English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
What must I do? There is no action in nature 0:00 In the progression of this workshop, which, as far as this season is concerned, as they say in TV series, is the second-to-last one, isn't it, before the one in June that will close, well, this semester. And that gives us relatively little time for a greater density of content than everything we've seen up to now. So we'll try to manage anyway. I mean, you know that we're in the process of finishing our arch of the philosophy of knowledge, of the answer to the question "what can I know" last time, and moving on to trying to answer the other great question that Kant was kind enough to formulate for us.
0:49 What must I do? And above all, I had announced to you an almost-bad piece of news last time, which is that we may have done all that for nothing. That's a provocative jest, mind you. From the start, setting aside the essential—that's fairly normal, I mean—the answer to the question "what must I do," which gives a specificity to philosophical inquiry as compared with scientific research, for example.
1:19 And especially when we take "to do" in the strong sense that the language gives it, where it expresses an action, and not mere agitation. I remind you that it's not enough for there to be movement for there to be action. Otherwise birds like hummingbirds, which make about 3000 wingbeats per second when hovering in place in front of a flower they're about to feed on, would be the most active beings in creation. I'm reminding you that we must be wary of metaphors.
1:54 And when we say that the wind acted on the trees to the point of bending their branches, well, that's a metaphor, of course. The wind is no more active than the branches of the trees. It's a series of effects with no first cause, neither transcendent nor immanent, if you prefer. In other words, that's the conclusion, which has a certain importance. Stated as such, it may even seem brutal given the weight of contemporary dominant ideology: there is no action in nature.
2:27 If we want to speak of nature in scientific and serious terms, there is no action in nature. There are only passions, in the sense that the seventeenth century still gave that term, that is, everything in it is passive, strictly speaking. So we were there last time, and I told you, we fell a bit into the illusion of believing that we could set aside our impulses toward action to concern ourselves only with knowledge.
2:57 as if I could artificially abstract from all the weight of what is active in me, my interests, my more or less conscious will, my desires, my needs. For now, all this will be a bit vague. I take the general term "action" as the alteration, the change produced on an object when it is a subject that carries it out. The wind is not a subject. It's an object alongside the branches of trees, alongside the tides or the rotation of the Moon.
3:28 All that is objects, isn't it? They are mechanisms. There is no finality. Let me remind you a bit of the notions we saw last time. There is no finality, no goal pursued, no intention, and other notions that all imply the notion of a subject. Only a subject is active. I'm not settling the debate. Maybe action is an illusion. Maybe determinism is right and, at the very moment I'm speaking to you, I believe I am acting and producing effects on you, hoping that you produce some on me, otherwise I wouldn't be here.
Freedom, postulate of practical reason 4:05 Whereas in fact, I am the prey of determinisms that completely escape me, biological, physico-chemical, etc. That's possible; I'm not settling the matter on the substance. But that doesn't take anything away from the distinction of concepts. That is, just as we saw that for philosophy to be possible, freedom had to be postulated—it's a reminder—there's no point asking the question "what must I do?" if it turns out that I am determined to the point that I will never be able to do anything, that I will always be "had," as the colloquial expression goes.
4:40 I don't know. Not only would I not be the master of the game, but I would rather be the plaything of blind determination. So, just as freedom—as Kant puts it now, in somewhat more technical terms—freedom is a postulate of practical reason. That does say what it means, doesn't it? It means we must suppose, which doesn't mean it's guaranteed. We must presuppose, which is what "hypothesis" means, that freedom is at least possible, if philosophy is to be possible.
5:15 That doesn't mean freedom exists. It's not because a proposition is non-contradictory that it corresponds to a reality. The fact that it is non-contradictory, in logical terms, simply reminds us that it is possible. That doesn't mean something real corresponds to it, still less something necessary. I took the liberty of reminding you, for those interested in logic—we're moving quickly over this—that these are the three postulates of modality, as we call them. The possible: the minimum for knowledge is at least that the object I'm working on be possible, because if it harbors an impossibility, it's not even worth talking about.
5:52 There are excellent mathematicians in the room, so I'll remind you anyway that it's a very good habit among mathematicians, when they study a function, before even solving the equation of the function, to add a short introductory chapter called "initial restriction." For example, if the function—I don't need to write it because it's simple—has the form Y equals A over X, one must state as an initial restriction that X is different from 0, because it's contradictory in mathematics to have a 0 in the denominator.
6:25 So there would be an impossibility right from the start, you see. So the minimum for knowledge is that at least the statement we formulate corresponds to a possibility. This possibility, as I just told you, does not imply that we have grasped a reality, far from it. Possibility, as I just said, is non-contradiction. It is therefore of a purely logical order. You see how this helps us review Kant. Kant made a scalpel-sharp cut between the logical and the ontological, between discourse and being, if you prefer.
7:01 Between the concept and being, you see, you can formulate it differently, between the logos and being, and "on," which is the origin of the term ontology. The "on," being in the strong sense as existence. There, these are important reminders. That's where we had left things, and it was a false piece of bad news. We're not going back to zero, we haven't done all that for nothing, we haven't wasted time, far from it.
The drawing of the cave and ordinary language 7:31 And to show you how necessary it was for us to take this detour, to realize how it leads to an impossibility, and how we now need to take into account the subject as active within the operation of knowledge, I'm now going to develop a bit a theme offered to us by Plato, extremely famous, since it is none other than the celebrated myth of the cave, which I've alluded to from time to time, as one does when introducing philosophy, but which I'm going to dwell on a bit today, because it sums up rather well the program of what we've done and what awaits us.
8:13 And above all, it positions very well the moment we are at, at the point where... I was speaking of arches earlier, I was thinking of our cathedrals, of Gothic ones because of the ribbed vaults, isn't it, where there's one great arch which is the philosophy of knowledge, then another, in the reverse direction, of the philosophy of action, the two meeting at a keystone which is freedom. In that gap. Well, you'll see that all this is not unrelated to the myth of the cave, if we restore it in full, which is fairly rare.
8:48 Generally, it's mutilated to half its size, and you'll understand right away what I mean. There, we are in Greece, so we're by the sea. Isn't it? And not tarataraum. There. And here, this cave—I draw poorly, but I try to keep the decisive elements of the Platonic text. I mean, I'm making the back here slope, on purpose, steeply sloping, isn't it?
9:22 Because it's Plato who indicates it. There, so, excuse me, here then is the famous little wall Plato speaks of, which divides the cave in two, lengthwise, in cross-section. Here, then, there is this crowd of prisoners, isn't it? There, all chained in such a way that they cannot look back, nor left, nor right, but only forward.
9:55 Hello—I'm repeating here what Plato says, for now. So they can only look toward the back of the cave. And meanwhile, while they're looking, there are, over here, strange figures, about whom Plato doesn't tell us much, actually, who pass on the other side of the wall carrying on their heads an example of roughly everything one might see as a reflection or shadow on the back wall of the cave. In other words, I'll put a flower here, since I'm a poor draughtsman, to represent more complicated things.
10:28 But there, and here, there's a fire at the entrance of the cave, and of course this fire is only the relay of the central hearth—we're in the land of Apollo—and of the cave. What's important to remember is that Plato tells us, I repeat, that the prisoners have been chained since birth, so they have never known or seen anything other than the back of the cave, since the system of chains prevents them from looking elsewhere, left, right, and especially behind.
11:03 And so, Plato tells us, they necessarily call reality what they see, and they don't see what we see—there's already a distinction here; Hegel will use the notions of what is "for consciousness" and what is "for us" or "in itself," Hegel will say—"for us" or "in itself," we phenomenologists who observe consciousness through these stages. You see that the model-copy relationship, which we'll come back to, plays a large role in this imagery, insofar as the fire is already a copy of the sun, and then the fire projects shadows here which are copies, and models—the model-copy relationship plays a very important role.
11:45 For now I'm just summarizing—not "vulgar" Platonism, because vulgus means the people, there's nothing pejorative in that, it's even the same root as the Indo-European Volk, and there's nothing pejorative in it, especially since philosophy, since its origins, contrary to appearances, avoids learned language and uses everyday language. You'll say that's paradoxical, since philosophers are generally found to be abstruse and far removed from ordinary language. I'm speaking of language here—their discourse is complicated, their speech is sometimes complicated for some, but the language they use—when Hegel says "the pure porosity of matters," we may understand nothing of it, but still, "porosity," "pure," and "matter" are words from everyday language, which mathematics has not used for 2000 years.
12:33 Mathematics avoids these terms from everyday language, which are polysemic, as we say, don't they? They can have many different meanings, which isn't so serious, but sometimes contradictory ones, which is more of a problem. And so, very wisely, mathematicians, just before the flowering of Socratic inquiry, through Euclid and the teams that must have been around him, very early on, said that with that kind of language, one cannot say univocal things, as mathematicians say, isn't that so?
13:06 And so they set that everyday language aside, in order to create a learned language, but a much more univocal one. Free of ambiguity, where there's Y, X, equals, signs whose meaning is specified before being used, there. We haven't learned to speak like that. We didn't ask our parents what the concept of such-and-such was; we followed more or less what we heard, we jumped in to speak, didn't we? So we are all a bit in violation, that is, we speak without a license. Do you see what I mean?
13:36 We didn't take the "speaking license" test before speaking. Mathematicians, aware of this problem, made a language of their own, which became the language of science—it's serious business, I mean. And by evacuating everyday language, they did very well from the point of view of their own research, which is not ours, of their discipline, which needs univocity and non-contradiction, and thus terms that are quite clear from the outset. But in doing so, by evacuating everyday language, they evacuated one of the main functions of everyday language, which is not solely to tell the truth.
14:13 when I use language to chat up a girl on a train, hoping she won't get off at the next station, my purpose isn't quite cognitive or theoretical. So language contains, I mean, a metaphorical, allusive thickness, isn't it? It's not made only to tell the truth; it's often made to conceal it—that's what we call lying, concealing it, stealing it away. There are great studies by Kant on lying, which belongs to a Christian civilization, isn't it?
14:45 And in the Gospel, there is a very important passage on Maundy Thursday, where Christ, in his last conversations, tells his apostles that the prince of this world is coming—that's how the devil is defined in Christian thought. Interesting, the prince of this world is coming, and since, as for Christ, you know, he says my kingdom is not of this world—it's fairly consistent. So, for now, let's leave the world to its prince. The prince of this world is coming, but he is already defeated, for his essence is falsehood.
15:20 You see? And later, in the Apocalypse, written by the same John, the same John who wrote the Gospel—that Gospel that begins with the prologue on the logos, in Greek, while some other books are written in Hebrew—the same John, in the Apocalypse, when catastrophes begin to unleash themselves and fall upon these worlds of sinners that we inhabit, the voice of the prophet says: outside, all the merchants, all the fornicators, all the sorcerers, in short, all the sinners of the earth—that is, full stop, all the liars.
15:56 That's interesting, lying as the generic figure of evil. So, mathematicians, to pick up my thread again, can set aside everyday language and manage by developing a language that begins to exist with them. I call a circle the locus of equidistant points. I'm no longer talking about ripples in water; they're talking about the circle. But in doing so—and this is what needs to be understood today—they evacuated precisely everything of the order of action within language.
Doxa, dianoia, dialectic and theory 16:31 Everything that is not only of the order of knowledge, but of action. That's what we're going to deepen now. Now, I remind you, I'm still in scholastic Plato for the moment. I haven't yet gotten to the continuation from last time, but I'm introducing it because I have the myth of the cave at hand and it lets you review—we've done it enough, but anyway, to sum up—not everything we've seen so far. For him, there is a gradation of the objects of knowledge according to their degree of reality, from the least real, that is, what is at the back of the cave, whose equivalent are the shadows, isn't it, the reflections, everything that is...
17:15 whose scant reality is given only through the intervention of another, much more concrete reality. And so, to these different degrees of reality correspond, in Plato, different degrees of knowledge. The knowledge that stays at this first degree, which wants to know nothing but the shadow-puppet shapes outlined on the back wall of the cave, Plato calls opinion, doxa. There it is, doxa, as you might suspect.
17:45 I don't know. It's the mode of knowledge that sticks to everything that stems from the sensible world, with its flux—I won't go back over this, we've developed it enough—with its mobility and its inconstancy. Then, second stage, corresponding roughly to that of the models parading here, second stage, so here, doxa.
18:18 Here, it's doxa, opinion. A statement that may sometimes be true, orthè doxa, or that may be false, and which does not contain within itself the principle of its own truth. Here, what he calls dianoia, usually translated as discursive knowledge.
18:51 There. There, here, we talk. There, we stay silent, we look at things, we eat our ice cream while watching the TV screen. We can talk, but when we talk, it's to comment on the shadows that are there, so it amounts to about the same thing. Whereas dianoia, of course, its model here would be precisely mathematics and especially geometry at the time—discursive or hypothetico-deductive knowledge, whose main procedure is "if, then."
19:25 If this figure is a triangle, then the sum of its angles is 180 degrees. It's much more certain, isn't it, than the previous one. That's the second stage of knowledge. I'm dwelling on this a bit because we find it throughout the centuries at every great advance in philosophy. When Spinoza distinguishes a knowledge of the first kind, he too links it to the sensible. Then, when he distinguishes a knowledge of the second kind, he gives hypothetico-deductive reasoning as an example. So we find the same thing when Kant distinguishes among the three faculties sensibility, understanding, then reason—we find roughly the same divisions.
20:00 That's why I'm lingering a bit on this. So what characterizes this dianoia is that we start from hypotheses, as we saw when we spoke of mathematics—I won't go back over it too much—we speak of hypotheses, of first notions. We had seen among ourselves, hadn't we, definition, axiom, postulate. And we move toward conclusions from these hypotheses, trying not to contradict them, of course. And then there's the third stage, when we see the model of models, isn't it?
20:34 Here we're no longer dealing at all with a copy, but with what is the sun. But before we get there, I wouldn't want to take you around like on a bus tour of Paris—why don't we just stay with dianoia? Why isn't that enough for us? And there, Plato answers. In the sixth book of the Republic—this myth is presented at the beginning of the seventh book. The Republic has ten books, ten chapters. Because when there are ten books, well, that alone frightens people. There, if you'd rather call them ten volumes, ten chapters.
21:08 And, as it happens, the distinction of the different degrees of knowledge I've been telling you about occupies the end of the sixth book. So just before summing all that up with the image of the cave. Well, why don't we stay there? Plato answers: because geometers—and God knows he did not despise mathematics, and he had supposedly written at the entrance to his school, all this is legend, but well, since it has never been contradicted by his contemporaries, and since it's quite consistent with everything Plato says—he had, by the way, written at the entrance to his school that none may enter here who is not a geometer.
21:42 Which means, on the one hand, that he holds mathematics and geometry in very high esteem—almost too much so for Aristotle's taste, who leaned more toward physics and biology. And he thinks highly of it. But "none may enter here" means, well, mathematics, you leave it at the door. If you want to enter, you must have studied it. But here, we're going to do something other than mathematics. Don't forget, after all. He's a philosopher. So why isn't mathematics enough for him? Because he says geometers proceed from hypotheses toward a conclusion.
22:14 Telos. It's the same root as in "television"—everything that is at least oriented toward a conclusion without going back up. So, you see, from hypotheses toward a conclusion, in reasoning, without going back up, in the reverse direction, toward what he calls the anhypotheton, the unconditioned principle. We are always somewhat cut off from foundations, from first determinations and final determinations. We're always in the middle, with dianoia.
22:45 Besides, you see, the prefix "dia-" says it well—everything that goes "through," everything that is somewhat mediation. So the third stage would be the direct relation with, once again, the model of models. And there, it's no longer either doxa or dianoia; we go beyond that. There is what he calls here dialektikè. Dialectic. Let's put it in English. Dialectic.
23:18 You need at least, then, two contradictory discourses for there to be a dialectic. There has to be dia logos. There is indeed dialectic. I'll just note in passing that a term as important, as omnipresent as logos in the Greek language, and therefore in the families of languages that derive from it. Don't forget that two-thirds of French vocabulary comes from Latin. Two-thirds of Latin vocabulary comes from Greek. By simple arithmetic, roughly half of French comes from Greek.
23:49 And so you find it in soliloquy, in monologue, in dialogue, in logic, in logarithm. You find all the different senses of logos, which of course first means everything to do with language, speech, language, discourse, definition—that's where we're in logic—but also fraction in the mathematical sense, ratio. We say 'the logoi.' Yes, that's Greek mathematics for talking about fractions. So you'll say, it's annoying when such an important word has so many meanings.
24:21 Yes, there's polysemy, but it's not a contradictory polysemy, because if you look closely, language is what puts us in relation with one another afterward. And how—give me a synonym for fractions. What else do we call them, in arithmetic? x over y or three quarters, that's also called what? Sorry? I didn't hear. Yes, that corresponds to a division, but when they're written like that, ratios. Logos.
24:52 Logos, ratio, that's called logos. Relations, that's called logos. And when you're serving out the shares of a cake at the end of a meal, you say, I'm giving it out at the rate of two per person. You find logos, reason, ration, my ration. You see, none of this is contradictory. So, the dialectic, and finally, last stage, we talk. Here, we chatter without really knowing what we're saying, without knowing what it means to speak. Here, we speak rigorously, but without going back up to the unhypothetical principles that ground everything.
25:29 Here we finally reach the principles—this isn't the first one, which is no longer a hypothesis—that ground all things, the hypotheses, but here there's no more discourse. Here we fall silent, and we contemplate, and that's what he calls theory. Here. There we are. That's not my topic today, so I'll go through it fairly quickly, but it's important to see. It's theoretical. I mentioned this to you once, just to remind you in passing—it's convenient, because, it's no accident, when I say it 'falls'—not from the sky, though—but what's convenient is that the way Plato speaks of what's there shows clearly that we're at the boundary between knowledge and action.
The sun, offspring of the idea of the good 26:18 I'm referring to what I think is one of the most profound passages in all of Plato, if not in the history of philosophy. It's the passage where Socrates is pressed by his interlocutors, Adeimantus and Glaucon in particular, to expound his theory of what we would call the absolute in modern thought, of what he calls the good, the idea of the good. And Socrates refuses, saying that the good is beyond essence, and therefore beyond discourse, so he can't speak of it, it's too far above—right?
26:48 —the understanding, and he says, but on the other hand, I can tell you about its offspring. In other words, about the image of the good, the metaphor which is the sun. There. And that's where he arrives at this passage I'm alluding to, which is so important, when he says—that's where we're going to reach the limit of the cognitive faculty—when he says, you will notice, to his interlocutor, that the sun is a third term which enables, light in general, the sun here in particular, which enables the eye to see and the object to be seen.
27:28 Imagine a healthy eye. And if it's in darkness, it sees nothing, however healthy it may be. Imagine the same for the object. So, light—there is a third term here which enables the eye to see and the object to be seen. And Plato carries on his analogy this way: the good is the equivalent in the domain of the soul.
28:00 The sun belongs to the visible world. We always find the Platonic dichotomy again. In the domain of the soul, what enables the object to be knowable and the subject to know it is precisely what must be called the good. So, a third term. Already we see this is a dialectician who is never locked into the binary. But so far, we're still in the order of knowledge. And then he adds—you'll notice, moreover, he says—that the sun doesn't just, he resumes his comparison, the sun doesn't just make the object knowable and enable the subject to be a knower.
28:39 It also gives beings growth and nourishment. There, we leave the order—the cognitive order. Growth and nourishment. There. We'll come back to that shortly, don't worry, I'm not dangling this in front of you just to leave you hungry. But often people stop there when they present the allegory of the cave. Well, yes, the quest is over. From the most false to the most true, why go further? Well, the text itself not only doesn't stop there, but we're only halfway through.
The descent and Socrates' fate 29:11 Because once he gets there, Plato wants to talk to us about the descent back down. So we could say that this whole path summarizes our philosophy of knowledge. There. That's why it's convenient to do this today. And that this next part is the philosophy of action.
29:44 So let's look at this in more detail. First, it's worth saying, in the details of the ascent—the mystical Platonists call it the procession of souls—in the details of the process that goes from the depths of the cave toward the sun, and that's why I insist on the slope, well, I insist following Plato's own insistence, he says clearly that he's going to suffer. The ground is rough, he's going to hurt himself.
30:15 I'm alluding to all the resistances there are to the act of knowing, right? I've borrowed a term from psychoanalysis—psychoanalysis calls it resistance, which in the subject amounts to denial, for example. Because he knows he's going to lose some feathers over it. We've known this forever, since it's the primary meaning—I don't want to reduce it to just one—but still, of the myth of the tree of knowledge in the biblical Genesis.
30:48 If you taste this fruit, you'll be done for. He doesn't say that because he's a tempter. He says you'll be done for, yet you'll have touched it anyway. He's cunning, he's cunning, he's the Evil One. He says you'll be like God, knowing good and evil. It's true that nature, the animal, doesn't know good and evil. It knows the possible and the impossible, what suits it and what doesn't. It's altruistic for a while when it has young, as long as the hormones force it to look after them. Afterward, it sometimes eats them, in fact.
31:19 Even the female does—you see this with rabbits. As for the males, let's not even talk about it. Lions spend their time devouring the cubs that distract the female from the sexual duties they think are owed to them. There. There's a somewhat Mediterranean side to lions. This twofold movement alone shows the richness of this myth, this story invented by Plato.
31:56 Because as soon as he's finished the account, speaking of the prisoners, he says, 'it's us he resembles.' Of course, we're talking about humanity here. So, after insisting on the difficulties, the pain—I'd gotten to the point of the rough ground. Once he sees where the truth is, he says, 'that's not possible, we had it all wrong.' So he has to go back down. Man is a zoon politikon.
32:27 Man is a social animal. Man is an animal that lives in the city. What good is it to have the truth all to yourself? What good are all the notions of morality, envy, jealousy, if I'm alone on an island? Who would I envy? But zoon politikon. So he has to come back. And here are more difficulties, but exactly the opposite ones. Before, he was stumbling because he wasn't used to the light. And Plato says, now he stumbles because his eyes are no longer used to the darkness. He's alluding to the difficulties Socrates had with public opinion and with Athens.
32:59 He says, look at him, he's stumbling. So the others start to laugh and mock him. What was the point of making the whole trip if he comes back and doesn't even know where to put his feet. An old suspicion, isn't it, kept alive by the powers of opinion toward knowledge. An old Greek legend says that Thales, looking up at the stars, fell into a well. Opinion loves catching the intellectual out like that.
33:30 Yes, while looking at the stars, a noble theoretical pose, whoosh, Thales fell into a well. Imagine the laughter of the women of Thessaly—not the shepherds of Thessaly—seeing him fall into the well. It's like that—an excellent friend of mine, François de Negroni, for a fine fee, fell while out walking in Dakar, into some wet cement in the street. Apparently all the women at the market were in stitches. Well, the opposite difficulty. Here, he's mocked because they say, he's ruined his eyesight, what was the point of going up there.
34:01 And if on top of that he tells them, no, everything you're looking at is nonsense, that's not the truth—then that's too much. And here I quote the master text: 'and if he could lay hold of him and get his hands on him, he would kill him.' 'No doubt,' says Glaucon, his interlocutor. There. The allusion to Socrates is clear. Not to Socrates as an individual—I'm not doing a series here on the life and death of Socrates—but insofar as he expresses the fate of one who transgresses, right, the limits of opinion. And for whom knowledge is knowledge only when it is communicated, communicable and shared.
34:38 That's what's contained in the word 'universal.' If a piece of knowledge is not shared—sorry, if it's not shareable, whether it is shared or not, already it is not universal. This is very important, what we're saying here. Because, you know, there are notions like this that have been particularly attacked by the dominant ideology. There isn't one single dominant ideology running through the centuries—they're not the same across different eras—but there is a logic that has dominated us for at least two generations. There's an offensive against the concept of man, of humanism, and against the concept of the universal, which is being replaced by relativism, culturalism.
35:17 All of that involved important moments. It's better to have a relativist and culturalist view than to have a fantasized view of man that would be—there are certain definitions that give the impression that man means only white, rational, adult man. So it's true that this needs correcting from time to time. Yes, when we say 'man, a rational animal,' we exclude the mad, then. We're not going to leave him like that, alienated—alius, other, in Latin—other than our community, all the same.
35:52 So this is precious for showing us that the place occupied here by the sun, the idea of the good for Plato, in ancient philosophy, is the place we are in the process of replacing—it took a century to get there—with the idea of freedom. And if it took that long, it's because there's something too positive in this already-there-ness that is the sun, compared with modern thought. We saw last time with Kant that the common point between viewpoints as apparently opposed as the materialist, naturalist, determinist viewpoint—represented today by cognitive science, for example, but represented in every era in various forms—and its opposite, the religious, transcendent, spiritual viewpoint, is that both of them presuppose something already-there prior to man.
36:46 So much so that from a naturalist point of view—thesis—the supernaturalist, religious point of view—antithesis—calls for an anthropological synthesis, if I may go a bit quickly since I've often alluded to it, whereby it is not nature that makes man, nor supernature, God, that makes man, but man who progressively constitutes man himself. That's why it took so long before the sun, which here is a given, could be seen replaced by freedom.
37:19 But it didn't happen just like that. It's not as though, all of a sudden, after 20 centuries, a Kant comes along and says, right, I'm removing that, I'll put freedom in its place. Especially since he owes it to Rousseau, doesn't he—it's Rousseau who inaugurates this shift that initiates modernity. That's what makes Kant say that Rousseau is the Newton of morality, as we saw last time. For that, dramas were needed. This sun, to paraphrase one of our greatest poets, had to prove to be a black sun. An allusion to a very well-known poem by Nerval: 'the shadowy one, the widower, the unconsoled.'
37:51 There's a lot of darkness—the shadowy one, the widower, the unconsoled, the Prince of Aquitaine at his ruined tower. My only star is dead, and my star-strewn lute bears the black sun of melancholy. Melancholy in the clinical sense, this is serious—madness, the melancholic humor, as they said in the Middle Ages. Nerval wrote this between crises and between stays at the asylum, Dr. Blanche's asylum. As for darkness, that rings a strange note.
The desire to know is not natural; error and illusion 38:23 So here, it's true, the black sun. And that's what we've been missing ever since we set aside—I keep coming back to this preliminary point—action, in order to act as if we were dealing purely with knowledge. This error is perfectly illustrated in the very first words, the first line, the first page of the first volume of Aristotle's Metaphysics—a considerable work. I'm going to quote it here in order to criticize this statement, but I'm not discouraging you from reading this extraordinary work, the Metaphysics of Aristotle, which has been commented on for centuries and which is extraordinarily rich.
39:02 But the very first statement, the famous one, is: all men by nature desire to know. Very Greek, isn't it? All men by nature desire to know. Well, that's what was false. No, no, certainly not naturally. It takes blows to the head for us to suddenly stop being on autopilot, in the daily grind and habit, and decide to start asking questions. Questioning is not spontaneous. Among the oldest animals still alive today, there are sharks.
39:34 They go back to the end of the primary era. How is it that so many well-armed creatures, the tyrannosaurs and so on, got wiped out, while sharks are still here? Any idea why? You're laughing, but it's true, Wilfried. Yes, plankton too. No, I'm sure someone has an idea. Think about the position it occupies in its biotope.
40:05 Bravo. It fears nothing. It has no problem. Why would you want it to ask itself questions? It doesn't need to evolve. It works. Nobody bothers it. Besides, it doesn't have a taste for tuna. Even man doesn't bother it much. A little. Near China, with their shark fins, they love that. They massacre them. We should have a little debate with the environmentalists, that's interesting. Anyway, sharks are doing fine, and have been for a long time. And probably will for a long time to come.
40:35 It's an interesting example. It reminds us that the act of asking questions, of seeking to know more than what one already knows—the shark knows things, there's electrical information, whether there's prey, etc. No, no. A consciousness, even an animal one, is always consciousness of something. Well, it's rather limited. It's enough for the shark, it's the master of the game where it is. Conversely, think about it. If man is so fiercely intent, as he is, on knowing more than any other animal, it must be because he's remarkably poorly helped by nature, precisely.
41:05 Here I'm alluding, of course, to the myth of Prometheus. There's anthropology here, not in the sense of a plus compared to the animal world, you see—I'm not talking about man, as Spinoza would rightly reproach me, as an empire within an empire that would be nature. But on the contrary, all his difference, and his future superiority over nature, if I take him at his origin, man, comes from a minus.
41:35 It comes from a minus. No claws to dig burrows, no fur, no scales, no... Some have—this is the myth of Prometheus I'm summing up, right? Some, birds, I don't know, have speed and agility to escape a predator, others have strength, right? He's not among the strong, he doesn't have much defense, he's not viable. And on top of that, as we saw briefly, there was an obstetric catastrophe that occurred when the human species passed from a quadrupedal to a bipedal stance, which, in evolution, as is well known, paleontologists tell us produced a narrowing of the pelvic bones, making childbirth far more problematic and painful in the human species than in most other species, right?
42:21 'In pain you shall bring forth children.' Theology takes this seriously, they use that very word. And so, man is not viable on his own. In other words, if there weren't the relation to the other, if there weren't a politicity, we see here that man as a political animal doesn't mean man as a substance with the political as an added attribute or epithet. That's not it. Because that would imply that man could be man without the political epithet. No, it means that without the relation to the other, man does not exist. And that the relation to the other, politicity, in the Greek sense—not party politics, of course—is constitutive of his being, of his emergence and of his development.
42:57 There are a great many problems packed into this myth of the cave. There, so, roughly speaking, our main illusion here is worse than an error. We saw the difference together. Every illusion expresses an error, but not every error goes as far as illusion. To reach the level of illusion, the false must not merely differ from the true—excuse me, the statement must first be false.
43:33 In that case, it's an error. 3 plus 4 equals 11—there, that's an error. But 3 plus 4 equals minus 7, that's strange. Because it's exactly the right result, but inverted. And there, it can no longer be mere chance. And that's why what distinguishes illusion from error is that the false is not simply different from the true, A different from B, but is exactly its inverse. And so this expresses that there is a necessity to the error, that the subject carries within himself the causes of the error, and not, as in the case of mirages, an external cause—optical or meteorological.
44:15 And so, in conclusion, it's much easier to correct an error—a coffee cup, my calculation mistake, I just don't make it again—than to dispel an illusion. Even though I've said it, I repeat it, because it's today's subject: because the roots of illusion are within me, they lie above all in the fact that I have no interest, rough ground, I have no interest in enlightening myself, in climbing back up toward the truth—there's too much that has to stay swept under the rug, as we say so well in French.
Kant: regulative ideas and the primacy of the practical 44:48 So, to answer the question 'what must I do,' not only did we recall that this question has two meanings—that if we take 'do' in its strong sense, its ethical sense, which implies and presupposes freedom, and so we sketched last time, very quickly, a first approach to the notion of freedom—I'm being a bit cautious, I won't say concept, but a notion.
45:21 Recalling, still, the result we arrived at, the result of this inquiry with Kant, from which we'll move a little further away today—but anyway, for Kant, freedom is one of what he calls the ideas, regulative ideas that reason needs in order to think its object. But be careful, for him, ideas and their regulative character are less, less normative at the cognitive level, less certain, if you prefer, than what is opposed to the regulative, namely the constitutive—for example, the concept of space is constitutive of geometrical objects.
46:02 There cannot be a geometrical object, right, if the notion of space is not given, for example. So space, well, space like time, like the other categories, are indeed constitutive of objects. The concept of causality allows a physics to be constituted, for example. He opposes to this constitutive side the merely regulative side of what he calls the ideas. That is to say, everything happens as if—that's very Kantian. If you want to sum up Kant in one phrase, it's 'everything happens as if.'
46:32 But it stays that way, Kant is very cautious. There you go. Once we've drawn up the balance sheet of everything the sciences teach us, in short, the work of the understanding — let's have it take a stand — reason can then begin to reapply, to build, I don't know, to say, starting from the indications of the understanding, another reminder, knowing what we have thanks to the collaboration of the matter contributed to the mind — this isn't coming to us from outside, he's not an idealist — and of the form contributed by the mind — he's not an empiricist either, not a naive realist — it's the composite of the two, the phenomenon, which defines the field of our knowledge, and everything that wants to go beyond it — freedom, God, the soul, the world — these are the four ideas Kant says are regulative ideas which reason needs, but it needs them in the practical order — how convenient, that's exactly where we are — they don't expand our theoretical progress at all, that's over, they are indications for action, not for knowledge.
47:32 Kant's great genius was to have made us understand that many concepts we believed were constitutive of things only make sense in relation to the interests we have as free beings — practical interests in the Kantian sense, and I remind you that has nothing to do with 'practical' in the ordinary sense. He even has an expression — I won't confuse you too much — but Kant, that great Chinaman of Königsberg, as Nietzsche called him, has a whole vocabulary of distinctions: the practical in the ordinary sense Kant calls the technico-practical, so there's no mistaking it — practical, if in doubt, is better translated as 'moral,' even if that's a bit reductive, it's closer to the sense Kant gives it than 'practical' in the sense of, say, a new washing machine — nothing to do with that.
48:17 So this is where it happens, it's not now. Depending on whether I put into it something given, or how I put into it something to be done, which is not, but which ought to be — Kant stopped at this limit. For him, freedom, happiness, the world, etc., are limits toward which we tend without ever — a bit like what are called asymptotes, not in geometry — and which thus regulate somewhat the curve of our asymptotes, but without there ever being coincidence between the asymptote and the axis of its limit.
49:06 That's why the notion of freedom — I repeat, so with caution — which we're now going to see develop in the practical field, must be taken exactly as Kant begins his moral reflection. Besides, this is my last parenthesis before returning to freedom: as far as morality is concerned, Kant's conclusion is that we cannot seek a principle for our action in the sciences of nature, since the more they develop — and Kant hopes they will never stop developing — the more they increase the opposite of freedom, the more they reveal to us the empire of necessity, the empire where the formula Y equals F of X holds, so the universe of determination, the universe where Y depends on X, is a function of X.
50:00 This can apply to the subject — one of Freud's most mysterious formulas: 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden' — 'Where the id was, the ego must come to be.' A bit like the rear wheels of a car being forced to pass through where the front wheels passed in a turn. 'Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.' At the center, where I put the question mark, when we interrogate the concept of freedom — I take up my comparison again — we find ourselves like Kant, who, to define the moral procedure, could not ask it of the order of nature, nor of the order of the supernatural either.
50:47 And so, says Kant, we must start from the good will, from the representation of the good will that exists in everyone. That may seem a bit disappointing after the rigor of Kant in the field of knowledge, but it's a very logical deduction from his approach, isn't it? We're not going to find freedom in the dianoia, in the Y equals f of x, in the hypothetico-deductive. For freedom, we're going to do the same thing. And you saw, last time, when we asked the question 'What is freedom?' I asked you to answer as spontaneously as possible first.
Doing what I want and doing what pleases me 51:18 And I believe it was Samuel who was there and who had answered, 'Philippe, when I do what I want' — that's what needs to be answered. Not to close the debate, but to open it. Because that's where the problems begin. We saw that last time. All right, let me continue now. Of course, when I do what I want, I'm not going to tell you otherwise. There are cunning people who could convince you that you're only free when you do what I want — why not, there are people like that, ideologies like that. So we must hold onto it, it's precious. The problem is that it's not always obvious to know whether we're really doing what we want or whether we believe we're doing what we want while actually being driven by a determination that has nothing to do with our will.
51:55 I'll give you this rather amusing example of the two schoolboys, to find others too — of Peter and Paul, let's say it quickly like that, who had decided — it's the season, in the month of May, the season of exams and competitive tests — who had decided to slack off a bit, which they have every right to do after all. And then, as the deadline approaches, they decide to get up the next morning at 6 to work — the home stretch. At 6, the alarm rings, and Peter gets up, Paul stays in bed. And when you ask the question 'which one is doing what he wants,' the first answer I've often gotten from the audience is: both — one wants to get up, he gets up; one wants to stay in bed, he stays in bed.
52:37 Each does what he wants. And this is where we need to pay attention to words. And I'll add here something I didn't have time to recall at the end of last time. We must pay attention to words — that's how we began our workshop. It's the 'what do you call?' That's the Socratic question. 'What do you call wanting?' Here, 'What do you call will?' I'm not telling you 'we must look for the definition of the will.' That's not what 'what do you call' means. It's even more fundamental, more radical, more properly philosophical. It means: let's start from what people designate by that word.
53:11 We find again the political nature of language. In other words, do people call 'will' the fact of staying in bed when one is sleepy? Clearly not. No one will tell you 'it takes tremendous willpower to stay in bed when you're sleepy.' No, it's the opposite, you know that well. And we had deduced — language is rich, we must make the most of it — we had deduced that the one who does what he wants is the one who gets up, which was what had been willed.
53:46 And then the one who stays in bed does what — does what — he does what pleases him. He has every right to. We're not conducting a moral trial here. We're not into moralizing. We're not trying to make people feel guilty. I have never seen an era as guilt-inducing as ours — whether it's about sorting the garbage, well, I'll stop there. Exactly. It's a distinction. That's where we see that, very well, being free is doing what I want. We must start by being sincere.
54:17 We must do as Socrates did: start from what people in the street call courage, beauty, virtue, and see afterward what problems that raises. Otherwise, we make ourselves a language among philosophers, and then when I say to you 'pass me the salt,' I mean 'pass me the sugar.' That's an annoying business. Right? Well, we could decide to make a little language among ourselves like that, nice and univocal, sure. We wouldn't get far. So we don't call 'will' the act of yielding to pleasure — that doesn't mean you shouldn't yield to it from time to time, you're not obliged to be, all the time, in the rigidity of the will.
54:54 We're not obliged to be voluntaristic in order to be free. But, on the other hand, there is indeed a distinction between doing what one wants and, you see clearly, doing what pleases one. And why then does doing what pleases me not fall under the will and, even less, under freedom? Because, in Kantian terms, the subject who stays in bed is heteronomous. In classical terms, that means the law that governs him is not within him but external to him. He is not autonomous.
55:24 That's the great turning point, isn't it, of modern reflection on action. A great turning point which Kant does not conceal that he owes to Rousseau. Because this story is furiously reminiscent of the social contract, isn't it? Because until Rousseau, there was the opposition between those who rule and the anarchists of all times, those who contest those who rule, if you like — they contest all order. And so, in other words, either I do what I want, or I obey the law.
55:54 That was how the problem was posed before Rousseau. And Rousseau says, no, we are free when we obey the law — on condition that it's not just any law, but the law we have prescribed for ourselves, and not one that was prescribed to me, or that nature prescribed to me. Because eating when one is hungry — I'm not saying it's not good, one must do it — but that's not where we exercise the maximum of our freedom. Because eating from the mere fact of being hungry, we share that with animals, it's a determination.
56:25 On the other hand, eating at certain hours, with guests, with a little presentation of the dishes and by cooking the food — since, in passing, in matters of food, man moved from the raw to the cooked, to borrow a famous title from contemporary anthropology, isn't it, Lévi-Strauss — all these aspects make us increasingly measure to what extent freedom is one of the great sources — well, the representation we associate with the word freedom — is a source of illusion. We see it clearly: the one who stays in bed believes he's doing what he wants, has the illusion of believing he's doing what he wants.
57:03 So I insist a great deal on this concept of illusion. A great specialist in illusion is Spinoza. Few philosophers have developed such a pertinent theory of error and illusion. Not only him — Plato's myth of the cave, Plato spends his time denouncing an illusion. But Spinoza is the one who developed the theory of illusion in perhaps the most exhaustive way.
57:33 So there you go — since 'doing what I want' hasn't quite answered our question of what freedom is, still less whether it exists, we haven't wasted time, it has at least let us understand that there were many things that resembled freedom. Here I open an important parenthesis, because as I told you, we don't have much time left, so I'd better say the essential, perhaps not quite in the right order this time, but in case we run short of time later — we're soon going to see a philosopher who belongs to post-Kantian philosophy, as it's called afterward — essentially German idealism, the Reinholds, Fichte, Schelling — I'm alluding here to Hegel, who somewhat closes off, historically, chronologically, this post-Kantian movement — and in Hegel there is a principle which, I think, today I'll say it dogmatically, without developing it, a principle that plays a central role in relations between men: recognition.
58:42 A self-consciousness is in itself and for itself only when it is in itself and for itself for another self-consciousness. We can translate it into French — he does it himself, since he adds, 'that is, insofar as it is recognized.' We've seen the translation. Recognized, anerkannt — what does that mean? It means that the goal of every properly human action — we saw earlier that there was action only on the side of a subject. For now, around us, as subject, we only know the anthropological field. I'll leave aside, for now, God and the angels, without resolving the question.
59:15 I'm opening a parenthesis within the parenthesis. I have this caution which was taught to me by Kant. When Kant arrives at a certain point at the concept of 'rational being' — for other practical matters — he puts in a small note: 'rational being,' not 'man.' Because, he says, you never know — God, the angels, etc. We imagine them as beings, as subjects — the rigor of this language. If we feel the need to pursue our inquiry, it's because we clearly see there's a trap here, isn't there, if we stopped solely at the statement 'to be free is to do what I want.'
1:00:05 And on the other hand, we're not going to rush into the antithesis by saying that I'm only free when I do what displeases me. Nor should we believe that what makes the one who gets up different is that he does something unpleasant by getting up — no, it's that he does what he had willed, that he is adequate to himself, that he has an identity which confirms itself and which is that of the goal he pursues — a goal that may one day turn out to be an end. I mean by that: why do I take the metro? To go to school. Why do I go to school? To pass the baccalaureate. Why do I pass the baccalaureate? To...
The bone of knowledge: the sciences of man 1:00:40 And then afterward we no longer really know. All that is made up of goals. But there is something immanent to all these goals, which is the end. When we reach it, it's finished, as the word says. You see why I put the question mark in place of the sun. Rest assured, we haven't done all this for nothing. As Romain has just shown, we wouldn't be asking ourselves the question of freedom if we hadn't run into a snag in matters of philosophy and of knowledge.
1:01:12 What is this snag? It's that if we continue like this, with scientific knowledge, everything will be determined once there are sciences of man and not only of nature. Remember the historical chronology: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, then the human sciences. And ultimately, the discipline that should close off the edifice of the sciences and crown it should be... Yes? I didn't hear. No, no, no, even beyond, beyond.
1:01:42 That's for the individual. But the human science that encompasses man as a political animal — I said it — would be politics. If politics were a science, we wouldn't be here. But at the same time, that's what the picture tends toward. Look closely. It begins, chronologically, with mathematics, the first to be constituted as a science — that is, the science of what is most distant, most abstract, most general, of what concerns us least personally. A equals B implies B equals A, valid for everything.
1:02:12 Then physics — we get closer to ourselves because we move on to the real. We're no longer in abstraction. Then chemistry, then biology — living beings, of which we're a part. It gets closer to us. Then we move on to the human sciences. So, speaking in tendential terms, as geometers do, this curve has as its limit politics as science. Political science! But this time not in a programmatic sense, but an effective one! It's another way of...
1:02:46 Marx had said an admirable phrase when he said that if the essence and the appearance of things coincided, all science would be useless. If it were enough to open one's eyes to pick up the truth from the gutter, we would know. Politics ought to come to crown the whole. But no, we ran into a snag. And fortunately the human sciences did not establish themselves with the same ease and the same efficiency as the natural sciences. Because otherwise that would mean we're not free.
1:03:17 That would mean we would have applied Y equals F of X to man. Which is exactly what the cognitive sciences are bent on doing. And the trick is done. I'm an engaged philosopher, I'm sorry. Not against — you understand — those who support the cognitive sciences, people who span the whole political spectrum. Which is somewhat troubling. But there you go. Let me remind you that 'cognoscere' means 'to know' [in the sense of acquaintance], and that 'scire,' or 'scientia,' means 'to know' [in the sense of knowledge].
1:03:47 It's a play on words, this business. Knowledge of acquaintance, or acquaintance of knowledge. That's what makes it cognitive science. There's a snag somewhere. Our snag is precisely that. We had set out from a project that presupposed freedom, which made philosophical inquiry possible, made the question 'what must I do' possible, and above all, once we had answered that question, made action possible — as action, not as agitation and movement, like that of the tree bent by the wind earlier.
1:04:18 And here is our knowledge triumphing by increasing the empire of necessity. That's why there have been unconscious resistances to the progress of science. Why do you think Galileo had so much trouble? 'Eppur si muove' — 'And yet it moves.' A good Italian, in petto, on the sly, coming out of the courtroom, on the steps. 'Eppur si muove.' And why did they cause him so much trouble? Precisely because, obscurely, consciousness knows very well that if we keep progressing like this, knowledge is going to draw closer to itself.
1:04:54 And there is resistance. I alluded to Freudian vocabulary earlier, which fits perfectly here. There is resistance. No one wants to consider himself as a plaything of the elements, as an object. Everyone is nonetheless attached to the illusion, or at least to the representation he has of himself as a free being. The whole point is to make a bit of an effort so that this representation coincides with the present. To represent — that's what...
1:05:24 ...it's only valid when the present [the thing itself] is not there. An ambassador represents his country when his country is not there. I care a great deal about what I call, in colloquial terms, this snag, this difficulty. It's what somewhat keeps us from being sharks in our workshop, I mean, isn't it — we've arrived, we've bumped into something, we can no longer just continue like that, benefiting from the status quo — we were headed for catastrophe.
1:05:56 And when Kant said 'I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith,' that doesn't mean — it would be a huge misreading of the respect Kant had for the sciences — it doesn't mean that these impious inquiries that are the sciences must be forbidden in order to reestablish faith. It means that science, knowledge, for which he had great attachment, on which he worked enormously, has a field specific to it, and action and freedom are another.
1:06:28 The word faith — he says 'Glauben,' which means belief as well as faith. When I was speaking earlier about regulative ideas, everything happens as if there were an 'I' behind all my representations, as if the phenomena of nature that the understanding presents to us in a somewhat cut-off way from first causes and final causes had a unity somewhere behind them, and then everything happens as if there were a first principle of all things — God, the world, the self, etc. In Kant, as I told you earlier, these are regulative ideas — everything happens as if — we remain, once again, very cautious.
1:07:05 So, if we cannot stop there, it's because we do indeed have the form of freedom — now that we've seen it must not be confused with what solicits us in natural or supernatural terms — but on the other hand, we haven't given it any content. That's somewhat the weakness of Kantianism, isn't it, that's why we sometimes speak of moral formalism in Kant. I don't know — I forgot to say that the good will is at the start of moral action, it's almost a tautology besides, but it doesn't give content to the will, content other than negative. Earlier it turned out that I was only free insofar as I did not do what pleased me by getting up; there was a warmer, more constructive conception of freedom. So this question from Romain was very precious to us, but on the condition — now I'll answer precisely what is at stake in your question, whether you intended it or not, I don't know, we'll find out — what is at the start of the trajectory that pushes the prisoner...
Catastrophe or splendor against the backdrop of the cave 1:08:15 ...to leave his nonsense aside, or rather behind him, in order to turn toward the light, toward the truth. At the start, something happened on the back wall of the cave, otherwise he could have stayed seated a long time in his cinema seat — dark room, excuse me, it's the Cannes Film Festival — but let's leave them in their cave, in Cannes, and let's look — I come back to my sharks — as long as there's not too much trouble on the back wall of the cave, I stay chained, I'm fine there, it doesn't bother me, I don't want to be in the false — actually, I don't care about false and true, it works — which is what makes Rousseau say, for example, that as long as the balance of power favors the tyrants, it works; he doesn't yet know that the strongest is never strong enough, etc., he could still be the master — so something happens, in time, on the back wall of the cave. Yes, two things happen, and we come back to the beginning of our course, the beginning of our sessions, I'm quite glad — either a catastrophe,
1:09:25 ...or a splendor — that's pure Plato — either the crisis, that's where we started, our seminar, our sessions — or all of a sudden something happens that means things can no longer go on as before: a misfortune, which can be individual, it can be a bereavement for some, it can be a war for a people, a crisis, a passage from one mode of production to another, in Marxist terms, why not, etc. — or an immense happiness — here I'm alluding to Plato, the greatest artist of his time, this philosopher who wanted to banish poets from the city, the greatest poet of his time, I don't know — I mean by that that Plato's works, apart from their properly philosophical message, have been revered for centuries, rightly, as marvels. If you want to convince yourselves of this, if you have a bit of time — I'm not sending you to the ten books of the Republic on vacation, you may have better things to do, philosophers, though I strongly recommend it — but take the beginning of a dialogue like the Phaedrus, or the whole of the Symposium, they are marvels. From the political point of view, well, there you go — and so there can also be, somewhere on the back wall of the cave, something of such beauty that the world can no longer go on as before. And in the modern era,
1:10:35 for example, there is a whole avant-garde poetry beginning with Baudelaire that takes up exactly this theme — look at the sonnet 'Correspondances,' he says exactly that: 'Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes let confused words escape; man passes there through forests of symbols' — who is the apostrophe, who observes him, 'with familiar glances,' somewhat unsettling — it's not man who looks at the symbols, it's the symbols that look at man 'with familiar glances,' meaning man has not pierced the mystery of the symbols, but the symbol knows the mystery of man — exactly the reverse of what happens between Oedipus and the Sphinx. What happens between Oedipus and the Sphinx, which reminds me of the deal — it's very short — well, the riddle, the Sphinx is there to pose riddles, enigmas — 'sacred are they,' you will say?
1:11:33 What riddle does the Sphinx pose to Oedipus? You know the deal is this: I pose a riddle to you, if you don't find it, I devour you, if you find it, I die — an interesting deal. What does it pose to Oedipus? Very tricky question. There you go, I'd need to try hard — you're strong. Yes: 'What is this animal that walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, on three in the evening?' He says, playing on my Greek, its intelligence tested by experience — it's man, of course: on four legs, the baby; on his two human adult feet; then when he's old, on a cane, on three legs in the evening.
1:12:10 And oriental Antiquity collapses and Greece appears. The answer was man. The Sphinx is not an idea that originally comes from the Greeks. The Sphinx has interrogated man since forever. The Sphinx is the emblematic figure — it's not Egyptian art. There's a very beautiful passage in Hegel's Aesthetics where he speaks of the sense of mystery among the Egyptians and of the Sphinx as...
1:12:40 Sorry, where he speaks of the concept of the symbol, illustrating it through the sense of mystery among the Egyptians, and in particular through the figure of the Sphinx, as the enigma of the enigma. We are not committing, Hegel says, an anachronism. Let us not attribute to the ancients forms of knowledge, a bit like those who say that in the deserts of Peru, the drawings correspond to extraterrestrials — they may well be raving, anything is possible. But what is certain is that we must not attribute to the Greeks, to the Egyptians, notions, ideas, feelings, representations that only appear twenty to thirty centuries later.
1:13:22 What I mean by that is that Hegel wants us to understand that the sphinx was an enigma for the Egyptians. That is how he represents mystery, the mystery of being. And you see the figure of the sphinx. Concretely, what is it? It's a human head that starts to emerge from an animal form. And a hominization of nature, already in the figure of the sphinx. And so when Oedipus answers, says, sorry, that the key to the riddle is man, that's a lesson in humanism.
Tragic hubris and Cornelian honor 1:13:57 That means the answer isn't found by scanning the cosmos or in the search for divine permanence and immutability, it's in man. The mystery is man. So instead of the solar god, as in Plato, we begin to see that freedom, I don't know, man could occupy that question mark. That wretched runt, we heard about earlier, that is barely viable. Is that it? And who deserves — I should have brought it, some of you may know it — the admirable chorus of Sophocles' Antigone, there's nothing greater...
1:14:30 It had to be Hellenic civilization to produce this hymn to man, I don't know if you can hear it, from this chorus. You know that the chorus in Greek tragedy has somewhat the function of the confidants in our classical theater, which of course always takes Greek theater as its model. That is, the hero is a tragic hero insofar as he is prey to hubris, to excess, insofar as he transgresses, you see, the fragile balances instituted by the law. Icarus, who flies too high, Antigone, who pushes too far against the law decreed by the city.
1:15:07 Family piety, Creon, who condemns it in reverse, who goes too far in the state's intrusion into what nonetheless belongs to the most irreducible sphere of the private, which is the sphere of mourning and death. The warrior belongs to the city as long as he is alive. It sends him to fight the Persians. Once he's dead, that's a family matter. Each of the two, Antigone as much as Creon, has somewhat overstepped their domain. That's why it's a tragedy.
1:15:37 There isn't a good one and a bad one, it's not Bush's world where I'm the empire of good and you're evil. Then what I designate to you as evil is that I'm the good one, it's roughly the same thing. No, tragedy is serious. Both of them, you see, have done wrong. Both committed hubris, in the Greek sense. So you see, if I put here — I'm in the process of saying how it is — I was talking about that runt, it made me think of this chorus, you see?
1:16:09 As I was just telling you, the tragic hero — whether it's our tragedy in its Greek model. Fortunately he has somewhere something that comes to balance his excess. And that balancing element is the confidant. In Racine, all the confidants are Cornelian. In Corneille, it's the reverse. It's amusing to see. In Corneille, what matters is not my little inner problems, the petticoat problems, as I saw last time, as so often happens in Racine.
1:16:44 It's honor. The value to which I sacrifice everything else, including my personal feelings as a lover, for Chimène. It's honor. And honor only makes sense in relation to the other, if you look carefully. That means my honor on a desert island — you know we always come back to that aggregate of individuals on the other side of the wall. Honor in relation to the other. The other can be the narrow group, the family. Indeed, the Cid begins by avenging his father, not for the dishonor he suffered, which, as long as it isn't avenged, reflects on all who share his blood.
1:17:21 It's a body speaking to you. That's what vendetta is. It's unfortunate that because of that I can cause 50 deaths. It concerns everyone through whom the blood that was struck and wronged flows. And then, honor, of course, with the wider community when he wins the battle against the Moors and saves the kingdom. In both cases, it's in relation to the other's gaze and to a collectivity that we speak of honor. As a result, the Racinian heroes try to make the Cornelian heroes a bit more human.
1:17:53 Or the interlocutors. When the news arrives in Corneille's Horace, the news arrives that, you know, the two cities are waging a war that has become endless. So, very wisely, they decide it will be settled by a single duel. Fewer deaths, it's better. A single duel with one member from each camp, between Rome and Alba. Small cities, when Rome is not yet a great empire. Rome hasn't even conquered half of Italy. But for now, they're fighting the small cities. We'll come back to that. There you go. And they draw lots, you see? And unfortunately, a Cornelian situation, as they say, a dilemma, you see — two friends are going to fight each other, all the closer because they were about to become brothers-in-law and give each other their sister.
1:18:34 You see, it's a horrible situation. I'm forced to slaughter and thus forever alienate the one I was going to marry and whom I loved. Well. There would be a woman weeping because I've eaten up my honor, in Corneille. And I was saying that the balancing confidant is a bit more human here, and here he confides — not to a confidant, but Horace confides to Curiace — in the passage I'm going to quote for you. Curiace is the Alban, you see. Horace is the Roman.
1:19:05 And when the news arrives, he's devastated, Curiace. It's not possible, there are choices. Well, it's the fact that it falls on the two of us. And then, I'll spare you the whole tirade. Horace, for his part, rejoices — he's a Roman. He rejoices at this occasion to show my honor. To show how far the value I attach to honor can go, since the higher the price to pay, the greater the sacrifice I have to make of what is dear to me, the more my honor will emerge, you see, will stand out brilliantly and be better recognized.
1:19:40 "The fate that opens for honor the barrier, the dice that fell to us, offer our constancy an illustrious matter." He is happy as can be about having slaughtered his brother-in-law in a few moments. It's extraordinary, somehow. I don't know. "To fight an enemy, to expose oneself alone to blows in the fray, in battle, is the ordinary effect of simple virtue" — meaning courage in that era's code — "simple virtue is the ordinary effect. A thousand have already done it, a thousand could do it, but to want to immolate before the public those one loves, to expose oneself in combat against another self, to take up a cause that requires one to fight the brother of one's wife and the lover of one's sister — this other virtue belonged to us alone."
1:20:15 The other is stunned in front of him. He's going to be freed — that's what I wanted to illustrate again. And he ends up saying, because he too is as brave as Horace, he doesn't tremble for a second in combat, he trembles at killing his brother-in-law, not at fighting, not at dying. These are the heroes of antiquity. And he says, "Your firmness has something of the barbarian in it." That's a word too many for a Roman to hear.
1:20:46 "Your firmness has something of the barbarian in it, even a great heart" — heart meaning courage in the code of the time — "even a great heart would take vanity in going by this path to immortality, whatever price one puts on such smoke" — meaning honor, the supreme value for the Roman, and for him mere smoke — "whatever price one puts on such smoke, obscurity is worth more than so much renown." After insisting that he will go, he will go, "I did not hesitate for a moment to do my duty. Our long friendship, the love of the alliance, could not for a moment set my mind wavering. And since by her choice Alba shows, indeed, that she esteems me as much as a warrior as Rome esteems you, I believe I do for her as much as you do for Rome."
1:21:21 "But after all, I am a man." You see, I was saying he humanizes the debate. "I see that your honor demands all my blood, that all of mine consists in piercing your side; close to marrying the sister, one would have to kill the brother; though I run to my duty without terror, my heart recoils from it, and I shudder with horror at it," etc. And it ends with — no, sorry — Horace responds by saying, yes, excuse me, he ends with these words too many, "and I love this choice that has just fallen upon us."
1:21:58 "I love what it gives me, but I mourn what it takes from me. And if Rome demands a higher virtue, I thank God for not being Roman, so as to keep something human still." "If you are not Roman, be worthy of being one," the other replies. That's a Roman's answer. You're not Roman, too bad for you, but you could at least be worthy of being one. Terrible, women like that. Etc. You see, with Racine, it's going to be the opposite. The confidant, male or female, will say: think of your political interests, your honor — you, Phèdre, falling for your stepson, that's a fine thing.
1:22:32 You are, after all, the wife, you are, after all, the queen, there's the state, a vacancy of power, and what are you thinking about? Hippolyte. So these kinds of measure and balance are quite important here. But all this was to say that there is something tragic from the start, at the back of the cave, where there is something so beautiful that it turns them back on themselves. A crisis produced by beauty. That's why I quoted Baudelaire earlier, but I could quote you, you see, practically all the poets of modernity, if we periodize it so as not to say just anything.
1:23:10 The modern era in history, clearly, runs from the Renaissance to today, you see, it's what begins after the end of the Middle Ages. But modernity, in the cultural sense, is of course situated from the great upheavals we started from — the English industrial revolution, the French political revolution, in short, late 18th, early 19th century, with the appearance of Romanticism and its offshoots afterward. And well, most poets there are going to insist on this side of beauty as devastating, as also dangerous, you see?
1:23:40 To explain his madness, his madness, Hölderlin, the great German poet, a fellow student of Hegel and Schelling, said about his trip to Bordeaux, the first time he came into contact with the world, with the southern sun: "Apollo has struck me," a famous phrase. Apollo struck him, he got hit hard, so to speak. Apollo has struck me — or, as he says in another poem, "for misfortune is heavy to bear, but happiness so much more so." You see, this is all at the back of the cave.
1:24:11 It can simply be a romantic passion, I mean. Even a pretty woman, a handsome man, that appears at the back of the cave. At the outset it's bodies, it's the visible, the sensible, and they can drive us mad sometimes. That's it, that's what makes the status quo change and a quest begin. It's not a bad idea, Plato's. It's fruitful nonetheless. So there, that was for the additional answer to your question. Of course it comes before knowledge, but because in action something has happened at the back of the cave.
From ought-to-be to being: the world of the sign 1:24:41 I can no longer behave as before. That's why we must make this detour, this great theoretical detour that Plato enjoins on us in Book Seven of the Republic. I did not say that to be free one must not do what one wants. I even said the opposite in terms of vocabulary. I said one must not confuse doing what one wants with doing what pleases us. So when you speak of this determined world, etc., let's set it aside. Let's reserve, for my relation at that moment to being, the phrase "doing what pleases me." I have never condemned doing what I want, on the contrary, I grant the common definition of freedom, to be consistent with what I said.
1:25:17 there's no need to take the opposite view of common opinion in the general statement. We need to give it content. Namely that being free, I am free when I do what I want. Except we've just seen, through the examples I took with our two young people and through your answer, which validates this quite well, we've just seen that the distinction between doing what pleases me and doing what I want is far from obvious. We often spend our time confusing them.
1:25:48 Leibniz said that if the compass needle were endowed with consciousness, it would have the illusion of thinking it wants to point north. It is not in accordance with a law external to it, you see, that it wants to point north. There you go. It's as if we said that if the moon were endowed with consciousness, it might have the illusion that it loves turning around the Earth. Let's leave that aside. Now, to answer your question, it's a very important one because it raises the problem, which we've seen insufficiently treated by Kant, of the content of freedom.
1:26:22 When I posit freedom as an ought-to-be, we never manage to answer your question. It would be necessary that I not yield to my passions, my impulses, that I not be under what's called the impulse of mere appetite, but only in obedience to the law I have prescribed for myself. It would be necessary — we're in the ought-to-be. In what's called in German the Sollen, "you should." Nordic languages have an advantage over French on this point. That is, they distinguish "to must," "to ought to," physical necessities and properly moral duty.
1:26:55 So, you remember, we had a lot of fun with the verb "must/should" which really needs examining when we say that all philosophy rests on the question "what must I do?" It's an important verb. We showed clearly that in our language, I must eat to live, I must obey the red light or not run through the stop sign. We use the same verb even though these are very different things. English, precisely, like German, has the sense to distinguish the two. Now Kant, when he speaks of the ought-to-be, well, of freedom, always uses the word "Sollen," which is moral duty.
1:27:25 As you say, it's the thing I set for myself, but like a kind of horizon that never comes into being. So your question is well-founded and it raises the problem of content. It's a bit set aside by Kant, the content of will, the content of freedom. I can't answer you in prescriptive terms. I'm not going to say "here's what must be done for this." The next step, and your question allows us to get there, is to restore the being lost with Kant.
1:28:01 not natural being — that page is definitively turned, it is an object of knowledge and mastery, nature, that's not the question. But I'm speaking here of my relation to the world. The fact that it is posited as ought-to-be, Kant and his heirs, presupposes that human beings — and here I get to the heart of your question — have never realized what they wanted. Let's not exaggerate either.
1:28:31 We can observe in being — I spoke earlier of the sphinx — it exists in the desert and has for millennia. Human beings have not been content to have mere velleities in their heads. They have embodied their will or their pleasure or their end, whether fantasized, good or bad, they embodied it. In other words, we must judge the content of freedom and of the will from what people do and not only from what they say about it. When — this is an example I've often given for other purposes, but which resurfaces here in the horizon of freedom — when, in a working-class family, on Sunday, I have a meal with friends and it's a nice festive interlude between two weeks of hell, we do a bit better than usual.
1:29:26 It's not — we've often developed this — we dress up the dishes a little, not just the quality of the cooking, but the decoration, the tablecloth, everything that means we're not devouring something on the floor, without a bowl, without anything, whereas none, none of all these protocols adds anything whatsoever to the biological program. The body, to have its needs for lipids, carbohydrates and proteins satisfied, doesn't need to go through all that fuss. This fuss is man, the fuss-maker. We shouldn't neglect it as secondary or superfluous — or else we must say that anthropology begins with the superfluous.
1:30:00 Since we have a few union-world folks here in the room, this is an argument I can offer them. When they're told, "that's a luxury, that's excessive," man begins precisely beyond natural necessity, because painting on cave walls, frankly, will never add anything, you see, to the nutritional quality of reindeer meat. Yes, quite simply. But nevertheless we consider it just as necessary as everything else, to the point that when, on an archaeological dig, we hesitate over whether we're dealing with an animal, an australopithecus or something like that, and to decide we're dealing with a hominid, when there are burial remains, that settles the problem.
1:30:42 In other words, it's the world of the sign. And a sign addresses itself to the other, you see? It's the world of the sign that is properly anthropological, one that adds nothing to the world of causes and effects. You see the distinction: in nature, there are causes and effects. In the human world, there are meanings and signs. There you go. So this question stirs us right to the heart of the debate.
1:31:12 We must give content to freedom, but this "must" mustn't be arbitrary. This is a bit like all the bloody revolutionary utopias in general, I mean, which resemble somewhat Procrustes' bed. You know, when I have such an abstraction in my head that when I absolutely want reality to bend to it, I do considerable damage, because reality never bends to an abstraction. So, to give content to the will, we must observe man, so to speak, in the act. His will expresses itself, externalizes itself, it is not hidden, it is not only in his head, it expresses itself.
1:31:43 We owe to disciplines like psychoanalysis, and others, but I think of it because it's more familiar, the knowledge that what is unconscious, what is internal, our drives, are not... We shouldn't make accusations of intent and try to read — one expresses oneself, it's there in the lines. We just have to read the lines, or listen to them when it's speech. The subject often says much more than he himself wishes to say. See the slips of the tongue, the failed acts when speaking, and things like that.
Fichte, Schelling, Hegel; art as realized will 1:32:15 So, there, I answer your question by reorienting the inquiry on the ought-to-be — sorry — on the conversion of the ought-to-be into being, but not natural being. Historical being, and we only get there now, after Kant. That's what was missing in Kant. That in order to know what is at the basis of will in man, we must look at how this will satisfies itself in the anthropological sphere. I spoke of meal rites earlier, which we find in all societies. What differs is the modalities.
1:32:46 Here we use chopsticks, here we use forks, here we use the three fingers of the right hand — sorry, never the left hand — and so on. But all that varies. What is common is that there are all these rites, this whole universe, what I call the symbolic order, of sign and meaning, which add nothing to cause and effect in biological terms, but are highly elaborated, etc. And that's the direction dialectical thought will take, in particular starting with Hegel, to resolve the contradiction of his time between two schools of thought that opposed each other in the two greatest post-Kantian philosophers after Kant, Fichte and Schelling — Fichte exasperates the moral side of Kant, to go quickly.
1:33:28 By opposing a self and a non-self and wanting absolutely to impose the moral law on the rest of being, so it's an exacerbated ought-to-be, whereas Schelling will say — this is progress compared to what I just said, in the direction of being — that our will is already realized, but for him, not in history but in nature. We're going to move quickly through the stages that still had to be crossed before reaching Hegel, whom I'm now discussing, and who studied philosophy at the same time as Schelling, and the third man, his friend Hölderlin, who was very close to him in friendship — the poet who is known as a poet, and for good reason, one of the greatest poets of all time, if I may make this value judgment — I say that because I'm far from the only one to say it — one of the greatest poets of the West — I don't know what "the West" means since the Earth became round — but people forget that he is also a philosopher, with a remarkable philosophical text by Hölderlin, in particular
1:34:38 on the concept of judgment, but above all it's an era where this distinction between philosophical discourse and poetic discourse is not obvious, and it's no accident that I follow up on this, and I'm going to wrap up for this second-to-last time, because it will let us validate what I'll do in the final session — that is, tackle all these illustrations, if you will, particularly in the aesthetic field. It's no accident that Hegel, at the end of his life, produces an aesthetics, you see, the first developed aesthetics of the modern world, in order to see that human desires long ago became embodied — we can read them as we tried a little to do earlier with the figure of the sphinx in the desert, after all I'm talking about Egyptian art — just as, for example, the need for finitude that the Greeks had; for the Greeks, perfection is what is completed, what is finite, which exists only in the world of the city and of man, because in nature there's always something left dangling — that's why they were anti-feminist, or rather anti-feminine, which is even more serious, I don't know, you know that Greek mores didn't particularly incline them toward women at a certain period
1:35:48 but there's a deep reason for this, it's not merely a matter of aesthetics or customs, as if there were peoples who happened to be like this and others like that — it's because they had such a — for them, one escapes nature in the city, it's the exact opposite of the modern world. The modern world, ecology, but not only that, it's not the polis, nature — one escapes, you see, the hell of the city where humanity's happy livestock, alas, wallows in its litter — one has to be elitist, one has to escape that to go into solitudes. Well, among the Greeks it's the reverse, it's usually not that — it's a world of anxiety, it's the world of the gods, the world of excess, and one has to arrive at our world, where there are right angles, of the Parthenon — we saw this last time with the temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion facing the infinite — daring to place a temple so limited, finite, complete, and so woman, as she is in these archaic societies, assigned to the tasks where nature determines us — bearing children, cooking, well, eating — all that is not what man decided, it's in these activities
1:36:58 that one shows one is nonetheless Greek or not, independent of nature, and as a result this somewhat demonized woman, who was bound up with the indeterminate — that's not finite, that's not clean — that explains a lot about the distribution of value in Greek thought. So, comparing the Greek temple — I just pointed this out — which limits, which doesn't want that, it will limit the verticality of the columns with the pediment, a cap, you see, without measure — look at the opposite, the world of transcendance, whether it's Islam's minaret, cathedrals, bell towers, a bell tower, or sometimes the vault, at Beauvais — it's not the tallest vault in the Christian world, it's a bit lower than it was in the Middle Ages, because they had built it even higher but it collapsed one day — I'm joking, excuse me, it's dreadful — the day of Easter Mass, it's — not terrible damage, of course, the inhabitants — correct me, Catherine, if I'm wrong, that's right, an excellent historian — it was seen as a punishment, Babel, they had gone too high — you see this upward drive of transcendence in the religions
1:38:08 of transcendence, of the infinite, there's no limit, you see, you see that we don't need to ask, well, what is it, you, for you to be free, what is it — it's not — I said earlier that psychoanalysis has taught us that by speaking we reveal much more about our own reality and truth than we obtain when we think about ourselves, badly placed as we are when it comes to ourselves — well, in the same way, here we see that we learn much more about the will of humanity when we catch it in the act, in art, where it has realized itself, all the more so as it realized itself freely — and that's why I speak of aesthetic works, I'm not talking about what we do out of necessity, that wouldn't express meaning, it would be a chain of causation, that's it — so that gives you a bit of the program, the program for next time, we'll try to see a few examples, I don't know — good news, that freedom is on the march, and has been for a long time; it must not be an ought-to-be that lies in our future, and I'll close today's session with this formula, which for Hegel sums up not only human history but its meaning — I'll discuss it after next time, you see — that sounds a bit old-fashioned
The meaning of history as progress of freedom 1:39:20 When we speak of the meaning of history today, right—and quite rightly, moreover—it can be taken in a totalizing sense, even a totalitarian one, because I could decide on a meaning that completely excludes other experiences. Yes. Now Hegel found—but the accent, the accent, it's the Corsican in me speaking, excuse me—I'll say it this way, he found a good thing, a tropism: he found a meaning that not only doesn't threaten freedom but that is freedom itself. Here's the formula: the Orientals know that only one is free, the Greeks know that some are free, the moderns know that all are free. It's clear in Hegel—he may be wrong, we can discuss it—but for him, if there is a meaning in historical evolution, it's toward more freedom, not less. The Orientals know that only one is free: the emperor of China, the pharaoh, the great Mongol—what's called in historical sociology the stage of the charismatic sovereign. Fine, but he is the only one; he has the right of life and death over all the rest of his subjects. And then with the Greeks there's a threshold: there is a community that has the same rights, the same freedoms, a community.
1:40:30 within the city, which needs roughly 20% to be effective, the rest being in slavery. It's progress because power within this small group of free men is no longer decided by force—you have to speak in the parliament, in the agora, to determine who will hold power, and so the road is opened to the sophist—what am I saying—to the communicator, to the publicist, to the one who manages to convince the crowd to vote for him, because what makes power now is the parliament. And then the moderns know that all are free—we move, for historians of antiquity, to the world roughly when Christianity arrives. Christianity says: render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, render unto God what is God's—a total disjunction of the temporal order and the spiritual order. Man does not have to bow before anyone, including before the pharaoh, the king, the emperor of China, or anything else—I'm speaking of the Christian texts, I'm not speaking of how, well, the churches turned them around for the benefit of the powers, of course. I'm making a precise point here, I'll finish with an amusing anecdote, hoping that this aporia will be an appetizer for the meal to come, but you know
1:41:41 there's a very well-known passage, even for those who've never opened the Gospel, that it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Damn, what a dirty trick—I am king of France, so I am responsible for the eldest daughter of the church, France, that sovereign, absolute right, I am sacred, I think that's a cruel—right—an almost sacred character, people pay to come watch me eat, and now here's this religion being taught that tells me the peasant oppressed by my feudal system has a better chance of entering the kingdom of heaven than I do. That's a dirty trick—what is this story? At that point there were Jesuits who invented casuistry, the study of cases: you don't read the Gospel just like that. First you start by saying, outside the church there is no salvation—you think you're going to understand the Gospel all by yourself, my little fellow? It's complicated—illiteracy is good for this, because you need to go through those who are educated and literate to transmit what needs transmitting. Which is why Luther's first political act was to have the Gospel translated into German, to free himself from Rome, which had massacred
1:42:52 the peasants afterward, who had believed in this story, in Germany. Secondly, the Jesuits, in their study of this passage, had ended up saying it was a translation problem, and that if you look closely, it's a metaphor, and that what's called the eye of a needle in the text is actually, in Aramaic, something like a gate. Obviously, I'm telling you this to show that when I speak of the Gospel, of Christianity, I say it's serious, historically speaking—it produced the world, the world we live in, right? It's slavery that was the productive force, on the Marxist level, the pillar of antiquity, which disappears after Christianity—not on December 31st at midnight, that's not how it happens, it's progressive. And you see, the simple fact that during medieval wars there was the truce of God within the church, which is a sacred space beyond human conflicts—that was an enormous emancipation. You do not bow before the creature, you only bow before the creator—that's important, you don't bend the knee before a created being. There, good news, that's good.
