, that is Debussy and Ravel. And when they had finished playing the last quartets of Beethoven, they would finally get up from his bedside, and he would shower them with banknotes, just like that. That's rather generous, isn't it. I'll end with that last example, but Wagner—now that's even better. Wagner had a father-in-law—not everyone gets that. He had married a daughter of Liszt, and Liszt was the greatest virtuoso of all time. You'd say anything to him, and he'd say, play that for me.
11:57 So he could play you the Prelude and Fugue of Bach, right there in the salon. Or the piano version of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, right there at the piano. So, there you go. "It is bitter and sweet, on winter nights, to listen, by the flickering, smoking fire, to distant memories slowly rising to the sound of chimes singing in the mist. Happy"—it's not unhappiness—"happy is the bell with the sturdy throat." It's a theory of communication, if you look at it closely, of information.
12:30 "With the sturdy throat, which, despite its old age"—churches are old—"alert and in good health, faithfully casts its religious cry, like an old soldier keeping watch under his tent." There's extra security. The church and the army. The bell, the church. "Like an old soldier keeping watch under his tent." And the army. Sleep soundly, good people. That's not me speaking there. That's them, the people, ordinary people—those who live to the rhythm of the good bell.
13:00 And there begin the tercets. That's only eight lines so far. "As for me, my soul is cracked"—new line. "As for me, my soul is cracked." So he compares himself to a bell—a bell that would no longer have a function, since it's cracked. The purpose of a bell is to carry far. It's cracked. I told you, it's a theory of information. "And when, in its anguish"—in the strong 17th-century sense; take it back a notch, that means anguish, not annoyance—"and when, in its anguish, it wants to fill the cold night air with its songs."
13:31 Watch the decrescendo. "It often happens that its weakened voice seems the thick death-rattle." We're far from... "It is bitter and sweet, on winter nights..." "Seems the thick death-rattle of a wounded man left forgotten by a lake of blood, under a great heap of the dead, dying, motionless, in immense effort." We're in a full nightmare. In fourteen lines. What happened? There you go. I'm dwelling a bit to show you what's at stake in the period we're studying, and which we're linking for now to the name Kant.
How is it that it works? From mirror to prism 14:02 Which is quite legitimate. But I say this to tell you that it goes well beyond the person, even beyond the work, of Kant. Even if it's in Kant's work that we'll see these problems I want to address best developed and clarified. So let me continue now. The problem I raised last time, and to which Kantianism attempts to provide a solution, was the one I had posed in the form of the question: how is it that it works? If you remember. We make, we elaborate concepts.
14:32 We, we, the scientists, elaborate concepts. These concepts extend into judgments. Judgments into reasoning, etc. And that's how we appropriate the world—the movement of the tides, of the moon. That's how the thought of this animal barely out of the forest appropriates all the movements of the universe in six lines of Newton's law of universal gravitation. Well, the problem isn't that it works. That's a fact, not to be disputed. The problem is: how is it that it works?
15:03 I told you last time that I'd like this to become a real question for you. And to help you with that, I'll quote you one of the most beautiful sentences of Einstein, which has considerable epistemological scope, because it poses the problem very well. "The eternal mystery of the world," he says, "is its comprehensibility... The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." You see? There, it's not the physicist speaking. It's a true philosopher of science and of knowledge. That goes far. The extraordinary thing is not that we can know the world.
15:33 Knowing the world—we manage that, fine. We have predecessors, we just need to... Newton and all that, we just have to carry the torch a bit further. But how is it that it works? How is it that the world is such that we can know it? And I told you last time that this question had to wait for modernity. You see why I gave this long preamble on modernity? For it to be able to arise—because before, the religious answer preceded the question, which therefore could not be asked.
16:03 God created the world and our mind in such a way that the world would be knowable by our mind. I quoted you Spinoza, who says that the order and connection of ideas is the same as that of things. The order and sequence of theorems in a scientific model is the same as what happens in reality, between, say, hot air and cold air, which then produces wind, then the wind chases away the clouds, then that causes a drought. So the religious hypothesis, whether directly religious or present through the mediation of metaphysics—of which I remind you the Ancien Régime, especially the 17th century, saw the height, the apogee of classical metaphysics: Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Malebranche—that's what we're talking about, everything that precedes Kant, precisely.
17:03 It's the fact that it works that poses a problem. And, from there, I think I'm getting to the essential point, from last time's result: the Kantian solution consisted in completely changing the subject-object relation in the operation of knowledge. Up to now, I made you a little diagram, remember, the object had the status of a mirror. That's the image I took, I took an optical metaphor. The subject was passive, like a mirror.
17:34 Consciousness is affected by impressions coming to it from outside, sensations, perceptions, which it records, and then stores in its memory, like a blank page. Whereas, still staying within the field of optical metaphors, if we had to compare the subject as Kant sees it to an optical object, I took the example of the prism, rather than the mirror.
18:11 The great difference being that a mirror tries to be as faithful as possible—the better it is made, the more faithful it is to the reality in front of it. Whereas the prism, on the contrary, is a little factory that transforms the white light arriving at the input into colored light at the output. The spectrum, Newton, etc. So the subject is no longer a passive recorder.
18:43 It is no longer determined—we were talking about determinism—it is no longer determined from outside, like a child, like a schoolboy who, as Kant says in the preface I read you, lets the teacher say whatever he pleases. Right? But it is a true, a real site of transformation. I said a little factory, intellectually speaking. And so I go back a bit to this diagram. And I'm going to continue from there, you see?
19:15 I had called this here classical thought—pre-critical thought, if I remember rightly, since we call Kant's philosophy criticism, pre-critical. So, whether one is empiricist or rationalist, whether one is a Cognitionist or an ATE thinker, in every case the subject, which is here, behaves like a mirror, doesn't it? And I took an example—since I'm a bad drawer, I'm pleased to indulge myself a little.
19:47 There you go. And then, with the correspondence well formulated by the scholastic formula, there is nothing in the mind that has not first passed through the senses—nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuerit in sensu. Indeed, there can be nothing in the mirror if there wasn't first something in front of the mirror. That seems self-evident. Whereas, with Kant, I told you, the subject is this—that is, something does arrive from outside.
20:17 Like an idealist—I'll get to those notions today—but it doesn't just passively record what comes to it, it transforms what arrives into what? Well, that's the notion we'll take up today: in the world around us, our perception, what Kant calls the phenomenon. That's what we're going to dwell on today. But before that, I'd like to multiply a few images. Kant's thought is such a reversal that it needs to be made a bit concrete. I already took the example of the prism as an image.
Yellow glasses, realism and idealism, faculties of the subject 20:47 I'll take another image—let's imagine that we, you and I, were born with yellow glasses that we could never take off. Plato's myth of the cave begins like that too. We are chained since birth, in the form of glass, in the form of a corpse—let's imagine our sight is chained, the yellow glasses. It's obvious that we would take yellow to be a property of being, of the outside world. Kant's work is precisely that—that's the reason of Kant, in a sense.
21:17 It's to examine what comes to us from the outside world and what we bring ourselves. Because if we mix the two up, we won't know anymore—is this objective or subjective? That's the great work he did. Because the given, contrary to what the empiricists thought—who thought that what is given is sensibility, touching with fingers—we've seen how much mediation there was in this supposedly immediate experience. And besides, I look at the Earth, I see it moving—but that's not what's going to give us scientific truth, the eyes.
21:48 I'm not talking about spaces in eleven dimensions as they speak of in mathematics today. String theory—you're going to talk about string theory now, you'll explain it to me. It's one of the latest cutting-edge theoretical developments. And the reason I'm using this image of the yellow glasses is to help you better understand what is meant here by a priori and transcendental. Because the yellow light is not a transcendence—it is there, in every single thing I see.
22:21 It is there, it is immanent, in all the things I see. As a result, I get the impression that it emanates from the objects. Whereas it's me, the projector, sending out this coloring. So that's modernity. Originally, the subject takes nothing upon himself. It's God or nature that matter, and I make do with what they make of me. Whereas here, I told you it's no accident that this is contemporary with the French Revolution—there's a real emancipation of the subject. The subject is at once both legislated and legislator.
22:54 That's where I'm going to dig in a little more today. By insisting, not on new oppositions, I'll group those together afterward, but on what's at stake in these oppositions. Rationalism, empiricism, dogmatism, skepticism, all of that is a shadow theater, a Chinese-shadow play unfolding on the back wall of the cave, and it conceals much more concrete stakes. For example, the opposition between rationalism and empiricism. Should I base knowledge on experience, empiricism, one could say sensory experience, or on reasoning, statements, logos, ratio, reason, rationalism.
23:34 An example of what's at stake. If empiricism is right, I am determined by the external world, aren't I? What is in me is only an effect whose cause is out there. So, first, I always come after, and it's always the real that comes before. And so I make an assertion that belongs to metaphysics, I cross a threshold into metaphysics here, called realism. Careful, I'm not at all talking about literary realism.
24:04 literary realism. But about realism as opposed to idealism. Another dichotomy, but I'll group them together for you to show you it's not as complicated as that. It's a bit the same pattern of reactive theorizing. Realism opposed to idealism. These are like terms in a multiplication table in the history of thought, one being the antonym of the other. So realism: the external world exists independently of my thought, independently of the fact that I think it, see it, and so on.
24:37 You'd say, that's what the corner tobacconist thinks. Yes, obviously. Much more unexpected: idealism. Much further from immediate opinion, for which, exactly the opposite, the world around us is not reality but the reflection of the subject. Yes. In the previous case, I am the mirror reflection of the real. You see, of the reflection.
25:08 Whereas in idealism, think of dreams. I think I see my grandmother appear, but I am the projector. It's not when I dream of her while she's been dead for 20 years — no. There, everything I believe to be external, isn't it? — is in fact only the reflection of the inner world that is in me. To go very fast: my own fantasmatics, in the proper sense. Fantasma, meaning the production of images. I say that because the word fantasy, in the Nordic languages, German and English, doesn't have quite the same meaning, a bit lighter than in French.
25:41 Very important. In the field of the imaginary. So, the fact... Do you see what's at stake here? Idealism, realism — there's nothing else at stake than life and death. Well yes, if I depend on the external world, that's more anxiety-inducing. I don't have my principle within myself. Whereas if I distinguish the soul from the body, the body as perishable and the soul as the immortal part, well, I save my skin a bit.
26:16 There are these stakes behind it. What Kant will call the interests of reason. Reason is prodigiously interested, for Kant. That's not good. In knowledge, one must be disinterested. In knowledge, I must not say what is good or bad according to me, or what is beautiful or ugly, but what is true and what is false — which is not at all the same thing. Whether I like it or not, I must say what is. I'm recalling the fundamentals we've seen from the start regarding knowledge. And leave to morality, to law, what ought to be. The ought-to-be.
26:47 So, in principle, if reason has interests, that's not very good for knowledge. Well, that is indeed what Kant says. He is harsher toward reason than toward understanding. He is harsh toward reason in the operation of knowing. Because reason has interests. And sometimes, in the name of its interests, it pushes understanding around a bit. And that is what produces the great metaphysical theories, which seek to unify the whole field of knowledge all at once in a somewhat hasty and dogmatic manner — whereas understanding proceeded step by step.
27:19 So, very quickly, the scheme of knowledge for Kant unfolds as follows. There are several instances, what Kant calls faculties within us. At the front, that is, in the most immediate contact with, closest to, the external world and the real, at reception — it's fitting to say so, since he speaks of receptivity — at reception, there is, of course, what he calls sensibility, the senses. The faculty, sensibility.
27:49 Then there is understanding, in a more internalized way, the faculty of concepts. Here it's no longer just about seeing something appear, but about saying it's a raccoon and not a microphone. Concepts. Classification, category, etc. And then there is reason, which is the faculty of ends. Which reflects on ends. I must pursue. Now, Kant's strength is to have shown that already at the level of sensibility, the apparently most passive part — think of my mirror, etc. — there is already work done by the subject.
28:21 So, I sketched this a bit quickly last time. It's the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason, titled the Transcendental Aesthetic. Aesthetic taken here in the proper sense, on the theory of the senses, in the sense of anesthesia — you suppress sensibility in the physical sense. And in the Transcendental Aesthetic, we get this rather incredible result: that space and time, which until now were the frameworks of the external world — we already noted this last time — are brought by the subject.
28:51 When Kant carries out the critical examination — that's it, you see, critique having the same radical root as sieve. You know, there's a sieve, a strainer in the kitchen. There's what passes through and what doesn't, the good seeds and the little pebbles. So when he carries out the critical examination, when he sifts through what comes from us and what comes from outside, he speaks, regarding what is external, of the manifold.
29:23 The manifold of sensation is brought to us from outside; there's also matter. Matter is brought from outside. Form, on the other hand, is brought by the understanding. That's what I'm going to develop. But already at the level of sensibility, space and time are already an ordering of the real. The order of time follows succession. The order of space, on the contrary, follows simultaneity. In space, things are simultaneous, exist at the same time.
29:55 Partes extra partes, as the scholastics said — beside each part, outside it. Each part being external to the other, if you will. And for those who had naively believed until Kant that our knowledge of space was itself derived from sensation, Kant points out that no sensation is possible unless space is given first. This isn't a chronological priority — that would be less serious — it's a logical priority, which is even stronger. I gave you the example of musical perception last time.
30:25 So try to listen to a musical note if time is not given beforehand. It must last a stretch of time, perhaps even an infinitesimal one, for the sound to be perceptible. So time is here a category already presupposed. So, if I take this — time and space tipping over into interiority — the great stakes that precede Kant, the great oppositions idealism-realism: if idealism is right, the soul is eternal, yes, those are the great stakes.
The phenomenon is neither thing in itself nor appearance 31:03 Kant provides a solution to them, but not at all in the mathematical sense. The mathematical solution is x equals 2 at the end, when you pose the question of the unknown. The solution here is to pose the problem on completely new grounds, such that it can no longer be posed as before. In other words, to show that the problem as previously posed is a dead end, with no assignable outcome, an illusion, if you will. It's a bit like telling children to chase the rainbow because there's a treasure at its foot that keeps slipping away as they go — illusions.
31:38 So, what does he mean by that? Well, remember our problem. There was Newton, who gave us the intelligibility of the world around us and was starting to give substance to Descartes's dream of making man the master and possessor of nature, since he was beginning to know its laws — never so much as thanks to Newton, at the time. And when you know the laws governing a process, well, you command that process.
32:09 And then there was Hume, remember, who said: yes, it works, but good grief, it works, it works. There are many false things based on habit, which is a subjective notion that we've taken for objective, and so, as long as it works, fine, sheer luck — but still, it's a bit annoying that what makes humanity function rests on such poorly grounded foundations in terms of right. He didn't want... this problem, we insisted on it quite a bit last time. Now you see how Kant resolves the problem. Hume is wrong, Newton's laws are indeed universal, with reservations we'll see later, since relativity theory came to somewhat limit this universality.
32:46 But still, it does apply to all bodies that aren't moving too close to the speed of light, let's say, to go quickly — Newtonian mechanics works, no exceptions needed; there's no need to wait, as Hume would, for some experience to one day contradict the fact that water boils at 100 degrees. No, that's not it. But we shouldn't believe that we have found the laws governing objective reality itself. That is Kant's contribution. These laws govern what he calls — I'll tell you again a second time — the phenomenon.
33:17 Now, the phenomenon is not something that either exists or doesn't exist. Sorry — now we get to the serious matters. Serious matters are never at the extremes, but in the murky middle where the extremes are forced to compromise with each other. If Kant had been an idealist in the sense — let me remind you of the definition — the position of thought for which my consciousness exists independently of the external world, precedes it, and the external world is only its reflection, etc.
33:57 If he had been an idealist, he would have said the whole of the external world is the product of the categories of our understanding. He doesn't say that. He does not say that we are responsible for the existence of the external world — that would be a lapse into metaphysical idealism. He says that we legislate. It's not because we legislate for a people that we created that people.
34:27 Legislation only gives the form, the rule of behavior that the people must have, but it is not responsible for the existence and birth of that people. This is very important. So when he says phenomenon, it's a notion to look at closely. Its opposite — as always when something is a bit complicated, thinking of its opposite makes it luminous. He opposes the phenomenon to what he calls the thing in itself. An sich.
34:58 I see this book. What is this book in itself? That is, when I don't perceive it, when I'm not looking at it — because even looking at it is already an embryonic form of knowledge. It's already an activity of me as a subject. And for good reason: the fly looking at it doesn't have the same vision at all. You know a bit about it — there are facets on their eyes. It's sensitive to colors we don't see, and vice versa. Women, when pregnant, smell odors they don't smell when they're not pregnant. Our perception is also an effect of the state of the body.
35:29 And horses panic very easily. You know, they're often fearful because, on the contrary, they have magnifying eyes that make it seem like a small dog passing by looks like an ox about to charge into them. So, I mean, you have to factor in panics. This object in itself, as it is in itself, I will never know it and no one will ever know it. We can only know the way it appears to us. Us — not 'appears to me.' We're not in the subjective and individual whim. Kant isn't entirely a fool.
36:00 But the way in which we can only know its phenomenality, that is, its presence in time and space. And he goes so far as — you might say, this is a limitation of knowledge. He says we can never know reality in itself. That sounds simple to hear, but it's a complex notion, that of the phenomenon, because it is a mixture between the objective reality-in-itself of the realist, and the pure subjectivism of the idealist, who sees only his own thought as existing.
36:40 Kant's position is much more synthetic with the notion of phenomenon. Yes, Newton is objective, and not caught in the subjectivity of habit. His laws have more objectivity than the mere fact of being due to the habit of seeing things this way — but because they apply not to the world that exists in itself, but to the phenomenon. You see, there's a limitation, almost a humiliation, of knowledge in Kant. That is, knowledge always seems to happen a bit on the surface.
37:12 So, the phenomenon, what is it produced by? By... hello. By the manifold. Let me go back to what's here. Sorry, I signaled it wrong. This is supposed to be a question mark, you can't tell, I can't even redo it. That's the thing in itself. That's why I put a question mark. Yes. So there are things, aren't there, that come to us from the manifold, I'm putting question marks.
37:45 smells, scents, whatever it may be. And then, this is what he calls the manifold of the sensible. Manifold of the sensible. He also says it is the matter of knowledge — how is he not an idealist? The subject does not create the matter of knowledge. But what does it create? That's what we're going to see now in the reverse direction.
38:20 Here, there is what I oppose to matter, what is opposed to matter: form. Something becomes an object of my perception, and I call it a matchbox. The conceptualists. And it is the collaboration of the two, the matter brought to the mind and the form brought by the mind, that constitutes the phenomenon. It's up to us, philosophers, especially critical philosophers like Kant, to do the sorting.
38:54 I do see a sifting, a sieving. Critique, and crisis, and sieve share the same radical root, the name. That's it. What passes through, what doesn't pass through. It either passes or it breaks. That's what critique is. There's our new object. Does reality exist independently of me, or is it, like a dream, only a representation? That's the title of Schopenhauer's most famous book.
39:24 The World as Will and Representation. There you have it, the great idealisms. That's indeed what it means. It means that only the will exists, but that is a great unknown, a bit like the question mark. Because as soon as it manifests itself, it takes the form of a Vorstellung, a representation. Even so, in effect, that's what stands before us, what is required — I am not telling you that Kant tells you that the world around us, the sensible world, is a world of appearance. Because one could understand it that way — if that were it, as it was a century before — that Kant is someone who holds that reality is elsewhere and that the sensible is illusory.
40:03 And that we should not concern ourselves with it, because there, there are eternal ideas. A greater than B implies B smaller than A. I mean to say that this world doesn't move, it isn't in temporality, it isn't true on Tuesday and false on Wednesday, etc. It's true in Paris and false in New York. No, no. That much is certain. But that comes at the price of writing off the whole world around us and fleeing upward into the cosmos noetos, the world that can only be thought. It's the same word as noumenon now.
40:34 The intelligible world. So, if Kant had contented himself with saying that the world around us is bunk, that it's the back wall of the cave, he would be renewing the Platonic gesture. He doesn't say that. He doesn't say it's an appearance, he says it's a phenomenon. I'm forced to write it out again. I've already told you I'm not a French Heideggerian who puts a German word in parentheses after every French word.
41:08 A book. But sometimes it's necessary, because these are important clarifications. 'Appearance' is Schein in German. You find the language of... In English, 'to shine' means to shine. To shine, that means to appear. Because all that glitters is not gold. I said that already. Schein. It is also beautiful. It needs to appear.
41:40 There is schauen. To see. There is Anschauung. Intuition. These are fairly rich layers. So, a phenomenon — that's E-R-S-C-H-E-I-N-U-N-G, Erscheinung. You find Schein in there, of course.
42:10 But, all of a sudden, with an activity added. Erscheinung — that's the equivalent, as a suffix in German, of '-tion.' As we say — as we oppose freedom, which is a state, to liberation, which is an act. It's like that. It's not appearance, it's an appearing, a coming-into-appearance. It's more active already. As if it weren't a matter of a mere collection of something, as here, but as if there were someone underneath seeking to appear.
42:45 There you have it. Kant's great revelation is that between the subject and the object, there is the subject itself. But a whole part of the subject that the subject itself is unaware of. And as philosophers, isn't it indeed our goal to know ourselves? Not to ignore too much what properly belongs to the subject. So we must take stock of this whole completely unconscious activity — not at all in the Freudian sense, but completely unnoticed by consciousness — which means that at every instant I subject the surrounding reality to what he calls, moreover, categories.
A priori forms and categories: the astronaut's object 43:20 Time and space are not yet categories, they come a bit before the categories; they are what he calls the a priori forms of sensibility. You know well what that means — Kant has the advantage of speaking precisely, once you know it, it's very simple. It means, first, that they are forms — there's still nothing in them, it's a frame, there's no picture yet — these a priori forms do not come from experience; on the contrary, they will serve to found it. A priori forms of sensibility, they will ground sensible experience — seeing, touching, etc.
43:52 With the categories, on the other hand, let me make you understand them this way: imagine I come back as the first cosmonaut of the planet — I won't even say Mars, let's take a planet from a galaxy even much further away — and I come back and give a lecture. I have a bag in which I've brought back an object never before seen on Earth, one that exists only on that planet. So, to get the audience a bit worked up, I do this before opening my bag: guess what it looks like, you see.
44:27 but you already know, without ever having seen it, there are things you know about this object — can't you tell me a few, things that hold true for any object whatsoever? Pardon? It is extended — bravo — it occupies a certain space; whether that space is 300,000 km or a tenth of a micron, it occupies a space, otherwise it isn't an object. And that, we didn't need experience for — you can't look inside the bag to know it.
44:58 It occupies a certain duration, if it occupies a space, it occupies a certain duration, otherwise it would disappear at every instant, at the very moment it appears, it has already disappeared. If I take the categories, since Kant is going to make a real table of categories, with his table of twelve categories, like multiplication tables, we pretty much all have, this is what Aristotle called—because the word category already exists in Aristotle, even if they have a different function. Aristotle has a good definition: the categories are the most general predicates of being.
45:29 We just saw this with my example of the object coming back from the planet Mars. Whatever particular features this object may have due to its environment, the planet it was brought from, there are still general predicates of every object, such as occupying a certain extension, a certain duration, etc. And now I come to categories like this one. If I take the category of quantity, every object has an aspect by which it lends itself to measurement, for example.
46:00 Well, Kant is going to divide the category of quantity into three moments. Hegel will pay tribute to him for having understood this movement of triplicity already—namely, quantity as unity, that's the thesis; antithesis, plurality, fine, plurality is opposed to unity; synthesis—sorry, singularity, no, that goes with the... singularity is the first one, what did you say?
46:32 Unity, there we go, singular unity. But it's good to think about it. Come on, I'll guide you: a pebble, all alone, unity; a pile of pebbles, plurality; the set—ah, I like that move you made—the set, yes, there's no word for that, sorry, it's totality. What is a totality?
47:05 It's a plurality brought back to unity; every totality is uni-total, isn't that so? A pile of pebbles can never be a totality. It's an indefinite plurality; you add a pebble, you take one away, it remains a pile of pebbles. You remove the cerebellum, there's no more Pagani. In an organic being—that's what we think of when we think of totalities—first of all, the parts are not distributed at random as in a pile of pebbles.
47:37 You take a pebble out, you cannot reconstruct from that pebble the shape of the pile it came from. On the other hand, with a dinosaur tooth—since the eighteenth century and Buffon—one can entirely reconstruct the totality of the animal from which that part was taken, which proves it is more than a part. Because if it were parts of a whole as in the pile of pebbles, one could not reconstruct it. It's because it's an organ. For example, if the teeth are like this, it's a herbivore, and so it will have a stomach like this one, a bit like a cow's, and not like that of a carnivore with pointed canines for cutting meat, for tearing it.
A totality that unfolds in time 48:12 There is a logic of totality, as if all the parts were conspiring together within the totality. So you see clearly the work Kant does: thesis, unity; antithesis, plurality; synthesis, totality. A plurality brought back to totality, a plurality brought back to unity. I note in passing—I'm digging a bit deep here, it's a bit abstract, but it exercises our minds so we can better see simpler things later on that are very important.
48:42 And the stakes are not negligible. If I were at totality, I told you the emblematic example of an organic whole is the living world. Precisely because each of the parts is only conceivable in relation to the whole—the tooth is not something indifferent to the stomach and vice versa. But be careful not to have too spatial a vision of totality—this is a warning I personally insist on. Take the plant, precisely.
49:20 At every instant, it is total. Whether it's like this, or like this, sorry, or like this two months later, if I water it well, etc. Well, you can see that many things change: the size, the height, the thickness of the bark if it's a tree. But there are things that don't change. In the case of a tree, there will always be the structure, the roots, the trunk, the foliage above; the roots will not be underground.
49:51 Except in the case of baobabs. Have you already seen photos of baobabs, or perhaps baobabs in real life? You get the impression that the tree was stuck head-first into the ground and that its roots are up in the air, there are branches a bit like that. It's because Africans, Malagasy people in particular where there are many baobabs, say that it's the gods who sent baobabs down like that—they fell on their heads, they are buried head-first. So the plant has invariant elements and elements that change. And that means when I take it at that stage, I must not say I have the total plant in front of me.
50:26 I'm beginning to notice that it still has stages to go through. And so its totality unfolds in time. This is the point I want to insist on a little, a delicate one but one that will serve us later. It's not the totality of a house. A house would be a whole whose windows would be parts, or the bathroom would be a part. That's a spatial totality that corresponds well to the concept of totality as we saw it in Kant, that is, where everything has a function, the kitchen is there, the living room is there, the pipes, etc.
50:58 But the electrical pole, etc. But a totality in space—there, it's fixed. It's not evolving. Whereas if I take the example of the living, for instance, one can only speak of the totality of the plant once it has completed its process. I'm telling you this because there's a long way, I don't know, from totality to totalization. I'll take the opportunity, since as far as I know no one claims allegiance to totalitarianism in politics and there's an anti-totalitarian consensus—there aren't many consensuses, so let's take advantage of this one—to say that I completely disagree with a definition of totalitarianism that has been most popularized and that originates with Hannah Arendt.
Totalitarianism: a part crushing the whole; Faust and action 51:50 I remind you all the same that she was the student of the most Nazi of philosophers. I won't press the point—if you want a debate, we'll have a debate about it. But I'm telling you what I think. Now, what I hold against these conceptions—for now I'm just being insulting, so it's not very convincing. What matters more is that the discourse we generally hear is about the poor individual crushed by the global society surrounding him. So the good individual is the one who will be praised by the anarchists in '68, the one who rebels against the establishment, it's the student who says the teacher is a fascist because he put his desk 50 cm higher instead of coming to sit among the students, etc.
52:34 I'm exaggerating a bit. The one serious thing in all this is that thirty years later there's Marine Le Pen, because when you trivialize fascism like that, fascism becomes more dangerous. As Clouscard used to say: under the paving stones, Le Pen. Meditate on that profound line of Clouscard's, under the paving stones, Le Pen. He said that at a time when there was only the father—he had a nose for it. I'll continue my story about totality. What I hold against it is that it takes the exact opposite of reality. What is monstrous in the historical figures we associate with totalitarianism, and which we are right to condemn?
53:11 That it involves the great Stalinist purges, that it involves Nazi barbarism. What do they have in common? A society that crushes the individual—I see exactly the opposite. I see a part crushing the whole. The single race at the expense of humanity—a race of masters is singled out like that, given all the rights, the others have none. The single party—yes or no? It's not totality that rules. If it were totality, that is, you, him and me, we would rule too. Totality is everything.
53:43 In the whole, nothing is left out. Yes or no? If the whole were in power, that would be the best news for democracy. That's never told to you. You're told it would be worse than totality in power—obviously. Because the concept of totality that I'm working through with you gets replaced by an image, namely the great rallies in Nuremberg, etc., or the parades on Red Square. In short, the concept is replaced by images, which is very dangerous at a time of speech, because it creates confusion, and it's on confusion that the worst political theories flourish.
54:23 At the midpoint of the segment, where the extremes almost touch, so that we no longer know who is progressive, who is conservative, who is Nazi, who is communist. We no longer know—as these fashionable ideas go these days, I might point out in passing, these red-brown ideas. Goethe, a contemporary of Kant, a great German of whom Nietzsche said he would always be above the Germans, he would never belong to them. A good German, even in the words of that terrible anti-German Nietzsche—well, who became anti-German on the ground to needle Wagner, but that's another story.
54:59 Uh... Goethe's hero, Faust, his most famous hero—there's a scene right at the beginning of Faust where he sets about, in his laboratory, translating the beginning of the Gospel according to Saint John, the famous prologue of John: 'In the beginning was the Word'—the verb, first, he translates it, he wants to translate it, it's a little play on words: modern Germany began when Luther translated the Bible into German.
55:33 Historically, you can't imagine it. Before that, everything that existed... well, people were illiterate, 90% of people were, and so... But they were pious, they went to church and all that—what does the gospel say? You had to go through the church, outside the church, no salvation, for interpretation. So it's a fundamental political act for Luther to translate the Bible into German—it no longer depends on Rome over there, on the understanding, we can't be told, from Rome where palaces are being built, we pay Michelangelo with our German taxes, there's a whole history to it.
56:03 We're going to do the Reformation, we're going to stop paying Rome. No, come on! Well, I'm not defending Rome, but I am defending Michelangelo's paintings. He translates: 'In the beginning was the Word.' He says, I need the spirit to inspire me. You know, the spirit in the Protestant world is a fine custom—Protestants, anyone can go up into the pulpit, even if he isn't ordained like a priest, and give a sermon. That's interesting. Anyway—the spirit doesn't inspire me. It's possible that the word creates everything in everything. The word is evanescent, it's done.
56:36 So I correct myself: in the beginning was the Will. We already sense a progression from object toward subject. If you look closely, the pen must not be hasty. It's an admirable passage. I'll translate: in the beginning was the Force. If there isn't a force at the start, so to speak. I'll open a small parenthesis—I had a friend, an agrégé in physics, who, when I asked him what energy exactly is, told me: look, give me the concept of energy and I'll give you everything else. He said, I can't define it, but if you give it to me—correct me if I'm wrong—I can define everything else in physics as a concept.
57:09 All right, the Force. And then finally he writes, radiant, inspired: in the beginning was the Deed. An admirable passage. Well before Marx said, philosophers have only interpreted the world—the Word; we want to transform it—Action. You see, these are dichotomies that haunt modernity. So I made this rather long digression to make you attentive to this somewhat delicate notion of totality in time.
Procrustes: abstraction forcing reality 57:47 I'll finish my political digression by telling you that I am not defending the regimes labeled totalitarian against those who condemn them. I'm saying that what is criminal in them is not that the whole exercises a diktat over the poor part that I am, among others, but on the contrary, that a part has arrogated to itself the right to speak in the name of the whole. I said single party, I'll say single race.
58:17 Today one could say single thought or the single market, which starts to become dangerous when you want all of reality to conform to the law proper to a single part. The Greeks have an admirable myth for this, a myth we should think of every time we're tempted by formalism—not by form, form is very powerful, working in the formal, the pure forms of mathematicians—but by formalism, the ideology of form. A very beautiful myth is the myth of Procrustes, which some of you have surely heard of in mythology. Procrustes was one of those brigands, one of those bandits who lived at the crossroads of the none-too-safe roads of the time.
58:54 We talk about insecurity today, it makes me laugh. And one of those monsters that Theseus, Hercules, mind you, purged the earth of—these are our buddies, they clear the earth so mankind can live on it, the heroes, the demigods. So this one's fantasy was to grab passersby at the crossroads and stretch them out. Depending on the translations, it's a bed or a table, doesn't matter, a flat surface. And the person captured had to be exactly the length of the table—see the formalism.
59:28 If he's a bit too tall, they cut him. They cut him. If he's too short, he's stretched. Like someone being quartered. There you go. That shows well—you know, it may seem like I'm joking, but there is no greater criminality in history than when an abstraction absolutely wants to force reality to be adequate to it. Hegel gave a very fine analysis of the process of the Terror during the French Revolution, and he was an admirer of the Revolution—not of the Terror specifically, but of the French Revolution.
1:00:01 And he says—it's typical of the formal in power—virtue at the formal level, and they ended up cutting off heads like cabbages, that's his expression. There have been much more murderous things than that. I remind you that despite all these abuses and the blood that was shed, the French Revolution lasted how many years, Catherine, roughly? We have a better historian of Paris with us, that's a pleasure. Three years? The French Revolution, in number of years, roughly four, no?
1:00:32 The Revolution—no, no, the Revolution up to the Directory. Historians don't agree. Yes, well, roughly, from the storming of the Bastille to the Directory, that's not very long. That's from '89 to '95. There you go, there you go, six years, actually. And on... I'm losing my thread. Thank you. During those six years, there were X thousand deaths.
1:01:06 During the Paris Commune, in three weeks, there were 75,000 people killed. Ah, they're not the same. They're workers, things like that. I'm not comparing them, mind you. Well, anyway, we talk about it much less. I'm not trying to count the corpses, but since some people do, from time to time you have to set things straight. And I'm not talking about the deaths that interest no one. They're contemporaries, of the world you have lived in... nearly 3 million dead in Angola. They're Black people, nobody cares.
1:01:37 2 million in Vietnam. 50,000 Americans who left their skin in Vietnam. 2 million Vietnamese. I was born in '45 in Hanoi, under American bombs that were there for the Japanese at the time, and we were already fighting against subversive communism. It's constant carnage, all of it. Especially, as far as I'm concerned, if I were to circulate a little petition—if I still hold to what I'm saying, that there are more priority deaths, I don't know, some kind of contest among the stiffs.
1:02:10 But still, it's because I lived there a lot and it was African schoolteachers who taught me to read and write—I do have a cultural debt toward that continent. But it's the massacres of what's called the African Great Lakes region. How long has that been going on? Sixty years. We're at over 15 million dead amid general indifference. There you go. All this because we were talking about totality—unity, plurality, totality. There are the categories.
The noumenon, negative knowledge, and the possibility of freedom 1:02:40 If you forget what that means in Kant, think of the little story of the cosmonaut who comes back and of whom you can guess a priori—Kant encourages you to do this before opening the bag—certain properties that are common to all objects that appear in the field of phenomena, of time and space. And this distinction will prove extremely fruitful for him. The distinction of all objects into phenomena and—oh yes, I haven't told you the antonym of phenomenon—the thing as it is in itself but which cannot be known. That's the noumenon in Kant.
1:03:13 We had a philosophy teacher who rambled on a bit—I remember once, when we wanted some peace, we'd say, 'Sir, what exactly is a noumenon?' He'd launch back into long demonstrations and we could play Scrabble or whatever. There you go—maybe that'll happen to me too when I give lectures, because I also go on and on. So, the noumenon is what can never be known, but that's no reason not to think it, says Kant. If I become aware that I've been wearing yellow glasses since birth, I still don't know what color the world is, since I told you I couldn't take them off by hypothesis.
1:03:48 Do we agree so far? So I have no positive knowledge as to the reason for the world, such as the color of the world in itself. On the other hand, I have negative knowledge. This is the furthest point Kant reached in getting closer to what will follow after him with Hegel and dialectics, for that matter. I know the world is not yellow, because I know that comes from me. So the noumenon offers no positive knowledge.
1:04:18 It must be thought even though it cannot be known, but it indirectly gives us negative knowledge. It may seem like I'm splitting hairs and getting lost in subtleties. Let me get straight to the point. You know well that the stake, since the beginning of this course, is freedom. We saw that without freedom, philosophy is impossible—I won't go back over that. There's the postulate of practical reason. We're soon going to start the philosophy of action. You and I are a bit tired of the philosophy of knowledge—it's rather thankless compared to more interesting things, looked at more intimately. It's not the domain of politics, of the love of the beautiful, the ugly, the good, the evil—not just the true and the false, which is knowledge.
1:04:57 That's going to be interesting. But between the two there is freedom, which is the keystone that comes to finish our arch of the philosophy of knowledge, which comes to finish it logically—and I hope I've demonstrated this a little, but I'll continue—but also chronologically, since I told you we arrive at modernity through a revolutionary complex between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and it doesn't stop there. 1789, after trying to get rid of the king—bang, 1830, and then bang, 1848, and then the Paris Commune, and then the October Revolution of '17—it doesn't stop, to the point that we could say that the nineteenth century, which is the only one without a nickname—the others have the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the classical age, the age of the Sun King—the nineteenth is the century of revolutions, that's all it is.
1:05:40 So the stake, I'm telling you, is contained in the notion of freedom, because—why am I talking about freedom again when I'm talking about negative knowledge? What's the connection? Well, if until then determinism denied freedom in the name of causality—there is no spontaneity, heat expands bodies; if there is expansion, it doesn't come from the body and its spontaneity but from a phenomenon, from another object external to it that determined it. Likewise, as I said earlier, if there is wind, it's because there are air masses colliding and pressure differences—there we are in the order of time, of the succession of causes and effects, you agree—causality presupposes the order of time; it's even thanks to our sense of causality as human beings that we have bearings in time. Sometimes we can deduce from the shape of a river's estuary that it carried pebbles down from high mountains, or that it wandered for a long time across a plain, meandering—so we hold here
1:06:50 the wolf by the ears a little, because if what opposes freedom—this determinism—no longer concerns reality itself, that's the good news Kant announces to us, but only the phenomenon—we don't know what the thing in itself is like, but what is certain is that it is neither in time nor in space, and so freedom becomes possible again in the order of being-in-itself. Possible—here again I give you the three modalities, you don't have to write all this down, but: the possible, the first moment of modality as we say in logic—possible, first degree of knowledge, that's already something; real, in addition to being possible, there we have the reality of the thing itself; and finally necessary—it's not real just by chance, but on top of that it's the effect of a law. So: possible, real, necessary are the three stages that all scientific knowledge dreams of. For a phenomenon to be possible, it's enough that it contains no contradiction. That doesn't mean the thing will actually exist—I told you the other day that the statement 'a castle with 2 million rooms has twice as many as a castle with 1 million' is
New criterion of truth and Copernican revolution 1:08:00 a perfectly true statement that corresponds to no reality—this is where we see the disjunction between truth and reality. Still, the notion is not impossible—a castle with a million rooms encloses no contradiction, just a few difficulties, but man has seen worse. So there's the great shift that occurs with Kant: this emancipation of the knowing subject, who no longer settles for the criterion of truth that had prevailed until then. I'll tell you—the great criterion of truth in scholastic thought, which reigned for centuries, is that truth is adaequatio rei et intellectus: there is truth when there is adequation between what I have in my mind and the thing I'm talking about—which still seems obvious, when the reality of the book conforms to what I say about it, that it's a paper object weighing so many grams, etc. But in this conception, the subject is always a little bit on a leash behind the object; it has to be adequate to a model, there's always the model-copy relationship—that's why I told my story about the mirror.
1:09:10 In my mirror story, it's the subject who is the copy and the object who is the model, whereas in the case at hand here, starting with Kant, the criterion of truth is no longer the adequation of the mind to the thing, but the adequation of the mind—finish my sentence—yes, no, no, no, that's still external, the phenomenon to itself. What does a mathematician do when he doesn't contradict himself? He stays close to himself, bei sich, as they say in German. Well yes, we do have to become aware of that today: the adequation of thought to itself—that's why it was mischievous, the inscription written on the pediment at Delphi that gives philosophy its program: know thyself, gnôthi seauton. I told you last time, what's important in it is not only knowing.
1:10:20 And you, that is - what is it that makes an invariant, the same, the identity that is maintained in me between the toddler I was at 8 years old and now, despite the physical changes in character and mood - what makes an invariant that allows us to speak of an identity? All philosophers have run up against this problem of the one and the multiple, of identity and otherness. The Greeks, to train themselves, posed this kind of difficulty which is excellent for exercising our logical mind: starting from how many hairs is a bald man bald? Starting from how many pebbles do we have a heap? Is two pebbles a heap? We can discuss it. The Greeks loved this kind of discussion - they were originally traders; people used to argue in commerce, as they say in Africa: 'you just have to talk and everything gets sorted out' - before war, between crisis and war, you still have to talk a little. This emancipation of the subject of knowledge...
1:11:30 It's curious that it occurs right at the moment when Rousseau emancipates the subject of action through the social contract - a historical coincidence, you see. So I was talking about what? About adequacy, the new criterion of truth. Old criterion: the mind must conform to the thing, reflect it, conform to it. Modern criterion: the mind must conform the thing to itself. I remind you of the passage from Kant that I read to you one last time: 'Reason must approach nature with, in one hand, its principles, and in the other, the experiment it has devised according to these principles, and thus come before nature not as a pupil who listens to whatever the teacher chooses to say, but as an appointed judge who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them.' That's the preface to the first edition. This emancipation is enormous - otherwise you get an empiricism of observation that could last 10,000 years without ever producing a single scientific law.
1:12:40 So I was saying: adequacy of the mind to itself. The mind recognizes no external authority in matters of knowledge - I'm not in Rousseau here, I'm in Newton, in logic, in physics, in the human sciences perhaps. I mustn't contradict myself - there, I've already said it, so I always say the same thing despite the variations it can take. Now Rousseau, at that very moment, founds the contract and a political thought in which he says that man must not bow before anything that is given to the subject we are - that is, either nature or supernature, God. Atheists and believers, materialists and mystics may well oppose each other, but they have this in common: they both want man to submit to something already-there, a given already-there, whether natural or supernatural. Don't look for what sense of morality and values - there, he says, boom boom boom, or in another legislation, the good is to cut off the thief's hand.
1:13:50 From the moment there is this parallelism - because I said here we had separated knowledge and action, you see - and there, suddenly, the same phenomenon happens, and both come together in Kant. I had told you that Kant's whole richness was to have united - to have been sensitive to Hume's critique, in particular regarding knowledge of nature and our claim to formulate universal laws - and Rousseau's contribution, which completely overturns political reflection by placing right above force and founding societies on the contract, therefore on mutual recognition, and no longer on a state of fact which is most often, moreover, a relation of force. That's what I wanted to insist on in this first part, then - this reversal.
1:15:01 of perspective received, from Kant's pen, an expression that has become famous - he calls it a Copernican revolution. Why? He says: because when you look at what happened with Copernicus - before Copernicus, we understood nothing of the system surrounding us because we were motionless and we let the universe turn around us, the great orbs of Ptolemy. The Copernican revolution consisted in making the spectator turn around the stars, says Kant - making him active, moving from center to periphery. Well, this symbol of the Copernican revolution has been permanent since Kant in the expression of modernity, and if I insist on the emancipation of the subject, it's the common point to all these attitudes, because you see it's valid both on the theoretical level - I showed it in the change of the criterion of truth, that's really the theoretical order - and in the order of action.
Human rules and laws of nature 1:16:13 which we will soon approach, through the exceptional position that Rousseau gives to freedom as the very foundation of anthropology. One cannot understand anthropology, therefore develop what we agree to call the human or social sciences - never mind for now the nuance that has a meaning elsewhere - one cannot develop it if one doesn't put at the outset something that distinguishes them from the natural sciences. Because if it's an annex of the natural sciences, as the cognitive sciences think, believing that human sciences are made from stimuli, reflexes and things like that - I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, these are very interesting things, but precisely they explain what is not human in man, but what he shares with the animal. Take demographic laws for example - you see, these are disciplines, we're in the human sciences, I'm not so sure. The distribution of sexes at birth is a great stroke of luck, that roughly 50-50 males and females are born - imagine if it were 80-20! I've seen that the balance of this world is hard to find, but then, I've already told you about those ponds in Africa at the end of the dry season where there are 8 crocodiles left fighting over 10 square meters because there's no more...
1:17:25 much room left - it's generalized brawling, there aren't many females left, and at the very moment I'm speaking to you, there are societies where the great task is to go and snatch one or two women from the neighboring little tribe - it's vital. I'm thinking of the Papuans of New Guinea; I'm not being very murderous about these guys, I'm not condemning them, not much choice. But a little anthropological digression - to go very quickly, I'm getting a bit ahead in our research into the human sciences and the philosophy of action, but very quickly: there are laws in the natural sciences, I won't come back to that; there are rules in human societies. A small nuance: polygamy is a rule, not a law - the proof is that, as Pascal said, 'truth on one side of the Pyrenees, error on the other' - that's the difference. Rules are less constitutive than laws. Kant often opposes the notion of constitutive to the notion of merely regulative, as he says - merely regulative, where I'll come to what is an exception: there is a rule that is truly a rule because it doesn't come from nature - we'll prove it later, but I'm telling you right away - it's the prohibition of incest, which is common...
1:18:35 to all human societies, which is as general as a law, even though it isn't natural. Look at the bee communication system, which was extensively studied by Frisch the entomologist - one of the most sophisticated communication systems in the animal kingdom, along with that of dolphins, etc. But I don't know if you know roughly how it works: a bee that has spotted booty returns to the hive and, to communicate to her mates where the booty is, performs a figure-eight dance like this, whose main axis forms a bisector with the sun and thus indicates the direction - the direction is indicated, so the others rush in the indicated direction. But moreover, the quantity of food she has found is also signified by the frequency of the eights she makes - I quite like that, the booty is the hard rock, isn't it, I don't much like - it's adagio, lento, ma sostenuto. Well, so don't rush...
1:19:45 to say this is a language - it's anything but a language, it's a communication. Many things do pass from one animal to another, but firstly it's innate - there are no conservatories where bees learn to do the dance, the figures - there's no learning, whereas the code we have between us right now to speak - if I had been born in China, it's obvious that it wouldn't be this one I'd use - it's not innate, there are no molecules, no genes for the French language in us at birth. No, but there are a lot of fantasies - one must stop from time to time - there are genes for lots of other things, eye color, whatever you like, for such or such disease, which is already more troubling, but genes for sociological things by powers - that's contradictory. So language is what is brought from outside - more seriously, we talked about wild children - language is not just the tongue, and if it isn't brought before a certain age, it can no longer be acquired, isn't that so - I'm thinking of wild children who have been studied, the real Mowglis, not Kipling's. So if I come back...
1:20:57 to this exceptional rule which has the universality of a law, the prohibition of incest, while remaining a rule - I come back to my story of the crocodile pond and the brawl, and that there isn't enough for everyone. Because us, we're in the Paris market, for the girls, for the guys, doesn't matter, it'll work out for both sexes, what I said is fine, there's a market. When you're deep in the forest, a tribe of say 150 inhabitants, 70 men, 70 women roughly, a bit more women - I remove women I could marry, my sisters, my mother, the incest prohibition, the old ones, the babies - not many left. There you go, that's to defend my little Papuans who are going to try to snatch one - it makes one dead, one and a half dead sometimes, then afterwards they arrange little feasts, they give pigs, 30 pigs for the guy who was killed - that's fine, that's well settled. But there, I'm in the process of showing that things are quite different in human affairs...
Obeying the law one has prescribed for oneself 1:22:07 than in the laws of nature. So from when do all these problems out there start to take the form in which we pose problems today? The distinction between natural sciences and human sciences already presupposes this post-Kantian modernity. If you take Aristotle's system, philosophy is the general science, and there are parts of philosophy which are physics, astronomy, zoology - the treatise on the parts of animals is a treatise by Aristotle. It's a megalomaniac pretension to want to assign to the frail shoulders of philosophy this task of being a kind of encyclopedia of the external world. But I'm not casting stones at Aristotle - he was an excellent observer, I mean he wasn't just an amateur in zoology - there are still studies on the placenta of the galeos, or dogfish, if I recall correctly, that are still authoritative. And then when he was Alexander's tutor, he had found the dream job for a Greek who should have been massacred by a Macedonian - he got off well.
1:23:17 He becomes the tutor of the new master of the universe - let's be serious. When Alexander set off on his campaigns toward Asia, he sent scouts to bring back specimens of animals and plants. While Plato is more fascinated by mathematics, by the timeless, Aristotle is fascinated by the living, by biology. So this - we didn't wait for Kant for that. What is new is this tendency of the subject to yield to nothing external to itself. When Rousseau says in the Social Contract, 'the impulse of mere appetite is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed to oneself' - I'll stress the reflexive 'to oneself,' which is the most important part of the sentence even if it's just a few words - 'obedience to the law one has prescribed to oneself,' and not that has been prescribed to me, 'is freedom.' That's a strange definition. It's interesting - on one hand, you understand it: I'm freer when I obey myself than when I obey under constraint - everyone will agree on that. But obeying - I thought being free was not obeying.
1:24:27 For Rousseau, there is no contradiction between obeying the law and being free, so long as I am party to the law, I recognize it as my own, and it's the one I would remake if I were called to vote today. There, I'm making all sorts of hypotheses - not that I'd like to see it verified in everyday political life, but well, after the revolution there are restorations, we can't help it. We don't live in a revolutionary world, we don't live in a reactionary world, we live in a conflict between revolution and counter-revolution since the end of the 18th century. It seems like nothing, but concretely it matters a bit, what I'm saying, because if you add up the revolutionary years, it doesn't amount to much, it doesn't last long. The French Revolution, no doubt the greatest government our country has had in terms of number of innovations - even today we have the Convention on the French Revolution, the metric system, the engineers, all that stuff, it's fantastic - after which, a few days in 1830, 1848, the Commune - I don't count it, I have enormous admiration, but because it's a revolt crushed in blood, it unfortunately couldn't be a revolution, that is, an inversion of order and powers - it's a term that comes from astronomy.
1:25:37 revolution, revolution of the stars, what is above goes below, what is below goes above. So it's precious to see that this no longer stops, once the subject poses the problem of freedom, you can't hold it back with little dikes. That's the point I wanted to draw your attention to, but above all to the completely unconscious side of the categories and a prioris that Kant develops - the subject is much more complicated than it thought itself to be, it thought itself simple. Look at the Cartesian cogito - there's nothing there, there's the fact that I think, then afterward there's a progression, but I am a thing that thinks, res cogitans - it's really - there's still an existence, and it's a bit abstract. The subject does not take for itself everything of which it is nonetheless the author - and that's important because I said the word 'subject.'
1:26:47 to avoid saying either the person, or the individual, or the singular - someone told me earlier, but these are precise notions, let's maybe put a little order precisely into these notions. In the individual there is 'indivisible' - so the individual is always a totality, if it can't be divided it's because at the start it's a composition, it's something that can't be decomposed once composed. So the individual is one of the most complex notions of thought - perhaps one of the greatest efforts of intelligibility humanity has produced is Aristotle's system - for his time it's fantastic, everything that was clarified, the number of concepts that were brought forth that still remain - you see, genus, species, individual - we still use them in Linnaeus's time, in the 18th century, to classify the animal kingdom. Even an effort of intelligibility of that scale would get lost in the sand...
One is always already in action; Freud listens to the patient 1:27:57 if there weren't the unity of the subject to gather them together. So why am I making these distinctions? Because I was taking Aristotle's example - some have said that his whole work consisted in trying to give an ontological status to the notion of the individual - because for us it's simple, we take the individual in the biological sense, right, and even there it's not yet obvious that it isn't divisible. So, and so on. I'm in the process of saying that we've gone the wrong way since the beginning of our sessions. I reassure you, I'm not saying you've wasted time with me, but even so, we have lost time, but we had to go through this loss of time - you'll see why - in order to gain some.
1:29:01 Ok? Because - what did we say at the beginning? We gave a definition of philosophy, two questions: What can I know? What must I do? Well, it's 'what must I do' which is the more important for defining the specific field of philosophy, since 'what can I know' it shares with the sciences. So it's 'what must I do.' But what is properly philosophical is wanting to answer the question 'what must I do' in an epistemic manner and not only a doxic manner - not only through opinions, but through a knowledge.
1:29:32 Reminder of the beginning. So, on the question 'what must I do,' let's do as Plato and Socrates did at the start of the Republic. We want to deal with matters concerning action - what is the ideal city, what must be changed in our city so that these ills stop overwhelming us. And then, suddenly, we notice we can't do it directly, we have to take a big detour through what we've done these past weeks between us, theoretical philosophy. We need to know a great many things. Because what is the good? Already, true and false is complicated, but then the good and the bad.
1:30:07 There, a big detour. That's where we made a mistake. Because that presupposed that I could set action aside and pass transparently to knowledge. What does Kant teach us with this image of the prism? It's that we are always within action. I believe I'm on objective ground, the ground of knowledge, epistemic ground, and I bring with me all my prejudices, all my habits. That's why I insist on the word unconscious, which are so - not of a psychological order, I'm not talking about my habits as an individual.
1:30:41 But that in the end, our error consisted in confusing - in distinguishing and separating. We were right to distinguish the moment of knowledge - one must know what is, whether we like it or not, I said that earlier - and the moment of action, where things must be changed, acting is that. Whether it's pouring acid onto chalk - it makes bubbles. Limestone is effervescent with acid.
1:31:14 Every action consists in establishing an otherness, a change - otherwise it's not an action - within the surrounding world, and not leaving it in identity. That's why, small parenthesis, I'm annoyed by the notion of sustainable development. I find the intention very nice. Well, you can't ask a circle to be square. To develop is to change, it's not to endure - it's the opposite. What do you want? That's like the flame wanting to blaze without wood. No, no, no. The flame believes it's the master, that it's devouring the wood.
1:31:47 Except that when there's no more wood, there will be no more flame. A fine example of dialectic, the flame and the wood - look, each is in turn master and servant, so to speak. There, that's what annoys me about this notion of sustainable development. Either you leave things as they are so they last - why not, I'm attached to an old little house, a door that wobbles a bit, but why not, it has tremendous charm - or I develop, so I change. Sustainable development is strange.
1:32:18 Sustainable change. And Hegel says in the preface to the Phenomenology - manifestation is another word for phenomenon, that which manifests itself - manifestation is the movement of coming-to-be and passing-away. That, the early Greeks had seen well. Genesis is phthora, generation, corruption, life, birth, death. That's what becoming asserts against permanence. So, I repeat: manifestation is the movement of coming-to-be and passing-away, a movement which itself neither comes to be nor passes away. There is nothing eternal except becoming, precisely.
1:32:50 In this mobilist thought, as it's sometimes called, which goes back to Heraclitus, who said, 'Panta rhei, everything flows, one never bathes twice in the same river.' And one always bathes in the same river - one mustn't forget the rest of his sentence. He's a great dialectician, who forces us to think about what we call the river. Is it the water passing? In that case, it's no longer the same. Or is it the banks? Then we define the river without the water. Very dialectical, the notion of river. There. We are always within action, I'm saying, always in the process of categorizing - even seeing a thing is already imposing on it.
1:33:27 a certain status. Vision is very alienating. I had taken the example, in a completely different context, of Freud's contribution to the therapy of psychic suffering. I recall that before him, the patient was examined from every angle, examined until the third Broca's lobe was found, which is at the origin of aphasias, or of the left temporal lobes. Yes, cerebral localizations - a kind of illusion of cerebral localization. Like the fact that there's a traffic jam at Place de la Concorde doesn't mean that's its function.
1:33:59 Anyway, that's not my subject today. But what Freud does is invert this process. He doesn't examine the patient, he listens to him. He can even turn his back to him. The inverse relation. Those before Freud examined without listening - which was consistent with their positivist point of view, since this speech had no meaning.
1:34:29 It's a machine grinding because there's no oil. I'm exaggerating a bit. But there, these are mechanical symptoms, and not - things that have a meaning, that call for a response, that address themselves to me and to every man. A capturer of meaning, that is, every man. So, one doesn't look at him. He is senseless, the madman, by definition - Wahnsinnig, as they say in German, Sinn is meaning. One doesn't listen, one examines. Well, those who weren't mad going in were sure to be coming out, under that regime.
1:35:00 Whereas Freud listens to him. And he listens in order to hear, in order to be attentive to what this patient doesn't say, moreover. Can you imagine? But don't think that's easy - it's not at that moment that I'll say 'you say that, but your unconscious...' No, no, no. Because what I don't say, what I don't want to tell myself, and what Samuel or Wilfried don't want to tell themselves, are not the same things. So one must properly restore each person's utterance in order to reconstruct their unthought and their unconscious.
1:35:30 We don't want this to be an arbitrary operation consisting of injecting meaning from outside. That's what I mean. It's not a matter of reading between the lines, as Freud says. Everything is in the lines, everything is said. The unconscious expresses itself and spends its time expressing itself. I take the example of that meeting of businessmen where someone said, 'Now we're going to make a toast to our director.' 'To make a toast' is 'anstoßen' in German.
1:36:01 Sorry - 'Auf'... no, it is 'anstoßen', excuse me. And 'to burp' is 'aufstoßen' and not 'anstoßen'. And of course, the man makes a slip, the executive: 'And now we're going to burp to the health of...' Oh, sorry, Herr Direktor, sorry. Well, clearly relations weren't the best. Or like that anatomy professor he'd seen at medical school, Freud, who was a specialist in the nasal cavity, and who addressed the lecture hall in these terms, saying: 'Now I come to the nasal cavity, so hold on, because it's complicated.'
1:36:36 And I can tell you, in all of Vienna, the people who really know the nasal cavity well, including among doctors, could be counted on the fingers of a single hand. Not on the five fingers of the hand - on the finger, singular - there was only him in Vienna who really knew the nasal cavity, on the finger of a single hand. Laughter in the room. In short, the truth, when you want to hide it, you say it. Goethe again: 'The truth is that which, when we push it away, we embrace it,' he said. And in the Gospel it is said, 'The stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.'
1:37:09 In the construction of the temple - 'the stone which they wanted to reject' - repression, you know - 'has become the cornerstone.' Indeed. The worker - excuse me for suddenly getting a bit political, but I'll say - well yes, it doesn't exist anymore, it's not archaic, that, the proletariat, that, the worker, it's services now, we have services everywhere, we have white-collar workers, we have executives, we have intellectual professions. No. In fact it still exists, but it's been transplanted to Slovakia. There have never been so many workers in the world.
Kant's limit: a subject without history 1:37:41 They've simply been relocated a bit. They're not the same ones, but we take the result without its becoming and we live under the illusion that we live in a world without workers. There. We owe it to Kant, all the same, to have revealed the activity of the subject and its decisive position in knowledge - but its limit, well it's fine, I'm just paying tribute here - its limit - we haven't finished with Kant.
1:38:14 We'll come back to it. I tell you right away - it's that these structures, these a prioris, come from a subject without history for itself. Every time he says how it is that we see things through time and space, he says 'our reason is so made that...' It's in our nature that... The nature of our knowledge is so made that... There's a kind of timelessness to the construction of human knowledge. There's no history. Which is very curious, because Kant was the first to show to what extent time was constitutive of the subject, but he didn't dig into one of his most brilliant discoveries.
1:38:48 It's the importance of time. I told you last time that all classical thought, before Kant, strove to reconcile thought and extension - astronomy in Antiquity, and afterward, only that gap remains. And that from the end of the 18th century, in Kant's time, it's rather the relation of man to time that will give the meaning of the problematic of modernity, I think, in relation to history, social history, time of labor, economy, etc. The relation to time will become much more important.
1:39:22 So there, the point is that there is a timelessness. And this subject has no content. I spoke to you earlier of the noumenon, the unknowable, the thing-in-itself. There are two fundamental noumena. One on the side of the object - this is Kant speaking - the object as it is before my knowledge is exercised upon it. We will never be able to know it, and ultimately it doesn't much matter. And the subject, such as - I was able to, but you see the subject that sends out these concepts, doesn't it, to go and classify the matter sent to it by the sensible, and these classifications are formulated in the form of concepts and languages.
1:40:05 In short, the function of the real and the logical function facing it, the composite of the two which gives the phenomenon - all of that is timeless and without history in Kant. There is nothing further from Kant than the notion of genesis. We never have genesis in Kant. So this is the abstraction that is going to nag at the successors, the admirers of Kant, the generation that followed.
1:40:35 Sometimes it's called post-Kantianism, sometimes German idealism - Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, I mean, others less well known like Reinhold or Bardili, who are very important. Anyway, never mind, we're not doing history of philosophy, but what is their problem, as we've just seen, which arises in the immediate post-Kantian period? It's to give a content to this rather mysterious subject who legislates for nature, isn't it, and about whom, in the end, little is known.
1:41:05 Now, if Kant did very well to show that our knowledge of nature - physics in a very extensive sense, comprising sub-continents like chemistry, biology - if Kant was right to show that nature, thanks to physics, has a legal form corresponding to law, on the other hand, I mean, there is nothing that allows - you see clearly what limits knowledge in Kant, it's limited to the phenomenon, going beyond is illegitimate - and we rarely see the quality of Kant, which is how he increased our knowledge.
1:41:50 I seem confused, let me be very clear. He increased our knowledge of the external world. On the other hand, in the world of the human sciences, it's a blackout. I quoted Clouscard earlier, with his Toulouse accent, saying: 'Kant, he saw everything, he saw everything, but as soon as he saw it, he lowered the curtain,' as if he didn't want to see. And it's up to his successors to sort it out afterward. He saw it - there was freedom, the subject, behind all that. But it would be up to Kant's successors to give a content to this subject.
Pierre and Paul: doing what I want, doing what pleases me 1:42:24 and see that the paths of freedom are not quite those of nature. And this work, which will occupy us next session, presupposes—I'm just raising the problem today, and I'll simply raise it, not develop it—presupposes that we're in agreement about this famous word, freedom, which we've been circling around, and now we need to tackle it. That's going to happen, Loïc, since you're quick. If I ask you, frankly, sincerely, just like that, what does being free mean to you, what would you spontaneously answer, without going to look in books or reflections, without playing clever?
1:42:58 Sorry? No, no, no, I'm not asking you—the question is easy, of course—but what would you answer, spontaneously? Yes, but bravo, in philosophy you have to start by being sincere, it always pays off. And afterward, of course, you have to reflect on your sincerity, against—oh dear, what I just said doesn't hold up, because, because, because—but you have to start by saying, well yes, free, I do what I want, don't philosophize over people's heads, otherwise you'll never catch up with them.
1:43:29 The problem is that it's not simple to know when I'm doing what I want—I don't know what I want. That's where the philosopher steps in. And for that, I had given you a little anecdote, but let me pick it up again. Peter and Paul, do you remember Peter and Paul? Well, no, don't work at it, don't remember Peter and Paul? Go ahead, Ulfric, remind us. All right, it's two candidates for the baccalauréat. Yes, that's it, yes, to know which of the two acted freely. So, you're going a bit too fast—two baccalauréat candidates who slacked off all year.
1:43:59 And who decide, for tomorrow, I'll set my alarm and get to work. There, tomorrow morning comes. The alarm goes off at each of their places, and one of them gets up and starts working, and the other decides to go back to sleep and stays snoozing. And the question is: which one did what he wanted? You see, there's no need to go dig up the opposition between the apagogic and the ostensive in the dialectic of pure reason to raise serious problems. You can do simple things and not put on airs. Honesty demands it.
1:44:32 Not such important things. When I ask the question to the first person who comes along, the alarm—they say it's the one who stays in bed who did what he wanted, the one who gets up—the other, a bit sharper, what does that mean? Both, right? One of them wants to get up, he gets up. One of them wants to stay in bed, he stays in bed. So each of the two did what he wanted. So I said to him, does it take an effort of will to stay in bed when you're sleepy? Oh no, sir.
1:45:02 You see? You see, philosophers are annoying, aren't they? They introduce distinctions where we thought we grasped a familiar homogeneity. I feel like snoozing, I stay in bed. No, I'm not doing what I want, I'm doing what pleases me, it gives me pleasure. That's for each person to judge, I have no right to say otherwise. He's for pleasure, I'm not going to tell him no, that's your misfortune. No, it's... Between doing what pleases me and doing what I want, that's where we're headed—it's not the same thing. Working at 6am because the exam is coming up soon, etc.
1:45:33 That one made an effort of will, because I don't know if you're like me, but it takes a certain... effort of will to get up when you feel like sleeping. Well, yes. So oddly enough, it's the one who does not do what pleases him who does what he wants in this case. And we get a disjunction of will and pleasure here in this case. I'm not a puritan, I'm not saying that it's only when you do what doesn't please you that you're free. I'm not saying that. But we're bound to note that Plato saw this very well as early as the Philebus, when he discusses the good.
1:46:04 Freedom—that's still too modern a notion—but on the good, which has the highest value in Plato. And at least, you don't think that the good is pleasure. Socrates says, stop, that's sacrilege. That's where we see it. So let's really insist on these down-to-earth examples. Peter and Paul say tomorrow, we get up at 6am and really cram for the exam. One stays in bed, the other gets up. Ah well, but both did what they wanted. No. The language is rich. One of them did what he wanted, was able to assert his will, even against physical constraint, and not only physical.
1:46:42 And the other did what pleased him. Because, after all, it's his right. There you go. You see. So, agreeing with the definition—you ask anyone what it is to be free, it's to do what I want. It's not always obvious how I do what I want. That much we've established between us. There are such confusions at this level that we end up bombing Vietnam to bits, don't we, and watching the eyes of Vietnamese children stream down their cheeks because of napalm bombs, because we're defending the free world.
1:47:14 And then, on the other side, there were the people's democracies. That's what a country living somewhat under the Soviet boot was called at the time. So, I mean, you see, these are words, we really need to be careful, I mean, more than with anything else. But we already have this good starting point: when do I do what I want. So that's where we're going to see a whole dialectic, you can imagine, because it's very rich material in literature, in cinema—what is the object of desire? The object of need is fixed fairly quickly.
The object of desire and the unconscious: the forgetting of aliquis 1:47:45 Thirst, the need that corresponds to it is water, or soup, which contains water, vegetables, which contain water. There you go. Need is supplied by nature, it is determined, finite, ahistorical. Take lions. People ask us why there's the saying, the Arab proverb, that it's better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep. Those are feudal cultures, of chieftains, not... caliphs. When you see a lion up close, it's not the life of a swaggering braggart.
1:48:16 What a sleepyhead this guy is! It's not possible. I've seen quite a few of them. But I have to say, he spends his time snoozing. Since he wakes up a bit out of hunger, growls like that, there are the females who hunt for him, and then there's a cheetah that has finally caught something, a little animal. Bam! He steals it from the cheetah, who is careful not to cross swords with a lion. And there you go, it's not... He's a chieftain on the cheap. The cheetah, on the other hand, which doesn't have retractable claws—so much so that some doubt whether it's even a true feline, but I'm not a zoologist, I won't settle that debate, it has the look but not the characteristic properties—and which, despite its record speed of 112 km/h, which it can only sustain for a few seconds, misses its prey four times out of five, and only has one cub a year.
1:49:02 It's a bit of a dead end of evolution. I don't want to condemn it to extinction, on the contrary, the more it's threatened, the more delighted I'll be to see cheetah parks made, that's not the point. You're always going to think I'm the most anti-ecologist man in Europe. No. But still, I mean, it's in a bad spot, like the panda, which only lives on one kind of bamboo that comes from a certain valley in China, whereas the panther lives by day, by night, in forest, in savanna, a bit in the desert, and so there are plenty of panthers. It's not endangered. All right, let's be very serious: if being free is doing what I want, we're going to see a series of problems lined up, so to speak, to make a plan, so you can find your bearings ahead of time.
1:49:40 The question will bear on what the object of desire is. And from the object of desire and its elusiveness we will be sent back to the subject of desire. What is desired, and who desires within me, and what desires within me? Right? I gave the example of the unconscious earlier. We've clearly seen sometimes, and often, that we are outdone by ourselves. Failed acts [parapraxes] are often great successes. Take this individual who absolutely did not want to go to a party his wife was taking him to, etc., who found the party unbearable—not his wife—and who can't find his keys at the moment of leaving.
1:50:21 Nothing to be done. You go crazy when you can't find your keys. But they were right there five minutes ago, etc. And of course, they don't go. They'll have a drink at another friend's place, and then when he comes back, he goes straight to his keys. Now that the problem no longer arises. But yes, it's just like you, like me. I look for my keys, but I can't find them because they're on my electricity bill. Why would you want me to spoil the pleasure I'm currently enjoying? I'm with you, we're having a drink, discussing philosophy, why on earth would I think about my electricity bill, it would wreck my mood. I didn't say it. It's an impersonal 'I'.
1:50:51 And so, this isn't the moment to think about it. In fact, I do see them on the bill, but that's precisely why I don't see them—because they're where they shouldn't be. It's not the keys' fault, it's the bill's fault. So we produce these failed acts—successful ones, if you like. If you want to indulge in this field, I recommend the same works by Freud. I'm neither Freudian nor Lacanian, but there really are admirable things in Freud. Because for once, he's not talking about the mentally ill, but about you or me.
1:51:21 It's the "Psychopathology of Everyday Life." As the title says very well, right, it's not about neuroses or psychoses, but about those little neuroses and psychoses that we produce a thousand times a day without any seriousness, that have nothing pathological about them—slips of the tongue, failed acts, forgetting names, or say a random number and the guy, completely at random, comes out with the year of his birth or his wife's. You're going to have a field day. I'll still take one example to show you we're not dealing with just anything. I once told you as a joke that the only difference between mathematics and poetry is that poetry is an exact science.
1:51:52 It wasn't an insult to mathematics, far from it, but it was to also convey the rigor of poetic writing. Here I'd like to do something similar with analysis. Freud is talking with a friend—not a patient, a friend who is a medical student like him, at the time when they're in their final year, Jewish like him, you'll see, this matters for understanding what follows—in the 1930s, things smell bad for Jews in Austria, and the friend—I think I'll have to emigrate, I don't know where I'll go, maybe Holland, the United States, I don't know—in any case, he has a quotation in Latin, since at the time everything in their studies was in Latin, so it comes out easily like that, a quotation which roughly says: ungrateful homeland, you will not see my bones grow white, a quotation from Virgil's Aeneid, and in Latin, ex ossibus, aliquis, ultor—you can forget the rest, but there's aliquis, A-L-I-Q-U-I-S, in the original quotation, in Virgil's text.
1:52:42 But it so happens that aliquis doesn't come—he skips it in the quotation, he who knows the text by heart, well, that happens to all of us, that we can't find just the word we knew the day before, that we knew like the back of our hand, as they say, and there, it's nasty. It's the word aliquis. So Freud sees a little smile appear on his face—I see where you're going with this, you're going to say it's no accident, well go ahead, you'll see. So the method begins: tell me everything that comes into your head when you think of aliquis, that is, between us, about the word he didn't think of.
1:53:13 All right? I think, so you... I don't know, I take the first thing that comes to mind, but it's silly. So he says to himself, refrain from writing it down, whether it's true, whether it's false, whether it's nonsense, whether it's important. Tell me really what comes to your mind, raw. I separate a from liquis, why not? But go on. After that, aliquis makes me think of liquid, of course, no need to be a genius. Aliquis makes me think of relic, relic makes me think of saints. So then I think of Saint Augustine, and then I think of my vacation in Naples with my wife, and then I think—something else, but I don't want to tell you, because it's something personal, and very confidential.
1:53:56 Freud tells him that his mistress is pregnant. How did you figure that out? You told me everything. Even the menstrual calendar, it's all there. It's incredible how precise it is. What did I forget? Aliquis. Liquid, already. Admit it, you don't know—excuse me—about the miracle of Saint Januarius; we went to Naples—I don't know if the vacation was in Naples, everyone goes to visit Saint Januarius Cathedral, the patron saint of Naples. That's in reality, not in the imaginary.
1:54:27 It was in Naples, I recommend it to you, it's an admirable church. Yes, it must be said, after fifty thousand churches, it's superb. Now, in the church, there are relics, you see, how everything fits together, absurdly. The relics—they keep there the relics of Saint Januarius, patron of Naples, and they keep his blood in a small vial. It doesn't matter that a little blood gets replaced each year. For the faithful, symbols matter. Every year, on Saint Januarius's day, people watch—the miracle of Saint Januarius takes place—whether the blood liquefies, since it's understood to be somewhat mineralized, having been mineralized since the time of the martyrs, so if it liquefies, that's good news.
1:55:06 You can invest in Genoa, conquer Corsica, you can start a war or marry into the Fiorentina, but if it liquefies, it's not a bad omen. There you go, that's the objective fact. It has to be said, but you've told me everything—if the blood flows, good news, it means the girlfriend isn't pregnant. And on top of that, you gave me a calendar: Saint Augustine, that's August, August in German.
1:55:38 August, January—so I don't know, in short, he wanted to hide everything, even from his friend Freud, and told him everything through symbols. I'll leave it there for now, just to show you that the unconscious can be very precise. And next time, still on freedom.
