English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The cave summarizes the moments of philosophical thought 0:01 So, picking up from where we left off last time, we had gone through a few developments — I won't say the interpretation, in the singular, because it's inexhaustible. Proof of that: it's been 20 centuries since this thing came out, and we're still using it. Hello. Don't hesitate, there are still three, I'll admit that. The myth of the cave — I told you I'm not bringing it up under what we'd call the academic heading of the history of philosophy and ideas, because that would mean we'd still be on Plato in principle, and in that case, at this rate, it would take us I don't know, 20 years, to get to the contemporary period, and even then, you can spend your whole life on Aristotle, you know, or on Spinoza, or on Foucault, or on Kant.
0:43 But here, as it happens, it's this myth as summarizing, roughly, all the moments — we'd say later with Hegel, wouldn't we? Not just the parts in space, but the moments in time, of the development of philosophical thought. I had reminded you that the tripartition here, for instance, is the first one Plato clearly sets out: among the most doubtful objects, sensible knowledge, the back of the cave — everyone knows that, so I won't dwell on it too much — which corresponds to the most doubtful knowledge, opinion, doxa. Today we'd say the corner café talk, which I don't despise — one shouldn't be elitist, and for fear of not justifying not being populist, one shouldn't become unpopular either.
1:27 Corner café talk is excellent for chatting with friends, for knowing about the football match between Bastia and Marseille, all that — I take it seriously. It's just not the place where truth is established. That's all. Paradoxical opinion. Then afterward, we leave the sensible world — we're very much in Plato here — we take off completely at an 80-degree angle, and we head into a world we can't see, because it's not a cosmos aisthêtos, a sensible world. You see that aesthetics here has its original meaning — the arts flatter the senses, and 'sense' is shared also with the anesthetist at the hospital — the first sense is indeed precisely sense itself, the most physical sense. So we leave the cosmos aisthêtos to go toward the cosmos noetos — it's from this noetos that words like 'notion,' 'noumenon' come.
2:20 I noted that this is the activity of the mind, so to speak, right? So, starting from this... Hey, I haven't taken my prisoners. Do you see the absurdity? It's us — I forgot that part. Because Plato says right away, after telling his story, that it's us he resembles. Have they heard about these prisoners? There you go. Don't forget they're all chained up, in such a way that they can only look at the context. So, here, one must think of mathematics, all that, for example.
2:53 For Plato, that's what he had in mind, right? Or as he puts it more precisely, the hypothetico-deductive discourse, which starts from a hypothesis to proceed, 'teleutê,' as he says, to move toward conclusions, respecting at each step the principle of identity, which we never find in the sensible world. You remember that Leibniz, who like Plato, was — of course, a great philosopher, you don't need me to say that — but he was an immense mathematician, a jurist, an advisor to princes, legal advisor let's say, minds like we can't produce anymore, given the specialization we have now.
3:26 And Leibniz would walk his students through the park — I think I told you this once, didn't I? — telling them, find me two leaves in the park that are identical. You have to take off from the sensible to arrive at intelligible realities. And to go from the circles you make in water by throwing pebbles to the circle as defined by the mathematician, which you can never see with your eyes, nor caress from behind either, I don't know — unless, like Ionesco, you say, take a circle, caress it, it will turn vicious. That's in The Bald Soprano, I believe. There you go.
3:56 So, second level. Third level. Dialectic, and why do we move on to it? We don't move on arbitrarily, as if I were giving you a bus tour of Paris, but because — this is Plato speaking — what leaves us unsatisfied is that we go from hypotheses to conclusions without going back up, he says, from the hypotheses to the anhypotheton, the unhypothetical principle, which would be a true foundation. He thus opens up the ground for what will soon be called metaphysics, the unhypothetical principle. So he moves past that — that's scholastic Platonism, and it's important, in fact it's familiar.
4:29 And then, dialectic comes to remedy the insufficiency of discursive knowledge. I should mention in passing — I know there are excellent mathematicians in the room who are interested in philosophy — they've understood Plato's message well, who had inscribed at the entrance of his school that none may enter here who is not a geometer. That means: don't snub mathematics, but once you're in here, we're going to do something else. 'Let none enter here who is not a geometer' — that's necessary knowledge, but not sufficient. Because mathematicians don't ask themselves the question 'what must I do,' which haunts Plato, morally and politically.
5:06 And even religiously, I don't know. So, the dialectician — yes, here we move from a logic of identity, if you recall well, I'll go quickly since this is familiar to you, non-contradiction, same thing, you can read it directly as identity, or negatively as non-contradiction. I remind you also that the principle of identity was formulated with rigor — because otherwise, our hunter-gatherer ancestors already handled that fairly well — but made explicit, if you will, in an unequivocal way, for the first time by Aristotle, in the admirable fourth book of the Metaphysics, right?
5:40 In which he says very clearly that there is a first principle — I won't dwell on this too much, he's doing metaphysics, but since the word doesn't exist yet, he calls it first philosophy. Besides, when you read Descartes' text, 'Meditationes de Prima Philosophia' in the original language, which is Latin — because the difference is, Descartes was a great political figure, he wrote the Discourse on Method in French, he wanted it widely disseminated. That was new at the time — Du Bellay had just, a few generations earlier, tried to justify writing in French, Defence and Illustration of the French Language — it was new, and to reach a wide audience, he had to leave Sanskrit, the learned language, and use Prakrit, that is, French, at the time.
The same progression from Descartes to Kant, and Plato's struggle 6:25 So, what interests me, the common point in all this, is that they all follow the same plan. Descartes too begins, in the First Meditation, by casting doubt on sense information, the passage on the piece of wax, right? Spinoza begins with knowledge of the first kind, from which one must free oneself to arrive at knowledge of the second kind, and then afterward, at a kind of synthesis of theoretical intuition that we find in him.
6:57 In Kant, there is sensibility, understanding, and reason, in that order. You see, we always find roughly the same progression. And that confirms it. I'm saying this, dwelling a bit, because I'd like to reassure you, for this last session. Because if I tell you, well, it's been a few months that we've tried to answer the first of the great questions of philosophy, what can I know? And here we've arrived at what is supposed to be the source of all knowledge. And then — greatness of Plato — because here, we leave scholastic Platonism.
7:29 We stop there. What is it, for Plato? No, for Plato, this is only a beginning. Now one must go back down to the bottom of the cave and tell the others: what you see, all that, is nonsense. It's nonsense, it's not that, they're copies. I'll show you the models. And so, this is political action, action toward others, political in the Greek sense, in relation to the other. Now, going back — if I was there, from that point of view, rigorous development — we move from a logic of identity to a logic that incorporates contradiction. That is, the opposite of identity. That's what identity is.
8:01 And Plato was not prepared for this — that's his heroism. It's an aristocratic thought. And so he tends to privilege everything that is identical over what is altered, the permanent over the changing. You find that in all the great spiritualities, broadly speaking. Immobility over movement, the intelligible over the sensible, the finite over what is indeterminate and indefinite.
8:32 That's very Greek, all of this, isn't it? And he was not prepared for it. And when you look at these great dialogues, which we call the metaphysical dialogues — I don't want to give a history of philosophy course because we won't have time — there are aporetic dialogues, which often serve as a kind of training to enter philosophy, to ask questions. One makes some use of skeptical mischief against the naivety of dogmatic opinion. Well, those are the aporetic dialogues, up to roughly that point.
9:03 Then there are the metaphysical dialogues, where everything is reset, laid flat. This is inaugurated by the Sophist and continues with the Philebus — the Sophist is almost unreadable in its difficulty. People say modern philosophy, Kant, Hegel, if you read them — some even think it was a caricature of the endless discussions of sophists, it's so complicated at times. Getting to the essential of this great series of metaphysical dialogues, which is a real battle of Plato with himself — Plato ends up concluding that there is no sameness without otherness.
The principle of non-contradiction in Aristotle 9:35 That's what I'm saying: moving from the logic of identity to contradiction. Galileo, a century later, in founding physics, Galileo will lay out the theory of relativity. I'm not going back to philosophy of knowledge — this is to illustrate what I'm saying about contradiction. Galileo will inaugurate modern physics, right? The physics of impact, with the model of collision, of mechanism, which brings down the finalism of antiquity, and the anthropomorphism that was a consequence of it.
10:07 Galileo himself constantly says that it's not enough for him that experience confirm something — he's always looking for mathematical justification. As he puts it. So when I say the logic of contradiction regarding dialectic, that doesn't mean the contradictory. And that's why I come back to my definition, the first definition of non-contradiction by Aristotle, which I'll now state. So I've extracted it from the fourth book, book Gamma if you prefer, of the Metaphysics.
10:42 One last word on the context though. He's at a point where he wants to definitively corner the sharpest of the eristics and sophists — that's what they called those who asked, starting from how many hairs is a bald man bald, from how many pebbles do you have a heap. The Greeks had two kinds of questions that mess with the mind, believe me. Or the liar's paradox. Do you know that one? It's worked on in logic. Does someone know it? Yes, go ahead. The problem, at the level of confidentiality, is that when it comes to the question of whether you are currently lying — if you are currently lying, he speaks the truth, and if you are currently lying...
11:19 Bravo. The essential point is there. It's reduced. As a party game, it's the trick of... he who says 'I always lie' — is he telling the truth? There you go. That's the liar's paradox. It became party games afterward, but it comes from great fundamental logical reflections, those kinds of things. So, I mean, I can state it now — he wants to corner them, the sophists, he says whatever one can say, the skeptics, etc. Or else, he shuts up, says Aristotle, he clams up — no, I'm not joking, because he cites Cratylus, who was the disciple of Heraclitus.
11:53 Heraclitus, remember, he's the one who said panta rhei, everything flows. Go ahead then and try to establish a discourse that is correct, permanent, valid in every place and every time, in a world where — as Valéry puts it in Le Cimetière marin — everything flees, all matter is porous, right, the classics, time that destroys everything, becoming. And Cratylus had taken this 'mobilism' so seriously — that's how his philosophical school, that of Heraclitus, is sometimes characterized, mobilism, as opposed to the Eleatics who affirm immobile being.
12:24 Well then, Cratylus — he was a real one, at least he's a consistent skeptic, he shuts up. Because a skeptic who speaks, in order to make you understand that language cannot say the truth, is a bit contradictory. You see what I mean? But Cratylus, Aristotle says, ended up staying silent and just moving his finger. He stopped talking to content himself with pointing — because 'to indicate' comes from 'index,' right? I can't say 'Socrates is young' — he's already aged by the time I say it, you understand?
12:55 The Greeks take these things seriously. There you go. So, to corner them, Aristotle states the principle as follows: two contradictory attributes, heavy, light, open, even, odd — two contradictory or opposed attributes cannot be attributed to the same subject at the same time under the same respect. End of quote. When you see the historical consequences in philosophy, and in the sciences especially, of such a proposition, and when you see how short it is, it's worth noting.
13:34 It's almost the equivalent of Newton, who in a line and a half sums up all the movements of the universe — when we're not too close to the speed of light, but that covers a lot — by saying that all bodies attract one another directly in proportion to their mass and inversely to the square of their distance. Period. These are sentences heavy with meaning. So, two opposed attributes cannot belong to the same subject at the same time under the same respect. Three times the word 'same' — which is why I told you this is the principle of identity. Right? So let's make it a bit concrete. If I say Socrates old, Alcibiades young, that's not a contradiction — we're not talking about the same subject.
14:10 Everyone understands that, let's move quickly. Next, Socrates young, Socrates old — that seems more contradictory, but no. If I say that Socrates is young when he's 16 and old when he's my age, I'm not saying anything contradictory. And I can even say, at the same moment, now, while I'm speaking, that Socrates is young and old, but not under the same respect. I'd say he's old in his arteries and young in his liveliness, his sharpness of mind. So Aristotle, cautiously, examined the question from every angle before saying there's a contradiction — three conditions must be met, right?
Temporalizing the contraries; theoria as final silence 14:47 Since this is a reminder, I mean, I did go a bit deeper into the statement of the principle. Dialectic does not deny the prohibition of the contradictory. When two rivers flow in opposite directions from each other and meet and form a confluence to merge into a single river — one going that way, the other going this way — as they meet, it becomes one great river doing that: the confluence.
15:25 The synthesis, here, is in time, it's a becoming. When Hegel uses the metaphor of the plant, right, to remind us that he isn't proposing yet another philosophy alongside all those that preceded it, nor dwelling on contradicting, refuting the previous ones, because for him everything contributes to... everything expresses the Absolute. Hegelian thought is very rich and very generous in that respect, right? And I told you, from the very start of the course, don't count on me to indulge lovers of philosopher-brawling, to pit Aristotle against Sartre, Spinoza against Malebranche, and Democritus against Maine de Biran.
16:12 I prefer to insist on what is common to all of them as philosophers in general, and to involve you in the philosophical adventure, in what is properly philosophical about it, specifically philosophical. And here, I showed it earlier with the three moments, for example, that we find in roughly all philosophers. But here, it's more concrete. Because the fact — I'm saying this because among you too there are some who are familiar with dialectic but who neglect this point of view.
16:45 It's not a refutation of the contradictories. It's the presence of the contraries. That's not the same. But what makes it possible for contraries to coexist? Their temporalization. So we're not violating the requirement that they must not be contradictory at the same moment or in the same time, as Aristotle says. Sorry, this is a bit technical and abstract, but it wasn't a step we could skip over approximately.
17:19 I put that one in parentheses, the last stage here, when we reach the sun, because Plato says quite clearly that here, we no longer speak. It's over. Decidedly — so we shut up after all? Except that skeptics shut up before even starting. Here, it's at the end that silence is earned, after having spoken and said everything that can be said — and this is theoria, I put it in Greek on purpose, regardless of any snobbery, because it literally means contemplation. It's a vision. A relationship, then, supposed to be immediate, and no longer, like all the others, passing through the mediation of a discourse, an articulation, a medium.
From knowledge to action: the question "what do you call...?" 17:59 We say 'the media,' which is just the plural of 'medium,' of that which stands in the middle between sender and receiver. I'm not just thinking of television when I say media — I'm thinking of a tool, a hammer, which is the intermediary between the iron and me, the blacksmith, an intermediary or nothing more. There you go. So, we had gotten there — you'll tell me, wait, this is the last session, it's been 4 months on the philosophy of knowledge, we've barely begun to work through the most concrete, the densest part, there's still all that to do.
18:38 No, no, no, I've been a bit sly with you actually. We haven't stopped — but it's not as though we've been in the philosophy of action from the start. Let me remind those who weren't there that that path is more or less finished — it's the philosophy of knowledge, the one that tries to answer the question 'what can I know.' There you go, and here, the philosophy of action, that's it — 'is action good' — there you go.
19:10 And apparently that's an unmanageable deal, isn't it? So, not at all. We had begun to see this last time, when I made the transition. We're coming back, on the contrary, to the beginning of the course. I would never have had the time if I had taken a systematic approach, and it would have been a bit tedious and less interesting to do it in chronological stages. I could only have rushed through each of these immense stages that are medieval thought, Kant and Descartes, all those people.
19:43 But instead, I've tried to be a bit more 'matrix-like,' since there are a few mathematicians in the room. I know nothing about it, I don't claim to solve equations, but I mean, I'm taking the term in its intuitive sense — to what extent, with a basic structure, right, I produce symbolic effects. I'll be very clear in a moment. You'll see through examples. But when I told you from the outset that the fundamental philosophical question — the one that makes it so that with Socrates we take off from forms of questioning that may have preceded philosophy by several centuries or even millennia, when we think of Eastern, Chinese, Hindu thought — we didn't wait for Socrates to ask questions of unfathomable depth about the world around us and even about what is within us.
20:30 What is new is that the question bears precisely on the means, on language, on the words we use, and that the fundamental question in Socrates is not 'what is that?' Man has always asked that question. It's 'what do you call...?' which is more radical than 'what is that?' Because in 'what is that,' being is already given. And you know well enough among yourselves that formula that what is well known, because it is well known, is not known. I don't know — being is what is most familiar. Hegel says that it's the child who already has the word 'being' in its mouth.
21:00 And so, we don't question it. There you go. There are eras — take the existence of God. What do you call God? Once you've defined for me what you call God, I can tell you whether I think that exists or not. You see what I mean? The two are linked, meaning and existence here. So the most radical question is the one that arises at the beginning, at our own beginning, when we all started to speak — I told you last time — without a permit, with our parents. We've always spoken illegally. And yes, language is important for this last session.
21:31 The language I speak with you is not that of mathematicians. That serves me well. Although. It's an everyday language, which I twist a little as I please, but they're everyday words. They're not well-codified words from the outset. That's how we all learned to speak, right? We didn't tell our parents, 'I'm making a univocal definition of fork,' because you ask me for the fork, 'what do you call a fork?' No. We just dove in.
22:03 There you go. Frankly. But, as a result, we shouldn't be surprised that crisis comes back to hit us. We started speaking illegally, and the problems of language jump out at us, sooner or later. They express... it's in words, in the crisis of words, that a malaise is expressed which doesn't come only from words, of course. And it's obvious that when someone in the streets of Athens walks around asking 'what do you call virtue,' something has happened historically.
22:33 You can't imagine, right? Among all those building the pyramid 2000 years earlier, there's one who says, by the way, what do you call virtue, what must I do? Should I build the pyramid or not? No, that won't do, will it? You're really the only one here who doesn't know what needs to be done. They needed a whip on that site. So, this already presupposes a certain degree of freedom within a certain community. Let's not idealize — there were 20% free men and 80% slaves in Athens. There's worse slavery than that which existed in Athens, but still.
23:03 But anyway, within that 20%, there is a community of men who have the same rights, and among whom, above all, political power no longer depends only on force but on speech, because it's now the Assembly that decides — the Pnyx, the Agora, whatever you want to call it — that will decide, right, and no longer the mere whim of the Emperor of China, the Pharaoh, the King of Kings of Persia. My favorite, personally, is the Emperor of Ethiopia. I'm talking about titles. Does anyone here know that one?
23:33 Caroline, who's just back from Ethiopia. She had gone to study the origins of coffee. No? I don't know all of them. The King of Kings, the Negus. Negus. King of Kings, Lion of the Tribe of Judah, descendant of Prester John, and Emperor of Ethiopia. That's the charismatic oriental sovereign, as they say in sociology, in historical sociology, but only one... That's the famous formula I ended with last time. Hegel's formula, which says...
24:03 I've been quoting Hegel a lot today because I got reproached for it. Someone told me, you're a Hegelian, you quote everyone except Hegel. It's been six months since we talked about him. Or you only quote Hegel for anecdotes, like the one about the doctor, things like that. Whereas you dwell at length on Kant, on Plato. First of all, I'm not here to pass on my personal whims, I mean, firstly, and secondly, yes, actually I'm rather clever, I've been Hegelianizing from the very start. The approach itself, if you like, precisely because it's generous.
24:34 Isn't that so? Because Hegel is Platonist, is Aristotelian, is Cartesian, is Spinozist. About Spinoza, he even said that every philosopher has two philosophies, his own and Spinoza's. Hegel, you see? And he said that Plato inaugurated the world revolution. Ah! Well yes, strange terms, aren't they. Do you know that passage? You're saying that Plato inaugurated the world revolution? Does anyone know that passage? Because people say that to me too, I want to reassure you today. You're always jumping around, we'd stopped at Kant at the end of the eighteenth century, at the start of modernity, we were finally going to learn what comes next, what happens to us.
25:07 And others, we go back to the fourth century BC, enough already. But it's not my fault. There was an agrégation topic in philosophy about fifteen years ago. The topic was: city and decadence in Plato and Rousseau. Curious, it's the same chronological split, you see? Rousseau, contemporary of Kant, you see? It's not my fault, there are periods of crisis that have a certain family resemblance. Crisis of the Greek city, crisis of certain models of society, of historical models that begin to falter and that raise questions which had until then been somewhat swept under the rug, quite simply.
From monologue to dialogue, between crisis and war 25:47 So, to reassure you, I've tried to be systematic in the sense that I've placed little, you know, little matrices step by step that let us save time. So when I, let me sum them up, when I asked you at the very start to make a break between what do you call and what is it, and that the fundamental philosophical question was, what do you call...? With my little drawing, you know, to clearly mark the old questioning and the new one starting with Socrates. The old one is the magus, the astrologer who climbs up the ziggurat, isn't it, as they said in Mesopotamia, thinking that at 30 meters up, I'll bring the stars closer.
26:24 And he asks the question, what is the sun, what is the star, what is the cosmos? At the top of the ziggurat. And at the bottom of the ziggurat, the little potbellied one, I'm thinking of Socrates, and bearded, like that, you can picture him, who doesn't look at the sun and the stars, who looks at the fellow up top and says to him: what do you call the sun? I had pointed out the opposition, I had dug into the opposition. Namely that when I say, what do you call the sun, a speaking being speaks to a mute object that won't answer him.
27:00 The sun is not going to tell him, watch out, I'm not a planet, I'm a star. Which would have saved us a lot of research over the centuries. No, no. So we have a monologue in the what-is-it, the dogmatism of being. We have a monologue. Whereas the little potbellied one asks a question, the little potbellied one who speaks, speaks in order to ask a question to someone who can answer him. And we move from monologue to dialogue. These are not insignificant differences.
27:34 Between crisis and war, philosophizing, question mark. I apologize if it's only at the end that you'll understand why I chose this title. But at least when we're talking, we're not brawling. I say that because there's a dialogue by Plato, I've already pointed it out to you, where the discussion reaches such a pitch of dramatic tension that we're on the verge of a fight. It's the Gorgias, where Callicles is only held back from striking Socrates because of his age. Not just because he says absolutely scandalous things, like that it's better to suffer injustice than to commit it.
28:08 But above all, more generally, because he does philosophy at his age. It's fine when you're young to train the mind a bit. Once you're mature, you go into business. You go where people show themselves, in the text, exactly like that. You go where people show themselves. Yes. So I'm barely joking when I say between crisis and war, philosophizing. I've reminded you from the beginning that the great philosophical advances always occur against a backdrop of historical crisis.
28:38 Look at how the Enlightenment tolls the knell of several centuries, not one century, several centuries of aristocratic feudalism, for example, under the Ancien Régime. Look at how the Socratic question starts to spread like wildfire through the streets of Athens just as the city is passing the torch to the Empire. It's not quite the same pattern. Let me remind you that at the time Plato is teaching, when Socrates is asking his questions, Plato, a student of Socrates, Aristotle, a student of Plato.
29:17 To the north of Greece, Philip is sharpening his weapons to swallow it up. Macedonia will soon swallow Greece. Someone once said, Greece, I don't know. And then the son will go even much further, Alexander. And after that, it's Rome. There's a model of the city that had reached its perfection in the classical sense. I'll call it its historical acme, and it's in the process of handing over to another form. I'm not making a value judgment here.
29:47 So, what matters is seeing the relation between philosophy and crisis. We're in the process of seeing it. Last time, I referred to our friends the sharks to deepen this notion of difficulty. I had talked about sharks to contradict Aristotle. I paid tribute to Aristotle earlier. I had made a little scratch last time. It's the very first words of his immense Metaphysics, which I warmly recommend you read, by the way. But the very first words, and how very Greek it is: all men by nature desire to know.
30:19 You see? A kind of spontaneity of the will to know, dear Aristotle. All men by nature desire to know. And I told you, no. Well, back to my sharks: if sharks are among the animals currently in existence, among those with one of the longest evolutionary histories, because they've been around since the end of the Paleozoic era. It's one of the longest durations there is in the animal kingdom. It's precisely because there's no reason for evolution. They're the masters of the game wherever they are.
30:49 Why would I bother asking myself questions in order to change the questions? I mean, you need to take some hits to change the system all at once, to start asking yourself questions and bring about a change. Otherwise I'd stay on my straight line. What's that called in physics, the principle? Yes, inertia, inertia. It's inertia. We have to be serious, materialist about this. A body subject to no force remains either at rest or in uniform rectilinear motion. For the shark, so far, that works. Except, as I told you, in a few places, the South China Sea, where they're hunted for their fins, it's not too worried.
31:22 Same thing. On the contrary, there was even a time when people worried on its behalf. Last time, one got eaten, in Réunion I think, right. And even then, luckily its flesh isn't as prized as tuna, otherwise it would be endangered. So there, that's important, the shark story. That is, what's false in Aristotle's sentence is the word naturally. No, it took hard knocks for us to start asking questions.
31:53 This is shown very well in a troubled dialogue by Plato, the Theaetetus. A dialogue that gives one of the best portraits ever made of the philosopher in general. With an anxiety that almost pushes the limits of the Greek world. It has often been said that Plato forms a bridge between the ancient world and Christian anxiety. But I don't want to get ahead of myself... Not Catholic, I mean Christian. I don't want to anticipate what comes next. You'll tell me we have little time left for that. Wait, but I don't want to do that. I want to stay here a while longer to understand.
Replacing the good with freedom; the happiness of the Enlightenment 32:24 Because that's what's going to change today. This kind of keystone between knowledge and action. We can keep this scheme all the way up to modern thought. Except that it would hold only up until the Rousseau-Kantian break. Kant was the first to credit Rousseau with being the first to force man to walk on his head, so to speak. That is, to take freedom as the foundation of the idea. It's an image about the head. Freedom as the foundation of anthropology, and no longer nature or God.
32:54 Careful. Well, if you put here, where Plato puts the Good — the Good as defined at the end of Book Six of the Republic, right before presenting the myth of the cave, which is narrated at the start of Book Seven — he said that. So, in place of the Good, it took a century for this — a small change — freedom.
33:31 Even in the domain of knowledge, remember the text of Kant I read where he completely reverses the positions of empiricism in order to draw the lesson from the scientific revolutions that had occurred in the generations right before him — the prodigious movement running from Galileo, the emergence of modern physics, to Kant, that is, to the time of Newton, roughly, a little after Newton. And this movement, which begins with Galileo, culminates with Newton, and gives an almost definitive shape to scientific physics up until the fruitful crises that would be called, at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th, relativistic physics and quantum physics.
34:08 There. And that's not my field, so I'll avoid saying anything foolish for now, I'll stop there. But by replacing the Good with freedom, we've made a small shift, but wait, that changes everything. I had a bit, at the end of the last session, a bit of a muddle, but let me recall a line from a poet I like, among others, Gérard de Nerval, his most famous poem, 'I am the shadowy one,' you know it, 'and my starry lute bears the black sun' — with the modern world, everything is going to reverse.
34:40 And I had prepared, that's it, my little matrices, starting from session number 4 of our conversations, I told you, there's still an enigma. How is it that the 18th century, which is the culmination of the whole feudal monarchical period, before the Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, is haunted by a principle — that's what makes its greatness — a principle so important and so unifying for that century, otherwise so teeming, look at someone like Diderot, how hard it already is to bring him back to any unity, isn't it, he who said of himself 'dogmatic in the morning, dogmatic against in the evening,' you see, to poke fun at himself.
35:17 But, well, a value that unites all these philosophers, including the enemy brothers, Voltaire and Rousseau of course, who would end up opposed, even the very opposite of each other on quite a few subjects — but there's a value that unites them, which one? More than that. A properly 18th-century value. Yes, thank you, happiness. I tell you this because it's a right that was... At the time, it's posited as a right, I'd love for that to come back, wouldn't you?
35:49 It's the question, what must I do. Relearning the right to happiness. But careful, they didn't see it in the same way at all. For Voltaire, happiness comes through free enterprise — there's no invisible hand of the market yet, but really it's somewhat implicit in what he says. I mean, it's the development of the sciences, the arts, the techniques that produces industry, commerce, that brings people into contact with one another. There's an admirable letter by Voltaire, in the Letter on Commerce, where he compares precisely the French system, where there's contempt for anyone who works, isn't there.
36:23 And he says, in France, whoever wants to can be a marquis. And anyone arriving in Paris from deep in some province with a name ending in -ac or -ille can say, a man of my rank, a man of my quality, and haughtily despise a merchant. Yet I don't know which is more useful to his country, a powdered lord who knows exactly at what hour the king rises and at what hour he goes to bed, giving himself airs while playing the slave in a minister's antechamber, or a merchant who from his office gives orders to Surat and Cairo and contributes to the happiness of the world.
37:02 That is to say, the word happiness, like a bubble swollen with gold. But I don't mean gold only in the sense of Scrooge McDuck. Voltaire is Voltaire, after all. There's happiness in it. That's what I mean. Let me get back to it. It's the color of honey and of wheat fields. I'm not changing subject. I was on the logic, on the break between words and things, and I'm right in the middle of it. When people thought the sun was a little plate 20 cm across, and that if I could climb up onto that piece of furniture there, I could almost touch it.
The astronomers' sun and the shepherd's sun: causes and meaning 37:37 Isn't that so? I remember, when I was a kid, I didn't believe my big sister when she told me stars were things bigger than the Earth. How foolish of me. We've all been through that. Now that we know it's a ball of incandescent gas so many million kilometers in diameter... Wait, wait, wait. This is important, what we're looking at here. We haven't... we haven't stated the truth. That doesn't mean astronomers finally give us the truth about the sun. The word 'sun' existed since prehistory, long before we had a scientific theory of it, yes or no.
38:13 So it designated something else. Precisely, what I was telling you, the color of my girlfriend's hair, the blondness of wheat fields, the softness. I smile because in the Nordic languages, like German, the sun is feminine. I mean, the sun in the morning when it's minus 20. Fine. And... and we say the Moon... I won't go there, you see. Die Sonne, der Mond, that's what they say in German.
38:44 So, all of that is connoted. So, wait, we hadn't seen that. I was waiting till the end to drop this. I told you it's a very good thing that mathematicians left ordinary everyday language behind and invented another language where there are univocal terms — there aren't even words, just univocal terms — Y equals F of X, which are defined beforehand. Like I said about the circle earlier, I call a circle the locus of equidistant points...
39:15 Now I've called it — democratically, I gave the rules of the game before playing. That's the opposite of speaking 'in breach,' as I mentioned earlier, remember? I said that mathematicians did very well from their own point of view, which is a cognitive aim. Because if it's a matter of knowing, and not of staying at the café du commerce, maybe yes, maybe no, if it's a matter of transmissible knowledge, then that everyday way of talking, which gets us nowhere, had to be abandoned.
39:48 We can't even agree on what democracy is, because one person will say he's defending the free world by bombing Vietnam, and the other will say the people's democracies support Vietnam. There's freedom, there's democracy, and each side claims them for itself. You see? When words are perverted like that, it's normal to ask the question, what do you call that, you see, to come back to it. So when I told you we're going to switch off this sun and make a black sun of it, to understand the modernity we come from, and I say we break — thankfully scientists broke with our immediate approach to the world — but the philosopher, on the other hand, cannot afford to evacuate everything that was contained — here's the new word — in the way people spoke of the sun and other things in pre-scientific consciousness.
40:43 Why? Because remember, our goal is not just to know — because if it were, well, I'd be at the CNRS talking to you. A physicist at the CNRS also wants to know, even par excellence — scientific research, what does that mean? It means striving to answer one of the two great questions by which Kant summed up the program of philosophy: what can I know, what must I do? There. What is specifically philosophical, though, is the question 'what must I do?' It's the only one a physicist cannot, as such, challenge or dispute with him — though of course a physicist, as a human being, always has the right to speak of his values, he has nothing but that left.
41:21 But in any case, his authority as a physicist counts for nothing at that point, is of no use to him, sorry, that's what needs to be remembered. One can be an immense physicist and a thorough scoundrel — it's happened, it's a dangerous profession — and conversely, the wisest and most benevolent man in a village deep in Africa is not necessarily the one who knows how many satellites orbit Jupiter or the DNA sequence of tomatoes. So you see, a disjunction, as we saw from the start, so I'll go quickly, between knowledge and wisdom.
41:57 What's new here now is that we realize there's a whole universe left fallow. It's no longer the search for causes — let's leave that to scientists — it's the search for meaning, because we're talking about words here. It's not true that the answer 'the sun is a ball of incandescent gas' gives the meaning of the word 'sun' the way I was saying — literary people know this well — there's a medieval literary genre called the 'aube' (dawn song), always the same: a shepherd in the morning sees the sun, then sees his beloved appear, who makes the sun pale — well, somewhat formulaic people, you see.
42:38 All that has meaning for the shepherd in question, and for the poet too. That meaning is rightly evacuated by the mathematician or astronomer for his own purposes, but we cannot dispense with it. Why? Because as a philosopher, there isn't only the search for knowledge — I come back to this, I'm holding the thread — there's also, even before speaking of 'what must I do,' the phrase written on the pediment at Delphi, to which Socrates slyly refers his judges: know thyself. That's not just any kind of knowledge.
43:11 And to know oneself, it may be better to read the poets than the astronomers. Do you understand? That's the difference. That's what we're discovering today. And it's no accident that, since — thanks to the progress, the rationality introduced by the Greeks, applied only from the 16th century, what patience history has, the calvary of history as Hegel says — applied to physics, to the light surrounding us at the end of the Renaissance and the start of the classical age, then to chemistry, then to biology, and in a rather messier and less legitimate way to the human sciences today.
43:49 We'll come back to this divide before we finish. Nevertheless, as you might suspect, this technical progress hasn't brought only benefits, and hasn't brought happiness proportional to the power — this power which, as Descartes says, makes it so I can render man master and possessor of nature — because the problem of meaning has been neglected in favor of the problem of causes. So it's clear in your minds, let me do a little chronological summary. I'd say the whole of Antiquity, I'm thinking especially of Aristotle, who is the most exemplary figure of the Greek world — perhaps Plato, who as I said earlier was somewhat the hinge between the ancient world and the modern world — is characterized by what I would call philosophical imperialism.
The end of philosophical imperialism and the field of values 44:32 As you were saying, Aristotle is very clear. There's one discipline, philosophy, and one science, philosophy, from which all the others branch off. When the philosopher applies himself, for example, to mobile beings without a soul, he is a physicist. When he takes an interest in mobile beings that have a soul, he isn't a biologist, he's a psychologist — but for the Greeks it's all the same, the psyche, the soul, and the living being, it's the same thing for them. And so on. So I mean, as he says very well in Book 4, all the other disciplines carve out one part of being.
45:06 Only the philosopher studies being qua being. That's the famous passage that makes this fourth book so great, being qua being, which will be the object of metaphysics. That's not my subject, don't get stuck on it, it's fascinating, but read Book 4, it's clear, it's magnificent. That's where you'll find the allusions to Cratylus. But what's interesting here is that there's a philosophical imperialism. And of course, as happens to any declining empire, pieces got carved off it. Mathematics broke away first, as early as Euclid's time, didn't it? Then physics at the time of Galileo — we no longer need Aristotle's authority to develop equations, thankfully.
45:36 Then chemistry with Lavoisier, then Claude Bernard, the one who said the living is the dead. And you see, we haven't... What's left for philosophy? Shrinking skin, it's a classic subject, a classic subject. Does the notion of a perennial philosophy still make sense nowadays? It could be put that way. Isn't philosophy already old hat? Isn't it the case that more or less all the questions the philosopher asks, the territory left properly to him, shrinks like a piece of shagreen, since the answers always come from elsewhere, from science rather than philosophy. Complete misunderstanding.
46:06 Yes, if answering the question 'what can I know' were the philosopher's only goal, that would be true. But precisely, there's also a field that remains open, infinite, isn't it, that of values, one might say. In more everyday language. Answering the question 'what must I do' means, what's worth doing more than something else? You find again 'to be worth,' 'value.' There, with this great reminder — but replacing here the Good with freedom, careful, what remains of the Greek Good in Plato, despite his being a hinge figure, is that there's an optimistic side to it.
46:37 There was here, somewhere, the good, the beautiful, the true came together, in a common home. My origin and the origin of nature, of being, all that is the same. If you replace it with freedom, it's not the good. It's the possibility of doing good as well as the opposite. Otherwise it's not freedom. There, you see why I say there is here a danger, a peril, an intermediate negativity, considerable at the stage that comes well after Kant, which is Hegel, if you replace good with freedom, which suddenly has this negativity of the subject that's going to appear.
Happiness distinguished from salvation, peace, and pleasure 47:15 And so, my black sun, I hold on to it, to the extinguishing of the lanterns. And I had posed that to you as a riddle, but without answering it, still at the stage we were at. How is it, I go back to my theme of happiness, that the 18th century, the Enlightenment, whose common value is this happiness whose current title I recall, because it is neither salvation, nor peace, nor beatitude. A century earlier, in the 17th century, Pascal's problem is salvation, not happiness.
47:48 Happiness is an almost pagan notion. I say in passing that Pascal is the favorite of everyone, the greatest of Christians for those who don't believe in him, for materialists — interesting, Nietzsche, who never misses a chance to needle anything Christian in passing, said of Pascal 'he runs in my blood.' I close the parenthesis.
48:21 The fact that Pascal is known, among other things, even without having studied philosophy, in literature — he's well known for his extraordinarily fine analysis of diversion, which occupies a considerable place in the Pensées. Now what's new in the Pensées? Precisely that all reflections before him consist in explaining desire through the object in front of me, the carrot, the stimulus, as one would say in behavioral science today. Whereas Pascal explains our behavior not through something ahead that I pursue, whether for biological reasons or others — that would be a different problem — but through something behind me that I flee.
49:01 That's diversion. There's a negativity. You see how we come back to it with Pascal? It's even Pascal who said 'the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.' That was new, from him. It wasn't Nicole. He didn't say that. No, no. He had understood that nature is inhuman. That had just been revealed by physics. So I go back to my 18th century. A century before, Pascal's problem is salvation. Beatitude, the communion of saints in theology, why not?
49:31 Whereas here, we're talking about happiness. Now, remember, what distinguishes happiness from the infinitely respectable values I just mentioned, distinguished by essential determination — a necessary relation to the world and not to the world beyond. Salvation, for Pascal, comes after death. For Plato too, moreover. But that's why Plato's politics has enormous problems.
50:03 Peace, you can have it in prison. Someone can have a wisdom that lets them be in accord with themselves. That's peace. They're not with the world — in prison. Happiness, the difference, is that it requires a positive relation to the world, in other words what you call pleasure. If that were all, the best recipe for happiness would be the libertines who sought pleasure. But, in addition, there's duration, which is the great difference from enjoyment or pleasure, which can be extremely intense but fleeting and evanescent.
50:40 And so when you have both determinations — relation to the world, positive — money can count. Yes, money doesn't buy happiness, they say — that's not my subject. But still, since I'm talking about happiness and everyone has money troubles, as you say, more or less, I'll still quote — I can't help quoting African wisdom when I can, but I owe them that much, since they taught me to read and write. But when you ask an African, tell me, for you, does money make happiness? Do you know what he answers? Well, I've had that answer a hundred times, or six times, myself.
51:11 Ah, I recommend the answer, frankly, you wouldn't think of it. He answers, you have to give it to me first, then I'll tell you. You might be right, I'll say, it doesn't bring happiness. I have to experiment first with what I can do with money. Then I'll tell you. That's not bad, as a 'give first, I'll tell you after.' There, it's the same ones who say: you have the watch, we have the time.
51:41 You see? Happiness. Well, yes, time — I'm not just talking about Coca-Cola here, there's duration, happiness. In the great literature of happiness, or the literature that evokes happy moments, often in the mode of the past, of memory. Think of Chateaubriand, think of Proust, think of Rousseau, who tries to enchant himself amid the illnesses that rack him in the street, rue Plâtrière as it was called, in the Marais, with all of Europe filing past to see him, overwhelmed with visitors, and who finds himself in the depths of distress — it's a bit like politicians, especially given the sound of the era, imagine, we're not waiting for details — and they enchant themselves, one draws out a sort of torment, thinking back on those same moments, the happiest ones, on the Ile Saint-Pierre, on the Lake of Bienne — but it's in the imperfect tense.
52:27 When you learned your grammar, which you've since forgotten, you learned that you have to use the imperfect to describe things that have a certain thickness of duration, that were repeated. 'When I was little, every morning I would...' — that's imperfect, really the happiness of life. So there you have it: there's the evanescent, intense, fleeting enjoyment of the libertines, nothing against it, right? There's puritanism, which sometimes even guillotines in the name of virtue — the two extremes. And then, between the two, you have this extraordinary synthesis that happiness took on in a more concrete sense, now, you see, it's not the bland vision that the phrase 'a thousand recipes for happiness' might evoke.
53:13 in a book on alternative medicine. Recently someone offered me an oil — what are those things called? Essential oil? No, that's not it? You know it better than I do, well, anyway, because I had a little sore throat, and the person told me, you have to rub it on your left hand and if possible during the full moon. I have some doubts about the solution. There. So you see, in moving from the good to freedom, everything changes, because there's freedom.
Power of means, good and evil; negative theology 53:48 you once said, if I stab someone with a knife, it's not the knife we send to prison, and we're right. Everyone agrees on that. Yet we make exactly the same stupid nonsense when we condemn the sciences and technologies. We condemn the means and leave aside those who use them, whom we should rather judge. Right? Now, what's true — I wouldn't want to be anti-Heideggerian and say that what matters is the end, not the means.
54:19 Still, it's obvious that the more powerful a means is — and the evolution of the sciences and technologies goes in that direction — and here we cannot say there's no direction to history. Not in the spiritual sense of direction. But I mean, the time it takes to make this table now and the time it took a carpenter three centuries ago, that's not the same thing. The only domain where progress, without value judgment, is measurable — and there is only science of the measurable — is the labor time needed to produce a commodity.
54:49 From the Neolithic to today. That's what makes — what makes the economy, I don't know, I won't decide whether it's the economy that determines this or that. What is certain is that it's an exceptional level of legibility of man, precisely because of the quantified data it gives us access to. So, the more we increase the means, the more we have the possibility of doing good as well as evil.
55:19 As well as evil. So you understand why things darken here. I'm not switching it off all at once, but it starts to grow dim and turn black, toward the black sun. We're in the process of doing what's also called negative theology. God defined by his absence, by his remoteness. This is often said of the God of transcendence, the Jewish, Christian, Muslim God. He's not the one we don't see, the one who is not in herbis et lapidibus, in the grasses and the stones. He's not like the pagan god. He's the one who manifests his presence only through his remoteness.
55:51 Because Kafka's entire work, which doesn't specifically speak of God, is situated within this apophatic logic, as logicians say. The Buddha's teaching is often apophatic, especially when he speaks of the absolute, which for him is called nirvana. And moreover, the negative prefix — we have the same Indo-European language system as the one the Buddha used. When the disciples, the bhikkhus, as the monks are called, ask him what nirvana is, he answers: there is neither left nor right, neither up nor down.
56:24 There, one is neither lying down nor standing. And he speaks of it negatively. One cannot say directly what it is, but one can strip it of all the attributes that might be wrongly attributed to it. That's this approach called the apophatic approach, which Plato uses in the Republic, as he says, well, what about the One? In the One, there is neither up nor down — it starts again the same way. A small reminder: what they have in common is negativity. I define a thing by what it is not.
56:55 I define God by his absence. Oh! That's curious. Curious indeed. And, because of this little shift — you see it's not so small after all — from good to freedom. So, starting from modernity, late 18th century, early 20th, following these great fractures, I'm trying to give a few historical markers, this isn't my field. But broadly, by consensus, this modernity has its two first roots in the English industrial revolution, the French political revolution, which happen almost in the same pocket handkerchief, chronologically speaking, at that moment.
57:32 Right? And the enormous upheaval — here I'm entering the domain of the humanities, so to speak, since I'm a bit of a specialist there, whether in economics or the hard sciences, to move into the literary domain, because it's the upheaval of sensibility that will first be called Romanticism, but which will keep widening its gap with the old sensibility of the Ancien Régime, which we admire today more than ever, precisely because it has never been so far from us. I love listening to the music of the old masters, early music — we didn't yet call it Baroque music, now we say 'poor Baroque music,' because we absolutely have to do like the Anglo-Saxons or the Dutch, but anyway, I mean, early music — now we put under the word 'Baroque' people who never called themselves Baroque musicians, I can guarantee you, the musicians we now designate as Baroque.
58:19 But, never mind, the musicians of the 17th and 18th centuries, mainly Italian, and then imitated across almost all of Europe. The young Bach's dream was to be Vivaldi — with what humility. He copied out note by note all of Vivaldi's concertos, to train his hand, to find his own originality by copying. And now, when you listen, after three notes, no one confuses him with anyone else — prodigious. What humility.
58:51 And his motto. Do you know what his motto was? Anyone? I don't know, maybe. Soli Deo gloria, to the glory of God alone. There you go, my entire work, I do nothing myself, I'm a little nobody, as they say in Africa. It's for the glory of God alone. Bach's humility. Well. Enormous possibility of doing good, as the development of technology progresses, enormous possibility of doing evil. What is it that makes the Nazi period monstrous, always rejected as emblematic of absolute evil?
59:27 It's not the details of the suffering inflicted on people at that time. Frankly, read the chronicles of Genghis Khan; as the Bible says, this world is a vale of tears, we didn't invent suffering and torture and ignominy under the Third Reich. What is vile, abject — you see, here I'm using moral terms, I'm no longer in physical description — is that it happened in the midst of civilization. That it's not excused by ignorance and barbarism. In other words, that it hangs over our own heads.
59:58 We are between crisis and war. The more we philosophize, the more we try to carve out a place between the two, nonetheless. Right? So, putting freedom in the place, to sum up, we have never had as many conditions as since the end of the Ancien Régime in the 19th century — I meant the beginning of modernity. We have never had as many conditions for happiness thanks to the prodigious development of the sciences and technologies that feeds into that relation to the world. I was saying it is fundamental to happiness, and to inscribe it in duration.
1:00:32 Which is what irritated me one day about the notion of 'sustainable development.' Either you develop or you leave it as it is. And symmetrically, we've had just as much possibility of producing horror too. With equal internal criminality, someone holding a knife and someone holding an atomic bomb — that's not quite the same amount of damage.
1:01:02 There will be the hand on the knife or on the telephone against a political order. That's roughly what I wanted to say. Today, I'm sorry, it's the last session, I should give you a happy ending, and instead I'm going to tell you dreadful things. That's the thing about negativity today. And it's no accident. If, immediately following the 18th century — that is, the ideal of happiness — what succeeds it? The mal du siècle. Good grief!
Mal du siècle and representations of the divine in Hegel's Aesthetics 1:01:32 These are not coincidences. It's not me who says so, it's known in literature, that's what it's called. But when I tell you 'in the same pocket handkerchief,' good grief, Chateaubriand is still a kid, just starting out, still picking his nose when Kant isn't even dead yet. So you see, these things overlap. And this ideal of happiness, what happens? Even Rousseau, even Rousseau, who is a difficult character at times, when he's on the Ile Saint-Pierre, trying to make the reader understand what he felt: 'I would give all the men of this century to guess at the reality of the happiness I experienced.'
1:02:06 The precious farniente — it's a Corsican speaking to you here — the precious farniente was the first of the occupations to which I gave myself without restraint. I mean, he only talks about that, the pure sense of existence, as he says, the feeling of existence stripped of all other affection. As long as this state lasts, one is self-sufficient like God. Like God! I don't know, like God, as long as this state lasts — not quite you.
1:02:37 Well, precisely, here we are. The difference is this: it's as if there were sunlight, we're almost in full eternity. And in eternity, suffering fades a bit. So I'm going to Hegelianize what follows and lay it out for you, and I may disappoint those expecting a full development on Hegel, you'll see why I won't do that. Instead, I'll do it through just one of his works, his Aesthetics, which ideally sums up his whole system. Because once the system is in place, whether he's talking about law or art or history, I mean, we don't get the same result.
1:03:21 Take three stages of the representations of the divine in the history of art. Take the Egyptian god, so the colossal statues you think of when I say Egyptian divinities — I don't just mean the Colossi of Memnon. You see, I'm not making a value judgment, I'm on my knees before the Egyptian statue, but from the point of view of freedom, the gestures are still a bit stiff, hieratic, one might say, motionless. There's one leg forward like that, but it's not the Greek world with the half-open mouth about to speak.
1:03:59 And then there's Titanism. Within Titanism, on the colossal side, you can still feel there's a terrifying god and a terrified creature trembling before the divine that speaks. It's barely emerged yet from natural forces, which is what makes its beauty. This human head emerging from a lion's body, that's the Sphinx. Or conversely, the jackal head of Anubis emerging from a man's body — you see, all that is later banished from Greek statuary. There is indeed an eagle, symbol of Zeus, but it's down below, off to the side. This has been noted by art historians.
1:04:30 It's not part of his shoulders. So look how we pass from one to the other. Already, the representation of the divine, I'm summarizing the Hegelian sequence, from the Egyptians to the Greeks. It happened among the Greeks that the god was no longer crushing, but a man like you and me. If I may say so, excuse me, I'm no Apollo Belvedere, I mean he's about 1.70, 1.75 meters. We've grown since. The Japanese, it seems, have grown 30 centimeters in 80 years. That's enormous, for average height.
1:05:02 The generations, the ages — well, this fascinates me, these things. So, but what's missing from this man, as represented in the Greek statue, what's missing for us to recognize ourselves in him? Can someone tell me, roughly? Hmm? Ah, that's already good, yes, death, suffering. We are man, we are suffering, that's part of man, it's important.
1:05:35 I was praising happiness a moment ago. I mean that from the Colossus of Memnon to the Greek statue — which is somewhat the statue of the ideal man, the Greek citizen freed a little, whose hands aren't calloused from labor — up to this puny figure writhing in suffering on a cross, there is a progression toward the deepening of the human. So, I said, up to us. I'm not talking about belief here, we are in a Christian civilization, quite simply.
1:06:06 I mean, whether one objects or discusses this from a religious point of view is another matter, but sociologically speaking, we come from a religion where one bows not before the creature but only before the Creator, right? Why did Christianity have such success from Antiquity onward? Or rather, why did it have it among those circles, those of slaves and freedmen in the great cities? Why is my name Pagani, is it because of that? Because pagus is the pasture-land, it's the most primitive thing there is, the shepherd, the pasture.
1:06:37 Because the countryside was Christianized much later than the cities. There was this poverty, this ancient proletariat, if I may use this anachronism. And so paganism, or rather the old religion, remained longer in the countryside, which is why paganus, the word that meant 'peasants,' ended up meaning 'pagans,' quite simply. You see why there was this popular success? Precisely because it spoke to those who were beginning to have the means toward emancipation.
1:07:12 Wasn't it you I was telling the other time that Crassus, one of the three members of the triumvirate after Caesar's death, Crassus alone had 10,000 slaves. Can you imagine? 10,000 slaves — I wouldn't mind that myself. Well, yes, 10,000 slaves. So: Egyptian statuary, a kind of timelessness defying death, a sort of eternity like that, but very far from the creature.
1:07:43 The creature trembles before the figure of the god. And then, a freer figure, in the physical sense, more relaxed, the famous Greek hip-swing. The body is no longer vertical. You start to see it a bit in the statuary of archaic Greece. I'm thinking of the Kouros, right? They still have the somewhat Egyptian foot forward like that. But there's a little smile that's already Greek. No, but I was saying that because it's something we lack today. Today it's really all about the compassionate mode. We play on emotion for the worst causes.
The Gospel does not condemn the flesh but the lie 1:08:14 It's frightening. We've lost the sense of that smile. Look, in terms of morals, I think — I think there's worse. I'm thinking of Strauss-Kahn. But well, that's how it is. He did harm at the time, yes, to millions of Estonians. He gave them a pension of 50 euros when he was director of the IMF. But I'm almost ready to defend him regarding those sex scandals, this moralizing side, what Nietzsche called 'moraline.'
1:08:44 As for that, why do I... I bring this up because it's often blamed on guilt, as they say, Judeo — tell me the rest — Christian. I challenge anyone to find in the Gospel a condemnation of the flesh like the one we see in today's emancipated bourgeoisie. In the Catholic Church, there's nothing but that. But that's not the only place. In all traditional customs, parents want their children to be... chosen ones.
1:09:17 That's normal, there are reasons for it in the Gospel, in education. But, in the Gospel itself, it is written: "You judge according to the flesh, I judge no one. That's not what he says. You judge according to the flesh." It's the problem of Mary Magdalene, you know, because we always say it's about the question of casting the first stone, everyone knows that, but we don't mention what comes next. It's even more scandalous with respect to the strict morals of the time. When he's left alone face to face with the girl, sorry, with Mary Magdalene, and he says to her, "Woman, where are those who condemned you?"
1:09:47 They've left. He says, "Go, I do not condemn you either." He doesn't say "I forgive you." That would imply she had committed a fault. As there's a religion of forgiveness, people pass over that. No, I do not condemn you either. And he says to the Pharisees, "You judge according to the flesh, I judge no one." And if there's one sin toward which he is uncompromising, it's lying. There's nothing physical about it. You know, because I think I pointed this out to you the time before last, on that Holy Thursday evening, when he says, "The prince of this world is coming, and he is already defeated, for his essence is lies." I'm not doing theology, I don't care whether he's right or wrong to say that. What matters is that in that discourse, evil is linked to the notion of lying, to a privation of truth.
The slope of the cave, Nietzsche, and Oedipus: an unbearable truth 1:10:23 To put it in rigorous terms. So there is a progression toward evil, but at the same time toward liberation. That's the price of it. And that's where everything starts to take on its meaning again. Things I had told you but which only take on their meaning now. You see why the ground slopes here. I told you that everything is in this myth. I'm not the one inventing it. It's Plato who says very well, with his humor, that the prisoner who is going to be freed will suddenly understand what he has in front of him instead of his shadows, and that he will begin the ascent, the procession, as the mystical theologian said, the procession toward the model of models, moving away from all its copies.
1:11:07 He does say that the ground slopes and that it will hurt his knees and feet because the ground is rough. It hurts. So already there is almost an indication in Plato—I tell you he already touches a bit on modernity—about the obstacles that keep us from getting there. They are not objective obstacles. There's also the fact that we drag our feet, literally and figuratively this time, to go there, because there's something formidable here. You see? And what if the truth I'm waiting for here, in the answer to my question, what can I know?
1:11:39 I'm not asking any moral question. But what if what I discovered at the end, which explains the entire origin of the world in which I live, were a truth so unbearable that it discouraged all action? You never know. That's where I think it's not really so bleak after all, you see. It's a hypothesis someone like Nietzsche makes. Look. It's actually a rather well-known text. It's from Beyond Good and Evil. But it's right at the beginning.
1:12:11 So what does this great ego tell us? I always have a bit of tenderness for him. The will to truth which will... Ah, on the other hand, he's one of the rare Germans who knew how to write at the time. There aren't many philosophers who have a sense of style, believe me. The will to truth, which will yet tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise—that famous truthfulness of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect. Yes, we argue over whether one should be empiricist or rationalist or idealist or realist. We're all searching for the truth.
1:12:42 What strange, insidious, questionable questions this will to truth has posed to us! It is a long story already—and yet it seems to have scarcely begun. Is it any wonder that we should finally grow suspicious, lose patience, turn away impatiently? If this sphinx eventually teaches us to ask questions ourselves in turn? What is it in us that wants to find the truth? Not what is truth, but what is it in us that wants to find the truth? Understood? And what if the truth is unbearable, and one has to be mad to seek it?
1:13:14 Doesn't it remind you that this happened to a hero? It's a well-known story. Sorry? I'm talking about truth. Yes, a hero of action. Sorry? Thank you. O Oedipus, pierced feet, Oedipus. I challenge any detective novelist to have come up with a plot as good as that one—you can't find the culprit because it's the culprit himself who's leading the investigation. You see? Even Agatha Christie in And Then There Were None, where the culprit is among the victims, didn't go that far, did she?
1:13:49 It's the culprit himself, and in perfect good faith, who conducts the investigation. And then, harshly, he gives orders. When he learns that the oracle said that as long as Thebes has not been purged of the one who killed Laius, the plague will continue, he gives orders. Everyone searched for who killed Laius. Unfortunate man. And yet the one who sees—that is, the one who is blind, Tiresias, the only one who is a seer in this story, who sees what is going to happen—is the one who has no eyes.
1:14:19 In the Gospel, he says to them—maybe there's a video about that—they have eyes and they do not see. But he has none. Tiresias warns; he says one must not go too far, because in Greek morality, it's still an excess to want to know too much. I haven't left the aesthetic field. I'm drawing a continuous parallel. I spoke of representations of the divine. Let's now picture the dwellings of the divine. Look at the Greek temple. I was talking about excess, immoderation, hubris of course, as the Greeks said—it's hubris that tragedy must purge, precisely.
Dwellings of the divine, Semele, and resistances 1:14:57 Tragically. So that we can start again afterward, things go better. Well, Icarus who flies too high—well, the columns of the Parthenon, of the Greek temple in general, are tempered by the horizontality of the lintel and the pediment. There's no sense of a defiant beauty, of harmony. This isn't Chartres. This isn't a minaret. This isn't Beauvais. Remember, last time, we talked about Beauvais, the tallest vault. Christendom collapsed onto the faithful in the middle of Easter Mass because it had ten more meters.
1:15:29 Anyway. You find the same progression. The religions of monotheistic transcendence grant more weight to freedom than to any other value, even if they attribute it only to God. The almighty—what does that mean? The Greek gods are not almighty. They are subject to fate. You know that, obviously. They can't do everything, they're subject to fate. It never occurred to Zeus to want everything—to have his cake and eat it too, and the shepherdess besides, without getting caught, moreover.
1:16:01 who mix with shepherdesses. Gods of Olympus—that's all we see, the shepherdesses. He says that because... Look at Semele. Do you know the myth of Semele? No? She's one of many mortal women. One must believe the gods get bored on Olympus. And that with all these misfortunes, man—woman, rather—is more interesting than man for the gods. Because they often come down to visit them. And so they fell in love. That's all there is, the story of a god falling for a shepherdess.
1:16:31 There, they had fallen in love, not with Psyche, which means the soul, Psyche, but with... What was her name again? Thank you. With Semele. And... she must have been quite a lover because he told her the classic line: I'll give you whatever you want. Ask me for anything you want. One wish, I'll grant it. And she answers: I want to see you in your splendor. Some of you know the myth, or some of you here, perhaps not? That is, as you are, there, without disguise, because... I haven't left my subject.
1:17:03 It hurts to draw near the absolute. That's why the god disguises himself, takes precautions, otherwise he would strike her down with lightning. If she were seen as he is in himself, right? You see that? I'm following Plato's text. Plato says he'll have to get used to looking at reflections in water before looking directly. Otherwise his eyes will be scorched. There are stages. You see? The quest for the Grail.
1:17:33 So it's the same thing that fulfills and that strikes down. It's the same thing that saves and that can destroy. There's the ambivalence we couldn't see here, because we had banished negativity from the absolute. That's what remains of our ancient optimism. So the fact that here we replace that balance with a black sun—that wasn't a joke earlier—this difficulty, this pain that one should feel in the knee and the feet, as the other says, is also what will be called, twenty centuries later, under Freud's pen, resistances.
1:18:14 When the subject, finally managing to know himself, resists. He resists. Damn, I thought I was a generous guy, a good guy, but I feel that I'm actually a scoundrel. He thinks he's a scoundrel because we go from self-adoration to self-hatred, whereas, as Pascal says, man is neither angel nor beast, but it is he who wants to act the angel who acts the beast. Well put, isn't it? There are people who have caused millions of deaths with generous ideas.
1:18:44 But Hitler—you shouldn't think of it as some kind of state cynicism, the cynicism of those in power—he sincerely believed that the Jews were a danger to the German people. What can I say? There's nothing to be done when someone is that stupid, but I mean, it was sincere, in his head, what I'm saying. He didn't sleep over it. The Judeo-Bolsheviks, my God. So I'm really not joking at all.
Rousseau, the Newton of morality: freedom and gravitation 1:19:15 when I talk about progress in the good and, at the same time, progress in the possibility of doing evil just as much as good. And so why do I keep going with these aesthetic models? Because—and this is what Kant lacked, which is why we couldn't stop with him, with Kant, I told you last time so I won't dwell on it too much, but still, let me remind you—we do have the general form of freedom that he owes to Rousseau. He's the first to acknowledge it. Kant says Rousseau is the Newton of morality.
1:19:45 One can never say it enough. The equivalent, in the knowledge of the world around us where Newton triumphs in his time, the equivalent of the fundamental law of gravity, gravitation—I do it like this, from top to bottom—so we know these are not physical notions. The equivalent and inverse symmetrical counterpart in the moral world is freedom. Freedom plays the same role in Rousseau's inter-human world—I say this, later, more extensive than political, if you will, so as not to overload it with connotations of politicians.
1:20:23 In the intersubjective world, if you want to be a bit more technical and snobbish about it, freedom plays the same role as gravitation does in the field of nature. And you can see it in language, because wherever we overcome effort—against gravity, so to speak—we speak of an effort of liberation. The first time, it was the Soviets, the first time a satellite escaped Earth's gravity, the first Sputnik, it was because it had reached what astronomers, or rather astrophysicists, called at the time, escape velocity.
1:20:59 The minimum speed needed to escape Earth's gravitational field. I think it's 11.2 km per second, something like that—total. Is that right? 11 meters per second. Oh, I thought it was one kilometer per second. 11 meters per second. Good thing I ask questions, I confirm, because you see the size of the blunder one can make. And that seems awfully slow all of a sudden. Anyway, escape velocity.
1:21:30 And in language: to hold the high ground of the pavement. Well yes, back when Rue Mouffetard was filthy in the middle, it was better not to walk in the middle, especially since it was full of water—bad example actually, it was the Bièvre river flowing where the street now is. But anyway, the streets were like that, and the filth was in the middle. So when a lady passed by, out of courtesy, one left her the high side of the pavement, literally. "Highness" is someone who is up high, who sings like an alto. Well yes, all these roots mean what is up high.
1:22:00 I mean, going back to my story about the sun earlier, science never speaks of heavy and light, of high and low, and it does well not to. These confusions can cause millions of deaths. I mentioned Swift to you, who in Gulliver's Travels explains that war broke out between those who said eggs should be broken from the small end and those who said from the big end. You see, with that derision we also find in Voltaire's time—there's often an English model in 18th-century France—to show that violence, suffering, can arise from the most trivial things.
1:22:34 but what is serious in all these trivial things is truly qualitative, as I just showed, when we insist on something being absolutely objective. Is this bag heavy or light? We can't decide. Ask a child, ask a market porter, you won't get the same answer. And so science, what democracy! resolved that by saying the bag weighs 1.725 kg. See!
1:23:04 And that imposes itself on everyone. Except on those who contest it—and one should contest. Science isn't dogmatic, that's all it asks. You run the experiment, you verify, you measure. And everyone measures it. We're in the realm of democracy. I also reminded you that when Euclid establishes the first pure mathematical model, his first notions, he doesn't say axiom, postulate, he says demands. "I ask you to grant me that through a point," etc. They are demands, appeals made to the other.
1:23:34 A second illustration of the democracy inherent in rational knowledge. I say this because it has been so fought against ever since it appeared, by reaction, indeed by confusionism. I respect confusion, I'm full of it myself. But precisely, one must make an effort toward clarity. Listen to Schubert's music. Here's someone haunted by shadow, and his whole musical quest is a kind of quest for light. One can be in the shadow while still being against the shadow, nonetheless.
1:24:11 And this way of proceeding, calling axioms and postulates "demands," this democracy, if you will, of science, means that I replace heavy or light—I don't take a side in the debate, I send it back to a draw by saying 1.725 kg. Same for all qualitative oppositions of this kind. For a long time, people believed blue and yellow were distinct essences.
1:24:44 We now know it's the same substance. All of that is light, with differences of frequency. The differences affecting attributes here, not the subject, if we were to translate it into logical terms, if you will. It's all the same body. There isn't a blue body and then an essence of blue and an essence of red. So we know, we moderns—right? But at the price of what you said earlier. Here is a world which, thanks to science, reveals to us an endless chain of cause and effect. Yes, but no meaning and no sign.
1:25:14 But we, we live in a world of meaning and sign, we humans. We do not live in the world of science. It wouldn't exist without us, without man, of course, science. But we don't live in the world Galileo speaks to us of. Sorry. So I go back to my little examples that seem trivial. I was tracking down, in language, all the metaphors attached to high and low. We do say, well, young man, you must learn to rise in life.
1:25:44 You see, that's going upward. Still a metaphor. Instead of dragging yourself in baseness, or rolling someone in the mud. Mud is what's under our feet. You see, language is always consistent with itself. It's always the same distribution of values in metaphor, isn't it? And today's novelty is that the scientific solution, however democratic it may be—and I've paid tribute to it in that sense—is not only a cognitive tribute.
1:26:14 I don't need to pay tribute to science as knowledge. It gets along without me. Especially when I confuse meters and kilometers. But on the other hand... That gives 30 kilometers, I think too. But on the other hand, I mean, it comes at the price of having left fallow, as I said earlier, the world of meaning. And I'm picking up my thread again this time, taking the last step, with Kant—we did have the formula that came from Rousseau's insistence on grounding man in freedom, namely that there is indeed the form of freedom.
The Kantian form of freedom: neither nature nor supernature 1:26:47 I am free when I obey neither anything already given. That's what I am... that's what I am, to the already-given. Neither to the already-given of nature. It's not because I eat when I'm hungry that I'm free. Because that, well, on the contrary, I'm an animal. That's fine. I grant you that. Rousseau loved that. He's fond of the flesh. He even wants to say something about the gift of the vine-grower, as he says in La Nouvelle Héloïse. You should see the grape harvest scenes. But, I mean, that's not the moment I'm free. Remember our two students who had decided to get up at 6am. It's the season, exams are now, competitive exams, because they'd been slacking off a bit.
1:27:19 There isn't much time left. So tomorrow, we wake up at 6. One of them stays in bed. The other has the courage to get up. And which of them did what he wanted? Since we say being free means doing what one wants. And at first we gave a common answer: both do what they want. I want to stay in bed, I want to stay in bed, I want to stay in bed. Then we said, hold on, we mustn't play too loosely with words. Because no one would ever say it takes willpower to stay in bed when you're sleepy. It takes more willpower to get up. And we resolved it by recalling that language is rich.
1:27:49 It's like the Republic, generous, there's room for everyone. The one who stays in bed isn't doing what he wants, but he's doing... he's doing what pleases him. He has the right! I'm not going to say a word against pleasure. But he can't say that's when he's free, that he's doing what he wants. It's not... the man who is hungry is not a free man—who said that? How would the Ivorian say it? There are Ivorians here, I know. It's Houphouët-Boigny. Because I... we taught in Côte d'Ivoire, Jean too.
1:28:19 Don't you remember that sentence, you know, on the board? The class monitor there often puts up the president's quote of the day. That's how it was. No, no, one shouldn't... these are newly independent countries, the first head of state, there's a certain charisma. Some better, some worse. "The sage of Africa," as they say. Anyway, doesn't matter. I got the president's quote too. So whenever I entered the classroom, every time, and even quite quickly, once someone stumped me a bit, because it's not inexhaustible, so some of them recur. There was one time: "Peace is not a word, it is a behavior."
1:28:52 Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Bang, bang, bang, that's the morning on the radio or on the board. So then, since it was the 27th time it had come back, I called up the one who had written it on the board. He said, yes, that's what's written. So how many words are there? How many words are in your sentence? You're being a pain, philosopher. So how many are there? The articles, yes, yes. There are seven. The seventh word is "behavior." So "behavior" is a word, right?
1:29:22 Yes. So, peace is not a word, it's a word. Philosophy is bad. Yes? Watch out for these... these habits of thought. Now, that was... No, that's it. The man who is hungry is not a free man. That this should come from a head of state, from a poor country, yet not at all insignificant. Right? For those who think that as soon as you have the right to vote, and as soon as there's universal suffrage, well, that's it. Fine, not everything's perfect, but all the other systems are worse.
1:29:52 Yes, it's the system that produced Hitler's rise to power. I'm not going to speak out against universal suffrage today. It's not that simple. Problems like that don't get settled just like that, believe me. But on the other hand, I will say, we can see clearly that if that's all there is, it's no guarantee either, far from it. So, the man who is hungry is not a free man. That should give us pause. I'm saying, going back over everything, that with Kant we do have the form of freedom. I know I am free when I set aside the natural form, which is determination, and determination, without exception, is strong.
1:30:28 It's not to give myself the last word, I could guide it when no one's going to convince everyone, but well, yeah. But no, nature means eating to live, and there's no exception to that. It's a law, not a rule. So freedom cannot come from a world that is so determined, and it's therefore no accident that human beings throughout history invented a supernature—well, invented, I won't decide, I mean, posited a supernature, I think, religious of course, so that anything resembling a free subject within it could be seen as an emanation of God.
1:31:07 So, Hegel, in the Philosophy of History, when he says of the Orientals, they only know that one is free, and God himself, it's not the almighty—I'll come back to this—the only one, of course, who is almighty, because we are finite beings, etc. In relation to God, we are lesser. And when my action is determined neither by nature nor by its antithesis, supernature—it took centuries to arrive at dismissing both, on equal footing, from law—when it's no longer nature nor supernature, it's not nature, sorry, that makes man, nor God who makes man, but when it's man who makes man, when the anthropological standpoint dismisses both the naturalist standpoint and the theological standpoint, I had advised you, if one day you're confused about any problem whatsoever, to remember this triangle.
1:31:57 All the standpoints—and God knows there are plenty in philosophy, even contradictory ones—consist in privileging one of these three. The naturalist standpoint, for example, empiricism, determinism, today the so-called sciences, tithes, naturalism, explaining everything by natural causes; supernaturalism, the antithesis, if there is freedom in man, it's because God put it there, or if there's a soul in man, it's because God put it there, etc., etc. Breathing, you know, God. I say that because—where is there air in a car?
1:32:31 In the tires. And breath is called pneuma in Greek. I'll blow into this oriental tradition. And you find a trace of it in the Gospel, which offers a beautiful metaphor for freedom. When the disciples say, but what is the spirit? Again, God the Father, we form a representation of him, God the Son, but the spirit, what is that? The answer is: you hear the wind. It's neither this nor that. So it is with the things of the spirit. A beautiful gospel for winter. It's not linear, it's not a heading or a fixed direction.
1:33:03 You hear the wind. That's a beautiful image of the spirit of freedom as breath. I'll also recall, since someone brought out the DVD earlier, Samuel, of the Island of the Poplars, that thanks to Bertrand's friendship and perceptiveness, we walked through the park of Ermenonville where Rousseau's tomb is, that tomb being set within the so-called Island of the Poplars.
1:33:33 Do you know what poplars are? Like their cousins the aspens, at the slightest breath, an infinity of tiny leaves flutter like that. And in a way, for us, it was the metaphor—popolo, poplar—of the people. It's the same root, exactly, in the Romance and English languages, isn't it? And somehow we found it fitting, this cascade of signs, that this tomb—the least morbid one there is, because it's very disappointing for a fetishist—Rousseau's remains aren't even there, they're in the Panthéon, right?
1:34:04 So it's a tomb of pure sign, a sêma, tomb in Greek, pure sema, sign. The pun must have already been made by Plato twenty-five centuries ago. The first sign. I ask the anthropologists working on this to determine whether it's an australopithecine or perhaps still an animal, or whether it's a human being when there are remains—is there another, is there a burial site or not? No, that's fine, it's a heap, there were handfuls taken of the earth, actually of the earth—otherwise it's what's making a mouth over there.
Mal du siècle and interiorization 1:34:36 It's what gives presence to what is not there. The first time an absence had to be filled, that's the tomb. It's a first way of speaking. Sign. So, there you have it, I wanted to pile up all these clouds to eventually give you—I promise you there will be a point—but to say that this way of constantly rejecting the negative means that, as Goethe said, truth, when you push it away, you embrace it.
1:35:13 It comes right back at us in the face, and now I'll answer the little question from earlier, which was a false suspense. How did we manage, in less than a generation, to go from that extraordinary hope of happiness, in the most secular sense of the term, throughout the whole Age of Enlightenment, to the nightmare that would follow? It begins with the mal du siècle, and all the authors will make clear that this ill is not at all—careful—the tragic; we didn't wait for modernity to know the tragic.
1:35:43 It's not about that. It's not about suffering caused by a positive pain, a bereavement, the loss of loved ones, of money, ruin, loss of honor, of glory, all that, as in ancient, classical, antique tragedy and whatever else you like. No, not here. These are people who have everything they need. I'll even give the example of Senancour, if you remember. Because he may be the one, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, who dug into this question of the mal du siècle even more than anyone else, and who dug into it with an almost masochistic, surgical precision.
1:36:20 It's not S-E-N-A-N-C-O-U-R with no consonant at the end. He wrote only one book, which you can find in paperback at Folio, I believe it's Oberman, an epistolary novel. It contains the finest, sharpest analyses of the mal du siècle I've ever seen. "I am happy, I have no cares, I am in good health, and I am bored. Sad life." And he shows it well. Even here, I only like the evening. Here is Fontainebleau, from where he writes.
1:36:51 No, that seems banal to us. At the time, it was new—a poetry of autumn. It was unthinkable before. How could one find beauty in things that are decomposing, dying? It's curious, modernity. In Balzac, yes, Balzac, who isn't a Romantic fond of the morbid—nevertheless, in Le Lys dans la vallée, one of the rare works where he lets himself go a little, he says so himself. A bit like Flaubert let himself go in Salammbô, he says, "I treated myself to a swig of lyricism." There, Balzac turns away for once from the world of bailiffs, lawsuits, etc., and sordid inheritance stories, for a love story.
1:37:25 And when he speaks of his region, Touraine—"don't ask me why I love Touraine, I love it as an artist loves art"—so, skipping some passages, he says: in spring, love beats its wings across the whole sky, in autumn, one thinks of those who are no more... the lung, still in autumn, the sick lung finds rest in refreshing touches. How can one say that... you realize, about the lung, it pleases me to see—I don't know—this pleasure that I'm the first to feel when I gather mushrooms, forced to smell that mildewy, humus-like odor, I don't know, that belongs to autumn.
1:38:08 These are things familiar to you, but they're new. We don't realize it, we believe so much that there's an essence of man, like that, which hasn't budged. We've been so accustomed to denying history in this century, where much more weight is given to nature than to man, and to spatial dimensions. We're much more attentive to differences between cultures laid out in space than to their differences over time—which would nonetheless be far less alienating. You know, when people tell me—for those who have known sub-Saharan Africa well—we're not badly off here.
1:38:39 I immediately understand what I'm about to say when people say things like: well, the difference between African and European cultures, and the Africans, look how strong their sense of solidarity and family ties are, blah blah blah. Of course that's true. But it's not the Africans who live in the country now—it's before and now. In the countryside, people were more supportive, more communal, more collective, weren't they, than in some tower block in Paris where I could die with a heart attack and no one would care. That's one of the reasons that also explains rural populations, isn't it?
1:39:09 In the city you'll find enclosure, you'll mainly find the fact that people leave you alone. But at the same time we've lost the substantial bond, which is what makes people like Michéa weep today. I'm not criticizing, I mean, I understand that too, which is why so many say it was better before. Roughly speaking—I won't refine it—both views are equally foolish. But let's not waste too much time on that. What's certain, though, is that we can see it clearly with my story of the three representations of God and the three dwellings of God.
1:39:43 The direction that moves toward freedom also moves toward interiorization. It may be tragic, but that's how it is. Interiority appears increasingly as, I don't know, the image of God here develops. And I compared earlier the cathedrals and the temple. What is inside a Greek temple? Nothing. Well, a small altar, I don't know, where sacrifices are made. Correct me, Catherine—I can be corrected by mathematicians, but I also have excellent distinguished historians here.
1:40:17 But, roughly speaking, the most interesting thing about the Parthenon isn't what's inside. Agreed? On the other hand, seen from outside, it's the realm of Apollo, its proportions, the golden ratio, all that you like, the friezes, the titanic struggle, so to speak, right? You see, the spear and the shield. But you can't say the same of Chartres, there's a difference. Or a few similar structures—what's essential is on the outside. It's the collective, whereas Apollo's light is outward, but here it's filtered through stained glass, it's the light of inner fervor.
1:40:52 You see? It's not the same thing. There's progress in interiorization, but it's also a form of suffering. Because when you're a bit separated from the group, you're more likely to suffer than when you sing in chorus with it. Here again, I'm referring to Africa. How much depression is there due to bereavement? It's rather classic. I don't want to refer to Freud's famous article on mourning and melancholia—no need for a psychoanalyst to know that, with us, it's very often on the occasion of a bereavement, often of someone close, a dearly loved person, that a depressive process is triggered.
1:41:27 All right. But in very collectivist societies, which we can speak of, somewhere in the rural provinces of Ghana or Côte d'Ivoire, I mean, when there's a death, you're not alone. The whole village gathers around you, weeps with you. There's a collective bearing of the pain—I'm talking about the pain—which makes it, more durably than with us, incidentally, I recommend—if you're interested—the documentary Les Maîtres Fous by Jean Rouch, the filmmaker. It's very well known in African studies.
1:41:59 Those who haven't been warned about it—it's striking sometimes. It's the rituals, precisely, that are practiced by little office clerks in Ghana. It's not performed by magicians. And then afterward, everything is fine. It lasts two or three days. The crisis passes. And then things get better. There you go. It's a somewhat cathartic process, as they say. There you go. I do hold to this distinction.
Hegel against Kantian duty; the good news of finitude 1:42:29 where I'm going to find what's missing. I've said it ten times already, but without saying what's going to fill that gap. That formal aspect in Kant, which is nonetheless the limit of the Enlightenment, its crowning achievement and abridgment—we have the form of freedom, but not the content. Because we do not have—I'm now answering—to ask the question in place of those concerned. It's up to free men to know what they will do with freedom, it's not up to philosophers to prescribe it to them. That's the great difference with Lenin.
1:42:59 Otherwise, the damage begins. But on the other hand, this is philosophical. I'm not putting the problem off indefinitely. On the other hand, it was Hegel, the first, who understood this. He says: if freedom is indeed foundational to anthropology, as we know—shown by Rousseau and demonstrated by Kant—then we, modern philosophers, weren't needed to answer the question "what must I do."
1:43:30 Let's stop speaking in terms of duty, says Hegel. The Kantian Sollen, which is like—my action always comes down to a kind of, as we say, an asymptote, in geometry, which approaches the limit like that, but without ever reaching it. And above all, which always refers to a later time. At every instant, there, on the wall of the cave, in the sensible world, in the world we live in. What Kant calls the object of...
1:44:01 the whole set of objects of a possible experience, the phenomenal world. We have two main frameworks, space and time, etc., I won't go back over it. In that world, two determinisms intersect. It's, at the furthest end, that of the state—of the state as an architect, that of judgment. So, very quickly, I have to give you an example from my culture, like this. I'll put Kant's idealism to you as if flying over the Amazon in a helicopter. You'll see why. Because it needs to be seen from above, vertically, for my example.
1:44:33 All right. For a while, what am I flying over? There, it's nature. It owes nothing to man. What's it called? The canopy. The treetops, like that. Well, everything unfolding there can be explained by Y equals F of X, by physical, chemical causes, whatever, biological, anything you like. Then suddenly I arrive at a clearing. A half-circle, the men's huts, another half-circle, the women's huts. Suddenly things happen—not foreign to nature exactly. When you build a hut in that village, there are certain things you need to account for, like gravity, the center of gravity, and so on.
1:45:07 But there are phenomena—not just that we can't explain them yet, or haven't managed to yet, and will get there through natural causes. It's that they contradict it. I've spoken of this a thousand times, so I won't insist further—it changes from one culture to another. "But serve yourself first, even though I'm dying of hunger." Right? You'll never see a dog say "after you, my good fellow." No. A dog will even bite its master if you approach its bowl and it doesn't want to give it up. So, marriage, monogamy—if it were only about reproducing the species, as the sole motivation for sexuality in nature, I mean, monogamy would actually be a limitation.
1:45:47 So, there you are—there are other reasons, not merely different ones, but ones running in the opposite direction. That is, man is only himself since he put a stop to certain natural tendencies—not all of them. Which is extremely important to realize. And that's why—the good news I told you there would be one—because it seems hopeless, we are finite beings, we are not gods. But yes, yes, yes, yes. One of my favorite poets, Hölderlin—I'm quoting nothing but madmen to you, a Nerval, a Hölderlin, I'm sorry.
1:46:18 But it's to make you understand the power of reason. Hölderlin has a magnificent hymn called Mnemosyne, Mnemosune, who was the muse of memory, mneme, mneme, amnesia, among the Greeks, I don't know—people say it's difficult poetry, etc. I find it perfectly clear. At the end, he says this: "For they cannot, all the heavenly ones." They are not all-powerful. "For they cannot, all the heavenly ones" — he's speaking of the gods. "The mortals, before them, reach the abyss."
1:46:48 And yes, men die, that's the great difference with the immortals. So you'll say, well, that's even more of a minus. No, look at what follows. "So with them" — that is, with us, with men, with them — "the echo turns. For long is the time, but the true comes." It's magnificent. Magnificent. I'll repeat: "For they cannot, all the heavenly ones. The mortals, before them, reach the abyss." Man has a knowledge of death that gives him superiority over all the gods.
1:47:19 Never will a god understand the anguish of a guy waiting at the RER stop for his beloved, the little shopgirl he met at the checkout at Franprix. I say that with immense respect. Never sneering at the shopgirl type. I find them more interesting than Philippe Sollers's women. On every level, actually. So, he's not saying that out of contempt. On the contrary. I'm saying those emotions—we can't have them. "Damn it. She doesn't love me anymore. She's not coming. She's five minutes late, so she doesn't love me anymore." Ah, even that text message that doesn't arrive—she doesn't love me anymore.
1:47:51 That can only come from a being who is afraid. Something the gods don't know. Those joys, too, can't come to them—look at that admirable passage in Proust where he doesn't find Odette at the rendezvous. Before she appears, it's like that, in the evening—I don't know if you remember. The happiness he feels. He's overwhelmed by it. Well, yes, well yes, it's not going to happen. It's the power of initial fetishisms. So, there you go, felix culpa, as they say in theology. Rimbaud said theology is serious, you see. Rimbaud, hardly suspected of bathing every morning in holy water, all the same.
Liberation realized in praxis 1:48:24 So, by replacing freedom with the good, we've made a huge step forward. But—and this is the new step we've taken today—this freedom has long since been realized. And here we're on a path that leads to Hegel and to Marx, if you look closely. It means it's not up to us to figure out what form the good should take, etc. That would lead to totalitarianism. Look at what all men have done for millennia. They progressively free themselves from the constraints that natural being-there wants to impose—wants to impose, sorry—on man, in the generic sense.
1:48:58 And so, this liberation has a meaning. It has a meaning, it's the sum total of the work that gets done. And Marx used a generic term for this called praxis. It's more global than economics, because Marx's economics isn't something added on as if it were revolutionary, alongside bourgeois economics. That's a misreading. Marx isn't an economism. It is, on the contrary, a challenge to political economy's claim to constitute itself as an autonomous science—a critique of political economy. There's a science, that of history, which sits above that of economics.
1:49:29 isn't that right, Tristan? An excellent economist here. I could have said—how could Tristan come to succeed the figure of happiness, Tristan? He's the one who never smiles in the Arthurian romances. Not your father, thank goodness. I'll take this opportunity, because my publisher was kind and generous enough to bring these along tonight. It's just been published, fresh off the press. For me, it's the most important book of the postwar period. Excuse me for being a bit solemn. It's not because I knew the man. But it is the most important.
1:50:00 And if everything I could do in my talks were a way of guiding you toward the paths of praxis, I wouldn't have chosen otherwise... It's a posthumous title, that's why I'm dwelling a bit on the title. I believe it's the publisher's doing—we can pay tribute to him for it—because the author died, you see, before being able to synthesize his work, his final book, while fighting against Parkinson's. And so, there are, on the one hand, some rather quick ellipses, and on the other, developments unlike any he'd ever made before.
1:50:31 A bit like the state in which Pascal's Pensées were found. You know, nowadays people contrast the Pascalian aphorism with the system. Pascal wanted to write a system called Apology for the Christian Religion, that's its title, and then he died, and all that was found were notes, brilliant ones, sewn into his coat. And, a part of it. So, this book alludes to a title by Sartre—some of you know it—Sartre has both the worst and the best side by side in him, a man who wanted to play on every board, the man with the pipe, who is a writer, a novelist, a playwright, an amateur, a philosopher—fine, fine.
1:51:11 And what's the best in him, in my view, is the series called The Roads to Freedom, in Sartre. And above all, Sartre understood well—though he says he's Hegelianizing Marx there—that man is not a having but a doing, he is what he does, which is to say, I say this because it was very familiar in the '60s, but it's been so obscured by the counter-revolution since then that it needs restating. We no longer speak now of alienation as a category, that sort of thing, yet it's absolutely crucial.
1:51:43 And so, the roads to freedom here become the roads to praxis, less abstract. But now we understand why. We don't seek freedom in Kant's sense, as a horizon that would lie at the end of that asymptote, up above. No, it's been there from the start, since anthropology began. Synthesis of determinism and freedom—not synthesis in the sense of attiéké, sorry, that's a little Ivorian dish, a sauce—not synthesis in the sense of a small compromise where you mix everything up into a mush.
1:52:15 The true synthesis, the one that completely dismisses the two one-sidednesses opposing each other, while taking the best of each. We take from determinism its strength in knowledge. If there were no law, Y equals F of X, it would be unintelligible. I couldn't act on things if I didn't understand them—the principle of regimes is not the law. Of course. And the freedom to which determinism is opposed—we dismiss both of them, together, with the concept of liberation. That, you had seen very well. I don't say that because of the end of the Liberation days, because it's changed a great deal since then.
1:52:46 The public would turn over ten times in its grave if it knew. I was just talking about the owner's election. And now, it's in the service of NATO, I say that because it's a bit ugly, what happened—the one who set up the tribunal in Stockholm, with his friend Russell, a mathematician. He was rather close to Marxist thought, actually. A tribunal against war crimes in Vietnam. Well, let's move on. There you go. Liberation is a concrete term. What neither freedom nor determinism are—they are phantasms produced by the cave of ideas, of an abstract universal, as Hegel would say.
1:53:20 Two abstract universals. Because you will never find a freedom in the absence of any determination. That doesn't mean anything. You're not going to tell me it's a problem that I'm not free to go spend the weekend on one of Saturn's rings. That's not what troubles you. That's not what limits your... You see? It's not the impossible that limits you. One is free or not free, or one feels a diminished freedom relative to things that tempt you and that you want to do. Now, this liberation of man is not abstract.
1:53:50 It is not a wisdom like that, whereas one can, strictly speaking, when one is in prison, at least have an accord with oneself, a balance. No. It has been achieved from the moment I build a dam, right, for the tribe. I've seen floods. I'm talking about a small dam with stones, as one knows how to do in the Neolithic, right? Afterward, it grows in scale. And when one... It happened to me once at an embassy, indeed. I was starting to read yesterday, I was starting to read. I ended up reading.
1:54:27 There was someone who spoke with contempt about Africans. They're never... The media that we give them. That doesn't mean I'm not saying it. Because they do produce them. And then, the pirogues. In the end, the Asians end up doing the same thing. Now they're economic powerhouses that people wish for. At that point, the Koreans, the... became the Taiwanese. And so, it's a challenge. So, the same person, at another time in life, previously at the same table with the same ambassador, had said that anyway, they have too many children. It's the same thing.
1:54:58 Wasn't there a TV presenter who's dead now? Also, who had said it should be cut off in black. That would be a service being sold to Africa. Sevran, wasn't it? That's it. So you see this is an idea that circulates not only in embassies. And so, there, I'm no more prevented. I said there are too many children. And now, you say, to give them the example of the Asian dragons. The Asian dragons who have 3000 inhabitants per square kilometer in Thailand, in Vietnam, in the deltas. That's their strength. I come back to praxis.
1:55:28 One bucket, one bucket, one bucket, and I made a dam. He tells me at the end of the day, I'm going to walk your... It's a bridge over the heat of the horizon. There's no way around it. I mean. Democratically, it's important. We don't realize now that the number of people is a burden. It's still extraordinary to come to that. It's a fortune to have daughters-in-law and sons-in-law in quantity. No? Especially when the primary sector, agriculture, still accounts for 80% of production, as is the case in poor countries.
1:56:01 And which even allows us to give a measurable and scientific definition of poor and underdeveloped, without any value judgment. There you go. So, good news. Listen, liberation has long been underway. It is progressive. But here are the threats. This liberation happens through the growth and progression of means that are the best for allowing us happiness and also for bringing about the worst misfortunes. The difference is that it's you who decides.
1:56:31 I'll see you again for the continuation starting next school year. Thank you. Applause. Thank you. Applause. Thank you.
